Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Conversation carried on at insufficient dialogue.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because it's fun to hit things that can't be hurt or hit back.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your ice cream be festooned with insufficient crunchy things.

arious news stuff up here, and then some fiction stuff below. Friday's blog will include more stuff of a personal angle, with additional discussion of Kali class, our new punching bag, and our new drill, assuming we have a new drill, which I sincerely hope we do since we need one in order to make proper use of our new 60lbs punching bag.

Breaker Boys 1910

What Charles Dickens did with words for the underage toilers of London, Lewis Hine did with photographs for the youthful laborers in the United States. In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee was already campaigning to put the nation’s two million young workers back in school when the group hired Hine. The Wisconsin native traveled to half the states, capturing images of children working in mines, mills and on the streets. Here he has photographed “breaker boys,” whose job was to separate coal from slate, in South Pittston, Pa. Once again, pictures swayed the public in a way cold statistics had not, and the country enacted laws banning child labor.

Elsewhere on the Digital Journalist site While looking around the site, I found their Best Shots of the Olympics collection to be a fun view as well, if a lot less visually powerful.

¤ The following link is not at all safe for work, but it cracked me up. I saw it linked from a blog that said it was "Photos of Kill Bill 3?" so of course I clicked to see what the joke was.  It made me laugh, and they didn't even mention the bonus Matrix photos!

One of my favorite punchlines, whenever Malaya and me see something ridiculous but filled with women in anything approaching skimpy clothing is, "The saddest part is that you just know some guy somewhere is jerking off to this right now."  I must have said that 10 times during the Olympics when they showed the prepubescent female gymnastics competition, as well as sports with actual women in them, such as diving and sand volleyball.  I'm sure you can throw male gymnastics in there as well; after all, it's not like being gay makes men any less pathetic in their Pavlovian sexual desires.

Even if I'd never made that joke before in my entire life, I'm pretty sure I would have thought of it while viewing the Kill Bill/Matrix nude photo shoot above.  In fact I wish I could have seen this link from some geek-heavy fanboi type site, like AICN, just so I could have read the one-handed comments from hysterical 14 y/o's with half a dozen Matrix and Kill Bill posters on their walls.

¤ Check out this cool article about the Paris Underground. I'm not talking about the subway system, I'm talking about the thousands of ancient caves, caverns, and other weird structures below the surface that urban explorers make their own and that police only occasionally stumble over.

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: "Building site, No access." Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said. Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

I love the concept of these old quarries all still down there, hidden away and unknown to 99.9% of the people on the surface.  But this case in particular makes me happy, for the way the people there were so slick. The cops find it, and by the time they get their shit in gear to return with utility guys to track down the power source, the people who built it have come back, cleaned out every trace of themselves, and vanished again.

Check out the Urban Explorers site for tons more info on this sort of thing, though they're located in the US, so it's mostly abandoned warehouses and such. Not so many ancient tunnels and crypts and quarries and such to examine beneath the far less ancient US cities, though there's quite a bit of cool stuff out there, for people who know where to look.

As I told him in my reply, his mail made me laugh because... there are 3 feet in a yard, and a yard = a meter (mostly, yard is a bit shorter). I didn't know if he said "foot" instead of "yard" as a typo/brain fart, or if he was providing a perfect example of why I should just go ahead and use the metric system in my novel, and to hell with the anachronism problem.

Fortunately, he replied a day later and said that yes, it was a typo, and yes, he knew that a yard = a meter.

The larger issue though, remains the same. What sort of measurement should be used in a fantasy novel? I think that in general, the best bet is to not use any units at all, especially not any that differ from country to country.  My story isn't really set on earth, at least not our version of earth, but at the same time it is. So there are 24 hours in a day, 7 days a in week, 365 days in a year, one moon that takes about 28 days to revolve around the earth (not that the common person in my story knows anything about the heliocentric model of the universe, of course), etc. I'm not going to dick with any of those basic things, and I'm also not making the humans hugely different in size. There will be more extremes, groups of people who fall further outside the bell curve of size that we see on earth today, but I'm not making them all 1 meter tall, or 3 meters tall or anything confusingly off-scale like that.

And when it comes to other measurements, I try to be non-specific. I say something is a finger's width, or a hand's length, or ankle-deep, or other terms like that. Things everyone can understand and that translate universally. And I try to be accurate on time, without making it seem like everyone is wearing a watch. (Since machinery doesn't exist on that level.) So if they run for a while and something happens, it'll take place "a quarter hour" later, rather than "15 minutes."

Even with that though, I've still got to use actual measurements in terms of feet and inches and yards and such from time to time, or it just seems silly. If someone sees a 100 foot cliff they're not going to think, "That's as tall as  20 short men standing exactly on top of each other's heads!" Nobody talks or thinks like that.  But at the same time, lots of people (most of them outside of the US) don't know how the hell long a "foot" is, in that context.  Oddly enough, I often use "stride" as a measurement of length, like if the characters are crossing a dangerous space, Vena might think she'll need 10 strides to get across the trouble spot, but those go along with the "hand's length/width" type measurements.

As it is, I've still got lots of "X was perhaps fifty feet away" mentions, and I'm not real pleased with them. And now that I think about it, I might just convert everything to strides, and define them at some point as "the distance an average man could move in a long step" and put that into the glossary. Then everyone reading could assume it was a yard, or a meter, depending on their culture, and we'd all get on with our lives.

The other alternative is to make up my own measurement system and use that throughout the novel. The problem there is I'd be requiring readers to memorize it for any of the distances to make sense, and I know damn well most people aren't going to pour through the glossary and commit that sort of thing to memory. I certainly don't when I read a novel.

Robert Jordan did that in his Wheel of Time series, and as even the fan sites can't ignore, it's confusing and not adhered to strictly:

I've read the whole WoT series twice at this point (and talked about it at length) and I don't recall ever having any clear idea how far apart things are. Sometimes they travel for weeks, other times for days, and sometimes on foot and other times on horses. Basically Jordan is doing what most authors do, and he's cheating when he needs to in order to make things dramatic and interesting, with far less attention paid to concrete numbers of exact distances and mile markers on maps.

I also never really knew how much time was passing between events in the stories, and when I eventually read in one of the glossaries that a week had 10 days in it, I was annoyed by that arbitrary recalibration.  Here's another Jordan fansite quote that I google'd up.

Lord of Chaos is the 6th book in the series, and until then Jordan had never actually spelled out the measurement system for time. He'd been using terms like "week" all along, and seasons and years had passed, but suddenly, after 6 books, he decides that a week should have 10 days, just to be different. But then, as this quote points out, he obviously hadn't thought of that all along, since in book 2 he was going with the basic 7 day week.

I don't bring this up to pick on Jordan (I do plenty of that elsewhere on this site.) but because it illustrates the perils of an author making up his own measurement system. I think it's a bad idea since 1) it's unnecessarily complicated for the reader, and 2) it's unnecessarily complicated for the writer, since it's only a matter of time until he makes errors with it himself.