Daniel Keys Moran

Spoilers circle on G+

2011-10-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post ongoing bits of things I'm working on on G+ -- no massive spoilers, but if you're interested in reading them, +1 or otherwise respond on this post and I'll add you to the list.

On Art

2011-09-13T16:03:00.001-07:00

You can’t define art.

You can’t define storytelling.

You can’t define writing except in the most trivial and reductionist way: “words strung together.”

There are no rules. We tell young writers there are rules, because it helps limit the size of the problem they’re wrestling with, but really there are not. There’s technique, and that’s helpful and important: a command of technique is the difference between hit and miss and the ability to reliably produce competent work. But techniques are not rules.

There are no rules of writing I’ve ever seen that do not have exceptions – and let’s not waste our time with “the exception that proves the rule,” since this is merely a phrase misused by people who don’t understand it – it merely meant, in its original use, that the rule had been proven false.

Rules that have exceptions are guidelines, not rules. Orwell’s five rules famously contain a sixth that effectively says, “Except when the rule makes no goddamn sense for what you’re trying to do.” Elmore Leonard has ten rules that should be required reading for young writers – but which some great writers violate repeatedly to good effect. (Leonard, being a great writer, is as aware as Orwell that his rules are merely guidelines: his essay on his rules of writing finishes with an example of Steinbeck breaking these rules to good effect.)

Some rules I’ve had thrown at me over the years – once by Damon Knight, who said I’d convinced him, when we were done:

“A story must not be boring.” Says you. I’ve been bored by lots of stories.

OK, how about: “A story must not be intentionally boring?” Well, Waiting for Godot certainly appears to be.

“A story is a person with a problem.” It can be. But not always: sometimes a story is about something unambiguously good happening to a person.

Maybe even just: “A story must be about a person?” No? One of my favorite pieces of my own writing is a story about a tree, On Sequoia Time.

Stories are just a subset of all the kinds of art out there.

Recently a screenwriter I otherwise respect argued that the television show Dexter, far from being one of the best things on television, wasn’t even art: it was pornography, an exercise in pandering to the base instincts of its audience.

I am not writing to defend or even to praise Dexter. I don’t care if you like it, if you think it’s bad trash or good trash or simply brilliant. (I’ll go with “simply brilliant.”) Practically nobody likes George A. Romero’s Knightriders as well as I do, and that’s fine; I’m long past requiring external validation for my tastes, and I still watch Knightriders every year around my birthday, regardless of the opinions of others. (It is one of the best independent American movies ever made, by the way, despite being too long and having a few lapses of tone here and there.)

But the bright line used to consign Dexter to “porn” was this: that art must challenge us (and thatDexter did not, in this writer’s opinion.) That it must take our expectations and confound them, must make us reconsider what we know or believe to be true –

– and absolutely: this is one of the real functions of art, a vital and important function. But it’s not the most important function and it’s not the place where we divide work into “art” on one side and “porn” on another. Art, to borrow a terrible cliché (and Orwell would tell me not to do this) … is an elephant. We see the parts of it that we respond to, we become aware of art because it moves us. The parts that we don’t respond to are not art … for our purposes: but they may be art for the purposes of our neighbors, who are of different ages and genders and backgrounds, who have different life experiences and skills and lovers and friends and family.

Should art challenge us? Yes.

Should it uplift us? Yes.

Warn us? Yes.

Scare us? Yes.

Teach us new things? Yes.

Reinforce what we know to be true? Yes.

Entertain us? Hell yes.

Connect us to one another? Yes.

Let us see through someone else’s eyes? Yes.

Remind us of our common humanity? Yes.

Remind us of the ways in which we’re unusual, or even unique?

… yes.

Art is whatever you experience as art: all that’s required is that some person or persons, in an intentional act, created something that, when you encountered it, caused an emotional or even spiritual reaction in you.

… and there are no rules. There’s technique, and mastery of technique is one of the differences between mediocre and good artists; though probably it is not as important as conviction.

There is a language of art that we’ve learned and taught to one another, and that language changes by art form and by time and by culture and by person. But there are no rules, none, not a one: just people traveling down their personal roads: and for all of us, wherever we are this year, the horizon is the same distance away.

Programming People

2011-08-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

The speech I gave at Singularity University yesterday morning.

I wish G+ did friendlier URLs....

https://plus.google.com/107286020910913706370/posts/3tkCqaStaEf

DanielKeysMoran.com

2011-07-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Pretty much what you think -- a redirect to my G+ page.

danielkeysmoran.com

Google Profile ...

2011-07-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

gplus.to/fatsam

I may post some more to this blog, but mostly I'll be there.

Thinking about going to Google+ ...

2011-07-17T00:51:00.001-07:00

Not sure how that'll work, but I'm getting about 20 pieces of spam mail a day (for a while now) from Blogspot spammers. It's wearying. Should be less of that on G+, looks like. If you send me a request at danielkeysmoran at the gmail domain, I'll happily add you. If I do move off Blogspot as a permanent matter, I'll make sure there's a public presence elsewhere, and the last post on this blog will point to it.

Singularity University; Datawatch

2011-06-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

I'm (very probably) going to be giving a speech at Singularity University on August 3rd. Not clear where this is in San Francisco, but I'll find out -- probably won't have time to socialize in any case. 21st Century Biotechnology. It looks like this might be the start of a longer relationship with them, which would be interesting.

On another subject:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/231000131

In the case of many hackers, such as those dealing in stolen financial information, chats will take place in private, with new members coming into the group only if they know an existing member. However, in the cases of Anonymous and LulzSec, some of their chatrooms are public. The FBI has set up shop in numerous social media sites, going undercover where necessary to root out hackers and other online criminals, and it would not be surprising if they were actively monitoring IRC channels in this case.

~~~~~

Interesting times. The lulzsec/anonymous crowd is playing for money now -- I hope they know what they're doing. I'm sure some of them do, but not all of them. The problem with groups like these is that any break in pure anonymity is lethal -- you can't trust anyone. People you know well and trust are the biggest threat -- a drill bit on the knee will make almost anyone talk.

And these guys are charging full speed into knee drilling territory.

Been busy ...

2011-06-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Having one of my periodic low-availability stretches. I've got a hundred odd emails to respond to, a trade paper copy of AI War to get out the door, various other tasks I've promised people ... and I started a new job about 8 weeks ago that's been mostly a disaster. Very nice people -- horrible mess. Won't name the company, but really, the only thing I've got to compare this to is a couple of experiences with startups that went belly up. These guys are a 100 million a year in revenue and aren't going to fail, but it's 1995 in this particular IT shop. The *rest* of the company seems to be well run (or they'd be out of business, given the mess in IT) but man, in the universe of "didn't know what I was getting myself into," this is a world beater.

Fuck yeah! Osama bin Laden dead, US forces have his body ...

2011-05-01T20:13:00.001-07:00

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_17971424?source=rss&nclick_check=1

Books up on Amazon

2011-04-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

Emerald Eyes, Long Run, and AI War: Big Boost, are available on Amazon. For some reason Last Dancer hasn't made it through yet. Got my first sale and my first five-star review (probably from the same guy.)

http://amzn.to/eeI91R

"This is the best science fiction story I have ever read. I'm not going to describe how wonderful this book is because I do not have the time to do it properly."

That's a review. :-)

New Covers - EE, TLR, TLD. Angel Greenwood.

2011-04-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

The Amazon covers. They'll go up in new editions on fsand as well, and you'll be able to download them if you like. Last thing we were waiting for to put them on Amazon/Apple/B&N etc.

Goodbye, Sarah Jane

2011-04-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

Elisabeth Sladen, aka Doctor Who's Sarah Jane, passed away today. Just heard. I've seen most of the episodes of "The Sarah Jane Adventures," but my sons have watched every episode at least twice. Three years ago, when it premiered, it was at least as popular with my youngest as "Doctor Who" itself -- more their speed. Now my youngest is 9, that's probably no longer true ... but it was a good show for them, at the right time. We'll miss her.

I guess we're watching "School Reunion" tomorrow.

For Fans of Gregory Mcdonald

2011-04-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Just ran across this.

http://brucedesilva.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/gregory-mcdonald-creator-of-fletch-still-has-much-to-teach-us-about-reading-and-writing/

Opens with de Silva's thoughts on Mcdonald (interesting, but not the jewel of this blog post) ... and then goes into an interview with Mcdonald, one I'd never seen before.

de Silva thinks that Mcdonald's in danger of fading and being forgotten -- that would be sad. Fletch and Confess Fletch are two of the best books I've ever read, certainly both in the top 10 of all mystery books.

A while back I posted my top 50 favorite novels to my Facebook profile -- I'll repost it here -- and yep, two Mcdonald novels make the top 30:

~~~~~

Mentioned to a friend he'd written one of my 20 favorite novels recently; a couple weeks ago I got That Email, the one where someone wants your list of Every Good Book Ever Written. So, here it is. The only ground rules were that no book I'd only read once could make the list, and nothing I hadn't read within the last ~15 years could make it -- my memory's not that good. There are several novels that got dropped because I hadn't read them recently enough -- David Gerrold's third Chtorran novel, Spinrad's Bug Jack Baron, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Wallace's "Infinite Jest" dropped because I only read it once. OTOH, Gerrold's "Man Who Folded Himself" made it in because I just reread it about a month ago and it was vastly better than I'd recalled....

The first two novels are my favorite novels, the clear #1 and #2. After that, a different day would get you a different order -- though the broad bands (I broke them up into 5 groups of 10) wouldn't change that much, I think.

My 50

1-10

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin

11-20

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Great Sky River, Gregory Benford

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein

The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Great Sky Woman, Steve Barnes

Merlin Trilogy, Mary Stewart

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet

Confess, Fletch, Gregory Mcdonald

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

21-30

Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis

Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Protector, Larry Niven

Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry

Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

Pale Gray for Guilt, John D. MacDonald

Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglass Adams

Fletch, Gregory McDonald

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

31-40

Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Heroes Die, Matt Stover

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Poul Anderson

Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

“The Sacketts,” as a body of work, Louis L’Amour

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Frederik Pohl

The Perfect Thief, Ronald J. Bass

The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

41-50

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

Flynn’s In, Gregory Mcdonald

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milo Kundera

L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy

Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins

Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammet

I cheated a bit. There’s no Sackett novel that would make this list by itself, but I have gone back to it repeatedly over the years. (I might have snuck in Steve Perry's Matador books under the same theory, but I only read most of them recently and I've only read most of them once -- but they do for me very much what L'Amour does.) I also cheated by throwing the entire Merlin trilogy in there as a single book – fuck it, it’s my list, and I never read that a book at a time; I start off with “The Crystal Cave” and read through “The Last Enchantment.” (And hardly ever bother with the fourth, “The Wicked Day,” which Merlin’s not in.)

Two “Great Sky” titled novels in the top 20. You know what to do now, authors, if *you* want to get onto this very exclusive list.

If I were including children’s novels, Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising,” Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Series, various Patricia McKillip novels, and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia would certainly make it in.

Twenty-five years today since "Graceland"

2011-04-12T14:20:00.001-07:00

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

"Boy in the Bubble." A line from this song has appeared in every CT novel to date -- "Lasers in the junble," "bomb in the baby carriage," "age of miracles and wonders," and in AI War, "Don't cry, baby."

A Freeway In My Back Yard

2011-04-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Now available at Amazon as well as FS&. My remaining novels -- the four Continuing Time books, Armageddon Blues, Terminal Freedom ... and then somewhere down the road, possibly even "The Ring" -- I'll post about here when they become available on Amazon. (Or in the case of "Armageddon Blues," Amazon and FS& pretty much simultaneously.)

I'm going to settle on either Lulu or CafePress this week for POD. I have zero expectation I'll make any money off POD, but I'm sure willing to be wrong.

If you've bought off FS& already, the update will be ready a little later today -- version 1.1, which includes epub & kindle for the first time. (Getting the screenplays to look OK in both those formats was difficult, but we got there.) You can, as always, download the new version for free.

~~~~~

If you were a fan of "Quantum Leap," go see "Source Code." Amy and I went to a matinee this morning, and while it mins some of the same territory as QL, it does so knowingly and gracefully and is a pretty little jewel of a movie. Scott Bakula's telephone-only cameo includes an "Oh, boy," just for people like us.

Ebook reviewers

2011-04-11T11:20:00.001-07:00

If you're a reviewer of original ebooks for a reputable website or publication (or know one you like), drop me a line. Thanks.

"as insubstantial as a Peaceforcer's promise."

2011-04-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Shared this on Facebook, reposting.

Opening of "Live Fast and Never Die" -- it used to continue immediately with the main action, but since there's going to be a delay between books -- I gave Trent a vacation. Just some bits. He meets a girl:

~~~~~

“ANOTHER PITCHER OF margaritas, please. Wait.” He glanced at the girl on the hammock beside him. “Strawberry? Melon?”

“You look like Adam Selstrom,” the girl said in English that was better than Trent’s Portuguese and no worse than his French. “With blond hair. And younger, of course. Did anyone ever tell you that? Melon.”

The girl’s name was Allison. She was Brazilian, of apparently Asian background despite the blonde hair and blue eyes, neither obviously from a makeup key. Trent didn’t know how old she was – above 21, he was pretty sure, despite the presence of her parents on the atoll. In any event her father hadn’t said anything to him yet.

“Melon,” Trent told the waitbot, which bobbed its head at him and trundled off. “Yeah,” Trent told Allison, “I get that sometimes. Don’t see it myself.”

~~~~~

Her father, a squat middle-aged Brazilian Unification functionary, had given Trent the evil eye – her mother had simply failed to see him, as though he were as insubstantial as a Peaceforcer’s promise.

~~~~~

Allison’s voice was a little startling. “Have you been here before?”

“Rangiroa? No.”

“What made you decide to come here?”

Trent thought about Mohammed Vance, who by now was tearing apart the seams of the world looking for him.

“Did you know,” he said to Allison, “that there are twenty thousand islands in the South Seas?”

FS& Facebook Page is up...

2011-04-07T11:09:00.001-07:00

The FS& Facebook page is up and running. We'll probably start relying more on that to issue updates about non-Moran titles, rather than this blog. If you want to stay abreast of what's happening, go to FSAnd.com directly, or "like" this page on Facebook.

There will still be blog posts here when something cool happens, but I won't publish every new title to this blog any longer.

Margaret Weis, "Star of the Guardians" Book One

2011-04-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

The Lost King is for sale at fsand.com.

I'm quite pleased about this one. Margaret Weis Productions will be using the fsand.com typeset books for all their epub and kindle publishing -- we're just leading them by a short period. We'll have 15 or 16 more titles from Margaret and the writers she represents, in the near future.

Amy edited this when it was originally published. She was really happy to get a chance to work on it again.

The rest of The Star of the Guardians series will be up on fsand.com fairly soon. The others will follow as MWP gives them to us.

CafeExpress Print on Demand?

2011-04-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone got experience with them?

Omnibus

2011-04-04T17:49:00.000-07:00

The Continuing Time Omnibus Edition (including The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost; The Last Dancer;The Long Run; and Emerald Eyes) is available for purchase at fsand.com. It's $22.99, or about five dollars cheaper than all the books purchased separately.

Dreadnaught, by Steve Perry and Michael Reeves

2011-04-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's cool to be me. I got to see this book in mss. -- I didn't know at the time I'd get a chance to publish it, as well. On Sale at fsand.com.

Behold Eilandia, a pre-industrial world with vast seas, about to embroil itself in a bloody global war. Here is a major fantasy in its first publication anywhere, a wide-ranging tale of kings and thieves, magicians and soldiers, priests and sailors, aswirl with intrigue, swordplay, and assorted magicks. A rollicking adventure from New York Times Bestselling authors Steve Perry and Michael Reaves. Available in epub, mobi, pdf, and html.

Last Dancer ver 1.0; updated AI War, EE, and TLR.

2011-04-03T16:16:00.001-07:00

"The Last Dancer" is available for sale at fsand.com. An omnibus edition of all four Continuing Time novels will be available later tonight -- I'll update the front page of FSAnd when that happens with a graphic & link.

Anyone who's bought a copy of "The AI War, Book One," or "Emerald Eyes," or "Long Run," version 1.1 of those books is available now on FSAnd. You should be good to download them -- they're much cleaner than earlier copies, and have been tested on a much wider range of devices.

Also, new works from Steve Perry, and some new material from Margaret Weis Productions will be appearing on FSAnd -- Perry tonight, Margaret Weis probably on Monday.

Big Boost Edition 1.1 this weekend -- bug fixes, typos

2011-03-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

About a dozen typos and some formatting problems (computer speech not rendering at all in epub/mobi) will be fixed. If you run across something not working, drop me a line.

We'll probably also have reworks of EE/TLR and a new render of Last Dancer -- we've gotten better at producing epubs in particular since the earlier books. If you've ever bought a copy, you should be OK to download the new files, when uploaded. They'll all be marked in the download file name as "1.1".

Spoiler Thread for AI War

2011-03-28T01:22:00.000-07:00

Post any comments you have about the book in this thread. Nowhere else, please. Thank you.

The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost

2011-03-28T00:53:00.001-07:00

"I am sore wounded but not slain

I will lay me down and bleed a while

And then rise up to fight again"

Cover art by Angel Greenwood. Available for sale at fsand.com -- and only fsand.com, for the immediate future.

The cover.

2011-03-26T19:38:00.001-07:00

It's good to have friends. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Angel Greenwood is easy to adore even before taking her remarkable talent into account.

A probable cover

2011-03-25T05:54:00.001-07:00

A possible cover ...

2011-03-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

Challenger explosion

2011-03-19T01:31:00.000-07:00

The Challenger explosion -- I recall something about the joints on the solid fuel rockets being mounted upside down? (So that liquid could seep in, which led to the failure of the o-rings.) Am I remembering correctly? Anyone? I've tried googling this for about the last hour and I'm not finding anything.

Melissa du Bois

2011-03-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

I posted this to my facebook page, so I guess I'll post it here. This is the last text I'll be posting from the book before it becomes available (and don't ask.)

~~~~~

ACCORDING TO HER father Ernest du Bois, Melissa had been born a soldier. He was not a military man, and did not understand why God had blessed him – that was always his phrase, even when presented with intransigence that would have undone a lesser man – with a child so stern and unyielding. But Ernest was himself gifted with patience, if not understanding.

When she was four Melissa’s older brother Vincent died. Vincent was two years older than Melissa, and later in life her memories of him were just flashes, images and impressions; but her memories of her parents’ grief were clearer, sharper, altogether more lasting. Her Mama, Rebecca, withdrew from the world so severely that, looking back years later, Melissa suspected she had been suicidal, though Rebecca did not kill herself.

When Melissa began school that fall, it was not Mama who took her to St. Margaret’s: her father walked with her, every morning, holding her hand all the way there. It was her first strong memory: her hand, in Papa’s, on the way to school, morning after morning. When he picked her up in the afternoon, he wouldn’t hold her hand unless she asked him to, and she rarely did. They walked home together discussing what had happened that day, in school or work. But in the mornings she would take his hand, stepping out their front door, and not release it until she had stepped through the front gate of the school.

MELISSA WAS BORN on August 4, 2046, in Narbonne, a small town near the Gulf of Lyon, in the Mediterranean. The town had only some forty thousand residents, the year Melissa was born. It was not quite a beachside town, though Melissa and her parents lived inland only ten kilometers.

Melissa’s mother was a therapist, and her father a nurse. After her brother’s death, for most of two years, her mother did not work much. It made no real difference in their lives; there was enough money, new clothes, food, medical care. The essentials of Melissa’s life was secure, and would have remained so barring a disaster depriving her of both parents. Fortunately no such disaster occurred: her mother, with the passage of time, resumed an interest in the day to day details of their lives together, though by then the cast of Melissa’s relationship with her mother was set; Melissa would rarely seek Papa’s approval before deciding upon a course of action, and never Mama’s.

SHE GREW TO adulthood in Narbonne. Her parents rarely traveled even on business, and never for pleasure: Melissa had never left Narbonne until, at thirteen, her school had arranged a field trip to the Louvre. It was 630 kilometers to Paris, not an unreasonable distance on one of the bullet trains that networked France; except that Narbonne was too small to have a stop. The nearest stop was in Beziers, a nearby town about twice the size of Narbonne.

That morning they arose early and caught a bus to Beziers, then boarded the 6:15 A.M. Express to Paris. The Bullet rode through an evacuated tunnel just barely wide enough for it. It scared some of her classmates: at its top speed the Bullet traveled through the vacuum at nearly 600 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t so bad in the underground portions of the tunnel, when you couldn’t see anything, but during the portions where the Bullet rose above ground, the sense of speed was frightening, and some of Melissa’s friends had to close their eyes.

Melissa wasn’t worried about the speed as such; the rapidly passing landscape did not frighten her. She was thinking, though, about an incident six years ago, when she’d been seven: a Bullet in New York had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. Terrorists had left a bowling ball in the tunnel. The Bullet had vaporized the bowling ball, but it had also made contact with the side of the tunnel. In the resulting crash everyone aboard the Bullet, over eight hundred people, had died.

No one claimed credit. Melissa, at seven, had been baffled by that. She was clear that the ideologs who had committed the attack were wicked – “wicked all the way through,” she had informed her parents – but she had been baffled by the intent. If the terrorists did not claim credit, who would take them seriously when they made demands? Clearly they wanted to scare people – not that she was afraid, she assured her parents, because France was safe, not like Occupied America … but it made no sense to her.

But even while telling her parents that she wasn’t afraid, she wondered if she was really. She’d never been on the Bullet – maybe if she were riding it, knowing what might happen, she might feel differently?

Six years later she found that no, she wasn’t frightened, not even a little. But, riding the train, she had flashes of what she would recognize later as anger, thinking about the sort of people who would destroy something like the Bullet, take all those innocent lives, and not at least accept responsibility for their actions. It was, she concluded, that they were afraid – afraid to stand and fight, because they knew they would lose. So they used the tools of cowards, and struck at the weak rather than the strong.

It was the first consciously political thought she’d ever had.

THE LOUVRE MADE no real impression on her. She saw Voleur’s masterpiece, Je Suis Le Fleuve, while she was there, and found it not to her liking: a red monochrome, a river flowing through a darker, redder jungle. “I Follow The River,” or “I Am The River,” the painting’s name meant: Melissa was sure she was not a river and equally certain she didn’t want to follow what looked a river of blood.

The Mona Lisa left her cold. The Venus de Milo was broken and in Melissa’s opinion wanted fixing. She despised The Oath of the Horatii; weeping women to one side, men playing with swords to the other.

Their tour guide took note of her lack of interest at one point, and told the joke that many visitors to the Louvre hear at some point: “A woman visiting the Louvre,” the tour guide said patiently, “said, ‘I don’t think much of it.’ And a guide, overhearing, said: ‘Madame, one does not judge the Louvre; one is judged by it.’”

“The Palais du Louvre,” Melissa responded, “is a collection of buildings, and surely incapable of judgement.”

The tour guide, who seemed a pleasant young man, was taken aback. He stuttered slightly. “Since 1793, f-for generations, very wise men and women have chosen –”

Melissa interrupted him. Had her Mama been there she would have scolded Melissa for it; even Papa might have, for manners were important in their house. But she interrupted anyway. “I think my judgement better than theirs,” she said firmly, “in choosing what I like. De gustibus non est disputandum,” she added, displaying one of the benefits of a rigorous Catholic education: she could not really speak Latin, but she read it adequately and at thirteen she could quote in Latin as well as anyone.

Their tour guide ignored her after that, which suited her.

They had an early dinner in Paris before heading back, and that dinner stayed with Melissa in later years. The restaurant they ate in was not very good – the school’s budget was limited – but it was as good as her mother’s cooking and a little better than her father’s, and quite a bit better than what she ate in school. She did not realize they’d been taken to one of the cheaper restaurants available, and had she known, would not have cared.

They ended up sitting outside, watching the sun set while the City of Light came alive around them. The pedestrian traffic picked up as people came out for the evening. Melissa drank an after-dinner hot chocolate, watching the sophisticated crowds swirl about her, the young couples in the first bloom of love, old men and women cautiously navigating the traffic, still holding hands, some of them, as if they were still middle school sweethearts, and in the first and clearest of her life’s goals, knew she wanted to live in Paris forever.

SHE GRADUATED FROM high school first in her class, at the age of fifteen, more than two years earlier than most of her childhood friends. She was accepted, as everyone had known she would be, into the PKF Academy at Marseille. They wouldn’t accept students under sixteen, but Melissa would turn sixteen in August, just in time to attend the start of classes in September.

Marseille was 180 kilometers away from home in a straight line– 250 kilometers following the curve of the French coast around the Mediterranean, if one traveled by land. As no Bullet train connected the two cities, and her parents could not afford a car capable of flying directly across the sea, she had to travel by older rail, at a travel time of four and a half hours – which mean that she would have to live in the dorms in Marseille, and not see her parents except on weekends.

It bothered her parents more than it bothered Melissa. They were proud of her, of course – they were French and they were patriots and a career in the Peace Keeping Force, for a girl of her talents and inclinations, was an obvious path. But they were not ready to let go yet, particularly Rebecca. No one brought up her brother Vincent, but no one had to – the shadow of the dead child had hung over all of them, more lightly in recent years, but never forgotten.

Melissa would not miss her classmates; the girls were older than she was and disliked her; the boys older and intimidated by her. She had already said good-bye to her few remaining childhood friends from before she had jumped grades.

She had a last summer together with Mama and Papa before classes started. They spent a lot of it at the beach. Ernest was lighter-skinned than either Melissa or Rebecca, and couldn’t tan and refused to use any of the lotions that would have temporarily altered his skin to withstand the sun better; he didn’t trust the science behind the temporary alteration of the skin’s DNA. Melissa had inherited Rebecca’s skin: she quickly turned brown in the sun and could stay out in the sunlight through the heat of the day without burning or becoming overheated.

Rebecca and Melissa played volleyball in the sand as often as they could find competition, while Ernest sat under an umbrella and read on his handheld. They usually beat other women, and sometimes played and beat men – though men and boys who had lost to them once had a habit of making themselvs scarce. There was such a thing as male ego.

“I wish Papa liked volleyball,” Melissa said at one point, as they sat in the beach chairs by the volleyball nets, drinking water from their sports bottles, waiting for more competition to arrive. A few windsurfers were busy out in the bay, though there was just barely enough wind to keep their brightly colored sails full. “He wouldn’t quit just because he’d lost a few games.”

Rebecca smiled at her. “No, Papa is an unusual man. Better than most of them. He just can’t handle the heat.”

Melissa nodded. She knew that well enough. They went running together in the morning sometimes, when it was cool, all three of them, and Papa’s endurance was at least as good as theirs, perhaps better. “I just wish we could do more things together.”

Rebecca said simply, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

Melissa shook her head without answering.

“Not this year at least,” Rebecca continued. “I wish we hadn’t let you skip two grades.”

Melissa shrugged. That, she knew, had mostly been her father’s doing anyway. It hadn’t been important to him – he knew Melissa was bright, knew she was driven, and while none of this appeared to impress him particularly, seemed perfectly content that Melissa should have her way in most matters. If she wanted to study harder material, he was content that she have the chance to. If it meant she would leave home for university (or, as it turned out, the Academy), earlier than she would have otherwise, well, all children left home eventually.

Of course, from Mama’s perspective, it meant that she was losing Melissa two years too soon. “Mama, I’m going. I’ll perform well. When, in eight or ten years, they offer to make me an Elite” – Melissa had no doubt they would – “I will accept.”

“You’ll never have children,” Rebecca said very quietly.

“No,” Melissa agreed, “I won’t.”

HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY came and went, the summer waned, and the day before she went to Academy they went rowing in the morning on the Canal de la Robine, had lunch at the beach, and then had dinner together at home. Her mother cooked Melissa’s favorite dinner, fresh bread with mushroom chicken and artichoke hearts over wild rice, and her father baked a blueberry pie – their respective strengths. Neither was a great cook, but the resulting dinner could not have been improved on in the best restaurant in Paris, for Melissa’s purposes.

The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and afterward they watched the 100^th Anniversary reissue of an old flat classic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was Ernest’s favorite movie, and Melissa had never seen it before. For the reissue the studio had retrofitted the old movie with depth, traceset cues for smell, taste, and touch, plus the usual viewpoint options. Ernest hadn’t bothered asking if anyone else wanted those things; he turned them all off, positioned the flat screen at the front of their holofield, and they watched the movie as it had been produced, a century before. He didn’t even enable the French audio track; all of them spoke English well enough. He did, in a very limited compromise, turn on the French subtitles.

The movie immediately became one of Melissa’s favorites. It was a product of its time – a movie made in 1962, portraying the last days of World War I. In its three and a half hours only one woman’s face was seen, a nurse in the final scenes. It was not supposed to be a homosexual romance, either – in those days, even in 1962, such things were considered perverse and no one would have made such a movie. It was clear that the story’s – hero was not too strong a word – hero, T.E. Lawrence, was gay, though Melissa was not sure if Lawrence himself was supposed to be aware of it; in those days people often hid such things even from themselves, the social stigma against it was so strong. But it was a love story, regardless; between Lawrence and the young prince, Sherif Ali, who fought together, successfully, to free the Arab tribes from the rule of the Turks.

When the movie was over, Ernest said, “We must go to bed now, and you should too.” Her parents were coming with her on the train to Marseille, though they would not be permitted to enter the Academy with her; the Academy discouraged parents even remaining in town after dropping their children off, and Ernest and Rebecca would return to Narbonne the same day. “Perhaps you should not mention this movie when you talk with your new friends at Academy,” he went on.

It seemed an odd piece of advice. “Why?”

“In some circles it’s thought subversive,” he said. “They’re wrong, they lack imagination to think so. The Unification of our time is not the Turkish Empire of World War I … but some people have argued the connection, and some people take the argument seriously. Twice foolish,” he added. “David Lean” – the film’s director – “and the writers died decades before the Unification War. The movie is based on T.E. Lawrence’s writing from after World War I. They are reading intent where there could not possibly have been any.” He paused. “But be careful anyway. You have been raised in a patriotic household, but where you are going, you will meet patriots who will make us seem suspect and insufficiently proud.”

Melissa could not imagine such a thing (though it turned out that, as was so often the case, Papa was right.)

She kissed them both and went to bed. Later that night, something awoke her, some low noise – she lay in bed motionless, wondering what it was – a bird? – before she realized it was, from her parent’s bedroom at the other end of the hallway, with two closed doors between Melissa and her parents, the sound of her mother crying.

MELISSA DU BOIS’ four years at the Peace Keeping Force Academy in Marseille were without doubt the four best years of Melissa’s life up to that point. At least some of the men were not afraid of her – with the exception of her own father they were the first men she had ever met whom she had not completely intimidated, with her looks, her body, her athleticism, her intellect, her poise and reserve, or by all of those things in short succession.

Finding men who were not afraid of her was surprisingly pleasant. She was not tempted to sleep with any of them – they were usually upperclassmen and too old for her, and she knew her parents would have disapproved. “Men do not value what comes too easily,” was all Ernest had said on the subject, but Melissa thought it likely he was correct; he had been correct about most of the things he’d bothered to state explicitly, in her life. Melissa was still a virgin at sixteen, and in no hurry to change that.

But there was no denying the attention was enjoyable.

MELISSA LEARNED TO speak idomatic English and passable Chinese. She learned a pragmatic grasp of hand to hand combat, most of which consisted of harming your opponent quickly and savagely and then separating long enough to acquire a weapon. She learned to use every common weapon and how to improvise a startling variety of weapons from common objects. She learned to recognize a bomb, and how to build one.

She learned psyops – how to interrogate a prisoner, how to survive interrogation if captured. How to gain trust, how to manage distrust.

She studied Unification Law and PKF regulations. She studied military history and economic history and politics; one fairly technical paper she wrote on the evolution of intragovernmentalism into supranationalism, and how those things flowed directly from the lessons of World War II and became the basis of the European Union and later the Unification, aroused enough comment within the Academy that it was submitted for publication to a well regarded historical journal, not long after her eighteenth birthday.

A common subject, regardless of class, was the problem of Occupied America. Over four decades after the end of the Unification War, the Johnny Rebs were still functioning – not effectively, in the opinion of most of Melissa’s instructors, but still functioning and worse, popular. Stories about the Rebs, movies about the Rebs, portrayed them as heroes, as patriots – not in a proper sense, not patriotic to the idea of the stable and just society that only the Unification had ever provided to humanity in the entire history of the word; but to abstractions of justice and liberty that were impossible to measure.

“Make no mistake,” one instructor pointed out at the end of a period of discussion, “by any metric you care to name, Occupied America is a better place to live today – we leave aside the question of New York for the moment – than at any time in the history of the American people. They live longer, they live healthier. Infant mortality has decreased to nearly zero. Hunger is rare and starvation nonexistent. Drug and alcohol addiction is a fraction of the problem it once was. Crime of all sorts – violent crime, murder, rape; nonviolent crime, burglary, embezzlement, theft – are at levels previously unknown in American history.

“One would think they would be happy … but they are not. And were not, even before the Troubles began in New York. For Wednesday, a paper giving your theory as to why.”

AT LEAST IN part due to her excellent English, at the age of twenty-one she found herself walking a beat, showing the flag, airing the uniform … in the city of Santa Monica, California, Occupied America.

California was a state Melissa could only just have found on a map before her arrival in it; she knew not much about it otherwise, for all her studies at Academy concerning Occupied America. Los Angeles she knew something about – the part of it called Hollywood had been the most productive source of filmed entertainment during the twentieth century, and Humphrey Bogart had lived there.

Santa Monica, it turned out, was a beach town completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It reminded her a little of Narbonne, though it was wealthier and more crowded. The beaches reminded her quite a bit of the beaches at home; she found herself going down to Santa Monica and Venice beaches when off duty and playing volleyball with complete strangers. Her accent was still obviously French, but for the most part the people on the beach didn’t seem to care about that, at least not as much as they cared about her killer spike.

She spent most of a year in Santa Monica, teleconferencing with her parents to stay in touch. Her mother got nervous if Melissa didn’t call at least twice a week, despite Melissa’s assurance that she had landed in one of the softest, safest patrol jobs any Peaceforcer on Earth could have dreamed up – but with twice weekly calls, Mama was calm enough, if not noticeably happy. (“Happy is her job,” Papa said once, when Melissa was still very small. “You can’t make another person happy. Our job is to love her whether she is happy or sad.”)

Melissa thought her mother’s worries excessive, but it cost her nothing to check in regularly, to send messages back and forth during the course of the day; though she did get in the habit of blocking personal calls on her earphone while on shift. It was only a little white lie to tell her mother that her C.O. disapproved of personal calls – he did, but he wouldn’t have known unless he’d had cause to review her call records, and it would have taken a disciplinary review before he’d have been permitted to look.

As it happened, in December of 2068, he had cause to look.

LATER MELISSA BUILT up an idea of what had happened that day, only three days before Christmas. The last thing she really remembered was sitting in a PKF Armored AeroSmith at the intersection of Wilshire and 15^th Street, explaining wearily to her Captain who was on the phone and twenty kilometers away that she’d had no choice but to override the autocomp and fly directly to the UCLA Medical Center of Santa Monica, because the ambulance wouldn’t have gotten Pierre to a doctor in time. He had chunks blown out of his torso so large that his uniform was the principle thing keeping his spinal column from the air.

After that Melissa didn’t really remember much. She didn’t remember what had happened prior to that, either – at one point a bullet had clipped the back of her skull, digging a furrow in the bone and causing bleeding just the other side of the bone. She’d been, in fact, closer to dying than her partner, and it had required brain surgery by one of Los Angeles’s best human surgeons to save her.

Her performance review decided that Melissa had killed four of the Rebs; her partner had only accounted one. The remaining six had been killed by PKF Elite within minutes of their arrival onsite. The citation added to Melissa’s record concluded that she had directly saved the lives of at least twenty of the Reb hostages – all members of a group of Chinese Christian tourists visiting the U.S. for Christmas.

And they did, Melissa made a point of telling her mother, check her personal phone records before issuing the citation.

IT TOOK A while for her promotion to come through; it was the summer of 2069 before she made Detective. She was twenty-two years old, and along with her promotion came the invitation PKF both feared and desired: she was invited to apply for the Peace Keeping Force Elite. Others might have hesitated, but Melissa knew of no one as young as she who had ever received an invitation: if she turned it down, she knew the odds of receiving another, ever, were poor.

ON AUGUST THE fourteenth, 2069, Melissa du Bois and forty-six other members of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force took their seats aboard the Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, a SpaceFarer vehicle that had been retained to take them to the Elite surgery facility at Spacebase One at L5.

The cabin in which they were to travel had forty-eight seats. After Melissa and her fellow PKF were seated, there remained one empty seat – the aisle seat next to Melissa. No one seemed to know who it was for, but it was soon apparent that the ship would not be taking off until whoever it was arrived.

Melissa waited patiently for a few minutes, then took her handheld out to read. She was halfway through a classic her father had recommended, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” and had managed to get lost within it again when a tall young man wearing business clothing, carrying a briefcase, was led into the cabin and made his way to the empty seat beside her. Young as he was – he was her age, Melissa guessed, maybe even younger – twenty? Melissa wondered who he was, what gave him the pull to keep their ship grounded until he arrived. She didn’t look directly at him, just studied him from the corner of her eye while continuing to page through her novel.

He sat down and strapped himself in, put his briefcase in the safety web beneath the seat: handsome, blond, and quite strikingly beautiful blue eyes.

He turned to her and smiled, and Melissa allowed herself to look up from her handheld. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Trent the thief. Is there anything I can steal for you?”

Raising funds for fsand.com

2011-03-08T01:20:00.001-08:00

Looking to raise money to hire a programmer for fsand.com. To this end, I am selling the original manuscript for "The Long Run." Opening bid is $1000.

Also available, Emerald Eyes

2011-02-02T00:29:00.001-08:00

Here. The rest of the backlist should be up reasonably soon. The stuff that was made available on ImmunitySec is still free, and will remain that way -- what you're paying for here, if you are, is having the books converted into epub and mobi.

Terminal Freedom

2011-02-02T00:23:00.000-08:00

Available for the first time as an ebook. As with all FSAnd titles, Terminal Freedom is DRM free and available in PDF, HTML, EPUB, and MOBI.

"Terminal Freedom does for books what Pulp Fiction did for films; it is wickedly funny, beautifully written, snidely overconfident. What more could you want from a book?" - Kevin J. Anderson

"If Tom Clancy had written Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the result would have been Terminal Freedom." - eluki bes shahar, author of the Hellflower Trilogy

"This is the funniest book ever written, and very possibly the best book I, personally, have ever read." - Marilynn Moran.

Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon by Matt Stover

2011-01-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

I take particular pleasure in being able to make these two available again. FSAnd.com is offering them for sale in epub, mobi, html, and pdf formats. These were Matt's first two novels, and they're superb -- Jericho Moon, the sequel, is in particular one of my very favorite novels.

Iron Dawn

The Age of Heroes is over. The walls of Troy fell ten years ago, and the bright morning of civilization around the eastern Mediterranean is crumbling into adark age of war and savagery -- but for Barra the Pict, axe-wielding barbarian princess from the far-off land of Albion and her mercenary companions, war and savagery are business opportunities. When she and her friends make landfall in Tyre, the jewel of Phoenikia, the city is already under attack by ahidden enemy armed both with bright bronze and with black sorcery. For Barra, that adds up to silver.

Light? Dark? Who cares? She's the girl with the axe.

Jericho Moon

The kingdoms of Canaan are crumbling under a brutally relentless invasion. Now the last surviving Canaanite king has sent out a call for mercenaries to defend his capital, and where there's money to be made by spilling blood, Barra the Pict, gigantic Leucas of Athens and wily Kheperus, master of Egyptian magics, are sure to follow. Especially this city, built high upon an escarpment, with walls that dwarf those of fallen Jericho. And the invaders are only barbarians, after all, more a horde than an army. Easy money.

Or it would be . . . but the city is Jerusalem, and the invaders are the Israelites under the command of the invincible Joshua ben Nun, and the gods of Canaan have chosen Barra for their champion.

Angels, gods, blackest sorcery and shining courage take the field in one final battle for the fate of Canaan.

Winner take all.

Steve Perry and Michael Reaves (and Matt Stover...)

2011-01-27T15:17:00.001-08:00

Two new books, one by Perry and one by Perry with Reaves, are available on fsand.com.

Spindoc: Venture Silk is a corporate spindoc in beautiful Hawaii, twisting the news to serve his bosses when his girlfriend is murdered. Silk is pulled into a web of intrigue beyond the kind he has learned to spin. Spies, rogue agents, and religious fanatics, all armed and dangerous, turn Silk's life into an adventure he never saw coming, and death lurks around every corner.

And...

The Omega Cage: Set in the "Matador" Universe ... When Smuggler Dain Maro runs afoul of the criminal organization Black Sun, he is framed and convicted for murder, then shipped to the galaxy's worst prison. It's a one-way ticket to a hellhole planet -- nobody comes out alive, and nobody has ever escaped from The Omega Cage. Until now …

~~~~~

I'm extremely pleased to announce that two long-unavailable novels by Matt Stover are available now on fsand.com. Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon are two of my favorite novels, and if you've read anything by Matt, you'll understand that:

The Age of Heroes is over. The walls of Troy fell ten years ago, and the bright morning of civilization around the eastern Mediterranean is crumbling into a dark age of war and savagery -- but for Barra the Pict, axe-wielding barbarian princess from the far-off land of Albion and her mercenary companions, war and savagery are business opportunities. When she and her friends make landfall in Tyre, the jewel of Phoenikia, the city is already under attack by a hidden enemy armed both with bright bronze and with black sorcery. For Barra, that adds up to silver. Light? Dark? Who cares? She's the girl with the axe.

There'll be another post tomorrow when we do a co-promotion with Overworld.tv about these, but they're available now.

Iron Dawn

Jericho Moon

Jack LaLanne -- An Appreciation

2011-01-25T14:16:00.001-08:00

Apparently Rush Limbaugh mocked Jack LaLanne. For dying despite his vegetarianism. At 96 years of age.

There are very few great men in this world. But Jack was one. He plausibly added a million years of life, and many millions of years of better life, to the human race, by his presence on this planet. How many people lived longer or lived better because Jack LaLanne was there for decade after decade after decade, proving it could be done and encouraging them that THEY COULD DO IT.

I'm hardly ever shocked, but my God. Rush, listen to yourself.

MILLIONS OF YEARS OF HEALTHIER, HAPPIER LIFE ... for all of us ... because Jack LaLanne was a member of the human race.

Because Jack LaLanne was the best of us, the absolute best of what being human is, and walked the walk and told us that we could walk the walk, too, and made us not believe it, but KNOW IT. "Look," he said year after year, "here I am. Here's what I do. You do it too!" And people did, by the damn millions.

Jack LaLanne might have done more measurable good for the human race than any other human being of the twentieth century. Think about THAT.

I wasn't going to write about Jack LaLanne's death, despite having done jumping jacks with Jack when I was a boy, despite the fact that his presence in my life is one of the reasons I didn't have a heart attack at 44, like my father, why today at 48 I can run full court basketball for 2 straight hours. Folks, I bought the man's damn juicer (which was terrible) ... to this day when I exercise, I almost always hear Jack LaLanne's voice in my head. "One more!"

Overworld.tv

2011-01-20T21:03:00.000-08:00

If you're a fan of Matt Stover's, go on over and take a look. It's early in its life, but they've already raised the money for a first run of graphic novels based on his "Caine" novels. (If you're not a fan of his, you should be -- the man's a hell of a writer.) I am less involved than the team page makes me appear, but I am involved as a consulting editor, and it's a worthy project.

Overworld.tv

Convergence

2011-01-09T21:53:00.000-08:00

http://danielkeysmoran.blogspot.com/2009/07/convergence-or-device-i-want.html

In this post I talked about a variety of things I wanted in a convergent device. Today, this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4112/anand-goes-hands-on-with-motorolas-atrix-4g-webtop

Progress.

FSAnd.com, "Freeway In My Back Yard."

2010-11-17T05:44:00.000-08:00

New book, new website. FSAnd.com is the website, "A Freeway In My Back Yard" is the book. First new book in over a decade, first new website in almost a decade. :-) I've been busy lately.
Works of Steve Perry are also available on the site. Drop on by.

560 comments need to be moderated ....

2010-09-15T21:12:00.001-07:00

Admittedly most of them are spam, but some of them aren't....

You guys who pinged me with the "it's been a year!' ... OK. So it has.

A new collection -- "A Freeway In My Back Yard" -- is going up on kindle & itunes in the next week or two. It was out to proofers and anything they didn't catch is going as is. (I'm uploading it this weekend and am not clear how long Amazon/iTunes will take to make it available.) Table of contents:

Essays 1

A Freeway In My Back Yard 2

The Road Goes Everywhere 4

The Vast and Endless Sea 6

It’s Great to Be Me 8

Motorcycles 10

Two Guys Talking about Cars 12

The Conduct of a Gentleman 16

Freedom Highway 18

For My Father 21

Queen Of the Angels 23

Total Information Awareness 25

Don’t Get On The Plane 27

Greatest Movie You’ve Never Heard Of 28

Liars Like Me 29

Nonfiction 30

Speech to the Coalition for
Networked Information (1995) 31

A Faster Darkness (1995) 52

Driving to San Antonio (1997) 61

Infinite Methods (2007) 72

Fiction 78

A Day in the Life of a Telephone Pole (1974) 79

In Cool Blood 80

STAR WARS: Empire Blues 109

STAR WARS: A Barve Like That 134

STAR WARS: The Last One Standing 159

Roughing It During the Martian Invasion 220

On Sequoia Time 241

Spiderman Kevin Stout Moran 259

Everywhere You Want To Go 260

Scripts 263

5-Minute Brick 264

Pasty D 271

Dream On: Another One Bites The Dust 283

A Moment in Time 316

The collection following it has the following (roughly, though a couple of the pieces are from the dawn of time and need some rewriting):

Old Man and Other Stories:

Tales of the Great Wheel

The Gray Maelstrom

Given the Game

Strings

The Best Of All Possible Worlds

Correspondence (with Jodi Moran)

On the Boulevard of Dreams

Realtime (with Gladys Prebehalla)

Gray

Old Man

Tales of the Continuing Time

Starcloud (13 Billion B.C.; 2464 A.D.)

The Revolt of the Living (4.5 Billion B.C.; 3024 A.D.)

The Shepherds (2049)

Bordered in Blue (2072)

LeftBehind (2485-2489)

The Last Shot (2493)

Smile And Give Me A Kiss (2759-2803)

Cities In The Darkness (3020-3024)

Tales of the Shattered World

Hell Next Five Exits (155,305 ATB)

The Sheriff of Shokes (182,419 ATB)

And finally, there's a book thing coming too, a longer piece, which I might be willing to sell to people who have the good grace to not ask about it.

*****

There's a facebook fan page that I rarely post to, if you're on Facebook.

Thanks to Ruth Lynn Estep

2009-09-16T15:08:00.001-07:00

All of us in the Stout-Moran household want to extend our thanks to Ruth Lynn Estep. Ruth is the lawyer the court assigned to represent Andrea and Bram in our most recent court proceedings; as the lawyer for the children her job is to advocate not what one or the other of the parents want, but what she thinks is in the best interests of the children. Obviously we think she did that, and more to the point, Andrea and Bram think she did that.

We spent more than a decade in Los Angeles Family Court prior to Ruth's introduction to this case, and during that entire decade, never met a single person as conscientious and hard working as Ruth. She is the only person in a decade plus to actually read the documents associated with this case, to speak to the children at sufficient length to understand their perspectives and experiences, and to then communicate that to the court.

We deeply appreciate it. Thank you.

the six inches in front of your face

2009-09-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to say really.
Three minutes
to the biggest battle of our professional lives
all comes down to today.
Either
we heal
as a team
or we are going to crumble.
Inch by inch
play by play
till we're finished.
We are in hell right now, gentlemen
believe me
and
we can stay here
and get the shit kicked out of us
or
we can fight our way
back into the light.
We can climb out of hell.
One inch, at a time.

Now I can't do it for you.
I'm too old.
I look around and I see these young faces
and I think
I mean
I made every wrong choice a middle age man could make.
I uh....
I pissed away all my money
believe it or not.
I chased off
anyone who has ever loved me.
And lately,
I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know when you get old in life
things get taken from you.
That's, that's part of life.
But,
you only learn that when you start losing stuff.
You find out that life is just a game of inches.
So is football.
Because in either game
life or football
the margin for error is so small.
I mean
one half step too late or too early
you don't quite make it.
One half second too slow or too fast
and you don't quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us.
They are in ever break of the game
every minute, every second.

On this team, we fight for that inch
On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us
to pieces for that inch.
We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch.
Cause we know
when we add up all those inches
that's going to make the fucking difference
between WINNING and LOSING
between LIVING and DYING.

I'll tell you this
in any fight
it is the guy who is willing to die
who is going to win that inch.
And I know
if I am going to have any life anymore
it is because, I am still willing to fight, and die for that inch
because that is what LIVING is.
The six inches in front of your face.

Now I can't make you do it.
You gotta look at the guy next to you.
Look into his eyes.
Now I think you are going to see a guy who will go that inch with you.
You are going to see a guy
who will sacrifice himself for this team
because he knows when it comes down to it,
you are gonna do the same thing for him.

That's a team, gentlemen
and either we heal now, as a team,
or we will die as individuals.
That's football guys.
That's all it is.
Now, whattaya gonna do?

Happy Days ...

2009-09-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

It's taken over a decade, but seven days after my number 2 daughter turned 18, freeing herself from the clutch of the Los Angeles Family Court system forever ... the court ruled that Bram, my 13 year old son, no longer had to have any contact with his biological father.

The boy is safe, and free, at long, long last.

More later, but all of you who've written over the years, offering advice or merely support -- many thanks.

Nusquam bonus venio ut Moran est inter, or so I hear. Considering the source, this is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me.

I want to brag about the kids -- Alex is starting her second year at Cal Berkeley. Despite my income she got a partial scholarship this year because she performed so well last year; and she has two years of credits, after one year of college, because she performed so well on her AP classes in high school she got nearly a year's credits from it. Andrea is starting her last year of high school; last year she finished with a 4.3 GPA. Bram finished the seventh grade with straight A's. I don't really believe in grading on a curve -- the world doesn't care what trauma you had to get through to get the job done -- but certainly it speaks to the character of all them that they've done so well, and turned out so well, despite the death of their youngest brother and the presence of the monster in their lives.

I'm proud of you all.

Michael Brand's character sketches ...

2009-08-26T00:38:00.000-07:00

Some concept art for a Face of Night project J.D. Ray is trying to put together. I quite like it.

More here.

There's been a nibble of interest on All Possible Worlds, too, and The Hotel California is in front of an actual publisher at the moment. (I've had half a dozen people read the Hotel outline -- Steve Perry said people were going to absolutely love or hate it, and so far I'm 4 & 2 on love vs. hate, so I guess he was right.)

~~~~~

We watched the last episode of the BBC's Life On Mars about two hour ago. It's shockingly good. Not all the BBC work I've seen has been brilliant -- the recent Torchwood miniseries would have had to crawl up out of the gutter to get to bad -- but on balance, there's not much on American tv I'd trade for it. (OK, Dexter is maybe the best thing ever broadcast on television -- I'm not kidding. But I'd rather watch 35 year old episodes of The Rockford Files, or 50 year old episodes of Maverick, than anything else being broadcast over the airwaves in this day and age, in this country.)

The last of the brothers is gone

2009-08-25T23:47:00.000-07:00

Godspeed, Teddy.

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men." -- JFK

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

2009-07-20T14:06:00.001-07:00

It's my first memory of the world outside our little house in Pomona -- sitting on my father's lap and watching the Eagle land.

Who'd have believed, 40 years ago, that those Apollo missions were an aberration, and not the beginning of a new era of space exploration for the human race? With a fraction of the money being spent on military adventures and cosmetics, the human race could have had a permanent presence in space today. But we don't, and on this one, all ideologies have failed us. Private enterprise hasn't gotten us there (and maybe couldn't have); our government could have, and hasn't.

Today is a bittersweet day.

Roughing It During the Martian Invasion

2009-07-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Keys Moran And Jodi Moran

...this is a matter for thought, and for serious thought. And it is full of a grim suggestion; that we are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed we were.
—Mark Twain, “Man’s Place in the Animal World.”

We were on the open sea, returning from Britain; and despite the odd shower of meteorites we had seen over the previous week, nothing in our prior experience had led us to anticipate Martians.

“By God,” the dwarf exclaimed, in an accent I had not heard him use before. “Would you look at that!”

I looked only at the dwarf, my eyebrows pulling together in a frown. We stood side by side at the forward bow of the Minnehaha; and we had been gazing, previously, at the dark smudge that would become New York City.

This is, I suppose, what comes of traveling in a ship called the Minnehaha. There had been nothing humorous about the trip and the only small thing I had encountered had been the dwarf.

“Ah.” The dwarf resumed his phony accent. “You missed it. It is gone.”

“You, sir, are a low-down dirty Cajun liar.”

The dwarf, who went by the name of Francois Maitrot, turned to me. “And you are not a liar?”

“I’m a storyteller.” I added quickly, lest the dwarf, a tricky fellow, tried to equate ‘storyteller’ with liar. “I get paid for my stories.”

Francois Maitroit’s eyes twinkled. “To tell the truth, Monsieur, I usually get paid for mine, too.”

When the dwarf said “the truth,” it came out as a flatly Louisiana Cajun “de trut,” as opposed to the lisping Parisian “ze tooth” he had been using over the course of our two week voyage from England.

I shook my head. “I’m baffled, Mr. Maitroit. Why would any man of worth choose to pass himself off as a bloody Frenchman?” I had, through much of the long ocean journey, suspected that the small man was some kind of con man—but by God, what was wrong with being an American con man?

“It’s the British.” The dwarf shrugged. “One makes far more money, dealing with the British, presenting oneself as a gentleman of noble French extraction, than one makes as a banjo-playing Louisianan dwarf—I’ve tried both routes.”

From behind us, Livy asked, “You play the banjo?”

It was typical of my wife that she had ignored every other aspect of the conversation she had overheard; Francois and I turned from the railing. “All Louisianans play the banjo,” Francois assured her.

“Of course they do.” Livy smiled at the small man.

I did not much approve of the friendship that had sprung up between the Cajun and my wife. Other men’s wives made friends with other men’s wives, but not Livy. We were traveling together, we Clemenses, Olivia and myself and our daughters, the lights of my life, Clara and Jean—and still Livy, in a spare two weeks, despite the attentions and company of our daughters, had arranged to take a liking to a four-foot tall lying card sharp of French descent.

Livy said to me, “Did you see that?”

“See what, my dear?”

“Well, it was like a spider, with very long legs, but made of metal, and it was skating across the top of the water.”

“No,” Francois answered for me. “He missed it. I told him to look, but he didn’t.”

“He’s a willful man,” Livy conceded. “Pity—it was skating quite well. Quite quickly.”

I sighed. “I did not see it, dear.”

“Oh, well.” She smiled at me. “It was headed toward New York. Perhaps we’ll get another chance to see it there.”

We did not get another chance to see it there; in fact we never got to New York. A week later we were in New Orleans, and—

But I am getting a large step ahead of myself. I should explain; it is what I do, and I fancy I am good at it—explaining, that is.

Doubtless you know what awaited us. In the waters off New York we were privileged, if that is the word, to witness the final battle between the United States Navy and the invading Martians. It was short, it was awful, it was to the point. When it was over one surviving battleship steamed away into deep water—and there the Martians did not follow. (We did not know at that time, of course, that they were Martians.) Once the fight was done, and only the sinking hulks of the American ships were left around them, the walkers turned back to shore—

The moment still grips me with a chill, when I think back upon it. We had thought them vessels, you see, sea-going constructs of one sort or another, though unfamiliar to us—

As they approached the shore, the walkers rose up out of the water—ten feet, twenty, forty . . . a hundred. They towered up over the skyline of New York City, and stood before it as though they owned it. Then one of the walkers swung back out toward us—

“About!” Captain Davis cried. “Hard about!”

The Minnehaha steamed south.

Aboard the Minnehaha a tremendous argument raged. We had gathered in the main dining room—many of the sailors, Captain Davis and his First Officer, and most of the male passengers.

“We are at war,” Francois said. “We must learn more of the situation, and to do that we must go ashore!”

Captain Davis seemed personally affronted by the whole affair—he commented that we ought to have stayed in England, where we would have been safe. Then talk turned to the issue of assigning guilt. “The Spanish, do you think?”

“No.” I lit myself a cigar, to give myself something to do—the Captain edged away slightly. I shook my head. “If you live long enough, Captain Davis, perhaps your taste in cigars will improve—why, these are forty cent cigars!” I drew on the cigar.

“Forty cents a barrel,” said Francois. “I think it’s the Germans—”

“The French,” I said around my cigar. “And they’re thirty-three cents a barrel, to come clean—that includes the barrel. I second the dwarf’s plan—let’s find a safe dock somewhere and go ashore, and find someone who knows something of these walkers.”

“Did you see the damage those walkers caused half a dozen of the Navy’s best? How can you ask me to take a commercial vessel into that? I can’t ask one of my men to go into that.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “Have some courage, man! Let’s go ashore and learn the facts.”

“Mr. Clemens, you’re sixty-five—”

“Sixty-four,” I said dryly, “and not in my dotage yet; and I daresay this dwarf has the courage to brave the shore with me—”

The First Officer, a strapping fellow name of Stephen Bradshaw, spoke up. “I’ll go ashore with them, Cap’n. We’ll get the lay of the land and report back promptly.”

“If we’re going to send anyone it ought to be some of the seamen—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “that will not do; for when it comes to learning the truth, and reporting it flawlessly, they have not had my training.”

Down around South Carolina we closed in on the shore again.

Walkers patrolled along the length of the beach. One of them turned toward us and strode out into the ocean, making a hooting noise that was eerie, indeed unearthly. Though we saw no weapon discharged toward us, the sea about us began to flash into steam, and then to bubble and simmer—

Captain Davis turned ship again and ran, with the boilers in the red.

At Florida we saw more of the Walkers, as we were now calling them, with the word audibly capitalized. One of the Walkers waded out into the water after us—and did not stop when its hood was at the level of the water. The hood dropped below the sea, and Captain Davis turned the ship and ran at full steam, a day and a night, into the Gulf of Mexico, before conceding we had outtrun the beast.

Two days later we made port at New Orleans, at the mouth of the great Mississippi river.

It was plain, entering the harbor, that things were not well; the mouth of the river was choked by some terrible red growth, a growth that gave off a vile and somewhat decayed odor; the air above the city was smoky with burning buildings. Captain Davis sent the other passengers back to their cabins—I, trading shamelessly on my fame and age, convinced the Captain to allow me to stay up top, though I sent Livy below with our daughters. Francois Maitroit simply took up position next to me, assuming, I imagine, that nobody would hustle him back to his cabin—no one did.

The harbor was empty of traffic; an astonishing sight. “I am of a mind to put back to sea,” Captain Davis muttered to me. “But we are low of fuel, and will soon be low on food.”

I watched the city. Buildings of wood were mostly burned down; the brick buildings were mostly still standing, though here and there the brick buildings looked as though they had been smashed to bits with cannon fire.

We saw no Walkers. The ship held motionless, at the mouth of the Mississippi, boilers stoked, for half a day before Captain Davis had the temerity to make shore.

Over Livy’s objections and the Captain’s dithering, Francois and Stephen Bradshaw and I went ashore in the French Quarter—in its original incarnation the Spanish part of the city. Bradshaw carried a rifle, and Francois a revolver; I declined a weapon.

“We’ll be back shortly,” I told the Captain. “If you see signs of trouble, cast off; you’re to take no chances with the lives of my wife and daughters.” The Captain assented—a little readily, I thought, but just as well, in the circumstances; I could not much object to a coward of a Captain, when that cowardice would protect my girls.

It was a hot day and sweltering, as sultry as only Louisiana gets at the height of summer, before we set foot on land. Our plans were not distinct; they involved finding someone still alive, and then questioning that person before he, or she, could be made otherwise by one of the Walkers.

The French Quarter stank. It always stinks, to give it its due justice, but this was a new stink, a different stink and highly improved; of decay and death, rather than the stench of perfume and rotting food. We walked down the center of the road. The wrecks of carriages were scattered here and there; the decaying bodies of dead horses were still yoked to a couple of them. The horses looked as though they had been burned—

“Fire,” said Francois. “Fire everywhere. All the wood has burned, the brick is scorched and in some places melted—the city has been attacked by fire.”

“The Germans,” I conceded finally, “I think you are right. Not that the French would be above this; it is precisely the sort of crime those malignant little soldiers delight in; but the science behind this—the skill—it reeks of German engineering.” We neared a cross street, and I slowed as we entered the intersection. For the first time we saw human corpses—fresh ones, dead no more than a day or so. Two adult men lay sprawled in the center of the intersection, one face down, the other face up. Both had been burned hideously—

The motion caught my eye, off to the north, and I turned to look.

It was the first Walker—the first Martian war machine, as we shortly learned—that we had seen up close. It walked on three metallic legs, and it was a hundred feet tall, with a hood-shaped platter atop it. It was a mile or more distant, I reckoned, and even at that distance looked huge. It hesitated briefly, then seemed to catch sight of us and turned swiftly and began lumbering down the street toward us at an amazing speed, faster than land-bound creature I had ever seen—

It gave me an energy that would have astounded and delighted me, under other circumstances; it is impressive, the things a man can do with appropriate encouragement, even an old man such as myself.

We ran like the wind.

The dwarf ran remarkably well; he kept up with me easily enough. We ran south, and then cut east, out of the monster’s immediate line of sight, looking for a place to hide; I knew that Francois and I could not possibly outrun that monstrosity; and Bradshaw was no longer an issue.

Bradshaw had left us, back at the intersection where we had first sighted the Walker; taken up his stance, and aimed his rifle at the approaching Walker. I glanced back over my shoulder, slowed to a halt and yelled, “Bradshaw! Don’t be—”

Something reached out and touched Stephen Bradshaw. It tore him apart and his blood sprayed twenty feet to splatter against my coat. In retrospect, sitting in the cellar with time to think about it, the moment seemed dim and blurred—the First Officer coming apart like a mouse struck by the edge of a hoe. Even today, all these years later, I can but barely remember the next few moments —— I could hear the clang of the monster’s metal feet moving down the cross-street toward us, could see the flames dancing over what was left of Stephen Bradshaw, could smell Bradshaw’s blood where it had spattered me—

“Here! In here!” Hands grabbed me and pulled us down into darkness.

In the darkness of the cellar I said, “Damn fool.” I was so shaken I could not think up anything witty to say, could not even manage a witticism stolen from someone else. I have seen men die before, some quantity, but not like that, not torn apart by an invisible beam.

“Shhhh!”—came a fierce whisper in my ear. “Not a sound until it passes!” In the abrupt stillness I heard the clinking steps of the Walker—louder and louder, until each step sounded like sledgehammer blows against the surface of the cobbled city street. There came a huge sound then, an explosion that rocked the cellar and sent dust sifting down from the cellar’s ceiling. An Irish-sounding voice whispered from somewhere off to my right, “Blew up the house next door, I bet,” followed by the sound of flesh smacking flesh, and another “Shhhh!”

Some interminable time later, a candle was lit. I looked about the cellar and found myself in the company of a well-dressed Negro; a barrel of a man of perhaps fifty, Irish at a guess; a boy I guessed to be that man’s son, and the source of the earlier whisper; and a beautiful dark-haired girl dressed in what I took to be Gypsy clothing.

A motley lot—I was extraordinarily grateful that I had left Livy aboard the Minnehaha—I know her, having been married all those long decades, and though she is a good woman, she would have taken to these people.

In short order the crowd had filled me in on the events of the last several weeks. The Gypsy girl started off. “First they came shooting out of the sky, crashing to the ground—one of them smashed the old St. Louis Hotel, and killed everyone in it, including a priest and a gray mare. Martians, we were told, not long after that. Then they opened up and got up on their legs and started killing people. They had set fire to the remains of the hotel, and the firemen came to put out the fire; they slaughtered the firemen first—”

“Dreadful!” I exclaimed.

“Then the police came and they slaughtered the police.”

“Indeed, indeed.”

“Then the Army came and they slaughtered the soldiers—”

“I see a drift here,” I said, “a trend.”

“Then the city government collapsed—”

“Fled,” said the Irish boy—Paddy, a redhead of about fifteen.

The elderly Negro—well, about my age, which is elderly, in most men, those lacking my energy and charm—I do not mean to sound boastful, but my reputation on these counts is well known—this Negro said with a pronounced and attractive Southern accent, “Gone, sir, the police, the soldiers, dead or gone; indeed, most of the city has fled the city; I doubt there are five hundred humans left alive in all of New Orleans.”

“The psychic pinhead,” the gypsy girl said in a profound voice, “predicted this. Back in early 1894.”

I glanced at her sourly. “What psychic pinhead?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” The girl waved an arm airily. “She’s dead. Died in late ’94.”

Francois and I exchanged a look—we each recognized a liar when we were speaking to one.

“This pinhead,” Francois asked. “Was she a Gypsy?”

“Oh, no, no, indeed not, Gypsies don’t have pinheaded children. We’re all especially good-looking.”

I declined to comment on that—it was true enough, in this young lady’s case; though I had known more than one ugly Gypsy, over the years. “So in 1894, this pinhead predicted that metallic monsters would take over the world at the turn of the century?”

“Well, no, she said Martians would invade at the turn of the century. The metallic monsters won’t really take over for another few decades. And they’ll come from Detroit, not Mars.”

“They’ll be rollers, not walkers.” That was Paddy again.

“I told him that,” the Gypsy girl informed us.

“Talia thinks she’s the source of all knowledge.” Paddy sneered at the girl—she was probably only a few years older than Paddy, but was acting as if she were in charge of the whole cellar.

I tried valiantly to drag the conversation back on track. “Have you any kind of plan to deal with these beasts? Or are we merely hiding out until we’re found and killed?”

“Don’t be silly, man.” The Irish father, one Mister Connor Turley, offered me a fierce look, augmented by a grandly fierce mustache—he would never have my hair or my brow, but one had to admire the facial hair. “This cellar is a hotbed of resistance,” Mr. Turley continued. “We’ve brought down three of the devils already. In Ireland I fought the English; and here in this grand city of New Orleans, I’ll fight the Martians to the death.”

As the denizens of the cellar took a moment to appreciate this declaration, Paddy added, “Their death, he means”—evidently he didn’t want anyone to think his father was contemplating either martyrhood or defeat.

“I hate the English,” Mr. Turley added.

“They’re a cheap lot,” Francois concurred.

“I despise the French,” I offered, and added, for Francois’s benefit, “Though Americans of French descent are rarely scoundrels. It’s principally a cultural villainy.” In another effort to stay on course, and to return to Livy and my daughters before some Martian fire-beamed them out of existence, I asked, “How exactly did you bring three of them down?”

“Well,” said Paddy, “the first one we had help with—this Englishman, Christopher, decent sort for an English, he come up with the idea of digging a pit to catch one of them—then we painted a man and a horse, both of them, bright green, and when the Walker caught sight of him, off it went after him and ran across the hole we dug and fell in.”

“And then a dozen more Walkers come along and slaughtered everyone was involved with that,” said the father. “We just barely got away.”

“Since then,” said the elderly Negro, in his deep, distinguished voice, “we’ve been using dynamite buried at the intersections, set off by percussion caps when the Walkers step on them—New Orleans is a dangerous place for tourists.”

I eyed him. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced yet, sir—though you sound a native of these parts, unlike the others.”

“Not quite—I was born a slave in the land of Georgia. Freed by Mr. Lincoln and given a job in the offices of this fine city.”

“You’re a clerk,” I guessed, from the man’s suit.

“I am a civil servant—Peter Grayson, at your service.” The man’s dark eyes gazed at me neutrally. “And you, sir, are Mark Twain.”

“Samuel Clemens.” I held out his hand and after a moment the other man took it. “And my companion is Francois Maitroit. We arrived by boat this morning, having crossed the Atlantic, and traveled down the coast and around Florida. Aboard the Minnehaha.”

“Ah.” Grayson smiled slightly. “Thus explaining the amusing small man.”

“There’s fewer than there was,” said Connor Turley, speaking swiftly to cut off Francois’s response. “Of the Martians, I mean. Must be some others been knocking them down as well—there was dozens of them roaming the city at one point, and now there’s only just the few.”

“I think they’re sick,” said Talia. “We’ve seen a couple staggering around, shooting at nothing—”

Francois glowered at Grayson, still smarting from the man’s joke—he made a small gesture with the revolver. “I’m liable to shoot at something.”

“I think,” I said quickly, “we should go back to the ship.”

“No! If—”

“No! We—”

“No!” said Grayson. “Not until dark, sir. Not until dark.”

We waited in the cellar until dark fell.

I sat quietly for the most part, sick with worry—to be sure, I had faith in Captain Davis’s cowardice, but not his competence; if one of the Martians attacked, who knew if the man would manage to get under steam in time? The Minnehaha had a pair of Gatling guns, and rifles and revolvers, but she was hardly a military ship, and I knew she wouldn’t last long in a duel with one of the Walkers.

Only Francois managed to distract me from his worrying. He took me off in a corner and spoke in a low voice:

“The Walkers aren’t the Martians themselves,” Francois said. “So Paddy tells me—the Martians are inside them; the Walkers are just transportation.”

“Of course,” I said, “plainly the Walkers are mechanisms. So?”

“So,” said Francois persuasively, “the Martians are ugly. Terribly, terribly ugly—tentacles and such—”

“Pretty bad.”

“—green skin—”

“Indeed?”

Francois hesitated. “So Paddy tells me.”

“He’s Irish,” I warned Francois. “They’re known to improve their statistics some.”

“I adjusted for that—he says Martians are more frightening than a Christian Scientist working his theology—”

“I’ve had the honor of that sight—Paddy is wrong.”

“—and uglier than a Capitalist.”

“It seems extreme,” I admitted. “Uglier than ‘Jo-Jo The Dog-Faced Boy;’ that sounds plausible, that sounds about right. You could put in on a poster. But uglier than a Capitalist . . . there would be skepticism, Francois, healthy skepticism.”

“You know what we need?” demanded Francois. “Live specimens. If they are falling sick, if the invasion is failing—well, there’s opportunity here, if we grab it.”

“Grab a Martian, you mean. For display?” I asked doubtfully. “I doubt it would pay, Francois. We might make a million, selling it to Barnam and Bailey perhaps, and that assumes no one else has had any luck getting himself a Martian to show, and that some circus, somewhere, will pay us what a Martian is worth.” I shook his head. “The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than two millions. In fact—”

“No,” hissed Francois, cutting me off, keeping his own voice low so that we would not be overheard. “Not one Martian for display—two Martians . . . a breeding pair.” Even in the dimness of the candle-lit cellar, I could detect the gleam in Francois’s eyes. “A breeding pair.”

I stared at him, a slow smile appearing below my mustache. A dwarf after my own heart, I thought.

I could not help thinking that it sounded like the setup for a joke, probably a poor one—what do you get when a Negro, two Irish, a Gypsy, a dwarf, and a world-famous writer go out for a nighttime stroll?

We did not stroll, in fact. We scurried. From place to place, cover to cover. My suit, my very good white suit, had been darkened with coal dust, and my long white hair blackened also. We made our way back to the docks without encountering another Martian, and my heart leapt at the sight of the Minnehaha, apparently unharmed, still tied up at the dock—

We ran down the dock, and arrived at the ship—I was out of breath from all the running and hiding, and had had about enough of it.

Only Captain Davis was up top when we arrived—the ship was darkened.

“Cast off!” I called as we crossed the boarding planks. “Cast off!”

Captain Davis sat on one of the deck chairs—he leaned forward. “Mr. Clem—Clem—Twain? Is that you, Twain?”

“Cast off, man! We’re back!”

Davis shook his head gloomily, settling back into his chair. “I can’t, sir. Can’t do it, can’t.”

I could tell from the sound of the man’s speech that he was roaring drunk, four or maybe five sheets to the wind. I looked about—

“Where are the passengers? Where are the crew?”

“Oh, the passagers,” said Davis dismissively. “They’re b’low, they’re alive, more or less.” He raised a small flask to his lips, drank from it. “The crew, now, that’s another story. Another story—”

“Where are they?”

“They fled!—the dogs.”

“You impugn the dogs”—I said automatically—“noble creatures, dogs—and perhaps the men, too. To where did they flee?”

“They headed off ’long the coast, sir. For Alabama. They took the boats.”

“You do impugn them,” I said severely. “Their flaw was merely one of judgment, not character—they assumed Alabama was preferable to death. Promptly they learn of their mistake, they’ll be back. In the meantime, we must sober you up, we’ve a project—”

By just the next day it was plain that the Martians had indeed fallen sick. The Walkers were seen less frequently—late that afternoon one of them staggered out onto the Mississippi, waded a ways into it, and then fell, and apparently drowned; at least it sank beneath the water and did not surface again.

The crew, having learned the truth about Alabama, returned to face the Martians the following day. Captain Davis seemed more relieved than angry, at the sight of them returning in the lifeboats. He lined them up for a speech:

“You have abandoned ship once or twice before this, most of you men. It is all right—up to now. I would have done it myself in my common-seaman days, I reckon, if I’d returned to the States to find Martians invading and the cities in flames. Now then, can you stand up to the facts? Are we rational men, manly men, men who can stand up and face hard luck and a big difficulty that has been brought about by nobody’s fault, and say live or die, survive or perish, we are in for it, for good or bad, and we’ll stand by the ship if she goes to Hell!”

The men gave up a tolerably decent cheer then, and the Captain seemed to gain a little stature again with that; and added, “And there’s a profit, too, men, Mr. Clemens swears it—”

There was a larger cheer at that.

The next morning we went out and captured a Walker.

That night was spent in planning—plotting and considering and devising, laying out tactics and strategies; schemes were proposed and modified and perfected, resources counted and estimated—no group of soldiers had ever gone about taking a city with more clarity of purpose than I and Francois and the Captain and Peter Grayson and the two Irishmen and the Gypsy woman went about planning for the capture and care of a Martian breeding pair. We had plenty of dynamite, we had the ship’s Gatling guns; we had twenty stout seamen who had been chastised by their failures in Alabama and were prepared to follow orders once more. The plans evolved and developed until it was clear that there were two plans with good support behind them; mine, which I supported, and Francois’s plan, which everyone else supported. I proposed they dig a pit, and lead a Walker over it—with a green man aboard a green horse, as the Englishman Christopher had done earlier; I conceded I was not above appropriating someone else’s good idea, though perhaps for variety’s sake it would be better to paint the man, or the horse, or both, red or blue rather than green, the Martians having seen a green horse at this point. Francois accused me of plagiarism and suggested that we try lassoing one of the Walkers, using one of the Minnehaha’s two anchor-chains—how the lasso was to be thrown or made tight about the Walker was a minor detail, and not worked out yet. Finally Peter Grayson proposed we put the matter to a vote, and I pointed out that it was nearly daylight, and we had lost an entire night’s pit digging; it wasn’t safe to go digging in the daytime, I said severely, it wasn’t fair to the seamen, brave fellows if a little unclear on their geography, to force them out to do hard manual labor on a sweltering Louisiana summer day—and with the threat of immolation from fire-beams on top of that, I added as it occurred to me.

The sky to the east was lightening with the first hint of morning when Francois suggested we put it to a vote. I lit a cigar to gain time—I knew a losing hand when I saw one; certainly the seamen weren’t going to vote in favor of pit digging—

About twenty minutes after dawn a Walker fell over at the West End, not far from Lake Pontchartrain.

By mid-afternoon, scouring the city, we had found three fallen Walkers. There appeared to be none still moving. Whatever illness had struck them down had done likewise to the red weed that had so choked the Mississippi; the river was cleansing itself; clumps of the red weed were being torn free and deposited, as the river has always cleansed itself of that which it is not pleased with, in the the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

By evening we had cleared out a hotel on the banks of the Mississippi, and had eight living Martians behind bars—the sailors pulled them from their fallen Walkers, picked them up in canvass lifts, and transported them to the hotel in a sailor-drawn carriage, there being no horses alive that we had yet found.

It was my first sight of the Martians themselves—a thing no human who saw them, while they were still alive, is likely to forget. They were as ugly as their reputations—ugly as a Capitalist, and a sight uglier than Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy had ever been. They have been described frequently enough since then, by a variety of word scribblers; I shall not waste time on it here, except in brief; grayish-green, with two sets of tentacles beneath the mouth; each of them was somewhat larger than a man.

I will mention their eyes at somewhat greater length. They were large and expressive; they seemed somehow both mournful and calculating, as though figuring the probabilities on their situation. They were not human eyes, but there was no doubt in me that they were the eyes of sapient creatures, of creatures as intelligent as any man, including perhaps myself. When I met the eyes of the first of our captured Martians, I had the sense that I was meeting the gaze of a being wiser, and older, and colder, than any Bishop who had ever lived.

Two of the sailors returned from their searching, near evening, with a story that caused us some concern. They claimed to have seen a pair of Walkers, their walking-legs bent double beneath them, kneeling at the edge of the Mississippi; and a vessel of some sort, half-submerged beneath the river’s flow, taking on half a dozen Martians, or more, all apparently healthy—they were not specific on this subject, due to the difficulty they had had, trying to observe while fleeing in the other direction.

By nightfall we had seven living Martians behind bars—by midnight it was down to six.

“It’s the gravity killing them,” Francois insisted. “I’ve read on this subject, Clemens, I tell you it’s the gravity. Their world is colder than ours, and lighter.”

I shook his head. “I grant you, the heat’s not fit for man or Martian—but there’s no electricity, Francois; I doubt there’s a working ice-maker within a hundred miles of here.”

“We could put one of the Martians in the river,” Francois suggested. “Perhaps it would float, relieving the weight upon it?”

It drowned. We were down to five.

Two more died the following day. It left us with three.

I spent that night with the Martians.

The three of them looked listless.

They had trouble moving, and nothing I had arranged for them seemed to suit their appetites—they hadn’t touched the beef, or the greens, or the beer, or the fruits or vegetables or eggs. I suspected that at least one of them had drunk some of the water—I’d drowsed, sitting in the padded chair the sailors had brought from the ship, and when I awoke, the water bowl was lower than it had been.

Watching them, I knew I had been a fool to think they could be bred; my optimism had gotten the better of me. I had no more idea if any two of them could make up a breeding pair than I’d have had dealing with snails, or sharks. “For all we know,” I told Francois when Francois came by, near three that morning, “they are all three men, or women, or another sex entirely; perhaps they reproduce by division, or require ten mates—”

Francois nodded, and seated himself in the chair beside mine. We sat in a companionable silence, in the cool night air, watching the cage the three Martians had been imprisoned in. The Martians stirred occasionally, moving slowly and with evident pain.

“The sailors have ranged up the river a ways,” Francois said at length. “They’ve found a steamship, run aground about six miles upriver. It’s damaged some—”

It perked my interest. “Badly?”

“The texas deck is scarred by that weapon, they say, that heat beam, but otherwise it looks river-worthy.” Francois looked at me sideways. “That bunch of Martians that headed upriver, Sam, they were healthy. So the men said.”

“They did say that.” I withdrew a cigar from its case, offered it to Francois—the small man shuddered and refused politely. I lit it slowly, turning it for a smooth draw. I had the distinct impression that the largest of the three Martians was watching me.

“It seems a long way to come, to die in a cage,” said Francois.

I found myself gazing into the eyes of the large Martian, watching it as it died. “I would not feel too sorry for them—they are God’s creatures, no doubt, as we are; and therefore doomed and without hope. If there is a Hell, and if they have the Moral Sense humans are blessed with, they will doubtless go there for their sins here on the Earth; if there is no Hell, then death is nothing but release, and they go into a great dark.” I shrugged. “Hardly a thing to fear.”

The large Martian crept forward a bit, and drank from the water bowl as I watched.

“Man is the Reasoning Animal,” I said. “Such is the claim—I find it open to dispute, though. Any cursory reading of history will show that he is the Unreasoning Animal. It seems plain to me that whatever Man is he is not a reasoning animal. His record is the fantastic record of a maniac. These poor monsters had no chance—if the gravity and heat and disease had not killed them, we would have done it ourselves, I think.”

“A river-boat, Sam,” the dwarf said persuasively. “An empty river-boat.”

“Fifty-five or -six years ago,” I said softly, “it was my greatest ambition, as it was of all the boys in my village, to travel down the Mississippi—the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, to escape Hannibal and ride down that miles-wide ribbon of water to the sea, to New Orleans.”

“I’ve read your work,” said Francois. “Most of it, I think, at one time or another.”

I took a good drag, letting the smoke settle in my lungs. I spoke as he exhaled, and watched as the Martian drank again. “I expect they’ll be dead before morning.”

“I expect,” said Francois, not taking his eyes from me.

I turned to examine him. “You want to go up the river.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” he said in that low, intense voice. “Let’s take the guns from the Minnehaha, fix whatever’s wrong with that riverboat the men found, and go after the Martians who fled. For profit, for revenge—”

“The river is beautiful in the summer,” I said. “It’s harder going upriver than down, though; you must hug the banks to avoid the current. You’d need a pilot, a good one, navigating those shallows, and I confess, I’m a bit rusty.” I let the smoke trickle through my nostrils—though I did not like to confess it, the idea appealed to me; there was a symmetry in it. That young boy had wanted to go down the river, had wanted it more than anything; and with the world as it was, unsettled and dangerous, and I an old man, I might never have another chance to navigate its waters—

“I’ll do it,” I said finally. “Let’s follow them up the river.”

The last Martian died just after dawn.

The Penguin Wins

2009-07-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

I've been running Ubuntu for a little over a year now. I've gone through two major upgrades, from 7.04 to 8.04 to 9.04; and all in all, it's worked.

7.04 had bad wireless problems; 8.04 was much better; and 9.04 is generally functional, though not up to Windows standards yet. Multiple display support has had similar sorts of issues; in the three versions of Ubuntu I've used it's gone from awful to OK. OpenOffice -- at least the word processor and spreadsheet portions -- is a useable replacement for Microsoft Office (to the point where it's now installed on all of our Windows machines as well, and we've uninstalled Microsoft Office and lost the install disks.) OpenOffice is much better than Office when you contrast it to the most recent version of Office, the ribbon bar complete interface revamp, which is an absolute abomination, new for the sake of new. (Digression: no, it's not really new for the sake of new, it's new for the same reason IBM introduced the microchannel bus architecture twenty years ago -- they saw the ISA interface getting away from them and they wanted to move everyone to something proprietary. It didn't work for them and the ribbon interface isn't going to work for Microsoft for the same reason.)

GIMP isn't Photoshop, but it's functional, and free, and you can tweak it to resemble Photoshop.

XNView isn't ACDSee -- it's probably better. (Certainly better than the recent versions. It's available for Windows, too. FastStone is a Windows only image viewer, but it's also free and better than recent versions of ACDsee.)

VLC is the only media player I bother with any more. It's almost infinitely better than anything Microsoft has ever shipped, and it's available on Linux and Windows (and a bunch of other platforms.) As recently as a year ago it had difficulty playing windows media files on Linux -- you had to hunt for libraries and install them manually -- but that's resolved. It plays .wmv files beautifully.

There's nothing quite up to iTunes standards on Linux, and I've tried them all in recent years. I finally settled on Rhythmbox, but it's a pale imitation.

There's no open source 3D software that's as good as my 8 year old copy of 3D Studio Max. Blender looks interesting but it's not a commercial grade tool. (There are a variety of commercial tools available for Linux, though, and in this area that's probably sufficient. 3D Studio Max isn't available on Linux, but Cinema 4D is, Massive is, Maya is ... while the situation is no better than that on Windows, it's not a lot worse, either.)

The Bash shell is certainly vastly better than the Windows CMD prompt, but not in the ballpark of Windows Powershell. (Howls of outrage from the Linux community -- I'm willing to be educated here. But Powershell is an absolutely remarkable piece of technology.)

At least in dealing with NTFS, rsync is much slower than XXCOPY, the freeware utility I use under Windows to synchronize filesystems.

There's no newsreader for Linux that's remotely comparable with Forte Agent.

~~~~~

Linux started out as an 80% solution -- nothing wrong with that, and in in-house software development you're better off living with the 80/20 principle: you may have time to code the 20% that your users absolutely require (and which provides the 80% of the functionality they'll actually use), but the chance that you'll ever have time and staff to code the remaining 80% is usually poor. But individual computing is about the 100% experience -- if one in five people can't use a given platform, or one in 5 apps that an individual wants to use are unavailable, that platform is never going to be viable.

Ubuntu, for my purposes, is a 90% solution at this point. The underlying OS, as of Ubuntu Version 9.04, is superior to Windows Vista and probably a wash with Windows 7. It has sound issues, driver issues, multi-monitor issues, and yes, still has wireless issues ... but they're all minor by comparison with where they were. On the upside, it has infinitely easier installation and upgrades, and there's nothing on Windows that compares to the ease of use of the Linux respositories. (Though if the Linux crowd would get their shit together and settle on a single installation model, the rising tide would lift all boats. The deb/rpm/whatever split is stupidly counterproductive.)

About half the computers in our house (plus the media server) run Linux at the moment; it would probably be all of them if I didn't work with Windows software for a living. The value proposition is hard to beat, particularly for older machines -- reinstalling Windows on a notebook that never came with the Windows disks, once it's crashed, is more trouble than it's worth: I can install Ubuntu off a usb key. (Technically you can do the same with Windows XP, if you want to spend more hours of your life than it's worth to build a custom install key, and you're highly technically literate. I spent about 12 hours recently doing this for a netbook -- no optical media available -- that crashed with several days unbacked-up work on it. It was worth the 12 hours to recover the 30 hours of work, but it was still deeply annoying.)

The value proposition is pretty straightforward:

Windows XP ~ $100 vs. Ubuntu 9.04 free. A wash on functionality. Winner Ubuntu.

Photoshop ~ $670 at Newegg vs GIMP free. Photoshop is better and if you need it you need it; but if you don't, GIMP is the choice. A wash except for pros.

Microsoft Office $360 at Newegg vs. OpenOffice free. Big win for the OpenSource camp.

The various little utilities are mostly free on both Windows and Linux today, so we'll call that a wash, except that I wish iTunes was available for Linux.

$1130 for the Microsoft stack; free for the Linux stack.

This is the home user, student argument; it gets more complex for business people. But at our house we're moving toward Linux, and away from Microsoft, and I don't expect that to reverse any time soon.

~~~~~

So Google is now pushing both the Android and Chrome OS. Most companies would be content to fail at a single OS at a time.

Convergence (or, the device I want ...)

2009-07-05T03:18:00.000-07:00

It's been, OK, more years than any of us want to think about since I first wrote about Trent walking around with a handheld hooked up to the internet through radio packets. Over the years bits and pieces of that device have become real -- I had a nice letter many years back from a Compaq engineer who wrote that his design for the iPaq had been based in large part on my description of a handheld.

Currently, Apple is out front in the handheld market. The iPhone is a superb piece of technology, and while it doesn't do everything I want, it does a lot of the things I want, and does them somewhere between acceptably and well. But there's an opportunity here for device convergance -- if some company like Microsoft or Dell or even Sony or Nintendo were serious about absolutely owning the convergent device, here's what they need to build.

The device I want has roughly the same physical form factor as an iPhone, though there's no reason the screen can't be a little larger -- the iPhone masks off both the top and bottom of the phone with black bars. I want the entire surface of the phone to be a touchscreen. It needs a higher resolution screen than the iPhone, something in 16:9 format -- 640 by 360, say, or 800x450, as compared to the 480x320 screen the iPhone currently sports.

Next, of course, it needs to work as a phone, with high speed internet access. It needs a good enough microphone and speakers that it can be used as a speakerphone for conference calls. It needs bluetooth and high speed WiFi.

It needs to work as a computing device. This means multi-tasking built in, as in the Palm Pre, and probably some flavor of Linux-like OS. It means the ability to manage other devices -- the ability to work as a USB master, not just as a slave. I want to plug my USB hub into it and have my keyboard and mouse and hard drives and MIDI keyboard and Wacom tablet available.

I want a fast CPU, lots of storage, and lots of RAM and I want it all to go to sleep when I'm not using it. I shouldn't have to power up the 60 Gigs of storage I'm not using to get at the 2 Gigs I am using at the moment. I want a multi-core processor, with the cores turning themselves off when not in use.

I want to use standard peripherals -- cheap, standardized memory cards, power chargers, and spare batteries.

I want a wireless router built into it, so that I can use the connection to provide internet service to people or devices around me if I choose.

I want a video processor to offload 3D processing, for movies and games. I want a standard headphone jack. I want AM, FM, and HD radio.

The handheld needs a variety of cradles that it can be slid into. One cradle would be a games controller -- something like the Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable -- with the various buttons that the kids know how to use to play those games they like. (Take a look at a PSP and you can see what I'm talking about; a PSP is a set of controls wrapped around a device about the same size as an iPhone screen.)

It should work as a still and video camera -- a good one. The controls can be entirely software based, but the camera should be able to take pictures pointed either outward, or inward. Possibly the camera itself can be mounted on a swivel (within the body of the device) to permit this. This way, when used as a camera, you can see on the screen the picture you're about to take; when used for video conferencing, you can see the image you're sending out. (A potential alternative to a rotating lense is to put lcd panels on both sides of the handheld and use a smaller and cheaper panel as the viewfinder for photographs and video.)

A camera cradle would offer improvements to the camera functions and would give you the ability to mount a flash and improved 35mm optics on the device (hello, depth of field) ... and perhaps more importantly, to mount the device itself on a tripod. The camera cradle would also have a port for microphone-in so that quality audio can be recorded on the device.

The device should be able to record 720 or 1080P video to the memory card, in 24 or 30 frames per second.

It should offer a simple binocular function that permits me to zoom in on things easily to look at them. It should offer functional night vision -- not just light enhancement, but infrared stepup.

The next cradle I want is a simple waterproof enclosure. I want to read e-books in the tub. I've dropped a half dozen books in the tub over the years, or had them get wet on the bathroom floor -- that's unfortunate for a book, but a disaster for my handheld. The enclosure should also permit people to use the camera/video functions, for people to take photos when surfing, scuba diving, etc.

I want a projector. A projector cradle is the likely way to do this in Version 1.0, but by version 2.0 I want a little projector built in. Maybe the projector can double as the flash for the still camera. (There's a little gadget floating around out there that projects a keyboard on a flat surface, and then watches your fingers when you try to type on it. I'm skeptical, but they should include this anyway, just in case.) Also I want a flashlight -- not the "light up the screen" thing the current iPhone does, but a real little light (the projector, again) that will illuminate a room clearly.

I want a scanner built in -- the camera doing double duty, but I want to reliably be able to point the camera at a page of text and have it OCR the text and store it.

I want it to replace all my remote controls. I want it to open the door to my car and start the engine.

I want it tied into my bank and I want it to replace my credit cards. When I'm paying a bill, I put my thumb on the optical sensor (the camera, again) and wave my handheld in the general direction of the store's payment device. And we're done without having to wait for our stoned or stupid waiter to try to figure out the bill and bring it to us and wander away with my credit card and steal the numbers off it while he's out of sight.

I want it to recognize the faces of the people who are allowed to pick it up. If someone not on the authorized list picks it up I want it to yell for help and/or call 911. (Maybe 811 ... the "lost phone" registry: "Help! Someone I don't know has picked me up! I'm at these coordinates!")

I want a large-form tablet as well. I don't need multiple form factor versions of my handheld; I just need a cradle that has a big pressure-sensitive screen on it for when I want to lie in bed and paint.

I can't be missing phone calls. When someone calls me, the device stops whatever it's doing, and at my voice command either answers on speakerphone, or puts the caller on hold with the message that I'll be with them in a moment while I snap the device out of the cradle it's in and take the call privately.

I want the built-in GPS to give me real-time ground traffic control information. I also want it to talk to my radar detector and to share that data with everyone else using my brand handheld, so that when people's radar detectors start going off right before the 3rd offramp on the 405 after the 101, I hear about it ten miles back rather than when my radar detector goes off.

I want the GPS in my car to tell everyone where I am and how fast I'm going, and to tell me where everyone else is and how fast they're going, so that the same service that alerts me about the speed trap on the 405 can tell me, "Take Sepulveda. No, seriously, trust me on this one. Turn right at Mulholland and take Stone Canyon Road over to Kester and you'll be home 20 minutes faster. About twenty cars ahead of you using this service failed to do that, and they're stuck now."

None of this is impossible, though much of it is at the edge of the possible. But so were modern phones, just a few years ago. (What? A phone and an MP3 player and a camera and a little tv all in one device?!) At some point, someone is going to build a close approximation of the device I'm describing ... even money on Apple. Done correctly, it'll be a complete ecosystem and will simply own the handheld form factor.

~~~~~

Ran across an old file with business ideas in it recently -- two of them struck me as interesting, looking back. One was a television where the screen was built with fiber optics -- 20+ years ago, it wasn't a bad idea. Picture tubes monitors displaying 800x600 were state of the art, back then; that's a mere 480,000 pixels. Pixels were also, except in trinitron screens, circular and didn't actually cover the entire surface area; and in all televisions the pixels were created by grouping 3 separate light sources, RGB, with varying degrees of brightness. I sketched out a design for a television using a single very bright white light, along with red, blue, and green filters applied in succession at the base of each length of optic fiber to apply the correct color to each pixel; the pixels themselves would have been actual squares, covering the entire surface of the screen much as LCD screens do today.

It's not practical today -- and might not have been then -- a 1080P screen has over two million pixels. That's a lot of optic fiber. But twenty years ago it's not clear to me it might not have been workable, if probably a niche product.

The other one I like, looking back at it, was the use of film as a data storage medium. This one I'm a little more confident about -- I see no real reason it couldn't have been used as a data archival tool, anyway. The technology has certainly existed long enough. Film is an analog medium but a single frame of 35 mm film still has somewhere between 4 and 20 million measurable pixels, depending on a variety of factors. (Better film, better optics, more pixels, short form.) And each pixel has a realistic color depth of something in the range of 36 bits, again depending on a variety of factors. Taking conservative numbers, though, 4 million pixels at 24 bit color depth, you get 3 bytes per pixel x 4 million, or 12 million bytes of storage, or 1.5MB per frame of 35 millimeter film. Spool that through a film printer, and you could certainly get hundreds of megabytes of usable storage even using 1980s technology. I'm a little surprised no one ever did.

Today, with holographic storage around the corner, the idea is quaint. If you could actually print an 8-1/2x11 sheet of acetate as 1200 dpi, with 32 bit color, and reliably read it back, you'd have a write-once medium of 93.5 square inches, with each square inch having 1.4 million pixels, for a total raw pixel count per page of 134 million pixels. At four bytes per pixel (optimistic, I suspect) you'd have a storage medium capable of about 67 megabytes per page. You can fiddle with these numbers to suit yourself -- if you can only reliably get 8 bit color, that's about 17 megabytes per page. If you can get 4000 dpi, you get a page with one and a half billion pixels, and a storage capacity of six billion bytes --- roughly the storage capacity of a DVD.

One possible benefit might be in speed -- I can imagine a scanner scanning 6 GB of data much faster than a single read head can read a DVD. But that's the only real real benefit that comes to mind with modern technology. The next generation of holographic storage is coming in at around 500GB on a single disc -- I don't see any traditional film-based technology likely to challenge that. But someone (me, maybe) probably missed out on an interesting startup, back in 1987.

Songs

2009-07-01T00:43:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a bunch of youtube links to his favorite songs recently -- it made me curious how many of my favorite tracks were on youtube. So I went looking.

In most cases you probably don't want to watch the video. Watching the First Class "Beach Baby" video recently was one of those mistakes that's likely to haunt me for a while -- the "boy next door/The sun-tanned crew-cut all-american male" is, it turns out, a goofy looking guy with a Monkees haircut. It's not often I wish someone looked like Mike Love, American Asshole, but in this case it would have been an improvement.

The top 10 were mostly there. I'll link in the rest another day (some are linked already.) Where studio versions aren't available I'll link in an alternate version if it's of close quality.

TOP TEN
Thunder Road (Live 75-85) ~~ Bruce Springsteen

Will You Love Me Tomorrow ~~ Shirelles

Don't Worry Baby ~~ The Beach Boys

The Heart Of The Matter ~~ Don Henley (alt live version, but really nice)

O-o-h Child ~~ Five Stairsteps

Dreams ~~ Fleetwood Mac (Warner Music Group apparently don't want this, or much of anything else, on Youtube. This was the closest I could find -- Stevie is a babe, but the song is not the best version. They also took down the copy of "Silver Spring" I linked in on this blog a while back, the live version from "The Dance." A lot of what's missing below is WMG. Update: Apparently some WMG is available on Myspace. I found "Silver Spring" there.)

Here's another version of Dreams, from "The Dance." Still not great, but maybe better than the above. I'm not sure there's ever been a great live version of this.

Watching The Wheels ~~ John Lennon

Bat Out Of Hell ~~ Meat Loaf (opens oddly, but the song is there, and Mr. Loaf is young and not yet 500 pounds.)

You Used To Love To Dance ~~ Melissa Etheridge

Angel ~~ Sarah McLachlan

THE REST, with most links another day
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover ~~ Paul Simon (WMG; I suppose the live version I linked isn't as bad as the Jolie Holland performance I used below.)
A Long December ~~ Counting Crows
A Rock n Roll Fantasy ~~ The Kinks
Accidentally Like A Martyr ~~ Warren Zevon (Click on the 3rd video listed.)
Across The Border ~~ Bruce Springsteen
Ain't No Sunshine ~~ Bill Withers (nice live version)
All I Want To Do ~~ Sheryl Crow
Amazing Grace ~~ Joan Baez (no good version -- anywhere. Ever. If I hadn't downloaded this many years ago while searching for various copies of Amazing Grace, I'd have no idea it existed. I've run into a bunch of versions of AG sung by Baez, but never the right one.)
America ~~ Simon & Garfunkel (WMG)
American Pie ~~ Don McClean
Angels, The ~~ Melissa Etheridge
Atlantic City ~~ Bruce Springsteen
Ball And Chain ~~ Social Distortion (pretty good performance video)
Ballad of John and Yoko ~~ The Beatles
Beach Baby ~~ First Class (found a version without video. You're welcome.)
Boy In The Bubble ~~ Paul Simon (WMG)
Boys Of Summer ~~ Don Henley
Chain, The ~~ Fleetwood Mac (WMG)
Chuck E.'s in Love ~~ Rickie Lee Jones
Comfortably Numb ~~ Pink Floyd
Coming Around Again ~~ Carly Simon
Common People (Feat. Joe Jackson) ~~ William Shatner
Cum On Feel the Noize ~~ Quiet Riot
Danny Boy (the Derry air) ~~ Sinead O'Connor & Davy Spillane
Desperado ~~ The Eagles
Desperados Under The Eaves ~~ Warren Zevon
Devil Went Down to Georgia ~~ Charlie Daniels Band
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes ~~ Paul Simon
Don't Give Up (with Kate Bush) ~~ Peter Gabriel
Down To The River To Pray ~~ Alison Krauss
Dust In The Wind ~~ Kansas
End Of The Innocence ~~ Don Henley
Enter Sandman ~~ Metallica
Everybody Knows ~~ Leonard Cohen
First Cut Is The Deepest ~~ Rod Stewart
For My Wedding ~~ Don Henley
Free Fallin' ~~ Tom Petty
Georgia on My Mind ~~ Ray Charles
Go Your Own Way ~~ Fleetwood Mac
Gold Dust Woman ~~ Fleetwood Mac
Goodbye California ~~ Jolie Holland (a barely acceptable live version)
Graceland ~~ Paul Simon
Hot For Teacher ~~ Van Halen (I don't feel tardy)
Hotel California ~~ The Eagles
How You Remind Me ~~ Nickelback
I Love LA ~~ Randy Newman
I Will Never Be The Same ~~ Melissa Etheridge
If It Makes You Happy ~~ Sheryl Crow
If You Don't Know Me by Now ~~ Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes
I'm Comin' ~~ Will Smith
Keep Me In Your Heart ~~ Warren Zevon
Kiss The Girl ~~ Samuel E. Wright
Landslide ~~ Fleetwood Mac
Leaving on a Jet Plane ~~ Chantal Kreviazuk (Affleck warning)
Live and Let Die ~~ Paul McCartney (decent live version)
Lola ~~ The Kinks
London Calling ~~ The Clash
Love And Death And An American Guitar ~~ Jim Steinman (an OK live version)
Loves Me Like a Rock ~~ Paul Simon
Mack The Knife ~~ Bobby Darin
Mama I'm Comin' Home ~~ Ozzy Osbourne
Me And Bobby McGee ~~ Janis Joplin
Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) ~~ Marvin Gaye
Mohammed's Radio ~~ Warren Zevon (WMG.)
My Eyes Adored You ~~ Frankie Valli
Never Gonna Score Speech ~~ Beavis and Butthead (this is the actual clip -- I have no idea what the show is it's set to, but it's kinda funny)
New York Minute ~~ Don Henley
Nine Million Bicycles ~~ Katie Melua
No Souvenirs ~~ Melissa Etheridge
Not Ready To Make Nice ~~ Dixie Chicks (freaky video, and I think I like it)
Only the Strong Survive ~~ Jerry Butler
Part of Your World ~~ Jodi Benson
Push ~~ Matchbox Twenty (On Joost; you have to sit through an ad first)
Rebel Yell ~~ Billy Idol
Revolution ~~ The Beatles
Right Through You ~~ Alanis Morissette (decent live version)
River (Live 75-85) ~~ Bruce Springsteen (long intro w/story about his father. I said to a friend recently that most men had daddy issues; either from not having had one ... or from having had one.)
Science Fiction/Double Feature ~~ Richard O'Brien
Secret Heart ~~ Feist
Silent Legacy ~~ Melissa Etheridge
Silly Love Songs -- Paul McCartney

Silver Springs (The Dance) ~~ Fleetwood Mac (on MySpace)

Slip Slidin' Away ~~ Paul Simon
Smells Like Teen Spirit ~~ Nirvana (Cheerleaders of Anarchy)
Somebody To Love ~~ Queen
Spaceship ~~ Angie Aparo
Sunset Grill ~~ Don Henley
Suspicious Minds ~~ Elvis Presley
Take It to the Limit (Live Farewell) ~~ The Eagles
Under the Bridge ~~ Red Hot Chili Peppers
What's Going On ~~ Marvin Gaye
Who Wants to Live Forever ~~ Queen
Why Don't You Get a Job? ~~ Offspring (one of the tracks where you could watch the video)
With a Little Luck ~~ Paul McCartney
Woman ~~ John Lennon
Wrong Girl ~~ jaimi shuey (just a sample, but worth a listen. Click on "Wrong Girl" and then "Play Audio Sample.")
You Can Sleep While I Drive ~~ Melissa Etheridge
You Don't Know Me At All ~~ Don Henley

Michael Jackson reportedly dead ...

2009-06-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

Good. About a month back I said to a few people that if Michael Jackson would just die, I could listen to his music again ...

Rustlers Rhapsody

2009-06-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

One of the great movies you never heard of.

Sidekick: Why don’t you stay in the hotel?
Rex: I never stay in town.
Sidekick: Oh, What’s your name anyhow?
Rex: I’m Rex O'Herlihan, the Singing Cowboy.
Sidekick: The what?

Sidekick: I just want to say one thing. I hope you shoot Mr. Barber in both hands.
Rex: Who?
Sidekick: Barber, Bob Barber.
Rex: Bob Barber?
Sidekick: Yeah that’s what the Colonel’s daughter called him.
Rex: Not Bad Bob Barber … Bothersome Bob Barber … Bob the Butcher Barber?
Sidekick: No ... no, just Bob.

Rex: Ever faced another good guy before?
Bob Barber: Nope.
Rex: Me neither.
Bob Barber: Kinda makes you wonder what'll happen.
Rex: I figure the good guy'll win, just like always.
Bob Barber: Yeah, except we're both good guys.
Rex: Then I figure the most good good guy will win.
Bob Barber: That's how I figure, too.
Rex: Yep.

Just a joy from end to end.

Quote, and Belated Happy Fathers Day to you all ...

2009-06-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
Roger Angell, New Yorker baseball writer, 1975

~~~~~

One of the best father's days ever. First time since Christmas all my kids sat down together at the same table -- that's been rare since my oldest went off to Berkeley. We spent half the day at the beach, Paradise Cove in Malibu; ran around and read books and dug holes and ate the greatest clam chowder on the west coast, plus Kobe beef ribs which are as sinful as they sound; and then the 7 of us ate 5 pounds of Alaskan King Crab for dinner, and then watched a Captain America cartoon that was pretty good before bedtime. ("Ultimate Avengers 2" -- cartoons are better than they used to be, when I was a boy.)

Hope you all had as good a day as I did.

Last Lakers post for a bit

2009-06-18T14:33:00.001-07:00

I'm sure many of you are relieved. :-)

Seven years since the last championship ... these are photos, taken 7 years apart, of me and the two younger boys, at the 2002 and 2009 parades. Time flies.

Enjoy it while it lasts. They grow up.

An Editorial Letter for Bill Simmons, ESPN

2009-06-17T23:37:00.001-07:00

Bill Simmons, ESPN Columnist and Celtics fan, was clearly in shock when he wrote this ....

... so I've decided to help him fix it -- the task an editor would have performed, if ESPN had any.

Paragrah 1: I had trouble stomaching the 2008-09 Lakers for the same reason I've never bought Tom and Katie or Hillary and Bill. It always felt like something of an arrangement to me. Let's try to pull this off. It will put us in a better place. We can do this. I can tell the difference between "These guys love each other" and "These guys put up with each other for a few months because of the carrot dangling at the end." At least I'd like to think I can.

This becomes: "I Hate the Lakers." Fair enough, he's a Boston guy, but if you can say the same thing with a short sentence rather than a long sentence, you will usually improve your text. As we already know that Simmons is a Celtics fan, this is arguably superfluous; however, we will include it in anyway, to set tone for the remainder of the essay.

The second paragraph, beginning with Ultimately, does it matter? It doesn't matter, as Simmons clearly suspected.

In the third and fourth paragraphs, through "so we can say we were there to witness it," Simmons asks if Kobe has changed, and swears on the souls of his children.

Here Simmons violates the principle of authority. This is an important principle in writing: examine the sentences "He stood perfectly still" and "He stood still." They mean the same thing. "It was utterly dark" and "It was dark" -- again, they mean the same thing. A writer who is confident of his work will make the simpler statement: a writer who is not will reach for unecessary emphasis.

A man who swears on the souls of his children, in a trivial matter like sports, doesn't merely suspect he's lying: he knows it, and hopes you don't.

Next Simmons asserts that we are all in this together, which is untrue. Some of us, for example, are Lakers fans; and some of us are Celtics fans. The Celtics recent 20 year stretch of mediocrity was a matter of great joy to me; I believe Simmons does not share this emotion. I believe, in fact, that Lakers success pains him, and Celtics success pleases him. Understanding this ESPN essay as the work of a man dealing with substantial pain brought about by a Lakers championship, we can perhaps extend some generosity to the unfortunate Simmons ...

Midway through the fourth paragraph, Simmons shares with us that he envies those who saw the great players of the 60s and 70s in their primes. If not eloquent, this is at least clearly stated and imparts new information: it stays. Likewise his brave admission that Kobe Bryant's fourth championship has propelled him into the ranks of the 10 best players in NBA history.

In the fifth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs, Simmons shares with us that he is not yet 40, and that the comparisons of Kobe to Michael Jordan strike him as unreasonable; and that constant praise of Kobe makes him uncomfortable. We will accept the first two as reasonable statements; the latter is clearly a Hemingwayesque use of repetition, since he returns to it repeatedly. We will therefore include it, as a stylistic matter not wildly detrimental to the smooth flow of the text.

In the 8th paragraph Simmons asserts that he is smarter than the average audience of a basketball game. This is possibly true once we factor in data that Simmons does not share within this particular column -- namely, that Simmons is a Clippers season tickets holder. I will concede that Simmons is most likely brighter than the crowds at and audiences for the basketball games he most frequently attends, but perhaps Simmons makes too much of this? I, for example, am taller and stronger than the friends of my 10 year old son....

As a two year season ticket holder, he writes in the column linked above ... without any evident shame or embarrassment.

Much as the first paragraph of this piece can be accurately condensed to "I Hate the Lakers," the 8th paragraph might becomes "I am a Clippers Season Ticket holder," or even, "I am smarter than most Clippers fans."

In the ninth paragraph, Simmons asserts that the Lakers were a good team, and that other teams had problems that prevented them from being as good. While a true statement, it's trivial in context: this is true of every championship team, every year. (One must, again, make allowance for Simmons' Celtics neurosis; he notes Kevin Garnett had a knee injury that damaged his team's playoff chances; but fails to note that the Celtics lost to the Lakers both times this year while Garnett was healthy; in the first game, snapping a 19 game Celtics winning streak; and in the second game, on the Celtics home court, snapping a Celtics 12 game winning streak.) Nonetheless it should probably be included in the edited essay as it is one of the few arguments Simmons actually presents.

Toward the end of the ninth paragraph, Simmons asserts that the Lakers seem to him merely a very good team, and not a great one. This is nearly a meaningful statemtent.

In the 10th through 12th paragraphs, Simmons observes that Kobe's performance in the playoffs this year was almost identical to his playoffs performance last year. This is an accurate and legitimate observation. However, Simmons fails to note that Kobe's performance in the Finals round was one of the great performances in NBA History; the last player to average more than 32.4 points and 7.4 assists in a Finals was Jerry West, in 1969. This was a once in 30 years performance, and Simmons' inability or unwillingness to take note of it is striking.

In the 13th through 16th paragraphs, Simmons asserts that Kobe's once in 30 years performance was not really much better than his performance in the 2008 finals, since the improvement year to year was a mere 6.7 points, .9 rebounds, and 2.4 assists.

In the 17th through 19th paragraphs, Simmons explains that in addition to Kobe's improved play, his teammates also played better. He also asserts that the 2008 Boston Celtics were a better team than the 2009 Orlando Magic. One is tempted to give him credit for his final assertion in the 19th paragraph, that the Lakers "deserved to win" ... but unless the NBA is indeed fixed, this is yet another trivial statement that is true of all NBA champions since the league's inception.

In the 20th paragraph, Simmons selects various elements, while ignoring others, of Kobe's Finals performance, to support his argument that Kobe's once-in-30-years performance ... wasn't.

In the 21st paragraph, Simmons answers the question he opened with: "Ultimtely, does it matter?" He's still a Celtics fan, and it still doesn't. His conclusion is sound: he finds that Kobe has not changed. This is a point I would agree with; except that Simmons means it as an insult, when it is the highest of compliments for a player that has played at the highest levels since his entry into the league 13 years ago.

In the 22nd and 23rd paragraph, Simmons asserts that in previous years, Kobe's teammates were threatened by his individual brilliance; as opposed to the 2009 Lakers, who embrace it.

In the 24th paragraph, Simmons reiterates his distate for praise directed toward Kobe Bryant.

In the 25th paragraph, Simmons asks if the Lakers actually like one another.

In the 26th paragraph, he concedes that he does not know; and then appears to reverse field and conclude that yes, he does: the interaction between Kobe, his teammates, and Phil Jackson, seems inauthentic. (In this, Simmons, though he may not know it, is part of a tradition revered among Easterners for some generations now, to the effect that the citizens of Los Angeles are inauthentic, false, and shallow. It is only a minor amusement that Simmons appears to think this an original observation applicable principally to Kobe Bryant.)

In the 27th paragraph, Simmons reiterates his belief that the Lakers do not like one another and that any appearance to the contrary is, yes, inauthentic.

In the 28th pagraph, Simmons asserts that Kobe is an unusual player in NBA history, but that this is not due to his talent or accomplishments, but rather to his privileged upbringing (which, one assumes, is unheard of in NBA history) and to the circumstances of his career.

In paragraphs 29 and 30, Simmons asserts that Kobe is unlikeable, and adds that he does not like him. Also, the appearance of Kobe's wife and children after the end of Game 5 made him want to throw up.

In paragraphs 31 and 32, Simmons argues that Kobe should not have played in the Olympics, and repeats J.A. Adande's argument that Kobe should have because it gave him a chance to bond with his peers. Simmons now realizes that Adande was right, and adds that Kobe's bonding was inauthentic, a part Kobe had learned to play.

In paragraph 33, Simmons finds a certain detachment in viewing the Lakers championship, and finds, yet again, in a nearly charming return to form, that Kobe and the Lakers are inauthentic. (He also contradicts his statement in Paragraph 26, when asking himself whether the Lakers like one another: "I don't know. I couldn't tell." During the long journey of seven paragraphs, he's figured it out: they don't. "We can tell when a team connects as a whole. We can." One might call this inconsistency, dishonesty, or even growth: to be sure, seven paragraphs can be a long time for people with carpal tunnel.)

In paragraph 34, Simmons finds that young championship teams, such as the 2009 Lakers, are inferior to elderly championship teams, such as the 2008 Boston Celtics. Also, the Lakers are inauthentic.

Let's speed along some; there's duplication in much of the following.

35: The media talked about Kobe too much. Positively.

36. Stories about things other than Kobe's brilliance were more interesting.

37. Several of the Lakers had something to prove in the Finals.

38-39. Unlike other extraordinarily wealthy families, the Buss family is odd, and he would appreciate it if the least competent Buss family member could be put in charge of the Lakers. ("I Hate the Lakers," redux.)

40-41. The Lakers were lucky to win a championship.

42-43. Phil doesn't really like Kobe. In fact, they are inauthentic, and Phil liked Jordan better than he liked Kobe, because Simmons doesn't recall Phil making a particular face between 1989 and 1998. Nonetheless, Phil and Kobe will probably put up with each other in order to win more championships.

44. Phil Jackson is the greatest basketball coach ever and Kobe is the most difficult player the NBA has ever seen, after Wilt Chamberlain.

45. He repeats paragraphs 42-43.

46-47. Simmons makes the not overdone argument that the last two years of Kobe's basketball career have been one of the most remarkable events in basketball history ... and then cheapens it with 11 other examples.

48. Simmons liked Jordan better than he likes Kobe.

49. Kobe is inauthentic but plays hard.

50. This championship is a remarkable individual achievement for Kobe.

51. Simmons dislikes Kobe, but does not really know him.

52. Kobe Bryant is one of the gods of the NBA, but Simmons wishes it were otherwise.

In its initial draft, Simmons' essay is 5,804 words long. Let's see if we can improve upon that with rigorous, or even severe, editing.

~~~~~

I hate the Lakers.

The Lakers are inauthentic.

Did Kobe change between 2008 and 2009? I swear upon the souls of my children I would admit it if he had. I am lying about this.

We are all in this together, though I am a Celtics fan and hate the Lakers.

I am jealous of everyone who watched Russell and Wilt and Cousy in their primes (that is, before Wilt became a Laker.) I wish I could have seen a young Doc flying around in half-filled ABA arenas. I wish I could have watched the 1969-70 Knicks in person. In Kobe's case, we already knew we were following one of the better basketball careers of all time. That fourth title propelled him into the top 10 and yanked the "Can't win without Shaq" monkey off his back; ultimately, the exact ranking doesn't matter. He's one of the best players ever. He has to be mentioned now, if only to dismiss him.

I am not yet 40. Kobe should not be compared to Jordan, or Dwayne Wade. Praise of Kobe makes me uncomfortable.

I am smarter than other people who attend Clippers basketball games.

The Lakers are a very good basketball team, but not a great one. Other teams this year had problems that prevented them from beating the Lakers.

Kobe's performance in the Playoffs in 2008 and 2009 were similar. [Ed. And his performance in the 2009 Finals was a 30-year wonder. We won't put this editorial comment toward your final word count.] Kobe's performance in the Finals included improvements of only 6.7 points, .9 rebounds, and 2.4 assists over his 2008 performance.

Kobe's teammates were better in 2009 than in 2008. The 2008 Boston Celtics were better than the 2009 Orlando Magic.

The Lakers deserved to win the championship. [Ed. Absent fraud, isn't this true of all sports contests?]

Kobe didn't play well during the 2009 Finals and had only one clutch moment during it.

Kobe has not changed. Phil Jackson criticized him in 2004.

Kobe's 2009 teammates were better and more complimentary to Kobe than his 2004 teammates. Kobe did not sacrifice; his 2009 teammates sacrificed.

I can't tell if the Lakers like one another. Never mind, yes I can. They don't. They are inauthentic.

The Lakers are pretending to like one another in order to win championships. They are inauthentic.

Kobe is unusual because he came from a privileged background. We will never see anyone like him again, who came from a privileged background.

Kobe is unlikeable and has no friends. Also, I do not like him.

Watching Kobe's wife and daughters appear with him after the Lakers won the 2009 Championship made me want to throw up. A married man with children is atypical and inauthentic for an NBA player.

Kobe should not have played in the Olympics. Never mind, he should have. Bonding with his peers was good for him, though an act on his end, and inauthentic.

Kobe is inauthentic and unlikeable. In the last seven paragraphs I have realized that I can tell when people like one another. The Lakers do not like one another and are inauthentic.

Young champions like the 2009 Lakers are much worse than old champions like the 2008 Celtics. [Ed. - Please God don't let the Lakers win again next year, eh?]

I don't like it when the media says good things about Kobe, and I don't understand it. It's more interesting to me that various Lakers had something to prove in the 2009 Championships. It's more interesting to me that the Buss family is unusual. I wish the Buss family would put control of the Lakers in the hands of their least competent family member. [Ed. - Please God don't let the Lakers win again next year, eh?]

The Lakers were very, very, very, very, very, very, very lucky to win the 2009 Championship. Yes, seven verys.

Kobe and Phil are inauthentic and don't like each other. Phil liked Jordan better than he likes Kobe and I know this because I don't recall Phil making a face between 1989 and 1998. Phil and Kobe will tolerate one another to win more championships, because Phil is the greatest coach ever, even though Kobe is the biggest jerk since Wilt Chamberlain.

I really wish people would talk more about how Phil and Kobe are inauthentic and don't like each other.

The last two years of Kobe's basketball career have been amazing. It's only happened eleven other times that I can think of off the top of my head. Jordan did it twice.

I really liked Michael Jordan.

Kobe is inauthentic and I don't like him. However, he tries hard and has tried hard for 20 months, which is off the charts; it's only happened eleven other times that I can think of off the top of my head, and Jordan did it twice.

At this specific point in his career, Kobe Bryant shouldn't have been able to play as consistently well as he did. He shouldn't have been able to survive overtime periods in Game 2 (his 205th straight game in 20 months) and Game 4 (No. 207) and thrived in Game 5 like he was playing Memphis in mid-January. Basketball might be a team sport, but in this specific case, an individual's will stood out and made the accomplishment of the group seem ancillary.

I know that Kobe is inauthentic but don't know how inauthentic and probably never will.

But I do know this: What Kobe Bryant accomplished over the past 20 months ranks up there with anything that ever happened in the National Basketball Association. He walks among the NBA gods now. Like it or not. [Ed. - Please God don't let the Lakers win again next year, eh?]

~~~~~

890 words, not counting editorial comment. If not for Simmons' Hemingway-inspired use of repetition, it could have been less.

Bill Simmons, feel free to request feedback any time.

Greatest players in NBA History

2009-06-16T13:50:00.001-07:00

For the last few years years (since Duncan's last championship) I've been posting the following list various places. The top 10 players in NBA history are:

Magic
Russell
Jordan
Kareem
Wilt
Duncan
Kobe
Bird
West

This now changes to ...

Magic
Russell
Jordan
Kareem
Kobe
Wilt
Duncan
Bird
West

I admit, I suspect I'm being a homer at #1; it should probably be Bill Russell. But I can't bring myself to do it. If any Celtics fans out there want to rearrange the list to put Russell at the top, I'll close my eyes and look elsewhere.

The two items I get the most static for (aside from Kobe, which is going to elicit howls of outrage for the rest of time) are Jordan and Bird. Jordan's fans can't believe anyone could think he's not at the top; but I do. I was a basketball fan before he showed up, and unlike most of the younger crowd, I remember guys doing what he did before he did it. Doctor J is not just old tape to me (though I admit, Baylor is.)

Magic won 5 championships in 9 Finals trips during the most competitive era in the history of the NBA, in a career cut short by HIV. Jordan won 6 during a down era following expansion.

When Bird and Kobe both had 3 rings I had Kobe better than him; now he has four, and the only person ahead of Bird on that list with fewer championships (2, to Bird's 3) is Wilt Chamberlain, who gets in by dint of his astonishing production.

Mostly I don't bother with lists, because it's all just some schmuck's opinion. But genuinely important subjects like this one require occasional revisiting .... :-)

15

2009-06-14T20:05:00.001-07:00

I Love L.A.

One more

2009-06-12T10:44:00.001-07:00

Steve Perry says there is no way the Lakers lose this series. Better him than me: if he's brought the jinx, now we know who to blame.

Magic are down 1-3. No team in NBA Finals history has come back from that, and only 8 teams in any round of the playoffs. Either we're having a parade, or history's getting made.

Me and a million of my closest friends are planning on a parade, however, so the Lakers need to close out on Sunday.

~~~~~

Court went well. The therapist recommended Alan have no further contact with Bram, which was already the position taken by Bram's court-appointed attorney. More later.

Defining Moments

2009-06-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is the last championship of this decade. This is Kobe Bryant's last chance to mark himself as the dominant player of this decade, and probably his last real chance to stake any sort of claim toward the greatest player ever.

For the most part, the NBA has had clearly defined eras, and for the most part they've conveniently fit into decades. The dominant player of the 1950s was George Mikan, the first great NBA center. He won five championships (but no Most Valuable Player awards; the NBA didn't begin handing out MVPs until 55-56 season.)

The dominant player of the 1960s was Bill Russell, the center for the Boston Celtics. He won 8 championships in the 60s, plus 3 in the 50s; he won 4 MVPs.

In the 70s it was Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He won only one championship in that decade. (This depends on how you define decades, since the NBA season covers two years, and Kareem won his next championship in 1979-1980. For the purposes of this post, I'm treating each season as a part of the decade in which it ends.) But despite his single championship, no one else did much better in the 70s, and Kareem won 6 MVP awards during that period.

In the 80s it was Magic Johnson. He won 3 MVPs and 5 championships. In a situation that mirrors Kobe's, he had a competitor: Larry Bird. Bird won 3 championships and 3 (consecutive) MVP Awards. But Magic went to the Finals 8 times in the decade (a 9th in the 90s), and Bird only managed it 5 times.

The 90s was Jordan. 4 MVPs (plus 2 in the 80s); and 6 championships.

The 00s has been more fragmented, at least in terms of great players. At the MVP level this is due to the media (which votes on MVPs), and not to the actual caliber of the players. The media's voting in this decade can only be described as irresponsible; they in turn screwed Shaq, Duncan, and Kobe, over the course of the last decade and a bit. Tim's Duncan's only won twice; Kobe and Shaquille O'Neal have only won once apiece. During that same period the NBA has awarded MVPs to Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash (twice!), Kevin Garnett and Allen Iverson. Shaq's been cheated out of at least two MVPs, in 98-99; it went to Karl Malone in a year when Shaq was turning in one of the most stastistically dominant peformances in NBA history. In 00-01 the media handed it to Iverson, when Kobe was clearly a better guard and Shaq was still statistically tearing the cover off the ball.

I don't begrudge Garnett his MVP, though Kobe probably deserved it that year, he was on trial in Colorado and hell would have frozen over before he'd have won it. But the two years following -- Steve Nash? Twice? I like Nash, he's a great player and a joy to watch, but he's also the least deserving MVP in my adult life. And to follow him with Nowitzki was adding insult to injury -- that was three years of anybody-but-Kobe. (Or Duncan, for that matter, who deserved it more than any of the guys who won those years.)

But let the petty annoyances fade ... in this decade, Kobe's won 3 championships, and 1 MVP. Duncan's won 3 in 3 tries, and 2 MVPs. If Kobe wins this year, he'll have won his first championship without Shaq, fourth overall, in his sixth appearance in the NBA Finals, and will have cemented his claim as best player of the decade.

But it'll do more than that. It'll nail down his claim to third greatest guard of all time behind Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, and will catapult him into the discussion for GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) ... though he'll have more work to do to in coming years to live up to that.

Most people would concede Kobe is the greatest offensive force the game's ever seen. But the game is offense, defense, and leadership, and under defense Kobe is merely one of the better players the game has ever seen, and under leadership ... well, this is his second shot at leading a team to the championship. I didn't think they were going to win it last year -- there's an actual blog post where I laid out my feelings that the Celtics would win it last year, much as I disliked the idea -- and they didn't.

I do think they're going to win this year. They have home court, they have more talent than the Orlando Magic, and God knows they've been carrying the burden of their epic flameout in the last game of last year's Finals for the entire year since. When the Orlando Magic won the Eastern Conference Championship, they smiled and laughed and gave every indication of being pleased with themselves. The Lakers, at their trophy ceremony, looked like they'd just barely avoided being shot.

(It's not just the players. A few months back I asked a friend, a fellow Lakers fan, if he thought the Lakers were going to win it all this year. His grim answer: "They'd better.")

This is it for Kobe. I think he's one of the greatest ever to play the game, I think he's the greatest player the game's seen in the last decade, and I think he still has a legitimate shot at GOAT ... and all of that rests on this next series. Jerry West was one of the greatest the game's ever seen too ... but no one has ever really argued for him as GOAT. Because, when he got to the Finals, he lost. And lost. And lost and lost and lost and lost and lost and lost -- eight times, in all.

It's not often a single series means so much to a single player. But this one does.

~~~~~

I'm really sorry the Lakers didn't get to go head to head with the Celtics again this post-season. That would have been fitting. (I don't really care that they're not going to face LeBron -- in the grand Scheme of Schemes, it's a matchup that didn't interest me particularly.) As is, I'm probably going to change the quote on the graphic for this blog. If Garnett comes back healthy next year I'll put it back up again for the playoffs, but the top guys on the Celtics are elderly, and reaching the point where the productivity of basketball players typically drops off a cliff. Rondo's a stud, but he's not going to carry that team by himself with the big 3 aging.

~~~~~

We're back in the U.S., and back in Los Angeles. Court date next week to determine what happens with our 13 year old boy, Bram -- he's just undergone 8 hours of "reunification therapy," with his biological father, with another hour and a half scheduled for Friday. (According to Bram, quite a lot of it consists of Alan bitching about me. Shocker, that.) Quite a bit more coming on this subject, to be sure. The last year has been a fascinating one, and I will be writing about it at length ....

And yes, yes, yesssssssss ... there's more AI war coming. As soon as we have time to breathe, I'll publish the first half as an e-book. That at least ends at a nice stopping point after Trent surfs on a house. The rest will have to wait for things to settle down again, which is sort of the living definition of what the last year hasn't been. Though my sons have all learned to ride horses.

Interesting Times.

Aaron Burr, by Andy

2009-02-13T01:00:00.000-08:00

Aaron Burr:
A Patriot's Legacy Gone Wrong

by Andrea Stout-Moran

Canto I The Glove

With his pale face flushed and his bold jaw taut,
The enraged statesman Burr, the room did cross,
And before the slandering aggressor
Burr heatedly stood and stared at this cur.
The livid man of a towering five foot and six.
Panted with rage, on dueling his mind fixed.
Fiercely raising his arm, high in the air
He stood poised, Hamilton without a pra'er.
-- I now address those faint of heart,
Before I continue, you might depart --
Down, came the fist, clutching that bold white glove!
It whipped the poor Ham, and could have drawn blood!
The challenge was offered -- both men unnerved.
The article, its purpose being served,
Fluttered down to the floor, and waited,
As Burr spoke of how he'd been baited.
As what Ham accepted, would be his bane.
For now the glove had been raised yet again.
Finding itself back in the possession
Of Burr, the duel was now in progression.
(A note to my reader, be not mistook --
This canto by my mind was cooked
None seem to know what truly occurred
But that a formal challenge was offered.)

Canto II The Duel

That cold morning in the mid of July
Hudson was crossed to Weehawken Isle
By five men in two boats, prepared to fight.
...But keep it hush hush -- they hadn't the right.
Though 'twas coercion that moved Hamilton,
'Twas too late to halt what had now begun.
The second of Ham, was judge Pendleton
And when they drew lots, it was he who won.
With this bit of luck, he chose where and when
Perhaps 'twas all in Ham's favor again!
Sadly no, as we must never forget.
He stood on that ledge, his mind long dead set.
Ham, oh, poor Ham, in the ground would soon lie!
Yet the poor silly sap wished that none die!
Written the night before, was Ham's decision,
To throw away fire, his intention,
And Burr, unaware, remained embittered.
Thus he did shoot to kill, when given word.
'Twas heard "BANG! BANG!" as they fired their rounds
Ham faced death with those despicable sounds.
Two bullets found, one in a leafy scion
One clump of lead, though, now lodged in Ham's spine.
Held in the arms of his dear Pendleton,
Who called "Doctor!" in hopes death had not won.
As Hosack observed the sad, haunting, gore,
Gasped Ham: "This is a mortal wound, Doctor."
And with that one last panting heave done,
They did witness the end of Hamilton.
And heavy hearted, carried the pulseless man
When suddenly, was it the ghost of Ham?!
Oh... Nay... 'Twas simply Ham -- heart beating 'gain.
Being quite frail, to speak he must have strained.
Said he: "Take care of that pistol; it is ... still cocked"
And as they crossed Hudson they all talked.
To those who this give hope, 'tis now derailed
See, within one day his heart once again failed.
A solemn statement issued to the press
From the seconds -- Pendleton and VanNess.
'Twas an announcement containing the tale
Of Burr's quenched desire and how Ham failed,
Of the strictures they had followed that morn'
And the blend cedar and Ham's round formed
Accused of murder, Burr would now flee
From both New York and his home, New Jersey.
'Twas with this event, one must indeed agree,
The infamous Burr earned his legacy.

Canto III The Deserter

South Carolina, home of his Daughter,
Kind Theodosia now hosted Burr.
Burr would return to D.C. soon after.
His end came "not with a bang, but a whimper"
And so the shunned ex-Vice President
Now packed his bags as to the West he went.

Of what happened next, we cannot be sure
For 'twas the subject of many rumors.
Said Burr: I plan a grand expedition,
Said foes: Nay, he plans a grand secession!
For these two theories, two ideas clear:
To take Mexico was his new career,
And all else being merely a façade
Or to steal the west, the plan of a cod.
Even George Morgan, Burr's dear old close friend,
Feared he meant to force the Union to end.
And Merry, a British ambassador,
Wrote to London, of what Burr asked for:
Funds to effect western separation!
Though we must note, for he had just begun,
We do not know if 'twas all a fat fib --
If plans for Mexico were to soon jib.

Whatever the case, people did not trust
There was no thing on Burr's mind but land lust.
Jefferson received many a report
Of the dealings of Burr he ought to thwart.
Of this proposal do not be too fond
For all too many were signed as Anon

Jefferson, however remained outraged
With Burr's actions and what he may of arranged.
He, unlike Marshall, placed ev'ry confidence
In the anonymous correspondence.
Though the scripts were not all so devious.
From Gen Wilkinson was proof copious
In the mind of Jeff., who had been restrained
In assumptions based epistles thus far.
Now, he had begun credit the bizarre.
And so did he write to the congress at large,
On thoughts that Burr of the west did take charge.

The general opinion of people,
Was now that Burr was most contemptible.
Though 'tis essential to see neutrally.
Who was left to look but abusively?
Federalists, he had defied to oft',
(Burr not being a man who's thoughts spoke soft.)
Democrats still begrudged him his mulish stunt
Where he'd refused to yield to Jefferson.
In the election of eighteen-hundred
When it took Ham to get to the courts' head.
It had been a tie for presidency,
And Burr would not relent candidacy.
In this we see quite an obvious sign,
That Burr's actions to himself were malign.
Though even in this, we find legacy --
The twelfth amendment sprouts so readily.

Canto IV The Arrest
Aaron Burr, ever the opportunist,
Had bought a pathway to rouse colonists --
The acreage was bought from the Spanish
With intent to gain all Spain relinquished
Whether by force, conforming with the plan,
That scheme, for Mexico, which he began,
Or through drawn and grueling payment
To procure Mexico, still as he meant.
An associate through the arrangement,
Burr'd pegged Wilkinson, which he would repent.
Wilkinson -- coward and mole that he was
To protect his extremity gave cause
For both Jefferson and the Spanish state
With Aaron Burr to be quite irate.
While one may wish this to prove him noble,
I assure you, his purse was quite stable.
That summer of eighteen hundred and six
Their boats and schemes Jefferson would transfix
Not once, nor twice, but three times halted!
At Lexington, by Clay extricated;
At Adams, the folk by bias enraged
At Alabama encased in a cage
Er ... after several attempts to decamp.
But the last arrest Burr could not revamp.
Arrested by a young man named Toulmin,
Who was a minister to Great Britain,
In Virginia he found himself then,
It became clear Burr was snared yet again.
Though he would claim this was without reason
Burr was anon arrested for treason.

Others would note, had it not been for Jeff,
Burr, to his devices, might have been left.
The only error in such assumptions,
Is that unknown are now Burr's intentions.

Canto V Trial for Treason

The United States versus Aaron Burr
'tis a noted case to which I refer.
Left behind a federal legacy
That of both Burr and Judge Marshall jointly.
Previous to Burr being accused
Treason's meaning was not yet decided.
Even though the branches slowly struggled
The government joined for the road ahead.
Jefferson, uneasy at first and slow,
Marshall feared him to be in-apropos.
While he did provide the mole's document
'Twas but a copy, of no real content.
The witnesses, one bribed, one a drunkard
Meant things for Prosecutor Hay were quite hard.
Marshall, cautious, knew the verdict's purport.
Concerned, he formed laws for common support:
One must commit a direct act of war;
There must be two witnesses if not more.
Of the three called as witness to the stand:
Morgan was denied-- Burr had been jocund
When he'd been at George Morgan's home to dine.
As for Eaton, the state had paid off his fines,
When he offered the knowledge he had gained.
And lastly, it came down to Wilkinson
With the "truths" he offered, he was undone:
A letter was coded, called a "copy"
'Twas in Wilks' pen, evidence was shoddy.
And he, a man of no shame, a Spanish spy;
'Twas hard to discern if all was not lies.

When given a chance to speak for himself,
Burr spoke of acting for the country's wealth,
Fears brought on for no reason but Wilk's
Desire to profit from great panics.
Explaining his fleeing did not mean guilt,
Only belief that other's trust would wilt
As they heard Jefferson's claims against him.
Noting prosecutor's case was slim,
Burr also complained of his mistreatment.
While time with military captors spent.

As time has passed, it seems not much has changed.
For such great mistreatment is still arranged.
This story no worse than Guantanamo,
And Burr, much more quickly was he let go.
Few were sure that these prisoners deserved,
But for Cheney, who’s judgment had not swerved.
But still, actions of Burr took their affect,
Those Civil Liberties some did protect.
They, like Marshall, questioned treason’s meaning.
Then on Obama they were a-leaning.
Until the politician relented --
Grounds for closing Gitmo were presented.

'Twas Burr's actions that made his legacy,
Without effort, only wished to be free.
But they set precedent for the future,
Whether he explored or was a traitor.

Canto VI: Beneath the Gossip

In his noble actions Burr was humble,
Perhaps why is prestige did crumble.
But to those called him family, friend,
Burr, with compassion always did defend.

And for the Fairfields, impoverished,
In Boston they fought financial anguish.
Their children were with their grandmother
In a cold New York winter they hungered.
Burr, having heard the sad, poignant tale
Could not bare but for his efforts to avail.
So he sold his gold watch for the children
And through the cold winter they did fend.

His daughter, from him, gained education,
Known for her wit throughout the nation.
In the arts and foreign language immersed,
Theodosia was an esteemed Burr.

With his daughter's education we see,
Burr's intent that all women should be free.
A follower of Mary Wollstonecraft,
Burr supported women where others laughed.
With education, his aims did not end,
But also their rights he hoped to amend.
When elected into New York's Senate,
A Bill for their suffrage he did submit.

Canto VII: The Deathbed

Guilty or not, forever shunned was he,
No longer wanted by society.
He outlived his loved ones, they passed on
Even the daughter he'd doted upon.
On his deathbed he lay, eight decades old
And told the side that had never been told:
He denied ever wishing to destroy
This union of states -- it was all a ploy.
Perhaps an expansionist at his core,
His only wish steal Mexico before.
Perhaps these were the words of such a man
Weary of being cursed throughout the land.

A complex man was the Vice President
Abhorred by Jeff, and on his way he went.
So many titles had he earned by then,
Traitor, expansionist, father, soldier, friend
Radical, Lawyer and man all along.
Is this the tale of a Patriot gone wrong?

We never may know, but can still ponder:
Who was the true Aaron Burr, I wonder?

A Long Time Ago & Age Of Reason

2009-02-11T00:03:00.000-08:00

Richard at four: "A long time ago, when I was three ..."

Richard at five: "A long time ago, when I was three ..."

Richard at six: "A long time ago ... a very long time ago, when I was three ...."

~~~~~

"As you know," Connor said, "I am nearly seven --"

"The age of reason," FatSam agreed.

Connor paused. FatSam could see that he had prepared a statement, but now he hesitated. "What's that?"

"That's when you are responsible for your own behavior. According to the Catholics --"

"You were a Catholic when you were little."

"Yep," said FatSam. "I was actually an altar boy at my older sister's confirmation. Now --"

"What's an altar boy?"

"That's a boy who, during mass -- that's when people go to church, it's called mass," said FatSam quickly, to forestall the question he saw coming, "that's the boy who stands next to the priest and carries things for the priest, and hands the priest things and takes things from him when the priest wants him to."

FatSam waited while Connor absorbed this. He liked watching the boy think. "How come we don't ever go to church?"

"I don't go because I think the things they talk about in Church aren't true. Your mama used to go, but she stopped right before you were born because she was mad at the people who were running the Catholic Church. Some of the priests were ... doing very bad things to the boys and girls who went to church, and then lying about it, And the bosses of the priests, even though they knew the priests were doing bad things, didn't do anything to stop it or punish the bad priests. So she stopped going there."

"Did they do bad things to you when you were an altar boy?"

"Nope. Papa warned me about the priests, so I was careful and nothing bad happened to me."

"Well, I guess I'll be careful too, and not be an altar boy for any priests."

"Probably wise."

"Hey!"

"Yep?"

Connor took a breath. "OK. I am almost seven."

"The age of reason," FatSam agreed.

Connor stared at FatSam. "You keep interrupting!"

"I do," FatSam admitted.

"Don't interrupt any more."

"OK."

"When you're seven," said Connor in a rush, "which is the age of reason and you're responsible then you should get your own Nintendo DS for your birthday because you can take care of it."

"OK."

"Really? I can get it?"

"Me and Mama talked about it already. Yep."

"WOOHOO!" shouted Connor. "I'm gonna like being seven!"

Allow Me To Retort

2009-02-10T20:16:00.000-08:00

... there's this passage I got memorized ...

One of the great moments in film.

It Turns Out

2008-11-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

An irregular blog feature inspired by our soon-to-be ex-President, and not a moment too soon ...

"It turns out that there's a lot of interlinks through the financial system." -- George W. Bush, September 21, 2008

Shit, who knew?

It turns out ....

... that the main reason Obama won is that the country got less white. Whites were 81% of the vote in 2000. In 2008, they were 72% of the vote. McCain won among Southern Whites by 38 percentage points, and whites overall by about 12%, but Obama won by huge margins in every other group -- he took 95% of the black vote, 66% of the Hispanic vote, and 63% of the Asian vote.

It turns out ...

... that the Southern Strategy of marketing racism in code words, which worked brilliantly for two generations, is broken. Two generation ago a substantial part of this country really was racist, but the racists have been dying out. What's left is a country that's less white than it used to be and rather more white than it's going to be -- the Census Bureau estimates the non-Hispanic white population of the United States at 46% by 2050. Hispanics will be 30% of the population, blacks 15%, and Asians 9%. A few years back there were about 10,000 elected black officials in this country: 50 of them were Republican; one half of one percent.

Republicans will adapt: they have to. They'll find a way to market themselves to non-white audiences, they'll shed the (relatively few, any more) genuine racists among their ranks, and they'll become competitive again -- or they'll cease to exist and a new party will come into existence. Politics abhors a vacuum.

It turns out ...

... that people under 30 voted for Obama by 3:1. This is the period when voting patterns are set -- which is good news for Democrats and more in a long string of bad news for Republicans.

"It is my belief that our party has lost a generation of young voters." -- Ohio GOP Chairman Kevin DeWine

It turns out ...

... that George W. Bush was the Herbert Hoover of our era. (Well, worse; Herbert Hoover merely presided over an economic disaster. But economically, he's the first President to approach the Hooverian ballpark ...)

It remains to be seen if Barrack Obama is FDR.

It turns out ...

... that investing in the stock market during Republican Presidencies is a bad, bad idea. By raw coincidence, I am assured by my Republican friends, the stock market does substantially better during Democratic Presidencies than during Republican Presidencies.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, when George Bush took office, was 10,587. As of today it's below 8,000 -- about where it was in 1997. If this were an unfortunate coincidence, well, that'd be one thing, but it's not. Ever since the end of the Great Depression, the stock market has done better during Democratic administrations than during Republican administrations.

Look here:

"Looking at the 72-year period between 1927 and 1999, the study shows that a broad stock index, similar to the S&P 500, returned approximately 11 percent more a year on average under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the index only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills when Republicans were in office."

Worth a click-through -- but note that the study cited was performed in 2004, before the greatest economic crisis of the last 80 years hit.

It turns out ...

... that Senate Democrats will welcome back into their caucus, and into their leadership, a man who vigorously campaigned against their Presidential candidate, and who campaigned against other members of their caucus, if he really really wants to keep his job. "Whores" and "cowards" are two words that spring to mind, but neither one quite fits. I'll keep working at it.

I understand why people vote Republican. I do -- I don't agree with it, not lately, but the core of pure yellow at the heart of the Democratic establishment has to be heartening to America's enemies. Republicans may be crazed, but you'd have to hunt to find a group as gutless as the ones Democrats have elected to leadership positions in the House and Senate.

It turns out ...

... that Quantum of Solace is a good movie, but not a very good movie. It's not as good as Casino Royale, though it's better if you watch Casino Royale again before viewing it -- I did.

I will say that this is my favorite Bond, surpassing even Sean Connery. Heresy, I know, but ranking Bonds on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best ....

Daniel Craig, 10
Sean Connery, 9
Pierce Brosnan, 6
Timothy Dalton, 6
Roger Moore, 2

Daniel Craig is the best actor to play Bond, by quite a margin. (Connery became a very good actor in later years -- but not when the series started. The Connery of Untouchables is not the Connery of Dr. No.)

Craig's Bond is a blue-eyed sociopath, a man who kills when it's convenient and without remorse or much in the way of affect. Quantum is a lousy Bond movie; Bond movies are Western kabuki, highly formalized, and Quantum ignores most of the formalities. We don't get the right music, we don't get the "Bond, James Bond," we don't get the gadgets, we don't even get "shaken, not stirred" -- Miss Moneypenney is gone, and so is Q. And I don't care much. We get a man struggling to hang onto the shreds of his humanity, and I'm there. I'm willing to wait and watch this Bond evolve toward the more elegant Bond of the Connery/Brosnan mold.

He certainly does look good in a tuxedo.

Next episode, please.

It turns out ...

... that HDTV is not an unalloyed blessing. I had clear memories of Ursula Andress coming out of the showers naked in Dr. No -- I saw a 1080P copy of the movie recently, and in fact she's wearing a flesh-colored one-piece.

Technology giveth, and technology taketh away ... I've seen two high-def porn movies at this point, and it may be that there's a resolution limit beyond which porn should not be shot. DVD resolution, maybe. Just thinking aloud on that one.

(Still ... Phoebe Cates in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" justifies HDTV pretty much all by herself. I am not really open to discussion on this point.)

It turns out ...

... that David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who after the 2009 season. I haven't written about Doctor Who on this blog before -- I just discovered the relaunched Who in the last year, and as with Battlestar Galactica, went through it in a couple dozen sessions -- and it's brilliant, a show that all by itself has defined a Golden Age of science fiction.

I've also watched Torchwood, the spinoff series, and while it's OK (and pretty gay), it's not up to the standards of invention of the Eccleston (one season) and Tennant (four seasons so far) Doctor Who. The current Doctor is the last survivor of the Time War, a strikingly lonely man or alien or whatever he is, who's out to have fun and do the right thing. There's the suggestion that he killed millions in the Time War, destroying the race of the Time Lords and their Dalek enemies in that conflict -- but we're never shown the war, just the aftermath (a good decision, that)..., in which an immortal man, the last of his kind, keeps his head up and keeps swinging away at what the universe throws at him.

There are iconic moments -- in particular the ending of "The Family of Blood," which has a downright epic conclusion to the tale of evil, short-lived aliens who want to live forever, running head-on into the last of the Time Lords ...

He never raised his voice, that was the worst thing. The fury of the Time Lord.

And then we discovered why, why this Doctor who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden.

He was being kind.

He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star.

He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy to be imprisoned there forever.

He still visits my sister once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her but there she is, can you see? He trapped her inside a mirror ... every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you just for a second, that’s her. That’s always her.

As for me, I was suspended in time and the Doctor put me to work, standing over the fields of England as their protector.

We wanted to live forever.

So the Doctor made sure that we did.

Careful what you wish for. Tennant plays the Doctor again in four more one-hour specials -- five more hours of the best science fiction ever televised.

It turns out ...

... that people who kill children are prone to other failings as well.

~~~~~

The Last Dancer copies should ship at Thanksgiving. Sorry, I've been on the road and swamped. But home again and catching up.

(Thought about calling this "thoughts from the road," but I ran across the "turn out" quote again, and I like it better ....)

Yes, more AI War coming. And another chunk of Last Five Exits, too.

It's been suggested that the way I'm categorizing these posts is useless to most people -- I can see that. I'm going to add more generic posts categories going forward:

Writing
Programming
Fiction (mine)
Fiction (not mine)
Movies/TV
Politics
Sports

Maybe a couple others. I suppose I could add one for Alan Rodgers as well, but most of that material's going on over to the Alan Rodgers Experience. There are probably another half dozen posts going up over there -- some video from my daughters, a complete copy of the dependency court document on the death of Anthony Rodgers and the abuse that infant suffered before he died, a few other things. And then that blog will be allowed to sit, unless something interesting happens that's worth commenting on. I've got even money on a murder-suicide somewhere down the road.

Amy Casil, a downright remarkable human being, has sent me half a dozen psychotic messages lately -- one of them bragging about how many friends she's got. I'm curious if any of them have children, and if so, how many of them would let the love of her life babysit, unsupervised....

~~~~~

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss George Bush at all. He's been great for comedy. This, amazingly, is not photoshopped -- I got it directly off the White House website.

No more copies of "Last Dancer" available.

2008-10-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

FYI.

Hell Next Five Exits

2008-10-22T09:59:00.001-07:00

Where things come from ...

My sons are taken with the world described in "The Collapse of the Levels," and Bram, my oldest, keeps pitching ideas at me. One day he asked if there were freeways in the Levels, and I thought about it. "Maybe during the Republic of Potsdam," I offered.

Do the freeways just run in Middle Earth, or do they go across Heaven and Hell? I allowed as how they might cross the Levels ... and he grinned. "Hell, Next Five Exits," he said. "There's a guy who's getting chased, and he drives to Hell."

Now, this is the essence of plotting: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened ... I've met adults who had problems plotting, but I've never met kids who did.

I had a piece laying around for quite a while, about a guy being chased along the edge of the Grand Canyon, by vampires ... it worked well enough.

During the same walk on the beach where Bram threw "Hell, Next Five Exits" at me, he got off some cynical observations about life, the universe, and everything -- and I quoted at him more or less the text that opens this piece.

This is set about 70,000 years before the events in "The Collapse of the Levels."

Hell, Next Five Exits

All creation is ultimately an act of romanticism. This is true even for the cynics, perhaps especially so. To assert a world barren and brutal, a world of nothing but betrayal and bad faith, is to impose on what is.

Some people can be trusted.

*

The Freeway Naranda runs across the edge of the Canyon Loss. Where the Loss crosses Middle Earth it is, as most school children can tell you, two hundred miles long, forty miles across at its widest, and nearly four miles deep. The River Definite that cut the Canyon (so teach the stonebenders in those schools) runs down out of the mountains, twining together out of a myriad of small streams into the great River, and thunders down through the Loss on its way to the Desert Infinite. In olden days – before the Sixth Republic, in any event – that water passed through a dozen small towns on its way to becoming nothing, out among the Infinite’s fractal mirages.

But no longer, and not in my lifetime nor that of your grandparents. My Sulhola ancestors killed those small towns, stole the Definite’s water and watched the towns dry up and die: and for three hundred years now the Definite has come to its end at City Arch, where fourteen million souls drink and wash and farm that river into oblivion.

*

The world is one hundred and eighty thousand years old, so the earth witches and stonebenders say – some few historians agree with them. And they may be right, I don’t know. More historians agree that is has been one hundred and fifty-five thousand years since the Fracture, but there is disagreement there, too.

That the Republic of Potsdam is twenty-four thousand years old is a certainty: my family traces its lineage to the Republic’s founding and like most of good ancestry I can recite mine, root and branch, to the Morning Republic.

In twenty-four thousand years, or one hundred and fifty-five, or one hundred and eighty, what was happening to me had most likely never happened before to anyone else.

The Naranda runs mostly through Middle Earth. But it starts in Heaven, and it ends in Hell.

A crush of vampires had chased me almost two thousand miles down that freeway, from the edge of Heaven to the edge of Hell. I was a hundred miles past Arch when I saw the sign that says, to any soul less desperate than I, turn back:

Hell Next Five Exits.

*

The crush burst in on us at our lodge in Tajan. The lodge was newish, having been in my family perhaps ten generations, and was nestled half a mile high in the Near Northern Mountains, with a one-lane partially paved road, unmarked and with certain discouragements for the casual traveler, winding its way up from the Naranda. Tajan is a small town on the lower slopes of Saternly Mount; it has some four hundred rope people, perhaps two hundred lorun like myself. The tree people pass through occasionally, and there are some number of dragons at Satlake – they come and go as dragons will, and I could not tell you within a dozen how many there were at a given time, despite my family’s hereditary rights of passage over Tajan. We had never pushed for an accurate count – would you?

There’d been trouble with vampires further north, up near the River Ruby, so we should have given some thought to them – but we didn’t, not I nor our retainers nor Captain Balsam Remane. No crush had been as far south as Tajan in living memory …

Everyone is dead now -- Gurn, Remane, Ahjan, Terrero, even little Uadalure – everyone, as I say, except me, so placing blame elsewhere is both pointless and ungentlemanly. The blame is mine, because I’m alive to bear it.

*

They came on the night of my youngest sister Ahjan’s anacator. In olden days she’d have actually been married at fourteen, but civilization has advanced somewhat since those darker times; now, among our class, a cator is an assumption of some adult responsibilities and privileges, and an excuse for a party. Father and Mother were due to arrive the morning of her birthday, leaving Ahjan and her friends to have their more traditional unstructured fun the day before. And they did – Ahjan had two dozen of her friends with us, and a few of the boys got a little more drunk than was seemly, and a few of the girls got kissed rather thoroughly – but in all no harm. One boy whose name I did not know conceived a passion for Ahjan’s best friend Olinia, and we had to throw him in the lake to restore his senses; but once he’d dried off and perhaps sobered some he apologized, and in round Ahjan’s anacator was a success.

Gurny and I watched the sun set from the front porch that evening. Ahjan and her friends were inside the lodge putting on a play – decent work, some of her crowd were the children of professional entertainers and knew the business of it. They’d invited the lorun townpeople for audience, and about forty had come; and a dozen of the rope people as well. Gurny was worn and I was restless – I’m only three and a half years older than Ahjan, but Gurny was my grandfather’s man and he’d been principle chaperone to Ahjan and her friends in addition to managing logistics and transportation for some forty people – by the time the younger crowd had gone inside for their show, Gurny was moving slowly and was plainly grateful to settle into the biggest of the wooden chairs on the long redwood porch.

I pulled a chair more suited to my size over and sat beside him, a bit upwind. Gurny made a small gesture with two fingers, and I shrugged – he smokes flatweed, and my parents disapprove. I don’t care as long as I don’t have to breathe it. The cigar shook slightly as he lit it – exhaustion, more than age, though the exhaustion was the result of age….

Getting old is unpleasant, Gurny said sometimes, but all the alternatives are worse.

We sat in a comfortable silence while the blue sky took up streaks of pink and orange. Gurny was easy to be with; he’d taught me to read and ride, to hunt and shoot, to fight with and without weapons; had taught me more about being a soldier and a man than my own father. I didn’t resent it, much; Father was a busy and important man and I liked Gurny. Gurny had even taught me the little bit of military magic he knew – not much: witch sight to see in the dark; how to find true West; how to minimize hunger and fatigue; how to find water.

There was enough of a breeze to be comfortable, to stir the Lake off to my left into choppy small blue waves whose peaks caught the sunlight with orange and then red accents, as the sun sat across the long stretch of the Desert Infinite.

Gurny smoked half his cigar before saying, “Your parents are coming in the morning, first thing.”

Even a couple of years ago he’d have known he didn’t need to belabor the obvious to me. “I’ll see things cleaned and boys and girls bedded down in their own wings, before heading to bed myself.”

“Good boy,” said Gurny absently, which might have cost another man his teeth.

I smiled. “And I’ll see Remane posts a guard or two on the corridors.” Later that comment haunted me – the knowledge my only thought for safety had been to put our troops in between the youngsters, rather than around them.

Gurny nodded and puffed away at his cigar. I heard small footsteps behind us, and found my youngest sister Uadalure in her night clothes, fresh from her bath and her hair still wet, her nanny Terrero trailing behind her. Uadalure was four years old, dark-haired and dark-eyed and Middle Earth’s happiest child.

It was already near her bedtime and she’d had a busy day. She climbed up in my lap and whispered, “Tell me a story, Tari.” She curled up against my chest, rested her wet hair against my shoulder, and closed her eyes. “A story about Fluffy,” Fluffy being her ted who’d been left behind in Arch. I’d never thought there was anything much fluffy about her ted -- or anyone else’s – but she doted on him and it was the name she’d chosen.

Gurny closed his eyes and smiled a bit as I started in on the tale. It was the same story every time, Uadalure had objected strenuously the few times I’d tried to introduce changes. “When Fluffy was a baby,” it began, “he wanted a little girl of his own. And he was luckier than any other ted, because the little girl he got was the smartest and nicest and prettiest girl in all of Arch or Tajan--”

Arch was about twenty thousand times the size of Tajan, but they were the two places Uadalure knew.

“Nicest,” she mumbled, half asleep already. “Me.”

“You,” I agreed, and kissed her on her damp forehead. She snuggled a little closer, and her breathing gentled. “When Festival came, Fluffy made sure he was there, because he knew Uadalure’s mother would take her there to play. And because he was so handsome, so pretty, so fluffy, all the little girls who saw Fluffy wanted him to be theirs. But Fluffy said no!”

“No,” came the whisper of agreement.

“Fluffy knew that Uadalure would come and love him and have him forever, if only he was patient. And teds aren’t very good at being patient”—for my measure they were the dumbest creatures that breathed–“but Fluffy knew how important it was that he be patient for Uadalure, because Uadalure’s mommy didn’t like to go the Festival too early in the day. So one little girl after another came and saw Fluffy and wanted him to be hers, one after another after another, but every time Fluffy said …” I waited a beat. No sound came from her but her rhythmic breathing.

“No,” said Gurny very softly. “He said no every time, because Uadalure loved him more than anyone else, and he loved her just as much.”

I stood and handed Uadalure back to Terrero. “Put her in our parent’s room. She should wake up about the time they arrive.”

“Very good, sir. Good night, sir.”

“Good night, Terrero.” I turned to Gurny and held out my right hand.

The faint smile died. “I need help getting out of my chair now?”

“No, Gurny, I know you can get out of the chair on your own. I also know you won’t and I’ll have to wake you after you’ve stiffened and you’ll be unpleasant about it.” I paused and amended, “More unpleasant than you’re going to be anyway.”

Gurny observed that I was impertinent and that my parents had been unmarried when I was conceived. I nodded. “So my father has indicated on occasion. But I’ve seen the paperwork, and it appears to indicate a decent interval between wedding and birth.”

“You can pay special for those sorts of papers,” growled Gurny, taking my hand. I hauled him out of the chair. It was much easier than it would have been even a year ago – I was stronger, and he was lighter.

“You can pay for anything in Arch,” I agreed, and something in my tone struck him – he peered closely at me for a moment, not letting go of my hand.

“What have you been paying for, young sir?”

“Nothing unseemly,” I said, without changing expression. “Those sorts of things cost more than Father is willing to release from my accounts.”

He barked laughter and released me. “You’re old enough to work.”

“I’m old enough to fight, too,” and Gurny merely nodded at that, and clapped me on the shoulder.

It was nearly dark out, so we lit the porch lanterns and went back inside as the thin line of scarlet on the horizon faded to black.

*

I'll probably finish this soon. It's a discrete little story arc and my son's waiting on it. It does feel like the opening of a kid's book, though.

Yes, there is more Long Run coming. Probably a couple days.

Say It Ain't So, John

2008-10-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

After we liquidated things with Quietvision, they (quite decently) sent me the remaining copies. We've got two boxes of "Last Dancer" hardcovers, 20 copies, we're going to get rid of. $50 apiece, shipping included inside the U.S. -- an extra $10 outside the U.S. I've seen them going on Ebay for lots more than that. Drop me a line in the comments if you want one. They go in order requested.

~~~~~

Say It Ain't So ...

I've always admired John McCain. (Don't misunderstand; I'm not voting for him. I can't imagine voting Republican at the moment. But that's policy, and has nothing to do with McCain's quality as an individual.) As to McCain's quality as an individual -- he's an asshole, but that's not the worst failing for a politician. I'm sure, temper issues and all, he's a nicer guy than Bill Clinton, another guy with a volcanic temper. McCain's pragmatic and you can do business with him, which I've always liked -- I'm not a big fan of "bipartisanship," which is a longer post than I have time for at the moment -- but I do like pragmatic, and pragmatic married to something like character is the best you can ask for out of any politician.

Politics is an ugly business, and the first requirement is that you win. I don't have a problem (a moral problem, anyway) with much that McCain's done up to this point. Ditto Obama. A lot of what McCain's done so far has been a mistake, but that's just a judgement issue, not a moral one.

In 2000 robocallers in North Carolina, during the Republican primaries, called voters and told them that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. It was the nastiest possible libel; McCain has an adopted daughter of Indian background. Bush's operatives took that adoption and used McCain's daughter as the bsis of a smear intended to inflame the racist sentiments of Republican primary voters.

My longtime admiration for McCain took a hit when he embraced Bush on stage at the 2004 convention. Screw the politics of it; Bush used McCain's daughter, lied about her, to pick up the votes of racists. And McCain embraced him four years later. Imagine being the daughter, watching that on television?

But life is full of compromises. OK, that hug was one. But yesterday I read that John McCain hired the firm that executed that racist smear against his own daughter. Hired them. Paid them.

I'm hard to surprise, when it comes to politics. Steve Barnes, who I admire, thinks Obama is a "political philosopher" -- I don't think so. I think Obama is a Chicago pol, a street fighter -- better than a philosopher. See Al Gore, who I do admire: but as a politician your first responsibility is to win, and Obama's so far willing to do what it takes to win. Gore wasn't. (Which doesn't change the fact that he did win -- the only time all the votes were ever counted in Florida, Gore won by every single standard that actually involved counting all the votes .... of course Bush was in the White House by the.)

But even politicians should have lines they won't cross. The contempt I always felt for Bill Clinton was an artifact of my inability to see where that line was, for him -- the admiration I always felt for McCain came from what was, I thought, a pretty clear set of lines he wouldn't cross, not even to win. He's blurred a few of those, running for President -- fair enough, ambition can make even good men do things they wouldn't brag about.

But I don't see how you parse this last as anything but a betrayal of his daughter. It wouldn't have surprised me from Bill Clinton, but it sure does surprise me from McCain.

Shame on you, John McCain.

Caine Black Knife

2008-10-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

At Amazon.

I Still Believe ...

2008-10-15T12:52:00.002-07:00

Well, no I don't. 3-1 is a pretty big hole, and while I won't count them out, the Dodgers will need a lot of luck to get past this Phillies team. There are three games left, if the Dodgers are lucky, and two of them are in Philadelphia, and the Dodgers need all three.

That Game 4 loss is a classic sign of an overmatched team. Win the first two games at home, go on the road and drop Game 3 -- pretty normal. The underdog usually wins Game 3, because the implications (down 3-0) are so disastrous for them if they don't. Then, good teams win Game 4 and things are pretty bleak for the underdog from that point forward ...

This certainly counts as success for the Dodgers, however. Short of a World Series appearance I'm skeptical they keep Manny Ramirez -- he's old, which isn't that big a deal in the American League, where a big hitter can move to the designated hitter and be productive in his declining years, than it is in the National League, where a slow, aging player on the field is a danger to the team.

But after 20 years they've won a series, and even without Ramirez they have a young, talented squad. That's something.

~~~~~

Matt Stover's new novel, Caine Black Knife, is out. More about that tomorrow, but the very short form is, go buy it now.

~~~~~

Things have indeed settled down -- and my schedule has lightened up considerably -- I'm up to around 20 hours a week writing time right now, and if things stay the same, my output should rise dramatically. (It's been ~4 hours a week the last couple years.) may not blog much more -- I suspect everyone would rather see Trent text than blog text.

I'm going to issue the first complete half of AI War as an e-book -- my November 30 date's looking unlikely. Sorry, I should have known better than to make that post. That move ate up most of a month, unfortunately, but the first half of AI War is in clean shape and leaves the story at a good stopping point -- not a lengthy stopping point, I hope. I'm talking to Outpost Press right now to produce bound copies of the novel, but I'm not clear on timelines yet.

~~~~~

Yes, there surely is more coming on the Alan Rodgers front. I'm waiting until after the election, because no one'll be paying attention until then anyway, but post-Nov. 4 we're going to do a fairly large push on that situation. The Alan Rodgers Experience is back online -- no new posts, as I say, I've been busy, but some of the material that's coming there is an update on the last year or so, interviews and blogs with my daughters, profiles of some of the people inhabiting the Los Angeles Family Court system, scanned copies of various documents generated in the last few years, a review of two years of posts by Alan Rodgers and Amy Casil over on SFF.net, including the part where she sought a restraining order against him and he had a bugfuck flipout over it and started threatening her and her surviving child and then demanded she apologize to him publicly ... the list of people Alan's demanded public apologies from is striking, going through all his posts. After killing their little brother, he demanded that Alex and Andrea apologize to him as well. This hasn't happened yet but doubtless he's still waiting ...

The part of my deposition where Alan Rodgers lawyer asks if Amy Casil might have gone down to Alan's office and caused that explosion of filth in a drunken bender after the baby's death is priceless. If they'd just go away and leave be people who want nothing to do with them, watching them fuck with each other would itself be a form of entertainment. At one point in his SFF.net posts, Alan mutters that Amy Casil is accusing him of things that would require legal action if she said them publicly. I can imagine what that could be -- something to do with intentional homicide, maybe? She certainly already knew he'd killed that baby through negligence.

After Alan threatened to kill her daughter, Casil left him. After Alan killed her baby, Casil left him. And then sought a restraining order against him and Alan responded by threatening her and her daughter again, publicly. And then she went back to him, again. Fascinating woman, at least in a clinical sense.

There's material relating to recent court developments I haven't covered yet, but that's coming. Dr. Jane Ellen Shatz, a court ordered reunification therapist, thought it would be valuable to put the drunken, abusive, mentally impaired baby killer into therapy with his surviving children: we've quite thoroughly declined to do that. It's possibly unfair of me to note that she only got paid if the kids went to reunification therapy, but I take note, and will add that some therapists don't threaten their "clients," which Shatz did to my daughters. My daughters may have more to say on their experiences with Dr. Shatz.

I'm surprised by none of this. This is the court system that found O.J. Simpson a competent parent to take his children back, after he cut their mother's head off. It's a good place for monsters like Alan.

(On a mildly unrelated note, nice to see O.J. heading away to lockup. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Gives one hope for karma in other areas of life.)

If you're a blogger who'd like to blog about this, drop me a line in the comments. If you are or know a reporter for a meaningfully sized media outlet, ditto. I've got contacts within NPR and the L.A. Times, and I'll be following up with them as well. The Group News Blog is already on board to cover this after the election.

~~~~~

Along with the Matt Stover post, some politics coming tomorrow too. Interesting times.

Hello ...

2008-10-06T10:57:00.002-07:00

We moved in September, and as those of you wish large families know, this is a major production. So I haven't been posting much. But we're settled now and I should be around a bit more. Some interesting things to discuss, too .....

Great time to be a Dodgers fan.

Yes, will be more AI War up sometime this week.

Pirate Guy

2008-09-25T00:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Steve Perry for forwarding this ....

Thinking about getting some little gold hoop earrings. Just for the look.

~~~

One more for the Dodgers and they've won their division. Admittedly this is the worst division in baseball -- earlier this year it was in contention for the worst division in MLB history -- but hey, they're the Dodgers. This is progress.

BTW, you Brooklyn Dodgers fans -- I've heard it all. The reason I was born in Los Angeles in the first place was that my father followed the Dodgers 0ut from Brooklyn, fifty years ago this year ....

I am pleased for Joe Torrey. A year after being unceremoniously booted out of New York, he has the Dodgers in the playoffs -- and the Yankees are missing the playoffs for the first time in a decade or more.

Choking Dogs?

2008-09-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

7 With 9 Left ...

The Dodgers magic number -- the combination of Dodgers wins and Arizona Cardinals losses that guarantee the Dodgers will make the postseason -- is down to 7, with 9 games remaining.

I've been called a front runner occasionally because I'm a Lakers fan (Celtics fans can skip the next clause in this sentence) and the Lakers have been the most dominant franchise in NBA history -- also because I'm a UCLA Bruins basketball fan, and there was that Wooden thing, I root for USC football and they've been pretty dominant lately ....

I'm an L.A. guy. You gotta cut me slack on that stuff.

I'm also a Dodgers fan, and it's been 19 years since the Dodgers won a playoff series.

19 ... years.

In 19 years the Dodgers have won one playoff game.

A couple years back one of my daughters had a pack of boys over to the house. They were good boys who said "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and were on the track team at her high school, but there was a pack of them. At one point one of them mentioned the Dodgers and another kid said, sneering, "The Dodgers suck. The Dodgers have always sucked."

I was in the other room and the shock of hearing that brought me into the living room ... the pack looked at me, and I hesitated. Because they were young. 15 or so. And the Dodgers had always sucked, their entire lives. None of them had even been born the last time the Dodgers had won a playoff series.

"Never mind," I told them. "I forget sometimes that I'm old."

The Los Angeles Dodgers were the only team to win two World Series during the 1980s. They did it with two very different teams -- the 1981 Dodgers of Garvey and Cey and Fernando, and the 1988 Dodgers of Orel Hershiser, who won the Cy Young Award, and Kirk Gibson, who won the MVP that year and came up with one of the most magical home runs in the history of baseball.

Everyone expected the '81 Dodgers, if not to win the World Series, at least to threaten to win it. That team was a mini-dynasty and was loaded with talent. But the '88 Dodgers weren't -- before the World Series began that year, one of the announcers described them as the biggest underdog to play in the World Series in his memory. The Dodgers went to the World Series that year behind unearthly pitching by Orel Hershiser; everyone expected the Dodgers to win two games in that series, the two games Hershiser pitched, and to lose the series 4-2. Aside from Hershiser and regular season MVP Gibson, they didn't have much -- not a single position player made the All-Star team that year, for example. And they were facing the Oakland Athletics, which had amazing hitting and amazing pitching and had swept the Red Sox for the American League championship.

The Dodgers won that series in 5 games, but the moment everyone remembers is the end of Game 1. In the bottom of the 9th Kirk Gibson was sent in to pinch hit with the Dodgers down 4-3 and a man on base. Dennis Eckersley, the best reliever in baseball that year (and that era, for that matter) -- was on the mound when Gibson came up. Two outs, man on base, and Gibson had a badly injured knee and couldn't really run ...

I was at home, in an apartment complex of about a hundred units, watching the game with my wife Holly. I turned to Holly, said, "He's looking for a homer. He can't run."

Gibson worked the count to 3 & 2 ...

I turned back to her and said: "In a bad movie, this is where the hero smashes a home run and" --

-- while my head was turned away from the tv, a roar that rattled the walls of the apartment went up, a deep base bellow was like nothing I'd ever heard before. I turned my head back in time to watch Kirk Gibson trotting around the bases on those bad knees, pumping his fists. Possibly the most memorable moment in Dodgers baseball history -- I'd missed it, talking.

None of the boys in my house that day had been alive when that happened. All they knew was that the Dodgers were Choking Dogs, to quote local sportswriter TJ Simers, guys who played well in the summer, but not down the stretch when it counted: one year the Dodgers had the best record in baseball at the All-Star break, and managed to miss the playoffs. I doubt that's ever happened to another team in the history of MLB baseball.

Beyond that -- I've been annoyed at baseball ever since the World Series was cancelled by a lockout. I wasn't always the hard core basketball fan you've seen on this blog -- when I was a kid, I followed baseball, football, and basketball, and of the three, basketball was probably third. Roman Gabriel and Jack Youngblood and Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax hung on my walls when I was a kid, not Jerry West. (Some of that was my Dad, who had no patience with basketball -- and paid for the posters.) But more of it was me -- being a Lakers fan was a cross in those days, and Fuck the Celtics, you know what I mean? But in 1979 Magic Johnson came to the Lakers and the Rams left for Anaheim, and while I remained fond of the Rams, I stopped rooting: only someone who knows nothing of Los Angeles would think that a team behind the Orange Curtain was an L.A. team. In their place we got the Raiders, from Oakland -- and I hated the Raiders when they were in Oakland, hated them when they were in L.A., and hate them today. Then in '94 both the Raiders and Rams left -- the Raiders back to Oakland, the Rams to St. Louis -- and there was no football in Los Angeles, which admittedly was at an improvement over the Raiders stinking the place up.

It's been 14 years since there was pro football in L.A. -- well, except for USC.

1994 was also the year that the World Series was cancelled by a baseball strike. "A plague on both their houses" -- I couldn't tell you if the owners or players were at fault, and don't care to this day. World War II didn't interrupt the World Series, but greedy bastards on both sides managed it in 1994.

It's been 14 years since I've really cared who won the World Series, aside from rooting against the Yankees and Boston. (You'd think I'd really hate it when the Yankees play the Red Sox? Nope, because no matter what, one of them has to lose.)

But I'm still a Dodgers fan. And the last couple years, slowly, they've started to look like the old Dodgers -- despite being owned by a bastard from Boston, a real estate developer named Frank McCourt. Prior to McCourt, News Corp. had owned the Dodgers -- Rupert Murdoch -- meaning I had not one but two reasons to despise Rupert Murdoch, his politics and what his company did to my Dodgers during their ownership of it. Prior to Murdoch, the Dodgers had always been at least respectable; during the Murdoch era they were a joke and never got much past being a joke.

I'm not signing off on McCourt -- he's made decisions regarding the Dodgers I either don't understand or don't agree with -- but he cares. He's intensely focused on the Dodgers and while some of the decisions may have been goofy, having an involved and bright man as owner has plainly helped the organization regain its focus. They've actually developed young players -- the Dodgers farm system used to be the envy of the rest of baseball, and lately it's started producing again, which is nice to see. When Manny Ramirez became available recently, the Dodgers chased him, and Ramirez's presence has plainly energized this team ....

Which doesn't mean anything yet. I'm optimistic. I'm hopeful. The Dodgers have won 14 of their last 17 games, there are only 9 games left this season, and the Dodgers need some combination of 7 Dodgers wins and Arizona losses to make the playoffs.

Not even Choking Dogs should be able to screw that up.

Right?

Brilliant: Welcome to the Third World!

2008-09-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks18-2008sep18,0,7282720.column

Most of what's wrong with our economy comes down to borrowing money rather than paying as you go. The extremely low interest rates that caused the housing boom & bust were directly related to the Bush Administration's need to keep interest rates down to help finance their massive borrowing. The oil shocks were coming anyway, Peak Oil has always been a reality, but the rest of this could have been avoided by sane fiscal policy.

~~~

Speaking of sanity -- interesting couple of weeks coming. We've got family court next week -- they're apparently inclined to send my 12 year old son to reunification therapy with the baby killer -- and my daughter is talking about going to go see the District Attorney about things Alan said after Anthony died. I've thought Alan murdered that baby ever since I read the entire dependency doc, but apparently he said things she's sat on ever since. I don't think she wants to see Alan go to jail for the rest of his life -- I admit, I do -- but, like me, I think she's about reached the limit of what she's willing to tolerate.

Gregory Mcdonald

2008-09-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

Gregory Mcdonald died on Sunday, apparently. His website hasn't been updated yet:

http://www.gregorymcdonald.com/

Like too many writers, his later work wasn't up to the standards of his earlier work. Sometimes that's an actual decline, and sometimes it's merely regression to the mean -- an artist who's done something groundbreaking isn't likely to keep doing something groundbreaking. There was a little of both in Mcdonald's career -- "Fletch" is simply brilliant and not quite like anything I know of that came before it. I won't claim Mcdonald invented the dialog driven novel, but he surely perfected it. Kevin Smith's told people for years he learned to write dialog from Gregory Mcdonald; so did I. The scene in "The Long Run" where Trent meets Melissa du Bois for the first time -- that was me, trying to be Mcdonald. I won't claim I succeeded, but it's not a bad scene for something written by an 18 year old, and that's Mcdonald's influence almost entirely: if you're going to imitate, and at 18 you're going to, imitating the best is a great idea.

(I read an interview with Michael Jordan recently. He said, in essence, of course Kobe Bryant imitated him. As he, Jordan, had imitated the generation before him. It's how sports and how art evolves. Jordan influenced how an entire generation of basketball players played the game: Mcdonald influenced how an entire generation of writers wrote dialog.)

"Fletch" introduces Irwin Maurice Fletcher, who, sensibly enough, goes by Fletch. The sequel, the "Godfather 2" of the Mcdonald universe, is "Confess, Fletch," in which Mcdonald introduced Francis Xavier Flynn -- one of the great characters in literature, sharing space with Fletch, another of the great characters. That Mcdonald never had Flynn and Fletch together in another novel is one of the real missed opportunities in literature -- but the one novel in which they do both appear together will have to stand as among the finest mysteries ever written. (And personally, one of my favorite novels period.)

Within the last year, my daughter Andrea went hunting through the paperbacks on my bookshelf. She dug out the raggediest books on the shelf and went to pick out something to read -- the ugliest of the books was "Confess, Fletch," which was sitting on the shelf with no back cover and torn in half down the spine -- literally in two pieces. "Well," she said, "you've sure read this one a lot." So she took "Confess Fletch" and went off to read. When she got done, she said, "He reminds me of you, except, I liked it better."

"He reminds me of you" is a compliment I will happily take, even if it is wholly backwards. No surprise about the rest of it, either. :-)

~~~~~

The opening of "Confess, Fletch:"

FLETCH snapped on the light and looked into the den.

Except for the long windows and the area over the desk, the walls were lined with books. There were two red leather wing chairs in the room, a small divan, and a coffee table.

On the little desk was a black telephone.

Fletch dialled "0". "Get me the police, please."

"Is this an emergency?"

"Not at the moment."

The painting over the desk was a Ford Madox Brown--a country couple wrapped against the wind.

"Then please dial '555-7523'."

"Thank you."

He did so.

"Sergeant McAuliffe speaking."

"Sergeant, this is Mister Fletcher, 152 Beacon Street, apartment 6B."

"Yes, sir."

"There's a murdered girl in my living room."

"A what girl?"

"Murdered."

Naked, her breasts and hips full, her stomach lean, she lay on her back between the coffee table and the divan. Her head was on the hardwood floor in the space between the carpet and the fireplace. Her face, whiter than the areas kept from the sun by her bikini, eyes staring, looked as if she were about to complain of some minor discomfort, such as, "Move your arm, will you?" or "Your watchband is scratching me".

"Murdered," Fletch repeated.

There was a raw spot behind the girl's left ear. It had had time to neither swell nor bleed. There was just a gully with slim blood streaks running along it. Her hair streamed away from it as if to escape.

"This is the Police Business phone."

"Isn't murder police business?"

"You're supposed to call Emergency with a murder."

"I think the emergency is over."

"I mean, I don't even have a tape recorder on this phone."

"So talk to your boss. Make a recommendation."

"Is this some kinda joke?"

"No. It isn't."

"No one's ever called Police Business phone to report a murder. Who is this?"

"Look, would you take a message? 152 Beacon Street, apartment 6B, murder, the name is Fletcher. Would you write that down?"

"156 Beacon Street?"

"152 Beacon Street, 6B." Through the den door, Fletch's eyes passed over his empty suitcases standing in the hall. "Apartment is in the name of Connors."

"Your name is Fletcher?"

"With an 'F'. Let Homicide know, will you? They'll be interested."

II

FLETCH looked at his watch. It was twenty-one minutes to ten.

Instinctively he timed the swiftness of the police.

He returned to the living room and mixed himself a Scotch and water at the sideboard. He would not bother with ice. He concentrated on opening the Scotch bottle, making more of a job of it than was necessary. He did not look in the direction of the girl.

She was beautiful, she was dead, and he had seen enough of her.

Sloshing the drink in his glass as he walked, he went back into the den and turned on all the lights.

He stood at the desk, looking closely at the Brown. The cottage behind the country couple was just slightly tilted in its landscape, as if it, too, were being affected by the wind. Fletch had seen similiar Browns, but never even a reproduction of this painting.

The phone made him jump. Some of his drink splashed on to the desk blotter.

He placed his glass on the blotter, and his handkerchief over the stains before answering.

"Mister Fletcher?"

"Yes."

"Ah, good, you did arrive. Welcome to Boston."

"Thank you. Who is this?"

"Ronald Horan. Horan Gallery. I tried to get you earlier."

"I went out to dinner."

"Your letter mentioned you'd be staying in Bart Connor's apartment. We did some restoration work for him a year or two ago."

"It's very good of you to call, Mister Horan."

"Well, I'm very excited by this Picasso you mentioned in your letter. You said it's called 'Vino, Viola, Mademoiselle'?"

"It's been called that. God knows how Picasso thought of it."

"Of course, I'm puzzled why you came all the way from Rome to Boston to engage me as your broker. . . ."

"There's some evidence the painting is in this part of the world. Possibly even in Boston."

"I see. Still, I expect we could have handled it by correspondence."

"As I wrote in my letter, there may be one or two other matters I'd like to consult you about."

"Yes, of course. Anything to be of service. Perhaps I should start by warning you that this painting might not exist."

"It exists."

"I've looked it up, and there is no record of it anywhere that I can find."

"I have a photograph of it."

"Very possibly it does exist. There are a great many Picassos in existence which have never been recorded. On the other hand, the body of Picasso's work very often has been victim to fakes. I'm sure you know his work has been counterfeited more than the work of anyone else in history."

"I do know, yes."

"Well, I wouldn't be giving you professional service if I didn't bring these matters up to you. If such a painting exists, and it's authentic, I'll do everything I can to find it for you and arrange for the purchase."

Rotating blue lights from the roofs of police cars storeys below began to flash against the long, light window curtains. There had been no sound of sirens.

"Are you free to come by tomorrow morning, Mister Fletcher?"

Fletch said, "I'm not sure."

"I was thinking of ten-thirty."

"Ten-thirty will be fine. If I'm free at all."

"Good. You have my address."

"Yes."

"Let's see, you're on Beacon Street across from the Gardens, right?"

"I think so."

Fletch pushed the curtains aside. There were three police cars in the street. Across the street was an iron railing. The darkness beyond had to be a park.

"Then what you do is this: leave your apartment and turn right, that is, east, and go to the end of the Gardens. Then turn left on Arlington Street, that is, away from the river. Newbury Street will be the third block on your right. The gallery is about two and a half blocks down the street."

"Thank you. I've got it."

"I'll send someone down to open the door to you at ten-thirty precisely. We're not a walk-in gallery, you know."

"I wouldn't think so. I'm sorry, Mister Horan, I think there's someone at my door."

"Quite all right. I look forward to seeing you in the morning."

Fletch hung up.

The door buzzer sounded.

It was seven minutes to ten.

III

"MY NAME's Flynn. Inspector Flynn."

The man in the well-cut, three-piece, brown tweed suit filled the den doorway. His chest and shoulders were enormous, his brown hair full and curly. Between these two masses of overblown brown was a face so small it had the cherubic quality of an eight-year-old boy, or a dwarf. Even with the hair, his head was small in proportion to his body, like a tiny, innocent-looking knob in control of a huge, powerful machine. Nothing indoors had the precise colour of his green eyes. It was the bright, sparkling green of sunlight on a wet spring meadow.

Below the break of his right trouser leg were a half-dozen dots of blood.

"Pardon my pants. I'm fresh from an axe murder."

For such a huge chest cavity, for anyone, for that matter, his voice was incredibly soft and gentle.

Fletch said, "You're an Irish cop."

"I am that."

"I'm sorry." Fletch stood up. "I meant nothing derogatory by that."

Flynn said, "Neither did I."

There was no proffer to shake hands.

As Flynn vacated the doorway, a younger and shorter man came in, carrying a notepad and ballpoint pen. He had the grizzled head of someone fried on a Marine Corps drill ground a score of times, like a drill sergeant. The rubbery skin around his eyes and mouth suggested his eagerness to shove his face in yours, tighten his skin, and shout encouraging obscenities up your nose. In repose, the slack skin gave him the appearance of a petulant basset. His suit and shirt were cheap, ill-fitting, but spotless, and his shoes, even this late on a drizzly day, gleamed.

"This is Grover," said Flynn. "The department doesn't trust me to do my own parking."

He settled himself in a red leather chair.

Fletch sat down.

It was twenty-six minutes past ten.

He remained waiting in the den. A young, uniformed policeman waited with him, standing at parade rest, carefully keeping his eyes averted from Fletch. Beyond the den, other police, plainclothesmen, moved around the apartment. Fletch wondered if any reporters had sneaked in with them. Fletch heard the murmur of their voices, but caught nothing of what they said. Occasionally, a streak of light from a camera flashbulb crossed the hall, from either the left, where the bedrooms were, or the right, where the living room was.

An ambulance crew entered, rolling a folded stretcher across the hall, towards the living room.

"Close the door, will you, Grover? Then make yourself comfortable at the wee desk there. We don't want to miss a word of what this boyo in the exquisite English tailoring has to say."

The uniformed policeman went through the door as Grover closed it.

"Has anyone read you your rights?" Flynn asked.

"The first fuzz through the door."

"Fuzz, is it?"

Fletch said, "Fuzz."

"In more human language," Flynn continued, "I ask you if you don't think you'd be wiser to have your lawyer present while we question you.

"I don't think so."

Flynn said, "What did you hit her with?"

Fletch could not prevent mild surprise, mild humour appearing in his face. He said nothing.

"All right, then." Flynn settled more comfortably in his chair. "Your name is Fletcher?"

"Peter Fletcher," Fletcher said.

"And who is Connors?"

"He owns this apartment. I'm borrowing it from him. He's in Italy."

Flynn leaned forward in his chair. "Do I take it you're not going to confess immediately to this crime?"

He used his voice like an instrument--a very soft, woodland instrument.

"I'm not going to confess to this crime at all."

"And why not?"

"Because I didn't do it."

"The man says he didn't do it, Grover. Have you written that down?"

"Sitting here," Fletch said, "I've been rehearsing what I might tell you."

"I'm sure you have." Elbows on chair arms, massive shoulders hunched, Flynn folded his hands in his lap. "All right, Mister Fletcher. Supposing you recite to us your opening prevarication."

The green eyes clamped on Fletch's face as if to absorb with full credulity every word.

"I arrived from Rome this afternoon. Came here to the apartment. Changed my clothes, went out to dinner. Came back and found the body."

"This is a dandy, Grover. Let me see if I've got it in all its pristine wonder. Mister Fletcher, you say you fly into a strange city, go to an apartment you're borrowing, and first night there you find a gorgeous naked girl you've never seen before in your life murdered on the living room rug. Is that your story, in short form?"

"Yes."

"Well, now. If that doesn't beat the belly of a fish. I trust you're got every word, Grover, however few of them there were."

Fletch said, "I thought it might help us all get to bed earlier."

"'Get to bed', he says. Now, Grover, here's a man who's had a full day. Would you mind terribly if I led the conversation for a while now?"

"Go ahead," Fletch said.

Looking at his watch, Flynn said, "It's been a near regular custom I've had with my wife since we were married sixteen years ago to get me home by two o'clock feeding. So we have that much time." He glanced at the glass of Scotch and water Grover had moved to the edge of the desk blotter. "First I must ask you how much you've had to drink tonight."

"I've had whatever's gone from that glass, Inspector. An ounce of whisky? Less?" Fletch asked, "You really have inspectors in Boston, uh?"

"There is one: me."

"Good grief."

"I'd say that's a most precise definition. I'm greatly taken with it, myself, and I'm sure Grover is--an Inspector of Boston Police as being 'good grief'. The man has his humour, Grover. However, we were speaking of the man's drinking. How much did you have to drink at dinner?"

"A split. A half bottle of wine."

"He'll even define 'split' for us, Grover. A remarkably definitive man. You had nothing to drink before dinner?"

"Nothing. I was eating alone."

"And you're going to tell me you had nothing to drink on the airplane all the way across the Mediterranean Sea and then the full girth of the Atlantic Ocean, water, water everywhere. . . ."

"I had coffee after we took off. A soft drink with lunch, or whatever it was they served. Coffee afterwards."

"Were you travelling first class?"

"Yes."

"The drinks are free in first class, I've heard."

"I had nothing to drink on the airplane, or before boarding the airplane. I had nothing to drink at the airport, nothing here, wine at the restaurant, and this half glass while I've been waiting for you."

"Grover, would you make a note that in my opinion Mister Fletcher is entirely sober?"

"Would you like a drink, Inspector?" Fletch asked.

"Ach, no. I never touch the dirty stuff. The once I had it, the night after being a student in Dublin, it gave me a terrible headache. I woke up the next morning dead. The thing is, this crime of passion would be much easier to understand if you had a bottle or two of the old juice within you."

"You may find that is so," Fletch said. "When you find the murderer."

"Are you a married man yourself, Mister Fletcher?"

"I'm engaged."

"To be married?"

"I expect to be married. Yes."

"And what is the name of this young lady whose luck, at the moment, is very much in question?"

"Andy."

"Now why didn't I guess that myself? Write down 'Andrew', Grover."

"Angela. Angela de Grassi. She's in Italy."

"She's in Italy, too. Grover. Everyone's in Italy except he who has just come from there. Make a social note. She didn't come with you due to her prejudice against the Boston weather?"

"There are some family problems she has to straighten out."

"And what would the nature of such problems be?"

"I attended her father's funeral yesterday, Inspector."

"Ach. Dicey time to leave your true love's side."

"She should be coming over in a few days."

"I see. And what is it you do for a living?"

"I write on art."

"You're an art critic?"

"I don't like the words 'art critic'. I write on the arts."

"You must make a fortune at it, Mister Fletcher. First class air tickets, this lavish, opulent apartment, the clothes you're wearing. . . ."

"I have some money of my own."

"I see. Having money of your own opens up a great many careers which otherwise might be considered marginal. By the way, what is that painting over the desk? You can't see it from where you are."

"It's a Ford Madox Brown."

"It's entirely my style of work."

"Nineteenth-century English."

"Well, that's one thing I'm not, is nineteenth-century English. And who with a touch of humanity in him would be?”

Been busy ...

2008-09-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

Much to talk about, but I've been a little occupied the last few weeks. Some of what I'm going to talk about is Alan Rodgers -- apparently the baby killer sued me recently for hurting his feelings. (Swear to God.) I've been waiting for a while for a defamation lawsuit from him -- since verything I've posted about him has been true, I figured that was a winning lawsuit. Apparently so did he. So (I haven't seen the lawsuit yet) he sued me, not for saying that I thought he'd murdered his infant son, but because I posted information from the Dependency Court which said a bunch of vile (and true) things about him ... and this hurt his feelings. "Infliction of emotional distress," I think the phrase is.

Alan Rodgers Experience will probably be back online shortly.

Also another chunk of AI War coming soon.

~~~~~

The Dodgers are in first place!

Kobe rocked at the Olympics. It doesn't make up for the collapse against the Celtics, but it was sure nice to watch.

Black Hole of Cynicism...

2008-08-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080821/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq

After years of screeching that a timeline on pulling out of Iraq would be dangerous ... Bush has negotiated a timeline on pulling out of Iraq.

I recall immediately after 9-11 telling people no, of course the Bush Administration had nothing to do with it. These days, the weight of my own cynicism threatens to turn me into a black hole -- they don't have to worry about turning on the collider at CERN, Dan Moran is the actual threat to the survival of the planet.

I still believe the Bush Administration had nothing to do with 9/11: they're not nearly competent enough to have pulled off something like that. But with an election coming, and McCain close enough to Obama to at least stem the tide of blood Republicans are expecting in this election ... wow, gas prices start to drop. Timelines abruptly aren't treasonous, but simple good policy that takes the issue off of McCain's shoulders. Sorry about all the dead and maimed soldiers.

~~~

In a deeply weird coincidence, I wrote this post last night before going to bed. This morning, got to the office -- and found an email from BBC Radio asking to interview me ... about the turning on of the CERN collider.