Dear America, Thank you. Given the limited choices, the narrow range of political possibilities, and all that, I figure you done pretty good. Nobody’s ideal, but in a choice between jumping deeper into a pit or, well, a few positive changes, I figure you chose the latter. And at the very least, you kept Alzheimer’s McCain out, and Prayin’ Palin and the Bibliomaniacs from getting a heart attack away from the Presidency. Your countrymen abroad, as well as my Korean students, seem overall quite pleased. Or relieved. Or both. Actually, so does much of the planet. So… now what?
Category: PERSONAL
Not American? Vote Anyway. (Virtually.)
Regular commenter Val passed on this cool online experiment. It’s a site where non-Americans could vote for whomever they’d vote for if they were American today. I meant to post this earlier, but I forgot, and now the voting is ended. The results, though, are interesting in their overwhelming majority-ness. Hmm. One wonders whether conservativism in any government is bound to appeal only to people within that nation, while the liberal government (for a definition of “liberal” relative to the given state, that is) in a given nation is likelier to have appeal internationally? (For example, many Westerners I know …
Today is Full of Yaaaaaaar…
… in a good way. Not just because there’s buzz about Tesseracts Twelve, including a nice review of my story in it over in Locus (see here, at the bottom of the post), but also because I found out another of my Clarion West stories, “The Country of the Young,” is coming out in Interzone this month! I’ll be putting up a post soon about “The Country of the Young.” If you’re in Britain, feel free to hit the shops (in a couple of weeks, as it’s not out quite yet). Otherwise, there’s always an eMagazine edition (isn’t there?) at …
Busy, So Raftman
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:
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, …