And am I alone in thinking it interesting that Beth let herself be listed as Editor on Jay Lake's novel MAINSPRING?

Hippopotamus.
Antihippopotamus.
Annihilation.

"If we spread...$87 billion over an American football field, we would not be able to see much of the game. The players would be buried in 55 feet of money."

More shocking is that we've spent three and a half times that much to date.

I have this fear that I'm going to be walking around one day, and then *BLAM!* Gene Wolf shoots me in the face out of nowhere.

Also, he's brilliant enough to befuddle the police officers and get away with it.

Could you imagine the police officers trying to interrogate Gene Wolf about shooting me? Poor cops would be better off just getting autographs and letting the guy go.

And Abi is correct - now that the game is afoot, it can indeed become...apawling:

Were wary werewolf words wearing?

Nope, not yet.

"Just peachy darhling"

Xeger (5), if you were there and didn't say hello, I'm going to be ticked.

Can I just take the top layer?

I wasn't there - I was back on the east coast, melting :(

Have been trapped here for 5 hours. No end in sight.

I would say "send food", but they do have a pretty good sandwich place here, at least ...

Sigh.

Did anyone else initially think:
"What would an Open Source software distribution do? No, that can't be it. Maybe I should go look."

Just wondering.

You're not the only one....

I would just wonder how long after we figure out WWBSD we'd have before Theo de Raadt points out what we're doing wrong.

Gah! Can I blame it on wendacious wascally werewolves altering my link? :)

Gene Wolfe, gun nut? Gosh, I can't imagine it. His picture is in the dictionary under "avuncular."

If he was going to randomly kill a fellow, I'm confident he'd do it in a way that was charming, lyrical, and irritatingly labyrinthine.

I'm still working on the Trauma and You post, which is on track to get away from me. Big subject. Don't really know how to approach it yet.

I've also been doing an awful lot of EMTing. Haven't been on a run since ... two this morning. But had a squad meeting and a mandatory training session since then.

Plus I'm trying to write a novel or four.

turning japanese
poems into the summer's
games that we all play

haiku are easy
but they don't always make sense
refrigerator

I like that shirt. I don't think I can really beat that one; it makes me smile every time I see it.

I bet that I know
What Teresa has afoot
At least, I think so

Johnny Rico barely counts; as a young teenager reading Starship Troopers, even with his last name and the South American locations, he read entirely Anglo to me. (Possibly the fact that I was living in an area with almost no Latino population had something to do with it.)

There's Jorge Luis Borges, but I can't think of a single other notable Latino author, let alone one that would be as recognizable in the pop-culture world as Isaac Asimov or even Octavia Butler.

And I can't think of a single major SF show with a Latino major or recurring character.

Fandom reflects this; it's still a very whitebread community. More black people than there used to be -- but then, there are black SF characters on TV dating back to Lt. Uhura. Virtually no Latinos at all. Perhaps the experience of people in different parts of the country varies...?

I saw a fair amount of press hailing Edward James Olmos as the first major Latino character on an SF show. (Admiral Adama, the new Battlestar Galactica.) I wouldn't have known, otherwise.

Also:

Haiku are simple:
You can always wrap up with
"Motherfucker".

• Vasquez, Aliens

• Jo Lupo, Eureka
• Max (Jessica Alba), Dark Angel

P.S. I'm not dismissing the validity of the argument, just throwing some examples out there. Also interesting that they are all (relatively) attractive women.

No, seriously, I'm not allowed to post it. For some reason, the filter was a pre-nuptial requirement by my wife and she can telepathically sense when I try to bypass it...

Susan, #48: I don't have a strong definition -- "any writer or actor who self-identifies as one" would do.

Lance, #50: Counter-examples are one of the things I was looking for, so thank you. And yes, it is notable that "female exotic" is one of the few widely-available role types for them, not just in SF.

Complex URL,
or too many links, or both.
That's whats held my posts.

I had a comment held even though it had less links than other comments that went right through. The culprit- I guessed- was a very long and nested link.

PNH- I see a repeat of my bug report from OT85. However, Greg's comment doesn't seem to have an URL. Sinks that hypothesis.

Greg's comment is being held.
* It isn't visible in the thread.
* It also isn't visible on "Recent Comments" on the front page.
* It IS visible in the "View All By"

(Also, the 3 spam are still up at the end of the Fanfic force thread.)

should be diagnostic, not diagnostics.

One misspelled word falls,
on the crystallized poems
The avalanche starts
------

Line one is concrete,
then comes abstract references
to beauty, or time.
------

That named in line one
is life, which dies by line four,
So in three eat plums

Maybe we need to add to the discussion the possibility that many Latino SF/Fantasy authors aren't writing in English?

I actually think that Edward James Olmos as Adama on BSG is an excellent thing. There's no reason, in the BSG world, for the ethnicity of the actor to have anything to do with the characters since there is no Latin America in the twelve colonies. Choosing to cast somebody other than the default white guy or the token "We're going to be progressive see, see!" black guy makes it look like they're accepting that race as we think of it has nothing to do with the world they're portraying and so it needn't be an issue in casting.

I think part of the larger issue, at least as it pertains to dead-tree forms of scifi (and the need to limit it to those aspects probably indicates a serious flaw in this idea) is that authors are taking advantage of it being the future meaning that race isn't an issue anymore, and so can be ignored. Still, it's often there to be found if you look; just taking Heinlein as a point of reference we have Mannie's line from TMIAHM about Wyoh sticking out on Luna because she's white and blond and the native population is generally fairly brown, and he's got a short story - the name's slipping me and my library's a time zone away but I think it was collected in Expanded Universe - where the punchline is that the token black female vice president candidate is going to take office and won't step down even though others are trying to pressure her into it because she was chosen as a token figure. Also, there's a quick line in I will Fear No Evil about how unsavory it is to interact with people who spend their time complaining about minorities getting preferential treatment.

I suspect part of the problem could be that the Latinos are writing in Spanish and it isn't getting translated. I can list a few more Latino writers than have been listed already, but only because I've for untranslated stuff more accessible to a gringa than Borges. I haven't poked for Spanish language scifi since my vocabulary shortage would make me cry, but a quick google lead me to a few useful sites. There's probably tons more, but I'm stealing wireless.

Accommodate weird
minuscule embarrassment:
Gandhi etiquette.

----
This is just to say
Twenty pastiches total
only eight to go.

-----

!
?;
&:

:)
exclamation point
question mark semicolon
ampersand colon

wait.. 'fav-our-ed'... err yeah.. pronounce that with three syllables.. that'll do it.

B'Elanna Torres in ST: Voyager
Gaff (Edward James Olmos) in Blade Runner[*]
Just about all the cast of the Spy Kids movies (if you want to consider those as SF)

(I assume we're interested in English-language writing or media, otherwise it would be relatively easy to add, say, Mexican or Spanish movies.)

[*] Not clear if Gaff is, precisely, Latino

A review of an anthology of Spanish- and Portuguese-language SF.

I'm not sure what anti-spam measures you're using, but in light of the recent meltdown of the Whatever (probably) because of a huge influx of spam, can I recommend a very easy plugin called SpamFirewall? It blocks the most common forms of spam before MT even knows their existence, so it reduces server load and the amount of comments that end up in MT's junk file. I use it myself and it works great.

(Also, Comment E-Mail Filter would let frequent commenters get through the spam filter even if they post unusual links, which might be helpful. I also use this one and like it.)

So, in prose, thank you very much to ethan for mentioning Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I've had a lovely time the last few weeks, hanging out with the First Hundred.

The stash, forgotten,
Sprouted in springtime, with mixed
Oak and poe-trees.

A carpenter came
Seeking free materials
And cut down the trees.

He carved a small box
(Not a wardrobe - that is
Another story.)

I keep my hair sticks
Inside it. Inspiration
Leaks into my brain.

Sorry, Madeline.
Im writin al ur poemz.
I blame the squirrel.

Clifton Royston @#51: yep, all the Filipino folk I know are asian, but many of them have ostentatiously latinate names (Virgilio, for example). Kind of a cool thing, except for being the product of brutal colonization and whatnot.

There's Kit Rodriguez in Diane Duane's Wizards series

But seriously, for another example: I haven't read it for a long time, but didn't Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime feature significant "local" characters in its Central American milieu?

Gosh, that was a great book! I really thought he'd get significant mainstream crossover action on it, between the subject matter, the timing, and the marketing. Has he written anything else that good?

I generally dislike totting up lists like this; who knows what the person involved feels like?

As for Latino characters in SF, there was a series of shorts fairly recently set in a near-future maquiladora. I believe they were in Asimov's. The ambiance was Blade Runner crossed with magic realism, and almost all the characters were Mexican.

If Gene Wolfe wanted to kill you, you can be sure that he'd be the last person on the planet to be interrogated about it--they'd probably end up arresting Randy Newman.

Raindropped kitteh sez
DO NOT WANT

The punctuation haiku is brilliant. I am slightly biased because it contains my favorite punctuation mark ever.

---

Hail the iPod filk!
For I must focus on screen
end of fiscal year

As for American Latino or Hispanic authors, R. Garcia y Robertson is the only one who comes to mind.

Hermes Dances-with-raindrops would disagree.
Jewel, on the other hand, once was found with hind feet six inches up a screen door, climbing it to avoid water on the patio, four inches below the screen door. Getting the screen door open to let her in was ... interesting.

Today I wear that
shirt, and today Making Light
is making me smile.

Coincidence? Or
do the summer storms also
bring haiku showers?

The good thing about this recipe is that is just as good cold, so you don't have to eat it in one sitting.

"...can't recall the title or many details but..."

---L.

I hate trying to write the 5/7/5 pattern

I rewrote this one twice, trying to avoid the ham handed first draft (where I flat out said Summer). On the other hand, plums aren't an early summer fruit in Japan, so the seasonality is localised.

Then again, perhaps I'm being to slavish to form.

I learned haiku by reading lots of translations, and gained a "feel" for them. Many (most) of them weren't forced into the pattern (the worst was a collection which not only did that, but made the first and last lines rhyme).

One of my favorites:

To leave it is a pity
To pluck it is a pity,
Ah! this violet.

Issa (1763-1828)

I thought Willi Wachendon was black. Isn't his name a dialect form of "Washington"?

One, two, three, four, five
Six, seven, eight... how many?
Seventeen? Haiku!

It seems rude to put a picture right here in the comments, so I'll just post the link here. This seems vaguely related to Dave Bell's comment at #14. This picture was referred to as "Die gute Kamareden" at the LiveJournal (in Russian) of "onkel_hans." You folks who read Russian might be profusely thanked for going over there and telling me if the comments give a clue as to what is going on. Camouflaged spy?

1 14 oz can salmon, drained, bones removed
16 oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 tsp dill weed
2 tsp Liquid Smoke flavoring
4 tsp lemon juice
1-4 drops Tabasco sauce

Process the cream cheese till smooth in a food processor, then add the other ingredients and process till it's as smooth as you want it. Nice with a sprinkle of parsley on top. Keeps maybe a week in the fridge; doesn't really freeze too nicely. Serve on crackers or bagels. Cats love it, too!

Is is really good? Would you trust it as sashimi? (I think I've said it before, cooking salmon pretty much ruins it for me).

Chop some into bite sized pieces. Toss it with diced scallions, a little wasabized mayo (with, perhaps, a dash of garlic), some soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. Dress with a mix of plain, and toasted, sesame seeds.

Adapted from a dish I got at Mashiko, in W. Seattle (I told the cook I wanted a salmon salad).

For grilling:

Take the fish, marainate it in a mix of soy and teriyaki (to taste, though we use about 1:1.5), some rice wine vinegar, some crushed garlic, and a couple of sprigs of rosemary. We put it into a vacuum bag (food evacuator). That allows for marination with a lot less liquid.

You could add some sake to it, if you wanted.

After it's been in the fridge for 5-24 hours, remove it from the marinade, pat it dry and grill, aiming for an internal temp of 155-165 (pull it from the fire about five degrees before it's done, and let it rest).

Figure ten minutes per inch (though this is variable, depending on the heat of the fire), and flip the fish after about 6-7 minutes. I tend to cook the meat side first.

Maia's mother and I worked this one out, and it's one of the few ways of cooking salmon I don't mind. We've done it at the house; on the gas grill, and over an open fire in Joshua Tree (battery powered probe thermometers are a godsend when cooking somthing like this in the dark of a January night). It's almost foolproof.

You can, should you like, toss some rosemary (not from the marinade) onto the fire after you turn it. This is a lot easier here, where it's a weed, and I can collect it by the pound outside the supermarket.

You could also slice some thin, and make gravlax out of it.

Reduce 1C Soy Sauce and 1/2C Balsamic Vinegar by half in a saucepan (or further if desired).

Brush reduction on salmon steaks prior to and during grilling.

Dress steaks with cippolini's and serve.

This also works fantabulously with grilled sirloin cubes and cippolini's for summer party appetizers.

But why/if someone was in a silly suit, isn't being talked about; though a strong comment that it was just soldiering, not being a nazi party member was made.

If I'm inerpreting the mix of the russian and the german (which I don't really speak) properly, his grandfather is the Senior Sergeant on the far right.

Back in the late 1980's, I was listening to a Bay Area radio food show (probably this one or a predecessor also hosted by Narsai David), with guest Alice Waters, the chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Alice Waters is known for her emphasis on local, fresh cooking. Anyway, this show had a call-in segment, and one of the callers called in with your question: she had a large salmon in the freezer and wanted some recipe suggestions.

Well, Alice Waters was so flabbergasted by the thought of actually *freezing* a perfectly good salmon that she was unable to come up with a response. All she could do was ask why the caller had done such a thing -- she said, iirc, that she should have taken the fish to her local smokehouse (!) or something if she couldn't eat it all while it was fresh. The host, Narsai, finally bailed her out before the caller was completely humiliated by suggesting that she consider making gravlax or something similar.

I've always remembered this whenever I hear about chefs with fanatical devotion to certain ideas about food.

BTW, good luck with the fish -- I wish I had your problem...

anaea, #62: Excellent point re casting of Olmos.

Peter, #69: Spy Kids, yes! I remember seeing one of those on eternal-loop at CostCo and thinking how cool it was to have (what looked like) a mainstream kids' movie with Latino main characters.

Otterb, #75: Kit definitely counts; Lord John doesn't, I think, being a full-blooded Aztec. (I have a huge literary crush on Lord John.)

na NAAH nah na-na-na, mortgage
na nah NAH na, mortgage.

Not only has this earworm been bothering me simply by repeating itself in my head all morning, it's been bothering me that it keeps playing despite my protests that it's one syllable too short.

(sigh)

Wili is a black kid who speaks Spanish, but that's not exactly a distinguisher for being hispanic! Ever meet anyone from Cuba or the Dominican Republic? (His last name is clearly from his adopted father/math teacher, Sylvester Washington.)

(Sorry! It got into my head! I blame the Samurai!)

First thing I did upon opening this thread was read the brilliant Hippopotamus haiku to the rest of the room. The first thing the rest of the room did (after laughing) was recite the "refrigerator" haiku at me and say that an absent acquaintance has that T-shirt. Then what do I see not 40 posts later? Everything returns to Making Light. It's spooky.

Latino actors
making their way through deep space
rarely get credit.

Wasabi salmon and spinach
Salmon filet, 1/4-1/2 lb
wasabi
brown sugar
soy sauce
butter
olive oil
fresh spinach
West Virginia Zest Sauce

Around 2 hours before cooking, take a small lump of wasabi (I use about 1/2 the size of the last joint of my little finger. Your fingers may vary) and about 1 tsp brown sugar. Add enough soy sauce to make a thick syrup of the sugar and wasabi. Smear this all over the flesh side of your salmon filet, refrigerate till time to cook. In a large nonstick frying pan, melt about a tsp butter and add a small slosh olive oil; you want enough fat to brown the skin side of the salmon and contribute to the sauce, but It doesn't have to be a lot. Put the salmon in the pan skin side down and cook over medium heat while tearing up spinach. Tear up about as much spinach as you think can fit in the pan; it shrinks a lot. When the salmon looks cooked about halfway through, flip it over and put the spinach in with it. Stir spinach a bit, slosh a bit of zest sauce on, turn the heat to low, and cover the pan. While the salmon and spinach finish cooking (doesn't take long) mix up a bit more wasabi and soy sauce. Open up the pan in a couple of minutes and see if the salmon is done. If it isn't, cover the pan and wait a bit. If it is, plate it and pour the wasabi and soy sauce on it. Turn the heat off and stir the spinach and pan juices. Put the spinach on the plate with the salmon. If the pan juices seem thin and watery (the spinach loses a lot as it shrinks), turn the heat back on and reduce the juice. When it's a nice sauce consistency and quantity, pour it on the spinach and fish.

This makes a quick and tasty meal for one. I've expanded it for two (had to cook much of the spinach after removing the salmon, but it takes very little time) but haven't tried to make a larger quantity.

From the uniforms, it's plainly not late in the war. By 1944, there would be variations in the tunics, and different types of boot. Unless these soldiers were a selected parade detachment, which is very likely.

But the helmet decals and the shine of the buttons also bias me to an early or pre-war timing.

Incidentally, they are Heer (Army).

So what we likely have is a regimental mascot. The soldier on the right of the picture is an NCO. The soldier on the left, wearing the greatcoat, seems to be an officer, but it's hard to make out the rank insignia.

I reckon the unit could be identifiable--what German Army units, probably infantry, had a bear as a mascot? I'm not sure that it would be info you'd find on the web--it's the sort of thing that would be buried in a unit history.

Biscuits.

Damn you all.

I made biscuits this morning. It took a supreme act of will not to make them last night after reading Open Thread 86. But I pulled up the Alton Brown recipe and made them this morning. They were very easy and fun to make, and delicious with butter and blackberry jam. And fried eggs. My husband also gives them a thumbs-up. He doesn't usually get breakfast cooked for him on Fridays because I have to be elsewhere at 7:45. But we both happily woke up for these.

I have a question, though, about buttermilk and buttermilk substitutes.

See, I don't buy buttermilk. Store-bought buttermilk tends to be that cultured stuff, not the butter-making by-product that originally got the name. Instead, I buy heavy cream. When a recipe calls for buttermilk, I measure twice as much cream into a screw top jar and shake it a lot. Usually the resulting butter goes into the same recipe as the buttermilk, which makes me wonder why the recipe didn't just call for heavy cream instead. I tend to do stuff like substitute 4 tbl heavy cream for the 2 tbl butter and 2 tbl milk in mac-n-cheese; this is why heavy cream doesn't go to waste much around our house.

But here's the thing. When a recipe that calls for buttermilk also calls for baking soda, baking powder, and salt, it's relying on the interaction between those and the buttermilk to make the bread rise. This is the case with these biscuits, or Diane Duane's "Peter's Mum's Soda Bread". And doubtless these recipes go back to times when buttermilk always meant "what's left after you make the butter." But... true buttermilk surely isn't as acidic as the supermarket cultured stuff or the milk-soured-with-vinegar substitute (which I used this morning since I was out of cream), is it? Doesn't less acidity mean less rising action? So maybe I *shouldn't* use true buttermilk in soda breads?

Opinions eagerly sought!

Outside the bluest
flower draws our waking eye,
such perfect colour.

I watch Mexican
roofers laying tarpaper
on the newest house.

A late breakfast is
the summer's finest pleasure,
tea makes me joyful.

I name this moment
the one that should never leave,
freeze now this second.

Traffic between Olympia and Seattle, and ohgodsaveusall, in Seattle, is nightmarish at the best of times, and today is not only the Friday before a major holiday, but also the Mariners are playing at home. Now, if we could leave in a half hour, things wouldn't be too bad, we could probably head home before three.

The dog's cable run just broke, and he's long gone. So, give it two hours before he gets home, on average.

This sucks.

You might be able to use diluted yogurt for the buttermilk, although the flavor is different. (Cookbooks sometimes have this kind of substitution listed.)

I've seen dehydrated buttermilk in the supermarket occasionally, with something like 4 packets each making 1 cup in the box. (There's supposed to be a bulk-pack version around, but I haven't seen it. Maybe I need to hunt around some more.)

Baking soda is straightforward alkali, combine it with an acid and you get a gaseous reaction that produces leavening in batters.

Baking powder is usually a combination of baking soda and a crystallized acid (not sure what), so adding any liquid will produce the leavening. Double acting baking powder adds a second kind of crystal that only reacts under heat, so it provides additional leavening during baking.

If you add baking soda _and_ baking powder to an acidic batter, I think you are supposed to cut the baking soda in half, at least that's the way I learned it. Otherwise there's too much alkali leftover and you get that funky taste when you eat the goods.

Real and cultured buttermilk contains lactic acid while vinegar is usually an acetic acid and lemon juice is a citric acid.

My experience has been that there is enough variation in the relative strengths of each kind of acid ingredient that a 1:1 substitution never really seems to work.

My rule of thumb is to make the following adjustments:

• lemon juice * 1.0
  
• vinegar * .75
  
• store buttermilk * 1.0
  
• real buttermilk * 1.0 + 1tsp lemon juice
  

So, after making the butter, the buttermilk is slightly sour (it's adding those cultures which makes buttermilk for the store, otherwise what one has is skimmed milk).

And yes, the soda is supposed to react to the acids in the buttermilk to increase the fluffiness of the biscuits.

I've only managed one that I thought did justice to the form:

Web over water
Steel spun by a human mind
For others to walk.

I ask because of the definitional problem which is already leading to confusion in the discussion. Self-identification isn’t a terribly useful basis – I mean, is there any reason you do not self-identify as Latina? You must have some concrete basis for assigning people as such.

For examples of the other problems:

Peter @ #69:
(I assume we're interested in English-language writing or media, otherwise it would be relatively easy to add, say, Mexican or Spanish movies.)

Spanish != Latino. Latino refers to Latin American – Central & South America.

Bruce @ #102:
I thought Willi Wachendon was black.

Being black or white or any variety of mestizo is orthogonal to being Latino or Hispanic, so this is irrelevant. Neither Latino nor Hispanic is a racial classification, though it’s certainly used with racist overtones by some people (not meaning you, Bruce).

Jim @#95
The Sferoj 4 anthology (the only one of that series I own, but there were ten or eleven volumes) has sf short stories from authors in a number of countries including Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, and Cuba translated into Esperanto; and I'm fairly sure one of Hartwell & Cramer's recent Year's Best SF anthologies had a story translated from Spanish, by two authors from Spain -- can't recall the title or many but it was a time travel story involving an incident in Spain's recent history.

From Spain means that by definition they are not Latino, though they are Hispanic. This is why I asked Lee to define her terms. Is she interested in sorting out:

People who write SF in Spanish?
Brownish-skinned people who speak Spanish?
People who speak Spanish even if they don’t write in it?
People with surnames of noticeably Hispanic origin?
People descended from same even if they don’t speak or write in Spanish?
etc.

I’m unclear how people on this thread are identifying Latino and/or Hispanic, so it’s hard to know who to include in the discussion. I'm also unclear how Lee identifies Latinos or Hispanics in fandom; @ #42, it looks like she might be considering it a racial classification:

Fandom reflects this; it's still a very whitebread community. More black people than there used to be -- but then, there are black SF characters on TV dating back to Lt. Uhura. Virtually no Latinos at all.

And one can determine this by a visual survey? What is the definitive visible requirement to be classified as Latino and/or Hispanic, when those are classifications based on geography and language?

So, a definition of terms at least for purposes of discussion would be useful.

Dave @ #84:
I generally dislike totting up lists like this; who knows what the person involved feels like?

It’s making me feel pretty squicky, gotta say.

On the other hand, I think his character was supposed to be Native American (albeit not from any specific present-day tribe/nation), rather than Latino. (Yes, I know that's not necessarily a clear distinction, particularly south of the US.)

If we go with Latino actors playing non-Latino characters, then there's Raul Julia (Frankenstein Unbound, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank), Jennifer Lopez (The Cell), Benjamin Bratt (Red Planet)[*], Emilio Estevez (Freejack), Charlie Sheen (The Arrival, Red Dawn), Raquel Welch (Fantastic Voyage), Rosario Dawson (Men in Black II), Rosanna DeSoto (Star Trek 6), Jimmy Smits (Star Wars II and III), and probably some others I can't be bothered Googling for...

Marcus Chong in The Matrix? (I don't know if Chong is Latino, and I don't know if his character "Tank" was supposed to be Latino...)

[*] Bratt did play a (secondary) Latino character in Demolition Man...

I've recently, finally, had the discussion with my husband about why he's so anti-SF, knowing how much I love it. He's fine with mainstream-type stuff, like the original Star Wars (same goes for fantasy: he enjoyed the LoTR movies), but he seems to labor under a delusion similar to CB's: that is, that most genre fiction is hackery. I agreed that there is hackery out there, but that it's no more than in any other field. The majority of stuff out there just isn't mind-blowingly great. So I asked him what it was he liked about Star Wars, and he answered that it was the the SF setting was really sort of incidental--that it was a good, classic story underneath, and that it didn't have to be "Long ago in a galaxy far, far away." I replied, one, that the setting was integral, as those events wouldn't have been possible in any other setting and two, regardless, that what he described could apply to all of my favorites. What I love about SF is how the setting can be used to explore deeper issues of what it means to be human, regardless of setting.

Anyway, all that is preamble to the second problem: several (more then seven, I believe) years ago, I made the ghastly mistake of offering him Heinlein's Job to read, not realizing that it would embody all of SF for him. He hasn't trusted my suggestions ever since. For my part, I enjoy the Biblical riff, but I understand thoroughly that I messed up, and ruined him for SF.

I'm hoping not for ever. He's agreed to try again, and I don't want to mess up this time. So I'm looking for suggestions for something to give him that will knock his socks off and become a new example to him of what SF is, or even better, get him to read more. He's not a huge fan of fiction in general. He reads a lot of biography and non-fiction, and he's a financial analyst. He's really reality-based. I tend to go for the more fantastical and literary, but I'm thinking he'd enjoy more hard science with some economics thrown in.

So, suggestions? My marriage may depend on it. *wink*

Hooray for infamous ancestors! My great-great grandfather was a confederate general, and one of his forbears, a judge, was responsible for the martyrdom of a saint back in ye olden times. It's a bit odd to have the really interesting family stories also be uncomfortable or horrifying.

So, your fellow...babelfish tells me that "muy mujeriego" means "very mujeriego." Thanks, babelfish! Hint?

Hm, well, further scientific research reveals that my brain had inadvertantly substituted "na"s for what was actually "do"s. So I should have actually type this:

doo DOO da do do, mortgage
do doo DOO do, mortgage

Sorry for the confusion. It's been probably a couple of decades since I've heard that actual song.

It was used in a commercial about a year ago. A guy was talking to a woman on what appeared to be their first date. He's talking about being a doctor, winning the lottery, and some other "good catch" stuff. She takes a sip of whatever drink they were selling and suddenly the camera pans back to the guy who is now saying "ma na ma na".

Anyway, the "ma na ma na" part was what got switched out for the word "mortgage", which, as I said, was a couple syllables short. But at least it started with an "m". Not sure how all the "doo"s got switch for "na"s.

Oh well.

I'm going to go watch that scientific research again now.

Didn't L. Sprague de Camp write a series of stories set in a Brazilian-dominated future? Did any of those have prominent Latino/Hispanic characters?

[*] In the case where "Latino" includes Brazilians; Susan's schema (# 132) seemed to exclude non-Spanish-speaking Latin Americans...

Two possibilities: Dune by Frank Herbert (this is the first SF novel I read, and I was hooked).

Or, if short stories might be more his speed, an anthology called _The Science Fiction Hall of Fame_.

As I recall it was stories about the diplomatic corps.

Pasteurized cream won't ripen the way that raw cream or milk will -- the pasteurization kills the lactic-acid-producing bacteria. So making butter from pasteurized cream won't give you an acidic buttermilk. That's WHY storebought buttermilk is cultured skim or lowfat milk.

As to why you'd use butter and buttermilk instead of just using cream -- it's for texture. What happens when you cut butter into flour is that the flour coats and encapsulates little bits of butter into a gluten matrix. Butter is part fat, part milk solids, and part water, and when you bake it, the water turns into steam and gives lift to the biscuits, and as it evaporates, it leaves little pockets all through, making the biscuit flaky. (If you overwork the dough, the gluten toughens, and the steam can't lift the biscuits as high.) If you just use cream, you don't get the little encapsulated pockets, and so you don't get the flakiness.

And on an entirely different note, I wanted to mention my favorite haiku:

The morning glory today
Has taken my well-bucket;
I begged for water.

kouredios, what biographies has he read recently? Maybe allohistory would be a good place to start, rather than spaceship-battle stuff?

It probably helps to know that 'mujer' is woman (Latin 'mulier').

Erm, you have seen "The Searchers", right? It is an old John Wayne western that contains the frame work for the main characters and plot of episodes 4, 5, and 6 of Star Wars. John Wayne plays the parts of ObiWan Kenobi, Han Solo, and DarthVader all in one. (that may sound impossible, but when you see the movie, you'll understand.) John Wayne hooks up with a young man who doesn't know who his parents are, living on a dirt farm in the desert, and takes him on some damn fool crusade to rescue a little girl (Princess) who has been captured by Stormtroopers. Except the Stormtrooper are Native Americans. There is a Cantina scene. Han shoots first. There is a bit of play with light sabers, I mean, cavalry swords. And in the end, the rebel fleet attacks the deathstar, er, I mean, the Native American camp.

Having watched Star Wars probably a hundred times in my lifetime, it was freaky watching "The Searchers" for the first time just recently and watching the entire Star Wars story unfold before my eyes, except situated in the American Wild West just after the Civil War, rather than long ago and far away.

So, the story about Luke and Anakin, which are the main characters of Star Wars, was originally told as a Western genre, when Westerns were in style.

That was last night's dessert; homemade biscuit using butter and baked in a tart pan; served with sliced strawberries, ice cream, and a dollop of whipped cream.

Mid-day snack may be leftover shortcake, berries, and milk in a bowl...

I'm not sure how you get there from what I said:

Latino refers to Latin American – Central & South America.

I didn't say anything one way or the other about Brazilians. I've never inquired of any Brazilians as to whether they see themselves as Latino (though I see no reason they shouldn't). Doesn't make much sense to call them Hispanic (Spanish), though I can imagine USAns failing to grasp the distinction since most of the Hispanics in the U.S. are Latino as well so the terms get used carelessly.

And, um, it's not my personal schema. It's the standard definition of the terms, though many Anglos don't find it important to actually learn this before jumping into a discussion. If I'd made up a schema (which I wouldn't, since I'm big on "human" as a classification), it would make more sense. I just have to try to live in the imposed one and among people who (understandably) can't keep it straight.

There are certainly more interesting cases that make it even more obvious that USAn terminology is dubious - what about Fujimori? If he wrote an SF novel, would he be considered a Hispanic author? A Latino one? If not, why not? What if he wrote it in Spanish? English? Japanese?

various contemporary Hispanic writers I can't think of names of, some of them writing books denoted "magical realism" that tend to come out in hardcover and not be anywhere the SF/F section

Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is Chinese, where are all of them in film and TV and SF noticeable in the USA, and the next largest group is Indian, where are they?

various contemporary Hispanic writers I can't think of names of, some of them writing books denoted "magical realism" that tend to come out in hardcover and not be anywhere the SF/F section

Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is Chinese, where are all of them in film and TV and SF noticeable in the USA, and the next largest group is Indian, where are they?

various contemporary Hispanic writers I can't think of names of, some of them writing books denoted "magical realism" that tend to come out in hardcover and not be anywhere the SF/F section

Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is Chinese, where are all of them in film and TV and SF noticeable in the USA, and the next largest group is Indian, where are they?

I can't think of anything that I know that would be guaranteed "knock your socks off" SF. If you just want him to read more, the "really reality based" bit made me think of "The Old Man and the Sea", which isn't SF and I wouldn't have mentioned it other than it is probably my most favoritest piece of fiction I've ever read.

Oh, he might go for "Hitchiker's Guide". It isn't reality based so much as it's showing how absurdly funny life can be. Think of it as an outrageous version of Dilbert in space, if he likes Dilbert. Hm, Dilbert in space, that just made my head go sproing. Maybe Monty Python in space, since it's got that British humor going on. Yeah, that's probably it.

Anyway, there was a recent discussion of "suffering" for your art, and not reading for "pleasure", and just how backwards that is. And Hitchikers is just fricken funny, if you're into that kind of humor.

It's more of a "tall tale" genre than it is a SF story, but it's got spaceships, so who's counting.

Now, if you had slathered that butter on white bread and poured a tablespoon of sugar onto it, then added another slice of white bread to make a sandwich, then you'd have independently found a really guilty pleasure of my childhood.

Linkmeister @ 161... What about sandwiches that consisted of lard and brown sugar? (I'm not making that up and that was my parent's idea of something yummy. I shudder, just thinking back.)

I just stopped an acquaintance who's an aspiring SF writer from paying $500 to have his novel printed so he'd have a book to impress publishers with.

He is (obviously) completely clueless about the entire process of submission and publication.

I know that this blog has published some great material on this subject, and (I believe) some collections of helpful links as well. I would like to send them to him. Can anyone point me there?

(I don't know if he's any good: I haven't read a word he's written. But I like him, and I'd like to help him out.)

Maybe some Peter F Hamilton? Good hard SF, great characters, plus he has some interesting economic elements in his settings.

OTOH, I'm from California, and the story's set there, so if one of the characters wasn't Hispanic, it probably would have looked a little weird.

-kat

I'm kind of with Fragano--I just wish Earth Made of Glass wasn't a sequel. Barnes isn't a bad idea for a starter, though. Some others that I'd consider, in more or less chronological order:

Waldo and Magic, Inc.
The Syndic
The Man in the High Castle
A Spectre Is Haunting Texas
The Stochastic Man
In the Ocean of Night
Beggars in Spain
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I'm the reader that adores 600 to 800 page tomes (Sharon Kay Penman's _Sunne In Splendor_, for example.)

I mean, I could have suggested David Brin's _Earth_...

If we go with Latino actors playing non-Latino characters

Were they? I haven't seen all of those movies, but in the ones I did see I don't remember anything that suggested that they didn't have latino heritage. Granted they weren't identified as such, and they weren't used as "the latino character," but I don't remember them being specified as anything else.

Peter Erwin #140: That was de Camp's "Viagens Interplanetarias" stories. I best remember the "Zei" ones, set on one of those great semi-barbaric SF swashbuckler planets. The title of the series and part of the background came from Brazil being a Great Power in that future. I don't remember the Brazilian-ness making much difference in the stories, to be honest.

Going way back to Lee #42 (on Latinos in TV/movie SF): back then, as someone who grew up in the Washington, DC area, Latinos didn't impinge on my consciousness as any sort of "other" at all (as African-Americans very definitely did). It would never have occurred to me that they were a group that needed any character representation in the style of Lt. Uhura. They were just white people who spoke (sometimes) with an odd accent and (sometimes) had dark tans and (more often than not) played baseball for the Washington Senators. (The owner of the Senators, Calvin Griffith, pioneered recruiting Latino players, alas as an alternative to recruiting Black ones -- he was infamously racist.)

IIRC, the priest protagonist of The Sparrow is Spanish. (And Antonio Banderas was trying to make it into a movie at one point.)

I can think of a lot of really good SF, but I'm not sure how it overlaps with his likes and dislikes. SF is *really* broad, right?

One big theme in SF, at least for me, is that the story is usually told in a different world than the one I live in, but a world where I can still see how the rules work, maybe how it's consistent with or derived from the world I know. I think that's a big part of what I like in SF, so that colors all these comments:

Vinge's _The Peace War_ is one of my favorite books, set maybe 50+ years in the future, but with only a few big technological steps from here. But it has a whole different world, barely recognizeable as ours, based on the storyline of what is assumed to have happened over the intervening 50 years.

I also really liked Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, which was space opera mixed with usenet mixed with the complexity hierarchy, and absolutely wonderful. But we're talking about a huge civilization in which humans are a small and more-or-less unimportant part, full of bug-eyed (or butterfly-winged) aliens, interstellar war, destroyed planets, godlike AIs, etc.

Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ was also very good, but it's set in on the moon. It also has a big invented world (the world the lunar settlers live in), in which a sort of stable anarchocapitalist society has evolved because there's a very powerful government imposed by Earth on the moon, which doesn't care what happens to the lunar colonists so long as they don't cause much trouble and pay their taxes/tribute/whatever.

I enjoyed Spider Robinson's _Mindkiller_ very much. It's near future urban stuff, cyberpunk in content, but not in style. Sex and violence, only a couple of really impressive bits of technology we don't have now, a bit of social extrapolation. The world is a little grittier than the one we live in, but not too much so. (This is much less world-building than the others so far.)

SM Stirling has a pretty entertaining book called _Conquistador_. It's very near future (maybe five years from now), with a single SF-ish premise. I like it that he builds a 'utopia' that corresponds to the wishes of a set of characters, but which isn't what most readers would think of as a utopia, exactly. There's war (SM Stirling is big on war), but it's on a small scale. There's world-building, but it's modern technology.

I hope this helps. All these are books I have really enjoyed and read multiple times, which aren't (other than _A Fire Upon the Deep_) space opera or overly out-there in terms of technology or society.

It's possible that I've misunderstood what your husband doesn't like about SF, though. There are a lot of other good books out there, and I'm sure I'll think of another ten to recommend after I hit "Preview"

Are we talking hard sci fi or not? Folks who like Star Wars stuff seem to like plot over characterization (I realize that this may be generalizing too much here) so for good strong plots, you might want to steer him to George RR Martin's Ice and Fire series or Greg Keyes' Briar King saga. Also Grass by Sherri Tepper is fine sci fi with a plot that hooks you in. Bujold is good space opera. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is a wonderful yarn. The foregoing are books that, once I got going on, did not come up for air, sleep or sustenance until I was done. That's my gold standard.

The characters of C3PO and R2D2 come from "Hidden Fortress", an old Kirosawa movie that takes place in the runup to the Toronaga clan's bid for power, IIRC. So kouredios, if your husband is interested in Japanese history, you might want to make that point.

Also, if he's interested in the history of the American Civil War, then I recommend Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee", which is an alternate history story, and a very good one, IMO. It's a classic story by a writer who never did write about space ships.

You did no such thing, kouredios. The problem is with him. At least he's not like a co-worker I once had who never could get into Star Wars because, to her, sets were just that, sets. No imagination, no willingness to pretend. That being said, since your hubby liked SW because he could recognize a classic plot from the mainstream, has he ever tried Asimov's SF murder mystery, Caves of Steel?

I would look for a unit from the area of Berlin. The city mascot of Berlin is a bear.

Latino characters: I can't believe no one has mentioned Inigo Montoya. Or do Spanish people not count as Latino?
"I could give you my word as a Spaniard."
"No use. I've known too many Spaniards."

Also, Manny, the narrator of "Red Thunder", is Hispanic of some sort, I forget what.

Fiction for the reality-based financial analyst: speaking as one in the financial business, you could do worse than "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan. Start him on that and maybe he'll take to "Black Man", and then the Takeshi Kovacs series (Altered Carbon/Broken Angels/Woken Furies). All good stuff. Also, Bruce Sterling's "Distraction" and "Heavy Weather" are pretty near-future; and "Pattern Recognition" is a good gateway drug for the rest of Gibson.

Oh, yeah! And Pedro Ramos, too. They were probably a better #1 and #2 starter combo in my memory than in real life, given that the Nats finished dead last most years, but who cares? I think Zoilo Versalles also came up just before they moved to Minnesota.

On the topic of scifi recommendations for non-scifi readers: tentatively, I suggest either Connie Willis or Lois McMaster Bujold. The latter because everyone in my family loved the Vorkosigan series, even the members who don't usually read scifi; and the former because well-done time travel may be of interest to people who read a lot of non-fiction. (I do not read huge amounts of non-fiction, but my friends who do appreciate well-researched history.) The Doomsday Book if he prefers something grim, and To Say Nothing of the Dog if he prefers something funny.

I second the recommendation not to start with Dune. I read that in my youth, and found the "exotic" cultures tedious and all the characters both implausible and dull. Which says more about my taste in fiction than it does about the book, but it doesn't strike me as a good introduction to the genre.

I agree that the broadness of the genre and his own idosyncrasies make it even harder.

I think what he liked about the original Star Wars (and I agree Greg, that the structure could be placed elsewhere, but the particularities of the story needed a SF setting: no Death Star in a Western, e.g.) was that, it was just a good story, period. But I personally think his general reality-based preferences make it likely that there's some hard SF out there that might speak well to him. For example, he's read Stephen Hawking for fun in the past.

I've got Herbert, Heinlein, Kress, and a Dozois anthology covered, as well as Hitchiker's Guide, which might be a good idea as he's also quite the anglophile. Xopher, I think the last biography I remember him reading was Katherine Graham's. Lately, though, a lot of his reading has been informational books on homebrewing.

moe99, I'm a big Ice and Fire fan, but I'm inclined to say that he'd resist things that are so clearly and wholly of a different world. He's going to want, I think, something more like near-future, possible, political and economically involved stuff.

Moon is a Harsh Mistress isn't a bad idea. It might go a way towards rehabilitating Heinlein for him, too. Which is important to me personally, as he's one of my personal favorites.

John and Fragano, thanks for the Barnes and Hamilton suggestions. I wasn't familiar with them.

Wikipedia says Puerto Rican, and I don't even begin to know how that fits into the bizarre framework of the "Latino" label. Wikipedia also says that Brad Pitt plans to play Sandoz in a movie. I really hope that's just a Wikipedia rumour, because that would really be the most egregious whitewashing imaginable. Banderas I could live with, though I would prefer someone who can actually act rather than just looking pretty.

Cuban, I think.

Tarr and Turtledove's _Household Gods_ might appeal and I'll put in a second plug for Willis' _The Doomsday Book_.

I was just commenting on the fact that you followed your mention of Latin America with a list of questions for Lee:
People who write SF in Spanish?
Brownish-skinned people who speak Spanish?
People who speak Spanish even if they don’t write in it?
People with surnames of noticeably Hispanic origin?
People descended from same even if they don’t speak or write in Spanish?
etc.

Which seemed to focus exclusively on Spanish.

And I was using "Susan's schema" as shorthand for "the schema which Susan discussed in her post"; I didn't mean to imply that it was something you invented. I remember trying to explain something like it to a couple of Spanish astronomers two or three years ago; they were a bit confused by it[*].

[*] Possibly, I think now, because at the time I didn't know that the American term "Latino" derives from Spanish "latinoamericano" (= Latin American) rather than from Spanish "latino" (= speaker of a Latin-derived language).

Anyway, focusing just on actors for the moment:

At this point, I'm kind of surprised that Ricardo Montalbán hasn't been mentioned. In addition to Khan in Star Trek (presumably an Indian character, from his name), he played a Latino character in two Planet of the Apes movies. (And he's in two of the Spy Kids movies.)

Gina Torres (Firefly & Serenity; a small part in the second two Matrix movies; something called Cleopatra 2525...)

Jose Ferrer: Dune, The Return of Captain Nemo

Miguel Ferrer: Robocop (also a small part in Star Trek 3)

Cameron Diaz: Vanilla Sky, Being John Malkovich

Michelle Rodriguez: Resident Evil

Julia @ 173:
That's an excellent point. I guess what I meant was that they (the Latino/a actors) were playing characters who weren't unambiguously Latino (e.g., Hispanic names, references to Latino culture or ancestry, etc.). But that certainly doesn't rule out some of those characters potentially being Latino.

For what it's worth, that comment makes me think immediately of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, especially Red Mars and Green Mars. They're very much hard science, but they were pretty much the first books I'd read which actually made me interested (at least for a while) in economics. And I think the writing is amazing: there are parts of it which read like some of the best nature writing, which just happens to be about places no one has actually set eyes upon yet...

Sure, but my point was that your husband explained why he liked Star Wars (good story, whether it was in space or the old west) and you focused on the macguffin known as the Death Star, which was space station, but really could have been a camp of enemy native americans in teepee's, as it was in "The Searchers".

Back in #137, you said what he described could apply to all of my favorites. What I love about SF is how the setting can be used to explore deeper issues of what it means to be human, regardless of setting.

OK, but while "Left Hand of Darkness" lets readers explore deeper issues of what gender means, the race of people on planet Winter who change between genders is integral to the story. You take that out of LHoD, and the story falls apart completely.

Star Wars, on the other hand, isn't a story about exploring the deeper issues of what it means to be human, it starts with a classical default understanding of being human, and shows someone struggling with a problem and overcoming it.

You can replace "Death Star" with "native american camp" and either way, the focus is on attacking the place. The focus remains the same whether its one or the other.

You cannot replace the gender changing people of Winter in LHoD, because the whole point is to get the reader to question their reality about gender. If you replaced them with regular humans, the focus of the story falls apart and dissolves into "how to survive in the artic" rather than "What does it mean to be male or female?"

I think what your husband is pointing to about "Star Wars" (and this may be my personal preferences getting projected) is that he liked that it wasn't about questioning what it means to be human, but allowed him to identify himself into the characters without questioning what it meant about him, and instead focused on the fight of good versus evil, coming of age, etc.

I don't know all the other books that have been recommended, but I think the test of what your husband would like is whether or not the story allows the reader to maintain their assumptions about their own personal identity as the story progresses or not. If the story is more focused on getting the reader to question their own assumptions about who they are, then it probably isn't for him, based on what you've said.

Hidden Fortress is a wonderful movie; one of my favorite Kurosawa films.

Historical nitpick: it's Tokugawa, not "Toronaga"; the latter is James Michener's made-up name, because for some reason he didn't want to use actual historical Japanese names in a historical novel set in Japan...

I agree that John Barnes is a very good author to read when first getting into SF, except that most of his books are fairly rich in spaceships, teleporters, and other heavy-duty SF tropes. If kouredios' husband is shy of the glitter and gadgets, then maybe it's not a good choice.*

"The Syndic"! Marvelous suggestion. Is it still in print?

* A terrible shame, if true; I agree that "Earth Made of Glass", and the whole "Million Open Doors" series in general is great SF.

Shyly raises hand...
Guilty, guilty, guilty. But only a tablespoon? Makes me a bit queasy to think about it now. And salt and sugar on freshly sliced garden tomatoes, and butter and sugar and more salt on popcorn. We used to hang with a group of my grandparents' peers and their progeny that made dishpans full of popcorn balls (except not balled, just stirred into clumps) that had a hefty dollop of vinegar in the syrup - sweet, salty, sour.

#165 ::: Serge ::: (view all by) ::: June 29, 2007, 03:22 PM:
What about sandwiches that consisted of lard and brown sugar?

Lard and butter are both solidified animal fats, and processed sugar is processed sugar. (Pause for getting past increased queasiness) Harking back to the biscuits, the lightest, most flakiest I've ever had were made with lard. Ditto for pie crust. Farm families in Nebraska used it almost exclusively in the fifties and sixties (and beyond), I suspect because it was even cheaper than oleo. Lots of early oleo was largely lard. That became funny when our butter-only family switched to oleo "for health". My mother obviously never read the package contents.

Also loved potatoes with extra salt and vinegar, but even then would have balked about sprinkling them with sugar, too.

He's going to want, I think, something more like near-future, possible, political and economically involved stuff.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Charles Stross yet. He writes fairly hard SF and likes to have his characters discuss the economics of their situations and world.

The Hugo-nominated Accelerando is near-future hard SF about humanity reaching the singularity and beyond. It's also available as a free e-book here

Glasshouse is a follow-up novel set in the same universe as Accelerando but hundreds of years in the future.

His Merchant Princes series (first book: The Family Trade) is parallel-world urban fantasy with lots of plot points turning on the kind of business a Machiavellian extended family of world-walkers can run...

Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are less hard, somewhat space-operatic far-future SF, but dwell a lot on politics.

The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue are rather fun 20th century spy novels crossed with Lovecraftian mythos with a computer and occult geek as its (anti?) hero.

Just some more suggestions for your list... :)

and:
Serge @ 195:
Yes... until I went wandering through Wikipedia's list(s) of Latino/Hispanic-American actors today, I didn't even know Anthony Quinn was originally from Mexico!

(I didn't mention Hercules [another Gina Torres appearance, too!] because I wasn't sure if Lee meant SF and fantasy of all kinds, or more specifically SF. If the former, then we can obviously bring in more actors and characters. For example, I seem to recall that one of the two main characters from our world in Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy might have been Latino...)

Well, golly! You're welcome. I'm sure you would have come across them without me, though--they're just two freaking great to miss. There's pretty much nothing in the world better.

Individ-ewe-al #176: ...Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow...

THANK YOU! I've been trying to remember enough details of that book to ask people here if they know what it is for months! Now I can read it again!

Actually, tying into the SF-for-people-who-don't-like-SF subthread, I read The Sparrow years ago on the recommendation of a friend who reads about one SF book every three or four years (in fact, Brian Aldiss's brandy-new Harm is the first SF book he's read since The Sparrow). He loved it, so maybe it's a good one for kouredios's husband?

Bwahahahah!!!

There's a collection of links from Making Light and elsewhere put together by Teresa but posted in Neil Gaiman's Journal. It's technically addressing the getting of agents, but also has everything else.

Actually, most of Teresa's publishing business posts on Making Light are not collected here, but on Neil Gaiman's blog here (up to 2005 and including a whole bunch of other useful publishing weblinks).

(Another hint to TNH to bring that list up to date and to create a page or link to it here on Making Light.)

Ah, the wonders of simultaneity...

My apologies to the hosts for the duplicated information, although the hint still stands...

My favorite salmon ever was done on the grill in a foil packet, with a peach/nectarine salsa bathing it. There's nothing quite like ripe peaches from the grill, and the bit of heat, salt and cilantro with the salmon was yummy.

To supplement the great information at Neil's page that Sharon M. posted, I pulled out some of the other ones that I, as a non-writer, found interesting/educational/entertaining/appalling.

I'll get caught in the moderation queue if I put in the URLs. The front page of ML has a search feature in the left column. If you keep on scrolling, you'll eventually find it.

Atlanta Nights and Publish America

More on the Atlanta Nights story

Follow the money

Dumbest of the Twenty Worst

Barbara Bauer takes action! (*yawn*)

Absolute Write is gone

The uselessness of Airleaf Publishing

I said that he enjoyed Star Wars, despite the fact that it was SF, because it was, as he described it, "a good story, regardless of setting." My point to him (which is really irrelevant, and I should have striken from my post in preview) was not as much that it was a good story that had to be SF, but that its being SF made some of the things he enjoyed possible. Your analysis, quoted above, puts way too fine a point on what you think he's looking for, because I think you're reading it as the embodiment of what he looks for in any story, but it's not: it's illustrative only because it's an exception to his general knee-jerk dislike of SF. As I've said, he's really not a fan of fiction in general. Again, Star Wars is an exception, and he's not even that big a fan of that. It's just that it's one piece of SFiana that he'll actually stay in the room and watch with me, rather than grumble and mock.

But I'm really not interested in any kind of debate. I'm looking for recommendations based on a loosely sketched description of my secondhand understanding of his preferences, hoping that it will help me process what I already know and point me in the right direction.

I think I'm going to, at first, limit my choices to things I'm already familiar with, just so that I will be able to discuss/defend it as necessary. So Stross is going on the list too, though I've only just started reading him. I've already downloaded Accelerando, and just finished The Family Trade. I need to read Kim Stanley Robinson myself, so I may add that to the list after I've read it. I'm also jotting down all the recommendations for further reference, so thanks for all of them!

I have a copy of the recipe for 'dishwasher poached salmon'. It isn't poached, strictly speaking, because it's seasoned and wrapped in foil before being run through the dishwasher. (When I get home this evening I can type it up, but it's long.)

FWIW, you run one cycle of the dishwasher beforehand, without soap.

Nobody is Latino in BSG (or Star Wars, or LOTR) any more than anyone is American, Israeli or Shinto. Those descriptors simply don't apply. Uhura or Lando Calrissian are "black" only when the term is defined based on appearance and therefore, if the actor is black, so is the character.

Anyway, if you're looking for examples of people from a particular culture in a particular genre, maybe you should look at works of that genre from *inside* that culture, rather than looking at a different culture? I'm not familiar with Latino F/SF works, but I would expect to find more Latinos and fewer Anglos there.

Similar remarks apply to Chinese and Indians - there's plenty of Chinese characters and actors in Chinese productions of, e.g., Journey to the West. (Of course Chinese fantasy is more likely to be based on Chinese mythology, the way LotR etc. are based on European mythology...) Applying a loose enough definition, Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and similar works fit into "fantasy", too.

If technology-oriented SF hasn't spread much yet outside the cultures that have been industrial the longest... well, I'm not sure that should be regarded as surprising or alarming. It took a couple of centuries after the industrialization of Europe and America before much technology-oriented SF started being written there, too.

I'm planning on smoking some Copper River salmon next week, after the super-spouse gets back from catching them. Terry Karney mentioned gravlax... takes awhile, but sure is good to eat.

Provigil

I don't know whether it would be of interest or not, but thought I would pass it along.

IANAP, but i believe you're mistaken here. Per this guy, as well as Dan Margulis' book (Margulis being one of THE names in digital color correction), digital camera makers mostly err on the side of blowing the highlights out completely to preserve shadow detail.

So far as my experience, study, and professional work with software development for 16 bit editing programs, it's not, quite, the case.

They are, mostly, right about the clipping. They are wrong about the blocking up.

Way overblown, gone. Same for film as for digital (and the comment that Rockwell makes about the "natural" blocking up of film... no. It's what we are used to. Then there's the question of color film dye clouds, color reversal dye clouds [absent the orange masking layer, and with a lot less leeway, but more saturation] and and the amusing quirk that B&W film is digital, where digital B&W is analog, but I often digress).

But the largest space is the white, the smallest is the blacks. If your whites are slightly blown out, and you are in a 12-bit space, there is hidden detail (because the white is a mosaic/demosaic algorithm, using the RGB pixel array) which can be recovered. But the amount of working space in the bottom is smaller, which means the amount the algorithms have to work with is less.

If you look at the images Rockwell provides (even accepting the loss of detail/resolution from being converted to a 72, or 96, dpi image in web color) you don't see any more detail in the shadows. What you see is that the detail he was able to capture was still captured.

Further, as an issue of what makes for better images to view, we are more prone to accept an image which is a little blown out, than one which is blocked up.

But I've found that trying to relaim contrast from underexposed images, by pulling the bottom up, is less useful than doing by pushing the top down/opening the middle up.

There are other issues, relating to range compression when one moves to paper, because the finest gradations of white in the negative/slide/file, are lost when the paper becomes the white value (which is what I was talking to Greg London about).

Greg: If I could code perl, I'd love that little cheat. I suppose I'll toss that at my father, and see if he knows someone who can/how to do that.

kouredios,

I really liked Iron Sunrise--I just read it recently, and it's nice seeing we've got yet another new Heinlein-but it does have an awful lot of spaceships.

I agree that A Million Open Doors does have teleporters and AI, but to some extent, it's also a book about economics (and about the pernicious effects of Romanticism--but enough about me). The Man Who Pulled Down The Sky starts with that wonderful introduction that's all about compound interest, and maybe that makes it a good choice, but it's also kind of a harsh book.

Based on the one Connie Willis I've read (Bellwether), I agree she's a promising choice. Serge's suggestion of Caves of Steel is really sharp, too.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think a big, varied collection of short fiction might be best, if you think one more book he doesn't like could be the last straw.

Bruce,

I don't think The Syndic is in print, which is a damn shame.

Madison Guy,

I was just thinking about writing a nice long rant about Steven Hunter's dumb-ass piece on Sicko, beginning with home much I liked Hunter's Hot Springs.

Well, if you wouldn't mind digressing a bit more -- could you unpack that? 'Cause by itself it doesn't make sense, and I'm curious what you mean...

Serge@127: my grandfather would take us kids down to the cool basement to escape the hot and humid Missouri summertimes; that was where he stored the apples – he'd cut slices, salt them, and hand them around. Mmmmmm.

and, since I hail from Alaska, I must add:

Alaskan salmon?
Dress with mayo, lime, and dill
Grill for twelve minutes

Perhaps Richard Morgan's Market Forces- near future marketing meets war. Also well-reviewed is RM's just released, mid-near-future Thirteen / Black Man (latter is the UK name).

But I think that novels aren't necessarily the best way to introduce SF.

You can spend hours reading one novel, and in the end discover you hate that author and have lost those hours.
OR
You can spend hours reading representative stories from many authors, and then find which of those authors knows how to grab you.

That's why I've loved my Asimov's subscription. I've found at least 75% of my current favorite authors first through their short stories, then through their novels.

You mentioned one Dozois anthology-- is it his "Best of the Best" anthology that recently came out?

Maybe a Cramer & Hartwell anthology is better: its size won't look as intimidating. I just finished their 12th. Very good, although #11 might be easier for beginners. #12 struck me as having more 'for experienced SF readers' stories... (and Robert Reed's sharp knife of story).

Or, hey, go to the Archive (Internet Archived) for Sci Fiction. Pick out the best of the classics and the new stories there.

If your husband reads a best-of anthology and none of them do it for him, well, then you know he had a fair chance.

Worcestershire, butter,
brown sugar (not much) on top.
grill the fish in foil

:)

B&W negatives work by blocking light from the paper.

When one exposes the film, the amount of light which hits the emulsion, and causes the silver to aggregate.

Where there is a grain/aggregate of grains, one has a "bit" of blocked light, when making a print. Because of flare, and diffusion, that builds up to shades of gray.

Digital uses an array of RGB pixels (excluding the Foveon, which layers them, so each pixel is has one of each color).

By mapping them, sampling them (and then resampling them some more) they come up with a color value for the pixel when the image is presented on the screen/for printing.

To make a B&W image from that file, each color is assigned a grayscale value, analogous to what that shade would be if it were photographed with the software designers, "ideal" black and white film.

Depending on what the program does, you may be able to move the RGB values of each pixel (as if you were playing with the contrast grade of the paper/film), or you might have to just use a gross control ("contrast").

From there, the conversation went to, "So what, if anything, can we do to make the con more inviting to the Latino community?" And that brought up the observation that Latinos don't seem to have much opportunity to see people like themselves in either literary or media SF. So I thought I'd throw the topic up for discussion here and see what emerged. I'm sorry if I've inadvertently stepped on toes.

I forgot to mention that the gray is approximated from the wider color spaces (usually sRGB or Adobe RGB) into a mere 256 values.

Which is why they tend to be flat, as initially created, and why one wants to desaturate, not "convert to grayscale" (because the desaturation leaves you with independant channels to adjust things.

ooo! that sounds good! I'll try it tonight on some of TJ's Norwegian salmon kabobs ("the best part of the salmon" they call it -- it's the fatty underbelly, salmon toro, almost).

it's Tokugawa, not "Toronaga"

And I knew that; my subconscious must have decided to have a little joke with me, so it crept out while I was looking the other way and swapped names on me, making me look very foolish.

That's not a small nit; that's reporting events from another universe; thanks for catching it.

My gravlax is usually made with lemongrass and ginger, or cilantro and citrus.

Between the biscuits and the salmon, I'm getting hungry!

Me too, but all I have available for supper tonight is a can of chili, what with my being a bachelor and car-less.

That's exactly what I think, yes. I think you and Kathryn @ 226 have it right. I should give him a number of short stories, and see what he thinks.

Kathryn, my Dozois anthology is several years old...let me run and check...Okay, I dive in for that and come up with Hartwell's Science Fiction Century. Not sure where the Dozois got to, but the library is a vortex right now, so it should get spit back out eventually.

The Hartwell should do, no?

If you really want to inflict hard SF on him, I'd give him Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, which is full of interesting concepts and also tells a great twisty story. Vinge is particularly adept at writing alien characters who are truly alien, yet are still people.

For someone who wants to dip a toe in, I'd recommend The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. It's fun, entertaining, and its concepts are still fresh--it's not one of those older books that's all about some technology that everybody now has. And it's structured as a thriller, so it goes down easy.

Marinate for a couple of hours and then grill/broil/bake and serve with a fruit salsa.

Lime-ginger marmelade also makes an excellent glaze for baked fish.

#161 ::: Linkmeister ::: ...Now, if you had slathered that butter on white bread and poured a tablespoon of sugar onto it, then added another slice of white bread to make a sandwich...

Add cinnamon for a substance that will transport near-bodily many a grown adult back to their grandmothers' kitchens. (Well, that's the effect on me, anyway. I'm sure I can't be alone. I always had that open-faced though. The tablespoon of sugar is no exaggeration.)

I have nothing useful to add to the SF discussion at current, but I did just pick up a couple Red Dwarf novels from a neighborhood charity thrift store. I eagerly await the fun.

We did have other varieties of bread besides Wonder in our house, honest.

I'll noodle around with it when I next go into CS2 (for spot removal, and printing), and see how I like it.

Part of my advice is to not start him off with "experienced reader SF" SF-- Alistair Reynolds, say.

I think that older SF can often fall into that category. Some is great, of course. But classic-to-us won't always read well to people not experienced in SF.

We- SF fans- are used to old SF's tropes and stylings. It has a mustiness that we don't notice, but if you aren't used to it, it could be a bit offputting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Shepard

Also part of the following group blog:

http://community.livejournal.com/theinferior4

Any experts on working with leather here? I have an (urgent) question about water damage and leather.

Imagine you dropped a leather coat into the pool- what would you do?
To be more specific:
Chlorinated water dampened snakeskin leather: how should I dry it / protect it?

My late aunt had a 14-foot python snakeskin that she'd stored badly: it had mildew stains. When I asked about how to clean it, Abi advised me to freeze then sun it- repeating 3 times- as a way to help with the mildew.

Today- just now- it fell into the pool. (I had put weights on it, but then came cats and wind.). I've patted it damp, but am at a loss as to what to do next. Neutralize the chlorine? Keep it flat? Roll it tight?

Greg, #147, Star Wars was first told as The Seven Samurai. The westerns were intermediate forms.

kouredios, if you want an anthology, how about one of Patrick's Starlights?

I loved _Deepness_, too, but I think it drew on a fair bit of underlying SF context. He never explains what a ramscoop is, or what black crypto might be, or even how long a Ksec or Msec are. (But after you do the calculation once, they make sense, and you could infer them roughly from context.) You're kind-of expected to get and accept the idea of widespread colonization of planets, coldsleep, time dilation, etc. Also, the human parts happening in the present are mostly pretty dark, though the history told through flashbacks is amazing and deep. And I want to meet Sherkaner.

If you like raw fish, sashimi is a good start.

For the cooked version, my stock recipe (such as it is) is blackened Cajun-style:
1. Rub Cajun seasoning onto fish.
2. Sear on a medium-to-hot frypan until blackened. Salmon is an oily fish, so you shouldn't need to do more than to wipe the pan with an oily paper towel to grease it; it shouldn't stick.
3. Turn over once to cook the other side. If you are not adverse to it, I'd take it off while still rare & rest it for a minute or two before eating.

I like having it with boiled new potatoes & grilled asparagus.

I think I need a cigarette and a copy of Time Enough for Love.

I'm amused to note that Garcia (perhaps the most obviously Latino author in our field) has been writing English and Russian(?) romances.

Serge@249: I'm not convinced that current SF has too many tropes for a neophyte to read; I'd rather recommend something new than something old and badly written -- and IMO a lot of the classics just aren't written very well by today's standards.

That being said, I would \not/ recommend Accelerando -- I'd expect it to be dizzying for someone new to the field. Almost any other Stross, but not that (and perhaps not Glasshouse).
I'm a Cherryh fan; I wouldn't recommend most of her work to someone who sounds less than open to the alien -- but Merchanter's Luck is a great story. It does require some ability to extract backstory, which might or might not exclude it. I'd like to suggest Pratchett, but I'm blanking on where to start \and/ P may be too British for some U.S. tastes. If he likes SW-type space opera you could try Doyle&Macdonald's Mageworlds books -- they have some of the same sensawonda without the this-doesn't-make-sense jolts. (Note that publication order on these is \not/ chronological order, but IMO is a good reading order -- but the first published was a substantial trilogy.) If kouredios's husband's politics aren't rigorously conservative he might like Brunner's The Shockwave Rider and The Stone that Never Came Down (OOP but probably findable).

Kouredios:
SF book recommendations that have gone over well with non-SF readers include Connie Willis ("To Say Nothing of the Dog" & "Passage"), Mary Doria Russell ("The Sparrow" & "Children of God") & Nancy Kress ("Beggars in Spain"). They are (or can be read as) stand-alones; no need to expend the effort reading a whole series.

The Gardner Dozois Year's Best SF anthologies are superb. I'd go with both Best of the Bests, one has short stories, the other, novellas/short novels. It's a good taster; exposes the reader to a wide range of the GOOD STUFF with least effort.

I would also recommend Charles Stross' Accelerando , but while exploring economics among others, is probably not for someone new to the genre. I also liked Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle ("Quicksilver", "The Confusion" & "System of the World") which is historical but has a SF sensibility & examines our roots. "The Confusion" in particular explores the origins of current day economic practices. Come to think of, "Snowcrash" , also by Neal Stephenson might not be a silly suggestion; lots of action, interesting speculations, and also an easy read. It's really hard trying to find a fit for someone else's tastes.

Carol@203:
Guilty pleasure? Butter & sugar was a standard sandwich filling when I was growing up.

ethan@208:
I went to a mainstream Writer's Festival to see Mary Doria Russell with some friends. "The Sparrow" had been marketed as Mainstream Literature, so us SF fans felt out of place.

Especially Neil Geiman. Does anyone know if he crosses dimensions on purpose, or if his brain just strolls over while he sleeps? His "A Study in Emerald"...let's just say I went "huh?" about a third of the way in, and was laughing outloud by the midway point... It was just exactly what I didn't expect, but the kind of thing that seems to bring out the "of course" reaction. You know, the one where you close the book in utter contentment and sigh "of course," because you had no urge to change anything?

Soon Lee #256: If what I remember from The Sparrow is accurate, I find it hard to imagine that it was marketed as mainstream...isn't it largely about alien linguistics? And set almost entirely on another planet? I guess the Jesuits make it not-SF, somehow?

I know that firmly SF stuff gets marketed to the mainstream pretty regularly, but my recollection of that book was that it was pretty deep skiff-stuff.

So there we were, awash in a sea of literati, feeling very fish out of water indeed. Russell herself freely admitted that it was SF. There was a discussion and in a way it was refreshing to listen to a bunch of mainstream readers discuss a work of SF, examining tropes SF readers take for granted de novo.

C.S. Friedman writes outstanding hard SF (to date, I've been less impressed with her fantasy work). In Conquest Born, The Madness Season, and This Alien Shore all make my Desert Island Books list.

I second the recommendation for Doyle & Macdonald's "Mageworlds" series, and also the suggestion that they be read in publication order. In particular, the 4th book published is a prequel that will seriously spoiler the original trilogy if you read it first, by giving away one of the main plot twists.

Am I the only person here who was seriously disappointed in Barnes' Earth Made of Glass and the third book in that trilogy, which was so forgettable I can't even remember its title? I'd been so looking forward to the next stage in the Million Open Doors saga, and it was just... flat. But that first book I'd recommend without hesitation -- especially if he likes economics, because a good chunk of it is about what happens when an unrealistic economic ideology runs smack into an external reality that it can't control.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, if alternate history is something that interests him at all. It's probably the most ambitious work in that field that I've encountered.

Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime is a classic murder mystery, just in a slightly exotic setting. If he can deal with the Death Star, he should be able to deal with bobbles. :-) (If he likes the mystery genre at all, I can provide a good many more such crossovers.)

Allen Steele's The Jericho Iteration is a stand-alone near-future story with a very cinematic feel -- I kept seeing the movie in my head while I was reading it. And while I think the exact timeline is dated at this point, the events postulated could still occur very easily.

I'm sure I'll think of a dozen more as soon as I post this.

If you'd like further details about any of the ones I've mentioned here, feel free to e-mail me.

OTOH, at least he doesn't have his characters fling obvious lumps of exposition at each other every time they sit down to a meal. I just finished reading two very good books (Bios by Wilson and Old Man's War by Scalzi) that contain such a meal. At one point Wilson even mentions that his "listening" character isn't interested in the exposition, just to make extra sure that I notice the pill I'm swallowing. (Bios is a lovely book, though...really haunting. This is one of its few imperfections. OMW is terrific, too, in an entirely different way.)

I'll also throw in Robert Sawyer's name for consideration: A lot of his books are fairly near-future, with some interesting speculations on the effects of the sfnal changes presented. (Sometimes I think he doesn't project those effects as far as he could or should.)

moe99 @ #221, re Provigil: I've been taking the drug for about the last three weeks. The effect has been... extraordinary. I hadn't realized just how much of my waking hours, for literally years, had been spent in a foggy state.

Short-form background: I've been getting along on five to six hours sleep per night for many years -- there are reasons why so few, but that's for the long-form explanation. Over the last year, I seem to have finally reached an age -- mid-50's -- where my body can't cope with this regimen anymore. I'd been having "mini-blackouts" -- periods of nodding off for, sometimes, a fraction of a second or a second; not much, but enough, when you spend the majority of your workday behind the wheel of a truck, for it to be, ummm, just a bit alarming, not to mention dangerous.

With the Provigil, the drowsiness and mini-blackouts are gone. I can be fully alert and attentive for the first time in... a long while.

This doesn't make Provigil a wonder cure for me. It keeps me from being drowsy during its effective period (about fifteen hours), but I can still feel, deep in my bones, that I'm still physically tired (make that tired; no, make that TIRED) from years of insufficient sleep. So what I really NEED is a change of lifestyle that will allow me to get a normal amount of sleep.

Which may well mean that, rather than retiring from the Postal Service as planned about three years from now, when the mortgage and other debts are paid off, I may end up retiring shortly after I'm eligible in September, and look for a part-time job to be able to keep servicing the debts and obligations.

I'm in Amsterdam! W00t!

The international move (performed in stages) is underway. And, for this weekend, I can has cat*.

-----
* as long as I am clear that I can NOT has flat; I can borrowz flat if I feedz her. Otherwise, well, houseguest has a flavr.

Alas (or thankfully), my Days of Salt are a thing of my foolish youth. Along with the lard-and-brown-sugar sandwiches.

And where does Battle Beyond the Stars fit in there?

I was somewhat disappointed with The Merchants of Souls, but thought Earth Made of Glass was better, in its way, than A Million Open Doors--it was sort of the same story with a different ending, and I like that kind of variation on a theme. I have to take issue with your description of Utilitopia as having "an unrealistic economic ideology", though--it was perfectly realistic and functioned fine for a long time. It just wasn't able to resist superior force.

Bruce Arthurs,

I'm liking Robert Sawyer's books one by one, though I'm noticing a bit of sameness about them when I think about them as a group. There are worse things to say about an author.

For serious, those books are about as perfect a refutation to Cliff Burns's irritatingly-phrased claims as there can be. They have everything anyone could hope for, except more so, better, and impossibly well-balanced.

Sawyer might not be a bad idea; I recently lent Mindscan (the only of his I've read thus far) to a not-especially-SF-inclined co-worker, and she loved it. I also second the recs for Willis and Bujold; I don't think I've forced Willis on people before, but Bujold is always successful IME.

(As it happens, I'm about 2/3 of the way through Red Mars for the first time. It's holding my interest enough that I expect to finish, but not enough that I imagine I'll be looking for the others. Partly because I don't find any of the characters likeable or interesting--except perhaps Nadia, who's barely around at this point--but mostly because all the geology and descriptions of the landscape bore me. I can, however, see how people with a different set of interests would enjoy this MUCH more easily than I can with the Bester.)

We always made this with raisin bread - usually not with the white frosting as this did terrible things to the toaster. Our family had a dedicated glass bottle (formerly for spice) with blended cinnamon and sugar. I can remember my mom dumping in some of each, putting her palm over the black metal perforated top (rings of little holes) and shaking it. She would then let my sister and me peek at the henna-type pattern on her hand, though she wouldn't have made that comparison.

Friends who grew up on the land made headcheese when they slaughtered pigs. There was a religious war (though both sides of the family were staunch Lutherans) over whether the slices should be served with or without white Karo syrup. Both spouses agreed on the Wonder Bread. Velda was the one who introduced me to pie crust made with lard.

My mom came to visit once and was rooting around in the refrigerator. I asked what she needed, and she was looking for cheese spread (a.k.a. Cheez Whiz) to put in her celery. There wasn't any. She kept looking, knowing we couldn't possibly run a household without it.

Lemme check with my friend and see if it's possible to use a scanner for that. I assume it's comparable. But I don't know exactly how that photointensiometerthingy actually works. Would I average over an area? The scanner might have some compression, color conversion, whatever, in it too.

Maybe I could put some perl code together for you. If you're not in a hurry.

and sand fleas...

Thank you for reminding me of the term 'cinnamon toast'. It wasn't coming to mind.

And I can remember a couple of my uncles slathering lard and sugar on lefse, although I preferred butter and cinnamon sugar.

I'm predicting a sudden spike in cinnamon based baked treats for Sunday breakfasts throughout the "Flour-osphere" tomorrow.

As to #51: ...I don't think either Filipinos or Latinos identify Filipinos as being Latinos.

That's actually a funny question. I noodled a bit with it here, and I didn't come to much in the way of conclusions. Filipino status, as far as category, is a hard one to pin down.

Those Cheez Whiz containers became the juice glasses of most of the families of my childhood. Nebraska did much to keep Kraft afloat (ooh, miniature marshmallows!). And Campbell's soup, and Wonder Bread, and jello. "Sandwich Spread sandwiches". Pickle loaf and olive loaf sliced lunch meat.

I remember figuring out that tuna-noodle casserole could be made with a white sauce rather than a cream soup, and that peas could be served separately rather than in it to become gray-green lumps on future reheatings. The sky opened, the angels trumpeted. Crushed potato chips for the top still are mandatory.

OK, we have the same basic understanding. I'd just quibble that you seem to be using "digital" to means something more like "direct" or "simple". I.e., the sequence from B&W film exposure to print is straightforward and simple, whereas the sequence from digital-camera exposure to B&W print is rather convoluted. But it's still fully digital: that is, everything from the point where the camera's A/D converter turns pixel voltages into numbers, to the point where the hardware controlling the printer converts numbers into something such as a voltage controlling an ink jet[*], involves numbers and numerical computations.

The deeper irony is that the digital camera pixels are intrinsically grayscale; a purely B&W digital camera would be both simpler and (in the non-Foveon case) higher resolution. But everyone wants a camera that can do color, so...

[*] Or whatever the final process is; I imagine Greg London would know all the details at this end of things...

I think it's the rebounding hamsters. Probably made from Amazing Zectron.

Bush's legacy of running the country into the ground (off a cliff?) is going to be paying interest for the next forty years....

[Early morning. Grandmother (in for a visit) rooting through the refrigerator. Teenage gay son (chubby blond with glasses) comes in and watches her for a moment.]

TGS: Grandma, what are you looking for?
GM: Oh, hi Chris! [TGS winces] I can't find the Cheez Whiz™.
TGS: Grandma, I don't think we have any...Cheez Whiz™ :-P.
GM: [laughs] Don't be silly! I just can't find it.

[GM then proceeds to completely unpack the refrigerator. TGS grabs an onion, some butter, and some extra-sharp cheddar from the heap accumulating on the floor, and some flour from the counter top; he goes over to the stove.

DISSOLVE TO GM putting the last few things back in the refrigerator (which is completely rearranged), looking bewildered and unhappy.]

GM: Well, looks like you were right, Chris. [TGS eyeroll] Looks like we're out of Cheez Whiz™.
TGS: I'm sorry Grandma. Will this do? [shows her the rich cheese sauce he's just made; sticks a stalk of celery into it and offers it to her; GM blows on it to make sure it's not too hot, then eats it]
GM: [mouth still full] Oh, Chrissy, [TGS: a moment's homicidal rage...] that's delicious! [...dissolves in a delighted grin]

[Pause as GM finishes chewing and swallowing]

GM: I wonder how come there's no Cheez Whiz™?

[slow zoom/fade on TBS's face]

"I wonder if works on Gerbils?"
"Of COURSE it doesn't work on Gerbils! This is HAMSTER research. There's a difference you know! You can't just lump all rodents together in one big heap!"
"Though after the Viagra™ that's how they end up."

It really is imposible to commnet on an errror withuot misspeling somthing int he coment.

SF: Catherine Asaro's (who may, herself be Latino -- the name seems so and her hometown would so indicate) Skolian Empire series seems to be Latino-heavy (sort of) in that the big reveal in the book I have (Catch the Lightning) is that the bloodline that makes the ruling class the ruling class is Mayan descent (and this book in particular certainly stars a Latino woman, so it counts itself as well as being evidence for further examples).

F: Tim Powers seems to use Latinos with some regularity: Angelica Anthem Elizalde of 2/3rds of the Fault Lines trilogy, and Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga of Declare (the later being Spanish rather than Latin-American).

Anne McCaffrey has Latino characters in the Powers That Be books, but they don't come in as much as the Irish and Inuittish-only-I-don't-remember-what-they-are ones. They're in one or two books, not all of them.

I know more when I discover that I don't know something I thought I knew.

The Franco dictatorship promoted a concept called 'hispanidad' intended to unite all Spanish-speaking country (in Franco's Spain, for example, the 12th of October was the 'día de la hispanidad'or 'día de la raza').

Back in late 1985, I was at some friends's bookstore when I came across a science-fiction book that sounded intriguing, but which, for some reason, I didn't buy. If I remember what the back cover said, it was about an alien on the run on Earth who finds refuge in a Catholic Church. I don't remember who the author was, but I think it was published by del Rey. It might have had a pyramid on the cover. I think.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I used to know* a guy named David Garcia, who definitely looked Mexican. Latino, right? Wrong. His father was a Spaniard and his mother was Japanese. None of his ancestors ever lived in Latin America at all. Part-Asian looks remarkably like Latino, because Native Americans (or Indians if you prefer) are basically (northeastern) Asian, and Latinos are a blend of Amerind/Native American and European.

*He was at his desk that Tuesday.

The Franco dictatorship promoted a concept called 'hispanidad' intended to unite all Spanish-speaking country (in Franco's Spain, for example, the 12th of October was the 'día de la hispanidad'or 'día de la raza').

Abi, congratulations! Amsterdam is a wonderful city. My very favorite painting in the whole world is there.

abi

w00t! You can haz Netherlands.

The discussions of "The Stars My Destination" and Barnes' "Million Open Doors" series prove yet again that taste is much like gang colors; some people are either Crips or Bloods, and that's all there is to it. Me, I love TSMD because it's not straight SF at all; it's Bester's trademark mix of pastiche (of "The Count of Monte Cristo" in this case), Grand Guignol (Mutants! Radioactive Men! Weird Religious Sects!), and invented argot.

As for Barnes, I personally like most of his books. I can see how others might dislike them, or at least some of them, though. He has a distinctive style and worldview which could easily be offensive to me if my tastes were different. But I am curious; no one has mentioned the fourth book of the series, "The Armies of Memory". I liked this better than "The Merchants of Souls", although it is almost as apocalyptic as "Earth Made of Glass".

Guilty foods: as a child I independently invented the mayonaise sandwich: two slices of cheap white bread, a leaf or two of lettuce (a sort of figleaf of respectability; the hardcore version leaves this out) and a lot of Hellman's Mayonnaise slathered on the bread. Has to be Hellman's (Best Foods in the Western Territories), that Kraft stuff has way too much sugar in it. I used to eat these things while reading Ace SF Double Novels all alone in the house on a Saturday afternoon. Ah, Paradise!

Enough to be able to say "Yes, I ate," while being virtually free of nutritional value. Everyone but him thought it was disgusting.

Well, I'm certainly having one, now that I have a use for the leftover pie crust in my freezer. Thank you!

My favorite sentence in Science News this year is still "Sildenafil, commonly known as Viagra, helps hamsters rebound from a 6-hour clock change such as a long eastbound plane flight produces."

An urban legend of some duration has it that orgasm is the best way to reset your biological clock. So perhaps it isn't the erection per se?

#289 ::: Xopher

I love the story about your mother assuming that of course you had to have Cheez Whiz™. A scene in an imaginary movie played in my mind...

You have nailed the feel of this surreal encounter, complete to the refrigerator reorganization, which I hadn't mentioned. And you could have a sequel when she realizes there are not enough juice glasses in the cupboard. You had to keep ALL of the Cheez Whiz containers, and they might eventually require their own cupboard.

Now today's trip down the slope and grocery shopping is definitely going to involve going to look at the Kraft dairy section to see what was in the cream cheese spread for the celery.

Does anyone else remember "The Perry Como Show", sponsored by Kraft, where the commercials had Delicious Recipes you could make with Kraft products, which in the early color days all looked horribly orange?

Please, please, Teresa, come back and tell us about your werewolves! My arteries are clogging from the memories!

Brown vs. Board of Education overruled. Move along now, nothing to see here ...

I know what happens when a mother comes to visit an adult daughter. Or son, which is why I never allowed my parents to come to my apartment when they were here!

C.S. Friedman writes outstanding hard SF (to date, I've been less impressed with her fantasy work). In Conquest Born, The Madness Season, and This Alien Shore all make my Desert Island Books list.

"Hard" SF implies a limited amount of stretching laws of physics (or none whatsoever), to me. That makes it a pretty narrow category.

When you say, "I'd say that Job and Friday were Heinlein's worst," does that mean you didn't read the ones that followed? I rather liked both Job and Friday but understand why others might not; still, I thought they were better than what came next.

"If I were introducing someone to Heinlein's work, I'd be more inclined to suggest his juveniles."

Mmm--maybe, depending on the person. I still think Waldo and Magic, Inc. makes a fine introduction. Revolt in 2100, too. Those five stories show off pre-loonietarian Heinlein.

Bruce Cohen,

I really liked The Armies of Memory, even if it wasn't as ambitious as the first two. I was also pleased to see he hadn't written himself into a corner with The Merchants of Souls.

How come the MythBusters never put that one to the test?

I’d like to say a few words
In defense of our country
Whose people aren’t bad nor are they mean
Now the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen

Let’s turn history’s pages, shall we?

Take the Caesars for example
Why within the first few of them
They were sleeping with their sister
Stashing little boys in swimming pools
And burning down the City
And one of ‘em, one of 'em
Appointed his own horse Consul of the Empire
That’s like vice president or something

That’s not a very good example, is it?

But wait, here’s one, the Spanish Inquisition
They put people in a terrible position
I don’t even like to think about it

Well, sometimes I like to think about it

Just a few words in defense of our country
Whose time at the top
Could be coming to an end
Now we don’t want their love
And respect at this point is pretty much out of the question
But in times like these
We sure could use a friend

Hitler. Stalin.
Men who need no introduction

King Leopold of Belgium. That’s right.
Everyone thinks he’s so great
Well he owned The Congo
He tore it up too
He took the diamonds, he took the gold
He took the silver
Know what he left them with?

Malaria

A President once said,
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"
Now it seems like we’re supposed to be afraid
It’s patriotic in fact and color coded
And what are we supposed to be afraid of?
Why, of being afraid
That’s what terror means, doesn’t it?
That’s what it used to mean

[To the first eight bars of "Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean"]

You know it pisses me off a little
That this Supreme Court is gonna outlive me
A couple of young Italian fellas and a brother on the Court now too
But I defy you, anywhere in the world
To find me two Italians as tightass as the two Italians we got

And as for the brother
Well, Pluto’s not a planet anymore either

The end of an empire is messy at best
And this empire is ending
Like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea
We’re adrift in the land of the brave
And the home of the free

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

I installed a 3rd LCD monitor in my office yesterday (returned from semi-permanent loan) and attached it to the mac mini running OS X server (named mini-mimir of course).

I don't really need it as a work surface, so I'm thinking of using it as more of a passive display. But I'm just not getting any great ideas about what to run on it. So, a plea for ideas: What kinds of things would be cool to have running on a passive display in the office?

I've got it positioned upwards and rightwards, out of my immediate concentration zone, so it doesn't really matter how distracting it might be, I'm just looking for cool.

In the path of the light there is, or isn't a crystal of silver salt. It's a binary equation. the density of those ones/zeros is what makes for gray.

In Digital to B&W they manufacture an analog of that situation.

I am not using it to mean direct/simple. The act of making a print from film is far more complex than making one from a file.

Expose the film, recall what you did; soup the film (making such adjustments to correct for things you had to do to get a decent image, or compress/expand contrast).

examine the negatives/make a contact sheet.

Decide what to print.

Figure out what needs to be done to make it look good (what paper, what contrast range, etc.).

Pick the paper, make a test strip. Double check the focus, make the print.

Decide what soup to use on the paper.

Mix same.

Run the paper through the soups.

Color is the same, but harder (in part because color papers don't come in the same variety of contrast grades; and the ability to play with soup time/temp is less; dye clouds not behaving in the same way as silver salts, and the masking layer making it harder to "read" a negative).

The print from file process is.

Take the picture.

Look at the files, choose the one you want to play with. Play with it (this is analogous to exposing paper).

Print it.

So it's not an issue of complexity that I'm saying is the difference between the two.

It's a direct binary state for B&W, and an analagous state for digital B&W.

Does the information the program is using get stored as one or zero? yYah. But that's so it can approximate something else.

That's why I say the irony of it is that the digital is analog, and the other (which seems to be) is "digital".

Wildlife webcams (that is, cams watching critters)? (There are all kinds of webcams out there: there are some that just watch trains going past their locations.)

---
Another vote for cinnamon-sugared piecrust here!

I've done mayo sandwiches too. Sometimes I put herb mixes or something similar on it.
Then there's the slightly guilty pleasure of the hot-muffin-with-cold-mayo-and-cheese sandwich. (Slice the cheese before putting the muffin in the toaster. Put the mayo and the cheese on one half of the hot muffin. Put the other half on top of the cheese. Squish together. Eat.)
As a kid, I'd do strawberry jam with sweet pickle relish sandwiches. (Now, no.) Didn't work with any other flavor.

First, ignore Alice Water's snit about freezing salmon; the best stuff is packed in ice as soon as it's out of the water, and stays at 27F or below until it hits the consumer's cart; "Fresh" salmon held above freezing temps degenerates fast, tastes fishy and then rancid, especially the high-fat Alaskan fish..

What I would do, if such a thing were mine, is take it out and unwrap it while still frozen, find my best knife and cut it into single meal packets, double wrap it in butcher paper and then foil, and then put it in the coldest part of the freezer to thaw and season (except I only season low-quality salmon, stuff bought from the grocery store or the frozen packs in my freezer which got a tiny bit thawed during the storms in December).

My favorite seasoning for oven roast salmon is a rub of equal parts (coarse salt, coarse ground fresh tellichery pepper) dark brown sugar as a rub, with nice smoked bacon and sliced sweet onions on the top side- actually, since I buy whole fish and freeze two pound roasts, the mixture and bacon and onions actually go inside.

Fillets are nice grilled, with a lime-based teriyaki or molasses, lemon, and pepper brush on sauce. Light hand for either with good fish!

Left over plain roast or slow-grilled salmon (and I do mean plain: no salt!) works well in a couple of pasta recipes; the favorite at our house is a lasagna-esque dish with leaf spinach, fresh basil leaves, and a white sauce with good parmesan and a little garlic, layered with fresh pasta and topped with chopped fresh mozzerella with more basil and a little garlic chives or plain chives.

(Which reminds me; the damned rabbits have eaten all my chives again, of both kinds).

High-fat Pacific Salmon needs treated gently; cooking temperatures should be low, and the interior temp for best taste below 135F; the fat has a low smoke point. Take it off the heat as soon as you smell fish!

But OMG that last shot is such an incredib;e cliche.

Then I got to get out of the car at the top of the NE45th overpass to remove a shopping cart full of some (invisible) homeless person's possessions which was blocking the west bound lane. At noon. Traffic was backed up to the Ave in the time it took me to wedge it against the rail and get back in our car.

Things went downhill from there. Except maybe not the shopping cart.

As for SF recommendations, though I review a lot more fantasy I see some of it now and then. How about Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Retrieval Artist" series? -- crime solving on the Moon, tending toward the dark but full of surprises.

Since I regard the original Star Wars as as much F as SF, some kinds of fantasy might also apply. If he likes history and doesn't mind writers messing with it, Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series is a possibility. (I don't call it a trilogy, since there's a fourth one due in October.)

It is possible that five hours of sleep, five nights in a row, is taking its toll.

Does anyone have any other examples of this kind of "fictional nonfiction?"

The really horrifying part is that they overruled Brown v. Board of Education by citing Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that because these attempts to remedy racial inequality categorize students by race--y'know, the disadvantaged ones, the advantaged ones, making sure they mix--it's judging them on the color of their skin, not the content of their character, so they're racist.

Two angles on that:
1. Paying attention to black and Latino students' being black and Latino in order to see about getting them better opportunities is racist, because it identifies them as black or Latino in the first place. Boggle.
2. Integrating schools is racist toward white people, because they're getting "judged" for "being white." They're being discriminated against, argued Justice Roberts, based on their race--poor oppressed white kids!--by not being favored by programs designed to offset problems with racially-divided "separate-but-equal" schools. Boggle.

I just--I honestly don't know. I thought last week's Supreme Court rulings were bad, but this...this...and the fact that Roberts justified himself by using Brown v. Board of Education and the words of MLK, Jr...I just don't know what to say. This is just astonishing. It just hurts.

Today's young people... I remember 10 years, working 40 hours in a row when my employer acquired a similar company, and we had to merge their computer systems with ours. Or was it the other way, and we were acquired? Can't remember. No matter, didn't hurt me one tiny bit.

I am not using it to mean direct/simple. The act of making a print from film is far more complex than making one from a file.

[snip]

So it's not an issue of complexity that I'm saying is the difference between the two.

OK, I see where I was misunderstanding you. I was thinking of the abstract complexity of the total process of going from initial exposure to final print. You, understandably, intepret "complexity" in terms of how much time, work, and thought you, the photographer, have to put into the process.

What I meant by complexity was the computational mechanics of generating a grayscale ("B&W") digital image using a consumer-level digital camera. As you're probably aware, a digital camera internally generates three grayscale images, one for each of the red, green, and blue parts of the visible spectrum. In most cases (the Foveon detector is an exception), these images are spatially offset from each other, and so a complex bit of interpolation is necessary to align them. Then there's usually a post-processing stage of anti-aliasing to hopefully remove any moire artifact, followed by packaging up the three (interpolated, etc.) grayscale images into the RGB channels of the color image, and then placing that in file format it's supposed to be saved it (possibly involving an extra stage of compression).

And now you've got a color digital image, so a further step is necessary to convert it to grayscale on your computer. This can be relatively simple, or more complex in mathematical/computational terms (if, e.g., you convert from RGB to Lab color space).

Most of this complexity, of course, has been worked out by engineers and computer scientists over the years, and is nicely automated and hidden from us users.

A film analogy of sorts: It's as if the only kind of film you could buy was color film, so you had to resort to special darkroom tricks to generate a B&W negative or print. But it turns out that the color film, internally, is actually made of three separate B&W films, that are merged in a complicated (but automatic) way during the developing process.

That, for me, is the complexity and irony behind (consumer-level) digital "B&W" imaging. (Part of where I'm coming from is astronomical imaging, which in these terms is all grayscale, all the time, from start to finish. Very simple and direct.)

Thanks also to moe91@221 for the link about Provigil. (I take it because the medications I take for intractable migraines make me sleepy.)

Worse than that, Roberts's reaasoning was so flaky that even Scalia is complaining about him overruling precedent.

I want to get Roberts and Alito up in front of a committee, preferably the House Oversight or the current Senate Judiciary, and ask them, under oath, if they knew they were lying when they told the previous Senate Judiciary committee, under oath, that they would respect precedent. (#$%^&* committee members, not doing their jobs.)

In any case, running into walls, literally, and being a less than perfectly pleasant person to live with, all incomplete sentences aside.

So, nap. As women who can order from the Senior Menu at Denny's, I feel I'm entitled to a bit of a kip of a Saturday afternoon.

Having "horstwessel" as an LJ-username is either excessively rebellious, or a bit too neo-naxi for comfort.

Maybe I'm just too sensitive: I get some of the same uncomfortable feelings about some militaristic SF.

Repealing Brown v Board of Education would mean permitting overt racial segregation used to keep blacks from getting a decent education (or mixing too closely with whites), which this decision doesn't do at all. It's great political rhetoric, but not true.

IMO, one fascinating thing about this sequence of decisions is how completely they undermine the idea that the SC is somehow interpreting the constitution, as opposed to just making what decisions they want to make and backfilling some kind of tenuous explanation for it. With no relevant change in the constitution, we've had:

a. Seperate but equal
b. No overt discrimination in schools (but move with "all deliberate speed" on it so you don't p-ss off too many powerful people all at once)
c. Court-ordered bussing to achieve the desired racial mix
d. Affirmative action programs allowed for universities, so long as you don't make the numeric manipulation of choices too obvious.
e. Required race-blind assignment to schools.

All this is from the same constitution. The justices simply voted on what they wanted it to mean, and it magically meant that.

I object to this in a way that's completely distinct from the rightness or the wrongness of the policy that results from each decision. Maybe this is a good policy, maybe it's a bad policy, but I just don't see why counting votes on the Supreme Court is a better way of making that decision than counting votes in Congress.

Hmm... electric sheep would definitely be neat, if you don't mind its sharing nature. Fluid is also very cool.

Well, of course, this woman runs multiple agendas as part of her Assigned Task of Being on the Planet. Nonetheless, had it been possible to restrict her to one and only one concept, it would have been the search for the Cheez Whiz.

And, freshly back from Boulder/Nederland, I can now state that the celery-stuffing stuff in the juice glasses from Kraft was:
1) "Old English" - tarted up Cheez Whiz
2) Pimento-flavored cream cheese
3) Same as #2 but with olive bits
AND the preferred:
4) Cream cheese with crushed pineapple

I had parked the money with Charlie, and forbore to read the fine print of ingredients (wasn't it George Carlin who speculated that "cheese food" was what you feed your cheese?) and this limited investigation was more than enough.

*waves from Longmont* Hi Neighbor!!

My mother, in times of stress, has been known to slice a banana lengthwise, apply Miracle Whip, and then add crushed peanuts. You get a lot of stress teaching 4th grade.

I'm more likely to get a bunch of Zesta crackers, some Tillamook Sharp cheddar, apply slices of the latter to the former, and then broil. If I'm feeling in need of extra spice, I'll add some sliced jalapenos. I usually also broil a few crackers with just butter, as well.

I also make milk toast (buttered toast in hot milk with salt, pepper, and more butter added) and a dish passed down from me mum, eggs a la king, involving hardboiled eggs, fried bacon, and cocktail olives in a white sauce over toast.

Texanne, #271, Exactly! I loved A Million Open Doors, read the next, never read another. (Hmmm, I just found out that the tacky underlining when it thinks words are spelled wrong is not LJ, but my new version of Firefox. There better be a way to turn that off. Damn, they think it's a feature.)

Mary Aileen, #282, I like celery with PB or with cream cheese.

Lance, #283, :::hangs head::: I buy already mixed cinnamon-sugar from the spice section of the grocery store.

Xopher, #304, I'm sorry. I was lucky, all the people I know in those places were away for one reason or another that day.

Xopher, #315, when I was in the hospital with the second renal failure, I told the "friend" who had the key that she should never give it to anybody from my family. Well, one day my father descends on me in my hospital room yelling that he wasn't in my will. How did he know that? The "friend" gave him the key. Security took him out, but when I got home I found out he'd rearranged every single cupboard. I came home with round-the-clock aides for three months and it was really embarrassing to ask them to search for stuff. The "friend" came over and complained that when she gave the key to my step-brother and his wife, they left dirty sheets and dishes for her. The friend who has the key now has resisted my father twice so far, and since Dad is now in a locked Alzheimer's ward, I'm not as worried.

I keep forgetting to tell those of you who like Morena Baccarin that after Firefly and Stargate SG1, she's now on TNT's Heartland. She's a secondary character -- the nurse who's in love with the doctor who is just using her for sex -- and I'm not thrilled with the series. I think I'll watch it again Monday and decide.

Funny, that. I mean, Chinese/Japanese/Koreans are all happy to be considered the same, and everyone knows that Aussies and Brits and Canadians are just Americans with funny speech patterns. And the Scottish and Irish are really English. Right?

Though I haven't looked into the matter, I have this suspicion that "Latino" is mostly an American concept to lump disparate nationalities together into one.

and @ #195:
[my list] Which seemed to focus exclusively on Spanish.

I stuck the "etc." on the end because it would take too much space to list all the possible variations. For example, how about a nice, pale-skinned, blonde boy who doesn't speak any Spanish and looks remarkably like his mother, who's of Polish descent, but whose first name is Roberto and last name is typically Spanish? No one would pick him out as Hispanic or Latino. But it makes a difference that his father is from Cuba. That would make him some sort of Latino, maybe (half white Latino and half white non-Latino? is there a one drop of blood rule here?) Except that while the father was born in Cuba, but his parents had only just immigrated there from Spain, and the whole family packed up and moved to the U.S. 15 years later, so the Cuban connection is kind of tenuous. Oh, and his grandmother is actually a pale-skinned, red-headed Basque woman, which would technically not be "Hispanic" since Basque is a different kettle of fish linguistically, but who speaks Spanish natively.

But going on with a long list of examples like that would take up too much space.

Lee @ #229:
Let me give you a bit of the background context. I live in Houston, which has a very high Latino population, and I seem to be defining it, personally, as "people of Mexican and/or Central/South American ethnicity."

Ah, Texas. I see, oh yes.

We just had our 4th annual local SF convention, and my partner and I were discussing the facts that (1) there were significantly more black people in SF fandom than there used to be -- when I started going to cons 30 years ago, there were I think 3 black fen in the entire region -- and (2) there were significantly fewer Latino fen than black ones. Both groups are under-represented in SF fandom, but IME Latinos more so than blacks.

I can only think of two possibly Hispanic fans in Texas 25-30 years ago, though neither was going to cons, and it's not clear to me that either would meet your definition of Latino anyway, or that you would have recognized them as such if they were talking to you. How do you know there aren't others who just aren't obvious to you because their name isn't obviously Spanish and they don't speak with an accent or have darker skin?

Anyway, it does make a significant difference culturally what nationalities you are lumping together and whether you are just looking for "things in Spanish" or "people with Spanish surnames" as if all Spanish-speaking cultures (or even dialects) were interchangeable, or if you were specifically looking for a particular latinoamericano culture or what.

For example, he was certainly not Latino (more like Cockney), but Roger Delgado was part Spanish (as in Spain). How exactly this would seem like ethnic representation to Mexican-Americans in Texas is unclear to me, though.

Oh, and I can explain a little more about baking powder. One of the original formulas was baking soda and cream of tartar (tartaric acid) -- that actually comes up in the Little House books, after the Long Winter is over, when Ma remarks on how strange it is to have a full pantry to work with, and now that she has "cream of tartar and plenty of saleratus," that being an old name for baking soda, she intends to make a cake.

During the "lab" section of my culinary school program, where we tested recipes with variations in their formulas to get a practical idea of what changing quantities or ingredients did, I discovered that the biscuits made with baking soda and cream of tartar were actually tastier than ones made with the double-acting baking powder we used -- they were a more appealing color (baking soda promotes browning, I forget the chemistry of why) and they seemed to me to have a wheatier flavor.

Most double-acting baking powders are based around sodium aluminum sulfate. Some people are very concerned about the potential health effects of aluminum in the diet. Enough people fussed about it at the cafe where I used to work that I switched to a brand that used a calcium compound instead. The non-aluminum one found most easily at supermarkets (at least in the Northeast) is Rumford; the kind I got from my supplier was called Benchmate, and I think it was produced by Fleischmann's. I don't know if it's available retail. I also didn't notice any change in quality in the baked goods between aluminum and calcium formulas.

However, the Benchmate brand came in an excellent plastic bucket with a lid, instead of the foiled-cardboard canister that the other kind came in, so I was perfectly happy to keep using it to please the few fussy customers. I love reusable buckets!

Politicians who think all Hispanic culture or even all Latino culture is the same learn on their first trips to Florida and Texas that this isn't actually the case.

The behavior of your "friend" is such that I doubt I could keep the words 'you stupid bitch' from passing my lips (even though I know many people find that word deeply offensive). Those of us with unreasonable families sometimes have a little trouble understanding what it's like to have a reasonable family, but people with reasonable families almost NEVER get what it's like NOT to have one. My parents are mellowing out, thank gods, but I still wouldn't want them making end-of-life decisions for me, for example.

#348 ::: Lance Weber ::: (view all by) ::: June 30, 2007, 08:02 PM:

Carol #147 ...freshly back from Boulder/Nederland...

*waves from Longmont* Hi Neighbor!!

I'm waving from Boulder, but you can't see me, because it's dark right now.

Also, am patiently waiting for the Doctor Who finale to finish downloading. Having my fingers in my ears until then. This would also make it hard to see me wave, as I can only use my elbows to do it.

John A A @ 273: I take exception to your exception. Utilitopia privileged belief over observation (cf the comment about propositions that couldn't be discussed); it started to crumble as soon as it had to deal with enough people who didn't blindly believe. Force was used to counter the mobs deliberately raised by the rulers in an attempt to hang onto power.

I've been finding the recommendations fascinating. I found Robinson's Mars trilogy bloated and ...Salt unfinishably didactic, and have given up on Sawyer. I \loved/ The Stars My Destination -- but I was exactly the golden age (12) when I read it, and can't guess how I'd react reading it for the first time now.
(wrt Barnes -- Earth Made of Glass isn't supposed to be a success story; Barnes is more mature than Reynolds, whose Section M stories also involved ]fixing[ cultures. People who gave up here should try the third one.) I suspect that recommendations without extensive conversation are a crapshoot, especially since it sounds like kouredios needs one perfect book to dent a conviction that SF is unreadable; but at least there are lots of possibly-useful comments on \why/ something is/isn't worthwhile. (Somebody mentioned Powers in the Latino subthread. I've liked everything he did for real publishers; maybe too weird for this case, but he certainly has real people dealing with the hard situations.)

#358 ::: Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
I'm waving from Boulder, but you can't see me, because it's dark right now...This would also make it hard to see me wave, as I can only use my elbows to do it.

Waving back from Peaceful Valley! We can pretend we're all in sight of each other and semaphoring in concert. Isn't the net fun?

Lance, any chance you knit? Nicole and I have been sporadically rabid about Magic Circle socks. Want us to teach you (sneaky laugh)?

You guys (this is now the full collective noun) have gotten Charlie and me into Buffy, which we are watching courtesy NetFlix. We just finished the second season's Inca Mummy Princess. The scriptwriters seem to have had the most fun with that one, so far. Quite a lot more to look forward to, much less Angel and Firefly.

----

(*) He then went on to play a different character in the recent TV seies based on that western. To my knowledge he has not appeared in Pixar's version of the story, A Bug's Life.

Also, you have no munchkin deductions to claim on the 1040.

Carol K., #311: I am now officially confused. Isn't Cheez Whiz the canonical "cheese in a spray can"?

Chris, #318: Would you be okay if I just called it SF (to distinguish these books from the Black Sun trilogy, which is classic fantasy) and left the "hard" out? I think that may be the base issue, that I'm using a more or less binary definition and you're using a trinary one. But I'll argue that the scientific background she provides for the vampires and werewolves moves The Madness Season well out of the "pure fantasy" category.

John, #320: I gave up in disgust after The Merchants of Souls, which read to me as if the whole of Earth Made of Glass had been just a cheap excuse to break up Giraut & Margaret so that he could rehash the falling-in-love plot line from A Million Open Doors again. Does the fourth book redeem this in any way?

Oh, and I consider the economy of Utilitopia unrealistic because it was completely artificial and depended on every single factor being under strict governmental control. IMO it wasn't "superior force" that caused the collapse, it was the collision with an external factor that could neither be controlled nor suppressed (not that they didn't try for the latter). The parallels to the current Administration's "making our own reality" behavior are disturbingly apt.

(Side note: I've gotten the impression, from something read I remember not where, that books 2 & 3 of that sequence were written during or shortly after Barnes had himself gone thru a divorce. If that's the case, then perhaps I know what happened with those books...)

Xopher, #355: Those of us with unreasonable families sometimes have a little trouble understanding what it's like to have a reasonable family, but people with reasonable families almost NEVER get what it's like NOT to have one.

Oh, yes. And my family wasn't by any means as bad as a lot of my friends' families -- but people from what I think of as "normal" backgrounds are just boggled when I describe some of the things I was expected to deal with as if they were perfectly common and reasonable and doesn't-everybody-do-that.

Moral of the story: If you know you are going to be incapacitated and you don't want your family being given access to your home/records/whatever, make sure that the person who controls the access is also from an unreasonable family background. THEY will not have the "Oh, it's FAMILY, what could be wrong with that?" reaction.

TexAnne, #357: I'm getting the feeling that I have inadvertently cast myself in the position of the man who comes onto a feminist blog and wants to be taught all about feminism right now. If there's a better way to learn about these things than asking, I'd be perfectly happy with some links (and indeed, I've already noted down several from the responses). OTOH, I don't mind being uncomfortable in order to learn.

They used to have a word for bending, twisting, and warping people. It used to be called "torture". I seem to remember that sleep deprivation was often part of it too. Doesn't happen these days, of course.

I didn't notice that (I was looking at content, and the site owner is onkel hans).

Since the title of the piece seems to be a reference to a napoleonic song (Ich hatt eine Kameraden), the nazi-ish aspects (what with the pointing out that this was regular army, not SS/political unit, and the apparenet time frame (pre-war), I didn't get that vibe.

It reads to me like the problem is the question, not the answer.

Essentially, we see a group or groups (depending on how you define them, but I'm gonna invoke Patrick and not focus on edge cases) of people in the world who don't seem to appear in SF. Barring some Vingesque Singularity that takes them all to Geek Paradise and leaves the British colonies* to conquer the stars, where did they all go?

The pre-question is, is it one group or many that we're discussing right now? What do we call them and how do we describe them, to be able to then search for them in the literature?

There is a valid point in here. Let's not lose it to a definitional discussion, much less a flamewar.

-----
* Except British Guyana, which is held in escrow

So it's no surprise that characters are written as if they're part of the dominant whitebread culture; even Heinlein's characters have been absorbed into that culture.

It's just a reflectioon of all the other media. And you saw depictions of working-class whites before you saw working-class blacks on TV shows.

And I have this feeling that SF is unusual in that we still seek out the works of the fifties and sixties. Because the alien world is a part of SF, those alien worlds of history are still within our grasp.

So lets be careful not to confuse a different sample space with a different reality. Does looking at the past really tell us anything about what writers are doing today?

For what it's worth, there are Wikipedia articles on the topics of Latino and Hispanic. These are occasionally confusing, but do give some sense of the complexity and the linguistic background. (I'd start with the "Latino" article; it's shorter.)

This includes some odd aspects that I hadn't really known, such as the fact that "Latin America" was originally a 19th Century French term, part of the propaganda associated with their invasion of Mexico (i.e., "It's OK to be ruled by us, we're fellow Latin-language-speakers, not like those alien Anglo-Saxon types...")

There were times, when I hadn't given up yet on ST-TNG, when I found myself thinking that, by then, there shouldn't much left of old-Earth racial 'purity'. Then again that might have been just me having a weird moment of optimism about Humanity. Was it Greg Bear who, in his own Star Trek novel, brought up that there might still be white supremacists even by the 23rd Century?

Posting to ML is a little weird for me, and has been for some time.

If I'm lucky, the preview works, and I get to the post screen fairly quickly. Sometimes it just sits there with the little arrow in the tab going round and round and never gives me the post screen. Sometimes, hours later, it does.

Even if I do get the post screen, it never finishes loading, but if I open ML in a new window, I'll find that my post has gone through.

With the counterfeit toothpaste issue I now finally have an answer to the haunting question, "If you're not going to work as an editor, what good does it do you to be an excellent speller?"

(this in addition to the boost it gives one's Google Fu to be able to spell search terms correctly)

I saw a review with that reaction, so you're not alone. They thought the graphics were good, but I got the impression that the reviewer thought there should have been more acid and darkness, to balance the sweetness and light (so to speak).

(The Disneyfication of Pixar?)

If they laugh at this, I know they'll get some other things. If they're shocked and appalled that a mother could yell such a thing at a four-year-old, ruh-roh.

Serge 377: Joss Whedon once responded to criticism of a scene with two vampires in a graveyard, with puffs of breath showing (Jossiverse vamps don't breathe), by saying "Funny, I couldn't find actors who don't breathe."

By the same token, it's impossible to find actors who are as racially mixed as we hope (and I think Gene Roddenberry hoped) people will be by then. Using race-blind casting would be one way, but that expects a lot of the audience, and we're talking about television here. I don't think people would be able to deal with a character played by an African-American actor having a wife played by European-American and a born child played by an Asian-American (please note, it's the combination I think they'd have trouble with).

I'd just like to say that I'm what the Ku Klux Klan calls a "race traitor." I am in favor of the complete destruction (as they'd see it) of the "white race." Of course, I'm in favor of the "destruction" of all other races too, but they don't mind that so much. I think the only way we'll get rid of racism is to get rid of the concept of race, and making it too complex for most people (because most people's ancestors come from more than two continents) is the best way to do that.

(I'm proud of my siblings in this regard. The ones who've married have all chosen non-European-descended people for their spouses! I don't think this was their criterion, of course, but we're talking three out of three here.)

Just my $/50.

Lee's question about Latinos in SF lead to this thing that I've seen a lot in discussions of race--we devolve into a somewhat touchy discussion of the right terminology (is it American Indian or Native American, black or African-American?) and kind of lose the interesting question, which still stands and is still interesting.

ISTM that when a person honestly asks a question from a position of good intent, having people get offended by the question suggests that something interestnig is going on there--it indicates a topic that's strewn with mines. It's like when a child asks some an innocent question like "why is Fred brown?" and everyone blushes, instead of just saying something about his family coming from India, where everyone looks like that. Those are indications that you've bumped into a taboo. ("Why is Fred so tall" or "Why is Fred's last name so long" are questions of similar importance, with much less blushing.)

From my perspective, understanding taboos is interesting because they're a way we learn to sabotage our own thought processes.

To quote the first RoboCop movie... I'll buy that or a dollar!

And you are right on all counts. And yes, this is television. On the other hand, I think Farscape was better at showing different racial types and the variations in between, but then again it was a low-budget thing, not a big-budget mainstream TV show.

What was that movie where the main character had a line (in a political speech) like "Go f-ck each other till you're all the same color."

Distinct races will probably fade out as they become less important--essentially nobody in the US is now scandalized when he finds out his daughter is marrying a guy of Italian or Irish descent, and "white" includes both groups without any qualifications. When you freely intermarry, the distinct races go away pretty quickly, as anything other than a few rare edge cases. (I expect that being pure Swedish or Dinka will make you *way* more striking in 200 years.)

I hope JJ Abrams's Star Trek movie doesn't hit on that solution to the depiction of various races. I shudder at the idea of Mister Spock played by Kermit, especially if the latter launches into a song.

"It's a song, you green-blooded Vulcan. You don't analyse it. The point is you have a good time singing it."

Later textbooks contained more sophisticated variations on a similar them. It was not until people started talking about DNA that the utter falsehood of such classification became completely obvious even to educated people. I wonder how many Americans carry with them the unexamined, barely remembered "facts" written in those early science books.

Carol K., #311: I am now officially confused. Isn't Cheez Whiz the canonical "cheese in a spray can"?

Of course you're right. This shows how firmly I've been repressing my heritage. In college, John Denver (after the Mitchell Trio and Denver, Boyce and Johnson, but before Take Me Home, Country Roads or whatever it was that threw him to national prominence) gave a concert and my future sister-in-law gave a party he and his backup guys came to. He was great to talk to, all they wanted was to drink, get stoned and get laid. They were out of luck for anything harder than beer in Hastings, Nebraska at that time of night.

She at the height of sophistication as far as we knew, made canapes of Triscuits with Cheez Whiz, but didn't have anywhere close to enough serving trays. She thumbtacked waxed paper to her apartment walls and stuck the munchies to it by the Whiz.

#385 ::: Xopher ::: (view all by) ::: July 01, 2007, 10:03 AM:
...I don't think people would be able to deal with a character played by an African-American actor having a wife played by European-American and a born child played by an Asian-American (please note, it's the combination I think they'd have trouble with).

The movie Cinderella Now was made in Omaha in the mid-80's by the Emmy Gifford Children's Theater. Cindy was black*, the prince was white, one sister was a Nordic blonde, the other Hispanic, the mom white, the Fairy Godmother was black, etc. Cindy was resourceful and quick-witted, and ended up rescuing the prince from the mob. The EGCT had a tradition of mixing up their casts like this. I was the Art Director, and in addition to storyboarding, had to figure how to make Omaha look like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. It was easier than you'd think as both are river towns with a lot of cast iron in the old areas. Omaha has hills, so location shots were imposing with the camera low. Other than that, we repainted and slapped up louvered shutters at each new location.

For the Mardi Gras parade in the Old Market, we schlepped bales of costumes and let whoever wanted from the local crowd be extras. We later found that a great many of the local "working girls" were identifiable. If you knew, how could you complain?

Getting back to Xopher, for its budget it came off very well, but of course no one wanted to distribute it.

#394 etc: another characteristic of the Toxic Family Member is that s/he feels fully justified in all abusive behavior towards you, but if you finally get fed up and say "No more. Stay out of my life" s/he acts mortally insulted. It's all, of course, being done for Your Good and you must appreciate the personal sacrifice the other has made because - it's family!

On racial mixing: Despite the racism that's still all too prevalent, the public seems to be getting a lot more open to obvious/interesting mixtures like Tiger Woods and the tennis player James Blake. It's one *small* step forward, even if it requires an equal measure of talent and good looks.

That could make the first interracial TV kiss vanish in comparison.

The only thing I knit is my brow, which can be solely attributed to the fact that I am the lone male in my household (wife, two daughters).

While my creative axis runs to software, cooking and gaming, my wife is intensely into the whole artsy-craftsy thing. It got to the point where I made her open her own store to get the all junk out of my house - at least that's my version of the story :)

s'funny - we got the DVD for Finding Nemo, and one of the things that impressed me about the special features was how much the people who worked there liked each other, and what a good time they seemed to be having at work - For The Incredibles (which I found pretty joyless), on the other hand, about a third of the special features were Brad Bird pontificating about not diluting His Vision and just how darn much Better he was than all those little people he had to do battle with to keep His Vision undiluted.

The other two-thirds was people from the production company, all of whom looked profoundly miserable, talking about what an awful, stressful time they had making the movie. The nicest thing anyone found to say about Bird - on the special features, produced by his studio, for his movie - was that his toxic behavior came from a place of strong convictions.

I begged off of seeing Ratatouille because he's involved in it. The kid's going with her grandmother. I get enough joyless on the subway.

He just had two weeks of getting home at 9-11pm chasing a system problem that was making jobs fail at unpredictable points in big mapping jobs; the final diagnosis (from him and the department Systems Specialist, working off and on for two weeks) was: WinServ's new security patch mistakes certain long data streams for hacks, when on its default setting, and when default is off, it induces similar failure at a different set of points in long data streams.

At least I think that's what he said. He hasn't been awake much since he figured that out.

Unfortunately most people aren't in a position to make that decision.

P.J. Evans @383:

They thought the graphics were good, but I got the impression that the reviewer thought there should have been more acid and darkness, to balance the sweetness and light (so to speak).

That makes about as much sense for Ratatouille as it would for P.G. Wodehouse.

(The Disneyfication of Pixar?)

I prefer Disney, even in its current etiolated form, to non-Brad-Bird Pixar, which I find twee, sentimental, and ugly. Lilo and Stitch crushes Finding Nemo like a grape.

#137
IIRC, _First Contract_ by Greg Costikyan has sound economics. When Earth is put in touch with galactic civilization, it immediately becomes a third world planet. Can a bankrupt Bengali businessman save the day?

For what it's worth, I count _Job_ as unique among Heinlein novels (simple plot, not especially bright protagonist), and not extremely much to my taste--I was never burnt enough by fundamentalist Christianity to get much out of seeing it satirized. On the other hand, I've read it more than once, and don't absolutely hate it.

For me, the real stinker was _The Cat Who Walks through Walls_. I believe the other most hated RAH novels are _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_ and _The Number of the Beast_.

Here's a large topic: I recently realized that I'm likely to live maybe another thirty years. At four books/week (I do most of my reading online), that's about 6000 books, which is rather few, considering the number of books I'm at least somewhat interested in, and especially if I include a reasonable amount of rereading.

So I've decided to only read books I'm enthusiastic about. No bizarre train wrecks. I don't actually enjoy those. No books that are only because I vaguely know the author. No books that are unduly depressing, even if they have a cool idea. (I should have bailed out of Lake's _Rocket Science_ much earlier.) No explorations of the author's psychopathology if that's the only attraction. No books that are just because I don't feel like tracking down something I like.

And apropo of that and economics in sf, does MT Anderson's _Feed_ ever get around to explaining who has enough mental focus to do the work? I'm not sure I'm going to finish reading it. It's got some touching moments, but it seems mostly like routine teenager-bashing. Yes, I did get the political aspect. I was underwhelmed--everything bad is because of the wicked, wicked corporations while nothing is the government's fault.

I like most of what John Barnes has written. I think he does something which appeals to me on the sentence/paragraph level, regardless of the subject matter. Still, I think it's unfair in the Million Open Doors series that he bashes libertarianism when the weird off-planet societies are entirely the result of an interventionist policy.

When I was a kid, I was very fond of bread (Pepperidge Farm) and mayonnaise (Hellman's) sandwiches. I might still like them--mayonnaise is almost the best part of a sub/hoagie.

In re the "future without x" issue: Maybe I'm too mellow about it, but future settings without Jews don't bother me. I just assume the author either didn't think of any or felt it would be worse to get them wrong than to not have any. When I look at what went wrong in re blacks in _Farnham's Freehold_, I think the fear of getting it wrong is quite well-founded.

I think I've mentioned somewhere else in this forum about the time my then-six-year-old jumped out of a moving convertible? He got sent to his room for a good long time, not just for punishment but so I would not shake him to pieces. Scared the daylights out of me, that boy did.

My favorite interaction I've ever had with my youngest:

K.: "Mom, I can't deal with my brothers. Life stinks. I'm running away."
Me: "Wait! Let me get my purse. I'll come with you."
K.: "What?!?"
Me: "No, really! We can get a lot further! I've got credit cards, and a car!"
K.: "Really?"
Me: "Sure!It would be great fun!"
K.: "Well, maybe I won't go just yet."
Me: "Just let me know when you do decide to run away, though! I'll want to go too!"

Somehow, having your mom run away with you takes all the drama out of it, which is what I expect he was going for. For my part, I was completely serious, although I don't think he believed me.

But at four he invented the word "haive". As in, "You're not being a haive," shouted at me on his way to his room. After a while, we figured out that he parsed the word "behave" a little oddly in the phrase, "Stay in there until you behave!"

Happy Canada Day!!!

Winces. This could turn the balance of the thread into a mayonnaise v. oil discussion, similar to the kind I've seen regarding BBQ sauce v. dry rub, or "who makes the best BBQ?"

I found it visually beautiful; I liked the plot, which was less predictable than I'd expected; and I thought it had a genuineness and generosity of spirit lacking in a lot of films. I also love the way that the rats move like rats. I liked the protagonist in spite of the fact that he and his family literally made my skin crawl.

English English kick in the head. (For me, anyway. I plead coming from Gloucestershire. Oi learns moi speaking from one o' they tractor manuals, see.)

Finally, a story ID: A couple (I think he's a PI) are plagued by random sorts who run reality and hop between their version of the world and ours by means of mirrors. One of the rum coves is briefly trapped, but escapes by carefully scraping the paint off a mirror.

Our favorite local sub provider uses mayo, then adds an oil dressing.

My husband loves mayonnaise (which he can never spell). I do too, but there are some things with which I do not feel it should go. We differ on what those might be--he thinks it belongs on saltines.

I would not use either word. I would use "digitalisize". The suggested words might possibly have had something to do with going digital, but they lost out to "digiti(s|z)e".

This message brought to you by Those Who Never Leave Syllables Unspoken (unless it's "Louisville", in which case all bets are off).

Maybe that's why we're getting random crashes in our software. Or, more accurately, the software we use. I think I'll run that explanation by the guys upstairs in ops tech (IT doesn't get to touch our machines because they don't understand what we're doing).

Lani Tupu is actually Samoan, although I had heard Samoans became Maoris when they settled New Zealand. Could all be Samoan propaganda for all I know.

As for weird foods, my mom is partial to Spam (her Samoan dad's legacy)especially in a white sauce with peas. The thought of which makes me gag, much like her own (czech) mother's tasty treat of a glass of cold milk with a glob of jam at the bottom that mom can barely bring herself to describe.

I've been a big fan of the pickle sandwich - sliced dill pickle and mayonnaise between two slices of wheat bread - since I "invented" it at about age 8. It was especially tasty with mom's pickles, which she hasn't canned in 25 or so years. And since the age of twelve, in my darker moments I've been known to make a quarter recipe of chocolate buttercream frosting with a heap of extra cocoa just to eat straight from the bowl (fie on canned frosting!) but I don't think I've done that in a few years now. Must be less depressed!

Growing up in a Mormon household in Utah with a working mother, I have a weird combination of super-homemaker-y foods (home-made bread with home ground wheat, home canned pickles, garden-fresh zuchinni and green beans) and canned-soup-back-of- the-box recipes that twig as "comfort foods" for me. My current favorite is a recipe for "wontons" that involves a can of chicken, shredded cheese, ranch dressing and wonton skins. Sadly, I have no time to grind my own wheat and bake bread.

Macs: I gave away every PC in the house two years ago and converted to Macs with 1 mini, 2 iMacs, 1 macbookpro. My sysadmin/family tech support time has dropped to mere percentage points of what it was previously. OS X is far better suited for a digital lifestyle, and the parental controls are easy to implement. Plus I think they're great dev platforms.

Mayo is a condiment. Oil is an ingredient. Period. :)

Based on his Wikipedia article, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" looks like a reasonable next read. Any particular problem with that, or recommendations for a better order?

joann @ #425, on saltines? Whew.

Tinker, Tailor is perfect for your next read. Follow up with The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

His books published after those are not, in my view, as good, but mileage undoubtedly varies.

Avoid The Naive and Sentimental Lover at all costs, now and in the future.

I find that for the last twenty-five years or so, I've not been able to reread any of the Smiley series without seeing/hearing Alec Guiness as Smiley. I don't know whether that little bit of foreknowledge will help or hinder you.

No, not mayo on saltines. Either butter or chocolate frosting on saltines. Mayo is for bread.

(Well, in a pinch you could use some other flavor of frosting, but chocolate works best with salt.)

...a peanut butter, jelly, and mayonaisse sandwich.

xeger, #431, I can't parse that -- do you mean a green recycling bin? What are you putting in it?

This is becasue Maori nouns don't differ in the singular and plural; thus: te waka, the canoe; nga waka, the canoes. General usage in NZ English is to treat words derived from Maori as indifferent to number, and this applies particularly to the people, in almost all non-anti-PC rant situations.

As for Samoan/Maori kinship, essentially, the Polynesians started in Taiwan a Long Time Ago, then spread across the Pacific, passing via the main Polynesian island groups before reaching the Hawaiian, New Zealand, and Easter Island extremities around (respectively) AD 400, 300 and 1000. However, I think you'd be best off saying that Samoans and Maori share a common ancestral culture.

Sorry - we're able to "recycle" organics around here - pretty much anything that rots is okay:

• Fruits, vegetable scraps
• Meat, shellfish, fish products
• Pasta, bread, cereal
• Dairy products, egg shells
• Coffee grounds, filters, tea bags
• Soiled paper towels, tissues
• Soiled paper food packaging: fast food paper packaging, ice cream boxes, muffin paper, flour and sugar bags
• Paper coffee cups, paper plates
• Candies, cookies, cake
• Baking ingredients, herbs, spices
• Household plants, including soil
• Diapers, sanitary products
• Animal waste, bedding (e.g. from bird/hamster cages), kitty litter
• Pet food

Predictably, after asking here, I finally found something on google that didn't involve jello, orange slices and cranberries - or suggest things I'd rather not see done in my kitchen with plastic sheets and kiddie wading pools.

Wow! Those are amazingly lovely (and I miss those mountains...).

I'm currently thinking it's 'red' bread mold, which as it turns out is orange - but now that I have an idea of what it probably is, I've moved from "Arghhh!" to "Hey neat! They've sequenced its genome"

nerdycellist, #428: a glass of cold milk with a glob of jam at the bottom

Sounds a bit like bubble tea with pudding. I like the boba, but I've never been able to bring myself to try pudding.

Now I'm wondering if Damfino Lakes are named as a contraction of "damned if I know," probably used by a local as a reply to a question from a tenderfoot.

I have seen this discussed in Scientific American with enough looseness to make clear that educated people can still differ on the subject. Note that DNA is not enough; once you look at how little DNA difference there is between humans and chimpanzees, the differences expectable between races approach noise level. Moreover, educated people know that DNA isn't nearly the whole story -- we're still missing a lot of the connections between DNA and expressed traits. (Trivial example: "This is the gene for insulin" is easy; "This is why one strain of type-I diabetics assemble the insulin polypeptide sequence but don't snip out the bit that lets it fold into the active form" may have been solved but is certainly harder.) Similarly, I've seen data that indicates the movement across the Bering land bridge(s) into North America not by spearpoints but by genetic markers ranging from lower alcohol tolerance (IIRC due to weak or lacking acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, and cf white/black differences in adult lactose intolerance) to ear wax. (I remember from many years ago that ABO blood typing also shows this, but data in Wikipedia suggests a relatively weak link.)

There have been respectable discussions about medicines which are effective for certain conditions (heart disease, IIRC) primarily in people who would be described as "black" by most observers. It's possible the result of Warren Beatty's plea would be an increased need for individual genetic-plus mapping before therapy (which might not be a bad idea anyway); fortunately, this is becoming easier. There are arguments that "race" is a multi-axis continuum rather than a set of categories, but claiming that there's \no/ science behind the term is a bit extreme.

Nancy@414: I think it's unfair in the Million Open Doors series that he bashes libertarianism when the weird off-planet societies are entirely the result of an interventionist policy.

Huh? The whole point is that these societies resulted from clusters of enthusiasts/fanatics following their individual paths, with nothing to compare or contrast to, for centuries; intervention did not produce Giraut's horrible intended-to-produce-artists upbringing, or the societies derived at least partly from synthetic mythologies in #2. His books are about what happen when teleportation booths make intervention \possible/ -- not that it always happens.

#424: Heinlein, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" -- IIRC not so much hopping between versions as hopping around this one, but the rest is a clear ID.

Although I also agree that the concept of race as it existed in grade school texts of the 1950s is indefensible, there is assuredly a reason to differentiate beyond skin colour. If we're simply going by "brown" vs "white", we're ignoring genetics and culture completely; while I might be considered "white" by some folk, I look nothing like your pale Scandinavian, and our genes show this lack of relationship quite clearly.

"Nancy@414: I think it's unfair in the Million Open Doors series that he bashes libertarianism when the weird off-planet societies are entirely the result of an interventionist policy.

Huh? The whole point is that these societies resulted from clusters of enthusiasts/fanatics following their individual paths, with nothing to compare or contrast to, for centuries; intervention did not produce Giraut's horrible intended-to-produce-artists upbringing, or the societies derived at least partly from synthetic mythologies in #2. His books are about what happen when teleportation booths make intervention \possible/ -- not that it always happens."

The only people permitted to start colonies are weird, well-defined groups on Earth. (This might include previously colonized planets--it's been a while since I've read the books.)

If there hadn't been a very strong policy of only allowing groups that lobby for permission to colonize, then planets would be settled by mixes of people--not the the same mix on every planet--but it would be unlikely for the colonial societies to be so extreme.

In more recent news, I just saw Ratatouille, It's all good--the writing, the story, the animation, the music. There are some clever ongoing elements about insanity and a cute bit about home cooking.

As for "who does the work," I took it as a given that the characters in the book are members of one social class, and there are others, both above and below them, with varying levels of self-awareness and power. Perhaps that's fanwanking?

The problem here is that "race" parses to about ten different things in normal American dialog, most of which is really defined from the dominant racial conflict in the US, which is black vs. white. So you get race as a stand in for culture (note that Jamaicans and Nigerians don't fit this model), race as a stand in for social class/income, race as a stand in for "target of discrimination", race as a stand in for "recipient of affirmative action," race as a stand in for "visible minority with worse outcomes than everyone else," etc. And probably a zillion other things.

I think this tends to color stuff like the use of "Latino" or "Asian" (now that Oriental has somehow become impolite) as racial categories, even though Latino isn't about race, and Asian is meaninglessly broad. (And so is black, but the specific situation in the US makes it somewhat more meaningful, since most American blacks ultimately come from slaves brought over from particular parts of Africa, to particular regions in the US, and with several centuries of really ugly history along the way.)

I don't think it's useless to talk about or think about, but it's important to work out which meaning you're talking about. If I want to know about black participation in SF, it's probably culture or social class I'm interested in; if I want to know about higher rates of heart attack in blacks, I'm probably concerned with either genes or culture-by-way-of-diet.

Ah - here's where you've lost me. Normal 'American' dialog is alien to me, not being from the US...

That's a really neat observation, and I definitely agree. We live in a world in which much of the best literature, art, music, movies, etc. in history is available to us. There's way more brilliant, beautiful stuff than we'll ever be able to really experience and love. So there's not much value in bashing our heads against unfunny comedies or bewildering/ugly art/music, or books that don't hold our interest, or whatever.

Lots of `I don't have a race' stuff in general culture seems to me to originate from people who do have a race; they just don't notice it, because nobody discriminates against them for it. It seems to me that throwing race out the window as being unmentionable often turns into `why should I be nice to (insert local group no longer fashionable to hate); they're no different from me!'

This, of course, relies on everyone knowing that (a) race is a social construct and (b) social constructs are real things.

Or possibly socio-economic class by way of diet for the last one. This is also a reason for answering `race' questions on Censuses, etc., correctly; there is almost certainly some poor bureaucrat out there who really wants to know health/race statistics in order that they may more accurately draw up health care funding plans. (Or whatever; insert relevant example here.)

Refusing to answer, on the grounds that race doesn't really exist, misses the point, and hurts efforts to aid victims of racism.

Contemplating worlds where there are *really* different races (or species) does tend to shine a light on how insignificant our own species' differences are, though. I think this effect has often been intentional.

After allowing the back yard to revert to jungle this year (except for a couple of plots of edible-pod peas during the Winter & Spring, and a few plants of brightly-colored Swiss chard) I poked around in it this morning and discovered tthree (small) ripe papayas (on one of the two plants that survived last January's *ghasp* frost) and about a quart of miscellaneous small tomatoes that I call "cherry-type" -- larger than cherries, most of them, but not large enough to actually slice, though cutting them in half prevents unintended squirting of juice when they're bitten-into. These are, I think, fifth-generation descendants of fruit I /s/t/o/l/e/ harvested while watering Terry Karney's garden for a while when he was away, and seem to be a mixture of varieties, somewhat selected for their ability to perpetuate themselves, so there are several slightly-different tastes and textures represented -- all good, though not quite the taste-explosion of some outstanding large-fruited cultivars. Cut in halves or quarters, mix with mayonnaise, eat (maybe not the entire quart at one sitting). Summer!

That, my friend, is a word meaning to administer a certain heart drug to someone.

Yeah, maybe. I'm truly skeptical about the value and use of those statistics, also about efforts to help the victims of racism with them. I suppose it's possible that such statistics do a great deal of good...

The idea of "race" is a social construct. Apart from that very powerful usage, is there a fact of race? I contend not. To say that does not, I think, ignore the fact of racism and its terrible manifestations in history. BTW, I didn't say "I don't have a race." I said I am no longer willing to support governmental efforts to categorize individuals into "racial" groupings.

But there's other things I'd like to do in my life, too. So I'd agree with your idea. I guess it reflects one part of a demographic change in one lot of societies as the baby-boomers (in whose temporal trail I've followed all my life) hit certain life milestones

In other news, it was reported here that in a branch of the New York Public Library there was a POD setup where you could pick from their (large) list of public domain works and have it printed and bound as a book on the spot recently opened. A quick scan of www.nypl.org did reveal a number of useful services, and an "eNYPL", but not that. Do any of the NY-based people know if this is happening?

Re "digitalisize" (#426 & #460) If you follow the orginal link @424,indeed the drug digitalis is being administered. BTW, I recently heard someone on a 'historical' documentary program on TV mocking a 19th Century doctor for "using foxglove to treat heart problems". How on earth did that slip past any kind of editor? The British Digitalis purpurea, & other Foxglove species from elsewhere used to be the most well-known 'herbal' remedy that was used in 'modern' medicine as well. It put the rest of the opinions and what was put forward as fact into doubt.

Keir mentioned that race is a social construct, which is also a true statement.

Asking for a "fact" of race doesn't parse for me. What is a fact of, say, marriage, which similarly exists on at least two detectable levels.

Holding the statement "race does not exist as a fact" does nothing to end racism nor to advance any human activity. It does muddy the water of some discussions- there was a case, last year, of an antihypertensive which was markedly effective in some people with African ancestry and not in those of Asian or European ancestry; there was resistance to publication of the outcome of the clinical trial which discovered that pattern, and to sale and labelling of the medication for use in the African-American population because "race is not a real thing-" even though hypertension is a much graver problem in Americans of African descent than in Americans of non-African descent, and even though other classes of medications are not as effective in the African- descendant population.

What I know is, no person can be adequately described nor their entire being encapsulated by any label, including race. And that there are detectible differences in large populations of humans who live in distinct geographic areas or are descended in whole or part from people who came from those areas. There is nothing in one statement which precludes the truth of the other.

Funny old world, all fuzzy like that.

ʞuı1

I have the movie book in that series. The actual title is 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I aim to live forever by not seeing all of them (my loathing for Roberto Benigni means that will be easy so long as Life Is Beautiful is in the book).

Well, I'm not an expert on the US Civil Service; however (just grabbing the nearest NZ public health related book), I know that Degrees of Deprivation in New Zealand (Crampton et al; 2001) which had contributors from various NZ public health services mentions ethnicity quite often. I further know that, in NZ, the socio-economic/ethnicity data comes up reasonably often in public debates about societal duties to Maori, biculturalism, and so-on and so forth. The PBFF (Population Based Funding Formula) used to use ethnicity as a demographic factor.

In general, information improves outcomes. Refraining to provide useful information because ``race doesn't exist'' is stupid. There clearly exists a social construct corresponding to race/ethnicity. Furthermore, we can often use this information to map onto need. It would seem logical to me that, given the ability of his information to help, answering in a smart-ass way is actively unhelpful.

For example, decisions on affirmative action (i.e above mentioned Supreme Court ruling) rely on knowledge of racial discrimination. Where do you think people get this information from?

Essentially, I think you've fallen into little light's
1. Paying attention to black and Latino students' being black and Latino in order to see about getting them better opportunities is racist, because it identifies them as black or Latino in the first place. Boggle.

Of course, if you want to stick it to Teh Man, or show off how super-liberal you are, go ahead. Just be aware that what is to you a mark of how superior you are, may well be used in quite major policy decisions, and, you know, GIGO.

# 335: Well, there is, of course, Stapledon's First And Last Men; also, Alasdair Gray's A History Maker and Poor Things, as well as several of his short stories.

But they're not having a fireworks show (due to construction going on), so they're not gonna have me. Guess it's the Berkeley Marina this year.

John Hawkes-Reed @ 424: your story might be "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", by Robert Heinlein. Does the phrase "The Bird is cruel" ring any bells?

(The rest of the VPX crew will now be laughing up their collective sleeves given the, um, strongly held opinions in re. RAH I held forth about in Room 50.)

The thing I took away from the BMJ article to which I linked was that my usage and understanding of -ize vs. -ise endings is entirely incorrect.

I wouldn't bother following up on this except that I have a tick with the word "somehow." It implies this fathomlessness, as if it made about as much sense for the word "puppy" to be impolite. It changes your clause from state description to expression of opinion.

Isn't it enough that due to a history of American racial discrimination, the term invokes bad memories among those typically tarred by the term? (It conjures up a stereotyped image, the less said about the better.) Isn't it enough that enough people have simply decided that that's not how they want to be addressed?

Now, I know you don't have a racist nucleotide in your DNA. You're simply expressing a hapless dismay that this term you've used all your life has suddenly become impolite through no action you can see. I'd think I'd be happy not to see why it has become the case.

I should point out that this is a North American thing. I near as I can tell, the term is more neutral in Europe. Also, there are worse Asian ethnic slurs. I've been called most them. Some of them don't even apply to my specific ethnicity. This one barely rates on the OffensiveMeter(tm). But it would go down better if Occidental were in more common use in North America and implied this sense of barbaric Western imperialism and erasing of enlightened, indigenous culture.

No, it's no more accurate than what Oriental implies. That's the point.

Susan @ 351: Whether or not Japanese/Koreans/Chinese are happy being lumped together has a lot to do with how far removed they are from their home country. Among second/third/fourth generation kids, they are often quite happy with a generic Asian label and sometimes even embrace it. This is equally true of the umbrella term "Latino"--individual's willingness to accept it is often directly proportional to their distance from the root culture that the identification is ostensibly based on. Like in the example someone cited above, where the Latino clubs in the U.S. found Columbian and Argentinian exchange students fairly skeptical of the idea of a pan-South American cultural identity.

FWIW, the historical basis for this sort of pan-SA identity goes back to the original independence movements in the 1800s. It was, unsurprisingly, strongest among the intellectual elite who had been educated in Spain (and learned there that while they spoke Spanish, they were not really Spanish.) It isn't really an American thing, though it's true it's not really a native South American thing either.

abi @ 371: "The pre-question is, is it one group or many that we're discussing right now? What do we call them and how do we describe them, to be able to then search for them in the literature?"

(This is a question that's pretty fundamental to the study of nationalism, which I've spent a fair bit of time on. Here are some thoughts.)

There are a few criteria that are particularly influential in determining group identities: language, history, and geography. In South America, these all draw lines in very different places. (This could be taken as a sign of how futile the process of trying to create cohesive national or cultural identities really is, but strangely, few do.) Different people will give different levels of importance to different criteria, resulting a panoply of different definitions. If you ask ten different people, you'll probably get ten different answers as to what "Latino" is. A Mexican is probably going to consider speaking Spanish a lot more important than a Brazilian would, for example. So not only is the question of what group we're talking about important, it's also important to ask whose definitions are we going to consider valid? We'll have plenty to choose from.

The fact that something is a social construct doesn't mean it's not real. No matter how many fictions the basic