Month: December 2003

I probably won’t be posting anything more today, mainly because I have a ton of other work to get done. Three stories are going into the mail, the domicile isn’t looking as good as it should, I’ve allowed the dishes to pile up. I’m not sure what 2003 “Retrospective” thoughts I want to post yet, if any, so those will wait until either tomorrow or the second. (I’m undecided on whether I’m posting anything tomorrow or taking a day off.)

So, as I complete my first complete calendar year of blogging (with the second anniversary coming up in a little over a month), I’d like to thank all of my readers, linkers, and commenters for the preceding twelve months. I’m not going to single anyone out specifically, because there are too many who deserve it and I’d inevitably forget someone important. So, to anyone who has perused this space over the last year, thank you and have a safe and good 2004.

And remember, if you go to any large, public celebrations tonight, please don’t drink too much if you’re driving and leave the almanac at home. I’d hate for one of my readers to be labeled a “person of interest”.

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Will Duquette, who was kind enough to link my thoughts the other day on LOTR as literature, today links another fascinating piece from someone who rejects even more strongly than I do the idea that the films represent finer storytelling than the books.

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Howard Dean may not know it, but he’s reached a milestone of amazing proportions: he has crossed the Lucasian Violence Threshold. (That’s the point a Democrat or liberal of sufficient visibility reaches when Rachel Lucas wants to punch him or her at the mere sight of his or her face on TV.)

Of course, given that she hates Howard Dean because he’s a Socialist (yup), I’m rather left wondering how much Rachel knows about Howard Dean or Socialists.

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(This post is slightly, well, “randy” in content.)

Tonight I was driving through a neighborhood I hadn’t been through before, and I saw some very nice Christmas light displays. But there was one thing that clearly the homeowner didn’t check out: they had a tall, oblong shrub in front of their house, about six or seven feet tall, with a rounded top and a very slight lean. This was covered in a brilliant display of green lights, which the homeowner had placed with sufficient density to make the thing very bright and very festive. Up close.

The problem is, from distances of, say, a quarter mile or more, all those lights sort-of blend together into a single shaft of green light. So, unfortunately, it looked as if this one house had a giant green phallus in the front yard. I seriously doubt that this was the intended effect.

Always check your Christmas lights from a distance, folks.

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Sometimes in the course of perusing Internet debates, I will encounter someone whose arguments are so outright bizarre that they just stop me cold. It’s not that they have good arguments, but that they are starting from a set of assumptions that I can’t even comprehend.

For example, check out this MeFi thread. The topic is public funding of arts programs. Whether you’re pro or con — I, personally, am very pro-arts funding — isn’t relevant to what I’m trying to illustrate here. There’s a commenter partaking of that thread under the handle “Faze”, who seems to think that we are in some kind of artistic golden age on the basis of how great current TV and rap music are. This person actually states that a single episode of King of Queens contains more laughs than the entire opus of Shakespeare, and he commits the “Popularity equals quality” fallacy numerous times. Another of his arguments goes roughly like this:

1. Most TV writers today are Harvard grads.

2. The finest minds in our society come from Harvard.

3. Ergo, some of our finest minds are spending the best years of their lives making us laugh.

4. Ergo, this is a golden age of art.

I try to comprehend the totality of questionable assumptions behind this view, and my mind shuts down due to the strain. Amazing.

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I’ve long since accepted the necessity of form letters for rejections; in fact, in most cases, I prefer them. (Except for that “We can’t tell you exactly why, but it probably sucked” letter that Asimov’s uses.) But that being the case, it would be nice if certain markets wouldn’t stuff my SASE with other stuff besides the rejection. The resulting thickness of the envelope makes me think, “Hmmm….could it be? Could this be a contract? Ooooooh!”

(Yes, this is a stupid thing to complain about. My New Year’s Resolution to whine less is not in effect yet. Oh, and there is no such Resolution. Heh.)

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I just treated my daughter to a mini-tantrum (no, not at her!). A rejection slip for a story of mine just arrived, from the market to which I have my largest ratio of “near misses” in my submission history. When I got done saying things like “Gaggle rogga fruggool Nozmeth ZOOM!” (because, you know, I can’t say what I’d really want to say in front of her), she asks what’s wrong, and I calmly explain:

“Well, Sweetie, I sent a story I wrote to this magazine, and they sent me back a nice letter saying that while they like it, they didn’t like it enough to buy it.”

She thinks this over for about 1.6 seconds, and then replies: “So send them a story they’ll like better, Daddy!”

One of the great unexplored mysteries of human nature, I think, is how children sometimes seem to instinctively know exactly what to say.

Pardon me while I fire up my printer….

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The novel-in-progress has been pretty-well stalled lately, both for circumstances beyond my control (that illness of mine, immediately followed by the climax of the Christmas season) and within my control: I had reached a point in the story where I couldn’t figure out how to make the transition to the next stage, even though that next stage is frighteningly, maddeningly close — it’s like in those adventure movies where one trail ends, the next trail starts just twenty feet away, and between the two is a bottomless chasm.

However, I finally figured it out. The solution was two-fold: first, I started suspecting that one scene that I’d been dreading writing actually doesn’t need to occur, but then I had to figure out what happened instead of that particular scene to get me to the point where I need to be. I hit upon the solution last night, however, and theoretically I can start picking up steam again now that I’m healthy and the holidays are just about over.

For some reason, January has always felt like a relief to me. When I actually had jobs, I liked to take vacation time not over Christmas but two weeks after it, and this is why.

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Here’s a funny list of what various folks in different locales do to cope with certain temperatures. I’m a little miffed, though, that Buffalo has no entry. Maybe something like this:

28F: People in Buffalo say, “What do you want from us! It’s colder in Minnesota, but you can’t ever talk about them, no, no, no….”

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Over at Laputan Logic is a fascinating post about the oldest roofed structure in the world, a tomb in Ireland whose purpose is to mark the Winter Solstice. Check it out.

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