Books Lying Open
¤ Dark Tower VII, Stephen King
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Weekend commitments.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because the #1 and #3 strikes look too damn similar from behind.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May the percentage of candy in your diet tick up sharply.

eader mail follow up, two amusing news items, and then various recent photos, with captions and discussion and such. I'd blab more, but I've got a lot of work to do this weekend, I've written all the below material already, and since I'm in a writing mood tonight (as you can see with a quick scroll down this page) I want to get on with it.

What's to write? Well, I need to do the Decahedron column for Monday (I'm going to regret setting Monday as my due date on those, I'm sure.) and I'm also planning on a new D2 fanfic short story for Halloween. Not another one in the humorous character series, but one more along the lines of the first four I wrote, back in 1999 and 2000.  I'm just trying to come up with a really good plot, and I've thought of several, but none with a good Halloween tie in. The ones that do have Halloween tie ins have good scenes and ideas, but are lacking characters or conclusions, and while I generally make up 80% of that stuff once I start writing and my creative juices drip out all over the place, I'm trying to get some/most of it thought out in advance, for once.  Chapter Two taught me that much, at least.

In preparation for writing a new Halloween story, and to make sure that I didn't want to write another one in the seven character holiday series, I went back and read over the last couple and the epilogue. They were a lot better than I remembered, and I laughed a few times at jokes I'd forgotten. I was surprised to see that I'd never added the reader feedback to the 5th story (last Halloween) and the Thanksgiving epilogue, so I dug into my email archives and threw up twenty or so representative mails for each story, and put my comments here and there as well.

Reader mails and Flux comments for the Halloween 2003 story and the T-day 2003 Epilogue can be seen by clicking those pretty golden letters.

As for the holiday stories, it seems to me that the epilogue perfectly set the series up to continue.  Read the T-day email and comments if you want to know why. I don't know if I will write another one, but I wouldn't rule an Xmas story out if I still have the desire in December, I have time with all the potential traveling I might do around then, if the D2 site is still online then, etc.

Now on to other things...

¤ After I posted the reader mails on Wednesday, four people mailed in to point out an error/omission in my comments about Harry Potter book 1. Jeroen gets the honor since it was his question in the first place.

Just two randoum coumments oun yor remarks re my previos mail:

1: Why wold it be that ounly soume U's after O's get droupped and outhers dount? (rhetorical question really and a poor attempt at humoUr, but now I'm curious, so I will not rest until I find the answer!)

2: The philosopher stone is called as such because it has always been called the philosophers stone. Rowling didn't invent it, she just used a (mythical) object that alchemists (not sorcerers!/wizards) have been searching for for centuries. I'm not an expert on alchemists but from what I remember the philosopher's stone was supposed to be an essential ingredient for the 2 things that craved alchemists the most; The ability to turn lead into gold, and creating the elixir of life (It's been ages since I read HP1 but didn't that guy that had the philosopher's stone use it for both those things? I remember he definitely had an elixir of life, not so sure about the lead into gold).

As for #1, I'm not a linguistics scholar to give a serious answer, though I'd imagine one could find some information about this sort of thing with the help of a search engine.  American English is one of the most adaptive languages on earth, which probably has a lot to do with it's remarkable popularity world wide. Though much of that is due to the economic and cultural power of the countries that speak English as their native tongue.

But my point with all English, and especially American English, is that it's adaptive and ever-evolving. New words enter into the language constantly, with origins from street slang to business-speak to foreign foods to Internet terms, and along with the new vocabulary existing words are shortened and abbreviated and combined. You'll still find the odd self-appointed grammar police person objecting to modern vulgarities like "okay" and "alright" and "tonite" but for the most part such words are accepted. I don't know dates or origins, but I'd bet that someone could tell you just when modern streamlined spellings of lots of words from Olde English came into popularity, and "colour," "humour," "rumour," and many others lost their "U."

As to why... why not? It does seem pretty arbitrary though... why just drop Us, other than to make Scrabble that much more difficult? Why not start dropping half of every vowel double letter also? Why not start dropping silent letters, or spelling words phonetically? After all, it seems to work well enough for people in Internet chat and most email. I'm not in favor of this, I should point out; I'm merely asking rhetorically.

I also tried the same argument Jeroen is using here, back when we were debating how to spell "Armour" when setting up the D2 items site. I was against the British spelling, and started asking if I should spell other words in the section with extra Us as well.  "Roube" and "Poulearm" and "swourd" and so on.  Being as Elly is English and Gaile wishes she were, my joke didn't go over real well.

As for #2, Jeroen was just the first of 4 people to point this out, and frankly I can't believe I forgot it. That's what I get for adding in one last email at 8am when I had wanted to be well into my 2nd REM cycle by then.  I hadn't heard of the term "philosopher's stone" before the Harry Potter controversy, and I think that since I was in my 20s and had read a ton of fantasy in my lifetime, it's a pretty good indication that most other Americans wouldn't have heard the term either. I don't know if that bespeaks some sort of national ignorance of historical alchemical terms or what, but it's just not a term that's ever in use in conversation or fiction, outside of that one Harry Potter novel.

That being said, I did read it and learn it during the HP1 controversy, remembered it when I saw the rather boring HP1 movie, and then thought of it again when I read HP1 last year. How I could have completely forgotten it as of Wednesday's blog, after at least three discrete life experiences with the term, is beyond me.

That being said, even if a person had heard of the term, I think they might have been confused by it when they got the book, since they'd have thought what I said in the last blog. "Where's the philosopher in the book? I just read about a bunch of sorcerers." Then there's also the whole marketing angle, where most people would rather treat their cold sores with salad dressing than read a book of philosophy, and that, I suspect was the bottom line in why they changed the title of HP1, in book and then in movie form, in the US. Whether "The Philosopher's Stone" is a common enough term in the UK that it worked for the book, or whether they don't have the natural American distaste for a weighty subject like philosophy, or whether the UK book publishers just don't worry about focus group testing their every book title is not a question I can answer, but there was obviously something different between that side and this side of the Atlantic.

¤ The jokes about this one pretty well write themselves, but I can't resist mentioning it, if only in passing. What's Homeland Security doing in this time of constant terrorist warnings? Busting counterfeit Rubik's Cube sellers in Oregon, apparently.

ST. HELENS, Ore. - So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act. So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied. After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.

The government had an excuse, though it's not a very good one.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.

Yes, and I'm sure we can put counterfeit novelty toys of the 80s at the top of that list.  Look! Someone's got a fake Wacky Wall Walker in Ohio!  Scramble the fighter jets!

The store owner herself provides the punchline to this story, saving me the trouble of typing it out myself.

Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox told The Oregonian she is still bewildered by the experience.

"Aren't there any terrorists out there?" she said.

Seriously, what do you suppose it cost us in squandered tax dollars to process the initial complaint, investigate the issue, assign officers to the case, fly them out to Oregon, rent them a car, and pay their salaries as they chased this six-sided wild goose down? And no one, at any point in this procedure, thought to call up the toy company and see if the toy was actually in violation of a copyright or not?  Also, why in the hell are they going to one toy store in the middle of nowhere to pull the items off the shelves? Shouldn't they be interdicting the toys at the distributor level? This can't be the only store in America selling that product.

This whole story gets weirder the more you think about it, and I would chalk it all up to a hoax of the Weekly World News type if it hadn't appeared in the major national media and included a quote from some relevant government agency.

Now that you know what sort of important work our security forces are engaged in, are you feeling safer in the homeland yet? Me too!

It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.

Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

The link above goes to the Nature Magazine coverage, and it's quite extensive. I first saw the news on Yahoo though, and after devouring the fascinating article I forced myself to click the comments link. I say "forced" because the Yahoo comments are absolutely without a doubt the stupidest things I ever read anywhere, on or offline. They must stock plenty of goats and bridges to live beneath, since it's usually just wall to wall trolls.

I can't bring myself to go back and hunt for exact quotes, but I saw several long threads with rabidly anti-evolution people going nuts over this story, and making comments like, "First we came from monkeys. Now we came from hobbits!  When will you liberals accept God's truth!" There are far more misspelled words, as you can imagine, but the essential message is the same. I hardly know how to reply to that sort of thing (not that I post on the Yahoo forums anyway), I mean it's just so profoundly ignorant and ridiculous that I have great difficulty believing someone posted it seriously, rather than just as an outrageous troll effort.  It's like someone arguing against evolution by pointing out that the monkeys in the zoo aren't turning into people overnight. What do you say about that? And does that sort of deliberate idiocy exist in other scientific fields? Are there people out there refusing to accept that magnetism works, and insisting those hunks of metal sticking to the front of their refrigerator do so because God imbued them with mystical powers 6000 years ago?

Seriously though, I do find the question of how these tiny people evolved an intriguing one. They had tools, which look like doll toys in size, and they apparently were about as mentally-advanced as Neanderthals... they were just really small. As the articles discuss, many species that have become isolated in a small area have grown progressively smaller over time as natural selection favors the individuals who consume fewer of their limited resources. (It's not magic, it's just survival; populations that don't evolve in this way tend to die off much sooner, for relatively obvious reasons.)

This hadn't really been seen before in hominids, at least not this clearly, which is why the biologists are so excited over it.

A rare shot of the kids sleeping on the same couch, without fighting. No, this wouldn't have been blog-post-worthy it not for the pretty design on the slip cover Malaya picked out. It also looks like Jinx has caught up in size, but no, she's still about 2/3 the size of Dusty; she just has very long fur and sleeps spread out, while he curls up. This is apparently as big as Jinx is getting, or so said the vet in her last visit a few weeks ago. She may well get wider, but she's not getting any longer or taller.

 

A familiar ritual around here, when we return from the Laundromat, fold up and hang up our two piled baskets of clean clothing, and the cats leap onto the bed to "help" in the process. By now they must have some inkling of what's coming, since it happens every other week or so, but if there's a cat on the bed and we have completely emptied one or both of the clothes hampers... it's kitty jail time. Dusty was the inmate this time, and as you can see from his seated posture, he wasn't real concerned. Eventually they get tired of being caged and simply walk off the edge of the bed, leaping down once they've got room.

 

Dusty doing his "All your chair belong to me." routine. If he's not asleep, I really can't get up without turning around to find him settling down into my butt-warmed office furniture.  He vacates it very gracelessly too; usually with much whining and sometimes even a parting hiss as I push him off. Jinx likes to sleep in my chair also, but she's such a lazy whore kitty that Malaya or me can pick her up by the four feet, carry her dangling over to the couch or purple chair, and deposit her there, and 98% of the time she'll immediately settle down and resume sleeping as though she was never interrupted by an undignified carry across the living room.

 

He wasn't posing or anything; just sitting on the edge of the never-used kitchen table and looking bright eyed. I took the photo Wednesday night, just after Malaya and I came back inside from taking a look at the lunar eclipse. I'd taken the camera out with me to point it at the moon, but we didn't have a good view with trees mostly in the way, and it occurred to me that there's really not much point in taking a photo of a lunar eclipse anyway, since all we were seeing was a moon with an orange-brown tinge. Something I could recreate in 30 seconds with the aid of Photoshop, no matter what the moon color was to begin with.

Now if I'd been out in a good spot with a good vantage point and a really good telescope/camera, I could have taken a series of pics of the moon as it was obscured by the earth... not that the same "easily reproduced with Photoshop" logic wouldn't apply then as well. Plus it was cold and we wanted to come inside and eat microwave kettle corn anyway, so moon photographs were shelved for 20 or 30 years, until the next eclipse comes around.

Fortunately, Dusty was posing on the edge of the table when I came back inside, and with camera in hand I snapped a few off at him, until he closed his eyes from the flash, and thus became even cuter.  Which brings this little photo caption full circle.