I don't think I've often posted three times in 24 hours--three times in a week has been a lot for me lately. But my narcissism sense of public duty compels me to point out that I'm interviewed in the latest Dragon Page: Cover to Cover podcast. It's available in a couple formats on their site, and will eventually be on iTunes, although it wasn't up there the last time I checked. There were some sound issues (at least from my end) and I said "uh" about fifteen thousand times, but I think it was a pretty good conversation.
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Isn't there a giant virus inside this thing?
( Stardate 4307.1. Do not enter the zone of negative energy! )
It's only five hundred light years away. And light years are not as heavy as regular years, I understand, so they pass more quickly.
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1. My Blog Gate post for the week is up. This one is about legends, the pirate queen of Ireland, phlegm and other types of humor.
2. Morlock may be immune from fire, but he has been Kindled.
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I expected this to be all over my flist today, what with the densely layered genre refs (especially a great turn on the novel Dune around the 11 minute mark). But maybe people are paying more attention to things that are really happening. Which, on balance, is probably a Good Thing.
But for those who need a break, here's John Hodgman (the Daily Show's "resident Expert", PC from the Mac commercials, etc) at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner.
As he mentions, Obama was his warm-up act, and the President did pretty well too. He's no John McCain as far as telling jokes goes; he has trouble keeping a straight face. But the Rahm-vs-camel joke was pretty good, and there were some other nicely placed zingers.
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1. Because it's always Wednesday somewhere, if only in our hearts, I just put up my Blog Gate post of the week. It's about whether Classical or Norse mythology has better monsters, which is a dumb thing to argue about really, except the other guy started it.
2. I tossed my melted mind into this week's Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question being "What real-life city seems the most fantastical or science fictional to you?" No prizes for predicting my answer.
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1. Happy Bloomsday.
2. Stately, plump James Enge was biking last night when he (i.e. I) realized something about being middle-aged. I don't have any first wind anymore. As recently as my thirties (which is not too recent, I guess), when I exercised I would start out with a lot of energy, then flag after a while (15 or 20 seconds, perhaps) and finally get a second wind as endorphins or something kicked in. Now I don't have that first wind: I'm groaning from the second I hit the road (or the rowing machine, as the case may be). If I stick with it, though, the second wind still comes along, as strong or stronger than it used to. If it ever stops showing up I think I'll give up every pretense of fitness and settle down to becoming perfectly spherical, which is where my natural talents seem to lie anyway.
3. Who do I root for in this battle of dinosaurs, Berlusconi vs. Murdoch? I suppose it's too much to hope for that they will plunge together down the chasm into the Reichenbach Falls.
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In a recent and valuable appreciation of Lord Dunsany on Tor.com, Jo Walton issued the following pronouncement that sort of freaked me out. Lord Dunsany wasn’t writing fantasy, because what he was writing was defining the space in which fantasy could later happen. I think it makes sense to draw a line between the modern fantasy genre and the work in older traditions which has influenced modern fantasy. Beowulf and the Odyssey aren't fantasy fiction in the sense that The Hobbit is. But British writers had been writing straight-up fantasy for half a century before Dunsany started publishing. MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin or Morris' The Well at the World's End are fantasy in precisely the same sense that Tolkien's fiction is, and they're obviously part of a continuous genre tradition. And this notion that genre-establishing work can or should be categorically excluded from the genre it establishes strikes me as inherently untenable.
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If it's Wednesday, it must be time for some whining, puling excuses about why my Blog Gate post of the week is late. Only this time it's actually early. (I was avoiding other work, naturally.) It's just some incoherent thoughts about a fantasy epic which, in some ways, is too brilliant to cohere.
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It had been so long since I hit pavement that the first signals from my nerves were a little hard to decode.
"Hey! Is this pain? Pain and biking don't mix! Go back and make sure the nerves know what they're talking about!"
Then I remembered I was rolling in the street with the bike on top of me. So I figured maybe it was pain after all.
Nothing very serious, though. What happened was that a puppy, being chased by a peace officer (doubling as animal control, apparently), ran into the street right in front of me, stopped suddenly, and gave me the old deer-in-the-headlights look. I managed to brake before I slammed into him, but Newton's First Law of Motion carried me off the saddle and onto the street. Pretty light consequences: some road rash on my forearm and hand, and some bloodstains on a shirt I don't like much. (Laundry day was several days ago, only it never happened.)
Here's the thing: this happened about a block away from the place where a squirrel bounced off my bike last fall. And the place seems to have more roadkill than any comparable stretch of road in town (though I can't claim to have made a scientific study).
The only rational explanation is that there is some aura of doom about the road that impels cute fuzzy creatures to seek their destruction on it.
Which is fine with me. I mean, if they like it. But why involve me and my shiny new bike in their bloodstained deeds of terror and despair?
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This week's Blog Gate post is up, this one tackling the subject everyone is talking about these days: effability.
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Now everyone can participate in ongoing political debates without the trouble of formulating coherent arguments! It's a wonderful age we live in, for however long that is. (Infamous examples here and here.)
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This: Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic interviews the oversigned. Herds of untold shocking revelations revealed. No one will be seated during the last fifteen minutes of this interview. Etc.
That: Christian Lacroix files for bankruptcy. My first thought on reading this was, "Sheesh, Edina Monsoon is going to be upset about this." It was a few seconds before I remembered that she doesn't actually exist.
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It's still Wednesday somewhere in North America, so I figure my Blog Gate post of the week is not technically late. (Nick, reading over my shoulder, remarks, "I think you've used that line before." But that just makes it a classic. Also, it's happened before, so....)
Anyway, it's a review of Dreams with Sharp Teeth, probably the best movie about Harlan Ellison to come out in the spring of 2007.
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I was pedalling down the bike trail last night, wondering if the Latin alphabet was unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, when I suddenly sensed that someone was grinding French Roast coffee quite nearby. Glancing around at the trees, the swamp, the fields, it seemed a little unlikely. Then I realized it was skunk that I was smelling. I didn't linger.
The trail seems to be unusually lively this spring. I startled a woodchuck the other night, and also raced an odd-looking yellow bird that may have been a goldfinch (although it looked too narrow).
[edited to add:]
The bird won. Just for the record.
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Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
--Longfellow 
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There is no dumbness like the dumb of a frightened xenophobe: like the guy who argues that legal Latin violates the First Amendment, since it's "the foreign language of a church." The best thing about this is that the guy uses a Latin phrase ("per se") in the course of making his silly argument. (Seen at Language Log, with a pretty crunchy answer.)
English-only types might be interested to see what would happen to the text of the First Amendment if all the Latin were struck out of it.
As is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Without Latin: REDACTED shall make no law REDACTEDing an REDACTED of REDACTED, or REDACTEDing the free REDACTED thereof; or REDACTEDing the freedom of speech, or of the REDACTED; or the right of the REDACTED REDACTEDably to REDACTED, and to REDACTED the REDACTED for a REDACTED of grievances. I might have snuck one or two more REDACTEDs in there, but I didn't want to go overboard.
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1. Anatomy of cartoons: Michael Paulus has been figuring out what sort of skeletons would necessarily underlie various famous cartoon figures. Peanuts seems to have gotten the most attention, but also included are the Power Puff Girls, Betty Boop, Marvin the Martian and (my favorite, I think, from this group), a Shmoo. (Snaffled from John De Nardo on Facebook.)
2. Weight-loss made easy! I was in a room with a scale the other day, so I weighed myself. I have no idea why, because I don't really care: for someone of less than average height, the BMI will always be the enemy. (In other words, shave me hairless and put a dixie-cup on my head and I am a Shmoo. Don't ask me how I know this.) But there I was, and there the scale was, so I stepped onto it. The last time I weighed myself was several weeks ago, but the difference was striking: I'd dropped something like thirty pounds.
I was mildly pleased ("Take that, Body-Mass Index!")--at first. Then I realized that a precipitous weight-loss without any real lifestyle change isn't really a good thing. I looked a little closer and saw that a paperback was wedged under the scale. I pulled it out, and the scale instantly spun around to the 200+ lbs. I'd been expecting. (I'm not being coy about the actual weight; I didn't have my glasses on, so an exact reading would have been more trouble than it was worth.)
Maddening. Enough to drive someone to drink--which would be appropriate, in a way, since the word scale originally meant "drinking cup" in English, and is cognate with the Scandinavian toast, Skaal! (Yes, I spent some more quality time this afternoon with my close personal friend, the tyrant OED.)
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Dave Pitchford was wondering on Facebook about the distinction between sardonic and sarcastic. I've often wondered the same thing, so I looked it up in a few places. The short answer seems to be: not much. Maybe, based on the etymologies, sarcastic is more aggressive, and sardonic is more an expression of an internal (even self-destructive) sense of bitterness, but I don't know that this controls people's usage in any significant way.
The etymologies themselves are kind of interesting. The root of sarcasm seems to be derived from σαρκαζεῖν: "to rip flesh like dogs, to bite one's lips." (Also "pluck grass with closed lips, as grazing horses do" say Liddell, Scott & Jones, but I'm not sure how that's relevant here, unless it's the basis of a metaphor for sneering. I'll pay closer attention the next time I see a horse grazing and get back to you about that.) Anyway, a vivid image for someone making a biting comment.
Sardonic is weirder. It seems to derive from Greek σαρδάνιος which means "bitter or scornful [laughter]" but even in the ancient world people seem to have been baffled as to why. A folk etymology grew up that it referred a Sardinian plant "Ranunculus Sardoüs, Sardinian crowfoot, called σαρδάνη... which when eaten screwed up the face of the eater" (LSJ). The tyrant OED gives a slightly different version: the plant there is "(L. herba Sardonia or Sardôa), which was said to produce facial convulsions resembling horrible laughter, usually followed by death." About these weeds I know less than nothing, but I would strongly recommend plucking them out if they get mixed in with your chaw; no good can come of them.
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