Am I actually sneaking in first?

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

Haiku of the day (not mine):

Hippopotamus.
Antihippopotamus.
Annihilation.

In the heart's absence
The rhythm fails, the blood stills.
Jim can give details.

#1: Beth has been taking editorial credits for a while. You merely just now noticed.

The game is indeed afoot - and apparently there were werewolves, both new and old.

xeger @5:
Wouldn't that make it apaw?

Posting in ur thread,
Poet Cat is poetic;
Give Rhysling now plz?

abi @6:
Only during the full moon.

$87 billion is the shocking amount that Dubya requested from Congress in order to attack Iraq.

"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.

#9 Tesla, ouch, just think of the papercuts. Good thing a lot went missing. I mean, think of how deep a pile those players would have to slog through with just the accounted for cash, if we added all those pallets of political contributions, I mean, walking around free spending, democracy building dollars, why, it'd be gianormous.

Closer to five times that much.

Does anybody know if Gene Wolf has lots of guns? He seems like the type to have lots of guns.

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.

Re: billions of dollars, I wonder if the square footage of Halliburton's HQ is available online; why bother with imaginary football field comparisons when the actual delivery site of said cash is known?

You may now make Desert Fox jokes.

I always thought of the word "game" in the phrase as referring to "contest" rather than "prey". But in the case of werewolves, I can see how the latter context might fit better.

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

Were wary werewolf words wearing?

we widdle werewolves won't waddle away.

Nope, not yet.

#14 ::: Dave Bell announced:
You may now make Desert Fox jokes.

"Just peachy darhling"

Dave Bell (14), is that anything like the 7th Armoured Brigade's Wüstenspringmaus?

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

So a football field, 275' deep in money.

Can I just take the top layer?

Linkmeister #13: Halliburton announced they were moving their HQ to Dubai earlier this year. My guess is it was easier to relocate over there than to move all that cash back here :)

#18 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden threatened:
Xeger (5), if you were there and didn't say hello, I'm going to be ticked.

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

Lance @ #20, right. Logistics uber alles. I shoulda known.

The transitway to Hell, apparently, connects through Midway airport.

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.

Xeger, #17: I'm sure you intended Desert Peach, but what came up on that link was Stinz.

re: Sidelight WWBSD?

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.

Tania @#26:

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.

#24 ::: Lee noted:
Xeger, #17: I'm sure you intended Desert Peach, but what came up on that link was Stinz.

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

#27, only if you're the ghost of Warren Zevon.

12 I can't see Gene Wolfe as a gun nut. I can definitely see him hiding an explosive device in a can of Pringles brand potato-chip-like snacks, though. Of course, it would be the kind of explosive device that makes a sad little popping noise while the real danger came from somewhere else entirely.

jmmcdermott @#12:

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.

meredith @#23: Hi from about 50 blocks south of there! Sorry you're stuck. Cinnabons are a good way to pass the time...

I'm busily sysopping the new McClatchy comment threads (they've added comments to the news stories).

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.

Haiku open threads?
this can only end in tears:
bad poets in snow

I bet I know what Teresa's doing! At least, I hope I do.

bad poets in snow
starring in an anime
turning japanese

turning japanese
poems into a summer
game because we're bored

Eeee, sorry, guys--I didn't set up my last line very well at all! Try this instead:

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

'game because we're bored'
might become a horrible
hunting/Scrabble pun.

TexAnne, mine turned out even worse. Let's consider that one a doubly dead end.

I have a shirt that says:

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.

Okay, okay, you win:

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

Tonight's dinner-table conversation topic (well, one of them) was: "Where are all the Latino SF authors and characters"?

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...?

Beth realized it was ineffective to be the only editor not permitting a credit in the books.

hunting/Scrabble pun
"xenophobia" gets points
too bad not funny

So, Beth, anytime we pick up a Tor book and there's no editor credited, we can assume thats your work?

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

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".

I'm skipping past most of the comments here, so forgive me, but I just have to say that the hippopotamus haiku is BRILLIANT.

Lee @ #42:
What is your precise definition of "Latino"?

#42: The only latino SF writer I know of is the deceptively named Ernest Hogan.

Latino Characters from SF TV/Movies:

• 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.

Just to confuse things, Heinlein's character Johnny Rico is Filipino-American, and I don't think either Filipinos or Latinos identify Filipinos as being Latinos.

P.P.S. I was _this_ close to working in a Hugo Chavez as SF character/writer joke, but fatigue has overwhelmed my "Is this really funny or are you just being an @sshole again?" filter which means I can't post it.

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...

in thread 86
comment held for approval
w t f is that?

Andrew, #46: Olmos certainly qualifies as an actor, but his character is not Latino. I don't know whether that counts or not. (We don't have cable, so I haven't seen much of BSG.)

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.

Greg @53, PNH @ future.

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.)

Cherry blossoms fall
All haiku must start like this
And finish with blood

Kathryn from the west
gives diagnostics data
to overworked hosts

arrgh.

should be diagnostic, not diagnostics.

There's Hugo Reyes on Lost.

@57

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

Lee @ 42: For authors--if you count Borges--how about the Latin American magical realists in general? Garcia Marquez, at least, I think, and I suspect I could make a case for several less well-known-in-this-country authors, too.

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

Lee @42, & following conversation:

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.

haiku go meta
seventeen syllables here
what more could you want?

Bruce: puns and kennings
knitting zombie lolcats and
Jim's 'How Not To Die.'
----

Accommodate weird
minuscule embarrassment:
Gandhi etiquette.

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

Raindrops on roses
And whiskers on kittens are
My favorite things.

I just watched an odd film called "Shadowboxer" with Cuba Gooding and Helen Mirren. We recorded it off the dish because of the cast; they didn't disappoint at all, but I'm somewhat undecided about the movie itself. Has anyone else seen it, and what was your reaction?

wet flowers, Dave Bell?
hairy nosed baby felines -
your favoured things?

-----

!
?;
&:

:)
exclamation point
question mark semicolon
ampersand colon

arggg... 'favourite' not favoured...

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

Hmm.... Latino actors/characters in (media) SF:

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.

For the admins:

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.)

I haven't written a haiku since 1985 (it was about a squirrel) and I've just sat here for fifteen minutes trying to squeeze my sentiment (and that's a collection of words that didn't sound so horrible in my head) into 17 elegant syllables. Can't be done.

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.

I had a comment pulled for approval in the last open thread; I figured I had been posting too much and took it as a sign from the fluorosphere to stop writing song verses.

Madeline's squirrel
Stole her future haiku and
Hid them with its nuts.

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.

Lee @#42: Not that it indicates a trend or anything, but wasn't the main gal in Greg Bear's Eon Latina? I read it a while back but I seem to remember that.

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.

Lee @42 Well, there's Lord John Quetzal (son of the Duke of Mechicoe, I believe) in the Lord Darcy books, but I suppose that's a stretch.

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

And Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts and sequels

For Latino SF writers there's the aforementioned Borges and Garcia Marquez. Apart from them, a few years ago Ursula Le Guin put out a rather nice translation of Angélica Gorodischer's _Kalpa Imperial_. (Gorodischer being Argentine, like Borges, and _Kalpa_ being subtitled "The greatest empire that never was.")

science fiction with
latinos sells better as
"magic realism"

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?

What about Willi Wachendon in Vinge's The Peace War?

Bad wiki query
reveals spanish cycle team.
Kaiku rock! Sorry.

Greg and others: The word "mortgage", all by itself, somehow got into the list of strings that land a comment in the moderation queue. Sorry about that. Fixed now.

Whiskers on roses
and raindrops on kittens are
also nice to have.

Alex R, yes indeed, Life During Wartime had many, many significant local characters.

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?

R(odrigo) Garcia y Robertson sounds more than somewhat Latino to me, but I have no idea.

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.

I have a small dilemma (about 10 pounds) that I'd appreciate some help resolving. It's a side of Alaskan salmon, currently sitting in the freezer, after having been picked up for me by a friend who was in Anchorage recently.
It's possible that the housemate, the dog, the cats, and I can simply eat all of it in one sitting, after grilling it, but that seems unwise, although Death By Gorging on Salmon may not be the worst way to go.
Does anyone have a favorite salmon recipe they'd care to share? We're already browsing online recipe resources, but since there are so many devout foodies here, I thought I'd see what the Fluourosphere might have to share.

I've eaten the plums
in the icebox. So sorry!
So sweet, and so cold.

So here I am, settling in on my morning bus ride to work. I pull out my recent library acquisition (my only time to read recreationally), Freedom and Necessity. I read the dedication page and burst out laughing, startling all the reserved Seattlites in the seats around me. After months of reading Making Light, it's like I know these people! What fun. Y'all made my day.

jmmcdermott @ 12: "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."

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.

Bruce @ 82: Though I imagine the kitten disagrees.

Raindropped kitteh sez
DO NOT WANT

marty @67,

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

you all are evil
silly song stuck in my head
must not sing at work!

---

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

Counting syllables
Is not how you write haiku.
The subject matters.

meredith #23: You have my sympathy. In January we were stranded for hours at Louis Armstrong Airport.

I know the author is Irish, but wouldn't MacDonald's Brasyl count as Latino sci-fi? Or is "Latino" reserved for descendants of Spanish colonies only?

There's Angélica Gorodischer, also Argentinian; Ursula Le Guin translated her novel Kalpa Imperial, and part of it appeared in one of the Star Light anthologies edited by our Patrick. 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.

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

Heresiarch @ 89

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.

Fade @ 40:

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

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

fidelio @85: James Beard has a wonderful poached salmon recipe in one of his books. I'm not at home to check which one it is right now, but Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" turned up what looks like a very similar recipe on pages 135 and 136 of "James Beard's American Cookery". See the recipes "A Simple Court Bouillon" and "Cold Poached Salmon Steaks". You can do a whole side of salmon instead of the steaks, see the information earlier in the book for adjusting the cooking time.

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

Sorry, should be:

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

I'm silent because I've been gone. (Honest, I'm only linking to it because the form's appropriate.)

---L.

I am still waiting
The potted plums on my porch
Are almost ripe now

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)

abi @ 79

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

Blasts from the past:

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?

fidelio -- you could cook all the salmon then use the leftovers in pasta salad, omelets, etc. Or make Smoky Salmon Spread, one of the first things I learned to cook after I got married. I usually make it with canned salmon, but the equivalent amount of fresh cooked should be yummy.

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!

Fidelio:

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.

My favorite "super-simple-give-to-friends" salmon marinade:

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.

Kip: They don't really talk about the bear (though it's not brown, but "field gray". It's a photo in which Onkel Hans' grandfather is seen (to the right of "Private first class 'Bear'".

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.

fidelio @ 85: I don't have a recipe for you, but your request brings back a memory that I can't resist sharing.

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...

Stefan, #49: Having now taken a look at your link, I think I'm going to have to get some of this guy's books. And if I like them, I'll be pushing for him as a guest at ApolloCon. Thanks!

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.)

Patrick@81: Greg and others: The word "mortgage", all by itself, somehow ...

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)

Bruce 102:

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.)

Scrabble/hunting pun:
if you use blanks
you don't score

cardboard tube weapon
is deadlier than it looks
at Penny Arcade.

(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.

Peter Erwin #69: I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Robert Beltrán (Chakotay).

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

abi @ 85 - I do have a favorite salmon recipe, but I don't know whether or not it will be any use to you; I'm normally cooking for one. It uses leftover wasabi paste from takeout sushi, which I freeze to keep till needed; it seems to stay pungent for at least several weeks frozen. It also uses West Virginia Zest Sauce, which is a vinegar and spice concoction from Appalachian Mountain Specialty Foods. It's available on the internet, and I use it a lot (good start for a meat marinade, perks up soups etc.) but a slosh of cider vinegar or wine vinegar and a sprinkle of herb blend would be a reasonable substitute.

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.

Mary Dell #74: I feel obliged to point out that one of the brutal Spanish colonisers of the Philippines was my great-grandfather. Since he had a reputation for being 'muy mujeriego', I've a feeling that I have unknown relatives in or around Zamboanga.

Kip, I don't get anywhere with the Russian comments, but the German comments are about the critter not being a brown bear, but a feldgrau bear, because brown was the Nazi uniform colour.

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.

Greg at 110, I am getting unjustly earwormed. I don't know what song you're naaing, but my brain has managed to misread it as Batman, Manamana and the Doot-Doots, and a very brief Vindaloo. Please tell me what should be torturing my poor brain.

On another note, which properly belongs in Open Thread 86, but I hear things go pear-shaped as we near the kilocomment, so.

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!

We wait for morning,
hot, steam rising after rain,
green trees are glowing.

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.

*Random*
We have searched in ever widening circles, but there are some items which we need which are just not available here, so today we must go to the nearest big city.

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.

Fragano @ 114... Let's not forget Richard Chavès's Lt. Colonel Paul Ironhorse in 1988's TV series War of the Worlds. He probably was the best thing in that show, which is why, for the second season, they got rid of him. Makes perfect sense.

Serge #122: Things do seem to work that way.

Nicole @ 119

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.)

At this risk of getting trounced by real food chemists, here's my cook's understanding:

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
  

Strawberry shortcake, with biscuits, not those sponge things. Or one great big biscuit. Mmmmmm.

Speaking of nourishment... When I was a mere lad, I found great pleasure in taking a bite out of an apple, putting some salt on the exposed surface before biting into that. Did anybody else ever do that? Or is this just one of the weird tastes of my youth, along with eating real butter by the trowel?

Nicole: In Europe, all buttermilk is cultured (mostly). In the States we use sweet cream to make butter. In other places (I don't know about Canada), they let it ferment a bit.

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.

People say, "when you multiply a recipe, don't multiply salt."
Why is this?

Terry @101:

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 have a vague memory of hearing that in the days before storebought buttermilk, they used clabbered milk, which I believe is more like crème fraîche than anything else. Or crema fresca, if you've got a decent Mexican grocery nearby. I don't know how the lack of acid would affect the rising, though.

Lee @ #54:
Susan, #48: I don't have a strong definition -- "any writer or actor who self-identifies as one" would do.

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.

Serge, I've never done that specifically, but it sounds like another version of the sweet + salty = delicious thing. Chocolate frosting on Ritz crackers, lemon curd on same, Krispy Kremes have that bit of salt, salt on canteloupe. I think the combination keeps your tongue from getting acclimated to the taste of either, so it's constantly a new and more delectable combination.

Diatryma @ 133... Thanks. I am quite relieved to know I wasn't totally deranged as a youth. Still, I'm glad I outgrew this because I dare not think what all that salt and butter would do to my legally-adult body.

#127: I remember seeing == maybe at the big San Jose flea market == stands selling slices of mango with salt.

Fragano @ 114:
I have to admit, I'd forgotten about Robert Beltrán.

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...

Another request; it seems like the day for it, here.

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*

Fragano Ledgister @#116:

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?

Diatryma@118: Please tell me what should be torturing my poor brain.

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.

Latino[*] characters in written SF:

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...

kouredios @137:

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_.

re de Camp: Yes, he did. It's why I know that ombrigado is Portuguese for thank you.

As I recall it was stories about the diplomatic corps.

Clabbered milk has the same lactic acid thing going on as cultured buttermilk or genuine byproduct buttermilk left after making butter from ripened cream, so it would work with the baking soda.

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.

I-87:
It's an Interstate Highway
That's just in New York.

Oog, Lori. Dune has a good story, but the writing is kind of...Herbert. And while it hooked me in too, it was partly because of this exotic culture he "created"—which is, of course, just Arabs in Space.

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

Mary Dell @ 138

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

kouredios@137: 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

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.

Kouredios #137: Might I suggest John Barnes's The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky?

Kouredios, I'd see if I could get him to read three to five books-- it's a big genre, and you never know if he's just predisposed not to like the subset you've presented.
I've been lending a fair few books to my parents lately-- Dad likes SF, Mom is ambivalent and has some issues. They both liked Scalzi (Mom liked it 'except the parts in space') and E Bear. Dad likes Lois McMaster Bujold, or at least what he's read; Mom hasn't read that one yet, but I expect she'll have the same space complaint. We all like Connie Willis' books.
However, I'm the one picking the books for them, and I don't have the same taste as your husband does. Good stories, yes, but I dislike much of the harder, almost philosophical SF I've read.

Mary Dell #138: It means that he was a womaniser (certainly, all his household servants in Zamboanga were women). Interesting ancestors tend to be interesting in ways that we mostly don't find pleasant.

Tracie @ 126:

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...

Terry Karney #142: That should be obrigado, 'ombrigado' sounds to me like 'possessing a navel'.

Peter @
Susan's schema (# 132) seemed to exclude non-Spanish-speaking Latin Americans...

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?

Lester Del Rey
Isabella Allende

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?

Lester Del Rey
Isabelle Allende

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?

Lester Del Rey
Isabelle Allende

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 think Patrick's Law of Categories applies here.

I just moved back to Brooklyn, and don't have net access at home yet.

kouredios@137: 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 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.

When I was studying Spanish Lit (poorly-- it was the only thing we had besides grammar and history that still centered on the lit) I decided that magic realism is fantasy in Spanish. In my more bitter moments, I decreed that magic realism is Literature because it's foreign and therefore must be good, the same way all subtitled movies are good to some people.
I really wish I had time and lack of embarrassment to read Spanish fantasy. I have one by Daina Chavez from ICFA a couple years ago that I am told is good, but haven't gotten to reading yet.

Serge @ #127, You are not alone. Salt on apple slices, salt (and pepper!) on cantaloupe; both were and occasionally still are some of my indulgences.

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.

Paula 156: Actually India passed China a few months ago.

Diatryma #160: Given the roots of magical realism (I prefer 'lo real maravilloso', the marvellous real, the phrase coined by Alejo Carpentier) in the circum-Caribbean and northeastern Brazil, I'd say that it was reality being described in Spanish (what happens, for example, when the French Revolution projects itself into the Caribbean as in Carpentier's El reino de este mundo --'The Kingdom of this World'-- and El siglo de las luces -- translated as 'Explosiion in the Cathedral', but actually meaning 'The Age of Enlightenment').

Greg London: Huzzay and hallelujah! You just told me why _The Searchers_ arrived from Netflix the other day. I knew a Fluorospheridian had suggested it, but the details had escaped me.

Stefan Jones @ 135... Mango and salt? Hmm... What did it taste like? I don't go for salt much anymore, but I still have the bitter/sweet thing, I guess, considering the way I love scarfing up lime-flavored ice cream.

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.)

Lurker here, glad to have found an open thread.

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.)

Koureidos (137)

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

Huh. In the story I'm working on, one of the major characters is a Latina. I didn't think there was anything special about it.

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

kouredios,

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

Oh, and The Star Fox, or maybe A Million Open Doors.

Xopher, would it help if I told you _Dune_ hooked me because it had the same detail that the Michener books I love did? And that I class _Dune_ as an easy read?

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_...

Serge @ #165, gah. Nope, we had no lard in our house; closest we could come might be one of those little tin jars for bacon drippings.

Peter Erwin @ 136

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.

Serge #127: My family's idiosyncracies included putting salt on grapefruit and pepper on cantaloupe. I've given up the former but still do the latter.

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.)

Latino actors playing non-Latino characters... Henry Fonda, anybody?

I agree that making lists of people according to some weird and shifting category that isn't even as well defined as race is kind of icky. Nevertheless I offer the protagonist of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Because it's an interesting book, and because Sandoz' ethnic and cultural background is relevant to the story, it's not just token multiculturalism.

J. August Richards (Gunn, on the Angel series) is properly Javier Augusto, his folks were from Panama, and his great-grand/grandparents from Jamaica.

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

DaveL @ #174, Camilo Pascual!

koureidos:

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"

Kouredios,

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.

kouredios, Greg London,

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.

kouredios @ 137... For my part, I enjoy the Biblical riff, but I understand thoroughly that I messed up, and ruined him for SF.

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 reckon the unit could be identifiable--what German Army units, probably infantry, had a bear as a mascot?

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.

#178 Linkmeister: Camilo Pascual

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 infamous ancestors: I have a some-number-of-greats-grandfather who was the governor of the Bastille. Right when the French Revolution hit. Apparently the only reason I'm here with this genetic legacy today is because his daughter got out of the country while they were busy doing in her father.

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.

Among alternate world stories I used to like Farmer's Riverworld series (To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth). Clifford Simak wrote some great stories about other places; for an alternate universe leavened heavily with humor, try The Goblin Reservation.

Thanks all for the recommends so far. I was hoping for some ideas to kick my own mind into gear, and you all have been really helpful.

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.

Connie @177, my memory is that Fnaqbm jnf rvgure Yngvab be npghnyyl fbhgu Nzrevpna, naq sebz na rkgerzryl cbbe onpxtebhaq, ohg jbhyq fbzrgvzrf cergraq gb or n cngevpvna, Pnfgvyyvna Fcnavneq vavgvnyyl gb vzcebir uvf ybj fgnghf naq yngre ba nf n wbxr (juvpu ur fgbcf jura vg sernxf bhg gur ybir vagrerfg, nf n Frcuneqv Wrj). (ROT-13 because the book is written out of chornological order so I can't remember if this character background is made explicit early enough not to be a spoiler.)

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.

Oh, and Serge: one of my favorite things from Trader Joe's is a chili-coated dried Mango. That's savory and sweet for you!

ajay @ 183

Cuban, I think.

Kouredios, would he like time travel tales?

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

Susan @ 153 - It's been a few years / decades, but I remember at college the Latino community was fairly politically active. And they were rather upset with the students from South America who did not self identify as Latinos. They identified themselves as Brazilian, Chilean, Argentinian, etc. And were not entirely sure that really had that much in common with students from other countries that just happened to be on the same continent as theirs.

Kouredios @ 189... A chili-coated dried Mango? That sounds very interesting. I don't if the local Trader Joe's would carry it in spite of my being in Albuquerque. Well, I'll be around the Bay Area in two weeks. If they don't have that, nobody will.

Ooh, savory-sweet? Our favorite local market (Mercado Los Pericos) sells a candy that's lightly-sweetened tamarind pulp wrapped around a skewer and rolled in chile powder. Mmmm.

Susan @ 153:

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.

kouredios:
... but I'm thinking he'd enjoy more hard science with some economics thrown in.

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...

kouredios@187: the particularities of the story needed a SF setting: no Death Star in a Western

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.

Peter Erwin @ 195... Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn, born in Chihuahua, was mostly known as Anthony Quinn and played Zorba the Greek, and Zeus in the first Hercules TV movies with Kevin Sorbo.

Bruce Cohen @ 181:
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.

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...

ajay 183: Spaniards count as Hispanic but not Latino.

Peter Erwin... You mean, James Clavell, not James Michener.

Fragano Ledgister, John A Arkansawyer

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.

#161 ::: Linkmeister ::: (view all by) ::: June 29, 2007, 02:55 PM:
...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.

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.

Re: 203
Aargh.
"Flakiest" or "most flaky".

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

Bruce Cohen (Speaker To Managers) #202: You have a point.

kouredious:

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... :)

Serge @ 201:
Uh, yes. Clavell, not Michener.

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...)

Madeline Kelly back at #71: 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.

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?

Carol @ 203... (Pause for getting past increased queasiness)

Bwahahahah!!!

For Janice E. @ 166:

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.

Janice @166:

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.)

Tip of the hat to Michael Moore, whose Sicko opens today -- a film with the magical power to morph film critics Stephen Hunter and David Denby into health care concern trolls.

Sharon M @210:

Ah, the wonders of simultaneity...

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

Fragano:

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.

Janice @ #166:

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

Greg @ 197: 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.

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!

Salmon ... oh yeah.

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.

If "Latino" is defined in cultural terms it doesn't apply to *practically all* F/SF settings - they have completely different cultures from completely different universes, or are set in the past when Latino culture hadn't formed yet, or far enough in the future that it has mixed with other cultures to the point of unrecognizability (quick, point out someone with specifically Phoenician culture in the present day).

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.

Carol @ #203, Grins. Well, 1 tbsp might have been what my mother allowed, not what I'd have preferred.

re: Salmon - fidelio, if you have access to a smoker, or if you can create one (Alton Brown style), you could consider brining a portion of the fish and hot smoking it. Hot smoking usually takes 4-6 hours, so it's not a long-term obligation.

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.

Note to Teresa: have you seen this article about Provigil?

Provigil

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

Thread jumping, from 86:
Adrienne L. Travis

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.

Is it really true that Heinlein fans consider Job one of the worst of his works? I think it's one of his best, but a friend told me otherwise recently.

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.

Terry Karney @ 222:
... and the amusing quirk that B&W film is digital, where digital B&W is analog, but I often digress ...

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...

The character Liz on the Roswell TV series was not played or cast Latino – but in the books by Melinda Metz, that character was Latino, I believe. Her name was Liz Ortecho, not Liz Parker. That series was curiously lacking in Latinos, considering it's set in New Mexico.

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

Koureidos,

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.

embee - maybe in your part of Alaska! In my part

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

:)

Peter Erwin: Here's how it unpacks.

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").

Susan, #132: 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." 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.

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.

Me/Peter Erwin:

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.

tania@227:

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).

Peter Erwin @ 199

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.

embee @ 225... That'd make me associate apples with good feelings too. I don't smoke, but I love the smell of a pipe,in spite of the stink, because of my own granddad.

embee @#231: It is good. I don't like dill (except dill pickles), so I have to come up with other flavors for my fish.

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

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

Tania @ 234... 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.

John @ 223: 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.

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?

kouredios... I recently read a review of anthology Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which gathers short-fiction classics from before 1965, when this book was originally published. It is my understanding that Tor Books has re-released it.

kouredios @#137: Dune, mentioned up above, is awesome. I didn't read it until about 5 years ago, because I thought it was a total boy book. All of my geek-guy friends in high school would discuss it endlessly and it sounded dry as toast. I was shocked to discover that it is, in fact, chock-full of of amazing & powerful female characters, and is just all around one of the best things ever written. LOVE that book.

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.

I'm delurking to share another Alaskan salmon marinade recipe (in the sense that the cook is Alaskan and so is the salmon, not that the other ingrediants are regional), makes enough for a couple of pounds of fish if you put the fish in a ziploc bag and squeeze the air out:
The juice of an orange
juice of a lime
splash of tequila
one chopped up jalapeno (adjust chile content for the audience)
a handful of snipped up fresh cilantro
salt and fresh ground pepper

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.

Lance @125: Wow. Printing that out and putting it on an index card in the kitchen for, like, *ever.* Cheers also to Rikibeth @143, for clarifying even more of the science. The entire conversation has been very helpful--thanks everyone!

#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.

Ah, Nicole @ #240, the cinnamon and sugar was specifically for toasted white bread in our household, but you're right; it would take me right back.

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

Mm, bread-butter-sugar. Lots of butter, lots of sugar, the way my mother made it--she said she'd never been allowed to make it right when she was little, so she always gave us at least 1/8" sugar on ours. Because that way, when you run it under the broiler, it makes a crust.

Terry @ 230 - I've had good results by turning on 'Preserve Embedded Profile' for greyscale in Color Management before switching color spaces, fwiw.

Cinnamon sugar or honey on either bread and butter or buttered toast. Brown sugar with bread and butter, not toast, but it's going to be a quarter inch of brown sugar, just because it doesn't work in thin layers (lumpy, always).

julia: I suspect that's a colorspace desat. Since I don't use CS@ for much these days (and always found PS to be PTA) I've not tried it.

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

kouredios @236,

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.

If you want an SF writer whose work had lots of Latino characters how about Lucius Shepard.

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

Also part of the following group blog:

http://community.livejournal.com/theinferior4

[oops on the post to OT83]

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?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 246... True, we who have been reading SF for a long time may not notice the mustiness of the old stuff. On the other hand, I think someone once said the more modern stuff is so dependent on those tropes that it is nearly inaccessible to people not familiar with those traditions. I don't know that this is true as most of the people I know either don't read or they have been reading SF since they learned to read.

Andrew, #46, unless you have an odd pronunciation, "motherfucker" is only four syllables.

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?

@238 Mary Dell:

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.

So am I incorrect in thinking that the characters of Carlos and Maria (and their parents) in Alan Steele's Coyote books are Latino. The names suggest it of course, but that could just be "Americans of Hispanic heritage".

fidelio #85:
My rule of thumb for fish is that the fresher & the better the quality, the less you should do to it.

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.

Marilee, true, but there's always "that motherfucker" and "you motherfucker", to say nothing of "motherfucking shit". We'll always have Parris Island.

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

Latino characters:
Memory of Fire (George Foy)
Clade (Mark Budz) (Crache looks likely but I haven't read it.)

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).

Serge @127:
Ever tried salt on fresh pineapple?

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.

Absolutely off topic, but I want to thank whoever in the previous thread recommended Shadows Over Baker Street. I was a passionate follower of the GD once upon a time and the idea of a Doyle-Lovecraft mashup tweaked my interest so I picked it up on my way home...and it was FABULOUS.

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?

Mary Dell #238: Duh! Of course Alfred Bester should be the go-to guy to turn anyone on to science fiction. That's so smart.

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.

ethan@258:
Yup, marketed at the mainstream. It was one of Russell's talking points. No spaceships or BEMs on the cover, sold in bookshops in the mainstream section (not in the SF section), that sort of thing. The festival we went to where she spoke was advertised accordingly too.

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.

Kouredios: Musing on SF novels which knocked my socks off (although I do think the "start with short stories" suggestion is a sound one)... and bearing in mind that I'm a characterization bug, so good characters will make me forgive many flaws:

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.

albatross @#251: good point about the assumptions in Deepness. I kind of like that he skips over the basic stuff and just focuses on the really interesting technology, but I've been reading hard SF forever, so to me "ramscoop" is like when they say "hyperdrive" on TV. I guess it wouldn't be for a newbie!

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.)

Recommended SF: I'll second the suggestions for Bester (tho' I prefer The Stars My Destination over The Demolished Man) and Stross (especially the Merchant Princes books).

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.

wrt Hispanic/Latino characters in SF, there are several English-language fantasy novels with various amounts of (pseudo-)Iberian flavor: GG Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan, the Rawn/Roberson/Elliot collaboration The Golden Key, and to a small extent (mostly names and bits of conlang) MZB's "Darkover" series.

kouredios: I'd second Peter Erwin's recommendation of Robinson's RGB Mars trilogy, but even more so, I'd recommend his newest trilogy, starting with Forty Days of Rain. It hypothesizes what would happen if environmental collapse hit us suddenly and catastrophically, rather than gradually. It is set in contemporary America, and the divergence doesn't happen until almost the very end of the first book, so your husband would have a lot of time to get into the story before his suspension of disbelief would be tested.

Taking advantage of the openness of the thread...

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.

Yay Abi! Best of luck for the rest of the move.

abi @ 265... Congrats to Our Woman in Amsterdam!

Soon Lee @ 256... Ever tried salt on fresh pineapple?

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

CHip @ 255... I don't know if modern SF has too many tropes for the newcomer. After all, I am not a virgin reader, having been at it for almost 50 years (if you include the years where I apparently would stare at the newspaper's funnies before I knew how to read). This is something someone had written in an SF publication, but I don't remember where. I mentionned this because I was curious about what others think of its assertion.

Marilee @ 250... Star Wars was first told as The Seven Samurai. The westerns were intermediate forms.

And where does Battle Beyond the Stars fit in there?

I loved A Million Open Doors too. I was deep in the middle of my master's report, which I was writing on, you guessed it, the troubadours. I couldn't sit still for the joy of it--he got the troubadours' personalities exactly right. Then I read the second one, and I've never touched a John Barnes novel since.

kouredios - I'd like to second the recommendation for the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson for your husband. It's one I've given to non-SFers in the past with good results. It has really great science, especially geology, that would appeal to a Stephen-Hawking-reading type person. It has great politics, which includes the above-mentioned really interesting economics. It has great characters.

Lee,

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.

The Mars trilogy is awesome! Great story! Great characters! Great science! Great political...er...stuff! Great worldbuilding! Sensa-sensa-wunda!

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.

I would absolutely not recommend The Stars My Destination. I've been reading SF for most of my life, and when I picked Stars up earlier this year, I was surprised that such a short book could leave me feeling like I had to slog through it. I finally gave up about 3/4 of the way through, because time's too short and the to-read pile's far too large. Clearly mileage varies greatly here, but if we're talking someone who's not interested in the genre in the first place....

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.)

(240, etc): Cinnamon sugar, yes! On buttered toast (with lots of butter to hold lots of cinnamon sugar). When I was a kid, we had a sugarbowl full of pre-mixed cinnamon sugar, ready to go. Yum! It reminds me of cinnamon rolls.

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Announcement: The Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an Essay Not in English
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007
The IAFA is proud to announce that the annual award given for best essay not in English has been officially renamed The Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an Essay Not in English. Jamie taught German at Virginia Tech and his fantastic artwork has been the cover art for books by Michael Jasper and Michael Bishop. Jamie's impressive electronic portfolio can be found at http://www.memory39.com/.

I was told by an attorney from Los Angeles (a fellow who was born in Mexico and became a naturalized American citizen about 25 years ago), that the term 'hispanic' was invented during the Nixon administration and when used in the hearing of many who might fit the term, is considered an insult. As a result, ever since, I've tried to avoid use of that word.

re: cinnamon toast

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.

Terry@222: 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.

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.

We'll always have Parris Island.

and sand fleas...

Carol: Celery with cheese spread? How odd! :) We always used peanut butter. PB is good on carrots, too.

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

My grandma and mother would take the leftover scraps of pie crust dough, flatten them on a baking sheet and sprinkle the top with cinnamon sugar (from our pre-filled shaker of course) and bake them. Eating one of these treats fresh from the oven was heavenly!

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.

Well, on top of the eminent Mr. Olmos and the says-she's-not-really-Chicana Jessica Alba playing sci-fi marquees all over, we all seem to be forgetting Morena Baccarin; a pretty good argument can be made for Brazilians counting as Latin@. Her Stargate character isn't of any Earth race, or course, but Inara Serra's arguably some projected sort of Latina, if anything.

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.

re:282 Mary Aileen
We also used some kind of cream cheese spread to fill in celery - and peanut butter, though not in tandem. I may have to look at that section of the dairy case next grocery visit.

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.

Terry @ 228:

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...

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."

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

Supreme Court decision on schools and race.

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

Carol 279: 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:

[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]

RATS. TBS would have to grab some milk, too, of course. DUHH. One of those things you spot RIGHT after hitting Post.

Lance 283: My mother did exactly that (except we just had a jar for the cinnamon sugar). I've made those myself, for a special treat. Used a leftover pie shell, which makes rather a lot of them.

Bruce 287: Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me did a whole riff on that story. "When this news was announced, every flight attendant in the world resigned immediately." And this exchange:

"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."

John A Arkansawyer #223: I'd say that Job and Friday were Heinlein's worst. Job drove me up the wall. If I were introducing someone to Heinlein's work, I'd be more inclined to suggest his juveniles.

*sigh* TGS, of course I meant.

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

I may be a bit late, but I don't think these have been mentioned:

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).

Fragano 293: Yeah, Heinlein kind of went spung toward the end of his life.

I don't think Asaro's Skolian books count. The non-Earth people's ruling class may go back to Mayan ancestors, but they were removed from earth and possibly their own time and universe long, long ago, genetically engineered for various things, and then let loose for a few thousand years. Much more is made of purple hair, red eyes, metallic skin, and other mostly-human alien features.
Catch the Lightning does have a Latina protagonist, so we can add that to the list.

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.

Abi #265: Congratulations, en goede gelluk!

BSD 295: Kind of looks that way to me. Huh. I always assumed she was Japanese for some (stupid) reason. Mostly because the name sounded that way to me, in my ignorance.

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

BSD @ 295... Actually, Asaro's father is Japanese-American.

eric #214: That sounds very tasty!

moe99 #278: What I've noticed is that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York use 'hispano' to refer to Caribbean Hispanophones such as themselves. Persons of Mexican and Central American origin in other parts of the country tend to prefer 'latino'.

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').

In the does-anybody-know-what-book-that-was? dept...

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?

Serge 300: Which makes me even dumber! *bangs head on wall*

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.

moe99 #278: What I've noticed is that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York use 'hispano' to refer to Caribbean Hispanophones such as themselves. Persons of Mexican and Central American origin in other parts of the country tend to prefer 'latino'.

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').

About cinnamon toast: it sounds like y'all put the cinnamon on after it gets toasted. I like to butter the bread, put the cinnamon and sugar on, then slide it into the toaster oven. You get a nice little cinnamon and sugar crust. Yum. I still make it -- for myself, the kids don't really like cinnamon.

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

A few random remarks to toss into the mix. I'll be AFK for an unknown time between 8 hours and a couple of days. My local network needs to be upgraded; I now have machines that use three different wireless transport layers: 802.11b, g, and "draft-n", and the old router won't talk to the n, so a router transplant is in order. Depending on how well the new one works out of the box, I will either have a happy network right off, or be relegated to working at the end of a cable until I sort things out.

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!

Eek! Sorry for the delayed stereo effect.

My brother used to eat "nothing sandwiches"— one slice of (cheap white storebought) bread had Miracle Whip™ on it, the other ketchup. Put them together with, as the name suggests, nothing in the middle.

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

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

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

#287 ::: Bruce E. Durocher II ::: (view all by) ::: June 30, 2007, 11:59 AM:

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!

Mary Aileen 310: They're even better if you butter them before you put the cinnamon sugar on them.

#288:

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

Xopher #296: That's a good way to put it.

Carol 311: You have nailed the feel of this surreal encounter, complete to the refrigerator reorganization, which I hadn't mentioned.

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!

My mother ate mustard and jelly sandwiches in her youth. Yellow mustard. Strawberry jelly.
We were talking about salt and sweet? I can't even... ew. Just ew.
The worst food I ate in my youth (so far) was Ramen. Lots of Ramen. Canned cheese on crackers, yes. Or Chicken in a Biskit crackers, which are somehow *damp* and will take the skin off your mouth if you eat too many.

307/309: On a slightly higher note, my family invented 'meatless cheeseburgers' as a way to use up leftover hamburger buns. They had everything you'd put in a cheeseburger except the meat: cheese, pickle, onion, lettuce, tomato....

#260

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.

myself @ 317: Darn it, I forgot to mention the ketchup and mustard! Those are key; without them what you have is just a cheese sandwich, not a meatless cheeseburger.

Fragano,

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.

Mary Aileen 317/319: My wife and eldest spawn are both vegetarians and "Meatless Cheeseburgers" are their menu choice of last resort when we're road-tripping.

Carol Kimball @ 311... An urban legend of some duration has it that orgasm is the best way to reset your biological clock.

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

Our Arkansawyer friend above left a comment at my place leading me to Randy Newman's website. While poking around over there I discovered this versified op/ed entitled "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country":

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'm in need of some inspiration:

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.

Lance, they have Matrix screen savers around. Or any nifty screen saver-- Windows has a My Pictures slideshow screensaver, but I don't know if Macs do.

Peter Erwin: I mean no such thing.

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".

John A Arkansawyer #320: No, I didn't. Masochism is not one of my vices.

Lance @ 324

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.

Thoughts on fidelio's salmon "problem" from someone who once fell into a set gillnet:

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!

No Doctor Who spoilers...

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

Also, to close the random bitching about going to Seattle: the traffic north on five was enlivened by a apparently drunk and definitely irresponsible driver of a silver Accord with Utah Plates, who cut back and forth through traffic looking for an opening and was last seen heading toward the Narrows Bridge; there was a report of a wreck in Gig Harbor about twenty minutes later.

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.

Re current government abuses: the latest "Tom Tomorrow" cartoon is a good one!

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.)

To continue the odd sandwiches subthread, peanut butter and pickle sandwiches are surprisingly good. At least I used to think so; I haven't had one in at least 20 years.

Me, at 329, missing a phrase "to thaw and season for cooking, later, one at a time."

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

One thought on the SF recommendations... if the recommendee likes nonfiction and biographies, it might be helpful to find books with a nonfiction "feel," or even fiction written in imitation of some nonfiction genre--i.e., history or biography. Off the top of my head the only examples I can think of are A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude by Stanislaw Lem, two volumes of reviews of and introductions to imaginary books. Personally, I love these, but they may or may not work for someone else.

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

When we were kids, my brothers and I started eating open-face peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with sweet pickles (Mom's homemade sweet pickles) and popcorn as the top layer. I don't eat them anymore - I prefer my popcorn on the side these days - but at least one brother feeds them to his kids from time to time.

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

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.

Carol 311 again: Halfway through my 20 minutes on the elliptical ski machine it occurred to me: maybe "looking for the Cheez Whiz™" was just an excuse for reorganizing the refrigerator.

JESR @ 334... It is possible that five hours of sleep, five nights in a row, is taking its toll.

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.

Terry @ 326:

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.)

WRT my friend the would-be novelist: Thanks so much to Sharon M. and Bernard for the link to the page at Neil Gaiman's blog, and to Tania@215 for the list of ML posts of interest. If this info doesn't help the guy, nothing will.

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

little light @ 333

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.)

Serge @339, I think I've pretty much used up my life's quota for sleep deprivation, though- or at least I'm over my limit for June, 2007 and possibly a bit of July.

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.

Terry, Kip, there's something about the LJ page surrounding that bear picture which I don't like.

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.

#337 little light:

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.

#324 ::: Lance Weber asked:
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?

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

#338 ::: Xopher
... Halfway through my 20 minutes on the elliptical ski machine it occurred to me: maybe "looking for the Cheez Whiz™" was just an excuse for reorganizing the refrigerator.

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.

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

*waves from Longmont* Hi Neighbor!!

Four times a week, I have cinnamon toast for breakfast. Without the cinnamon. Somehow the spice is just too much. Can anyone explain why it's supposed to go on top of cappuccino?

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.

Serge, #270, I've never seen it, but the blurb says it's a Star Wars clone, so I reckon it's also derivative.

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.

Steve @#192:
I remember at college the Latino community was fairly politically active. And they were rather upset with the students from South America who did not self identify as Latinos. They identified themselves as Brazilian, Chilean, Argentinian, etc. And were not entirely sure that really had that much in common with students from other countries that just happened to be on the same continent as theirs.

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.

Nicole #240, I'm glad my culinary school classes are of use to others too! I'm a baker by trade and I regularly do scones and Danishes, which rely on the butter-encapsulation lift, so it's something I breathe.

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!

re 285: celery stuffing:
creamcheese, a little milk to thin it very slightly and make it more spreadable, Worchestershire Sauce, sliced green olives. All stirred together.

Oh, and while I'm not certain of their nationality (I'd guess Cuban or Spanish with a brief stop in Cuba), there's Lucas Cortez and the entire Cortez Cabal in Kelley Armstrong's "Women of the Otherworld" books. Some scenes in those books press my buttons enough that I physically twitch.

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.

Marilee 350: I worked there.

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.

Susan at 354, is it a good twitch or a bad twitch? I've only read two, Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic, and I've done my best to keep from picking them apart too much. The books did what I needed them to do, so I'm giving them some time before the evisceration.

Susan, 351: Perhaps I'm overtired, but your remarks to Lee seem rather strong. It reads to me as though you're upset with her for not already knowing the answer to the question she's asking.

Wait, how did I miss this?

#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.

Serge@269: Delany took a position crudely summarized as "some people really can't read SF" (in NYRSF 8+ years ago, then in a discussion at WFC). Some of his argument sounded like "too many tropes" (and some sounded like "for 'too many', read 'any'"); I didn't find it especially convincing, but as this was Delany I can't measure how much I was missing.

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.)

#332: Yes, that's a good cartoon, but it's not Tom Tomorrow. It's Tom the Dancing Bug, which is a different cartoon by a different author.

#348 ::: Lance Weber
*waves from Longmont* Hi Neighbor!!

#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.

JESR @ 343... I think my own sleep deprivation's quota ran out too. Those long sleepless periods were something I could easily do 10 years ago, but not today. Unfortunately, I get the sense that my boss expects me to pull those stunts the way the team's new and younger members can easily do. I hate this feeling that I am getting old and that my past achievements don't matter one bit. I also hate that, because the younger members have kids and I don't, it's ok with the boss if my own personal life gets disrupted by work.

Marilee @ 350... Actually Battle Beyond the Stars is a remake of 7 samurai and has Robert Vaughn reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven (*). And Sybil Danning in a really tacky futuristic costume. What more could we ask for?

----

(*) 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.

Serge @ #362, that's the no-kids tax. It's worse if you haven't got a spouse. Then it's the single-thus-no-outside-life tax.

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

Bruce, #262: Sawyer, how could I have forgotten him? When I picked up Hominids, I'd been reading a lot of fiction that was competent but a little clunky in style. I got to the end of that one, and my immediate reaction was, "Holy shit, that man can WRITE!" It was such a relief to have the writing itself disappear seamlessly into the story; that's the way it should work all the time, but too often it doesn't.

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.

Serge #362 Ah, flexibility. A wonderful concept. Employers love it. We must all show flexibility, the company by bending you out of shape, you by being bent.

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.

Linkmeister @ 364... Lest people misunderstand me, I think that employers should make it easier for parents to be able to be there for their kids. What I'm referring is a recent situation. I had spent long hours that whole week, not just for work but also for some home-improvement, but most of it for work. By that last Sunday night, I was finally able to relax so I went to a bookstore, only to have my cell phone go off because of a production problem. So back home I went. I evaluated the situation and realized that my caller was the one who'd screwed up my program. After nearly one hour of not getting any response to my emails from the Boy Wonder, I called my boss, who casually said that he was on the road, not at his computer, because he's a family man and had to take the kids somewhere. Obviously he didn't have time to tell me that before he took off. It's the boss's attitude that really pissed me off.

Dave Luckett @ 366... Ah, flexibility... That sounds so much nicer, doesn't it?

I saw Ratatouille, Pixar's latest. It was so-so. Maybe there's something wrong with me. My consolation is that I probably was the only person in the audience who knew how to say 'ratatouille'. (Yes, it's a very silly-sounding word even in French.)

Dave Bell: re horstwessel.

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.

TexAnne @357
It reads to me as though you're upset with her for not already knowing the answer to the question she's asking.

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

Yeah, Terry, it does seem to be a picture blog, and not overtly political, but some of the people creeping in round the edges...

Yeah, Terry, it does seem to be a picture blog, and not overtly political, but some of the people creeping in round the edges...

"Standard orbit around Escrow VII, Mr. Sulu."

I think we have to remember that SF has been written, as a mass-market genre, for over 70 years. It started out in the same world as To Kill A Mockingbird happened in. It's the casual, unconsidered, racism of a world in which a hit song has the line, "pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo-choo", with it's mix of politeness and treating-as-a-child.

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?

Lee @ 365:
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).

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...")

abi @ 371... where did they all go?

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?

Dave Bell @ 374... "Captain! The finances cannae take it anymore!"

"Gomez" by Kornbluth, for a Hispanic character.

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.

joann (349): It sounds to me almost as if your mother is trying for banana splits without the ice cream. Although Miracle Whip instead of whipped cream is a pretty odd substitution. :)

Abi #371: That should be British Guiana; Guyana is the name of the territory after independence. I have a sister-in-law (lives in Aberdeen) and a cousin-by-marriage (lives in London) who want to ask about that 'escrow'.

Weird thought:

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)

Serge @ 369

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?)

PJ @ 383... Maybe. Or maybe it's the director, Brad Bird. One thing I liked in the Toy Story movies, in A Bug's Life and in Finding Nemo were the throwaway bits of humor, stuff going on in the background (for example, two swordfish have a swordfight and one sounds like James Mason). Also those were directed by John Lasseter though. Much as I liked Bird's Iron Giant, his The Incredibles left me cold.

Lee 365: My litmus test for this is what I regard as a funny story: once when I was four, and being very bad, and my mother was in a bad mood too, she shouted "Get out of my sight!" I responded "I don't want to be in your sight. Your sight is icky!"

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.

#371 abi and many others:

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.

albatross 386: I agree with you. And won't it be a better world when the first time a child asks that question it will be "how come some people are brown and others are pink?"

Xopher @ 385... Just my $/50.

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.

#385 Xopher:

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.)

Oh crap... I just went to imDB.com to check on something about The Day The Earth Stood Still and saw something to the effect that it's being remade. Someone send Gort over, quick.

It's not just about having friends with similar (difficult) family backgrounds: it's about having friends who respect your requests. If someone told me "don't give the key to anyone from my family," I might be thinking "my friend doesn't want them to judge his housekeeping/taste in books/find the sex toys" rather than "all her relatives will go through her papers or steal her jewelry" but I would do as my friend had asked. Because if my friend wanted relatives, or a specific relative, to have the key, they could give them one.

Serge #388: Shouldn't that have been 'I'll buy that for a a dollar'?

Fragano @ 392... Curses! Typoed again!

Vicki (391): Right. My family's pretty normal, but if someone specifically told me, as Marilee told her "friend," not to give access to anyone from her family, I'd honor that, even if I didn't quite get why. If she had just said "don't let anyone in," a well-meaning but clueless friend could think "but of course family is okay; she didn't mean them." As it is, the "friend" disobeyed specific instructions.

Serge 388: Also it was made in Australia, which led them to have lots of Ozzie and Kiwi actors, including some Maoris (if I'm not mistaken, Lani Tupu is a Maori, but I can't find confirmation online). They also used puppets a lot, which...definitely improves the racial mix!

Xopher @ 395... They also used puppets a lot, which...definitely improves the racial mix!

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."

Serge 396: But they'd agree that it's not easy being green.

#389, that movie is Bulworth, the lines Warren Beatty's: "All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."

Xopher at 385: I agree that the moronic concept of race held by many Americans needs to be demolished. For many decades now, my response to the question "What race are you?" on various forms has been either "Refuse to state" or "Human." That concept was taught to me very early, not by my parents but in school. The earliest textbooks I read stated clearly that humanity could be classified into 3 races; Caucasian (read, "white skin"), Negro (read, "black skin"), and Mongoloid (read, "yellow skin, slanty-eyed"). This could be found in science textbooks -- books that claimed to deal with "facts." The subtext of these statements was that these differences reflected something important about the 3 groups and individuals in them.

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.

#365 ::: Lee :::

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.

#396: Kermit, being The Star, has to play Kirk. Green or no green.

#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!

Jon Meltzer @ 401... And Miss Piggy as...?

#402: Piggy will insist on playing Spock. And if you demur she'll karate chop the crap out of you.

#360 (Chris): Oops! Thanks for the correction. My mind was definitely on vacation yesterday (though the mouth *wasn't* working overtime), and the heat we're supposed to have for the next week or so probably won't help matters. Just as well that I can veg out and watch a lot of tennis -- if it ever stops raining at Wimbledon. On our hot days, it's refreshing to watch people huddling into their parkas both in Old Blighty and at Giants' games in S.F.

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.

Jon Meltzer @ 403... Of course. And Beeker in the engine room.

Jon Meltzer @401:
So K/S is on the cards, then?

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

403, rather.

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

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 :)

Or maybe it's the director, Brad Bird.

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.

362, Serge: My husband is tech support for and server admin of a geographic database with terrabytes of points; anything goes wrong it's assumed that he will be there until it's fixed, and God save us all when there's a hardware update (the last one involved 100 hours of work in seven days straight). That he's been working at the job long enough that he can understand all the choke points and how not to interrupt the work flow and hash a big mapping job makes him valuable, and taking very occassional days off emphasizes how dependant they are on him.

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.

re "Cheez Whiz" - it comes in jars. It's "Kraft Easy Cheese" that comes in the spray cans.

JESR @ #410: This is why I discourage anyone I can from using Windows for servers. Desktops, OK. (Though Vista certainly seems like a nightmare so far.) But servers, no....

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

Josie and I loved Ratatouille. It's hilarious (with a lot of the jokes being exactly the sort of quick take that Serge is talking about) and gorgeous. My only complaint would be the over-use of narration, in at least one case as a desperate expedient to reduce running time.

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.

_Black Water_, edited by Alberto Manguel, has a lot of sf by Hispanic authors.

#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.

Xopher @385: Sometimes, even decent mothers say things like "Get out of my sight!" There are times when young children can drive you up the wall faster than anything else. Although I would have cracked up if one of my kids had come back with what you said.

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.

I've said "get out of my sight" to my 6 year old son. In the last month. He didn't manage such a snappy comeback.

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!"

In my circle of friends, one of the greetings (amongst many movie/book/comic quotes) used is "Did you get my Cheez Whiz boy?"

Before I flee to the grocery store to stock up for my camping trip...

Happy Canada Day!!!

Nancy @ #414, mayonnaise is almost the best part of a sub/hoagie

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'm not going to argue that subs are best with mayonnaise. I can see that there's a sort of purity and coherence to an oil sub. However, regardless of purity and coherence, I love mayonnaise.

412 Cliff Royston: there's a reason this household is Mac Based.

Nancy Lebovitz@414: I think my personal Heinlein low was I Will Fear No Evil, also because there were some interesting ideas and storylines that never came to the forefront.

Just got back from seeing Ratatouille. Husband, both teenage daughters and I adored it. It also made me nearly die of hunger. We went straight to the grocery store and bought tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, basil....

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.

Lance @ 417: This here's my brother Jake. He just got outta the joint.

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.

Nancy Lebovitz #420: I'm not going to argue that subs are best with mayonnaise. I can see that there's a sort of purity and coherence to an oil sub. However, regardless of purity and coherence, I love mayonnaise.

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.

John Hawkes-Reed #424:

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).

JESR @ 410

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).

Xopher (#395) -

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.

Ratatouille: 4 thumbs up from the family, we all enjoyed the movie a lot. Good story, excellent animation, some laughs. And the short flick "Lifted" was slap-stick hilarious!

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 a recommendation by Patrick (I think), I just finished "The Spy who Came in from the Cold", and now I want to read more Le Carre'.

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?

Seeing as it's an open thread, and my google fu is failing miserably - has anybody seen a mold on their green bin that's screaming orange? It's much more solid looking than the usual white fuzz, and I'm wondering if it's something I might want to be concerned about...

Todd @ #430, Wikipedia has a (kinda sorta) timeline for LeCarre and George Smiley here. You might find it useful.

joann @ #425, on saltines? Whew.

Todd #430:

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.

Linkmeister @ 432

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.)

Linkmeister & Joann - thanks! Tinker, Tailer, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People are on their way.

Remarkably good, though it wouldn't seem so at first suggestion...

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

Mary Aileen, #394, not only did I say not to give it to anybody in my family, I explained that my father had abused me and that I didn't trust him in my house. I told her that the step-siblings weren't really related and I didn't like them. Her explanation was that they were "so nice." Well, yes, my father has always been charming on the surface, but I expected her to follow what I said.

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

Point of usage: the plural form of Maori is Maori, not Maoris. As a general rule, use of `Maoris' in New Zealand is a good indicator of rants about the Treaty gravy train, Helen Clark's cabal of lesbian communists, and so-on and so forth.

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.

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

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.

xeger @ 431, could it be a slime mold? Not scary, necessarily; just different. Take a look at this (slime mold is second-to-last photo, but the others are beautiful and worth seeing too).

#440 ::: Lila shared:
xeger @ 431, could it be a slime mold? Not scary, necessarily; just different. Take a look at this (slime mold is second-to-last photo, but the others are beautiful and worth seeing too).

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"

Linkmeister & Nancy, 419/420: And I prefer my subs with neither oil nor mayonnaise, but with just a little plain old yellow mustard. (At Subway, if they even have yellow and not just brown, I have to fight with them not to drown my sandwich. The mustard is supposed to be a garnish, dammit!)

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.

Re LeCarre: FWIW, I think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to be one of the great underrated novels of the 20th century. Be warned, though, once you read it, other novels/thrillers about spies or intelligence become unreadable; at least, it has been so for me. (Well, not entirely unreadable. Kind of like reading the comic book version of Shakespeare. Full fathom five thy father lies... Thwack!) The other Smiley books are fine. His later opus is uneven.

Those are gorgeous photographs.

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.

LL@399: It was not until people started talking about DNA that the utter falsehood of such classification became completely obvious even to educated people.

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.

I impressed a few people in my office once by identifying a fridge stench as not just mold but mold on an orange. Nothing smells quite like a moldy orange. This may well be the only superpower I get.

CHip, the concept of race as it existed in elementary school textbooks of the 1950s is indefensible. I strongly suspect that most statements with the word "race" in it that are intended to differentiate between peoples are largely nonsense. If we need to talk about skin color, then we should talk about skin color, not "race."

#447 ::: Lizzy L states:
CHip, the concept of race as it existed in elementary school textbooks of the 1950s is indefensible. I strongly suspect that most statements with the word "race" in it that are intended to differentiate between peoples are largely nonsense. If we need to talk about skin color, then we should talk about skin color, not "race."

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.

#445 ::: CHip:

"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.

Xeger, I entirely agree there are good reasons to differentiate beyond skin color. But I'm suggesting that using the word "race" in any context is misleading and pernicious. Let's drop it completely. Let's talk about culture, genetics, historical relationships, the movement of early human beings across continents, whatever. Let's get specific. That's all I'm saying.

Nancy Lebovitz #414: I don't think MT Anderson ever engages in teenager-bashing, and surely in Feed the situation is the result of government's collusion with corporations?

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?

xeger 448 and others:

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.

#452 ::: albatross commented:
The problem here is that "race" parses to about ten different things in normal American dialog...

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

Nancy #414:

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.

What about race in the sense of people on the the other end of racism?

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.

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.

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.

I think it's about fucking time this happened. But then I want every single member of that reprehensible body to die a sticky death as soon as possible, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

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.

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.

Tomatoes!

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!

joann 426: I would not use either word. I would use "digitalisize".

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

Keir said: 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.

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.

Nancy #414 & albatross #454: Over the last couple of years there's been a rash of books called 1001 [noun]s to [verb] before you die (e.g. movies/books/places/dishes; see/read/visit/eat). Well, I worked out that I might survive another 25-30 years (maybe perhaps longer, but only with a lot of senses & physique severely affected). Some reverselope calculations on the time it takes me to read a book, or the length of the films in the list revealed I'd have to keep up a quite rigorous schedule to get through them, let alone scud across the world visiting spots - tho' one could of course read or take films with you on a personal DVD player during the travel.

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.