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[Dec. 9th, 2009|11:48 pm] |
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I may have found evidence to disprove the notion (popular among the members of my offline writers' circle) that I'll read any piece of fiction that has military stuff in it. As of now, I find Catch-22 a rather slow and repetitive read, sometimes even boring; I probably can muster enough willpower to read it to the end, but afterwards I suspect I'm going to trade it back to the used-book store I got it from rather than keeping it for later rereads. |
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| STUPID LAKE EFFECT |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|11:30 am] |
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No, see, the thing about the first snowfall of the year is that it works better if there's snow. The first slushfall just doesn't have the same ring. |
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| Afternoon Tea: Alcoholic edition |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
Originally Posted at Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog.
Since my life seems to be slightly dominated by social drinking obligations (I say obligations but what I really mean is opportunities), I thought I’d dedicate this Afternoon Tea to my alcoholic beverage of choice: BEER!
First up, would you pay £68 for six bottles of space beer? A bit of a cheeky misnomer but it doesn’t look like they are having a problem with orders.
Boys, you have another reason to have that pint. So when go come back to your Significant Others’ smelling like a brewry, you can say it was for your health. But watch out for excess. Although I think Brewdog has a point, is stating on the label that sometimes you need to have excess and this particular bottle is for those times promoting alcohol consumption? Or is a 24 pack of lager in major chain stores for less than one bottle of brewdog (which is sold only online and in specialty shops), excess? It could be tip of the ice berg type thing; so if they allow brewdog to have that label, would they have to do the same for other brands? Brewdog does do exceedingly good beer, so if you ever come across one I suggest you have a moment of excess.
I want to attempt some home brewing/distilling this summer but not to this degree!
http://bunny-comic.com/
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| Arctic Blast from the Past |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|05:01 am] |
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http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011956.html With the first major snowstorm of the winter bearing down on us, it's time to list some of the cold-weather stuff I've posted over the years, in one convenient place:
First comes Cold Blows the WInd Today. It's a brief note on hypothermia. Very brief. Just a single screen. None of the really horrifying detail about blebs and such that I could have used. The take-away lesson is that cold kills. Don't let it kill you. The comment thread is over 400 entries long, and filled with good stuff.
Snowed In. A review of a book about the Donner Party.
Stop, Drop, and Roll. Winter time brings new hazards, including heaters that produce carbon monoxide. Some notes on same. Over a hundred comments.
Happy stuff: Cold Weather Drinks, including my favorite, Hot Lemonade.
Weather outside: Frightful. My local weather. Lucky me! (Hey, I volunteered to live here.)
Dashing Through the Snow. How to drive in a snowstorm. Short version: Don't. Longer version: If you must, then slowly, and only if you have good snow tires.
Snowday. Ah, storms past! We gots photos!
Fimbul Winter. From last year's Snowpocalypse. Over two hundred comments, and all of them worth reading. |
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In which ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) night__watch avoids deep thoughts |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|10:05 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  despondent (ant?) | ] |
I could indulge in another thrilling philosophical treatise, in which I expound on themes such as truth, beauty and the seeming futility of life (as ably demonstrated by the meeting currently occurring in Copenhagen). I could talk about our country's apparent indifference to the threats, like climate change, that our lifestyle creates as a by-product. I could talk about how I'm going to educate people about how to do things differently.
Or, I could post a webcomic.
( guess which one I chose )
Yup. |
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| Weather reports |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|11:51 pm] |
Here: Alternately cold and mild. A number of trees have delicate little blossoms all over them, eagerly embracing December as if it were spring. In Canterbury Cathedral's leaf-cleaned courtyards, I can almost believe it is spring too.
Des Moines: 13-15 inches of snow, with gusts and drifts. Many places are shutting down, closed against the increased challenge of traveling in the weather. The roads are slippery. The airport is closed. |
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| FESTIVE WRAPPING |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|05:35 pm] |
A block north of Queen on Bathurst some artistic soul has covered a row of ring-and-post bicycle racks in red and white wrapping paper. They look very cheerful.
I, too, decorated my house for the holidays this weekend. Okay, by 'decorated' I mean 'cleaned', but hey: things are all sparkly, and it only happens a couple times a year. Thus, decorated. |
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| Christmas Special |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|03:33 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
The end of the year is almost upon us, and the holidays are bearing down like a freight train, so it must be time for a Christmas sale.
From now until the end of the year, I'm offering special discounts on three of the hardcover books offered on the Signed Books page of my website.
The Meisha Merlin trade hardcover of TUF VOYAGING, with a cover by Michael Komarck and interior illustrations by Janet Aulisio, normally sells for $29.
The Bantam Spectra hardcover reissue of WINDHAVEN, my collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, sells for $26 on the website.
And INSIDE STRAIGHT, first volume in Tor's new Wild Cards triad, goes for $27.
You can also get all three of these books for $69.
But those are the normal prices. From now through the end of the year, as a Christmas special, I'm offering each of the hardcovers for $20, or all three for $57.
Those prices include Book Rate (Media Mail) shipping within the United States. If you would prefer Priority Mail, please add $5 for a single book, or $10 for more than one. Overseas and out-of-country shipping is more; please inquire.
And of course I'm always willing to sign and inscribe the books.
Happy holidays, and good reading.
Note from the Assistant's desk:
Please email grrmbooks@gmail.com with questions regarding ordering or international shipping rates. |
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| Marvelous Miniatures |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|11:06 am] |
Just wanted to share some more of the wonderful Ice & Fire miniatures from Dark Sword.
First, some lovely painted versions of Prince Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper of Dorne, and Ser Gregor Clegane, the Mountain That Rides, dueling for the life of Tyrion Lannister. Tom Meier did the sculpts, and Matt Verzani painted these for the Dark Sword studio collection.
Prince Oberyn:
The Mountain:
The Duel:
Tom is always so exacting about scale and size with his sculpts; I love how this pairing brings home Ser Gregor's monstrous size in such a vivid and visceral way. And of course Matt has done a wonderful job with the paint, as always.
And while Matt's been busy with his brush, Tom has been sculpting up a storm in his studio, and we have some great new greens to add to the range. These aren't in production yet, but look for them soon.
Here's Arya:
And Sansa:
Lady Catelyn:
And a personal favorite, Sansa building her snow castle at the Eyrie:
For more information and pictures, visit the Dark Sword website at http://darkswordminiatures.com/ And remember, miniatures make wonderful stocking stuffers for all the Ice & Fire fans in the family. |
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| screw that |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|01:01 pm] |
i am really annoyed with things today. well, kind of weird. i sent an email out at 4 a.m. to the Stephen Lewis foundation saying I want to get my school fundraising to build a clinic in Africa. The woman wrote back with her number, saying to call so we could chat about it! yikes! I didn't mean to get started on this today or immediately. More like in a few months when I've got more time. Anyhow, I will call her probably tomorrow after my class' exam. How cool would that be if I get to build a clinic in Africa (well, raise the money for it)? I'd feel like I'd really done something important in the world! I didn't get to save lives as a doctor, but I got to help someone else save lives. Then again, maybe she will lambast me for being a naive idiot. I doubt it, though. She probably wouldn't have responded. All the same, I think that this could be a good thing overall.
Other than that, I am still struggling with the twitter block. I still don't understand it entirely. I still don't understand why my attachment is so hard to give up. What am I getting from this relationship or this connection that I am so attached to? It's sometimes so hard to get at the root of one's own psyche. For some people, its easy. I can point to a person and say, "Oh they did X because they had to prove something to themselves after incident Y." But for me, I'm not entirely sure what drives me or drives hope or makes me want to see this person as better than he was. He wasn't so good or great. I think I was unhappy with him and stressed out. It was fueled entirely on the momentum of the passion (and it wasn't like the first time I'd experienced passion... I can't call it a novelty). The things I liked best about him were traits that one can find in many others. I just don't know where this whole insane katowing is coming from. It sort of freaks me out a little. Blech. I'm mad at me a little.
Anyway, yeah, that whole thing is annoying me.
And being told by my colleague that building a medical clinic was colonialization also annoyed me.
I really have the thinnest skin on the planet. I need to toughen up a little, embrace a little more challenge to my pov.
Other than that, I'm tired and exhausted today. I have to run, go to dance class, do some yoga... I am feeling no motivation for any of it. Blech. wehn will i get healthy again???? |
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| Whisperado in Brooklyn |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|03:53 pm] |
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http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011955.html I'm trying to remember to mention Whisperado gigs a little earlier than the morning of the event itself. Hey! Whisperado will play the venerable Brooklyn dive Hank's Saloon, at Atlantic and Third Avenues, on Wednesday, December 30, at 8:30 PM. Get started on your New Year's Eve drinking 24 hours early while listening to new songs, new arrangements, new harmonies, and new lame stage patter. Forthcoming soon: news of our full-length CD, the recording of which is proceeding with the sprightly alacrity characteristic of all the best geological processes. |
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| Afternoon Tea |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
Originally Posted at Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog.
While your resident Big Bad Blogger is off enjoying the sunshine, I thought I might supply you with some science this afternoon.
First up, perhaps Scotland is more different than we all realised. It’s kind of interesting to realize how much astrophysics can be done with the debris that’s found it’s way down to our little planet. Granted, it can also cause a great amount of controversy. Which is really the fun bit of science (unless it is a hot button issue like climate change perhaps!)
A big well, duh for anyone who follows Canadian news. I doubt this is how anyone at home would like to see Canada’s international reputation being built. No doubt the environmental and political fallout (both international and domestic) will lead to some interesting election discussion. I wonder if the parties proping up a minority government will balance their environmental priorities with regular political maneuvering.
While we don’t get much snow here in the United Kingom, tis the season for snowflake science!
www.cutebutsad.co.uk (for all badger advent-calendar related goodness)
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| jerks abound |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|04:29 am] |
So, I have this lifelong goal. I am going to help pay for a medical clinic to be built in Africa. I have seen way too many documentaries and fallen under their spell. So I told my idea to a colleague who poo-poo-ed it as colonialism. My jaw hit the floor and I was very upset.
I realize I need a thicker skin when it comes to supporting my ideas. I should not be so upset, and yet I am.
Clearly, there are other forces at work in my head. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|10:26 pm] |
I'm writing a seminar paper on the laws concerning women in the fueros of Spain, and I've come across a bit of vocabulary that has me stumped (and the usual Latin references aren't clarifying things for me any further.) I was hoping someone with more experience either in Spanish history or in legal history in general might be able to help me.
Here's the problem: I've come across the word calonia/caloniam a few times in my readings, and I can't figure out what exactly it means. The context of the word is here:
"Et si aliquis eorum cum aliqua muliere, excepta maritata, fecisset fornicationem voluntate mulieris, non habuisset caloniam."
My best guess is that it's an idiosyncratically Spanish orthographic variation on calumnia and so has something to do with bringing false charges against sometime (which makes sense because the next line talks about the penalties if the woman does not consent.) My own searches for the word seem to indicate that it only appears in a few Spanish law codes, so I think that if it's not an orthographic variant, it must be very particular, local term. It's my first time really dealing with Spanish Law, so I was hoping that someone else here might be able to either verify this or shed some light on it? Maybe point me out to a reference book I may have missed?
Thanks! |
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| I Got Yer Contemporary Urban Catholic Fantasy *Right Here* |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|02:22 am] |
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http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011954.html  Tomorrow, the 8th of December, 2009, will see the re-publication in trade paperback of my novel, The Apocalypse Door. It is a thriller, a spy story, a mystery, a bit autobiographical, a devotion, an explication, and doctrinally correct. It was edited by the perspicacious Claire Eddy.
Here is a review, by Norman Spinrad.
Here is the first chapter.
I humbly beg all who wish to buy a copy to do so, not at Amazon, but by going down to their friendly local big-box bookstore and getting one off the shelf. And I further beg that all who will do so, may do so, sooner rather than later. This will be a positive good.
The main character, Peter Crossman, Knight of the Temple, has appeared in three short stories as well as this novel. (I am, as we speak, at work on another novel, and another short story.) Mr. Patrick reprinted one of those earlier short stories in his New Magics anthology.
- The Apocalypse Door
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Tor Books (December 8, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765306085
- ISBN-13: 978-0765306081
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| More book reviews |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|12:16 am] |
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http://limyaael.insanejournal.com/546512.html More books I finished recently, this time reading for my dissertation.
George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors
A Victorian novel by one of the authors I’m studying, which I’d read before, but found much more satisfying this time. It’s the story of Victor Radnor, the “conqueror” who has made his fortune in business and now thinks he’s going to enter on a scene of social triumph by establishing himself in a new home, Lakelands, and running for Parliament. He’s tried to establish himself twice before, but each time his neighbors discovered he is not actually married to the woman, Nataly, who passes for his wife—Victor’s legal wife, Mrs. Burman, whom he abandoned, is still alive—and ran them out of the neighborhood. Victor is pushing for Lakelands despite Nataly’s fear that the same thing will happen again. He’s also trying to contract a prestigious marriage for their illegitimate daughter, Nesta (who doesn’t know she’s illegitimate), though Nataly also opposes this.
This is an incredibly subtle and cruel novel when it comes to the psychology of the characters. As Victor sees it, Nataly is hounded by the persecution of a world that can’t recognize true love when it sees it and by Mrs. Burman, but he’s the main aggressor. He tortures her to death, never realizing what’s happening. Nataly, who has gone along with his plans for years, cannot bring herself to make more than token protests. The silence stifles her, and so does her fear of what Nesta will say when she finds out the truth about her birth. When Nesta befriends a “fallen” woman named Judith Marsett, things become even worse for Nataly. She doesn’t want her daughter to suffer the same things she did, and her love for Nesta turns into an obsessive concern about Nesta’s “purity.”
As usual, Meredith spares none of his characters, except maybe Nesta, who is stronger and braver than her parents, and Dartrey Fenellan, Nesta’s love interest. (One of the interesting things about Meredith’s later novels is that he reverses the usual gender dynamic and turns the admirable men into love interests and rewards for his heroines, who he is really more interested in). Nesta’s growth toward truth and love and a feeling of kinship with the women her mother has tried to keep her away from is about the only beam of sunlight in a novel that’s otherwise absolutely radiant with despair; you watch the inevitable happening and you can’t do anything to stop it. There is a reason—besides his continual deep flaws of style and structure—that Meredith was considered in the 1890s, when this novel was published, a great but not a popular writer.
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place
These are biographies of Charles Darwin—massive biographies of Darwin. They clock in at around 500 pages each. This is partially because Browne’s interested in establishing the historical and scientific context of Darwin’s work along with the facts about his life, and in analyzing his books, and in analyzing the books of other scientists, like T. H. Huxley and Charles Lyell, who supported Darwin, influenced him, and wrote in response to him. They take an awful lot of time to read, but they’re worth it. The first one covers his life up to about 1858, the year before the publication of The Origin of Species, and the second part is, of course, dominated by his publishing.
Browne makes a major point about Darwin’s correspondence and how his thousands upon thousands of letters helped him pull in information, assemble it, and recruit helpers who could pass along animal skins, feathers, observations, live animals, and books that further added to his pile of facts. She describes Darwin as a spider in the center of a web, and the metaphor is accurate. There is no way that Darwin could have gotten all of his observations by himself—especially since a large part of his life was spent in poor health and he couldn’t have traveled around the world to all the places he needed to see—but he could get, and use, them second-hand.
Browne also scatters the books with plenty of the fascinating little facts that help make biographies amusing. Darwin once stayed very still so that he could watch a wasp that was drinking out of his eye; he wrote indignantly as early as 1838 about how stupid people were to judge all animals by their own standards and how a bee would undoubtedly view humans as hopelessly backward in the instinct department; he liked trashy romance books that had pretty girls and happy endings; he was passionately interested in earthworms, molluscs, ants, beetles, and all sorts of “lesser creatures” that many people think of as neither interesting or likely to be so. He also got along well with his devout wife, Emma, and shared a full and busy life with her even though she knew full well that he couldn’t accept the existence of a benevolent God.
Incredibly rich books that depict an incredibly rich personality.
Anna K. Nardo, George Eliot’s Dialogue With John Milton
Nardo’s book, which was published in 2003, takes issue with one of the foundational ideas of feminist criticism about George Eliot: that she was dominated by her response to John Milton and never broke free of him. Instead, according to Nardo, Eliot did feel free to argue with Milton, to transform aspects of Paradise Lost into scenes in her own novels—scenes sometimes played straight and sometimes subverted—and to mock various legends that circulated about him.
The first chapter of this book is a long recapitulation of stories circulated about Milton in the 1700s and 1800s, stories that would have been familiar to Eliot’s audience and are almost lost to us now. The first was a story about Milton falling in love, either with an Italian singer or with a woman (probably Italian) who fell in love with him after seeing him asleep and whose face, barely seeing it, he mistook for an angel’s. (In some versions these are the same person; he supposedly met his admirer in Italy later and recognized her as the model of his “angel”). However, when he returned to England, he nobly gave up love in pursuit of the national ideal that led him to write Paradise Lost. The only trace of his lost love, according to this legend, is found in his version of Eve. The second story deals with Milton’s daughters, whom—depending on which author you read—either betrayed him by selling his books and tormenting him after he went blind, or who were “serviceable” to him and his art by recording his poetry and reading books in other languages, mainly Latin and Greek, that he taught them to scan but not comprehend. This story can be twisted to give different perspectives on female service to male creativity and female rebellion.
I’d known about a few of these resonances before, since I’ve been reading Eliot novels and criticism about Eliot for the past three years. But I hadn’t realized it went further than just the gentle mockery of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch when she wishes that she could marry a Milton figure because she would know how to value him and appreciate his learning, unlike his daughters, whom she thinks were awful. I find criticism fascinating that digs up a whole perspective I didn’t realize was there and explains it clearly enough that I can understand it.
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| Cupcakes |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|11:46 pm] |
I don't need to eat any more cupcakes right now, thank you. I've had quite enough this evening and I didn't even have a whole one. Our group of ten people, sharing a table, plates, and knives at Iron Cupcake, split something like 25 cupcakes ten-ways each. We didn't even sample the whole range of cupcakes in competition. There were - I forget - 32? 42? kinds of cupcakes competing for the best Christmas-themed cupcake prize. A lot of cupcakes.
( On eating some cupcakes - with photos... )
The real thrill of the evening, however, was that hungry_pixel came second place in the overall competition. Her "Ode to Panettone" was one of the real standouts, the lovely, smooth chestnut cream dominating the delicate notes of candied citrus. Best of all, it's her first ribbon, the first prize that she has won herself - as opposed to the dozens - hundreds? - decorating her walls already, all brought home by her cats.
( Ode to Cupcake )
Afterward, all cupcaked out, double0hilly and I renewed ourselves with salad, wonderful, fresh, green salad, and meat, a refreshing antidote to a surfeit of cupcake. |
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