The book is under limited discussion at the Gene Expression Science Fiction weblog: http://sciencefiction.gnxp.com/archives/003022.html
One of the attorneys I work for spent today and will spend tomorrow monitoring elections in the county just northwest of Portland.
Mt. St. Helens: Some of the younger people in the office were hoping it would be a huge eruption like last time, exclaiming how much fun that would be.
It was not fun. It was scary. The ash fell like snow, except it irritated your skin and made breathing hard. The tv, radio and phones were erratic with lots of static. Public transit shut down--we don't have a lot of snow plows (not having much snow in winter), and chains don't work as well on ash. People died, the land changed, river courses were silted up, plants and animals smothered.
Fresh produce was minimal and expensive that year, as most of the local crops were smothered in ash (which proved to be an excellent fertilizer, though, so the economic impact was ameliorated the next year).
It's unlikely to repeat, at least at Mt. St. Helens, because the sheer mass of material that was pulverized in the explosion last time is now spread out over the world (the ash cloud circled the world, IIRC). However, Mt. Hood is only a dormant volcano, not an extinct one, and Mt. Rainier is likewise, and even bigger.
Mary Kay, there are at least two places in Portland to get good hush puppies: Delta Cafe, and Big Daddy's Barbecue.
I sure appreciate that you (both)(and friends) do all this work so that I can read the interesting stuff and participate in the conversation. Thanks.
Teresa, I understand the hilarity of trying to reclaim payments from writers, and the irony that because they were last paid (through policy!) they are most likely to be attached. I think it's a good example of unintended consequences when passing laws that delegate broad power with no limit on discretion.
Sennoma and Stefan Jones: when I was growing up here in Portland in the 70s, we regularly had snow storms and icy conditions in the winter. So it doesn't seem strange to me, it's just that we've had unusually mild weather the last five or six years. (The summers seem to be getting warmer, as well.) The Willamette River used to freeze hard enough that you could drive a Model T across it at Portland, in the 1900s. (Of course that was before the taming of the banks by the seawall at Waterfront Park.)
I enjoyed the story about the bankruptcy trustee getting back the preferential payments. I've actually worked on a case where that happened (I'm a legal secretary). Most people are shocked about the law until you explain the situation it's mean to prevent--owners of a business paying themselves for a "loan," or paying Uncle Bill who sold them some inventory, instead of paying creditors on a pro-rata basis.
Well, adamsj, I don't know you. At least, I don't think I know you. And the specific experiences I've had involved people being really intentionally abusive and obnoxious, not just having a funny remark fail to get across. Real trash talk, extreme personal abuse (not directed at me, mind), from people I had previously found pleasant companions face-to-face, and who eventually exhibited those same nasty behaviors in person.
I know of a few people like that -- not many, it's somewhat rare -- people who are as sweet as can be offline but view the Internet as a place to vent their anger.
But my experience of the people like that of my acquaintance is that the anger will eventually come out in person. It's part of who they are; right now they are only expressing that part in one venue, but there can be spill-over. And I find that kind of interaction even more objectionable in person than in text. I've chosen to end a couple of friendships because of it, and I am reluctant to enter a friendship with someone whose on-line persona varies greatly from their face-to-face one, whether for good or bad, setting aside that some people communicate better in text than in speech.
See http://www.livejournal.com/users/wicked_wish/207090.html for a nice Dr. Seuss take on LOTR.
My mind must not work the way all of yours do: the first thing I thought of was that they'd been tracking book purchases and found a lot of almanacs going to names on lists, or to places where they think terrorists are training. I'm more appalled at the idea they keep track of book purchases (and yes, I know they've been doing it and that good bookstores refuse to let them look at the records) than by the portrayal of agents as so uncreative as to focus on almanacs.
I heard that story too, Nancy. Wasn't it introduced with a bumper about how now parents should let their daughters jump on the beds?
I think you're underestimating your explanation #4, since Teresa herself is a recovering Mormon, who wrote a most excellent essay about the time she was excommunicated.
At work we rotate through two weeks' worth of tape backups. We've had to use a backup once, and the previous day's tape was corrupted, but the day before that wasn't.
I feel your pain. When I was a child, at least twice we moved with only the clothes on our backs. I hope everything turns out better than you expect.
Ben, I'm also a Native Oregonian. My boss brought the op-ed to me to photocopy for our files. When I think about how hard we had to work to get her to agree to testify -- grrrrr. Phone calls and letters and more. It is part of the court record that she was granted immunity from criminal prosecution at least in part so she would testify against Sizemore.
There is so much background here I don't know where to start. That Ms. Miller herself participated willingly for months if not years in the fraud that was the subject of the lawsuit is only the beginning. Although her testimony at the RICO trial was inspiring (I was there for part of it and have read the transcript of her testimony), I suspect this battlefield conversion is to protect her self-image and remediate (at least in her own mind) some of the damage she and her employer did to the initiative process in this state.
I hope her op-ed gets *wide* distribution and affects the people she intends to affect.
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| 2005 | 1 |
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