Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Today I got a two-new-cars Green Line train again. Our leisurely pace inbound was quite regal.

The worst April Fools joke of all was, of course, the snow.

I stopped by the library on my way home last night and found Walter Jon Williams’ Star Wars novel on the new book shelves. I’d been looking around for it in bookstores, and just realized last week at Pandemonium in Cambridge that the reason I hadn’t found it before was that it’s out in hardcover. Somehow I always think of media tie-ins as going straight to paperback.

I have this problem with the Boston Public Library. I take out books, I return the books - no problem. Every few months, however, the library loses a book I’ve returned, and then blames me. There used to be a special status for such books - claimed returned. I would tell them that I’d returned the book and they would mark it claimed returned. Whether they ever found the missing books was beyond me. This time, however, a manager was trotted out to negotiate with the computer over the status of a useless little anthology in paperback that, even if I were the thieving kind, I wouldn’t have bothered to steal. Then he, the manager himself, trotted out into the stacks to look for this book which the BPL would be better off without. He must get a lot of exercise.

I don’t understand how a completely computerized system can fail so frequently. I doubt the bar code readers are at fault - in fact, I suspect that it’s human negligence, and not just human error, that causes so many books to go missing - somebody’s not in the mood to scan in the returned books.

Either that, or they’re running Windows.

This morning I discovered the MBTA’s clever scheme to keep the new Green Line trains running. They’ve split them up so that each new car is attached to an old car. This makes the new “trains” go somewhat faster, but still not as fast as two old cars together. All sorts of similes come to mind, but I’ll spare you.

Someone sent me a Chesterton quote that’s appropriate for these warblogging times. The following is from The Daily News, September 19, 1903:

The saying that good men are the same in all religions is profoundly true, if it means that the attitude of doing one’s best is the same everywhere. But if it means that they will all do the same thing it is not true; it is not common sense. A man from a distant continent or a remote century may be as good as any of us–self restrained, aspiring, magnanimous, sincere. But we must not complain if he has a slight penchant, let us say, for human sacrifice. It will altogether depend upon the nature of his philosophy. And that is how the case stands at the root of the horrors of the Near East. The Moslems are not without creditable qualities in the least–courage, sobriety, hardiness, hospitality, personal dignity, intense religious belief. These are fine qualities. The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy another quality, a total disregard of human life, whether it is their own or other people’s. Therefore our civilisation is and must be at war with them, and that war is a religious war, or, if you prefer the term, a philosophical war. We are allowed by the modern mind to call the Moslems en masse thieves, beasts, devils from hell, though it is manifest to common sense that no people can be so entirely composed. The one thing we are not allowed to say against them, the one thing that amid all our curses it would really be thought illiberal to say, is exactly the thing which is really our case against them. Our case against them, that is, is that they both think and act, that they think and therefore act against everything for which we stand.

It’s snowing.

According to boston.com, Park Street Station was closed for part of rush hour this morning because of a strong odor. That’s nothing new at Park Street, where I’ve caught a whiff of burning trains before.

The odd thing about this report is that it contradicts my experience this morning, when Park Street was open on both levels, but my Red Line train skipped Downtown Crossing entirely. At Park Street, the conductor said that Downtown Crossing was closed due to “police activity,” and that people who wanted the Orange Line should go back upstairs and take the Green Line to Copley. Apparently there had been a shuttle bus or bussing plan, but that had been changed to the Copley scheme. There is no connection to the Orange Line at Copley, by the way. Who knows what happened to those poor commuters?

Downtown Crossing and Park Street are connected by a pedestrian tunnel (as well as by the Red Line), so maybe the Downtown Crossing closure was a direct result of the Park Street incident. I was already wondering what was taking so long when my train reached Park Street, but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Who knows what I breathed in as my Red Line train was speeding past Downtown Crossing?

There was a crowd at the T stop this morning. That’s odd, I thought, and then I noticed the new Green Line trolley heading in the other direction. Aha! I thought. That explained it.

The new Green Line trolleys aren’t all that new anymore. Every six months or so the MBTA puts them back in service, until the next little derailment incident, and back they go in the T garage. Today they were creeping along (and it’s tough to go slower than the usual trolley crawl), making their tinny automated stop announcements. Mine didn’t derail, at least not while I was on it.

Sock of the day: Morn!

The Governor has advised me (and six million others) to remain diligent in my vigilance. I’m not ready. I don’t know how to turn off the gas. I have no plastic sheeting. I don’t even own a roll of duct tape. I don’t quite understand the warning signs, either.

At least I’m not out in the streets blocking traffic. What a war protest that is - annoy everyone who might possibly have sympathized with your cause, and beat up the police on the side. What ever happened to signs and sing-a-longs?

All we are saying….is give war a chance…

It never fails to be a gorgeous, blindingly sunny day when I go to see my ophthamologist. For those of you who haven’t been seeing an ophthamologist for your entire lives, an appointment on a sunny day means one thing…dilated pupils.

My ophthamalogist, let’s call him Dr. Hot Stuff, is associated with the New England Eye Center. Lucky for me (I thought) one of their offices is down the street from my apartment, so whenever I’ve been blinded by the light of Dr. Hot Stuff’s fancy equipment, I can stumble home in the bright sunlight with only a chance of getting run over by a truck.

Dr. Hot Stuff was recommended to me by Dr. Really Nice, my previous ophthamologist in Another State. She was really, really nice, even when she was frying my retina with a laser beam because I have bad retinas that occasionally need to be put in their place. She had a great chairside manner. Dr. Hot Stuff is a well-known retinal specialist, but I still miss Dr. Really Nice. I saw Dr. Really Nice for the six years I lived in Another State. She was recommended to me by Dr. Really Old, my ophthamologist at home in Fall River, whom I’d been seeing since the age of three. There were others before him, but I don’t remember them.

The point of all that background is that I haven’t chosen my ophthamologists randomly. They were recommended to me. My eye issues are not restricted to the occasional need to shoot a laser at them, either, but the danger of retinal detachment is certainly the most serious problem. I find it comforting to have the New England Eye Center down the street, conveniently attached to a hospital where really serious things with freezing pens might have to happen in a retinal emergency.

I was a little surprised last year when my HMO, let’s call it Blue Something Blue Something Else, allowed me to see Dr. Hot Stuff for my semi-annual eye exam, even though I hadn’t chosen a primary care physician at the time. Judging by this year’s visit, that was an oversight on the part of Blue Something Blue Something Else. At the time, Dr. Hot Stuff said to come back in a year, so today I went back. I knew that Blue Something allowed me only one eye exam in two years, but that never stopped me with my previous HMO, AnotherStateCare. Somehow Dr. Really Nice managed to refer me to herself so I could see her whenever she wanted to see me.

So, silly me, I thought maybe Dr. Hot Stuff’s medical opinion that I ought to come back in a year in case my retinas were falling off again would be enough for Blue Something, since it had always been enough with Dr. Really Nice and AnotherStateCare. When I called Blue Something, they asked around the Blue Something office and eventually decided that seeing Dr. Hot Stuff again so soon would be a medical visit and I needed a referral from my primary care physician. That sounded simple enough.

My PCP is Dr. Conveniently Located. She’s a couple of blocks away from where I work. I picked her out of the big Blue Something provider directory based on proximity to my workplace and gender. If you’re getting the impression that I care more about my ophthamologists than my physicians, you’d be right. My previous PCP was Dr. Conveniently Located In Another State, the one who told me I’d just have to live with my bursitis/tendonitis/whatever because I was getting old. Before him was Dr. College Health Center, who also failed to diagnose or cure my bursitis/tendonitis/whatever - though since I was only nineteen at the time, he refrained from calling me old. Before that was whoever was on pediatric duty at the Navy base in Newport. You don’t want to hear about my mother’s obstetrician, to whom I owe my high tolerance for alcohol. You can imagine what confidence in the medical profession (outside of ophthamology) this sequence of physicians has inspired.

So last week I called Dr. Conveniently Located for a referral to see Dr. Hot Stuff. Dr. Conveniently Located is part of Harvard Vanguard, a medical cult located here in the metropolitan Boston area. People had made various negative noises when I’d mentioned that my PCP was part of Harvard Vanguard, but no one had explained the cult aspect to me. So when I left a message on the special referral answering machine at Dr. Conveniently Located’s office, I figured they’d get back to me or to Dr. Hot Stuff eventually.

Instead, when I got to Dr. Hot Stuff’s office, I still had no referral. Dr. Hot Stuff’s people called Dr. Conveniently Located’s people, who acted like this was a big surprise to them, although I’d left all the information on the referral answering machine, twice, and called enough times to establish that it was, in fact, just an answering machine. Dr. Conveniently Located’s people said that Harvard Vanguard has their own retinal specialists, so they don’t refer patients to other retinal specialists. They’re still considering my request for a referral, and if they don’t accept it, they said, I’ll have to pay for seeing Dr. Hot Stuff today. They told me all this before dilating my pupils, but it took me months to get the appointment to see Dr. Hot Stuff so I wasn’t about to leave and go see some cult ophthamologist I’d never heard of in another few months, by which time my company may have already gone under and I’d have to pay anyway.

I used to pay to see Dr. Really Nice before I signed up for AnotherStateCare, back when I only had insurance against Being Run Over By Trucks and not for eye exams. I figure it can’t cost more than four times what I paid then, with inflation and Boston prices and the fact that I’m no longer at the poverty-line end of the sliding fee scale. The thing is, it’s not like I’m going to an ophthamologist who’s not part of Blue Something - I’m just going to one who’s not part of the Harvard Vanguard cult. So even if my cult refuses to give me a referral, I think there’s a chance Blue Something will pay anyway, since nobody warned me that having Dr. Conveniently Located for a PCP would mean I couldn’t see Dr. Hot Stuff anymore - not even the Blue Something people I spoke to last week on the phone who told me to call the referral answering machine.

Maybe I can even switch to another PCP who will give me a retroactive referral to Dr. Hot Stuff. More likely, when I ask our Blue Something representative to give me a list of PCP’s who are willing to refer me to Dr. Hot Stuff (who wants to see me again in a year), she’ll cover today’s appointment rather than compile such a telltale list.

These are all random blog bits and missing links. For real missing links, see Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the Lagar Velho child.

New on the backblog is the novel I finished on the T this morning, Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre of Trek novel fame. I found a link for The Tipping Point after finishing my entry on the book.

Yesterday there was some weird inversion layer over Boston, so that the clouds were right down on the St. Patrick’s Day parade and the city looked like it was on fire. Even if it had been on fire, we wouldn’t have asked the driver to turn the bus around and take us back to Fall River.

I’d heard good things about this Boston atlas, but it doesn’t seem to include my end of the city, and it’s slowing my browser to a crawl to boot. Speaking of which, I’ve upgraded to Camino 0.7, the browser formerly known as Chimera. Besides the name change, I hardly notice the difference.

People began fleeing Boskone on Sunday around 3 p.m. The snow didn’t start here until Monday morning, and it stopped Monday night. In that brief time, we managed to break all previous snow records, including the Blizzard of ‘78:

National Weather Service Taunton MA

715 AM EST Tue Feb 18 2003

Record 24 hour snowfall and record snowstorm snowfall set at
Boston

As of 7 AM Logan airport in east Boston had measured 27.5 inches of
snowfall. This eclipsed the previous 24 hour snowfall record of 25.4
inches set during the April fools day blizzard of March 31St and
April 1St of 1997.

The total of 27.5 inches also set the record for greatest snowstorm
snowfall total. The previous record was 27.1 inches set February 6th
and 7th 1978.

I haven’t heard whether the winds were high enough to qualify as a blizzard here in Boston, but I understand it passed the bar elsewhere.

It didn’t look like that much snow when I headed out to work this morning. The T was running fine (note past tense), cutting a lovely green figure through the snow - not that my co-workers made much use of it. I found two people who’d been camping out in the office since Sunday, and three others made brief appearances. I wish they’d email me to tell me when a snow day has been declared. I could have used the sleep.

So, about that past tense… Apparently sometime between my departure this morning and my return home, the overhead power lines for the Green Line trolleys succumbed to the excessive snow. We were all tossed off the Green Line at Star Market and put on buses for the rest of the T route. Bussing on the Green Line usually makes the commute faster - even today with the streets looking no cleaner at 8pm than they had at 10am - so no one complained.

I got to hear David Brin speak again today, on privacy. He has a book out about the advantages of openness, The Transparent Society. I thought I’d relate that to why I don’t believe in doing things for the children.

A person should have nothing to hide from children. I believe that anything out there that is bad for children (say, smut, or pre-marital sex) is also bad for adults. I don’t think there’s an age where bad things suddenly become good for you, or even acceptable indulgences for you. Behind every sentiment that such-and-such is bad for children is an unspoken admission that such-and-such is just plain bad.

On the other hand, anything that interests adults is going to interest children to some extent, whereas things aimed specifically at interesting children (such as David Brin’s plans to save fandom with Teen Appeal) go oft awry.

Enough about the children! There were some other good speakers at Boskone - which is not to say that the panels were all that informative, just entertaining. I especially enjoyed Darrell Schweitzer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Allen Steele. I hope it’s not too fennish of me to say so. I’m not planning on getting into the sf scene - I get more than enough fandom on-line.

By the way, Allen Steele says he wouldn’t want anyone to write fanfic about his works - to do it to him I believe were his words. I arrived at the end of the derivative fic panel, but it sounded like it was all about media fic, not fanfic. I never heard a positive word about fanfic. If you ignore the most active portion of fandom, it’s no surprise that you think fandom is dying out. Hint: it’s only you dying out.

One thing I wish I’d known about was the NESFA Short Story Contest for unpublished authors. I’m hoping not to qualify by the next deadline, but you never know.