Oops, wrong one. (Their version of "Samhain" is an open source file integrity and host-based intrusion detection system for Unix and Linux. They also do Beltane, a web-based central management console for Samhain. Additionally, they do web design for themselves and other people: see particularly Nightfall, a program which produces animations of eclipsing binary stars. Asimov would chuckle...)
...You pronounce it, more or less, "SOW'unn." This, with Beltane, is one of the two great hinge-point feasts of the old Celtic quarterly calendar: the beginning of winter, in Irish tradition (in the same tradition, summer starts on May 1st with Beltane, which is why June 21 is so frequently called "Midsummer's Day" over here). It was a time of "harvest home", when the cows came back from pasture to be shedded (or slaughtered if, as was often the case, there wasn't going to be enough stored hay or silage to keep them alive during the winter), and when the last of the crops and winter fuel were gotten in. Families that might have been scattered over much territory would reunite to take part in the work that had to be done if everyone was to live through the winter. After that there was time to thank the gods for the food people did have, and (on Oíche Shamhna itself, the eve of Samhain) to put out all the fires, kindling the first new fire of the New Year, and lighting great bonfires from it in defiance of the oncoming dark. (Completely understandable, since already around here it's starting to get dark at 4:30 PM).
The name Hallowe'en is a much later addition, referring to the Church holiday which was superimposed on the old calendar feast: but the traditions surrounding both remain much the same. All Hallows' Eve (the day and especially the night before All Saints' Day, November 1) was held to be one of those nights on which the walls between the worlds got thin, and things both good and bad were more able than usual to slip through.
Whether your day involves pumpkins or the lighting of the first new fire...enjoy the day, and the night: remembering that no night lasts forever, except the very last one...and we're nowhere near that one yet. (At any rate, to refute it, I plan to hum the Big Hum today. Better to light a candle...)
"Out of Ambit was the subject of much speculation when analysts at several firms were heard to be very positive about it's recent performance.It's share price rose from $ 63.15 to $ 85.25. Much of the hype was said to originate from Alex Dunn whose Analog (artefact) was said to be involved.
"Alex Dunn declined to comment on the recent speculation.
I really must find what's been driving my shares up. (wry look) I have a feeling, though, that having this explained to me is going to be something like having cricket explained to me...and whoever has to do it is going to have to do it a few times in a row...
Hal was such a gentleman...funny, scarily intelligent...and probably the only math teacher I ever really liked. He was a fixture around East Coast fandom / prodom for so long: no Boskone was complete without him.
I was hoping to have seen him at Worldcon in Toronto: either he wasn't there, or I missed him.
Damn. Noreascon is going to be very strange sans Hal...
They're diffuse, but we've got them. From our position in west Wicklow, the whole northern sky is lit up with a greenish glow. The beginnings of spikes and "curtain" formations are visible when you look at them with eyes averted. Much clearer curtain forms appeared in Meath, north of us, around 7 PM...and made the 9 o'clock news.
This image of the southern California coast was taken at 18:25 PST on 28 Oct 2003. It links to a really large image from the MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC: so beware! ...1 pixel=250 meters. The fire areas are denoted with dotted red lines.
Where Ikea gets its furniture names. "...Bathroom items are named after Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays; sets of bookcases after occupations; dining tables and chairs after Finnish placenames; carpets after Danish placenames; and much more."
The Sun chucked an X-17 level flare at us this morning -- not something that happens every day. SpaceWeather.com suggests that it's been quite a few years since the Sun last threw a flare like this. And the associated CME was unusual, too: not just a one-sided solar sneeze, but a "halo" CME. We may get aurorae tonight: I hope our sky clears up (for today it started to rain in that peculiarly persistent Irish kind of way, after having held off from such behavior for a good while).
-- some episode or other. But then, after being involved with Trek for so long in one way or another, I might just be hallucinating. Anyway, via Slashdot: The Laser Diagnostics lab at the Physics Department of the University of Queensland has a page about how they took the Enterprise and put her in their X2 Super-Orbital Expansion Tube to see how she would stand up to the kind of accelerations that a spaceplane would have to deal with in the high upper atmosphere. (And yes, they know that she's not intended for that kind of work.) She did pretty well, apparently...
Now I have just got to find out what's going on with these people. Er, pandas. ...I see at least a couple of "stock" characters: the chipper, cute kid, the wise old mentor doctor... the bad guy with the eye-patch...
(But I'm still wondering what the "-Z" is for.)
("Oh jeez," Peter is muttering, "more anime stuff!" But even he can see the point of this. Meanwhile, at least he now knows what to get me this Yuletide...)
And not just in LA. Giant sunspots 484 and 486 continue to transit the face of the sun, spitting off X-class solar flares every now and then. This prominence, according to Spaceweather.com, is as tall as thirty Earths...
They go on to say: "...On Sunday, Oct. 26th, there were two such blasts -- one from each sunspot. The explosions hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space and somewhat toward Earth.
"Because of these events, sky watchers should be alert for auroras during the nights ahead. High-latitude sites such as Alaska, Canada and US northern border states from Maine to Washington are favored, as usual, but auroras could descend to lower latitudes as well. Forecasters estimate a 25% chance of severe geomagnetic storming when the incoming CMEs sweep past Earth and deliver (probably glancing) blows to our planet's magnetic field."
For these parts, anyway, where "really, really cold" usually means -5C. ...Everything is gently silvered around the edges, as if God dusted the whole area with a really high grade of confectioners' sugar last night. Gravel doesn't crunch underfoot: it's like stone. Leaves glitter. The big long-dead oak tree across the field is tastefully adorned with rooks, all holding still, their feathers fluffed up against the cold; and at the top of the tree, like a Hallowe'en ornament, perches a single raven.
In the pre-birdsong silence, incoming red-eyes have begun to streak the sky. The only sound is the engine of a car heading up the road past the house -- and then, as it tries to take the curve onto the hill, the wheelspin-whine and hitting-the-gravel skrunnnnch! of the driver's attempt to control his/her skid on hitting the ice that inevitably forms there.
Take the digital camera outside for a few shots, and after no more than two minutes, your fingers are numb.
Usually when I coin a word I do it as a joke. Today I'm impelled to do it on purpose.
Probably somebody else has invented a better word for a feature in a program, or appliance, or whatever, that's supposed to make your life easier, and instead makes it more difficult...really annoyingly so.
Does anybody know how to turn off the damn "Search Inside The Book" feature, so that it doesn't bring up tens of thousands of useless, irrelevant items in a search for a single book?
This feature has great sucktionality. Used sparingly, used only when you want it, it would be super. But not all the time!!
Note also an associated piece of naughtiness about halfway down the "How It Works" page. You input your search terms. You get those tens of thousands of results thrown up to you. Let's say that in the first page of results you see a sentence or so that looks like it's from the book you need. (And bearing in mind the sheer number of results that come up, this seems unlikely.) You click on that sentence to see the rest of the page on which the sentence appears. But then it turns out that you'd better already be registered with Amazon.com as a customer...because if you're not, you'll get no result from clicking on that link you want. They're holding the rest of your search for ransom until you give them your e-mail address and other personal info.
Normally I would resist going to the Barnes & Noble site. (Personal reasons, nothing important.) But this feature will drive me to that site if Amazon doesn't fix it so that its use in searches is elective rather than imposed.
Just my opinion. I've always felt kindly toward Amazon, but they're on the brink of losing my business.
This picture of him is probably my favorite because it's the first one I ever took of him: we were having lunch at the restaurant by the Boat Basin in Central Park.
Today we go into Dublin to celebrate -- a good Indian restaurant for dinner, and yet another discussion (I bet) of the upcoming Last Rewrite of The Ring. Business as usual...
...none of which would be much fun without him. We're seventeen years together now. He is my world; he makes it all happen.
That review in the blog entry of a couple days ago made me start thinking about the reviews I see a little more often than the ones in print: I mean the reviews on Amazon.
There are writers who'll tell you they pay no attention to the reviews to be found on Amazon and at the Barnes & Noble site. I usually find this kind of hard to comprehend, though there must be those who genuinely don't look...or don't care. Yes, some writers will tell you that the only reviews worth paying attention to (and not always even those) are the ones done by professional reviewers, the ones that appear in the trades. Certainly all you have to do to find evidence on which to base this case is go over to Amazon World (which is worth a glimpse if you haven't seen it).
Well, other writers can do what they like. I do look at those reviews from time to time. I hope it's not always simply ego making me do it. It can't always be bad for you to see someone saying that they liked your book, can it? God knows, there are times in the middle of the night when every writer wants to hear that...
And then there are the negative reviews. Some of them are funny. But at the same time I often find myself looking at one or another of them and thinking, "Well, never mind if that's funny...is it right?" Certainly the "professionals" don't have a monopoly on correctly identifying something that doesn't work. So I look at the reviews with some care. You never can tell when you'll run into something useful...
Here are some from Amazon and B&N that caught my attention recently. I'm not always going to comment...
awsome!!!!!! this book is great! i say if you like adventure and you read thick books then this is the book for you!
Um...okay. (Why do I keep thinking of that Kliban cartoon? "I really go for a man in a thick suit!" ...I see a lot of variants on this theme, though, from people who find it unusual to read a book in a single sitting. But here's the other side of the "thick book" argument:
Different... I thought this book was strange and it did not entertain my interest that I thought it would. I thought the plot was not as good as it should have been, and the boncept it was based on i thought was extremely poor. if you like confusing and thick books i guess you would like these books...
Great!!!! I think this is one of the best books she has written. All of her wizardry books are fab. I hope she writes more. I think that all her books should get 5 stars and 2 thumbs up, and mabye even better! --
A lot of the DW reviews are like that. But if I start to get cocky, there are always plenty like this:
I never could finish it! The sequel to So You Want to Be a Wizard. I loved that book so I though I would like this one. I liked every other wizard book she has written except this one. I always fell asleep reading it. The spells and magic stuff are cool but the plot just wasn't as good as High Wizardry, A Wizard Abroad, and the Book of Night With Moon. It got so boring after they had to tell Nita's parents that they were wizards. I didn't even know that Nita hadn't died (since I never finished it) until I read the next book in the series. I give it 3 stars because the plot kinda sucked but the Stuff was cool
"The plot kinda sucked but the Stuff was cool." That's the kind of thing that makes you wake up at night thinking, "Stuff. What does 'stuff' mean? And how the heck can I do more of it?..."
And there are some that are equivocal:
Great but not that great... This book was well put together but got me really confused. I could not figure out who was who and what was what. Otherwise this book was pretty good.
Uh...make up your mind?! ...And a few review titles in passing: "I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" ... "Great Story" ... "Good,but not as good as the first book."
And one which brought me up short:
This book must have taken a lot of imagination! This book is so creative! I read the first three chapters, and then I couldn't put it down! You realy get to know the characters in this book. And then you start thinking like the characters. And pretty soon every thing that happens to them happens to you.
Sadly disappointing... I enjoyed the first two books in this series very much and was dissapointed by this installment. Diane Duane does not usually give easy answers to her moral dilemmas but in this story both the dilemma and the story were too easy... As a convicted Christian I find the idea that the 'lone power' ie satan can be redeemed repellent - this stuff is poisoning kid's minds. This sequel was obviously written to milk the orginal concepts and make a bit more money and I think I would admire Diane Duane infinitely more if she had stuck to her integrity as an author.
Hmm. Well, leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether my integrity is intact in this regard, I really think that -- assuming an omnipotent and ultimately compassionate Deity -- then for a mortal to declare his or her own limits on how much ability said Deity has to redeem is probably futile. Yes, I know this is a heresy. I forget which one. I'll sort it out with Her some other time.
Is "really wanting to write another book with the same characters" the same as "milking the orginal concepts [to] make a bit more money"? Seems some people do get this idea...but trying to combat it head-on instantly brings up charges of "protesting too much". Oh well...
Frightful... This book. What can I say? If the theology/morality wasn't so pointless, affectated and plain ridiculous...it would still be a crime against humanity on the part of the publishers.
Wow. Better tell the people at Harcourt not to open any mail from the International Court of Justice at The Hague...
Yet, in other comments: "The best", "Best of the series!", "Definitly the best book in the series so far". And charmingly, "In my next life, I wanna be Peach."
As regards A Wizard Abroad: "The best of the series." "Amazing!" "Grrrrrrreat!" And:
It's good, but terrible in context with the others.
Uh... This will probably make sense some day. Soon, I hope. ...Meanwhile, this next one is particularly intriguing: I think it's the enthusiasm that captivates me.
this book sucked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(many more !s)... A Wizard Abroad [wizardry series NO.4]" this was not even a good book to go with the wizardry series. The only good parts of the book are as follow: 1. It takes place in ireland. 2. It has custom spells. 3. Most of the people are wizards. 4. Theres one kiss in it 5. The main character is a girl. And there are many things i hated about it i'll give you five examples. 1. There are few spells in it. 2. The spells where weak and pitiful. 3. Everyone is a wizard. 4. There are few battles. 5. The kiss at the end took up two pages. So, as you can see the book sucked in almost all aspects
Other comments: "Not the best in the series, but okay", "Not bad, but could be better", "Well... definitly not the best...", as well as "Super," "I love these books!".
...You get the idea. The reviews for Wizard's Dilemma and A Wizard Alone are equally mixed. Balancing all the possible negatives, in my view, are the positive reviews given them by people with terminal diseases and people involved with autism. These have come to me mostly in letters: I'm not going to quote them here.
So now a new book is out, and the first review has already appeared: it's a kindly one. Others won't be. I'll probably look in again in a month or so and laugh, or shake my head...and get on with another book. It's all I can do...
I've been putting things in and taking them out... Meanwhile, if you're tired of looking at the white-on-white color scheme, look down at the bottom of the third column...the links under "Style sheet preview" will offer you some other schemes to try out.
posted by Diane: 10/19/2003 01:57:21 PM | link to this post
"Female characters look like they will be given short shrift in Spitfire stories, as Mr Elliot believes JK Rowling was wrong to have made Harry Potter's friend Hermione his equal.
"'It is typical of modern children's books in which there is a boy and a girl and the girl is as good as the boy,' he said.
"[Richmal Crompton's] Just William is a much better read for boys. Violet Elizabeth Bott was a whingeing, snivelling sneak who was always frightened. That is how I would like the girls to be."
...However, this gent seems to be remembering some other Violet Elizabeth Bott, possibly one in an alternate universe. The Violet Elizabeth in the William books that I read was rarely afraid of anything, and was best known for the (lisping but utterly calculated) threat to "thcream and thcream and THCREAM until I'm thick!" (ominous pause) "I can...", thus effortlessly railroading the hopelessly outclassed boys around her into doing whatever she wanted. That's the kind of woman they want in their books now, huh? (grin) ...Bring her on.
A little background here from Mary Cadogan's Just William Through the Ages:
"William's attitudes towards members of the fair sex are well defined in the early books. On the whole he has little time for them. As Richmal Crompton was to write much later (in the 1962 Collectors' Digest Annual): 'He dislikes little girls, not only because he considers them to belong to an inferior order of being but also because he suspects them of being allies of the civilization that threatens his liberty.' (Throughout the saga he makes no secret of his contempt for civilization. His classic quote is: 'I don't WANT to behave like a civilized yuman bein'. I'd rather be a savage any day. I bet savages don't let themselves be dragged off to dotty ol' women when they'd rather go to see blood-curdlin' an' nerve-shatterin' westerns.')
"The fearful feminine threat to William's freedom is expressed in his skirmishes with a variety of village stereotypes like Miss Milton, the astringent martinet, and Mrs Monks, the vicar's wife, who, after having so many church functions wrecked by [William's gang,] the Outlaws, feels fully justified in foiling their knavish tricks. There are also those solemn ladies who are concerned with Higher Thought or Perfect Love or Psychic Phenomena whose doings both intrigue and repel William. Generally speaking, these female seekers of truth or appreciators of art are not over-responsive to the male sex. As Miss Featherstone of the Literary Society nervously predicts, 'as soon as you begin to have men in a thing it complicates it at once'.
"'On the whole William can cope fairly well with the most determined of elderly or middle-aged females. The direst threat to his noble (or ignoble) savage state comes in the form of that frill-bedecked, diminutive bundle of pertness that is Violet Elizabeth, the darling only child of the stinkingly rich sauce magnate who lives with his family at the Hall.
"William's first meeting with Violet Elizabeth in Still -- William is a classic example of the clash between the sexes. 'William, pirate and Red Indian and desperado, William, woman-hater and girl-despiser' finds his worst fears about girlish ghastliness realized when he is forced by his mother to go to tea at the Botts' and meet the lisping little horror. She has bubbly blonde curls, glowing like a golden halo, a squeaky-clean pink and white face and a filmy white lacy frock, from the ballet-type skirts of which peep white silk-socked legs and white buckskin shoes.
"She shamelessly imposes her will upon him by threatening tears (the famous threat to 'thcream and thcream' until she's 'thick' comes a little later). For William there is no escape from her tear-filling eyes and trembling lips as she insists that he plays 'little girlth gameth' with her, that he really likes 'all little girlth' and -- most humiliating and horrific of all -- that he wishes he was a little girl.
"Er -- yes. Honest I do," said the unhappy William. "Kith me," she said, raising her glowing face. William was broken. He brushed her cheek with his.
"But even worse torture is to follow that notorious kiss as she piles on the final indignity: 'Now leth play fairieth. I'll thow you how.' He spends the rest of the afternoon agonizingly, 'in the character of a gnome attending upon Violet Elizabeth in the character of the fairy queen.'"
So much for William, who, for all his "savagery", reveals himself as a soft-hearted and irredeemable weenie, or, as Nigel Molesworth would say, "uterly wet and a weed."
amica esse videtur istorum hominum rhythmicorum. (She appears to be a girlfriend of one of those rhythmic-oration people.) sed, ut scis, (But, as you know) quis homines huiusmodi intellegere potest? (Who can understand persons of this sort?) colloquuntur equidem cum ista eo tantum, quod scortum perfectum esse videtur. (Verily, they converse with her for this reason only, namely, that she appears to be a complete whore.)
(Blogger now collapses in laughter, frightening the cats.)
However fleetingly. (Yes, it's probably "premium content..." ...sorry.) (We also made the Hollywood Reporter, in the October 3 issue, but that too is premium content, and I won't bother linking to it.) From a report on Mipcom, which started today in Cannes:
"Mexico's Televisa is fielding its latest telenovela, "Dark Fate"; Canada's Chum is pushing reality show "The Morning After"; Germany's Tandem is touting its Siegfried saga, "The Ring"; Oz's Southern Star is highlighting its comedy "The Sleepover Club"; and Indian sellers like Star TV will be pushing Hindi movies."
"The reformed drug addict and gambler admitted to selling his best friend's home and pocketing the proceeds as well as working up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scheme to find Montezuma's gold in Mexico. "
...Now if only I were clear about exactly how people are supposed to find it. I stumbled over it just now while looking for something else....
Aha, got it sorted. From their main page, click on the "Books" tab, then look down the navigation menu on the left: under "Your Favorites", click on "Teens." The link comes up about halfway down the ensuing page.
"Brain scans carried out on volunteers showed that when they suffered a social snub, the brain's 'pain centre' went into overdrive. The finding suggests that any emotional stress, such as the demise of a relationship or the loss of a loved one, might be far more closely linked to real pain than previously thought."
It comes with a Major Award certificate. And a box labeled FRA GI LE. ("Probably it's Italian...")
Dear heavens above, how am I going to keep Peter from trying to buy this thing? A Christmas Story is absolutely one of his favorite movies (probably just about tied with The War Lord and Victor, Victoria).
No, not the fairy tale by Comtesse d'Aulnoy (though that's on my mind at the minute too). This White Cat is the subject of one of the most famous old Irish poems, found written in the margins of a Latin manuscript copy which its author, an Irish monk, had been writing in a central European scriptorium during the eighth century. (The original manuscript is now in the Stadtsbibliothek in St. Gallen, in the northeastern part of Switzerland, near where it was written.)
Pangur Ban, "[My] White Cat", is the title of the poem in Irish Gaelic. It's just turned up in a collection of best-loved Irish-language poems, "The Great Book of Gaelic" or "An leabhar m�r", published online by Archipelago. The poems in the collection were selected by a group of Irish and Scottish poets, each of whom nominated a poem and a favorite translation: some of the links on the "Great Book" page have sound as well, so you can hear the poem in question being read as Gaeilge.
(Incidentally, there's a downloadable .PDF version of the whole journal here, if you're interested.
With me, he's always been tied with Peter Davidson as Best Doctor -- PD for a Doctor who radiates compassion, TB for one who is a child in an adult's body, relentlessly funny but also essentially serious. ...Not to mention the scarf. I crocheted that scarf once. Only once. In any case, I favored the Baker Doctor enough that he turned up once in a place he very much shouldn't have been, in my prose...well, bearing in mind some other writers' problems in this direction, perhaps the less said the better.
However, something else has come up (as we say). UK and Irish TV-watchers know Tom Baker's as a voice which turns up doing all kinds of commercial work.
Here are some outtakes from a recent recording session. Says Warren Ellis, that amazing creature, "Tom Baker is legendarily somewhat conflicted about doing voiceovers for ****ty-product advertising. " (Sorry for the asterisking, but younger readers do pass through here.)
...Uh, no kidding. Warning: the linked .MP3 is not suitable for people who have trouble with the F word. Or hearing a voice like that of a slightly renegade or cranked-off Deity pronouncing it.
Autumnal weather is swinging through Ireland: the northwest wind is blowing, and the temperatures have dropped hard from the Indian-summer range we've been experiencing for the past couple of weeks. Last night was the first frost. So today there's a fire in the fireplace, and the beef stew recipe below (properly, it's a daube) is on the stove.
The recipe dates back to a time early in the last decade when I stumbled into that mysterious and useful French information system, Minitel. What brought me to the National Tripe Butchers' site, I have no idea. But there I found two super things: a recipe for heart with garlic and red wine that produces the only genuinely delicious -- indeed, the only genuinely edible -- beef heart I've ever had (three days' marinating in that harsh red wine and some balsamic vinegar seems to do the trick; when Queen Prezmyra says "O, I could eat their hearts with garlic!", that was the recipe she had in mind...), and this recipe.
I translated it, installed it in my copy of Meal Master, and set it loose on the Net some time back in MM format, posting it (I think) to rec.food.cooking. Then various disk crashes and restores caused my various MM databases to become less than complete, and the recipe went missing. Today, though, I went hunting for it and found it (stripped of all attributions) at Chef2Chef. No matter: I recognize my own recipe-writing style, and at least I found the thing again...
So here it is, restored to MM format.
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
Title: Shin of Beef Stewed in Red Wine Categories: Beef, French, Meat, Stew Yield: 6 Servings
6 oz Smoked bacon or salt pork 1 ea Large onion 1 tb Olive oil 5 lb Shin beef off the bone 2 ea Cloves garlic 1 ea Bouquet garni 8 oz Red wine (or more) 1 ts Salt 8 oz Beef stock or water
Cut the bacon or salt pork into small cubes and put them, with a tablespoon of olive oil, into a heavy and fairly wide iron or earthenware pot. When the bacon fat runs, add a large sliced onion and stir about until slightly brown. On top, arrange the shin of beef, off the bone, into thick pieces. Add the cloves of garlic, crushed but not chopped, and the bouquet garni (either one of the "instant" ones, or a small bunch of parsley, thyme and bayleaf, tied up with a string). Pour in a large glass of red wine (about 8 oz) and let all come to a fast boil for 4-5 minutes. Add about the same amount of beef stock or water, and allow to boil again. Add salt. . Cover the pot with paper or foil and a well-fitting lid. Transfer to a very slow oven, 290 degrees F or gas mark 1, and in about 3 hours it will be cooked. Or you can half-cook it one day, remove it, and finish it the next. Serve with potatoes or rice to soak up the sauce. (Egg noodles also work well if you thicken the sauce slightly.) This dish can also be simmered *very* slowly on top of the stove.
MMMMM
This is a recipe for which the French verb mijoter was invented: that lowest simmer, at which the surface of the steaming liquid merely trembles and only the very, very occasional bubble rises to trouble it. After three hours, the meat has reached a tenderness that still has texture. But for this you also have to have shin beef, which can stand up to the long cooking. If your butcher can't get you shin beef for this, find a butcher who can. It's not worth it otherwise.
"A 'moving sale' sign in front of one of author Anne Rice's mansions drew bargain hunters and curious New Orleans residents. Susan Roesgen of member station WWNO reports on the vampire novelist's rummage sale that was not only sequins and black lace, but also Christmas albums and plant stands. "
...One of her mansions? Ah me... Heaven hasten the day when we can have just a single mansion.
That said...how many rooms is a mansion, these days?
Is it really "Post A Picture Of A Cat On Your Blog Day"?
No problem. Herewith Ms. C. J. Beemer (left) and her pet, the irrepressible Bubble.
...Meanwhile, today's horrible discovery (while watching a DVD of "Read Or Die"): the Intervideo DVD-playing software allows you to run the DVD image as the Windows desktop.
I owe my old friend a call this afternoon, when it gets to be a Decent Hour in LA. Tom it was who in 1979 or thereabouts read the newly published The Door Into Fire and somehow, unaccountably, came to the conclusion that its author might be someone who would like to write animation. And he was right! He and the inimitable Duane Poole were my story editors on Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, for which they asked me to write some scripts...and with infinite patience they guided me through the process, with the result that I now have sixty or so scripts, various European live-action TV series, and a prime-time live-action project under my belt (presently undergoing its fifth rewrite. Thanks loads, guys...).
Tom has, of course, moved on to (theoretically) deathless fame as one of the two Senior Advisory wizards for the NY metropolitan area in the "Young Wizards" series. But now I see that The Big Cartoon Database has done him and Duane a naughty. Do a search in there on "Diane Duane" and one finds that I have been credited with fourteen scripts for the series, whereas I only actually wrote two. I think we can chalk this one up to the dangers of "gang credits". Still, it seems unfair to my mentors, who (I'm pretty sure) wrote the majority of the others...
Meanwhile, I see that a rogue apostrophe has crept into the title of the Gargoyles script Peter and I wrote. "I'll Met By Moonlight?" Pleeeeeeeease!!
Peter was up all night waiting for her. Now he's asleep on the couch, more or less exhausted from pushing forty hours' wakefulness, and I can write this.
Bubble went out yesterday afternoon, before we went down to Baltinglass to do some food shopping and a couple of errands. She wasn't at home when we came back.
This by itself wouldn't have been a cause for concern. But she's always prompt about mealtimes. She didn't come in for dinner. She didn't come in later. She didn't come in in the middle of the night, as she sometimes does, with something freshly killed.
The night before last, Peter heard a fox yipping in the pasture behind the house. It's not a place Bubble normally would go. She prefers to cross the road and jump up and over the eight-foot wall into the Big Estate to hang out there. But was she out frogging, last night? She goes down to the pond for that...and that's where the fox was.
This morning Peter went out with cellphone and spear to see what he could see in the back field. He found, not Bubble, but the body of one of the young swans which had been coming into their adult feathers. When we got back from P-Con in Dublin, there had still been two of them (out of a total of six, three killed earlier in the season in uncertain circumstances, the fourth gone we weren't sure where). Monday afternoon we saw two cygnets walking up the slight hill from the pond with their parents. Tuesday we saw only one. Today there are none, and Peter found the ripped-up body of one of them. That was a big bird, even immature. Whatever killed it could have made two bites of a little cat Bubble's size.
We hope all the normal things: that she wandered into a neighbor's yard and got shut into a shed, that she's lost and confused somewhere. But our hopes, to be realistic, are not high. Not that I wouldn't laugh and feed her without complaint when she came in, shouting as usual, in the middle of the night. She is a goofy, valiant, loud-mouthed kitty who can be forgiven much even when killing things messily in the kitchen.
Goddess grant she's still on life. If not...may her passing have been swift.
A Wind from the South
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The Sun chucked an X-17 level flare at us this morning -- not something that happens every day. 
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This picture of him is probably my favorite because it's the first one I ever took of him: we were having lunch at the restaurant by the Boat Basin in Central Park. 
(Why do I keep thinking of that Kliban cartoon? "I really go for a man in a thick suit!" ...I see a lot of variants on this theme, though, from people who find it unusual to read a book in a single sitting. But here's the other side of the "thick book" argument:
