Reading this John Scalzi post, I’m struck by two things: one, his kid looks a lot like my kid (although I think his kid is older); and two, I’m really a terribly nosy person. Whenever I read some blog writer who says something like, “Man, was today the worst day in the history of days”, and then they don’t describe exactly why, I’m disappointed – – even though it is, in all likelihood, none of my damn business since with the exception of three people (two of whom I have personally badgered into Blogistan in the first place), none of these people knows me from Adam.

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This picture is an almost perfect enactment of something I did when I was in high school, and the day rolled around in biology class when we were to dissect a cow’s heart:

But the thing is…well, read.

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Sean is slightly miffed that Collaboratory hasn’t been doing so hot lately. And he’s right. I can’t speak for my fellow Colaborers, but I’ve definitely been remiss and will try to pick it up a bit. In my defense, I’m being pulled in about sixteen different directions right now, and the fact that I have a kid rules out what used to be my main method of dealing with such things (swearing a lot, followed by drinking beer and watching Die Hard).

(For newer readers here, Collaboratory is a group-blog of which I am a member. Check it out; we’ve put a lot of good stuff there, even if we’ve been total slackers lately. And we seem to be in agreement that new blood might be what the doctor ordered, so if you like what you see, e-mail Sean. He’s not that mean. Really.)

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A key tool of stage magicians is misdirection. What this means is quite simple: while the magician has you watching the mumbo-jumbo he’s doing with his right hand, you are paying no attention at all to his left – – which is the hand that is setting up the trick. Misdirection is also used in political rhetoric a lot: witness one of the current rationales of the whole Iraq/uranium folderol, that claims that it’s really all OK because intelligence is never perfect.

Except this wasn’t a case of bad intelligence. It was a case of bad intelligence that was identified as bad intelligence, and then was used anyway by people who either should have known it was bad intelligence and were thus inept, or did know it was bad intelligence and were thus deceitful. I’m always amazed at the sheer amount of smoke-and-mirrors foolery that can erupt around something that’s really not that complicated.

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Matthew Yglesias has returned from his terrible ordeal of European travel. Now maybe he can revise his blogroll…I can think of one key addition I’d have him make…

(Turn away, folks. Link-whoring is never a pretty sight.)

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Hmmm….I seem to be missing one of my readers. Is Michelle out there? (I only have one reader with a .tw extension, and that’s her…but maybe I bored her. It has been a while since I babbled about Star Wars.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

(Yeah, I said no image this week. I also thought it was Thursday when it was really Wednesday.)

Iceland at midnight.

I first discovered this woman’s journal when Warren Ellis linked it — apparently she does his web design, or something. She’s the woman who is basically the real-world physical doppelganger for the heroine of my novel (I posted about this before).

So I’ve been perusing her journal off-and-on, and it turns out she’s quite the “shutterbug”, for lack of a better term. And, at least to my fairly untrained eye, she seems to have a real knack for composing beautiful photos of her country, Iceland. Look at this:

And there are more.

I want a digital camera.

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Michael Lopez has a bad feeling about this.

Specifically, he’s worried about the trend these days to make sure that our schools are full of whiz-bang technology, such as giving every kid a laptop.

Now, I’m worried about this, myself. I like to wander through Circuit City or Best Buy every now and then, and I see the pricetags on laptops. I know that at my current rate of earning, it will be 2138 before I can own one. The USS Enterprise, under the command of Christopher Pike, will be drawing near its fateful mission to Talos IV before I own a laptop. But we can give one of these things to every kid? Well, how about giving a laptop to every aspiring writer, while we’re at it?

And as much as I love computers, I want to teach kids to love actual, physical books first. And judging by how some kids I went to school with treated their books, I shudder to think of how much schools will have to spend to repair and replace broken/stolen laptops. But at least kids will have a new set of excuses for not getting their homework done:

“My ISP had server problems, so I couldn’t do the research.”

“My dog ate my power cord.”

“How was I supposed to know that Windows would crash the night before the paper was due?”

Michael also discusses a disturbing meme, when he cites a twelve-year-old girl singing the praises of her free laptop because now she’ll have job skills for “the real world” — setting aside that she won’t be in “the real world” for another six to ten years, of course. I’ve long been bothered by the idea of education-as-job-training, and it really got annoying in college, when the refrain was constantly ringing throughout the lecture halls and classrooms: “Why do I gotta know this? I’m majoring in Chemistry! I’m not gonna have any use for the English Novel from 1750-1900!”

That’s part of what’s behind the “Here comes the real world” stuff that high school students always hear. The other part is the even-more nauseating platitude that was constantly shoveled my way:

“These are the best years of your life!!”

Oh, really? In all seriousness, I wanted nothing more than to hit everyone who ever told me this right between the eyes. And that didn’t just include teachers, but other students as well. (Funny how the students saying this were always the Class President, Head Cheerleader, Valedictorian Starting Quarterback types. You never heard this crap from the lips of the struggling C-student from the broken home. Nosiree, Bob.) My response was always thus: “So, given the average life expectancy of an American citizen these days, upon graduation from this Place of Magical Wonder I have something like sixty years of crap to look forward to? Are you really telling me that barely one-fourth of the way through my life, the best part is already over and it’s just wandering through the Doldrums from here on out? Am I to believe that further education, a career, marriage, raising children, and everything else to come isn’t as good as hanging out in high school?”

Or, more bluntly: if, when you’re in your mid-70s and winding down your life, you can honestly say that your best years were over by the time you were eighteen, I’d suspect that at some point along the way you made some questionable choices.

(I seem to be in a bad mood today. Hmmmmm.)

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(WARNING: ANGER ahead.)

It seems to me that certain activities, the mucking-up of which can do serious damage to people and property, should not be granted on a “lifetime” basis but instead subject to repeat testing every so often.

Such as, oh, elderly people driving.

When I was in Driver’s Ed, it was drummed into my skull (by the most droning instructor you can possibly imagine) that “Driving is a privilege, not a right”. Yesterday’s incident is far from the first such horror, and it’s not going to be the last. So I think that people should be subject to retesting as a requisite of maintaining their driver’s license — everyone, that is, but with the frequency of retesting going up as one’s age goes up.

Yes, it’s a knee-jerk response; yes, it involves governmental intrustion; yes, it involves bureaucrats, yada yada yada. I don’t care. I’ve been in too many close calls with elderly drivers who drove too fast in parking lots, or back out of driveways without looking, or don’t move over one inch when I’m walking or bicycling, or set up camp in the leftmost thruway lane and then go 56 mph, or tailgate, or make no attempt to allow for the dimensions of their vehicle when parking, or playing the “Who, me?” game after they’ve managed to hit another object or person with their car.

I know that the elderly value their independence and whatnot. But I also know that one particular gentleman apparently confused the gas pedal with the brake, and that nine people — including a three year old girl — are dead today because of it.

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Stick a fork in it. The second draft is done. Final count: 168,975 words, with cuts totaling about 18,400. That’s a little short of how much I wanted to cut, but I’ll take it.

The task now is to produce the outline, and then get it into the mail for submission next week. Oh, and on to the next book.

Whoopee.

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