Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Camel army"
¤ Usage: Right right... left left... right right left left... camel army!
¤ Origin: While watching a nature program one night the camera was turned on a flock of ambling camels, a sight that cracked Malaya up due to their right-right then left-left walking style.  We started verbally riffing on it, and from somewhere I came up with the above marching theme, to the tune of "1-2, 3-4, 1-2-3-4, go army!"
¤ Notes: Since the initial invention of this months ago, we've used it in numerous occasions that have nothing at all to do with dromedaries. Our favorite current use is to walk around the house and scare the cats; I stand directly behind Malaya with my hands around her waist and we walk in step, left-left then right-right, and relentlessly pursue the cats until they get freaked out and leap behind the couch or run under the kitchen table where we can't get at them. -- October 13, 2004

¤ Ever wonder why the local weather forecast seems to feature much more impressive weather than you actually see out your window? There may be a partial explanation in this months' Popular Science magazine, in an amusing feature about the Worst Jobs in Science. Television Meteorologist is one of the jobs profiled, and about it they say:

Not all television meteorologists are scientists. Many are journalists making a break for the big seat. And, contends Lee Grenci, a meteorology instructor at Penn State University, they’re not properly trained in the complexities of weather forecasting. Weather is naturally chaotic; forecasting precise snowfall three days out, Grenci says, is “disinformation.”

Alas, those meteorologists who actually know better aren’t allowed to exercise scientific caution. “Weather forecasting in this country is dictated by news directors,” Grenci explains. If a competing station is predicting calamity, viewers are going to switch, so it’s time to dire up your own forecast to keep them. A couple of Grenci’s former students who have attempted to be more responsible about their forecasts have been threatened with sacking. “Weather forecasting,” he sighs, “has become a fast-food science.”

This precipitation = ratings idea may be true, but if we're going to follow Occam's Razor, we'll just say that the weather people are always going to err to the side of disaster. If they predict sunshine and pleasant temperatures and people plan outings that get rained out, those people are pissed. While on the other hand, if the forecast is for rain and cold and it's less rainy and less cold, people are happy to have nicer weather and don't hold it against the weatherman.

Incidentally, TV meteorologist is far from the most interesting write- up in that article. Check out the job description for a worm parasitologist, tick dragger, or root sorter, for the sake of the argument.

 

 

¤ I can see this device being both very popular, and very controversial.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A lot of people love television but apparently some people have had enough of it, too. A new keychain gadget that lets people turn off most TVs — anywhere from airports to restaurants — is selling at a faster clip than it would take most people to surf the channels on their boob tubes.

"I thought there would just be a trickle, but we are swamped," the inventor, Mitch Altman of San Francisco, said Monday in an interview. "I didn't know there were so many people who were into turning TV off."

Hundreds of orders for Altman's $14.99 TV-B-Gone gadget poured in Monday after the tiny remote control was announced in Wired magazine and other online media outlets. At times, the unexpected attention overloaded and crashed the Web site of his company, Cornfield Electronics.

The keychain fob works like a universal remote control but one that only turns TVs on or off. With a zap of a button, the gizmo goes through a string of about 200 infrared codes that controls the power of about 1,000 television models. Altman said the majority of TVs should react within 17 seconds, though it takes a little more than a minute for the gizmo to emit all the trigger codes.

My first thought when I saw this headline was "Airport!" and of course that's mentioned in the first paragraph. The past few times I've flown anywhere, it's been virtually impossible to find a quiet place near the departure gates. Every single seating area has a TV bolted to the roof that's blaring CNN or some other news network; a TV that no one is watching, and that is so loud I couldn't even drown it out with headphones so I could read in peace.  I'm not even sure if turning them off would help though; the audio might be broadcast through speakers in the walls, since it seems to inescapably surround the entire gate area in every airport these days.

My ideal would probably be one that had power and mute buttons; I can pretty easily ignore the sight of a TV by not looking at it, but it's really hard to ignore the insipid music and sounds of most TV, and especially most commercials.

But while I would love this thing, either in airports or most anywhere else, I can envision other people being very annoyed if the TV were turned off (imagine pranksters turning off the sets in a sports bar just as the crucial play is coming up?), and I can definitely see TV manufacturers taking steps to stop it by using different frequencies for the power button, or putting some sort of encoding on their particular remotes. And how about the businesses who stick those TVs up everywhere? They're financing them with ad revenue, and if the set is off... no ads.

We haven't heard the end of this device, I wager.

 

 

¤ Just in case you thought only nerdy white people were so into Anime that they attended comic book conventions dressed up in cheap-looking homemade costumes... here's a whole page of photos from the Comike 2004 convention, in Tokyo Japan, courtesy of MasaMania.com.  I was going to list my favorite outfit but I really can't choose. They're all horrible or great, depending on how you look at it.

They also prove that it's not ethnicity that makes the Americans look so silly when they try to cosplay. No one who isn't actually a carton looks good in an orange or lime green or aqua wig, faux-chrome breastplate, and white stockings. Let this be a warning to any movie studios who are trying to make live action anime movies. Unless you've got the budget for LotR-esque costume design expertise and you can work in some special effects to make their hair flow and their capes billow, it's going to look very silly.

Of course there are several live action anime movies being made right now, most notably a screen version of Aeon Flux starring Charlize Theron.

I've yet to see any photos of Charlize in her Aeon Flux outfit, but since Aeon is basically a hot brunette in sexy black leather bondage gear, as seen to the right, the success or failure of Charlize and the costume designers won't tell us much, since it's not a real anime-style outfit. Still, if some random amateur fan can pull off the look this well, Charlize should be pretty easy on the eyes.

 It will be weird to see human actors playing the roles in Aeon Flux though, since the actual cartoon is very stylized with super long arms and legs and wasp waists and bony bodies. Real people won't look like that, and they'd be freakish if they did. 

ook reviews? What book reviews?  Today it's reader mail, since I've got several interesting recent ones, I haven't posted any for a while, it's late, and I'm lazy.

Here's Hans, with a few comments on the novel excerpt I posted a few days ago:

I very much enjoyed the bit of writing, even though it won't be in the final version. I have a few comments on it though. One, the wording. For the most part i was quite pleased with it; however isn't it a bit, shall we say, unprofessional to use the term "pissed" in the line "but mostly she was pissed at Quinoss for making her run all that way without offering her any help... "? it is used in many novels, especially the Tom Clancy type of modern thrillers/more military/informal sort of narrative style books, but in fantasy it sounds a little... hmm, off. I'm not sure how to put it o_O then again i don't know how the narration is for the whole thing, so..

grammar-wise i found one or two hitches, at least i think they are (i'm a horrible grammar person myself many times, so my apologies if I'm totally pulling this out of my ass or something). isn't it not "proper" to start a sentence with "also," in the line "Also, her feet were threatening to slide out of the too-large boots the whole time.

These things an editor would probably get so it's no real big deal, but I generally tend to be pretty picky about that despite being rather poor at it :3

On the whole though I'm very pleased with it and have full confidence in your ability to publish it. It's just as good as, if not better, than many of the fantasy/sci fi type novels I read, if a bit overlong like you mentioned. I personally like it, but unfortunately for marketing purposes and such it probably wouldn't be a very good thing. 

Yeah, the "pissed" stood out to me in a reread as well, and that term isn't going to show up in the novel anywhere in final form. I would have purged it from the excerpt as well, if I hadn't been slapping it online in mostly rough draft form just to have something to fill out the blog that day.

In general, I'm really having to do a lot of editing and proofing on the fantasy novel, and I'm not real happy about that. I'm not sure why; if my rough draft writing skills have gone to shit or I'm just much more demanding of my work than I used to be, but I've completely rewritten all of chapter one and two once each, chapter two needs another huge purging rewrite, and my initial version of the first half of chapter three (as far as I got months ago, before I went back and redid chapter 2) was reduced to about 10 bullet points and completely rewritten from scratch when I got back to it, a few weeks ago.  And I'm sure that I'll be making numerous changes to the new version of chapter 3 when I double back to it in a few months, once I've written up through chapter 5 or 6. (They are long chapters; 50-100k words, and the planned 12 or so chapters will be published as probably a novel and a sequel, so I'm not going as slowly as it might sound.)

The thing that worries me is that that changes aren't just a few words here or there. I reread them 2 or 4 or 6 months after writing them, and I literally rewrite it. Like I'll read two pages, and then type 1.5-2.5 pages to completely replace all that came before. I'll preserve most of the meaning, and a few good phrases or bits of dialogue, but the original writing almost never seems adequate to me anymore, as I want to improve upon the rhythm of the language, vary my word choice more, tighten things up, etc.

I was just reading over some of my first novel, Miss Pretty Lies, last night, and I can't see keeping a single sentence intact, if I rewrite it.  Literally, I would just reduce the chapters to bullet outline points, save a few chunks that I thought had a good plot element, but completely rewrite it from scratch. And it's a 230k word novel. (Though I think it should be shorter; there's not enough plot now to sustain it if I removed most of the gratuitous sex and violence and action.)

[Of course I never would have considered doing anything with MPL but keeping it around as a painful memory of my first completed novel (I wrote it in 1995ish.) if not for Malaya wanting to read it and liking it enough to keep poking me about redoing it some day. Which just goes to illustrate the "there's no accounting for taste" point I'll be making after the next email.]

I only bring MPL up since while most of the last chapter is rough, (I was getting very sick of it and had lost faith in its marketability when I finally soldiered on to the ending.) the rest of it was polished. At least as well as I could polish a decade or so ago. And that depresses me, since I thought I was a pretty good writer then. Not great, certainly not at novel structure and pace and flow, but I thought my use of prose was at least acceptable; and I can hardly read it now, and can not edit it without making massive, massive changes.  And I will some day, but not while I'm in the middle of the fantasy novel.

I'll also make massive changes to the plot and characters of MPL, since it needs a stronger narrative thread and theme, lots of physical details are unclear, and I don't play up the strengths that it has very well either. And anyway, I wouldn't be able to help myself on that front, since just straight rewriting a mediocre novel into an acceptable one would be very boring if I couldn't add a bunch of cool stuff to it. That's why I'm no good as an editor; I have to make a ton of changes or none at all, since I can't dabble and slightly improve something I think is basically crap.

Donnie commented on the excerpt as well:

I just want to mention one thing regarding the excerpt (though scrapped) from your working novel. That thing is that you are using a lot of contemporary terms, such as 'pissed' (and there were a couple of other instances of note when I read it, which I unfortunately never wrote down), in that rough draft of it. I believe that the mention of your character, Vena, being a whore/wearing a whore's clothing was another of those instances. It seems like you are trying to stay away from anything that is contemporary, which is very respectable, and also very difficult.

Far be it from me to try to criticize your writing, in fact I loved the little excerpt that you made available to all of us (your adoring fans). The thing is that you seem to be trying to make your world, the world in the excerpts at least, 500 years behind now. While the word 'whore' might have been in the lexicon at that time, I really doubt that the word 'pissed' would have been. Yet, you actually did say that the particular portion was a rough draft, and was later scrapped, so I guess I am barking at an invisible cat in that respect.

I only mention that because you always say that negative feedback is the only thing that can make you better.

Yes, "pissed" was obviously out of character, or at least out of the time/mood of the story. Donnie changed his thought on "whore" after I replied to him and pointed out that it's a pretty ancient word. Biblical even, but that's the interesting thing about language. A word that sounds odd or off or jarring or anachronistic to one person might be perfect to another person. This isn't really about Donnie's comment, but it reminds me that there really is no telling what people will find funny, or clever, or wrong, or whatever, if you survey enough people.

The most feedback I've ever seen to my own work (thus far) was from the D2 columns, back in late 2002/early 2003. I'd get about 150 mails per column, with all sorts of differing opinions, and while I could usually get a rough consensus on things, (most people agreed with most of my points) there were always enough outlying opinions to make reading the emails interesting. Every time I'd get people who had inexplicably strong reactions (good and bad) to parts of the column that not a single other person even noticed, and I often thought how cool it would be to devote time to interviewing them to try to figure out why they were set off by that one thing that no one else even noticed.  Maybe some day when I'm rich and successful and all of that I'll have assistants who can do that sort of thing for me, and get into discussions with readers who took radically different views of the same thing. Don't hold your breath, though.

Also, per the start of Donnie's 2nd paragraph, I want everyone to criticize my writing, especially the fiction. That's largely why I post it on the Internet, after all; so people will see it, and so people will comment on it, pro or con.  It's no accident that I always posted about 95% of the negative mails on my D2 columns, and maybe 5% of the positive ones. I find disagreement more interesting, and in the case of my fiction I'm trying to improve it, and I know what I want to change, but I don't know what the fans/readers think or like or dislike. And even when it's a minor thing like a few pages that were deleted from a novel I'm working on, specific feedback is always of use to me.  It really can't be too nitpicky either, though I'm human enough to want some "hamburger" style constructive criticism.

To "hamburger" is to layer the good and bad comments, so your whole email isn't a long list of stuff that you think sucks, but a list that has some good and some bad. That's advice for life as well as critical commentary on Fluxy's writing, of course. People shut down and become defensive if you just give them shit, which is why educators (who aren't Marine drill instructors) know it's important to find good things to mix in with the criticisms.  Plus when the criticism is largely anonymous, or at least faceless over the Internet, most people will get defensive and feel that they're being attacked if you don't ease into the "you could do this better" portion of your email.

It occurs to me that if I were truly gifted at what I speak, I would now give you all some compliments to go with the pointedly critical advice I just shared. Which is why I'm not much of a teacher, really.

On another subject, here's Caaroid, commenting on my lamentation of my body's inability to do any sort of long distance running.

I believe the trick is, that there is no such "attribute" to a human as "strength". Also, being in "good shape" is useless. Being in bad shape is easy to define, but it has many opposites.

Look at the body structure of a weightlifter. Compare that to a long-distance runner. See what I mean? One is good for lifting weights (surprise, surprise), while the other needs muscles that propel him/her for long distances. Add to the mix the body of a martial artist (hey, let's take Bruce Lee, his body is well-known enough), and it is apparent that it's another totally different shape. (By the by, this is one of the reasons that most martial artists tend to use weights in a different manner than most people who go to the gym. Larger series of exercises at higher speeds with smaller weights tend to create more dense and faster muscles -- they are more usable in an intense fight, but they don't show, so the workout seems less effective.)

How you train defines what you become; and not only in case of sumo wrestlers. ;)

Which is true, but as I told him in my reply, I'm not looking to run 2 hour marathons like those 100 pound/1% body fat Kenyans do. I just want to run a good 5 or 6 miles without needing to stop and walk, and I can't understand why it's so hard for me to get up to even 3 miles at this point, or why I can run a fast mile, walk twenty steps, and run another fast mile, but can't just run two relatively-fast miles. It's like this weirdly machine-like physical mechanism that forces me to stop and reboot before continuing. 

Also, plenty of muscular guys and girls run long distances and marathons. They can't do it in record pace, but they can turn in 3 hour 26 mile runs and not kill themselves in the process. I don't want to join them, but I would like to get somewhere near 1/4 of their distance and time.

The rainy winter season has begun here, with two substantial downpours in the past week, and since mud ruins my normal steep dirt hill workout course, I might be forced to join the gym pretty soon. I'll do weight lifting there, but also cardio on something, whether treadmill or elliptical or Stairmaster, and perhaps the more even pace of a gym machine will help train my body for sustained medium exertion, rather than going in faster, shorter bursts as I do now?

My goal isn't to run X distance in X time, though I would like to be able to run up the whole .5 mile hill I hike on now. (I can't even imagine anyone doing that now; I run maybe 40% of it, and there are two crippling-steep stretches that my feet all but slide out from under me while ascending.) But while I don't have some sort of 10k goal, I wouldn't mind being able to do it nonstop either, someday.

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