Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Harry Potter and the Theft of the Decade

I was wondering whether something like this might eventually happen. Weird to see that it has --

$1.7m Harry Potter books stolen...

....Turns out that story was confused: the real amount (according to the BBC) is more like Stg 130,000. Downgrade to "Theft Of The Week."



posted by Diane: 6/17/2003 12:15:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, June 16, 2003

How very interesting

Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror


posted by Diane: 6/16/2003 02:29:00 PM | link to this post

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Writer-In-A-Can 1: Meeting the Transcendent Pig

Comments here, in the quoted parts, from a friend:

"So the Pig is one of those characters that just waits on the sidelines for a good book to wander into whether he was meant to or not? ;) "

The Pig would say, "That last requires a definition of who's doing the meaning..."

"No wonder you get writers complaining about their characters running away from them."

(snort) I wouldn't be one of those as a rule. I've said it before: if a character routinely shows an inclination not to do as they're told, to the point where their actions threaten to derail a carefully designed plot, I kill them. Plotting is mine, saith Me: I will handle it -- and I expect my characters to "understand" that I have their best interests at heart, even though it may not look like it at the time. They start getting disruptive, I return them to the Creativity Pool and tell them to find some other author. We've got work to do here.

That said: "sidelines", in the sports idiom, are exactly where some of my characters are. I usually have one eye on players who haven't yet entered the game, as it were, and I'm not above one of them sidling over to the manager in the dugout, also as it were, and whispering, "Boss, come on, break the lineup and let me bat after him..." If I can be convinced that it's a good idea, sure, why not? -- as long as the main thrust of the through story is assisted.

I'm not going to add spoiler protection on what follows, except to suggest that people who don't want to know one way my characters get developed should probably refrain from reading it.

Flash back to June of 2000. Sometimes, when circumstances at home haven't been quiet enough for writing to get done in a timely way, I take off for a week or so with the portable to be by myself with the work. We have a friend in Switzerland who has a small studio apartment in a remote spot on Mount Rigi, and for a nominal charge to cover heat and power and resort tax and so on, one or the other of us can catch a cheapo flight via Ryanair/Easyjet to Zurich, catch the train downcountry and up the mountain, and go hole up there in perfect quiet and just get on with it.

It's a great spot. There are no roads. There are no cars. (That trip I got to see one of the neighbors having their newly-cut hay brought down the mountain by helicopter.) There is no phone in the apartment (though on top of old Rigi is a massive candy-striped cellphone mast with so many emitters on it that it ought to be possible to receive calls on one's fillings, and the Nokia connected to the portable makes it possible to pick up the e-mail and send off completed files anyway.) It's absolutely quiet up there, and all the views are wonderful, especially the southern one (see DILEMMA p. 129 for a slightly reworked view of the Alps as seen from the Vierwaldst�tersee area). There are no distractions. You can even order your groceries online from LeShop.ch and have them delivered to the local post office/train station for you to pick up.

But for stuff like milk and bread and fresh vegetables and so on it's silly to do that. After a day or three of hard work the urge to get out a little further than the apartment's terrace gets strong, and besides, you need fresh bread...and Swiss bread is the best in the world...so you grab a shopping bag and walk down the paved footpath to the dorfladen or village shop in Rigi-Kaltbad, about half an hour's walk down the mountain, and then (if you're a lazy thing like me) avoid the climb back up by catching the little cogwheel Rigi-Bahn train back to the apartment.

Rigi-Kaltbad is where I was when the Pig ran into me.

I have to write carefully about this, because people are prone to misunderstand it. After twenty years of this work, I've found that -- for me at least -- there are modes of creativity which can briefly overlay the normal senses, so that things that genuinely aren't there except in your imagination seem for a few moments to coexist with things that have what passes for physical existence. It doesn't qualify as hallucination, since never for more than the initial split second of surprise are you in any doubt that what you're experiencing is an internally sourced artifact of the making-it-up process. It's not a state that can be induced or forced. And it's not invariably useful. Sometimes it's just funny, your brain making a visual or aural joke to break the tension. Sometimes it turns out to have been helpful after you've figured out to what use the data or suggestion can be put. It's never to be taken as gospel, but it's always something to pay attention to when it happens, which for me isn't all that often.

So I've done my shopping and got my bread and milk and so on, and it's going to be about another hour and a half before the train comes through. Scene-setting here: Rigi-Kaltbad is all one steep hill. It's a small resort -- I guess from the name there must have been a small spa there at one point or another -- and has a number of good small hotels. One of them is right by the train station, which is literally only a place where the track briefly becomes flat so that when the train stops, people can get in and out without immediately falling either uphill or downhill. The nearest hotel is set at a right angle to the tracks, directly across from the station building, and the front of it, one story up, has a narrow terrace restaurant.

This is the best place to wait for the train, since if you've paid for what you've had, all you have to do is walk down the outside stairs and walk across the tracks to board. I went up there and had a salad and a couple decis of white wine. Nice day, warm, sun leaning westward, the lesser of the two views showing to the north -- Luzern, and the Jura in the distance. When lunch was done I pulled out the pad I always carry with me up there (the laptop was locked up in the apartment) and started to go over the remainder of the Dilemma outline and the beginning notes for the broad "arc" outline for the next three books. There were some details that were evading me.

I kept getting distracted. The day was gorgeous. The surroundings were gorgeous. The restaurant manager, waiting tables, let me alone except to bring me a little more wine and to pause by me briefly to deadhead some petunias in the nearby windowbox hanging over the railing. I stared at the train station for a while, and the building site to the left of it where they had finished tearing down the century-old hotel there and were rebuilding it on the same site, and then I turned my attention to the pad again.

Pad. Pen. Red and white checked tablecloth. Something standing beside the table. White. A pig. A large pig, its back at nearly the same level as the table.

"You never come see me any more," says the Pig in a voice partaking about equally of Milton Berle and Harlan Ellison. "You don't even call."

The next second contains the following thoughts, in more or less this order:

(1) A pig?

(2) Boy, this is a good one.

(3) Why a pig?

(4) Oh, it's him...

(5) Now isn't that interesting. I wonder....

"You come here often?" I "say" to the Pig, since I feel it's rude to treat one of these visitations entirely as if I were making it up. Then I laugh. Dumb line.

He laughs too, and he's gone. Reality, such as it is, reasserts itself in toto. But I've been reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I think about it. Some ideas start to arrange themselves in configurations they hadn't been in before. These look like much better configurations than the earlier ones. I start making notes. The train comes. I ignore it. I ignore the next one. And the next. I finally catch the last train up, around the time it gets too dark to write.

When I get home I check my own reference to the Pig, and check the one in Barry Hughart's BRIDGE OF BIRDS. I do a big old web search and another search at the main library at Trinity, and find hardly anything. Through a mutual acquaintance I get in contact with Hughart (who never made any use of the character beyond the one throwaway reference) to see if he knows anything more about the Pig. He gets back to me in due time and adds a little info from another source besides the Larousse, a large work on Chinese mythology, but there's really very little data, and nothing to prevent me going in the direction I'm heading already.

So I write the Pig my way.

And now we add the spoilers. There are a couple sentences' worth of material here vaguely having to do with the next three books, so don't blame me if you go ahead and read this and then later you're sorry.

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As things develop it will become obvious why the Pig has become involved with this storyline in Wizard's Dilemma and not before. This particular internal arc will take at least three books to resolve...maybe more. Probably it's wiser to say nothing more at this point, as this business is still shaping itself.

posted by Diane: 6/15/2003 04:27:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Not a lot of blogging for the next few days

The copyedited MS for Wizard's Holiday has come back, and I have a lot of work to do to get it handled before we go away for a few days off at the end of next week. Just so you all know not to expect any long articles... (I may republish a few things from other sources, though -- writeups of this or that which people have requested.)


posted by Diane: 6/14/2003 07:19:00 AM | link to this post

Hebesphenomegacorona

The word alone is worth the price of admission. (Another good one from the same source: "gyrobifastigium".) But wait, there's more!

Here's a picture of one aboard the Intenational Space Station.

Those wild and crazy astronauts; you gotta love 'em...


posted by Diane: 6/14/2003 06:57:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, June 13, 2003

Strange Search Terms

Every now and then I go through the user logs to see who's come to see the blog, and where they came from. A lot of people arrive via Google. But some of the searches that bring them here...well, they're a little weird.

Here's today's best one:

"free fonts pasture of muppets"

Hokay.....


posted by Diane: 6/13/2003 09:13:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, June 12, 2003

The job you really don't want

Bearing in mind that this was the kind of family who would torture you for not performing well enough in the national soccer team...you don't want this to be your job description:

Saddam Hussein's ghostwriter.




posted by Diane: 6/12/2003 12:43:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Two words I wouldn't have thought belonged so close to each other

"Sausage" and "origami."

(link via Die Puny Humans)





posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 08:31:00 PM | link to this post

Warning: hardware geekery ahead

The time is approaching when I'm going to be replacing Ryoh-ohki with her smarter younger sister (who will also be Ryoh-ohki). When the first machine gets back from her impending service, she's promised to a good home with a charming hotelier in Bern, a lady who will take good care of her and who's as big a hardware geek, if not a bigger one, than I am.

Yet at the same time, committed as I am to the MM-1 (also known as the Sharp Actius, now that they've started rolling it out in the US), there are other temptations. This would be one of them.

I've been getting increasingly intrigued by the tablet-PC concept, and the tablet version of the Mebius Muramasa TN-1 looks like a nice implementation of that. I'm impressed with the quality of Sharp's laptops by now, having worked extensively with both Ryoh-ohki and Peter's machine, the heavier and more butch Ken-ohki. If as I think the TN-1 is more of the same, that alone would be an attraction. I'd like to get my hands on one of these and play with it a little. The hardware specs are good enough: 1.1 gHz Intel Speedstep processor, 256-768 meg RAM, 30 gig hard drive, regular LAN and wireless LAN, all the usual ports for a machine of this kind, and (interestingly) a fingerprint lock. The only downside, for me, is the weight. 1.9 kg...mutter. That's almost twice what I'm used to carrying these days: more even than Ken-ohki weighs with his CD-R/W drive in. And the size (a little bigger than Ken-ohki) makes it more difficult to do what I like to do with Ryoh-ohki...keep her in my shoulderbag. Especially on the road, where I have no desire to reveal what I'm carrying by exhibiting something too obviously a computer bag...and also don't feel like having to schlep around something that weighs as much as some boat anchors.

And every time I start thinking about all that extra weight, I go back to the Dynamism site and look at this again...

"It's too small for you," Jason (my sales-and-sometimes-support guy at Dynamism) keeps telling me. Well, maybe. But my hands aren't exactly huge, and I wrote several novels on Allegra, my Acer TravelMate, without too much trouble. Her keyboard's only slightly bigger than the U101's. (She is presently in honorable retirement as the machine we give to houseguests. ...And yes, all my machines have names and genders, and it's not just a network issue. I find they work better that way. Don't anybody bring up the Pathetic Fallacy. [If I suffer from a fallacy, it's more likely to be the empathetic one: or as Brandoch Daha would put it, "Ever she perversely affecteth the losing side in a quarrel."]) ...And this machine plays exactly into a prediction I made to Peter years ago: that one day there would be a PC no bigger than a Filofax.

...It's gonna be a while before I have to make up my mind about this issue. Big and unusual, or small and neat?...

Hmmmm....


posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 07:54:00 AM | link to this post

Notes to yesterday

(a) The courier from Fountains and Decor never did arrive. Mutter. They'd better be here today before noon...otherwise I can't take delivery on the pots until Thursday, as between then and now we have a lot of running around to do before we turn the rental car back in.

(b) FedEx, instead of bringing the MS. here, dropped it at the pub, as they've been asked not to do unless we're not home. The last few times, the excuse was, "We didn't see a car there so we thought nobody was at home." The landlady at the pub having explained to the driver in great detail that we didn't have a car, I wonder what the excuse is going to be this time? Must call FedEx and sort this out. Well, maybe it was another driver.

(c) There was a (c), but now I can't remember what it was. Oh well. (This comes of getting up when the daylight suggests it's time to do so, and posting before the caffeine has set in.)

(Then again, why should I complain? The more daylight I get, the happier I am. And the more work I can do, which is a good thing, since now I have a very busy week ahead of me, making the necessary revisions to Holiday.)


posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 05:15:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, June 09, 2003

The only reason Beemer let me sleep late yesterday

-- was that the world was about to go slightly nuts. Like this:

0900: Awakened by Beemer. Feed cats. Shower, dress, eat a little something, spend the time until approximately 1200 puttering around the Web, tidying website, etc.

1200ish: Peter wakes up. More showering, dressing, eating. Peter points out to me small waterspot he's noticed in the bedroom ceiling. "Might be a leak in the roof," he says. "I'll take a look at that later... it doesn't look serious."

1400ish: We drive over to Fountains and Decor in Dublin to get the pond supplies and pond plants I've been wanting. Score numerous marginals, including some nice water iris, and also (something I didn't think I'd find there) two gorgeous topiary "standard" bay trees and pots for them, to go by either side of the front door. Also a new enzymatic/bacterial anti-algae formulation to kill "blanketweed" in pond. (The stuff is a nuisance: with these long days' worth of sunlight, and the speed at which the stuff grows, I have to clean out the pond pump every other day, sometimes every day.)

1700ish: Return home in triumph. Stick most plants into "shallow end" of pond to be dealt with tomorrow, put others in shallow dishes of water. Introduce magic anti-blanketweed stuff to pond via filterbox. Peter goes upstairs to take a look at the waterspot through the attic access in the upstairs bathroom.

1715: Phone rings. Editor calls to let me know that copyedited manuscript for Wizard's Holiday is on its way. Says he likes book, too. A lot. In the middle of this very pleasant phone call, which frankly could have gone on for another hour or so before I got tired of it (if indeed then), hollering comes from upstairs: "GET ME A POT RIGHT NOW!"

Uh oh. Drop phone in cat bed, race upstairs with saucepan. Find perspiring husband trying to shut down leak (which broke loose bigtime as soon as he touched it) from joint between cold-water storage tank and hose that leads to the well outside. Give husband pot. Husband places pot, runs downstairs, throws master circuitbreaker for house to kill power to well pump.

Fish phone out of cat bed, say goodbye to editor (with intense regret). Call landlord. Landlord promises to call plumber first thing in the morning. (And does, too. He's a super landlord.)

1800-0845: Power restored to house...but not water: P finds the circuitbreaker that handles the pump, shuts it down. Funny how sometimes you can skip a shower, if you're busy, but if you want one and can't have it, life becomes unlivable. Ditto re: drinking water, etc.

0500 this morning or thereabouts: Husband comes to bed, says his lateness is my fault because I wrote a good book which kept him up reading. At this time of day, my only possible response is: "Yeah, big deal, tell me all about it sometime when I'm conscious."

0830: Wake up suddenly (once again, cat has failed to get me up at 0600, but maybe this is a good thing.) Realize the plumber is going to be here any moment, and besides that, numerous things are scheduled to be delivered: chair, plants from Fountains & Decor, MS. via FedEx, etc. Leap from bed and start tidying the place. (Should have done this yesterday.) Urge husband also to leap from bed and start tidying the place. Response not unprintable in reality, but I can hear P. even when he's got the silencer on. Nonetheless, husband leaps from bed and also starts tidying. All things not good for plumber to see (i.e. much piled-up laundry, many unshelved books, etc) thrown into P's office with great speed and door shut. Husband pulls on clothing, lies down again to resume sleep.

Tea cannot be made because there is no water. In slightly grim mood, go out to fishpond to feed fish. Mood changes to utter shock to discover that fish are in exactly three inches of water and looking most bemused. Where did all the water go since yesterday??!! Discover that after dosing pond filter box with magic anti-algal stuff, box was not replaced in proper position to make sure that all water re-enters pond properly. Since approximately 5 PM yesterday, pond has been quietly emptying itself down the back of the pond shell.

Because water is cut off from house before well to keep cold-tank leak under control, pond cannot be refilled until plumber arrives. Bubble positions her small interested self on stones surrounding pond and gazes down at fish which are now in only three inches of water instead of three feet of it. Tempt Bubble inside with kitty milk. Bubble drinks milk, returns to fish. Several times.

Reflect that it's an ill wind, etc., and that with only three inches of water in the pond, this is a good time to plant in the marginals along the back (unreachable when the pond is full). Do so. This also protects fish from Bubble.

0900: Plumber arrives. Thank Herself! Plumber fixes leak in approximately five minutes, departs. Pump turned back on. Water again, hurray! Now we can have tea. But first run outside to start refilling fishpond.

0915: Peter checks leak one more time, just to make sure, then goes to have shower. Discovers that only hot water works...no cold. Hear him thinking things, in great detail, silencer or no silencer. (This is, after all, the same plumber who installed our shower cubicle upside down.)

0918: Aeron chair arrives at last. Much joy, for about two minutes. There are things more important than chairs right now. We both want a shower a lot.

0920: Peter disassembles shower. Nothing wrong with that.

0940: Peter goes into attic space, discovers that plumber shut off cold water feed to shower while working on tank, forgot to turn it back on. P now does so. Cold water now running to shower. Hurray!

1000: Unbox chair. Chair is wonderful. Hurray! Mail arrives. Mail contains check for recently written short story. Hurray!

1015: Fountains and Decor calls. Bay trees (now potted) will be delivered today. Hurray!

1100: Finally have cup of tea. Sit down in chair for first time. Pond is full again. Hurray!

Sheesh. It's a good thing I didn't have anything to do today...

posted by Diane: 6/09/2003 04:22:00 PM | link to this post

E. E. "Doc" Smith fans, here it is: the "spy ray"

Trust Doc to get there first.









posted by Diane: 6/09/2003 03:17:00 PM | link to this post

Sunday, June 08, 2003

A noteworthy event (locally, anyway)

Wow, Beemer let me sleep until almost 9 AM. How did that happen?...


posted by Diane: 6/08/2003 10:10:00 AM | link to this post

Saturday, June 07, 2003

A moment to breathe

Wizard's Holiday is with its editor now, and I expect I should be hearing from him momentarily with notes on the manuscript. While that's happening...there's this strange brief halcyon time (three or four days, anyway...) in which I actually can sit around for the better part of a day and not do anything.

-- For some values of the above, anyway. "Not doing anything" this week has included: work on updating the "European Cuisines" website, preparatory to moving it into its own domain: testing new webtracking software: some assorted gardening: going up to the local nursery to consider what tree to plant in the hedge to replace the one destroyed by the joyriders who nearly crashed through the hedge and into the corner of the house: stripping unnecessary files off Ryoh-ohki's hard drive, since she may have to go back to Japan next week for a service (the keyboard has begun acting up in the wake of the sake incident last week, though there are also signs that it might be putting itself right -- it's hard to tell, just hafta keep hacking at it for a while): doing the laundry: cleaning the fishpond: doing "travel agent" things regarding an upcoming trip during which Peter and I will go away and soak our heads for a week...

And there's still been time to get some other writing done. While gearing up to get the Rihannsu sorted out at last (and also doing early prep work for Wizards at War I've been able to at last finish "Herself", the Irish fantasy story I've been fiddling with for the best part of six months, and get it off to its editors, who liked it. Now I get to write a story about a game show for another anthology. The brain is ticking over on this one, which I suspect will be another candidate for an eventual, putative Duane short-story anthology called New Gods for Old. (Assuming the thing ever happens. )

And yes, pre-work work on The Door Into Starlight is going on as well. Don't think I'm not sensitive to the background screams and cries of those who've been so patient for so long. But things are coming together now.

In all of this, I'm finding the new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking to be a big help...and so is the little creature to the right. I dictate into it, and then (via a USB cable) Dragon magically sucks the words out of the recorder and transcribes them. So I can go out for a walk in the early morning, spend a lovely couple of hours talking to myself, and then come back and -- instead of having to type out the resultant material -- can have a cup of tea and watch the computer do it. Ah, technology...what a wonder! (When it works....)

If the recorder has a weakness, it's that (a) the file-folder system it uses is frankly Byzantine in its complexity, and (b) the controls are a perfect evocation of that last ad in the movie Crazy People: "Caucasians are just too damn big." The rocker switch is very small, does about five different things, and if you push your finger a millimeter in the wrong direction at a crucial moment, you're screwed. However, the tool is so powerful and useful that I've just sort of resigned myself to the steepness of the learning curve.

Meanwhile, they've started harvesting their barley, up the hill. We're having a few days of dryish weather, and all the local farmers seem to be taking advantage of it. This means that the early-morning walks are slightly complicated by huge harvesting machines rumbling up and down the roads (and the necessity for them to get far enough away, after passing me, so that I can record again without a lot of noise which will give Dragon the pip).

...An afterthought, just in passing. There's also one other thing which has been an issue, now that I'm doing a lot more dictation than I have for the last year or so: how to get past feeling stupid while dictating. I don't know if others who compose while dictating have experienced the problem, but it was a big hurdle for me -- getting past the self-consciousness about telling a story out loud to no one (since when it's working well, there's no particular sense of me being there, either). Even when there's no one for miles around, this affects me...though less and less with practice. -- What's funny, though, on these morning story runs, is the looks I get from drivers who see me walking along "talking to myself". In certain moods I like to make sure the recorder is visible...not easy, it's so small! In other moods, I don't give a damn...let them think I'm crazy. Like the people in town who see me talking to Peter using the Bluespoon wireless earpiece -- so small it can't be seen when my hair gets over it -- and who don't see the flashing blue light it produces when in active use. :) (There it is on the left -- on my monitor it's nearly life size, a shade under two inches long [35 mm]; it weighs about ten grams. Mine is just plain matte blue -- I think it was a slightly older version of the one shown here.)

(Of course, sometimes when people do see it the results are similarly amusing. A bunch of guys at the airside bar at Dublin Airport a couple of weeks ago saw me walking back and forth while talking to Peter, and did see the bright blue flashing; they were fascinated. One of them shouted loudly enough for half the terminal to hear, "Hey, lady, c'mere, we want to see your thing!" Well, gee, thanks, guys... Another one yelled, "Hey, Lieutenant Uhura!" Heh.)

(Oh...a tech note on the above stuff for those interested who've commented: specs/info for the Bluespoon can be seen here and here: specs, etc. for the Sony recorder are here.)


posted by Diane: 6/07/2003 09:53:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, June 06, 2003

I've got to have them

After all these years of marriage I've acquired from Peter a certain love of crew patches. So I have to have these...

(And I have a feeling Peter's going to want them too. In fact, I have a feeling that NASA is going to discover these patches are in much more demand than other recent ones...)

From the press release: "'It is exciting that our characters, which for so many years have been associated with space adventures in the animated world, should now have a chance to become part of a real and important space exploration,' said Jordan Sollitto, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. 'We are thrilled about teaming up with NASA on these exciting missions and are looking forward to giving our characters the opportunity to touch down upon the Red Planet.'

"'More accurately, the planet is an understated fiery umber,' Marvin interjected.

"'I know.'"

(Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)




posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 09:38:00 PM | link to this post

"Fairies defy chainsaw attacker to sprout new leaves on thorn bush"

How on Earth could I have missed this story the other day?

"The celebrated fairy bush of Latoon, Co Clare has confounded all expectations to sprout leaves again - eight months after a vandal's chain-saw was believed to have ended its life.

"In recent days, green leaves on the white thorn bush have been visible to motorists travelling along the �90 million Newmarket-on-Fergus bypass. Folklorist Mr Eddie Lenihan said yesterday he was 'delighted and relieved' that the fairy tree or 'sceach' was growing once more.

"The sceach received international attention four years ago when it was saved from destruction at the start of the roadworks scheme after a successful campaign by Mr Lenihan.

"He warned of a curse on the roadway if the fairy bush was destroyed and related how the sceach was a rendezvous point for Kerry fairies to discuss tactics on their way to do battle with the Connacht fairies.

"Clare County Council placed a wooden fence around the bush, however last August a vandal armed with a chain-saw reduced the tree to a stump after cutting down all the branches.

"County engineer Mr Tom Carey described the act as "deplorable" and the council reported the matter to the Garda�. However no one was apprehended for the attack. Now, with growth returning to the damaged sceach, Mr Lenihan remarked yesterday: 'The fairies are able to look after their own property.' He said the sceach offers a window to the 'other world'.

"Asked what he believes has become of the vandal, Mr Lenihan said: 'Well, after the despicable act was carried out on the tree, I rang an old man who was very familiar with the sceach and had told me stories about it. After telling him about the attack, there was a long pause before he asked, "Is he still alive?", referring to the vandal who had chopped down the branches. I won't say anything more but I would not like to be him.'"

...The bush is indeed moderately celebrated: see this story which appeared in the New York Times in 1999. Lenihan himself is a seanachai, a semi-professional storyteller who is also a moderately well-known folklorist.

It should be said that the hawthorn is a very tough tree. There's one behind our house which fell down in some storms late last autumn. However, since only about three-quarters of its roots were pulled out, it has gracefully declined to die and is now in flower as well. (It also allows Peter to come in and say things like, "The cat's up the tree with the sheep.")

In the NYT story, I'm also interested by the comment of the UCD folklore archivist about the widespread "passive belief" in Old Things. After you've been here for a while, you get a sense that there's a lot of it scattered around this country. But mostly people won't discuss it too openly even among other natives...and only ever so rarely when someone with a non-local accent (like mine) is standing there. The neighbors are concerned about looking or sounding as if they're stuck in a previous century. But get them alone, and sometimes you hear interesting things. The hill near our house is supposed to be haunted, for example, though by what isn't clear. I've never had any problems with it...but one of the neighbors, when her car broke down outside our house late at night, was so nervous about walking near that hill in the dark that she knocked on the door and asked to be given a ride home.

That said, walking a mile or so on a dark night near our house would not be fun. There are no streetlights. There are no sidewalks. There are very, very few houses, and their lights are mostly far away. If there's no starlight or moonlight, it's dark around here...and once or twice in such circumstances, walking home late from the pub, I've remembered Yeats's story about the man who was nearly scared to death by a ghost that was following him down a dark windy road...and which turned out to be some pages from the Irish Times. (A problem no longer possible with the online edition...)

It'll be interesting to see if anything further is heard about the sceach as we get closer to June 21st, St. John's Eve, the night when (it's said) the doors between the worlds stand open (and when they play softball in Reykjavik for 24 hours without stopping. Why stop when the Sun won't go down?)...


posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 11:14:00 AM | link to this post

These long summer days

They're the best... The sun comes up at 5 AM at the moment, and doesn't go down till quarter of eleven. I can get a lot of work done on a day like this.

The only problem with the period just to either side of the Solstice is that the cats -- particularly Miss Beemer -- become unbearable around now, in that they want their breakfast when it gets light. So Beemer puts her nose up mine around 0515 and starts doing the I Love You So Much, Give Me My Damn Breakfast Already routine. There are times this is particularly wearing, such as when I've been up later than usual (The West Wing last night. Why does RTE have to show it at 11:30....Oh well, at least we're getting it).

Don't imagine that any of them think of bothering Peter in this regard, either. They know better. He sleeps too effectively for them to wake him up. Whereas I unfortunately still have a lot of that nurse-wiring in my head, with its emphasis on assisting the weak and helpless rather than picking them up and throwing them at the wall. (sigh)

Never mind. Dawn is pretty this time of year...


posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 10:26:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, June 05, 2003

A happy find

Convivium is a peer-reviewed online journal concerned with food representation in film, literature and the arts. This is an area dear to my heart -- and to Peter's: he's the only writer I know who's had an editor call him up and bawl him out because he'd written something too well. She was reading one of his manuscripts (I think it must have been Firebird) and she hit one of the juiciest of his killer "feast scenes" while still two hours away from her lunch... (I bet it was the description of the smetanyk that did it. Recipe follows.)

My favorite quote from one of this month's articles (on the use of the chile pepper motif in art, craft and commerce), from an artist who enjoys painting peppers and chiles:

"Peppers are currently my favorite painting subjects. They are available, cheap, and will sit still for a long time and can be eaten afterward."


posted by Diane: 6/05/2003 10:46:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

This morning's goofy headline...

Butt arrested over night club incident

(Sorry if this is "premium content"...) The gist of the story: "England and Manchester United soccer star Nicky Butt has been arrested by police over an alleged assault in a night club, a police source said today."

(snicker)


posted by Diane: 6/03/2003 10:03:00 AM | link to this post

Off to the Bloggers Meet in Dublin tonight

-- to hobnob, fraternize and otherwise mingle with other Irish bloggers. Tonight is also the Irish Sci-Fi Club meeting, so Peter and I are double-booked. See you all there (x2)!





posted by Diane: 6/03/2003 07:35:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, June 02, 2003

I may have missed the annular --

-- but others didn't. The lovely shot at the right comes from a photographer who was at Cape Wrath in Scotland for annular totality. Lots of other shots can be seen at the eclipse gallery page at Spaceweather.com.


posted by Diane: 6/02/2003 09:13:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, June 01, 2003

Alaalu is a very large planet

Very large. I suspect I had some memory of Vance's "Big Planet" in the back of my mind (waaaay in the back: it must be twenty-five or thirty years since I read it).

I wanted a big, low-metal world. I did the "rough" calculations first and then sat down with the Planet Designer at http://www.cix.co.uk/~vicarage/planets/ to check my math (which is dodgy at the best of times) and make sure the world was possible. The trick is to keep the gravity roughly the same while still keeping an atmosphere on the thing. The interesting part, from Nita's and Kit's point of view, is the 120-hour day. (The year is 1421 days and change; axial tilt is 1.6 degrees.)

Alaalu's radius is almost exactly 34,000 km. This makes the equatorial diameter 64,000 km (polar is less: the planet is moderately oblate), and the circumference (by pi times D) a little over 201,000 km. (Yes, the "four times the size of Earth" line will need correcting: I think that may have survived from an earlier draft. Thanks for catching it.)



posted by Diane: 6/01/2003 05:59:00 PM | link to this post

For those interested...

-- the latest excerpt from Wizard's Holiday is up now at the YW site.


posted by Diane: 6/01/2003 02:05:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, May 31, 2003

I missed the annular

Oh well. First of all, it was cloudy. Secondly, I slept in. We were out last night with friends Pádraig and Deirdre and James, having sushi at Aya, and while showing Pádraig a short story I was working on, I accidentally dumped about half a small cup of sake into Ryoh-ohki's keyboard.

And perhaps understandably, she went dead. So we turned her upside down and thumped her and shook her and mopped out the liquid, and when I got her home I laid her, open and upside down, near the water heater in the upstairs closet. And this morning she's just fine. Booted up first time, no trouble.

That is one robust little laptop...

(Or maybe, considering her provenance, she just has a taste for sake.)


posted by Diane: 5/31/2003 09:43:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, May 29, 2003

Ireland and the 2003 Annular

Here's the local eclipse path, for those who may be interested.






Specific circumstances for the UK and Ireland are here on Fred Espenak's eclipse page for NASA.


posted by Diane: 5/29/2003 11:04:00 AM | link to this post

Wow, here comes an annular eclipse!

And a slightly weird one. The best details (as usual) are on Fred Espenak's Eclipse Page at NASA. (But see also Mr.Eclipse.com for other useful info.)

(The image to the right obviously isn't of an annular eclipse, but a total one. It was taken by Fred Espenak during the 1999 total eclipse, which we shared, soaking wet and under 100% overcast, with many others in the beautiful city of Stuttgart. [Best moment during this eclipse: explaining to six-year-old Gavin, who'd been brought all the way from England to see this wonder, that the darkness was caused by the Moon going in front of the Sun. His expression of polite but total skepticism on hearing this, plainly yet another of the endless dumb and patently impossible things that adults try to get you to believe when you're a kid, was memorable.])

...Ireland is not best positioned for this annular -- looks like Iceland wins in that regard -- but dawn will look interestingly strange and dark anyway. The weather is shifting a little, so that we may get a decent view: probably it's worth asking Peter to get the 35 mm cameras ready for a shot at it.




posted by Diane: 5/29/2003 10:23:00 AM | link to this post

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

The dumbest movie premise I've heard for years

I desperately hope there's something i'm missing about this.

"[Nicholas] Cage will play an archaeologist-historian who is the eighth generation of his family to believe the country's founding fathers drew a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence."

...Uh huh. So let's set this up.

You're Ben Franklin or one of the other original signers. You sign your name to what, at that moment, is arguably the most important piece of parchment (or paper?) on the North American continent. And what do you do with it then? You draw a treasure map on the back of it.

Of course you do.

(argh)

(Looking around a little bit on the Web, I now find various references to the "Beale Treasure", all of which make my head hurt. No, I'm not going to link to them. Argh again.)


posted by Diane: 5/28/2003 09:59:00 PM | link to this post

Bad cookie! Bad, bad!

I like these: Bad, web-generated fortune cookies.

My first one said, "If you do something right the first time, no one will appreciate how hard it was."


posted by Diane: 5/28/2003 09:56:00 AM | link to this post

It's away

Wizard's Holiday has gone to the publisher (and not before time). It's not perfect yet, not by a long shot, but that'll be sorted out (insofar as perfection is possible in anything..) when we go to copyedit, any minute now.

Meanwhile, now I can have my birthday. Ten days late is better than never....


posted by Diane: 5/28/2003 09:23:00 AM | link to this post

Saturday, May 24, 2003

A post that made me smile

From Thudfactor.


posted by Diane: 5/24/2003 09:31:00 AM | link to this post

Okay, I'm in love (re: giant stuffed microbes!)

These folks have cuddly cold viruses (see the rhinovirus at right), cuddly flu viruses, fluffy Streptococci, fuzzy Shigellae...

Gotta catch 'em all. :)


posted by Diane: 5/24/2003 09:08:00 AM | link to this post

Blogged In Thirty Seconds, part 4 (custom quizzes)

Here's something amusing: do-it-yourself custom quizzes a la "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". One of the users on the "Young Wizards" discussion forums forums built a quiz for the "Young Wizards" series (Thanks, marniebrown1!)


posted by Diane: 5/24/2003 07:36:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, May 23, 2003

A little blue world...

A great shot of Earth from Mars. And the Moon, too! (Thank you, Mars Global Surveyor...)



posted by Diane: 5/23/2003 05:33:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Blogged in Thirty Seconds, part 3 (did the Swiss build Stonehenge...?)

They've found another ancient burial (six bodies this time, most unusual) near the site where the "Amesbury Archer" was found, a few miles from Stonehenge. The Archer himself came from the Alps: apparently there's now conjecture that he may have been a builder or engineer who came in to work on the project.


posted by Diane: 5/22/2003 08:43:00 AM | link to this post

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Blogged in Thirty Seconds, part 2

Okay, about a minute.

I desperately hope that this article in the NYT food section isn't premium content. This fried chicken technique works. The rules seem to be: (a) good chicken (OK, that seems obvious..), (b) only half an inch of fat in a small pan (I used a saucepan), (c) put the cover on after introducing the chicken, (d) preferred frying fat: clarified butter and lard. (No, of course nobody would eat this every night of the week.) Minor addition: Every now and then, when checking the color of the chicken, I mop out the inside of the saucepan lid to stop the condensed steam from falling back into the boiling fat and causing a fuss.

YUM. YUM. I just made a batch in an hour off from the novel-finishing process. Stupendous. (The article suggests that breading mixes become almost a side issue with this technique. (My own breading mix is [wet] egg mixed with hot smoked paprika, [dry] Progresso Italian bread crumbs.)

OH yum.

posted by Diane: 5/21/2003 06:46:00 PM | link to this post

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Blogged in thirty seconds

This man is one of my heroes. This nice posting from eGullet.com tells about him. (I have a couple of his books, too.)


posted by Diane: 5/20/2003 04:14:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, May 19, 2003

Probably no significant blogging this week

I'm deep in work on Wizard's Holiday, and probably won't have any time to spare for extracurricular activities until this time next week. Just so those who are curious should know....
posted by Diane: 5/19/2003 04:32:00 PM | link to this post

I write for a living.
That being the case, sometimes I want to talk about anything but writing (at least, writing per se).

This is the old Blogger version of where that would happen. Click here to see where it happens now.

Biography
Bibliography / filmography




2008:
The Geneva Convention

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A Wind from the South
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