Let me second Mez @90; any text (be it a blog post or a novel) that refers to any American TV personality generally leaves me going "whut? who?" ... I've heard of Walter Cronkite, but couldn't picture his face or recognize his voice; anyone below that level is a placeholder or cipher. This stuff really doesn't travel, even if it can be used to establish a sense of place to those who're familiar with the refernece points.
Patrick, I'm with you in principle -- I, too, like fiction that's relevant to real life.
I fear it's a minority pursuit, though: there seems to be a growing segment of the population out there who just don't get metaphor, these days. (Maybe I've been sensitized by recent events on my blog, but: it certainly rubbed my nose in the phenomenon.)
mds: it's coming along: first draft is one-third written. On the other hand? Anyone expecting another book about MMOs and gaming is going to be disappointed.
NB: I want to second Cory's plug for The Caryatids. It's one of those significant novels that is going to be cited over the next decade as being hugely influential ... (by folks like me).
Engaging with the near-present in SF is hard. It's no surprise so few authors are trying to write this sort of stuff -- the world we're living in today looks like the result of a collaboration between Philip K. Dick and John Brunner.
(This is not to say that it isn't worth attempting, of course. But easy? Hell, no. Sparkly vampires and space dreadnoughts, those are easy. But engaging with healthcare reform, climate change, and the political consequences of the bandwidth explosion? Before you go here you've got to actually try to understand the present, and all the maps of the territory in question are by definition out of date.)
fidelio @15: I note that Keegan was born in 1934, and so is presumably 75. This sounds to me like a combination of little or no research assistants, a failing memory (Alzheimer's, anyone?) and editors who didn't bother editing because they were overworked and knew Keegan was a star who could be trusted to hand in a clean manuscript.
Ouch.
... And I just had a 3200 word day.
(But I'm about to stop. Off to Oslo on Thursday for the Oslo SF Festival. Home on Monday evening, then off by car to Novacon in Nottingham the following Thursday morning, and not home until the Tuesday after that. I've basically got two working days available in the next two weeks; experience shows there's no point even trying until I've got enough of a clear run to make some headway.)
I just burped up 2500 more words of "Rule 34" today.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow, The Toymaker gets up to his elbows in gore, and the body count begins to rise ...
I'm not doing NaNoWriMo. I'm 28K words into the current novel already, and it's not going to stop in 50K, and anyway, I've got two conventions and a CEM to grovel over this month (which kind of gets in the way of accidentally dashing off a long novella).
On the other hand: some SF plots.
Also: 42 essential 3rd act plot twists.
And finally: the Turkey City lexicon.
@59: I think any example contrasting workers and union reps is a bad one for the iron law of bureaucracy. Because the union reps aren't there to build an empire within the institution (the police force); they're there to represent the interests of their constituency, and as such, politicking is part of the package.
Now, the US healthcare insurance bureaucracy would be a classic example of the iron law in progress. Especially as there's enough money sloshing around the host organism to keep them well-fed.
While I don't like Pournelle's specific example[*], his iron law of bureaucracy seems to be an emergent truth of management: once you hit the upper limit of the number of people who can be managed by a single manager, the organisation responds by installing multiple managers, who then need to spend a chunk of their time coordinating between them rather than organizing the primary productive workers ... and the scope for empire-building emerges, which is easier than trying to manage yourself out of a job.
[*] Why go after union reps when there's non-teaching management, for example? Grinding political axes[**] in public is seldom pretty ...
[**] Yes, yes, bad pun. So bite me.
abi: I was in the Edinburgh freecycle list a few years ago but dropped out due to being unable to keep up with the volume of stuff. I may rejoin: freecycling has a certain appeal. But? The official Freecycle™ guys? Can kiss my goatse. Especially after that bunch of legalese-encrusted garbage they just horked up.
(I really don't approve of centralizing control freakery.)
OtterB: I've seen the Northern Lights just once in Edinburgh, during a spectacular solar storm a few years ago. Normally they don't get this far south, and if they do, it's frequently overcast, and if the sky's clear -- you're in a city, and there's a gas refinery on the north shore of the Firth that tends to light up the sky even if the street lights don't.
Caroline @63: I have a big-ass Lumie Brightspark light box (bought in John Lewis) for by-the-desk duty, and a portable rechargable LED box (same manufacturer) for travel. They work, but they're not cheap (£140 each -- I bought one in 2007 and the other last week). In general, decent SAD lamps aren't cheap -- they're very powerful daylight-spectrum lights rather than mass-produced kit. (The Brightspark is a 55 watt fluorescent tube system, to put it in perspective -- about equivalent to 300 watts of tungsten bulb.)
OtterB: by February the long nights will be slowly getting shorter -- but it can be the coldest time of year. Expect nighttime temperatures around freezing, and daytime temperatures not much higher -- unless there's one of the once-every-three-years arctic cold snaps, in which case it can get down to a wind chill of minus ten or lower.
As of next April, I'll have lived in Edinburgh for 15 years. Came for a job, stayed after the company went bust.
Yes, the long winter nights can be a bit grim -- despite the temperate climate, we're fifty miles north of Moscow here -- but I've found that a high-power SAD lamp helps immensely. (The only trouble is realizing that it's SAD when I start to feel run-down -- it happens a few days earlier with each passing year.)
Other aspects of Edinburgh life can also be annoying. During the Festival and Fringe, it's impossible to get into my favourite restaurants or pubs due to the wall-to-wall tourists, and the charm of omnipresent performing arts wears off after the first decade. And it's a pain to get from Edinburgh to anywhere else (except Glasgow) -- the trains have become progressively worse, the airport is bursting at the seams, and the A1 (the main road leading south) is still single carriageway for most of the journey through the borders (so you run a constant obstacle course of trucks obeying the 40mph heavy vehicle speed limit on such roads).
But the architecture, the people, and the beer ... it's not somewhere I would leave easily.
Nightsky @50: On the other hand, "Peggy Sue et le Fantomas" might actually be quite amusing.
We now return you to your regular scheduled bumbling killer ...
David Sucher @52: I'm not an Obama voter.
I suspect there are many others here who aren't, either.
This is a "not George Bush" award only to the extent that George W. Bush was in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize the way I'm in the running for a Gold Medal in the long jump at the next Olympics.
Personally, I think it's premature unless the incentive thing is taken into account -- but it's not wholly inappropriate. Breaking the logjam with Russia over nuclear disarmament is only part of it -- the START-2 treaty was due to expire and the Russians were making alarming noises about re-arming until Obama cancelled the eastern European ABM sites. He also managed to use the ABM cancelation to get Russia on team for dealing with Iran; the importance of this shouldn't be underestimated. Bush's approach to diplomacy was to world affairs as Florence Foster Jenkins was to music -- and now we've got a competent performer back on the stage, the contrast is all the more marked.
Bruce: note the tendency of schizophrenics to self-medicate with whatever comes to hand. For example, a recent study reported on in Scientific American noted that 85% of diagnosed schizophrenics smoke, compared to 10-20% of the general population: nicotine helps a little (at first) with the symptoms. I'd bet money that the correlation between cannabis consumption and schizophrenia is a causal link, but not in the direction drug warriors want it to be: rather, cannabis damps down the symptoms a little, so schizophrenics self-medicate.
Now note the proportion of the prison population (in the USA or the UK) with mental health problems. What explanatory hypothesis leaps to mind ...?
No problems, Lexica. The UK is ... not noted for forest fires. Tends to be a little too moist, climate-wise. (On the other hand? Charging someone who carelessly litters with a mandatory-death-penalty offense -- the 18th century equivalent of a terrorist attack on a naval base with weapons of mass destruction -- is a little over the top by any standards.)
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