fter slacking off on the blog over the weekend, I was in a blogging mood several times Monday and Tuesday, and thus today's blog is a long one. Lots of news, some musical discussion, and more.  After this outpouring, you can probably expect about five paragraphs total on Friday.

Just to touch briefly on other some real life stuff before the book news, music news, police brutality news, and religious news, my work on my novel is going very well. I did a lot over the weekend, and I've turned out 4-5000 words per day the past few days. Better yet, I'm managing to stay on topic and on target with the content, rather than adding tons of stuff that I'd just have to edit down for length later on anyway.

In bad news, I'm still sick. Not very sick, and I went to Kali Tuesday night and felt pretty okay, but I have a regular cough, and can't seem to hack up quite all of the phlegm that so bedevils my upper respiratory tract. I almost get it each night, finally, and then sleep and wake up with much coughing and hacking and it starts all over again. I guess this is better than I felt last week, when the cough was dry and my throat was itchy, since I felt very run down and lacking in energy then, but it's been like 9 days since I first started feeling sick, and that's no fun. Malaya had it for almost 3 weeks before passing it to me at the end of the run, so whatever virus this is, you don't want it.

As for Tuesday's Kali, it was pretty cool. Malaya didn't go, but we still had 8 people, one of whom was brand new to Kali. He'd done a couple of years of Muay Thai boxing though, and was a lot of fun to watch since he moved just like the guys you see in movies. It's hard to explain the body language, but Muay Thai is a very upright, square-shouldered style. They punch from the shoulder with almost no hip turn, and the kicks are mostly knees and side kicks using the shin. Get Ong Bak on DVD if you get a chance (Is that even out yet? I want to see it again.), since it's pretty similar. That's a purer version of Muay Thai though, and is much more fluid than the kick boxer/sport-martial art style the guy had Tuesday night.

He was good at what he did though, and looked challenging to spar open hand with. Very like a boxer; straight ahead, circling but never changing his direction to hit sideways or anything like that, and very stiff. He couldn't dodge anything, but he hit pretty well. I didn't get a chance to go against him, probably since I had to stop moving to hack and sound like I was dying every few minutes and Gura didn't want me diseasing him his first day. Several other students did though, and it was entertaining to watch.

The Gura and the two most-experienced Kali guys owned him, since our style blends and flows so much that they had no trouble getting in past his stiff punches and landing hits and kicks in close. One other guy who is about at my level had a much harder time though, since he couldn't flow in and out and get inside the guy's fast fists. I don't know how I would have fared, since while I move better than he does, he's done more sparring than me, and while it's very easy to watch other people spar and see the openings and opportunities, it's a lot different when you're the one doing it and trying to react to the fists coming at your face. Hopefully I'll get a chance if he comes back again, before he does enough Kali to start changing his movement and becomes flowing like the rest of us.

The cool thing about Kali is that it's so adaptive though, so while he'll get more movement and flow and such, he'll still keep some of his Muay Thai skills and styles, and find ways to work them into his Kali. Everyone has a slightly different style of Kali, especially people who have done other forms, since they always retain and modify some of their old stuff. On the other hand, lots of students never learn to move as fluidly as Kali can demand, since they trained in some other form first and can't completely let it go, no matter how they try.

Two book mentions. Not my book, for a change.

Reading last week's Entertainment Weekly, I was shocked by a number. The DaVinci Code was back in the #1 best seller slot, where it's been for most of the past two years. Literally, like 106 weeks, and you don't need me to tell you how much hype it's received. It's sold something like 10.4 million copies, according to the EW list. Impressive, right? Elsewhere in the magazine they had a quick mention of the upcoming Harry Potter book, and said that the first press run was 10.2 million books.

Think about that. The DaVinci Code, inarguably the biggest (in terms of media coverage) book of the last two years, probably of the century, a book that's been constantly in the news, a book that was the #1 best seller for over 18 straight months... and Harry Potter 6 is going to outsell it in a month.

Christ, I've got to write a damn kid's fantasy series with magic and heroes. I'll put in just enough intelligent stuff to interest adults, the good guys will always win after some fierce struggle against boo-worthy bad guys, and there won't be so much fantasy that you have to be an actual fantasy fan to get interested in it. Hell, it worked for Star Wars and Harry Potter, despite the somewhat limited talents of their actual creators. Why not me?

In other book news, I skimmed through a favorite book of mine yesterday, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger. I've discussed the author and the book before, and it's like 200 pages so you can just go read it in a couple of hours if you're curious, so I'm not going to prattle on and on. What I found interesting was that with all the writing and reading I've been doing lately, I'm in a very editing mood. So I'm reading and enjoying the very simple story with rich characters and the archetypal coming-of-age struggle, and at the same time I'm picking apart McCaffrey's prose. The word choice, the sentence and paragraph structure, the adjective and synonym use, etc. And frankly, it was quite bad. She's a great writer when it comes to telling a story, and she writes love and action very well, but technically she's a hack.

I saw poor wording in at least every other paragraph, dangling participles, fragmentary sentences, and the flow of the language was frequently very jarring too. She'd throw in 5 or 6 short, subject/verb sentences, and then wrap up the paragraph with a bloated, multi-comma sentence that you had to actually read 2 or 3 times to make sense of. It wasn't awful, and I could easily follow her meaning, but as I read it I found myself constantly rearranging the words to make the sentences flow more smoothly, to remove excess verbiage, to make a point clearer, to make the dialogue more like a human would actually speak, etc. 

What was surprising to me was that I'd never really noticed it before, despite reading the book at least half a dozen times over the past 20 years, and being a picky son of a bitch for at least 2/3 of that time.  The real question then, is whether improving her work with more editing would make any real difference? I really enjoy that book, and the first 6 or 8 novels in her Dragonriders of Pern series, (they may not jump the shark after that point, but they're definitely on the take off ramp by book 10) and while I've never thought McCaffrey was any good technically as a writer, I've always thought she was a very good storyteller. I still think that, at least as long as she had good stories to tell (hence Dragonriders jumping the shark several books ago), but given that I'd never paid any attention to the lacking prose in Dragonsinger, despite reading it numerous times, how can I expect anyone else to? After all, I'm far pickier about that sort of thing than probably 99% of the other fantasy readers out there.

Readers obviously respond most strongly to quality stories (Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code are good examples of great stories by mediocre writers.), with good characters and adventure and all of that, and while the actual writing quality is far down the list of importance, I think readers do notice it, on some level. Kids who write "r u gud?" type text messages probably don't care a bit and want things even more simplified, but adults and intelligent teens can enjoy a story, and have their enjoyment boosted by quality writing. At least I sure hope so, or I'm going to really rue the huge amount of time I spend on my fiction, getting the wording and phrasing just right.

If I just went stream of consciousness and simplified and didn't bother with varying word choice and such, I could churn it out at least twice as fast, and it would hardly need any editing at all. It wouldn't even suck, it just wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it could be, and that would make me unhappy. Should I spend more time on plot and characters and cool stuff happening and less on word arrangement? Possibly, but I'd prefer to do both, even if it slows the process down quite a bit. And yes, it's easier to be pure of integrity when I don't have a book contract or a deadline staring me down.

(And yes, I have 379 songs on my current play list. Yes, that's 29 hours and 8 seconds of music. Yes, I keep adding albums stuff I want to hear from my hard drive, and I remove stuff I'm sick of far less often. No, I don't play through the whole thing all that often.)

With Teeth is an interesting album. You can see the cover art and find links to the first single/video on www.nin.com, if you're curious. I'd recommend pulling the Quicktime file directly, so you can play it from your hard drive (and loop it) rather than doing it through your browser. It's a hell of a rocking song; Malaya was going off just 20 seconds in, and she's not really an NIN fan, though she's warming to them as I continue to expose her to it.

The album itself is more challenging, and I had to listen to it several times to start getting into most of the songs. NIN's sound hasn't progressed much; there's never a song I wouldn't have known immediately as Nine Inch Nails, but since they are one of my favorite bands and have a sound I really enjoy, that's not such a bad thing. The single/video, The Hand That Feeds, is definitely the best single on the album, in terms of being a song you can immediately start grooving to. The rest take some listening, but by the 3rd or 4th time through I was loving several other songs, if not the entire package as of yet. 

It's not as smooth or organic feeling as The Downward Spiral or The Fragile were. Those albums told stories and all of the songs felt connected in order. That was the idea, of course, but while With Teeth feels cohesive, I don't get the feeling that the songs are slotted in a specific order to heighten the listening experience. And who knows, since I'm listening to some leaked pre-release version, maybe the order will change in the final album. I haven't seen an official track listing yet to compare my 13-song version with.

Lots of the songs have a very strange vibe. The main guitar on Hand that Feeds sounded off to me the first few times I listened to it, and the drums on lots of the other songs are slightly discordant. Intentionally, of course, but they vary in pitch a lot (round drums, flat sounding ones, hard clacking thunks, and so on mixing all through a given song) and it's sort of jarring to the ear. Not what you hear in 99% of rock music, but it's certainly not boring or predictable, as 99% of rock music is these days. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but I'm very glad to have it. I'll likely put the album on my B-day list since I own almost all of the other Halos in CD form, and I'd like to own it to send Trent some royalties for the pleasure his music gives me. Plus if I ever want to play the actual CD, I could. I think we have a CD player around here somewhere, though it's hard to imagine any purpose for CDs other than as a source of ripped mp3s, at this point. I've ripped probably 95% of my CDs by now, and since I listen to music only through headphones on my computer and via our iPod through the car stereo, there's really no more need for those bulky silver disks.

¤ You know, when you murder a police detective with his own gun, in a police station, there is a price to pay. As Esteban Carpio found out this week.

Esteban Carpio, 26, left, is shown during his arraignment hearing Monday, April 18, 2005, at Providence District Court in Providence, R.I. Carpio was charged with killing Detective James Allen with the officer's own gun during questioning at police headquarters Sunday and was ordered held without bail Monday. His face is obscured by a white mask. Police have said he injured his leg, arm and head when he jumped from a third-floor window at the police building.

As for their attempted explanation... well, let's just assume the dead detective was the brains of the force. Guys, no one believed he "threw himself out window" excuse when the Nazi cops in South Africa used it during Apartheid, and we're certainly not going to believe it in Rhode Island in 2005.

If you read the whole article it gets even more ridiculous, since Mr. Pulp Face has allegedly been having mental problems, and he was downtown to be questioned about some old woman getting stabbed; an old woman who wasn't even injured that badly. The guy killed a cop and leaped/was thrown out a third story window over a crime that would have maybe gotten him probation at worst, and that's assuming he was even guilty of it!

Police say Esteban Carpio killed James Allen while being questioned at police headquarters Sunday and was injured in a failed escape attempt. But Carpio's family shrieked when he shuffled into a courtroom Monday for his arraignment with his hands and legs shackled.

"Oh, my God, look what they did to him!" somebody yelled. Carpio's mother and another woman were wrestled out of the courtroom as they screamed about police brutality.

Authorities said Carpio jumped out of a third-floor window, injuring his leg, arm and head, and was captured after a struggle a few blocks away. There was no indication that police used excessive force to subdue him, Police Chief Dean Esserman said.

"If (Carpio's relatives) have allegations, if they have concerns, we will not be deaf to that," Esserman said.

Am I reading this wrong, or is Chief Esserman pretty much just laughing at the whole issue? "If they have allegations..." Jesus Christ Chief, the guy commits a guaranteed-beat down offense and shows up in court a day later looking like a bag of raw flesh, bleeding from multiple wounds, and you're playing innocent? Could the Chief even keep a straight face when he said this?

If you can stand to, look at the photo again. See the cuts on his forehead, that look to be stitched shut? I'd guess he got those from the window or the initial chase and capture, got sewn up, and then the real beat down took place Sunday night or Monday morning before court, since the rest of his wounds look brand new, and like they've not received any medical attention. 

As for what actually happened, there's no telling. It's possible the guy plugged the detective and that the cops seized him right there, beat the shit out of him, and made up the whole "he hurt himself escaping" story. That's hard to believe though, I mean there must be witnesses to his defenestration and the subsequent chase and recapture. Maybe he was pushed out, maybe he leaped out after the shooting, and maybe he leaped out trying to get away from the beating, but I'm assuming he really did leave the building via that window, and obviously he took some damage when he landed.

But it's simply absurd to pretend that he got all of that damage to his face just from that event. No one in their right mind is going to deny that the cops beat the shit out of him; hell, I'm surprised they didn't blame it on a fight in lock up; the other prisoners certainly aren't going to show up and deny it to the media.

Whether or not Mr. Cop Killer deserved a beating is open to debate, and whether his alleged mental problems kept him fighting back when he should have covered up and played dead is another possibility, but there's no doubt that he was beaten severely. And while human nature is brutal and eager for revenge, in theory we do have laws and police to uphold them; not to flaunt them for their private justice.

It doesn't help that all of the cops, as seen in various news photos, look like the crowd in every lynch mob photo from the 1930s.

Providence Police Det. Michael Sweeney, center, and Det. John Murray Jr., right are among those looking on in Providence, R.I., Monday, April 18, 2005, as Esteban Carpio, accused of shooting and killing Providence Police Det. James Allen Sunday, is arraigned in Rhode Island District Court. Sweeney is a longtime friend and colleague of Allen and Murray had been Allen's deskmate in the detective's squadroom.

Seriously, are there any non-fat, non-white cops in this department? Well, I guess there's one less now than there was Sunday, but that's not really what I was asking. While we're making requests, can we check these guys' knuckles for cuts and bruises? Or swab their nightsticks for blood and tissue? You almost expect this sort of thing in some redneck state; Alabama or Louisiana or someplace like that, especially when the perp is a young black man and the cops are fat old white guys. But Rhode Island?  I guess there are rednecks everywhere, as this photo from the courtroom seems to confirm.

Looking for more on the story I found lots of articles, but very few additional details. Not that the police are helping:

Police Chief Dean Esserman would not say how Carpio managed to get Allen's weapon or discuss other details leading up to the shooting. He also would not discuss the protocols for carrying weapons inside police headquarters or for interviewing potential suspects, and would not say if there were witnesses.

...

Carpio had been trying to seek help for mental health problems, his family said. His grandmother, Jean Gonsalves, said he was "pacing, talking, seeing things."

Earlier this month, Carpio's mother, Yvonne Carpio, called police and had her son taken by ambulance to a hospital, Gonsalves told The Boston Globe. He was released that night, she said.

"We were trying to get him help, and it didn't seem to be there," said his brother, David Carpio.

A Caltech graduate student convicted of helping to firebomb scores of sport utility vehicles was sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution.

Cottrell, 24, was convicted in November of conspiracy to commit arson and seven counts of arson for an August 2003 vandalism spree that damaged and destroyed about 125 SUVs at dealerships and homes in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Cottrell was acquitted of using a destructive device — Molotov cocktails — in a crime of violence. That was the most serious charge he faced and it carried a sentence of at least 30 years in prison.

At his trial, the prosecution had accused Cottrell of "arrogance" and a "towering superiority" toward people who did not share his environmental views. Cottrell had testified that SUV dealers were evil. The judge said he felt sorry for Cottrell, a doctoral candidate in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, but he had only himself to blame.

"What a talent to have wasted," Klausner said.

The case isn't over yet either.

Federal prosecutors have identified former Caltech students Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe as "fugitive co-conspirators" in the case. It is believed that both have fled the country.

Cottrell was arrested in March 2004 after authorities tracked e-mails sent to the Los Angeles Times. The sender said he was involved in the SUV attacks and affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front.

Send them a letter next time, stupid. Or send email from a cybercafe somewhere, if you must avoid the use of dead tree.  And I suppose we've got to have rule of law, even if it is tempting to laud someone for torching a bunch of Hummers. FUH2!

¤ I don't have much comment on this phenomena, but as you can see there's another vaguely elliptical shape on something somewhere, and Catholics have chosen to view it as a religious experience. I don't keep count or anything, but doesn't it seem like there's a splotch on a burrito, or a cloud in a photo, or a tree stump, or lights on a building, or something, somewhere, at least once a month that gets in the news because it looks like Jesus' face, or the Virgin Mary, or God, or whatever?

...people believe to be an image of the Virgin Mary under a freeway underpass in Chicago, April 18, 2005. Police said the image might have been caused by stains from road salt that dripped from the Kennedy expressway onto the wall, but hundreds of believers have been coming to the underpass to view the image and pray at the spot.

It certainly is a lovely place to spend time with your faith, isn't it?  Just imagine the cold winds, the homeless people, and the constant deafening roar of traffic pouring along the Kennedy expressway overhead. Just like church!

Besides illustrating the benefit of choosing very common and rounded shapes for the iconic images of your religion, what do these symbols mean to people? Why does anyone care if some random splotch of dirt on a wall somewhere looks like some artist's representation of something from the bible? I mean sure, it's sort of a curiosity, and if I got an onion ring that looked just like the color whirls on my first cat's belly I'd think it was interesting... but I wouldn't spend more than three seconds contemplating it before I ate it anyway. So what? Of the billions of shapes on earth, it's inevitable that quite a few will wind up looking just like something else.  Various symbols in Egyptian and Inca hieroglyphics happen to look just like bicycles, or spaceships, or bubble-headed astronauts, and no one other than some new age culty types attach any significance to them.

So why do people respond so strongly to vague natural shapes that look sort of like someone in a robe, or a bearded face? Is that a sign that their faith is weak or strong?  Imagine if the rocks on some hillside in New Mexico looked just like the profile of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair; what would Christians think if atheists started flocking to the site and taking photos and crying about it?

I'm not really advancing any opinion in this one since I think it's ridiculous, but harmless enough not to pay much attention to. To me it makes the people who go there to pray look weak. Are they so faltering in their faith that they need to see a random blotch of road salt for inspiration? Is this the only sign of God they can find in the entire world?  What sort of God do they worship, if creating blurry images on the underside of bridges is the extent of his power?

I'd speculate more, but I'm really enjoying the new NIN album in my headphones right now, and this subject is boring me. If it gives these people joy to believe this is magic or whatever, good for them.  It's no skin off my back, and after another year or two of winter salt dripping the shape will be altered to the point that it no longer resembles anything recognizable, and that will be that.

¤ In related

A tree at the residence of Tony Gioeli is shown decorated with a human face, Sunday, April 17, 2005, in Wilson, N.Y. Mr. Gioeli said he recently attached the carved face to the tree for his grandchildren who visit and play in the back yard.

I find it creepy, personally. Like the angry tree spirit has come to life, and if I get too close it's going to eat me. If I were 8 I'm not sure I'd be real happy about Gramps taking this initiative, and I certainly wouldn't be climbing that tree ever again.

¤ And finally, there's a new pope, and there's no doubt about where he falls on the traditional vs. modernist scale.

Perhaps no member of the conclave evoked such potent opinions — and has stirred more arguments — as the 78-year-old Ratzinger and the role he's held since 1981: head of the powerful Vatican office that oversees doctrine and takes action against dissent.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires," he said Monday in a pre-conclave Mass in memory of John Paul. The church, he insisted, must defend itself against threats such as "radical individualism" and "vague religious mysticism."

As prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he was the Vatican's iron hand.

His interventions are a roll call of flashpoints for the church: the 1987 order stripping American theologian the Rev. Charles Curran of the right to teach because he encouraged dissent; crippling Latin Americans supporting the popular "liberation theology" movement for alleged Marxist leanings; coming down hard on efforts to rewrite Scriptures in gender inclusive language.

He also shows no flexibility on the church's views on priestly celibacy, contraception and the ban on ordinations for women.

...

"If he continues as pope the way he was as a cardinal, I think we will see a polarized church," said David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio journalist and author of a book on trends in the church. "He has said himself that he wanted a smaller, but purer, church."

It's interesting that they picked a complete stick in the mud for the pope, but that they picked one who's so old already that he can't possibly last more than a decade. So they wanted to stick to tradition and wanted to shore up Catholicism's appeal in the third world where people who want a harsh, demanding, old-fashioned type of faith, but they didn't want to be locked into that approach forever, so they picked a really old guy? Ratzinger, AKA the Grand Inquisitor, will surely continue the Middle Ages values that are contributing to the Church's slide into irrelevancy in the world's modern societies, but maybe he'll shore up their losses to Islam in the third world? So he's seen as a good way to compete with other religions for the souls/donations of the peasants, and they figure the ever-more non-religious high tech world is a lost cause to all religions?

The fatal flaw in my logic is the fact that I'm trying to evaluate it objectively, as if the pope vote is part of a logical and rational plan to perpetuate Catholicism worldwide. For all I know the guys voting were completely insular and cared about little more than their petty political squabbles and who owed who a favor, and how the new pope choice is seen worldwide was not even close to their highest priority?