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January 2002 Archives

January 1, 2002: Mere Household Cleansers

Well, the move is over. Sort of. I'm still unpacking boxes, but things are starting to settle down. We did some cleaning at the old house last afternoon with some serious chemicals. That is, chemicals for cleaning, not chemicals for making the cleaning process seem less burdensome.

Fortunately, my abortive career as a condensed-matter physicist ended up making me a little more sanguine about dealing with harsh household cleansers. For example, take HF acid, which will almost immediately start leaching the calcium from your bones. Now that's a hazardous chemical. Or photoresist, which (depending on the variety you use) can be a highly dangerous mutagen, carcinogen, and teratogen. (Yes, I had to look up that word when I first saw it on the label.) Anyway, as for household chemicals -- bleach, Raid, weedkiller -- bah! Milk of Magnesia, as far as I'm concerned.

The funny thing about moving is that every time you think you've packed up all the stuff, you open another cabinet or closet and look -- more stuff! (So that's where Dave Smith's staple gun disappeared to...) Eventually you end up fighting over who should take what. I even got talked into taking an old couch and a coffee table. Maybe all this extra furniture will lead to having extra visitors.

Oh yeah, New Years: I had a very nice time at the Smith-Holy residence. (Not the Holy-Smith residence, as previously discussed.) We had some good wine and danced to some techno. (Or, I lurched around to the music in my own off-rhythm way, content that only my friends could see how silly I was being.) After midnight, we went out to the balcony and sang songs, as obnoxiously as possible. It turns out that Nancy and Don know most of the songs to Gigi, and Nancy and I managed a stunning rendition of "I Remember It Well". At least, I thought we were stunning at the time.

Anyway, happy New Year to all. Just keep this in mind: no matter how your New Year's celebration went, it was probably not as bad as Andrew Sullivan's. (If necessary, scroll down to "The Curse of 2001".)

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 01, 2002 at 1:44 PM

January 2, 2002: Back to Work

I've bowed to pressure. I now have a Contact page. Of course, this pressure came from people who already have my email address. Hmmmm...

After some deliberation, I've decided to hide my private email address behind a script. I just don't feel comfortable putting it out on the web for anyone to grab (particularly a spambot). Maybe I'm being too cautious. But the way I see it, my email address is like my phone number. Heck, maybe it's more important -- after all, I've had the same email address for three-and-a-half years, while my phone number has changed three times.

First day back at office, and basically I just made more work for other people. Heh, my kind of day!

I still have a lot of unpacking to do. To avoid that, I picked up a couple of books at the bargain rack at Waldenbooks. The first was If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now, by Sandra Tsing Loh. It's... OK. I like her language and her style. But let's face it: she's taking her shots at... Los Angeles. How hard is that? Plus, I can only take so many sardonic comments and wry observations at one sitting. Pot calling the kettle, maybe, but still.

The second book was The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Hey, it was three bucks. And it's not without its charms. Take the cartoon sidebars. When the authors provide an anecdote, they use a cute little cartoon of an astronaut pontificating, labelled, "As You Know, Bob". When they want to warn you about a publishing industry pitfall, there's a cartoon of Robby the Robot, with the title, "Danger, Danger!" How could you not love a book like that?

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 02, 2002 at 1:40 PM

January 3, 2002: Reverb

An alert reader informed me that some of the links to my fancy shiny new Contact section were broken.

I knew that this contact section would come back to bite me in the ass. Communication. Bleah. Highly overrated.

Just kidding, of course. I hate broken and misdirected links as much as the next person. So feel free to tell me if you spot one here. It actually makes me feel good to zap those things. Or if you don't think the navigation makes sense, it couldn't hurt to let me know that either.

Now, criticizing my color scheme... that's another matter entirely.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 03, 2002 at 1:36 PM

January 5, 2002: Briefcases of Money

M'ris is back from vacation, but she seems pretty swamped with going through the WIHA slush. I sent her a non-WIHA related email, and her response began like this:

Thanks for sending this e-mail along, but I'm afraid it's not for me. Aside from a passing mention, it had nothing to do with aliens, much less with hating them. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Oh. Sorry. You get into the zone, you know...

Speaking of M'ris, her January 4 journal entry is on college and niche marketing. Specifically, she's talking about her alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the fact that they are eliminating "J-term", which is a one-month term in January where you take one course. I'm not sure if J-term is unique to Gustavus, but it's got to be reasonably rare, anyway.

M'ris is not in favor of the ditching-of-the-J-term. She says, rightly, that it's good that the thousands of different colleges and universities in this country are so different from each other, and they should stay that way. The more niches that colleges manage to satisfy, the better for students.

That's all true. Although I've got one nit to pick: perhaps because I am not a Gustavus alum, I'm a bit confused about why J-term is so important for Gustavus's niche marketing. Clearly Gustavus has many many attributes that differentiate it from Harvey Mudd, BYU, Simon's Rock, Yale, Bob Jones, Duke, or Florida State... is J-term really all that high on the list? Maybe for some. I dunno.

Anyway, the real reason I brought this up was that M'ris does a spot-on job of describing the different types of college students. For the heck of it, here's my take on the subject:

The Three Types of College Students

• Type A (The University as Glorified Summer Camp): The most common type. This student is there because he is a member of the middle or upper class, and in this country the rite of passage for staying in the middle class is going to college. Other than that, he isn't quite sure why he's there, other than Mom and Dad are paying. You can spot these folks easily enough: they are those who wax poetic about "The College Experience", who drone on about how "the most important things I learned weren't in the classroom". A self-fulfilling prophecy -- after all, you weren't in class after the first week, were you?

  It's unfortunate that we in the United States have chosen college as our rite of passage to middle class adulthood. Couldn't we choose a less expensive ritual? Or at least a less time-consuming one. For example, maybe the kids could link arms in a circle around a bonfire while their parents stand behind them, symbolically tossing briefcases of twenty dollar bills into the blaze.

• Type B (The University as My Ticket Up (or Out)): The next most common type. This student knows why she's going to college. She knows that for some reason, you need a bachelor's degree in this country. And she's going to get one -- and if she has to jump through hoops and put up with frippery that has nothing to do with her major, so be it.

  Many type B students are older people going back to college, first- or second- generation immigrants, or from low-income backgrounds. They are most heavily concentrated in pre-med, law, business, and engineering. Unlike their more slothful Type A colleagues, Type B students are hyper-aware of grades and finances.

• Type C (The University as Palace of Learning): By far the rarest type. The Type C student is the kind of student that colleges like to claim that they serve in their glossy brochures. Type C students go to college because they actually like learning. Some of these pathetic throwbacks love only one field, such as physics; others are true polymaths who drink up literature, history, theater, chemistry... you name it.

  Although the number of Type C students is small, the group is still big enough (and academically monomanaical enough) to produce a distressingly large supply of professors. This has lead to exponential growth in the number of academic papers and books produced, which many pundits falsely equate with exponential growth in human knowledge. The oversupply of Ph.Ds sometimes even forces the metastasis of yet more colleges and universities, thus exacerbating the problem.

Different institutions have different ratios of Types A-to-B-to-C. For example, Harvey Mudd was about 30-40-30, while UCSB (which I view as more typical) is more like 70-25-5. At a place like The University of Phoenix, the ratio might be 5-85-10. There's a lot of variation, but I'm pretty sure that overall, C < B << A.

Here's my modest proposal: Each school would shoot for having most of its students in one column. The Type Cs would go to fancy-schmantzy academic liberal arts schools, like Swarthmore. The Type Bs would go to trade schools or engineering schools, like MIT. And the Type As would go to pure party schools, like Stanford. We could even explicitly label schools as A, B, or C, to help high school students choose.

The benefits are clear. Happier students. No more stupid debates over football interfering with academics. No more pre-meds whining about having to take Physics and English Lit. No more worrying about whether your kid is getting the education he or she needs.

And just think how much more honest those glossy brochures and alumni magazines would be. Anyway, just a thought.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 05, 2002 at 1:32 PM

January 7, 2002: Bay Area Football Nerds

This morning I threw caution to the wind and listened to The Greg Kihn Show instead of NPR, like a responsible fiber-eating person. Greg Kihn is sometimes pretty funny, despite what Pat says, and he has this great grizzled old rock star voice. Anyway, during the show, Kihn mentioned that at his last Niners game, he and the crowd chanted, "Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball! Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!" Kind of like "Fight Fiercely Harvard!", I guess. Kihn, in true Dave Barry form, swears he is not making this up. "The really cool thing," he said, "was that we did repel them and they did relinquish the ball."

Hard to believe we're 12-4.

Sunday pretty much stunk. I was trying to finish a story, but I had decided that not only was I going to have an accelerating relativistic rocketship, but that the timing of all the messages from earth were going to arrive at the correct times, as opposed to merely sorta plausible times.

I had some initial successes in deriving some of the equations I needed, but then I got bogged down. My final answers were were nonsense. I soon became obsessed, and wasted pretty much the whole day.

It was probably the inital success that sucked me in. If I had utterly failed from the start, I would have been frustrated, but I would have given up a lot sooner. And then I would have spent my time actually writing the story, instead of indulging in physics snobbery. ("Ha! all those other rocketships move at constant velocity! Mine accelerate at 1g!") Sheesh.

Not only did I forget what was important about the story, but I also forgot to eat, somehow. And so I was feeling pretty crummy around dinner time, when I realized that not only did I have a ton of other stuff to do, but I was supposed to be at my old roommate's wife's birthday dinner at 8:30 in San Francisco. I just couldn't handle staying up late and socializing on a worknight. So I called them up and flaked. Then I felt bad about that, so the only thing left to do was to drive over to my parents' house and have them feed me homemade vegetable stew.

It did the trick.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 07, 2002 at 11:34 AM

January 10, 2002: Vanquishing Evil

I'm fighting off a cold. It's not helping that I have to be at work at the crack of dawn to train my European colleagues on the software we're releasing next week.

Not that I don't appreciate German humor or anything. For example, I was explaining a new module our software has, one which lets you create new benchmark centers cost centers, and organizations. The German manager was duly impressed. "So Evan! Ven I klick on ze button, do I alzo aquire ze budget for ze new center? Ho ho ho!" The best I could manage at 7am was a feeble, "Sure Ruediger, that'll be in the next release, I promise."

Even the French were better-behaved.

Since I don't have cable TV, I've had to amuse myself in other ways. Recently I've been plowing through the archives of The Brunching Shuttlecocks. I swear, their stuff is as good or better than The Onion. Take, for example, the Everquest FAQK:

Q: But I can at least put myself into the shoes of an adventurer, righting wrongs and fighting evil?

A: Sort of. The evil in question reappears in the world after you vanquish it, often within mere minutes. and the world as a whole never changes because of anything you do. So in that way it's less like being a fantasy adventurer and more like being a social worker.

But I'm running out of Brunching. Fortunately there's Andrew Sullivan, who, after seeing Lord of the Rings for the first time, concluded that George W. Bush is Frodo Baggins. Which makes the United States the Shire. And George Sr. is Bilbo, who "had his own little adventure with the dark forces, but poor Frodo is stuck with the legacy." Ah, I dunno. It made me chuckle.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 10, 2002 at 11:31 AM

January 13, 2002: Sim Subs: a Play In One Act

Today's question about the SF publishing industry is: Why do publishers disallow simultaneous submissions?

Any author or book on writing will say the same thing: don't do it. If you get caught doing it, you're in trouble. But the question remains, why?

Other than "we're the publishers and we say so," the only reason I've read comes from SFWA, in their FAQ for Beginning Writers (scroll down to the middle of the page):

Q: What is wrong with simultaneous submissions? Why can't I send out my manuscript to all the markets at once, and save years of waiting time?

A: Some markets allow simultaneous submissions. The Literary Market Place and The Writer's Market tell you which markets these are. Other markets do not want simultaneous submissions. Why? Because too many of them have been burned by authors who, on being told that their story was accepted and had been put to press, informed the editors that, "Oh, I sent that to another magazine and it paid more money so I let them publish it first." More than one magazine has found itself in the position of having to redo its entire layout, at considerable expense, because of such a situation...

After reading this, I actually went back and studied the SFWA acronym. "Science-Fiction-and-Fantasy-Writers-of-America". Yup. Still says "Writers". I keep rereading the explanation and it still baffles me. Hmmmm... perhaps we can elicit the Truth by transforming the narrative...

               PREMATURE PUBLICATION:  A PLAY IN ONE ACT

Editor:    Tra-la-la-la-la... Say, what do we have here in the slush pile?
           (he fishes a manuscript out of the pile)  Why... it's a story!
           I like this one!  Yes... it's perfect for this month's issue!
           Minions! (claps hands) Start the presses, post-haste!

Graphic
Designer:  Aye aye, sir!

Layout
Editor:    Full speed ahead!  

All three
together:  Huzzah!

Author:    (pokes head in the door)  Ummm... 'scuse me... but I ah... ummm...
           actually, your competitor down the street secured the rights to my 
           story over a month ago.  Terribly sorry about that.

Editor:    Whaaat!  Minions!  (claps hands)  Pelt this miscreant, this tramp,
           with crumpled Coke cans.  And blacklist her, post-haste!

Author:    Aie, curse my impatience!  I am undone!  (retreats under the barrage)

Editor:    Well, the only thing left to do now is to redo our entire layout, 
           at considerable expense, because of this situation. 

           (All three burst into tears)

               THE END

Well, perhaps that didn't help quite as much as I had hoped.

Anyway, the point is: how the heck does a submission equate to signing a contract? I mean it's one thing if the editor secures publication rights and then the author tries to renege "because they got a better offer". But that's not what's happening here. The author hasn't agreed to anything yet.

Frankly, the more I read the FAQ the angrier I get. The sad revelation of all those poor editors getting burned has to be just outright false. What idiot is going to lay out his magazine based on manuscripts that he hasn't bothered to acquire yet? The other possibility is that the poor editors really were criminally stupid. Either way, the whole thing stinks.

One more thing: notice how the long lead times are a direct result of the no simultaneous submissions rule. If simultaneous submissions were permitted, then any magazine that could read its slush pile faster would have a significant advantage, because they could snap up good stories from unknowns long before their slower competitors. Competition would force lead times to shrink dramatically.

Competition? Publishing? Bah, I live in a dream-world.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 13, 2002 at 11:26 AM

January 15, 2002: Sim Subs, Redux

I had a number of responses to the simultaneous submissions entry. A couple of them mentioned that it's acceptable to put an "expiration date" on a submitted manuscript. That is, in your cover letter you can state that after X weeks, the story is automatically withdrawn from consideration.

I admit that this method is a bit more efficient than having to manually send the editor a withdrawal letter. It probably has psychological benefits, too -- it sets a hard limit, and thus prevents you from dragging things out too long. "Well, I know what I decided back in February, but maybe just a couple more weeks..."

As for the root of the problem: Tim Cooper sent me an excellent letter, which provided me with the only cogent arguments I've seen so far for disallowing simultaneous submissions.

First, he points out that editors send out acceptances and rejections for a magazine at roughly the same time:

Suppose I have stories in my slush that I like, from Writer A, Writer B, and Writer C. I only have the ability to buy one of the stories. So, after much agonizing, I accept Writer A's story and reject Writer B's and Writer C's. The next day, maybe I choose to buy a very short piece from Writer D because it works well with Writer A's story. The day after that, Writer A writes back to me and says "Oh, wait, I already sold it to Editor X." At this point, I can't recover the stories form Writer B and C, which could very well be better than anything I'll get in before the issue comes up. And I now have a short piece I've committed to buy that doesn't fit with anything in the issue at all...

Which is fair enough: perhaps given a busy magazine's schedule, it isn't practical to hold off on rejecting Writers B and C until you have confirmation from Writer A. (I don't see how book publishers could use this excuse, though.)

Tim also mentions that the no-simultaneous-submissions rule serves as a barrier that limits inappropriate submissions.

If someone can send a story to every market in the field at once, quite a few of them are going to do it, regardless of how appropriate the story is for that particular market. If sending Stan Schmidt a high fantasy story isn't going to cost the writer anything, a lot of them are going to say "why not?"

And then there are authors who send cover letters that say things like "I have finished over 250 stories" -- with no sales. As Tim puts it, "I know that if simsubs were ok across the genre, the moment I opened for submissions I would have gotten every one of those 250+ stories. I'm going to get all of them eventually, anyway, it seems, but at least they're coming at a speed I can handle."

I sympathize with this. Barriers are necessary. After all, isn't that why so many publishers still require paper submissions?

However, I suppose that again this explanation makes more sense for a magazine editor than a book editor. First, unless our author writes with demonic speed, he or she will not have an outrageous number of unsold novels. Second, while a book editor's slush pile might be large if you count pages, my guess is that it is relatively small if you count manuscripts. This means that the burden of rooting out the inappropriate submissions should be lower for book editors. Finally, novels are expensive and time-consuming to print out and ship -- so again, fewer submissions.

Finally, Tim makes a very valid point (jeez, why didn't I just print his whole letter verbatim?) about the responsibilities of authors. If authors could be trusted to track their submissions and inform editors when a simultaneous submission is accepted somewhere else, the rule would be unnecessary. I couldn't agree more.

The flip side is that publishers should at least be honest about why they do this. The non-explanation in the SFWA FAQ just doesn't cut it.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 15, 2002 at 11:22 AM

January 16, 2002: Pundit Roundup -- Yeehaw!

Something awful happened today. I read George Will's column and found my head nodding vigorously at several points. Ewwww.

I had pretty much written Will off long ago, with the possible exception of his baseball columns. But here's what he says about the Enron collapse:

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else, transparency, meaning a sufficient stream -- torrent, really -- of reliable information about the condition and conduct of corporations.

Poor Will. That pretty much makes him a Stalinist, as far as his crowd is concerned. I don't envy him going through his hate mail bag tomorrow.

One interesting thing Will adds is that "a few capitalists have done more to delegitimize capitalism than America's impotent socialist critics ever did or today's moribund left could hope to. It is the Republicans' special responsibility to punish such capitalists." (Emphasis mine.) Hmmmm... if I buy that philosophy, then that means we liberals have a special responsibility to punish those who delegitimize our side.

Well! I am not one to shirk my duty. May I direct your attention to today's little gem from our old friend Charlotte Raven? You might remember her as the lovely young lady who, seven days after the Sep. 11 atrocity, informed us primly that a bully with a bloody nose is still a bully.

In her latest column, Raven claims that had Charles Bishop been raised in the UK, he would not have committed suicide by crashing his small plane into a tall building.

For boys like him, school will always be a nightmare, but there is far more chance over here that he would meet a like-minded compadre with whom he could share jokes and swap notes about the monstrous pain of the universe. At some point, they'd discover the Smiths and both would be delighted by how perfectly Morrissey captures that feeling of being invisible to the people whose attention you most want to attract.

The... "Smiths"? "Morrissey"...? Why, Ms. Raven, what are these... strange, exotic bands you speak of? They... confuse and frighten me.

No, I couldn't agree more. If only we here in the United States had any kind of outlet at all for our kids with Goth angst. But none exist. No, Britain is far better at absorbing its misfits in a healthy manner, given its far more easy-going culture and complete absence of class structure. I mean, young British misfits never do anything wrong, do they?

The really amusing part is Raven's comments on Marilyn Manson -- that if "Marilyn Manson were British he could have had a nice career singing songs about how it felt to be a sickly, spotty but highly intelligent young man with a wicked sense of humour and a perfectly comprehensible horror of the banality and hypocrisy of late-capitalist society." Could it be...? The high-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards everywhere, doesn't get Marilyn Manson? Any American with any knowledge of pop culture understands that Manson is nothing more than an off-color over-the-top 24/7 marketing campaign. Could it be that we get the joke and Raven doesn't? It's almost too much.

As an added bonus, Raven hated the Lord of the Rings movie (of course!) -- but if I understand her correctly, the movie would have been a success had the special effects been cheesy. She is quite disappointed with the movie's seamless CGI: "The minute Middle Earth is as real to us as Battersea or Burma, it is no longer Tolkien's creation... (Jackson's) literal-minded insistence on shining a spotlight into every crevice makes the whole thing seem completely banal. If Hobbits are real, they are laughable." Oh, dear, dear.

I know, I know. I resolved this year: no more po-mo lefty silliness. But I just ran across this one. I wasn't actively trolling through the Guardian website looking for trouble, I swear. Scout's Honor.

All right, I'll end on a positive note. Kathleen Parker pretty much nails the CNN-Paula Zahn-zipper promo "controversy" in today's Merc:

Still, for a nanosecond of offensive flattery, Zahn got the attention the ad was intended to get, she got to decry the "insult" that she's an appealing woman, and she gets weeks of coverage in which her professionalism is praised amid apologetic admissions that, well, she is a little bit sexy. And you thought you were having a bad day.

Parker also notes that the zipper sound was inaccurate: "I personally visited every closet in my house this morning and couldn't find a single zipper that made any noise. With little ado, we've entered the era of the noiseless zipper."

The Era of the Noiseless Zipper. What will our nation's scientific geniuses think of next?

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 16, 2002 at 11:18 AM

January 17, 2002: Killing Little Girls

Just read about today's Bat Mitzvah Massacre. The killer murdered the security guard and then charged into the main hall armed with guns and grenades. He ended up killing five more civilians, including the little girl's grandfather. This heroic act of resistance was apparently in retaliation for the assassination of Raed al-Karmi. Karmi was the leader of a terrorist cell associated with Arafat's Fatah faction -- he was wanted by Israel for, among other things, kidnapping and murdering two Jewish restaurant owners.

I don't see what Fatah hopes to accomplish with this -- other than making it increasingly obvious that, as Yossi Klein Halevi states in this week's TNR, "to demand that Arafat dismantle Palestine's terrorist infrastructure is absurd... the biggest terrorist infrastructure in the PA is the PA itself."

For many years, I believed that if only things would quiet down long enough to establish a Palestinian state, peace would take hold. But after these last few months... what evidence is there that a full-fledged Palestinian nation would do anything other than simply kill more Israelis, faster? How is Israel supposed to keep Katushya rockets out of terrorist hands once it loses control of the borders? No, I've realized that I was wrong, and that Hamas is right: there will never be peace in Israel. Not this century.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 17, 2002 at 11:05 AM

January 18, 2002: The Anti-Fry's

Pat called me at the office earlier this week. The only reason he wanted to talk was to tell me about his trip to the Apple store. "It was like the anti-Fry's," he said. "No -- it was like Frys is supposed to be. Everything is clean and bright... and the people in the store are there to help you, not keep you from stealing."

Well, I couldn't get him to shut up until I promised to go with him. "Pat," I said, "you know this is pointless. We both have relatively new computers. Neither of us can justify buying a new Mac. Going to the Apple Store is like, technology porn. Look-but-don't-touch. What's the point?"

But I went anyway. And I have to say, I was impressed with the new iMac. My favorite part was not the CD/DVD/read/write drive. Not the amazing swivel arm or the sharp flatscreen. Not the pretty OSX graphics. No, I think I liked the UNIX terminal window. Who is it that finally layers a modern user interface on UNIX? Not my company. Not HP, IBM, or SGI. Not GNOME or KDE. No... it's Apple. BSD with Java 1.3.1 & Apache built-in. Hot damn.

Alrighty, that's about it. Time to head out for the evening. Just one more thing -- I've added a custom 404 error page. The first and only Perl program I've ever written. It provides a random haiku every time you try to access a nonexistent file on this site. Give it a try: http://www.goer.org/sdlkfej.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 18, 2002 at 10:59 AM

January 20, 2002: Convolutions

Friday night Pat, Courtney, Amber, and I went out to see Mulholland Drive. Now, the movie theater was great. It's in Oakland, and it has big comfy chairs and tables and couches -- couches! And you can order pizza and fancy nachos and beer. As for the movie itself... it was a bit much. I think that unlike, say, Memento, Mulholland Drive cannot be reassembled into something that makes sense in the light of day. Which bothers me. Pat and Courtney and I talked about the movie on the way home, and I think we all agreed on which parts of the movie were real and which parts were dream/fantasy. But as for the niggling details -- what was that blue box? The monster in the alley? The old people? Well, who knows? Unlike Memento, where it was fun to pick over the details and marvel over the movie's clever intricacies... the same process in Mulholland Drive just makes me think that I'm wasting my time. That there's no there, there.

Which reminds me -- I just sent a short story, "Ogress", to M'ris for a critique. My main concern was whether the story made sense: there's a fair amount of backstory, and I tried to get some ideas across using couple of flashbacks. Frankly, I'm wary of the flashback device, let alone the dream/fantasy device. I want to tell my story, not dazzle the reader with Stupid Narrative Tricks. In this case, I wanted the flashbacks to provide the reader a few critical facts, while keeping the story from growing much, much, longer than I wanted it to be. And as it turned out, M'ris understood the story just fine. If she hadn't, I would have had to completely rewrite the whole thing.

Unfortunately, rather than polish up "Ogress" and ship it out, I've been finishing up the Sandman saga. I finally went out and splurged, bought all the books I was missing. Now that I'm done, I have to say it was a heck of a story. I can't see how Neil Gaiman could have told this story in any other medium. I wouldn't go quite as hyperbolic as some of writers of the introductions did -- and I'm thinking of Harlan Ellison in particular -- the Sandman comics were not Great Art. They were, however, really good art. Which is good enough for me.

Finally, I've decided to start a Winelog. (Not to be confused with Winerlog.) No, see, I have this problem: I buy wine, drink it... and then forget about it. And so I end up buying the wines I didn't like again -- because here in California we are blessed and cursed with an enormous wine selection everywhere we go, including Safeway. Which is where I get all of my wine. Safeway, occasionally Trader Joe's, and when I'm really feeling like The Man, Ridge Vineyards.

Henceforth, I will keep a record of the wines I've tried. Now, first off, let me say that I have no wine education whatsoever. I can't even grip the wineglass by the stem and swirl the wine properly -- I have to cheat and clutch the glass around the rim from the top. I don't know what "body" is. I couldn't care less about letting the wine "breathe". I evaluate wine in the same way I evaluate doughnuts. I try it and decide right then and there, "Yum!" or "Yuck!"

So here goes with the first one:

Bella Sera, Italy, 2000 Merlot: Yuck!

Hey, that was easy enough.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 20, 2002 at 10:56 AM

January 21, 2002: Virgil's Undertow

Today I went to Amazon.com to look for a book. On the front page, it had some book and music recommendations, including the album "Lateralus", by Tool. "Hmmmm," I said, as I clicked on the link "Why was I recommended this?"

The next page said, "We recommended Lateralus (Tool) because you recently purchased or rated Undertow (Tool), Toxicity (System of a Down), and The Aeneid (Virgil)."

Whaaat? What the heck does Virgil have to do with Tool?

The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald, Book IV, lines 465-469
(Aeneas's weaselly parting words to Dido, Queen of Carthage, who later kills herself.)

As to the event, a few words. Do not think
I meant to be deceitful and slip away.
I never held the torches of a bridegroom,
Never entered upon the pact of marriage.

"Sober", by Tool

I am just a worthless liar.
I am just an imbecile.
I will only complicate you.
Trust in me and fall as well.
I will find a center in you.
I will chew it up and leave,
I will work to elevate you
just enough to bring you down.

Maybe that Amazon database is onto something.

A funny thing happened yesterday. I was walking out to my car when I heard a kid say "Hey, Mister!" I looked around -- I didn't see the kid, although I did see a middle-aged man across the parking lot. I kept walking. "Hey, Mister!" And then another, "Hey, Mister!"

Finally, I saw a little head bobbing up over the wooden fence. The kid was just strong enough to jump up for a second and call, "Hey Mister!" -- not quite strong enough to hold himself up or climb over. Anyway, he was talking to... me.

"Ummmm... can I help you?" I said.

Turns out he had dropped a homemade birthday card over the fence. I picked it up, reached over the fence, and handed it to him. "Thanks, Mister!"

So I'm a Mister now. Crap.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 21, 2002 at 10:42 AM

January 23, 2002: Lucky, Lucky Davis

So it looks like Iran is working actively to undermine Karzai, while his new government is still weak and uncertain. Just when there was hope that maybe, just maybe, Musharraf was reining in the ISI and the extremist madrasas... a new threat appears in the west. Terrific.

Closer to home, the Republicans had themselves a gubernatorial debate. I read this article in the physical SF Chronicle... unfortunately the web version lacks the cute little table comparing Bill, Bill, and Richard on the issues. That's too bad, because in the cute little table's "Energy Policy" column there was a short, simple sentence for all three, "Favors full deregulation and a free market solution" or something along those lines. Well, no shockers there. Although it makes me wonder...

Jones and Riordan clashed most strongly over energy, with the Jones accusing Riordan of overcharging the state when Los Angeles sold electricity at the height of last winter's energy crisis.

"You were busy trying to make sure that Los Angeles made as much money as it could off California," Jones argued, adding that Riordan's expert on energy, S. David Freeman, later joined the governor's staff and contributed to the administration's problems wrestling the energy issue."

Riordan vigorously defended his actions, saying it was his job to protect the interests of residents in Los Angeles, whose electricity rates stayed constant during his tenure.

Strange that Jones, the stalwart free marketeer, would castigate Riordan for simply charging California what the market would bear. (Or possibly less -- according to the SJ Mercury's article, Riordan claimed that the Los Angeles DWP sold the state electricity at cost.) Guess those free market principles are harder to stick to when it's the other guy that holds all the cards.

Well, since I am not one to let Jones, Riordan, and Simon be pigeonholed by our mean nasty rotten inaccurate liberal Bay Area media, I went to each candidate's website to see what their solutions were for the energy crisis. No filtering, no soundbites, no cute little SF Chronicle tables. The straight stuff. Here's what I found as of Jan. 23, 2002:

Bill Jones simply provides a list of op-ed articles by the Mercury, the LA Times, and the Sacramento Bee that criticize Davis. (Pssst, Bill: every link you provided is broken. Neither the Mercury, the Sac Bee, or the LA Times perma-links their articles. Just FYI.) All righty then, moving on to...

Bill Simon. Who, under his "Issues" section, provides... nothing on energy policy whatsoever! Looks like our last hope is...

Richard Riordan. It turns out that Riordan's energy policy consists of a short press release calling for the dissolution of the newly-formed Power Authority. Well, I suppose that's something, anyway. Better than recycling other people's editorials. And definitely better than providing nothing at all.

Now, certainly it's fair to criticize Davis. He was slow to react to the mess he inherited from Wilson. And he might have gotten snookered in those long term power contracts. On the other hand, he was under tremendous pressure to simply keep the lights on... and despite all that the Bush administration and Enron threw at him, he managed to do it.

Davis's challengers have had a year to plan since the height of the crisis. They have the full benefit of 20-20 hindsight -- and then some. So do they have any new ideas? Anything besides attacking the governor and spouting clichés? No. Nothing at all.

Pathetic.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 23, 2002 at 10:40 AM

January 26, 2002: Reading Overrated?

I found a cute little NYTimes op-ed piece, which argues that these days, all writing is screenwriting. Embedded in the middle of the article is this paragraph:

At the moment, a tribe of 15,000 novel-readers on the Upper West Side keep fiction alive in America. Other than that, fiction writers are as archaic as fishmongers. If you wish to hide some human truth where no one will find it, place it in the middle of your first novel.

New Yawkers really are a different breed aren't they? Sure, if I was a member of The Tribe of 15000, I might believe that that it was only my efforts that kept the sputtering flame of fiction alive. But I would never express such thoughts to anyone other than my fellow tribesmen. Certainly not in the NY Times, where benighted Californians, Britons, or God help us, South Dakotans might stumble across it.

I'm not sure if this is an example of "the (New York) fish not noticing the water in which he swims," or something more. See, I've always heard people argue that one should read fiction to expand one's horizons and explore different modes of thinking. But our essayist now unwittingly provides us with the counterargument: that perhaps reading can have the opposite effect. Maybe this whole readin' and writin' business isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 26, 2002 at 10:32 AM

January 26, 2002: Moral Fiber

I've decided that everyone should move at least once every six months. Moving is good for your moral fiber. It obviates nearly every one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Take Covetousness, for instance. The human spirit of generosity truly shines forth when you're moving. "Here you go, this is yours." "No no no, you take it, it's yours." Just heartwarming.

Or Gluttony. I don't know how anyone can clean out their fridge without vowing that they will never touch food again.

Lust? Hard to be in the mood when you stink of sweat and bleach and whatever the heck is under the fridge.

Sloth? Not a chance, when you're supposed to be legally out of the house in a few hours. It's enough to make even Sam work his tail off.

Unfortunately I can't fit every one of the Sins into the picture. Particularly Wrath. So hold off on emailing Robert Bork and asking him to call off his crusade. I haven't completely solved the whole USA-moral-decay problem yet. Give me a few more weeks. I'm sure I'm real close now.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 26, 2002 at 8:54 PM

January 27, 2002: Leonard's Rules for Writing

Elmore Leonard's rules for writing:

1. Never open a book with weather.

   Sure. Nobody wants to be Edward Bulwer-Lytton, after all.

2. Avoid prologues.

   This is a pet peeve of mine, particularly when I read thick fantasy novels. If there's a prologue, it's almost always about Gods and Goddesses and Heros and Monsters and there's a blizzard of names and places to wade through. And then the story starts. Bleahh.

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

   This goes a bit too far. Better to say, "don't be afraid to use 'said' to carry dialogue".

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said".

   Well, avoid using adverbs, period.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

   My high school English teacher told us that we could only use two exclamation points per year. She was kind of a dotty lady... but she was right about this one.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose".

   And whatever you do, don't combine these words with a description of the weather: "Suddenly, on a dark and stormy night, all hell broke loose." That's like the Triple Crown of bad prose.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

   In the article, Leonard cites Annie Proulx, but I'm not sure if he's complimenting her or criticizing her. (Unlike B. R. Myers, who is absolutely clear; he hates Proulx.)

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

   Or, "Show, don't tell". But you knew that. I knew that. We all knew that. A round of applause for us! Moving on...

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

   See Rule #8.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

    As Sam might put it: Fuckin' A.

Winelog:

I think I've found a wine rating site that shares my philosophy. I do have to deduct a few points, though -- these folks do have enough vocabulary to say why they liked or disliked a particular bottle. No, no, no. I'm looking for just the visceral reaction: Yes! No! Maybe! That's it. Anyway...

Fetzer, California, 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon: Not bad.
Sonoma Creek, Sonoma, 1999 Merlot: Not bad.
Black Mountain, California, 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon (FatCat): Yum

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 27, 2002 at 10:28 AM

January 30, 2002: Good Guys and Bad Guys

Sometimes, we nerds win.

I'm referring of course to the tale of Steuard Jensen, Prom King. As it turns out, Steuard was a physics major at HMC, just one year behind me. I stumbled across his page by accident. Of course, his story is still not quite as good as the one about the straight-A clarinet player who took Miss December 1989 to his Winter Formal, but all in all, not bad.

In other news, Linda Lay is bemoaning her husband's fate. The spin is that the family is facing bankruptcy, and that Ken Lay is an "honest, decent, moral human being who would do absolutely nothing wrong."

It's funny how bankruptcy just kinda creeps up on you like that. I mean, I haven't cashed out $101 million dollars in stock, and I don't own several multimillion dollar homes in Aspen, and yet somehow I manage to pay most of my creditors on time. Maybe his teenagers have, like, huge phone bills or something.

Heck, forget about Lay. I'm still having trouble feeling sorry for those poor Enron employees. I mean, if you're a white-collar worker at a big company, you know what's going on. Sure, you probably don't know enough to be prosecuted for anything. But... you hear rumors. You pick up on things at meetings, on email aliases, in casual conversations. You just kind of know things you're not supposed to know, unless you're socially blind, deaf, and dumb.

Here's who I do feel sorry for: the janitors. And the landscapers, and the cafeteria people, and the workers who built and maintained Enron's plants and pipelines. And possibly the admins. But as for the energy traders and the IT department? Let's see... you earned your living screwing over helpless people for money, but it didn't occur to you that perhaps your bosses viewed you in the same light. Well, tough luck and good riddance.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 30, 2002 at 10:24 AM