I’m busy as all get-out, and while I’ve fallen out of the habit of sharing the interesting stuff I run across online — there’s just so much of it! — I do want to share this, which I found at Tor.com… The Raftman, by Keith Bearden:
Category: GENERAL
What Todd and Peanut Have in Common
I changed schools a lot in elementary school, mostly just because my family moved around a lot. When we arrived in Prince Albert, a town in Northern Saskatchewan, I ended up at this small elementary school where one of my classmates was a kid named Todd. Now, this was in the fourth grade, when secondary sexual characteristics aren’t really, er, apparent yet. Todd had a somewhat girlish face, but was built big, and had short-ish (but not quite short) curly hair. And I guess it was for this reason that Todd was often ridiculed by classmates as a “girl.” I …
If You’ve Emailed Me…
… or left a comment, or tried to call and not gotten a response: Sorry, but we’ve been moving house! This means that right now is my brief and perhaps my last internet connection for the next day or two. The campus network’s security system is allergic to Linux, or maybe to having two computers hook up on a shared wireless account, I’m not sure which (or maybe it’s both), so while I’m going to set up the wireless router upstairs, it may not work for me until Monday when the befuddled internet guys get called in to fix it …
Oriental Medical Pseudoscience Medicine, Sympathetic Magic, and the Consumption of… What?
I mentioned recently that Lime and I are thinking about picking up a second cat to give Peanut/Buffy/Undecided a playmate. She’s been looking at the adopt-a-cat webpages online, and was explaining to me the procedure in Korea for adopting cats. Not an official procedure, mind, just a common one. It goes like this: you adopt the cat. You pay a flat fee of, say, the equivalent of $20, or $30, or even $50. (Sometimes more.) Then the person who gave you the cat will come a few months later and check out how the cat is doing, as well as …
The Lone Ranger, and Tonto
So yesterday I was discussing Thomas King’s “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World” (from King’s collection One Good Story, That One), which is, well, sort of SF. “Sort of” because it’s not taking itself seriously as SF, but plays with SF tropes about aliens and spaceships. (Which, you know, is better than the kind of thing you see a lot of “mainstream” authors do — writing SF, and claiming it isn’t, because it’s not silly or dumb, or whatever. Yes, Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you. Come over here and say …
Props to Carl Sagan
(I mean, for something more than being the guy who made my high school physics class interesting. We watched some video and I was like, “Hey, this is that The Dragons of Eden guy!” Or for being a great science-popularizer.) I’m reading the novel he wrote, Contact, right now, and despite the obvious criticisms many have made — such as that the novel is the postmodern response to the Femi Paradox: if there are no aliens, mankind shall have to invent them — there are a few things that are pretty striking about the first third (or so) of the …
What’s the Problem?
UPDATE (2:30pm): I still haven’t seen the top man in the office, but some other high-level guy I’d seen before showed up with one of the below-mentioned Tweedles today, and said that, yeah, it’d really be better if we moved upstairs, as the place we’re now in is about to be torn apart to figure out what the hell is causing the recurrent tank leak above my closet. The good news? They’re going to be sending some guys over to “help” move the stuff upstairs. The bad news? Moving is a pain in the ass, we’ll have one fewer room, …
No Respect, I Tell Ya
So I’m researching (actually, flipping through a book and giggling at, though also trying to find good examples of) old hipster slang — that is, white hipster slang — and what, pray tell, did I find? Goon from Saskatoon: An idiot, a square. No respect, I tell ya. We get no respect. Then again, it’s kind of true, and was probably even more true in the 1930s. Another one I got a kick out of was Hot pillow joint, which is, of course, a hotel that rents out rooms by the hour. Just the kind of thing I can actually …
Third Time’s When I Flip Out
Yup. My closet started dripping again on Friday, and as usual with sudden housing emergencies, this was a national holiday. The lowest-level guys on campus, who can’t do anything but stop the immediate problem, showed up and, well, sort of fixed it. If “fixed” means that it stopped dripping but could start again at any time, leaving me with a ton of washing to do, and a closet I cannot use, and who knows how much actual repair to be done because, you know, a pretty wallpaper job? It doesn’t stop a faulty water tank from drenching your clothes. Or, …
At the Conference (Besides Me)
This recent post by Ben Goldsmith, one of the people I met at the AKS Conference I mentioned here, reminded me that I didn’t discuss any of the talks I saw by other people — mostly, I like to think, because I was so overwhelmingly relieved by the fact my own talk was not a disaster. (According to Ben’s post, absolutely not, and he was very kindly encouraging in person too, as was everyone else.) Here’s what I saw others talk about: on the first day, I saw a couple of interesting talks in the morning. One by Paul Bradley …