Month: April 2006

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Everyone to aft! The Captain’s gone daft about the draft! Quick, to a raft!

OK, I guess I gotta talk about the NFL Draft, since I’m a Bills fan and all. First off, drafting’s an inexact science and you never know which players are gonna be stars and which players are gonna tank and yada yada yada. William Goldman wrote that Hollywood’s golden rule is “Nobody knows anything”, but that could also apply to the NFL on Draft Day. The Bills weren’t stupid to draft Mike Williams in the first round, and the StuPats* weren’t geniuses to draft Tom Brady in the sixth. Nobody knows anything.

So why am I having trouble figuring out what Marv Levy’s doing?

I have no problem with the Bills not picking Matt Leinart. I really don’t. It couldn’t be an attractive possibility to Levy to use a first round pick on a quarterback for what would have been the fourth time in ten years, especially when the team has so many holes in other places. That, actually, is part of what’s bothering me: this team has so many holes that what’s really needed is an addition of as much talent as humanly possible. We’re talking large numbers of raw bodies, and then let’s see who sticks. So, when Levy had four picks to use in the first three rounds, along came a still-available Leinart and an opportunity to get even more picks. Instead, Levy used the pick on a safety — which, while yes we need one, isn’t nearly the major point of concern for this team.

So I, an armchair quarterbacking watch-it-on-TV-on-Sunday-afternoon fan, wanted to see those four picks used on two offensive linemen and two defensive linemen. Marv Levy, on the other hand, used one of those picks to trade up into the second round again, and thus used only three picks to take a safety, a defensive lineman, and a cornerback. Uhhhh…OK.

Maybe these guys turn out to be great. I don’t know. Not too many of Tom Donahoe’s picks panned out, and nor, frankly, did many of John Butler’s picks in his latter years here. But Levy always had a different view on personnel: he always looked for character and intelligence and raw athletic ability, players who could develop rather than start right now, and that appears to be what he’s doing now that he’s a GM. I’m willing to give him partial benefit of the doubt on the players he chose, but I’m less convinced about the manner in which he chose them. The best argument that I’ve seen is that Levy (and his assistants) came into this draft knowing, for the most part, which players they really wanted to get, and they paid the prices they needed to pay to ensure that they got them. If that’s the case, then these guys had better pan out.

And I should note that I’m distinctly unhappy that the Bills didn’t take an offensive lineman until the fifth round, and as of this writing, they’ve only taken that one OL player. I’d really hoped that OL would be a more pressing concern, given how stunningly bad the line has been the last few years. Maybe they’re convinced that the cast-off free agents they’ve signed will pan out, but it’s worth remembering that this is a team that closed out last season with zero starting offensive linemen who’d been drafted here. Free agency hasn’t changed everything, folks — the draft is still the main means of upgrading the level of talent on an NFL team over time.

Again, none of this is remotely exact. The Bills’ biggest draft bust of all time, Mike Williams, was taken fourth overall in the first round. One of the Bills’ best offensive linemen ever, Howard Ballard, was taken in the twelfth round, back when the draft had twelve rounds. Today, Ballard would be an undrafted free agent. But you can’t develop the linemen if you only draft one or two per year.

* For newer readers, the word “StuPats” is an abbreviation of “New England Stupid Patriots”. Because the NFL team from New England has, for the last five years, been the focus of Ultimate Evil in the sports world.

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Into the Depths of the Stars!

I’ve made the decision, based on lots of soul-searching and careful consideration…ach, who am I kidding? It’s basically a whim. But I want to become the world’s preeminent expert on space opera. Now, I know, this is a goal that will take years to achieve and will neither yield riches nor fame, but it’ll make me Lord Emperor of All Geeks (Space opera Division). And really, who could want more than that?

What brought this on, you ask? (Ach, who am I kidding — nobody’s asking that.) But anyway, it’s a pretty obvious interest, since I’m one of the most faithful worshippers at the Church of Lucas. Space opera has always been my preferred SF subgenre, the bigger and vaster the better. And really: since mid-May of last year, life has seemed a tad directionless and unfocused. (Don’t take my word for it.) So in a way, I’m going to try to scratch an itch that won’t ever be scratched in the same way again. Or something like that. (Hey, it’s a whim, and whims are pretty hazy things. Who sits and thinks out a whim, anyway?)

I’m also seeking to give myself a broader background in space opera tropes, because after I finish The Promised King* I want to turn to a tale that’s been sitting in my head gestating for a few years now. I posted a kernel of this tale before; you can read it here, although I’m not at all certain how much of that little excerpt will remain when I get back to that story. Suffice it to say that stories of war and romance on a Galactic scale appeal to me; and if I had to name the single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard, it would be “Write the books you want to read.”

So, where to begin? Well, I’m not sure where exactly I’ll start. But I’m in the beginning of amassing a collection of space opera books. These I have already, in no particular order:

:: The Lensmen novels, by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I read Triplanetary a few years ago and enjoyed it, but still have yet to read the rest of this series. My understanding is that Triplanetary wasn’t actually the first of the Lensmen tales.

:: The Skylark of Space, also by Doc Smith. Hey, you gotta inspect the roots of the genre, right? This book came out in 1928.

:: Brian Daley: Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, Jinx on a Terran Inheritance, Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I remember Will Duquette recommending these a while back. I remember reading some of Daley’s media tie-in novels as a kid, but never any of his own work.

:: Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns. This series is still “in progress”, with three more volumes to go, apparently. The first book is kind of weak, being chapter after chapter after chapter of exposition; also, Smith’s tendency to throw in cute allusions gets a little off-putting at times. But things improve quite a bit in the second book. I wouldn’t recommend splurging on this series in hardcover, but they’re fun in softcover. Anderson’s really got a gift for conveying nifty visuals in descriptive prose, like the diamond-hulled warships of the Hydrogues.

:: Debra Doyle and James MacDonald’s Mageworlds series. I’ve got The Price of the Stars, Starpilot’s Grave, and By Honor Betray’d, which constitute the main Mageworlds trilogy, as well as a prequel novel called The Gathering Flame. I read Price of the Stars four or five years ago and thought it was just “Star Wars lite”, but enough folks have spoken well of the series since then that I suspect I may have judged it unfairly. It happens, folks — I wish I had a dime for every piece of classical music I hated the first time I listened to it. Heck, I hated Berlioz the first time I heard him.

:: The Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I’ve read the first three of these and enjoyed them, although they didn’t feel all that “space opera-ish” to me — more like romances set in space. But as fans of SF and fantasy well know, these genres and their little subgenres tend to stubbornly resist easy categorization.

:: Primary Inversion and The Radiant Seas by Catherine Asaro. I read Primary Inversion a few years back as well, but I don’t remember much about it. These are the first two books in a larger series called “The Saga of the Skolian Empire”. Well, that’s gotta be good, right? It’s got the words “Saga” and “Empire” in it.

:: Downbelow Station and The Faded Sun Trilogy by C.J. Cherryh. These are apparently set in “the Alliance-Union Universe”. Strange as it may seem, I have never read anything by Cherryh before.

:: Star Soldiers by Andre Norton. Equally strange, I don’t recall ever reading Norton before, either. What the hell have I been doing?!

:: Excession, by Iain M. Banks. This is one of Banks’s “Culture” novels. I started The Player of Games a while back, but never finished it for some reason. Perhaps someone can tell me if Excession is a good entry point into the “Culture” books, or if I should dig back farther. My understanding is that they’re all standalone novels, but that doesn’t mean that one book isn’t a better intro than another.

:: A Thousand Words for Stranger and Ties of Power, by Julie E. Czerneda. The first two books in Czerneda’s “Trade Pact Universe”. I liked Thousand Words a lot when I read it a few years back. In honesty, I completely forgot I had the second book in this series until I went through the shelves just now.

:: The Duke of Uranium and A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes. Read the first and liked it a lot; never got around to the second. If there were any justice, “Toktru” would be as well-known a word in SF fandom as “Fnord!”

:: Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Another one I started but didn’t finish. In truth, I do this a lot. I’ll be reading along, and get to about fifty or so pages in and just kind of say to myself, “Hmmmm, this really isn’t what I’m in the mood to read right now.” It’s kind of a capricious reading life, I’ll admit, but I think the upside is that I think I’m more fair to books when I come to them when I want to rather than forcing myself through them when I don’t, if that makes sense. (I was clearly reading this last summertime, because I discovered that I’d been marking my place with an old grocery list. Charcoal, beer, and Italian sausage topped the list. Oh, and a can of infant formula. Weird, the reminders that await us in the tall grass….)

:: Sunrunner and Startide Rising, by David Brin. Everybody says that the first Uplift trilogy is amazing, the second one less so. Guess I’ll find out eventually. I’m still mad at Brin for saying mean things about Star Wars a few years back, but I’ll try to be nice to his books.

:: Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel. Not sure if this is space opera or just hard SF, but I just found it on my shelves. I don’t remember buying it, even. Anyone?

:: Jaran, by Kate Elliott. I don’t know squat about this one, save that the back cover refers to a mix of “interstellar empires and primitive cultures”. That works.

:: Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg. I’m honestly not sure this counts as space opera; the cover copy reads more like a blend of SF and fantasy. But again, the pesky dividing line between space opera and something else is always fungible. Onto the stack it goes.

:: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. First book in a franchise of sorts. I love this book’s cover art — simple, intriguing, and evocative.

:: In Conquest Born, by C.S. Friedman. I just bought this last week. I’d heard of Friedman, but knew nothing of her work. The cover has a guy on a starship, holding a sword. Yup!

:: Deathstalker, by Simon R. Green. Someone told me that this series probably went on two or even three books too long. This was another casualty of the “Hmmm, not really in the mood for this” malaise that sends me to the shelves for something else. Still, I absolutely adore that opening passage.

:: Pandora’s Star, by Peter F. Hamilton. Ahhhh, Hamilton. Tried him once before and didn’t make it — but not for the usual reasons. His Night’s Dawn Trilogy was so massive that when the books were issued in paperback, each volume had to be split in two. We’re talking a massive series here, folks. Well, I loved the first half of The Reality Dysfunction (the first book), but something went awry with the second half: my copy of it literally fell apart, some months after I had bought it. Bad glue, or what, I don’t recall. I never got around to replacing it. Anyway, I bought Pandora’s Star a few weeks ago.

:: Dread Empire’s Fall, by Walter Jon Williams. Trilogy about a fallen interstellar empire. Check.

:: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross. I don’t know why, but I always feel stupid when I read Stross. Kind of like that episode of Friends when Joey, tired of feeling left out in conversations, buys a single volume of an encyclopedia (because that’s all he can afford), and thus keeps trying to steer the conversations to topics that start with the letter ‘V’. I haven’t read any of Stross’s novels, but his short fiction is so idea-packed that I may need to decompress after reading his novels.

:: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. I liked Fire, although I don’t think I understood the ending all that well. Still haven’t attemped Deepness.

These are works that I do not own yet but plan to acquire:

:: Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire duology. I checked the first half out of the library and loved it. Why didn’t I read the second half, then? Because I’m forgetful as hell, that’s why. Hence this list.

:: Timothy Zahn. Pretty much anything. I owned his “Conquerors Trilogy”, but lost it in the last move. He’s fairly prolific, too.

:: David Zindell’s Neverness and Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy. Never heard of Zindell until last night. Anyone?

:: The Book of Skaith, The Coming of the Terrans, and The Starmen of Llyrdis, by Leigh Brackett. I read her Sword of Rhiannon a while back, and once I aligned my reading-mind with the fact that Brackett had been writing with a 1950s author’s knowledge of the planet Mars, I found it a highly entertaining read. There was a reason that George Lucas brought in Leigh Brackett to take the first whack at a script for The Empire Strikes Back, and her reputation as a writer of space opera was that reason.

OK, that’s what I either own or plan to get in the near future. However, I know that this list isn’t close to being exhaustive. So, what say you, readers? What space operas am I missing here? I’d be especially interested in comics, and in those terms, I’d like to focus specifically space operas, and preferably closed series that have actual endings. There are times when lots of comics titles delve into space opera — the famous Dark Phoenix saga from The Uncanny X-Men, frex — but unless the tale has a specific ending point, I’m not really looking for “Well, Superman often has some space opera stuff in it”. (BTW, the series Six from Sirius, from which my Net handle “Jaquandor” is taken, is pure space opera!)

I’m also keenly interested in older SF authors, long out-of-print, who worked in the space opera form. Aside from Leigh Brackett and Doc Smith, I’m fairly ignorant of space opera as a literary subgenre before Star Wars came along, and we’re talking about roughly fifty years of space opera goodness. So let me know about those, as well.

This is obviously something of a long-term thing that I’m putting in motion here. Looking at the stacks of books I’ve just created next to my computer table, I’ve got enough space opera goodness to keep me busy for a few years at least, and I’ve no intention of foregoing my other interests along the way — horror and fantasy will still abound.

But space opera? That’s where I want to be!

* I’ve started working again on The Promised King in the last week, and I’m hoping to start serializing Book II: The Finest Deed either later this summer or in early fall. I’ll keep everyone posted.

UPDATE 5-1-01: Readers have suggested the following series and/or books, either in e-mail or in comments:

:: Dune, by Frank Herbert. I own the first one and started reading it once. I stopped a ways in because I frankly got tired of Herbert’s constant use of his own made-up vocabulary. Usually this doesn’t bother me much when authors do it, but Herbert had me flipping to the glossary every other sentence, or so it felt. Not sure if this is “space opera”, really — how much of it involves, well, “space”? Someone who’s read it, let me know. Also cited are Herbert’s The Whipping Star and Dosadi Experiment. I’ve never even heard of these, but I’ll seek them out eventually.

:: David Webber’s Honor Harrington series. I’ve read the first two books, and I enjoyed them. They’re space opera to an extent, although most readers would more consider them “Military SF”. I like the Honor Harrington character, but I’ve heard that farther on in the series, Honor’s seeming perfection gets more and more grating; I’m also told that Webber’s infodumps get more and more intrusive and cloying. That would be something to see, since in the very first book, Webber completely stops the action just as the climactic battle/chase is starting to heat up, so he can go into a lengthy explanation of the history of supralight drive in his universe. I’m not sure how much more Honor Harrington I really want to read.

Military SF, generally, isn’t my cup of tea. Admittedly, it’s hard to find the dividing line between space opera and Mil-SF. My own way of determining the difference has a flaw or two, but so far it seems to have worked. I’ve never been much of a Robert A. Heinlein fan, but it’s been years since I tried reading him.

:: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books. Yup. I’ve read the first three. Pretty fun stuff thus far.

:: C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books. Never heard of them. I’ll look them up.

:: Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai series. My familiarity with these extends about as far as the fact that I know they exist. I’ll have to check them out.

:: The Hitchhiker’s Guide series by Douglas Adams. Strangely, I’ve never read these.

Keep the recommendations coming, folks — I’m looking for all the space opera that can be read in a lifetime!

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Pour me another draft!

I’m just going to throw this up here for reference, when I post again tomorrow to bitch about the Buffalo Bills’ draft selections. Anyhow, today will see Rounds One through Three of the Draft. The Bills have four picks in those rounds (with two picks in the third round, by virtue of last year’s trade of Travis Henry to the Titans). If the Bills do not have at least three new linemen, either offensive or defensive or some combination thereof, when Day One is over, I will be…annoyed.

The Bills have not been a force at the line of scrimmage since the late 90s. Pussyfooting around with fullbacks and wide receivers and having an open competition for the quarterback of the future isn’t going to cut it. I’m judging Marv Levy’s inaugural season as General Manager by how the team does at the line of scrimmage, because winning teams are good at the line of scrimmage.

Here we go. Next stop, training camp!

(By the way, I’m sure that lots of good analysis and rantage will be available over at BFLOBlog. Check those fellows too.)

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A call for recipes and cooking suggestions!

OK, readers! I have two pounds of Polish sausage in my freezer, comprising two large loops of the stuff. And I want to cook it. I’m planning to cook one of the loops, actually, and then slice it up for use in a jamabalaya sometime in the next week or two. But what about the other one? Any thoughts?

(I should mention that my family uniformly hates sauerkraut. While I personally don’t like to consume sauerkraut directly, I do think that a piece of meat simmered in sauerkraut is friggin’ heavenly, but I can’t even convince the clan of that, so recipes that involve sauerkraut are out.)

(By the way, when I went to college in Iowa, the pizza places out there offered sauerkraut as a pizza topping. That’s wrong on so many levels that it boggles the mind to even try to list them all.)

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Shuffling

I haven’t done one of these in a while — the “Friday Shuffle” thing, so here it is. (If you haven’t seen it, what you do is set up your computer’s music program to play shuffle your entire music library and then post the first ten tracks the computer plays.)

1. “Remembering” from Total Recall, by Jerry Goldsmith. I think that this was the last indisputably great score that Goldsmith wrote.

2. “Bounty Hunter’s Pursuit” from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Good action cue.

3. “The Cobbler”, from the album Big Shoes by the Dave Rowe Trio. I reviewed this album for GMR. This is one of those small bands that can be found in cities all throughout the country. I like their sound a lot.

4. “There’s Nothin’ Like a Dame”, sung by Bryn Terfel from his Rodgers-and-Hammerstein album. I like his Lerner-and-Loewe album better, but this is still a great listen.

5. “Rock Hammer”, from The Shawshank Redemption by Thomas Newman. This is a mild underscore cue that becomes rhythmic halfway through. This score’s last half hour is amazing.

6. “Lamenta”, by Mark Snow, from The Truth and the Light: Music of The X-Files. It really annoys me that this disc, with music from the show’s first two seasons and released ten years ago, is still the only music released officially from The X-Files.

7. “Ice Skating Sequence”, from Gigi. Music by Frederick Loewe. A nice waltz tune for an ice-skating scene from the film.

8. “Escape from Waziri / Eve and Struts”, from High Road to China, by John Barry. This movie was Tom Selleck’s consolation prize after he was unable to do Raiders of the Lost Ark because of his contractual obligation to star in CBS’s new show Magnum PI. I tend to think that worked out fairly well for all concerned. High Road is a nice little adventure flick, with a good score by Barry.

9. “Goodbye”, from Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. If you’ve got a bit of depression that needs to be nursed with some music and booze, this is the album for you.

10. “Forgotten Overture”, from Finding Neverland, by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek. I wrote about this score here. I used to play this score a lot while I was doing feedings for Little Quinn, and as such, this is a rare piece of music that is strongly connected to a certain set of memories and emotions for me. My relation to music tends to be strongly tilted toward the abstract, but not in this case.

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Anthems

I hope Digby doesn’t mind me quoting his entire post, but it’s brief and to the point:

A reader writes in to ask:

Please tell us again why the Spanish translation of the National Anthem is making wingnut heads explode when they all but genuflect at the waving of the Confederate Rebel flag?

Tell me please, which of these was meant to turn hearts to America, and which is meant to tear the country apart?

I don’t know the answer to that. Apparently honoring the confederate flag is ok because it’s a tribute to the heritage and culture of some Americans’ forebears.

But that’s the only culture and heritage to which Americans are allowed to pay such tribute. The one that seceded from the United States and created its own country.

Those whose forebears didn’t secede from the US to form their own country but rather came to America to become Americans should not be allowed to honor their culture in any way shape or form. That would be un-American.

I can’t explain this.

Yeah, I don’t get it, either. Alan also points out that the lyrics are hardly “offensive” or disrespectful, and he also reminds us that “O Canada” has two sets of lyrics — one English, one French.

A few weeks ago Kevin Drum expressed a kind of admiration for the way Michelle Malkin and her ilk seem to dig through local news all over the country in order to find tiny things over which they will then work up amazing amounts of rage. It really is amazing. Don’t they get tired of being angry all the time?

(For the purposes of this post, I tried finding the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner translated into Klingon, but I was unsuccessful. Alas!)

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United

Today the new 9-11 movie, United 93, opens. I’ve read a large number of reviews, and not one of them has been less than glowing.

I’m sure I’ll see it eventually, but not until I feel like it — which will probably be a year or two from now, when it’s on DVD and when the furor over its release has become distant memory. Kind of like the way I only watched The Passion of the Christ a few weeks ago. I’ll see United 93 when it’s easier to watch it as just a movie, which is what it is.

I have to note that I find slightly creepy the notion by some that United 93 will become some kind of tract that hopefully kick-starts American passion in the “War on Terror”, and that it will bring people back round to full support of President Bush and his various adventures around the globe, both ongoing (Iraq) and “coming soon to a theater near you” (Iran). I’m not sure this will happen, frankly. Maybe it will. But two points: first, every single review of United 93 I’ve read makes it crystal clear that this film is absolutely, rigidly tight in its focus on the events on that plane, and on that plane alone. There is no exploration of the geopolitics of 9-11, either before or after, and there is no real effort to depict the backgrounds of the doomed passengers or to make truly villainous the efforts of the hijackers. As propaganda, United 93 as I’ve seen it described sounds wanting.

Secondly, if the hope that United 93 reminds Americans of the importance of “this war” (to use that sloppy, ill-defined phrase) exists, such a hope tacitly grants the premise that most Americans think the “war on terror” has gone awry, if it was ever on target in the first place. Consider what that means to the myth of George W. Bush as a war-leader of Churchillian brilliance, if he needs a movie to lead the nation where he has proven increasingly unable to get it to go.

Do I think that it’s “too soon” for a 9-11 movie? I do not. Storytelling is probably the most inate human means of responding to events, whether mundane or traumatic. It wasn’t “too soon” for comic books to meditate on 9-11 (albeit with mixed results); and I myself wrote a short story about 9-11 (and James Morrow wrote a better one). United 93 is different, of course, in that it dramatizes the actual events, rather than ruminating in story form on the emotional aftermath. The only “too soon” that matters is if the artists involved had enough time to really focus on what it was they were trying to accomplish with their particular work. For United 93, it is, according to reviewers, exactly soon enough.

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If you can’t say something nice….

A blogger named John Bruce has been on something of a crusade about Glenn Reynolds, and transhumanism, and nanotechnology, and the Vingean singularity, for months. He seems to be trying to poke Reynolds with a bigger and bigger stick each time out, and he also seems to genuinely believe that Reynolds is somehow a driving force behind blogging, or something. Watching all of this unfold over the last couple of months, I almost get the idea of someone really hankering for an Instalanche.

But then, in this post, he goes over the line into stunning churlishness. He chooses to attack the way Terry Heaton (of whom I don’t recall ever hearing before I read Mr. Bruce’s post) dared to post about an awful turn of events in his personal life.

Short version: Mr. Heaton’s wife died suddenly and unexpectedly. Mr. Heaton wrote a fairly brief post about this, in which he expresses his terrible grief and tries to say, in what I can only assume felt like far too few words, what his wife meant to him. He doesn’t really write anything particularly out of the norm for such events. There is nothing in his post that one wouldn’t expect to find in a post by a man who’s just lost his wife.

Nothing one wouldn’t expect, that is, unless one is John Bruce, in which case the whole post is horribly inappropriate and an illustration of everything that is wrong with Blogistan in general and Glenn Reynolds in particular. So there goes Mr. Bruce, speculating that Mr. Heaton’s wife actually committed suicide, attacking the language Mr. Heaton used to describe his wife (calling it a “Righteous Brothers cover”), intimating that Mr. Heaton immediately followed up his post with an e-mail to Glenn Reynolds, attacking Reynolds for suggesting that his readers offer Mr. Heaton “their prayers” (since Reynolds apparently isn’t a believer in prayer), and intimating that Reynolds is seeking to salve Mr. Heaton’s grief by “giving him an Instalanche. That’ll make him feel better!”

And his final salvo:

But I’m left with a sense that the social mechanisms that ought to have helped Terry Heaton deal with sudden bereavement, and would likely have functioned effectively in earlier decades, simply weren’t there in his case. The blogosphere is not a replacement for real institutions.

How Mr. Bruce can divine the role in Mr. Heaton’s life of those “social mechanisms”, I cannot say. But he seems to immediately assume this, without any evidence at all that this is true. Bruce is just assuming whatever he wants to assume, shoehorning it all into his preconceived notion of the problems that ail the blogging medium and community.

As my own readers know, I can write about this with some experience. Last November, we lost our fifteen-month old son. And, horror of horrors, I posted about it — and yes, I got some traffic from it, mainly via PZ Myers, TBogg, and Lance Mannion. And yes, the large flood of condolences left in my comments and in my e-mails were very comforting. But I, in no way, considered it a replacement for the social mechanisms Mr. Bruce is kvetching about. I only posted to the blog about Little Quinn’s death after we’d already spoken to our families, people in our church, at our workplaces, and plain friends. The blogging community didn’t replace anything, nor did it substitute for anything that failed to function as it should have. The blogging community was, as it has always been, just another part of life.

This, then, is the ultimately nauseating kernel of Mr. Bruce’s post:

But if I were in similar circumstances, I’ve got to say that the last thing that would be on my mind would be “Oh, golly, I’ve got to post about this right away!” And consider that, once he’d put up his post, his next move had to have been to e-mail Reynolds and get the link put in Instapundit. If friends, neighbors, family, church members, or others counted for anything in this poor man’s life, they should have been keeping him away from the keyboard at such a time.

There’s no reason to suggest that his “next move had to have been to e-mail Reynolds”. I didn’t e-mail a soul after I wrote my own post about Little Quinn. Sometimes, things get around Blogistan all by themselves. That’s just a shitty thing for Bruce to say, and he says it for no other reason than to make a shitty point about Glenn Reynolds and how much Bruce apparently hates the social aspects of blogging. And witness again Bruce’s assumption that blogging about his wife’s death indicates that “this poor man’s life” has nobody in it but other bloggers.

Finally, this “Why, the last thing on my mind would be….” notion is ludicrous. Believe me, folks, the only way to find out what you’d do in a situation like that is to actually experience a situation like that. And they’re all unique. I’m not about to take my reactions to Little Quinn’s death as any kind of indicator of what I would do if something happened to The Daughter. Mr. Bruce is appointing himself to some kind of moral authority status, and frankly, it’s disgusting. I can’t say what the last thing on my mind would be to do if someone close to me died. But I can say that if I learned that someone died, the last thing on my mind would be to cherry pick that person’s subsequent actions for details that seemingly support my own personal crusade.

(And my deepest condolences to Mr. Heaton.)

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