How in the world did it take him so long to figure out this was a giant box?!?!?!

I never met Mike Ford, though my acquaintance with him goes back many years. When I was very young I read the early Star Trek books. My favorite was The Final Reflection, a book that delved into the history of Klingons at a time when very little had been done on the subject.

Later, when I was interested in the role-playing game Paranoia, I picked up a module called The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. It was funny as hell, though I expect the Cold War-era humor is now dated to those who didn’t grow up in the war’s long shadow.

After that I read whatever of his I could get my hands on. His second Star Trek novel, How Much For Just The Planet?, was a farce that had Gilbert and Sullivan, jabs at Paramount, and more Klingons. Growing Up Weightless was a beautiful coming-of-age tale set on the moon. The Dragon Waiting was an alternate-history story set during the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III and that involved vampires.

From this you may start to appreciate how varied his output was. It was also much smaller than I would have liked. Fortunately for me, I discovered his postings at Making Light, the blog of Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a pair of book editors for Tor. Mike’s posts were entertaining and wild — his knowledge was wide-ranging and astounding, and he weilded language with verve and skill. Occasionally he’d post something that I would force my friends to read, like Harry of Five Points, where he took Henry V and turned it into a gangster play.

He died today, cause as of yet unknown. I’d always meant to tell him how much I enjoyed his books and his posts. Now I never will.

Jessica tagged me with four words. I’ve always wondered if this is supposed to carry some deep, insightful meaning for the person tagging. Jess, you will have to tell me if you learn something deep about me.

1. Cold – looking forward to it! This summer has been way too hot for me. I especially want to take Eli ice skating this winter. I figure that’s gotta be good for some laughs.

2. Beauty – this one is hard. there are lots of things that I think are beautiful. but probably my favorite beautiful thing is our church. I love the people there and I love that they are honest and committed to living in community with each other and God.

3. Green – my favorite color and what my desktop looks like right now.

My favorite green though is fresh cut grass.

4. Book – I immediately think of this journal that my three best friends and I wrote in in high school. We called it “The Book” for lack of creativity. I made them all copies a couple of years ago when one of them got married. Next, I think that we are being overwhelmed in our house by all of the books. We need more shelving!

And now I’m supposed to tag four people. Ha ha to you, suckas!
1. Stephen
2. Lana Bob!
3. Rachel
4. Amy, cause I know she’ll never do it in a million years.

Your words:
1. help
2. monster
3. yellow
4. fish

I enjoy reading explanations of how to deal with extreme circumstances like being chased by killer bees or having to jump from a building into a dumpster. I had a good time leafing through various Worst Case Scenarios books in the bookstore. Thus I was pleased to find an explanation of how to survive a long fall.

Relax. Relaxing during a long fall-especially as you near the ground is easier said than done, but try anyway…. One way to remain (relatively) calm is to focus on performing the steps and being aware of your body. Doing so gives you something else to think about besides impending death.

And now you know what to do the next time an evil villian thrusts you from a plane without a parachute.

I started to break these two reviews into two entries but then decided it was more entertaining seeing them together. It shows how much broader my reading habits have become over the past couple of years.

Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
by Bruce Feiler

I finished Walking the Bible a while back and at the end, it was mostly a testament of my persistence. The book was long and while it started out and ended strong as with the actual bible, we got lost in the desert for a while in the middle.

For me there are two highlights in this book. One is watching Bruce come to terms with his faith struggle. I had never given much thought to folks of religions other than mine dealing with the same sort of struggles that I do. I didn’t think that people couldn’t have those struggles in other religions, I just grew up in the fairly homogenous south so (until pretty recently) didn’t know people of other faiths to see it first hand. There seems to me to be something unifying for all of us to be struggling with some of the same questions and interestingly enough, occasionally coming up with the same answers.

The other interesting bit for me was watching him try to come to terms with being Jewish and sharing the same holy land with Muslims. He talks about the uneasy cohabitation of Hebron early in the book but is very detached and able to explain it away with a nice metaphor.

After 300 pages of walking in Moses footsteps, he’s not nearly so detached. Bruce and his guide, Avner Goren, have dinner in the desert with some bedouin after a long day of travel and they all start comparing notes on the Bible and the Koran. Bruce gets frustrated with the Koran’s telling of a particular story and has to get up and walk away from the conversation.

For so much of this trip, I realized, I had allowed myself to get caught up in the emotional awaking I had been experiencing. If I could feel a growing openness in myself, if I could sense a similar feeling in Rami, Ofer, Father Justin, and countless other people we met, if I could picture a world full of ecumenical desert people, in touch with their inner selves, riding a wave of sand-hewn memories to international peace and togetherness, then surely it could happen. Surely we could forget the centuries of wars that have been fought over these stories. Surely we could overlook the millennia of bad faith that have been engendered by these stories. Surely we could remove these stories form politics, religion, and geography, and view them instead as a universal sourcebook offering readers a guide to spiritual emancipation and personal fulfillment. Surely, in other words, we could forget the things that drew me into this project—the archaeology and history that firmly anchor them in a time and place—and focus instead on the more universal qualities of reading the book—the internal growth and reaching toward God. Couldn’t we?

After this internal soliloquy, Avner steps out to check on him and offers his two cents.

“Mahmoud said, ‘God created everything,’ and I agreed. So in the end, they are the people of God, and so are we. He said it, and I said it, too: ‘It’s the same God.'”

Were it that the world could be wrapped up so easily as the plot line in books.

Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson

Stephen had already bought and read a copy of this book when it won the Hugo at the end of August. I asked him if he thought I’d like it and he said, “Um, maybe?” Which is to say that after ten years he still can’t peg what I will like short of a bodice buster. So I put it to the Paul test. Our friend, Paul, from college had a habit of reading the first line of the book and deciding from that if he would like it and continue to read it.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

I decided that I’d read that. And was immediately sucked into the spin. Part mystery, part ill-fated love story, mostly sci-fi, it’s a rocking good time that once you’ve read it, it’ll will have you looking toward the sky in a whole new way.

I am often amazed by the ideas writers come up with. Perhaps it’s because I’ve such limited storytelling capabilities that I become amazed at the simplest of yarns. I’ve decided that I really enjoy novel sci-fi, mostly because even the tired ideas from the genre are new and exciting to me.

Unfortunately, I can’t really talk too much about plot because I don’t want to unravel it if you haven’t read it already. Go read it and then call me!

So I’ll just say: It’s good. I enjoyed it. It won the Hugo this year. Eli can look at the cover, spell out the letters and say, “Spin!” triumphantly. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.

Eli has taken to asking a rather disturbing question here lately.

“Who’s coming over later?”

Yes, that’s right, people come over to our house so often that Eli regularly asks who is on their way over.

He’s usually disappointed when I say it’s just us for the day.

Gnarls Barkley: Crazy (2006)

This video is one of the tightest I’ve seen in a long time. It’s visually striking, with an endless parade of Rorschach inkblots in which the faces of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse appear. It’s thematically apropriate, what with the use of inkblots as a psychological test and the song’s subject matter. It’s focused, creating a visual language and sticking with that, and yet it’s not static, the inkblots moving from abstract shapes to much more explicitly concrete images as the video progresses.

Plus I always liked how good of a rebounder Barkley was.

Pham Quynh Anh & Marc Lavoine: J’espère (2005)

I am not crazy about the song, but I do enjoy the visuals. It’s as if the creator saw the Gnarls Barkley video and said, “That’s cool and all, but it needs more of everything.” I’m pretty sure the video for J’espère predates the one for Crazy, but let me have my illusions.

(A tip of the hat to Storme for pointing this video out to me.)

The following post has minor spoilers for the TV show Jericho. You have been warned.

Last night, Misty, Lana Bob! and I watched the pilot episode of Jericho, a new CBS show. Jericho is a small town somewhere in Kansas. Various characters are introduced, enough interpersonal conflicts are laid out to generate a season or two worth of episodes — and then there’s a nuclear explosion rising from Denver to the west.

Going into the series, I knew Jericho was about a community dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. I was certain that meant there would be mushroom clouds rising in the distance. I was ready for the roiling clouds of destruction, and I wasn’t disappointed.

What I wasn’t ready for was my reaction to the sight of that cloud rising in the distance, reflected in the windows of a school bus, glimpsed over the trees. Panic gripped me and I could not look away.

Growing up, I didn’t think much about nuclear war. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t dwell on it. I remember finding a book in the Ouachita library that documented the US nuclear tests of the 1950s at the Nevada Proving Grounds. It had page after page of pictures showing houses and other structures before and after a nuclear blast. The book was a product of the era that brought us The House in the Middle, in which the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association and the Civil Defense Administration admonish us to keep our yards clean lest a nuclear blast set fire to wayward newspapers and other detritus. I was fascinated by the book, but I didn’t connect the images to the reality of the devastation a nuclear war would cause. Unlike my friend Adam Cadre, I didn’t believe I would die in a nuclear war. I didn’t see The Day After. There were no “Duck and Cover” drills in my schools.

In 1989 I attended the Arkansas Governor’s School, a summer educational program that Bill Clinton set up. It was modeled after those in other states, most notably North Carolina, and the idea was simple: gather 400 gifted rising high school seniors and throw them in a six-week hothouse of academic instruction and self-actualization, sprinkled liberally throughout with experiences the students weren’t likely to get elsewhere. Governor’s School is where I saw Koyaanisqatsi and took part in a Holocaust rememberance that involved us packing ourselves into spaces that were equivalent to WW2-era boxcars. It’s also where I first internalized what nuclear war could mean. We watched When the Wind Blows, an animated film in which an elderly British couple in the countryside lives through a nuclear war, though not for long. I walked back to my dorm room and sat on my bed for a long time, staring off into space, sadder than I had been in some time.

My timing couldn’t have been better. While I was at Governor’s School, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union was on its way out, and with it died the Cold War and the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads^*.

Yet somehow I absorbed all of the old Cold War fears. When I saw that mushroom cloud on TV, I had a moment of unreasoning terror. Knowledge I didn’t realize I had flooded back into me: If they’re 30 miles or more away, they won’t be blinded, and they’re probably a couple of hundred miles away. One-over-r-squared means the gamma radiation won’t be a major concern, nor will neutron activation of the soil be a problem. Fallout will the true danger. Are the prevailing winds in that area easterly? They should have anywhere from a day to a week before the fallout reaches them.

How did that become so deeply burned into my brain that I could pull it out at a moment’s notice? A single warhead from a Trident’s MIRV is around 100 kilotons — not great but not too bad — but we’ve got bombs with a megaton yield still in active service. When did the fear of nuclear holocaust become part of my childhood, intertwined around happier memories like kudzu enveloping a tree? Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were 15 to 20 kilotons, and the tactical “briefcase” nuke was around 1 kiloton; a terrorist bomb would likely be somewhere between those.

I have no idea if others my age and older have the same reaction. I’m certain younger people don’t. They don’t look at how close they are to a major city or military base to decide if they’ll die in the first strike or linger on and face starvation and radiation sickness. When they visit sites showing the damage a bomb would do due to overpressure^**, they don’t have the same visceral reaction I do. They don’t imagine themselves becoming nothing but shadows burned into concrete sidewalks, shadows that mark where they stood when the bombs fell. Thank goodness Eli and his friends won’t grow up having drunk deep from the juice of that rotten apple from the tree of knowledge.

Oh, yeah, the show itself. Decent, with some uneven writing and a couple of gut-punching twists. Some “why don’t they…?” moments — for instance, when the phones and TV transmissions go dead, why doesn’t anyone check the Internet, given that it was designed for just this contingency? Perhaps everyone used dialup and Denver ISP. I was anxious from the moment the mushroom cloud rose into the air until nearly the end of the episode. I expect any teenagers watching it said, “Whoa, cool.”

On my way to a lunch appointment today I saw a jet contrail rising vertically into the air. I thought of missiles streaking through the sky, carrying deadly payloads and announcing to all who saw them launch that the end was sure to come in thirty minutes or less. I thought of those who sat in silos and submarines and on whose backs rested the entire world’s fate.

Then I went and had pizza and listened to a technical talk, knowing that nuclear annihilation is now a negligible threat compared to that of the drivers sharing the road with me.

^* Though not really, given that, in 1995, a NASA rocket launched from Norway was mistaken for a Trident-launched nuclear missile. Russia came close to launching a retaliatory strike by mistake. And it’s not like that was the first time we came close to a nuclear exchange. Hope you sleep well!

^** The link is to a Google Maps mashup that shows where the damage zones due to the pressure caused by an atomic explosion would be. For fun, enter “-86.64951, 34.69392” in the longitude and latitude box and press “Go”. That’s a ground-level detonation centered on Redstone Arsenal in the town where I live. At 1,000 kilotons my house is still outside the zones of major overpressure damage, though I make no guarantees about how much of the blast Monte Sano mountain would reflect back our way. Of course, where I work is within the 2 psi zone from a 100 kT blast, so I’d best hope the war happens at night. Hope I sleep well!

WARNING: This post contains graphic descriptions of vomit and the resulting cleanup. Please don’t read any further if you are eating your lunch or if you have a queazy stomach. Just know that we got off to a very bad start this morning…

Also note that Eli had dubbed my long-time friend Alana, Lana Bob! She will be known from now on as Lana Bob! I’ve even changed her link down on the left.

Eli woke me up crying. This should have been my clue that the day would not be a normal one. However, once I got him out of the crib, he seemed fine. We ate breakfast and got ready to go to the gym with Lana Bob! since we didn’t go yesterday. We were about half way there when I heard the retching sounds from the back seat.

Now, in his defense Eli is able to make this combination cough/hiccough/wheeze sound that always gets my attention because when he makes it, it sounds as if vomit is sure to follow. I’m fairly certain that he can now make it on command simply because it always causes my head to whip around as if on ball bearings and since he is a boy, that amuses him. So I was sort of amazed when I whipped my head around this morning and actually witnessed vomit flying out of his mouth.

Thank God that I have a cold this week as that is the only thing that allowed me to drive home without retching myself over the smell. Lana Bob! was not so lucky. As we pulled into the garage, she was frantically trying to get out of the car to keep from throwing up in sympathy.

During the ride home, Eli said multiple times, “I’m okay, Mom.” The interesting part was he did seem to be in better shape than either Lana Bob! or me.

Once we got home came the truly gross part. Removing Eli from the orange vomit covered car seat. I took him into the laundry room and started chucking his clothing straight into the washer. We went from there to the bathtub because of course, taking Eli’s shirt off caused us to get vomit in his hair.

Stephen hadn’t left for work yet so he very kindly, and while dressed in work-approved khakis and polo, removed the car seat from the car and started disassembling it. My clever, clever husband had installed the car seat into the car on top of an old towel, so luckily no Buick Le Sabre’s were harmed in the previously described vomit spree.

After his speedy bath and redressing, I went out to help with the car seat take apart. During that process I got vomit lodged under my fingernails. That’s where I nearly lost it. I assembled the sprayer on the water hose and carted the plastic shell of the seat over to the grass to hose it down, mostly with my eyes closed and trying desperately not to breath through my nose. Also, did I mention that the temperature has dropped noticeably in the past couple of days? It’s noon and still below 70°. So I’m doing this crazy cleaning dance while in my exercise clothes and trying to avoid the frigid water spray.

I find it fascinating how my mind sorta blanked out so I could accomplish the tasks at hand. I’ve often wondered how my mom dealt with vomit when I was a kid. I have such a sensitive nose that Stephen and I made a pact before we had kids that he would deal with the vomit and I would deal with the blood. He apologized as he was leaving for work that he didn’t have time to do more for us this morning. What he doesn’t know was that he did the job I had no idea how I was going to do: get the disgusting car seat out of the car.

I did manage to get the car seat base washed off and all the straps and buckles washed. The seat cover is drying after it’s trip through the washing machine. And we are marooned at home while it all dries. The poor car seat manual was a loss however, since it is rather stupidly stored under the seat. One short call to the manufacturer and I have .pdf of the manual sitting in my inbox. I forwarded it to Stephen so he could print it out double sided.

Through all these machinations poor Lana Bob! was trying to keep her cool and still get ready to go to her lunch meeting/interview with Jessica and Ashley’s company. She was a trooper through it all and managed to head out the door this morning looking cool and put together. Eli has watched his week’s worth of tv just this morning. He’s managed now to keep a whole package of crackers down and drink two cups of water. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if he planned the whole episode just to skip the gym, get to watch tv all morning long, and eat his favorite food, crackers.

Eli is now fully two. He’s as two as you can be and not yet be three or more. One of the ways he exhibits this is in his temper tantrums.

Mind you, his temper tantrums are comparitively small and often cute. But there are times when we are tired or otherwise run down and they drive us crazy. Most of them occur when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants and isn’t willing to be diverted to other things. His lip quivers, his eyes fill with tears, and he CRIES, mouth stretched wide, inconsolable because the world is ending ending ending unless he can have that sharp pointy electrified stick, must have, must have!

What really amuses me, in a “ha ha, I must laugh to keep from killing” way, is how he can turn it off. On occasion he has thrown a fit and we’ve given in after he has added “please” to his request. He takes it, says “thanks, daddy!” and goes on about his business.