NYT returns to SF/F
Posted 04 Sep 10
It’s been a few years since the New York Times Book Review tried a regular science fiction review column. Dave Itzkoff’s tenure was notable for the criticism directed at his column from the SF/F community. Whether or not you agree with the sort of vitriolic assessments Itzkoff attracted, it was striking how few of his columns actually reviewed, you know, new science fiction novels.
But that’s in the past. Sam Tanenhaus has apparently signed up Jeff VanderMeer for another go, and his first column — called “Science Fiction Chronicle” — appears this week.
Five books reviewed, from Ian McDonald’s latest to a French author I’ve never heard of (Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud) to a visual compilation of mid-century space-tech advertising (ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION). I’m impressed: a wide range, and all interesting.
Furthermore, VanderMeer is an accomplished author in his own right, someone whose qualifications and energy cannot be doubted.
High hopes! And credit where it’s due to the NYT, which has struggled with genre fiction for a long time. Now if only they’ll open a column devoted to romance titles – which, after all, are the single largest segment of books published in the United States …
This post indexed as: Reading, Writing
Grade-School Gourmet
Posted 01 Sep 10
Some of our family members love CALVIN AND HOBBES. Those familiar with the books — like, if you’ve read them all aloud about ninety times — will recall Calvin’s favorite breakfast cereal, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. It turns out these are unavailable in grocery stores (we’ve looked), so our son went ahead and wrote up his own recipe. He thought the rest of the world might want to know too.
“SUGAR BOMBS
2 pounds of sugar in a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. Add 2 pounds of: 1/2 pound milk chocolate and 1-1/2 pounds dark chocolate. Add cookie dough and cook on high for 10 min. Then chop up to 1/2 inch circles. bake for 20 min. Put chocolate sauce around. Put in freezer for 20 min. Allow to lose coolness. That makes – I don’t know how much. Enjoy!”
I lost my coolness many years ago, sadly, but this does seem like a good way to start the day.
This post indexed as: Personal
Goldman = Cheesy 70′s Restaurant
Posted 22 Apr 10
Although the big picture is clear enough — Goldman Sachs deceived one client on behalf of another, leading to $000,000,000′s of losses — the whole Paulson-Abacus-ACA-etc deal is complicated. Other commentators have tried analogies to explain the mess. Here’s mine.
In high school, in central Missouri in the late 1970′s, I worked at a buffet-style restaurant right off the interstate (“Busses Welcome!” which tells you all you need to know). For a flat price you got all you could eat from a long food line. Naturally, the owners were most interested in minimizing how much people consumed — at least of the expensive items. The entire place was basically designed to encourage diners to fill up on bread and celery, then leave.
Thus the plates were unusually heavy and a little smaller than normal, and only available at the beginning of the food line. The line began with a huge bowl of iceberg lettuce, then an array of cheap vegetables, then some starch like rice “pilaf” and “buttered” noodles and bread pudding. (Never, never, ever eat bread pudding in a cheap restaurant! Think about where the stale bread comes from …) Finally, at the very end, a teenage lineboy (that would be me) sliced pieces of ham and roast beef, kept warm under heat lamps.
The name of the game was to give as little meat as possible to the customers. So the lineboys were taught to cut slices like gossamer. Thin enough to see through, almost.
But that wasn’t enough. Imagine a standing rib roast, or a full ham: there’s fat and gristle on them, too. Not so much, actually, but after a busy night, there might be a quart or two of trimmings left in the catchment pan. Eventually, the owners decided they wanted to see as little trimmings as possible. No more waste!
What they meant was, leave the fat, etc, on the edges of the slices, so the meat looked a little bigger. But bits of crud still fell off; the trimmings pan still filled up (albeit more slowly). I resolved to get down to zero.
And this is how: instead of allowing the trimmings to fall into the pan, I slipped them onto the cutting board. Then, after cutting some meat, I would slap the slice down on on top of the trimmings, slide the knife under both, and transfer everything to the unsuspecting diner’s plate. Done with flash and verve, the result would be a rather lumpy but thick-appearing serving. Only at his table would the mark discover that, under a paper-thin wisp of meat, he’d been given a bonus quarter-cup of gristle and rind.
You can see the metaphor. Goldman sliced and diced tranches of mortgage-backed securities into CDO’s they then sold to various suckers (who then sold many of them on to smaller customers, which is why school districts and municipalities in Europe and the US are now broke). Instead of even reasonably solid mortgages, however, they let John Paulson hand-pick the rottenest, rock-bottom worthless toxic waste available to package up — just like the inedible fragments of fat and gristle I served to customers, long ago.
Hey, it’s what my bosses told me they wanted. Which suggests other implications of the metaphor — about designing proper incentive systems.
Anyway, Paulson went on to bet against these CDOs (by buying credit-default swaps that paid off when the CDOs collapsed in value, as they’d been designed to do), which is where the metaphor runs out of steam. But you get the idea.
The restaurant had other tricks. We believed the decor was deliberately designed to minimize appetite (lots of browns and greens), for example, and that the piped-in music was selected to subtly nauseate people. (Of course, the latter may have just been a teenager’s typical reaction to the oldies-muzak programming; the cooks had much better music in the kitchen.)
The place went out of business more than twenty years ago. Wall Street shows no signs of a similar fate.
This post indexed as: Finance, Personal
Cat Burglars Everywhere
Posted 16 Apr 10
There’s been a flurry of books and reporting on international burglary rings recently. First was Scott Andrew Selby’s FLAWLESS, an account of the biggest gem heist ever, when a gang of Italian thieves spent more than two years preparing to rob a vault in the center of Antwerp’s diamond district. Then the New Yorker ran a story about a diffuse Balkan gang, also stealing from jewelers across Europe, but using opposite techniques: little more than smash-and-grabs, with almost no preparation. Still, they too have walked away with millions.
Finally, Wired has just published an account of a remarkably talented, diligent and hardworking Canadian thief, Gerald Blanchard. In addition to exceptional mechanical and lock skills, Blanchard routinely infiltrated banks long before the actual robbery — sometimes even before new branches had finished construction — to copy locks, take measurements, install his own monitoring equipment, and even arrange hidey-holes in case he was interrupted during the job.
Read all three stories, and you can’t help being impressed at the ingenuity and plain effort that goes into liberating goods from their owners. Besides fodder for screenwriters, these accounts illustrate just what the police are up against.
Interestingly, Blanchard and the Italian gang were caught, tried and imprisoned. The smash-and-grabbers, however — though some are in jail — have mostly eluded capture.
Sometimes simple is best.
This post indexed as: Crime
Fielding Armor on the Cheap
Posted 07 Apr 10
While the Pentagon spends hundreds of billions on gold-plated aircraft and vast ranks of specialized armor, poorer adversaries are doing just fine with Toyotas.
Asymmetric warfare is uneven not just because a small, light insurgent force can tie up huge armies more or less forever, but because they can do it at much, much less cost. William Owens’ article is a little dry, but it makes the point that anyone can field an effective counterforce with very little money. And not just trucks (though what budget-conscious insurgent wouldn’t prefer an off-the-lot Toyota Hilux to a $150,000 Humvee?) You want, say, tactical missles? No problem:
Even the two most sophisticated weapons systems specified, the ATGMs and MANPADs, are cheap and readily available to almost any state or state supported entity. A number of the older and more conventional weapons systems can be made substantially more effective by simple applications of new technology. For example the 73mm SPG-9 can employ a simple laser range finder, greatly aiding its long-range effectiveness. GPS equipment and surveying can make MRL and mortar attacks much more effective. Relatively simple night sights and equally simple voice communications using low levels of encryption at the tactical level are commonly available from a large number of sources. Longer range digital HF or commercial satellite phones using high-grade laptop based encryption systems are not hard to obtain, given even a relatively small military budget.
When one dollar spent by an opponent can stymie $100 of your expenditures, the war just isn’t going to be won – not easily.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
“The Insider” is now outside
Posted 06 Apr 10
So to speak. My first paranormal story, “The Insider,” is included in the MWA’s new anthology CRIMES BY MOONLIGHT, which has just been released.
This post indexed as: Personal, Writing
Why do we have to throw everything away?
Posted 30 Mar 10
Today’s off-topic rant:
Some of the lights in our kitchen stopped working. Not the bulbs, the sockets. When I took them back to the (expensive) lighting store that sold them to us, 4-1/2 years ago, the clerk actually laughed when I wondered whether they’d replace them. In fact, he was impressed the fixtures had lasted even that long — far past their one-year warranty.
And it’s not just one corner-cutting manufacturer. He said they’re all like that.
The irony, of course, is that the failing component probably cost less than a dollar, somewhere in China. For just pennies (okay, maybe a few hundred pennies, but even so) they could build something to last.
I know, I know — planned obsolescence, all that, companies have been shaving costs since the dawn of time. Still.
I’ve been looking for a used table saw lately. Like most machine shop tools, if you can find one made a few decades ago, for similar cost it’s probably better and more serviceable than anything more recent (after minor maintenance, granted).
And don’t get me started on, say, current house-construction methods.
We used to build things to last. Now we buy them to throw away.
This post indexed as: Personal, Technology
Photography Lessons
Posted 30 Mar 10
That is, lessons for writers from the collapse of photography as a profession.
The NYT has a bleak article today on the vanishing — not to say vanished — future of professional photographers. Three factors have converged: the disappearance of buyers as magazine pages are cut; cheap, easy-to-use digital cameras; and the willingness of amateurs to sell their photos dirt cheap.
Today a creative director, rather than hiring a pro for hundreds of dollars, can buy an adequate stock photo for a fraction of that. And increasingly, those stock photos come from hobbyists who’ve placed their snaps on, say, Flickr, and who are happy to be paid anything at all.
“People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,†Mr. Eich said.
Now consider the market for short stories. In the old days, getting published meant sending out your manuscript to New York in a big brown envelope. Each response could take weeks, and you had to pay return postage, too. After a few rejections you’d have to retype the damn thing, what with the dogears and coffee stains. The process was expensive in time, effort and money.
Today? It’s as easy as hitting SEND a dozen times.
But the more important parallel with stock photography: most current story markets pay next to nothing — and writers are still happy to take it.
Decades ago it was difficult to publish, but once you did, you could actually make money. A fair number of authors even supported themselves, as late as the 1960′s or even 70′s.
Now we find the reverse: easier to write and (relatively) easier to get published, but impossible to be paid a living wage.
People still read. They still look at glossy, printed photographs, too. But that sure doesn’t make it easy on the folks who actually produce words and pictures.
This post indexed as: Technology, Writing
Use The Right Word
Posted 16 Mar 10
Okay, sure, I’m more sensitive on the topic than people who don’t get paid for writing. But: a typical English speaker has a learned vocabulary of some 20,000 words. Total English “word units” (that is, counting declined forms, plurals, etc etc all as one) approach four times that. No matter what concept you hope to express, there’s almost certainly one good, precise, well-established word for it.
So why not use it?
Just one example. It is common to hear someone described (often by himself) as a “fiscal conservative” — meaning, in favor of tax cuts. But “fiscal” refers to both halves of the income statement: revenue and expenditures. Using the word properly, a fiscal conservative wants a balanced budget. “Fiscal conservatives,” especially Republicans, often neglect the second half, with problematic results.
Every Republican president since 1974 has increased the annual federal budget deficit: Ford, from $26bn to $275bn; Reagan, from $190bn to $279bn; Bush I, from $279bn to $434bn; Bush II, from a surplus of $90bn to a deficit of $455bn. Carter and especially Clinton cut the deficits: from $275bn to $190bn, and from $434bn to a surplus of $90bn respectively. (all figures in current dollars.)
True, Obama’s deficits are even higher. No need to argue about whether they’re justified or not; my point is simply that you don’t hear Obama describing himself as a fiscal conservative.
It is not an act of political courage to vote for tax cuts. But, in isolation, it is not the act of a fiscal conservative either.
This post indexed as: Personal, Writing
Spring
Posted 11 Mar 10
First juggling of the season this week (can’t do it inside, too much damage would occur, so winter is time off). The new Dube Euro clubs are keen, though it’s a longer adjustment than I expected from my older, heavier, harder clubs. We’re supposed to have goals, right? — so: four by next year, maybe …
Also, the first bike ride (and for some, the first bike wrecks, but if you’re seven you can walk away from what might hospitalize the old guy).
First use of the new computer; not exactly spring related, but good to get done. The actual build turned out to be the easy part. Software, file transfer and configuration took much longer.
First plantings will go into the potting trays this weekend, almost on schedule.
Now that it’s spring, there are so many ways to avoid writing.
This post indexed as: Personal