Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

ENT humor of the day: Enterprise Characters plus reviews
VOY humor of the day: Foyager Park - check out episode 3!

Let me say straight off that I don’t like animals. Other people’s animals are ok, but I don’t want any flea-ridden beasts in my home. Living with animals leads to SARS and cat scatch fever and the death of half the population of Europe. In other words, it’s not a good plan.

I was up late last night finishing voting in the VOY catergory of the ASC Awards. When I went to bed, I started hearing things. Scratching, chewing things. I triangulated the noise: it was coming from inside the wall near one of my bookcases, about two shelves up from the floor. I knocked on the wall to discourage the chewer, but it took him a while to settle down.

Today I called the landlord to tell him about my nibbling acquaintance. He couldn’t give me a positive answer but he thought that maybe, possibly there’s a mouse in there. Ya think? Here I was thinking Elvis had entered the building. Seriously, though, Rattus rattus is a bit chubby for getting in between the floors - in my experience, he prefers Red Line subway stops. And decimating Europe.

The landlord said he’d send the exterminator next week. I hope the mouse doesn’t chew through the antique wiring and burn the building down before then. It’s not half of Europe, but it’s home.

Keyboard of the day: the TouchStream LP (thanks to KC for the link)

I was having a lazy day, making vague plans to blog about fear and loathing at Making Light, when I decided to check the Writers of the Future deadline. According to the materials that came with my latest rejection, the deadline is today, not tomorrow. I think I have a set of rules around here somewhere that says tomorrow instead, but better safe than sorry and all that.

So at three in the afternoon I printed out a story. At least, thought I, the Clarion deadline isn’t until tomorrow. I pulled out the application just to check. Big oops - April 1st is the deadline for receipt of the application. I hate non-postmark deadlines.

So I had to fill out the application, print out two more manuscripts, get everything down to the post office by 6pm, and send the Clarion app express. Since it was raining, I wrapped everything in a plastic bag for the journey. I wore a slicker, having forgotten that the primary function of a slicker is to channel the rain from the clothing covered by the slicker to the clothing not covered by the slicker.

And that was how I discovered Lake Sock, which I named after the laundromat on the corner that Lake Sock is threatening to flood. Here in the third world we have no drainage, so the lake had spread to cover an entire corner of two major streets. Tidal activity almost got me, but I found a route overland.

So now I hear we’re cutting off rail access to half the state and closing a major highway for the Democratic National Convention. KC informs me that we’re also suspending the blue laws (including the newest one against smoking in bars and restaurants) for the duration. When our dark-robed masters come to town, they want to smoke in the bars until 4am, and damn the laws of the City of Boston! Don’t you wish you were above the law?

New Hampshire is looking better and better.

The perils of the midlist continue. While I was reading this midlist report [PDF ] from the Author’s Guild, TNH was reporting the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Books.

TNH and her readers were put off by the whining. I was more confused than bothered - it’s not clear to me that publishers or chains have any effect on the used-book market. I don’t know how a used bookstore survived in the high-rent, high-price atmosphere of Newbury Street for as long as it did. As others have pointed out, the selection hasn’t been what it once was for few years now. I certainly haven’t had much luck in the sf section lately.

But like the bottom feeder of the publishing food chain that I am, I’ll be there on April 1st for the 50% off sale.

I’ve had politics on the brain for my NaNoEdMo novel. Seema spotted me a lovely link about Massachusetts liberals:

Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe thinks the prototype of the M.L. stereotype was first identified around Concord in the 19th century. Back before San Francisco was even a gold rush village, Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionists. “The downside is that they made their criticisms in a pious and haughty manner with great contempt to anyone who disagreed,” says Wolfe.

I admit, the haughty manner and great contempt get annoying after a while, but what really bothers me is the fear and loathing. An example of the former is the prevalent and irrational fear that unnamed Republicans are about to turn the country into something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. An example of the latter is violent hatred of President Bush, though the most offensive thing about him as an individual is his inability to form sentences in his native tongue.

The only people I fear are people who fear people. You never know what someone with an irrational fear of you will do to you or your rights in order to assuage that fear. Far worse, though, is the way “they scare me” is used to squelch rational debate about issues or candidates. Scary is shorthand for so bad that I don’t have to explain why.

On the other hand, I don’t hate the haters. They usually hate public figures rather than entire classes of citizens into which I could easily fall, so they don’t pose a particular political danger to me. Also, their virulence is disarming - you can spot them foaming at the mouth from quite a distance and you know they’re not going to have anything new or challenging to say.

It’s fine if you want to be an irrational Bushophobe; it’s even intermittently entertaining for the rest of us. But it’s not debate - it’s piety. That’s par for the course here, just as other pieties are in vogue in other states.

Trailer of the day: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village

According to Boston Online, the local crustacean has reattached himself to the local press. The Herald’s press release doesn’t say a word about how Barnacle came to be unemployed (and we’d fondly hoped, unemployable) in the Boston papers.

The moral of the story: Plagiarism is now fair game at the Herald. Make it up and phone it in, boys! If the readers don’t like how we do things in this state, they can always secede.

[P.S.] Did I mention it’s snowing? Where are the sunny, 60° days of yesterweek?

In the latest gay marriage news, the mayor of New Paltz is getting in on the act that started in San Francisco. Compare these upstart cities with peaceful Cambridge across the river, still waiting patiently for D-Day. Whatever else you can say about the state of marriage in Massachusetts, at least we’re following our own laws.

It’s easy to dismiss the actions of these rogue mayors as frustration that they don’t reign in Massachusetts, and more specificially in the Massachusetts of a few months from now. It’s even easier to call it civil disobedience, as if the term meant the disobedience of entire cities. But that’s not what’s going on here. You have to be a civilian to practice civil disobedience, or if you happen to be an official of the state, you have to civilly disobey in your free time. When a mayor flouts the law, what we have is rex lex, our rulers making our laws, rather than lex rex, obeying our laws.

If a couple of mayors out in the heartland somewhere took it upon themselves to, say, close abortion clinics because in their personal opinions their state constitutions (or the federal one) gave all citizens the right to life, etc., etc., people would be shouting lex rex left and right. Right now, millions of people who personally believe abortion is murder are letting it go on purely out of respect for the rule of law.

We can only live together for so long when the law applies to some people but not to others - probably only until the other people realize that they signed a social contract for lex rex and instead got rex lex.

Chinatown bus link of the day: the Bus Mafia

Once upon a time I lived in Western Massachusetts. Then I moved to another state, got a non-Mass license, and registered to vote. The next year I moved to a third state. The next year I moved to a fourth state. Sometime between the third and fourth states, I was called up for jury duty in Northampton, Mass. I failed to appear, partly because I didn’t get the notice until after my date, and partly because I wasn’t a resident of Massachusetts and therefore had no right, never mind duty, to serve on local juries.

Now that’s par for the course in Massachusetts. But this time, this time the Jury Commissioner went too far.

It all began three and a half years ago, when I was once again living in Massachusetts (the fifth state), after having been away for seven or eight years. I was called up for jury duty in Chelsea. Though I didn’t even know where Chelsea was, I checked with the MBTA and took the day off work (unpaid) in order to do my annoying civic duty. The reminder postcard said I was on stand-by status and to call a number beforehand to check whether I should report on my assigned day. I called the number; the recording told me not to come in.

Yesterday I got a delinquency notice for failing to appear in Chelsea three and a half years ago when they told me not to appear, complete with threats of a criminal complaint against me if I didn’t make it up to them by rescheduling my jury duty. Of course it’s been over three years and I’ve had jury duty in Roxbury since then, so if showing up for jury dury is enough to clear my record, it ought to be clear.

I called the phone number and a typical state worker answered. Since I’d served since my alleged delinquency, she said I was excused. I said I wasn’t delinquent; that I’d been told not to report. She said they wanted jurors that day, ma’am. Like she remembers whether they wanted jurors in Chelsea on a fall day in 2000! I remember because I was one of the jurors they didn’t want.

Anyway, the Jury Commissioner is going to send me a letter saying that all is forgiven because I cleaned up my act and showed in Roxbury. I’m going to send one back saying that there’s nothing to forgive and I want my record cleared of alleged delinquency in 2000, not to mention that incident in Northampton back in the 90’s.

The moral of this story is: if you’re called up for jury duty in Massachusetts and you don’t feel like going, hang it all and don’t go, because they’re just going to send you a delinquency notice three years later no matter what you do. And you can make it up to them by scheduling new jury duty, possibly retroactively. Why obey the law if you’re going to be treated like a criminal either way? You may as well enjoy the crime if you’re going to do the time.

I’m really starting to hate this state. Maybe I should move back to state #2.

Boycott of the day: Shaw’s Supermarket

Boskone has left town, perhaps due to the biting windchill here in America’s windiest city. I enjoyed the talk on interpretations of quantum mechanics given by John G. Cramer. He’s a good speaker and must make a great professor. I had no idea he had his own: the Transactional Interpretation. I’m a pilot-wave girl myself, but I don’t know that the pilot wave survives the experiment he spoke about. Then again, the Transactional Interpretation involves time travel and we all know that leads to being a monkey’s uncle.

The session on Fermi’s Paradox (that is, if the universe is as full of alien life as Drake’s equation seems to predict, then where are they?) gave me some good ideas. I’m firmly in the they don’t exist camp, but the discussion of how likely it is that aliens would colonize the galaxy of course also applies to us, even if we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

It might take a million years to colonize the galaxy, and our current motives for doing stuff - economics and religion, mainly - don’t seem up to that kind of sustained effort. The only “human” effort that took that long was that whole Out of Africa thing. But is there really no economic incentive to spread across the galaxy? What other force besides capitalism and religion might drive people out into space? I thought the answer was obvious, but maybe that’s just me.

Recommended books:

• Schroedinger’s Kittens
• …Where is Everybody?
• Rare Earth

I almost forgot to mention that Michael A. Burstein is a very funny guy.

It’s not often I get to be one of the least geeky of a room full of people. In fact, it’s only at cons. This year’s guest of honor at Boskone is Stephen Baxter, who doesn’t have the axen to grind that David Brin had. I’m looking forward to next year, though, when we get Orson Scott Card. September brings Noreascon to town, but the price is steep. There’s only so much I’m willing to pay to be one of the least geeky people in a room.

Mac hint of the day: View any number of days in iCal

It’s that time of year again, when local fen spend Valentine’s Day at Boskone. If you’re in Boston and you want to see off-line fandom in the flesh, stop by for a day. Sunday is cheapest. The preliminary schedule is already up.