Now a Florida salvage company has found her and is salvaging her. "'[The cargo] goes from pepper sauce to pickles to Champagne to mustard to patent medicine,' Mr. Stemm said. 'They're in beautiful condition and they tell a beautiful story of what the North thought the South needed after the war.'
"(He said he was puzzled about one thing. 'It's the beginning of Reconstruction,' he said. 'In this valuable space, why were they sending down pickles?'")
...about some of the people whose searches bring them to our sites.
On the Owlsprings.com site, at "Homeward", our informal bio / biblio / homestuff site, is a story called "Bears." It's one of a series of short stories I've written (and continue to write) based in Switzerland, my "second home" and someplace I most dearly love. The story is fantasy/SF...sort of.
The story has been there for a long while now. What slightly unsettles me is the Google search which brought someone to that story today. Someone typed in these words:
"Is the polar bear aggressive toward treats"
Well, no, so long as they're warm-blooded and breathing. Like YOU! This is the only ursine on the planet which is exclusively carnivorous. This is one of the few creatures on Earth which can only be hunted successfully, these days, with human beings as bait!
(shudder)
"Treats??""
(a) Who has these in their back yard and is seriously worrying about whether feeding them is dangerous? Alaskans, tell me it ain't so!!
(b) Who's considering going to their local zoo and throwing the PBs "treats"? Oh dear. Even the bears in Bern only get figs and carrots from the tourists. (Though there is a sign: "No meat, no soft drinks." Like other such signs -- the one in Stratford-on-Avon over the Avon that says PLEASE DO NOT JUMP FROM THE BRIDGE -- it makes you wonder. Both about the courtesy of the British -- only in Britain do they ask you PLEASE not to do what your mom always warned you about ["If Dairine said, 'Let's jump off the Brooklyn Bridge,' would you do it??"] -- and about Peter's First Law: "If they have a sign telling you not to do it...however obvious and stupid it might be...then someone, sometime, did it.")
...I'm still shuddering. Treats??? Treats??? Eeeesh.
The voice in the kitchen, carving the Thanksgiving bird, says: "You don't need to run faster than the polar bear. You just need to run faster than the guy running beside you."
Oh, thank you so much for reminding me. :)
(And a very late afterthought: whoever did that search might have meant "threats", and misspelled it. Boy, I hope so. But Heaven knows I've had to fix all the meta tags in our food pages to deal with the constant misspellings "recipie" and "recipee", and their rogue-apostrophe variant, "recipe's"....)
"'Lock up your daughters, give me the key,' Mr. Stewart began. Then, 'I usually don't do this without pay.'
"(The spirit of conga is on us — give us one little verse.)
"'Lock up your daughters, safely at home,' Mr. Stewart sang. 'Lock up your daughters where fancy cannot roam. Whether your daughter is pretty or plain, once she has done it, she'll do it again!'
"(Oh, do go on!)
"'No, no, that's enough. I'll only sing more for money.'"
(chuckle)
posted by Diane: 11/25/2003 09:08:06 AM | link to this post
I want one for the cats!
posted by Diane: 11/24/2003 09:27:13 AM | link to this post
Thursday, November 20, 2003
They're baaaaa-aaaaaack
I swear, you can't turn your back on the Sun for a moment, just now. Sunspot 484 and its buddies 486 and 488 have swung back around from the far side of the Sun and are throwing plasma at us again. Once again Ireland is having aurorae -- the wavefront of the CME responsible would have hit the Earths magnetic field around 0800 UTC -- and it looks like a good night for further rainbowy shenanigans. ..
Some readers of Wizard's Holiday, considering events detailed toward the end of the book, have been heard muttering that they are Too Damn Much Like Reality. NASA tells us we have nothing to worry about: the Sun has misbehaved this way on the downside of previous solar cycles. So we're nowhere near "bubblestorm."
So now we're official (and they even spelled Peter's name right...)
This link is probably premium-content, but never mind. "BERLIN -- Kristanna Loken ('Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines'), Benno Furmann ('The Order') and Alicia Witt ('Two Weeks Notice') will star in the $23 million production of 'The Ring,' based on the Germanic myth about the ring of the Nibelungs, which inspired Richard Wagner's opera 'The Ring Cycle' as well as J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings.'
"Furmann stars as Siegfried the dragon-slayer, with Loken playing Brunhild, daughter of the god Odin, and Witt as Kriemhild, princess of Burgund.
"Rola Bauer and Tim Halkin of Munich-based Tandem Communications are exec producing the project with financial backing from fellow Munich financier VIP Media Funds. Pic is set to star shooting Monday (Nov. 16, 2003) in Cape Town, South Africa. Tandem is handling international distribution.
"Uli Edel is directing from a screenplay by Diane Duane and Peter Morwood in cooperation with Edel from a story by Robert Cochran ('24,' 'Attila'). Konstantin Thoeren is producing the film, which also stars Julian Sands and Max von Sydow.
"The fantasy-adventure is the story of a simple swordsmith's son who repeatedly saves his country, not knowing that he is heir to a throne."
I'd heard about it on and off, through other people's blogs, over the last ten days or so. This morning, when it more or less shoved itself under my nose via Blog Irish (what a great name for a blog...) I thought I'd give it a try.
"Female Score: 253 / Male Score: 849 / The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!"
...Okay, it says that it works best with excerpts of more than five hundred words. So I pulled a 2000-word chunk out of the middle of Wizard's Holiday, and got this result:
"Female Score: 2533 / Male Score: 3223 / The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!"
"Female Score: 6721 / Male Score: 8784 / The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!"
...(chuckle) And this result from part of a book frequently mistaken for a romance. (shrug) I guess I must use a lot of "boy words", or something. I need to take a closer look at the algorithm they're using...in my copious spare time.
"My son left and moved into a house with this fellow and another bloke. They would dress up in costumes like wolves and take my son on a leash to South Bank."
"So, anyway, like I said I don't actually have a television, and I haven't seen this show, and it doesn't even sound interesting to me, but I've been told that what happens is that a bunch of guys who are gay--so, let's face it, they know what chicks dig--come to your apartment and get rid of all your old crappy stuff, like the couch with a stack of books under one corner instead of a leg and that rug that smells funny, and the cinderblock bookcases, and then they just give you a bunch of good new stuff. Apparently they also give you new clothes of the kind that increase your probability of meeting cool girls. Now, as I said, I haven't seen this show, but it sounds like an unbelievably good deal to me, and I just want to say: 'what kind of girly-man would let these guys change his life around?' Me! I would! I'm that kind of girly-man! And, in case the folks who make that show happen to be reading this, I will be on your show in case it is still on t.v. and you guys need more straight guys who are big slobs! Not like I expect there to be a big shortage or anything. I don't know for sure, but I have a pretty good idea that these sweat pants, for example, are not exactly working in my favor, female-wise. Now, see, maybe du Toit thinks that these guys expect you to have sex with them or something in exchange for the new couch and stuff, in which case it's not as great a deal as it originally sounds like. I mean, that'd have to be a really good couch. But, anyway, nobody is forcing these guys to take a new couch, right? And nobody is saying "look, you are a loser if you don't get a new couch," right? So what I'm thinking is that consenting adults should be able to give couches to whomever they like, and that the government has no business telling us who we can exchange furniture with. But anyway, back to the other point: I don't think you have to worry about these guys wanting to have sex with you, Kim. You see, you are probably a slob like me, and they probably aren't interested."
Oh, and that last paragraph:
"So, though men have ruled the world for all of recorded history, and though conservatism is everywhere ascendant, the duToitified conservative castrati wail and screech; self-proclaimed paragons of maleness emasculated by a Cheerios commercial and four episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, thus, in the end, confirming their own fears about the decline of man.
That's probably not going to be its name. There are too many other things around at the moment with "Ring" in the title.
But never mind that. After four years of seeing nothing but paper, of pushing characters around through draft after draft, the production has finally come up with something visual, something Peter and I can stare at and think, "It's really going to happen...!"
Our connection in South Africa, where shooting is about to begin, sent us this very rough bit of cut-together tape. He says: "[The producers say,] Just make sure they know that the title is a working title only, and that this material is not made with a professional camera, or by a professional cameraman."
The file is 6 megabytes of "Real" format video, an ".rm" file. In it you can see some of the sets being built: artists working on fine detail: an early CGI rough of one battle scene, done by Uncharted Territory, who did the special effects for Independence Day and Godzilla: and the fight arranger working with some of the on-scene fighters in South Africa, while the director (Uli Edel) watches. The background music is by JCR.
"Offense is fine," says one of the characters in Wizards at War to another, regarding the imminent invasion, "but you need defense too. How are we defining the defensive volume?"
The Planetary Senior for Earth indicates the surfaces of several concentric spheres, five hundred or eight hundred or a thousand AU out, and then points at the innermost volume, a hyperbolic solid rather than a spherical one. "But this is the 'line in the sand'," she says. "Nobody comes past the heliopause."
It looks, though, as if Voyager 1 is slowly approaching that point (or zone) heading outward. Readings from the craft's sensors suggest that it may be encountering the "terminal shock", the point at which the Solar wind drops below the speed of sound. ...Or maybe it isn't: the experts are arguing about the results....
And apparently have agreed with in the past, without knowing it. Philip Pullman wrote a terrific thing just now for the New York Times on how fantasy is simply what you sometimes have to write if your mind is set that way. He glances sideways at, but doesn't quite charge full tilt into, the idiot idea some people have that writing about "real things" is necessarily more valuable and useful than writing about "unreal things". But we seem to be of one mind about the business of getting the writing done. This is not a democracy: if it's going to work, we have to be despots. We can be benevolent ones, if we like, if the circumstances permit...but (in novel writing at least) no one else gets a vote as to what to do to make the story work best. Doing what we do -- I'll extend my vanity so far as to put myself in the same boat with Pullman -- is a heart's-blood matter. And nobody but God and I get to vote on when my heart beats faster, and for what.
Ooo, that sounded fierce. But it's nice to know I'm not delusional when I think these things. Or if I am, millionaires share the delusion. (grin)
Out of Ambit seems to have turned up as an Interesting Blog (and an Interesting Newcomer as well!) on Technorati. And in the middle of both lists, as well! Alas, my swoll'n ego.... But I have to say that this comes as a pleasant surprise on a day which was otherwise taken up largely with the logistics surrounding a visit to my bank manager (sure, the bank's only twenty miles away across the county as the raven flies... but I could have been halfway to Switzerland in the time it took us to get over there. All it takes is for you to get stuck behind one manure spreader...).
To all of you who might have seen OOA on Technorati, greetings. Please don't expect much but vague babblings at the moment. Peter and I are waiting to get the go-ahead for the final polish on the Ring project (some details here and here for those interested: you can find more by searching on "Ring" -- just hit that PicoSearch button), I'm finishing one book and am in the middle of another (which is a good thing, since it's due at the publisher at the end of the month...), and every time I open the back door, eight million beech leaves come blowing in, meaning I have to stop whatever I'm doing and sweep the floor again. But you're very welcome nonetheless. Pull up a virtual chair and make yourselves at home....
"The target of the temporal assassination was Sarah Connor, a Los Angeles-based waitress. In 1984, where Schwarzenegger has been sent, Connor was about to give birth to a son, John -- who, it is alleged, will become the greatest Democratic operative California has ever known...."
A Wind from the South
