How exactly do fundamentalist pro-lifers square Exodus 21:22 with their view that a fetus is indistinguishable from a child in Christian moral terms? I can see how non-fundamentalists can square it - the laws of the Torah are historical and the moralities revealed in the Bible advance with time, from old to new testiment - and I can see how Catholics can square it - the laws of the Church supercede those of the Torah via the Patrimony, etc - but I'm not really clear on how the hard-core by-scripture-alone folks can get away from this:

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

as an establishment of the fetus as an entity of lesser value than a child, implicitly taken under the following "life for life, eye for eye" passage.

None of which gets away from my increasing suspicion that abortion is a worldly evil on a strictly policy level, issues of religion and belief notwithstanding.

Thought encountered via David Plotz's fascinating Blogging the Bible column.

Back from New Jersey. Got talked into helping with their MangaNext project, which is coming up quick in October. Dave & Eugene Cheng were trying to talk each other into being con chair, which is more common on the scene than you'd normally think - people who are good con chairs are rarely eager to take on the job, and people who are eager to be con chairs are rarely good at it if they talk their way in.

MangaNext is a side-project of the non-profit that runs AnimeNext, set up as a "light" or "relaxicon" event in a smaller venue with less intensive programming and, of course, a manga orientation. The big convention has been talking about doing a minicon like this for years out of mind, but it never really got off the ground aside from the comcon, which isn't really open to the public. I think it was because the big honking convention absorbs every resource it can get its tentacles upon, and is more prone to burn out staffers than inspire them to run little versions of the big show. I also sort-of agreed to help with another con down in northern Virginia the month after that, although it isn't certain & set as of yet.

I was working registration like usual, and a girl came up with a copy of her birth certificate as a form of ID. I looked at it, and exclaimed in outrage when I realized that she had been born about three weeks after my first initiation into anime fandom, the end of my freshman year. She was literally younger than my otakudom. An entire generation of cosplaying teenyboppers has spawned since I first had my tiny little mind warped by Ranma 1/2 and Laputa at a PSSFS party.

Ha! American Pie was the only rock album other than Jesus Christ Superstar my parents owned, and I must have listened to that record a hundred times or more growing up. If you get all of the gags in the parody, you badly need to get a life.

Hee hee hee...

Oh, h/t spacemonkey at IMAO.

Really good month for Del Rey manga, BTW. The second volume of School Rumble has made me a real fan of the manga. I mean, I kind of liked the anime, but the material which was just generally OK as animation really shines in the original manga. Jin Koboyashi's art is at the same time cheerfully old-fashioned and highly polished, and the style parodies are broad enough that I can get most of the aesthetic jokes, while still marvelling at the crisp shounen and sports-manga action. It's both a parody and a pitch-perfect exemplar of the styles at the same time. I'm now really looking forward to all of Harima's mangaka scenes in future volumes, now.

While we're on the subject of crackerjack Del Rey manga, ES (Eternal Sabbath) is pretty damned exciting in its own right. I really, really liked mangaka Fuyumi Soryo's melodramatic Mars, but to a certain extent I have written off that enjoyment as an artifact of it being the second shoujo relationship-comic I had read after the extremely ordinary Peach Girl. But ES (Eternal Sabbath) has that same crystalline, chilly high-drama harshness that made Mars so striking, so entertaining, so... brisk. Soryo has a bitter, Puritan sensibility, an alienation and skepticism about human motivations which flirts with Hitoshi Iwaaki's open sociopathy if never actually embracing the darkness of Iwaaki's Parasyte.

ES is technically science-fiction, about a young man (variably named, and I'm not sure which name they're going to settle on past the first volume...) who can read and "hack" human psyches. He uses this talent to slip through society, inserting himself into the lives of people, and living parasitically off of their ideas of who he is. At the same time, he does indulge in mostly-benevolent manipulation of those around him, and Soryo quickly introduces a "moral centre" character in brain physiology researcher Mine Kujyou. But even Kujyou is presented as an alienated individual, one of those borderline-Asberger types who often gravitate towards the hard sciences. Not so much unsympathetic, as half-clueless and totally lacking in social skills - the type who's prone to cheerfully rattle on about reproductive strategies in lions (IE, males killing their young) at an omiai.

The art is striking - especially the pages dealing with "ES"'s perceptions and manipulations of the minds of those he interacts with - but not particularly brilliant or outstanding. Exactly what was required for the subject-matter. A lot more interesting-looking than Mars, but then, Mars was a romance manga with the occasional knife-fight or motorcycle accident thrown in for spice. Apparently Soryo has the chops for ES's more-challenging material. I'm really looking forward to the next volume.

Between a busy work season and a general re-direction of my energy towards small ends, I've been kind of slacking around here, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Sorry about that.

I got talked into going to that charity poker tournament at the State College Knights of Columbus yesterday. I ended up doing really, really poorly - went out inside of the first half-hour with an all-in on "Broadway" - a 10-J-Q-K-A straight. Wouldn't you know that those two kings that came out on the flop matched the two "cowboys" in the other guy's hand, meaning that I had been betting into a perfect four-of-a-kind. Gotta love that "walk of shame", when you're one of the first three or four to walk out of a room of ninety, complete with running camera from one of the local TV stations recording it all for posterity. Oh, well. It was "charity". Although I was told that the Knights do this every month. Dunno what their legal excuse is when they don't have a kid who fell off a balcony as cover.

No, I'm not bitter. A little rueful, maybe. But not bitter.

The Bellefonte Cruise is coming into town this weekend, which means that I'm leaving town. One of Bellefonte's relative virtues is that it's usually a quiet town, aside from the occasional aging biker gang's funereal roar. The Cruise is a definite exception to that general rule. Racing engines, loud PAs, Fifties-revival bands playing in front of the courthouse, and... the stereo contests. The stereo contests right across the street from my apartment. My thin-walled apartment.

See y'all. I'm going to Jersey to staff a convention in Secausus. Don't bother breaking in, I doubt you could get a fence to buy anything in my apartment, unless your fence is a thrift store with a side-line in anime DVDs, SF novels, manga, and Civil War history.

Jason & Dan Wolfe talked me into going along on a caving trip last night, to a place called Tytoona Cave down southeast of Tyrone in Sinking Valley. It's a pretty wet cave in a part of the state which has been honeycombed by quarries & open-pit mines. For some reason I expected it to be slap up against a mountain, but instead we ended up down a nondescript back country road, and a bit of a steep walk down a deep, fairly scenic sinkhole facing a limestone rockface.

You can see the pictures on that website, Tytoona is a flat, horizontal cave of about six hundred feet on a single level, before it "sumps out" and turns into a water-cave where the cave divers *used* to go diving before a woman got turned around & drowned a number of years ago. We were not, of course, cave diving, but rather just splashing around in the safe section of the upper cave.

We were promised "stooped-over" wetness, but it turned out that the last few years of deluges - Ivan among others - had changed the cave a bit, and it turned into a stomach-crawl through chest-deep water about a hundred feet in. I kind of freaked out the first try through, mostly due to Dan's remarkably gonzo approach to the challenge - he porpoised right on through. The prospect of having to do that, in the chilly shock of actually getting down into the water, was a bit much. After I calmed down a bit & followed directly behind him along the sharp pebbly shallow section instead of trying to swim around the other way, I got into the spirit of thing.

There aren't any really grand stalactites, but there was some "flows" that Jason was excited about. There were a number of side-holes going off the main chamber which we passed by on the way in to the back of the cave, the "sump". This is where the air pockets run out, and all the floating crud caught in the cave's creek floats along the surface in a mildly nasty agglomeration of scum. Since we were relying on headlamps, it wasn't too foul, but the scum kept us out of the sump-water, even though Jason and Dan thought that there was a couple dozen more feet to the cave further on, due to slight changes in the lay of the rock.

We found a lost, miserable toad and a bullfrog in this last sumpside gallery, washed downstream along with the rest of the rubbish. We supposed they were surviving on the random bugs also washed into the cave. Other than those, the only living things we encountered were good-sized brown and orange salamanders, which weren't afraid of us. Too blind to see our lights? I didn't bump into any fish, although they must have been in the water.

On the way back, people went crawling into the side-holes, one of which featured a tiny little stream, a remarkably long run of at least fifty feet, and more mud than I had really counted upon. I didn't get all the way back - by the time Dan went in, we realized that it was past sunset & was getting dark outside, and we broke for the exit. At first we forgot about Dan, and I had to turn around & yell that we were leaving. There's a section in this side-hole where the person climbing through either dams up, or pushes forward, the flow of the stream in a quite striking fashion - the first time it happened, I mistook it for the sudden onset of a rainstorm upstream, until someone reminded me of Archimedes' Law.

All in all, a lot of fun, but massive, massive amounts of dirt. Not a clean hobby, spelunking.

[Some history on the cave here.}

No great depression of the 1870s? That's mindwarping. Where's the link, damnit! I want to read more about this, but Google is being obstinant. Here's a review of the most recent book by the author, Charles R. Morris, apparently a financial expert of some repute. He's clearly talking about something which isn't great news to someone literate in economic history, but it isn't something I'm too familiar with, and everywhere I look, people talk about the great depression of the 1870s - even "The Long Depression of 1873-1896"!

Link via the Corner.

The North Aral Sea is coming back, in spite of all predictions. Apparently a reasonably rational government & some well-thought-out engineering work still can work miracles, given a bit of grace. On the other hand, the much larger southern half of the Aral has the misfortune of lying within the bounds of Uzbekistan, and has little to no prospect of returning.

Via Lawrence at the Argus.

This report on the National Guard side of Katrina unexpectedly makes Gov. Blanco sound much, much more competent and sensible than she appeared at the time, or afterwards, for that matter. It's testimony against interest, since RCP is kind of right-of-centre. Basically, the argument is that Blanco was inclined to resist federalization because she was tied into the state National Guard communications network, and was aware that they had things under control, no matter what fantasies the national press and Mayor Nagin were feeding us & the federals here in the outside world. She sounded incompetent, because our view of the disaster and the response was catastrophically inaccurate.

Link via the Instapundit.

Huh. The anime club at Penn State is talking anime convention. I've never been very involved with any of the incarnations of PSAO - I seem to remember that there was an organization of that name in the late Nineties, but the current one suggests that it was founded in September of 2001(!) on its website.

The various conservancies held their annual "Big Spring Festival" yesterday down at Tallyrand Park in Bellefonte. Attendance was kind of low, probably due to the miserable rainy morning and the many recent firehouse carnivals, but the afternoon was a bright, blustery blue-skied wonderland, so it was nice for the few of us who came by. They had a band - a pretty good one, too, a blues-rock quintet whose drummer kept crediting the sound folks, but never mentioned the name of the band. They had a young, tiny little frontwoman with an enormous, bluesy voice - I ran into her proud father afterwards. Even he didn't know the band's name.

About four o'clock they held a semi-ceremonial restocking affair on the High Street bridge over Spring Creek, one guy dipping trout and other big fish out of a truck into buckets, and a line of guys through the bushes down to the wall to hand them down to a guy who was showing them to the kids before emptying the buckets into a temporary sluiceway the last twenty feet into the creek. I kept expecting one of the kids or a member of the bucket brigade to overbalance and fall into the creek, but luck was with them, and the only victim was an especially large rainbow trout who was too big to fit into a bucket, and got handed down in the net, bounding out of the sluiceway before he got a foot and a half down, thus plummeting over a dozen feet into the water. Nobody saw the trout float to the surface, so the assumption was that he survived his plunge.

Later that evening I walked to Milesburg along the railroad. It runs along the far side of the water gap from Rt. 150/144, and I had never gone down that side of the creek before. Turns out there's a surprisingly large switchyard down there, with about a half-dozen sidings and thirty or forty empty cars sitting on one track or another. The fishermen were plentiful as well, no doubt getting their first crack at the newly released fish, although the one man I talked to, walking along the track towards his favorite spot, hadn't heard about the restocking when I asked. There were at least a dozen flyfishermen enjoying the early evening weather, in the creek between the mouths of Buffalo Run and Bald Eagle Creek. Not a bad walk, if a trifle uneven in places. Railbed gravel can be a little on the rockish side of big for walking.

Dimitri wonders in a comment on David Woodsbury's post on the Sultana why so many men who survived the initial explosion failed to find the river-bank and drowned in the Mississippi. Dimitri allows as how Andersonville survivors might have been physically weakened. I would add on top of that the fact that the explosion occurred in the darkness of early morning, and that many no doubt couldn't even find the river-bank. Additionally, we're talking about the middle river in the late Civil War, in a period of civic neglect, even by the 19th century's less-than-rigorous standards of civil engineering. It was no doubt a riverine wilderness, and in the middle of the spring flood at that! What's amazing is that they pulled as many living men from the river as they did.

On the other hand, I don't quite see what's obscure about the Sultana disaster at this point. To put it in Dimitri's terms, the Sultana is the last stop on the Centennial Andersonville narrative, and almost no modern writer who writes anywhere *near* the subject can resist throwing in something about the last, final act of the tragedy, where those who survived battle, capture, captivity, privation, and the many indignities of Andersonville, were killed by such an ugly and massive and stupid accident on the way home.

Huh. That's unexpected. The Crowbar is gone. It was a dive, and other than going to see a Pink Floyd cover band with Ben Hauger a few years ago & playing poker last fall, I never went there. But it was the kind of dive which I would have expected to have made money hand over fist - I wonder if live music for the kids is doing poorly with the university crowd?

Woohoo! Jubelirer is out on his can! Good job, Jessica!

There was somebody at our ward trying to get Democrats to write in Benninghoff. I still don't quite get why this was a worthwhile use of that somebody's time.

We were given a choice between the computer poll & an optiscan system, both of them new to this district. I went with the optiscan, since there were four booths, and just one computer. I managed to mess things up two different ways - by handing the ballot to the lady without the stub sticking out, and inserted upside-down such that you could see how I voted if you really cared, but neither was a vote-wrecking sort of error.

But dang, I miss the old needle-punch and card.

For the Fallen

What need of hope when on two proud feet
We stand safely on home ground?
What need of wealth has the solvent
Whose well-financed business thrives?
What need of might has the strong
Health for the hale, the rested for rest,
The clear-eyed for clarity, the clever for wits,
The knowing for knowledge, the wise for wisdom?

Seeing far with clear-sighted eyes
None blink away tears of regret or pain or sadness.

It is only after a fall,
Having stumbled,
Having been pushed,
Having fallen
By malice or illness or ill wind
Or sickness or the chill hand of death near at hand
That frustration, tears, fear and prayer
Come as the answers to our need

These are the children of pain and need
Of that lineage of age and misfortune
Whose ancestors were locked beyond the gates
From which, with our ancestors naked and shivering
Were expelled, were flung upon the world,
Who peered one last time
Beyond the flaming blade
That barred the way.

That blade comes again with every misfortune
As a memory of the fall
As a fall in itself
And like each fall,
It comes as pain and anguish
And a rush of naked need:

Clothe us,
Who having been warm, are naked
Feed us,
Who having known plenty, are starving
Heal us
Who having been whole are now hurt!

But while there is life
Man is more than his earth
More than the dust
More than that which rests in the grave
And even before the grave itself
Is hope
And man is a beast that
Having fallen but still having hope
Will rise again
Having tripped, will find his stride
Having found his knees
Will try to gain his feet

Having fallen,
Being now, as we are,
Fallen
In this time that has been given to us
In the hope that we might
Stand on our feet again
In whatever time we have remaining
Let us then put our faith
In the rising.

5/17/06

I picked up the first paperback volume of Tezuka's Buddha last week at the 'Swap. While I like Tezuka well enough, I don't like him enough to pay hardback prices for his stuff. I hadn't realized that the US version of Buddha had been flopped Studio Proteus-style until I cracked it open the other night. One character lost a couple of limbs, and *which* limbs kept varying from page to page, and even panel to panel, as the retouching crew were selectively flopping on a panel-by-panel manner in an attempt to match flow & layout, instead of just mirror-flopping everything regardless.

It's really kind of disconcerting. Fans have refused to put up with this sort of thing on doofy junk titles like Naruto or Sgt. Frog for years, but the hoity-toity art-comix and academic crowd which snabbles up high-tone projects like Buddha are apparently cool with the American publisher diddling the artwork on one of the God of Manga's flagship projects. I mean, Buddha is regularly recommended to the non-fan market in mainstream publications like Entertainment Weekly. The story and the background art manages to mostly overwhelm the flopped artwork mess, and I'm even kind of cool with the bambi-and-thumper-get-disemboweled cognitive dissonance of the cartoony art style and the gloomy-religious subject matter. I wasn't ashamed to be seen reading it while sitting around waiting for things to start up at the History Day festivities.

What I was ashamed of was the computer-marketing-sales-professional office dropping who decided to plug in his earpiece right there in Finlay Commons & loudly conduct his business in public, like he was doing high-pressure sales out of office at home or something. I don't think he was a judge - probably some poor kid's workaholic father. Jerk.

Oof. I love Penn State dorm food, but I think I'm too old for such shenanigans. They fed the run-off judges for the History Day thing out of the Finlay Commons for lunch. Two cheeseburgers, some fries, juice & milk, way too many chocolate-chip cookies. Now I can barely move, I feel like a rattlesnake on a chilly, overcast October afternoon.

Things went about as well as such things do these days. There seems to be fewer and fewer actual educational professionals judging at these things - last year there weren't many in the papers judging panels, and this year, I didn't work with a single teacher in either one of my panels. Yesterday was Judge Brown, me, and a lady from the documents section of the PSU main campus library - all of us from Bellefonte, BTW, we got into a big gossip section about my one-time landlord & all the fires we've been getting in town. Today was Bruce Teeple, the guy who's working on the Prince Farrington history, and a lawyer from Southeast PA who does a history column on the side. We seem to be doing OK, but where are all the folks with pedagogical training? Off doing the "fun" subjects like performances & documentaries?

Jim Cleaveland, a PSSFS alum from the mid-Nineties, used to do a comic for the weekly newsletters that Bernhard Warg put out for the club, the Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. Jim's starting up Bob again as a webcomic, here, starting with the original run of comics from the newsletter, which was called, er... You know, I don't remember what the newsletter was called when Bernhard was editing. It was Dangerous Advice when I took it over, but that was my name. Anybody remember?

Finally got around to reading that copy of Sterling's The Zenith Angle that I bought back before Christmas. It was a lot better than I had feared - funny and strange in that late-Bruce-Sterling sort of fashion. Sterling always has been the starry-eyed optimist of the cyberpunk set. He really believes in the innate decency of mankind. Of course, the cyber-war global-dot-com plot of the book was a complete and total misreading of what was going on in 2001 and 2002, and the book's constant administration name-dropping was rendered even more peculiar by Sterling's failure to mention Dick Clarke, the actual, goofy-ass proponent of cyber-terrorism and computer security who turned into such a walking embarrassment during the 2004 elections.

I kept expecting something horrible to come of the dropped thread mid-book about the elk with Mad Cow Disease, and the fact that they were feeding them to the astronomers. It seemed like the sort of thing which would have fed into the whole isolated-hiding-from-the-big-bad-world academics-unable-to-deal-and-hiding thing that Sterling was flirting with mid-book. Especially given the 2003-2004 vogue for "BDS" - Bush Derangement Syndrome. But, since the book reads as if it was mostly composed in mid-late 2002, I suppose that's a little ahead of the political curve, chronologically speaking. Although Sterling throws in a bit about "web logs" as the wave of the future in the last few pages.

Anyways, definitely better than Heavy Weather or Holy Fire, not quite as good as Zeitgeist. About on the level of Distraction.

Walked up to the mall to watch United 93 at the multiplex on Saturday. Not much to say about the movie - it was worth the twelve-mile round-trip - but I did spend a good chunk of the "there" part of the walk wondering if I was trespassing on State Penn land by walking along the side of the Benner Pike past all the "No Trespassing - Violators Will Be Prosecuted" signs. I had forgotten about all of the no trespassing signs - they go by pretty fast when you're driving past them at 55 MPH - but walking along the pike gave me lots of time to ponder the legalities. On the one side, there's the whole "public thoroughfare" thing - if it's legal to drive along the Pike, why the hell couldn't I walk blameless? - on the other side, there's that whole "this means you" every-two-hundred-yards thing shouting in my face in all-caps institutional-green lettering. Saw nothing but road traffic, distant cows, and Rockview's horse herd, so it didn't come to cases as I half-feared. On the way back, I walked along I-99 instead - louder, but probably safer & definitely not trespassing by any interpretation I'm aware of.

I spent the trip reading a Rosemary Edghill Regency romance in the style of Georgette Heyer, Turkish Delight, which really was a quite excellent pastiche. The one complaint I had about the novel was that the heroine, who supposedly spent her late childhood and adolescence in the harem of the Ottoman Sultan, speaks exactly like every other Regency romance heroine who isn't a French guttersnipe (These Old Shades) or Spanish newlywed (An Infamous Army). That is to say, full of early-19th-century slang and dialect, of a certain class and sophistication. If you're going to make your heroine a Turk who occasionally communicates in Turkish or swears by Allah & the Prophet, be so good as to actually use the language. It adds a bit of color, you see. And no, the occasional use of "hareem" and "houri" doesn't count. For one thing, I'm pretty sure both are Arabic, not Turkish.

Oh, and don't have your heroine dis on Mansfield Park until you have more than one book under your belt. You have to earn that sort of snark.

Yikes.

Er, to unpack that a bit, the link leads to an alleged description of Elvis's allegedly lethal diet. I don't believe he actually ate it, at least not more than once. The "Fool's Gold" sandwiches in particular strike me as gastonomically impossible. No human being could successfully eat entire jars of peanut butter and jelly spread on a full baguette, let alone two instances of such a concoction, let alone as part of a daily diet.

We went hiking yesterday afternoon trying to find the burnt section of Bald Eagle Mountain over west of Milesburg. We failed. We did, however, manage to scrabble up to the top of the ridge via a gas-line firebreak. Bald Eagle Valley looks positively bucolic from a thousand feet up. At close range, it's another story. Nittany Valley, on the other hand, looks like what it is - an enormous construction site. Progress ain't pretty at a distance, but it is progress. I'm much happier living on *this* side of the mountain.

Comment from other office worker: "this has enough salt to kill a horse!" Also much discussion of tofu's amazing ability to soak up flavor - being a sort of flavor vacuum itself, and bearing in mind nature's well-known abhorence of vacuums, it makes a certain sort of metaphoric sense.

Tofu jerky, by the way, bears a strong visual resemblance to chocolate wafers, or "one of those bricks of pioneer chewing tobacco".

Officemate brought in his tofu jerky. It isn't half-bad, but salty as all get out. Not the sort of thing you'd want to make a full meal out of, I think. The office vegetarian was delighted. Yet again with the vegetarians delighting in fake meats... if you want to eat meat, eat meat. If you don't, don't play foolie-foolie games with your palate. Not that I'd turn away the tofu jerky. In suitably small quantities with lots of soda-pop to wash it down.

And speaking of pop, Diet Dr. Pepper Berries 'n Cream is a trainwreck of a soda. Cream flavor does not belong in a carbonated drink. Oh, well. I can deal with anything for a two-liters-worth of time.

Saw my first tentworm nest on Sunday behind the Willowbank building. Now there's nests scattered up Valentine Hill & every other tree along the upper reaches of Valentine Hill Road. The entomologists say they're just nuisances, but they're ugly as sin. Hope the dry weather keeps 'em under control.

My officemate just announced that he makes tofu jerky. I inquired whether this was tofu & jerky or jerked tofu, and he admitted to the latter. Thus followed a conversation on the subject of what exactly was the process for jerking tofu, and what was added to make it taste like anything at all - a marination of soy sauce, honey, and garlic being key, apparently. It still sounds like a punchline waiting on a nonexistent joke.

These are the days I'm proud of not tolerating a stove or other cooking implements in my apartment. They almost always lead one into all sorts of culinary abominations, kitchens. Leave the cooking to the professionals, says I.

I was looking at John Scalzi's Whatever blog while pondering placing him on my blogroll as a replacement for some others whom I've stopped reading with any degree of interest or enthusiasm. Then I came across this post. You see, the thing I dislike the most about fandom - and I dislike it quite strongly - is the uncomfortable and overly close relationship it breeds between artists and their audience. I'm a strong advocate of the fourth wall being, if not impenetrable, then at least a functional one-way mirror for most of its operational lifetime. I don't want writers to be my friends, or mentors, or, heaven forbid, siblings parents or spouses. I don't want to consider their feelings when reading their output, and in fact, as I read an awful lot of fiction, oftentimes I don't want to think about them at all, if at all possible.

The internet & blogs in particular have done a lot to break down these barriers between the artist and the audience, and I can't say I'm too happy about it. I'm a nasty piece of work, to be honest, and it freaks me out when I say something about a writer out of the blue and he replies in email. It's all a bit "Kent, this is God" for my tastes. It's even worse when a writer I sort-of know & otherwise respect lays a massive turd of a book, and then I find myself tip-toeing around the subject. I *like* there to be a distance between me & my writers.

So I may or may not go back to Scalzi's blog. He's an amusing guy. But I've got this issue to work out on the subject.

Huh. There's another fire in the valley, or more strictly speaking, over in Penn's Valley. You can see a big honking column of smoke rising over Centre Hall Mountain, although I was just informed that it's Tussey Mountain on the other side of the valley that's on fire. Must be a heck of a fire if you can see it from over here. Nothing in the CDT as of this moment.

Our representative in Congress here in Bellefonte, John Peterson, is generally a colorless sort of fellow, neither warm nor cool. There seems to be one thing that gets him going, and that's drilling for American oil. He is pissed about Castro opening up potential offshore oil resources for exploration when Florida politicians refuse to allow the US to do likewise. Sen. Nelson of Florida was likewise pissed, so he's trying to get Castro to stop. Peterson, surprisingly for a politician, showed a great deal of common sense and inquired if we were going to stop the Canadians from doing the same thing. I think I'm proud of Peterson this week.

The cool thing? Central Pennsylvania has almost no direct economic interest in the oil industry. Our gas prices aren't even particularly high by national standards, although we're not an island of cheapness, either. Peterson isn't playing to the home folks, far as I can tell. He doesn't even have a serious challenge to his seat.

Well, Big Dave is moved down to Philadelphia, we finished clearing out his storage locker on Saturday, and he drove his belongings down Sunday morning. Gonna miss having him around town. We both got invited to a friend's wedding in November. I realized yesterday looking at my suit that I've shrunk right out of it. Wonder if you can get a suit re-sized downwards like that? A rented tux would be, hrm, a bit much, and I only wear that suit for weddings - the last time I had it on was for the Nadzams' wedding several years ago. They've got two kids now! It's definitely been a while.

The National History Day (or "NHS" as they're now referring to themselves in the documentation, sounds much less geeky, doesn't it?) materials arrived yesterday. A bit more than a dozen senior-level papers I have to read & critique before next month's judging. I need to get myself an eraser that *doesn't* leave a filthy red smear on paper when I try to clean off an ill-advised or unintelligible comment.

This year's subject theme, in case you missed it when I first heard about it late last fall, is "Taking a Stand in History". What do you think the chances are that one of the papers would be about William F. Buckley standing athwart history? Yeah, me neither.

[Pre-judging snark deleted in case the kids or their parents are googling]

I suppose I shouldn't be too loose about the papers before the kids have their say in defense of their work. But people! Don't quote from Encarta! Please! Especially when you've real secondary sources listed in your bibliography!

What a beautiful morning. It's nice enough I'm halfway tempted to walk down to Bellefonte for lunch, just for the sheer hell of it.

It's getting into the busy part of the spring here at work, so chances are I'll be kind of quiet unless something really gets me going. Sorry?

Jason Gullickson of MyLens went over to Bald Eagle Valley to get some photos of the wildfire on the north side of Bald Eagle Mountain: here, here, and here. Striking - the mountain is glowing in the dark, a little like that festival near Nara, whose ceremonial centre-piece is the controlled burn-off of brush on Mt. Wakakusa at night.

I finally stopped getting ShojoBeat a couple months ago, and picked up the back-issue graphic novel collections of Nana when I noticed that the 'Swap had them on the shelf this week past. I had only really been reading Nana, Crimson Hero, and Absolute Boyfriend in the monthly magazine, and the latter two only because they were *in* the magazine - nearly seven bucks to read a single chapter of Nana felt like a waste of money, and I needed to justify the expense *somehow*.

The magazine was an interesting experiment for a while, but the problem was that they are running the same six manga they started with, and I'm bored with half of them, and not particularly enthusiastic about two of the other three. It might have worked better as a "first one or two or three chapters of each new manga in the line" sampler, at least in my case. Certainly, the most interesting aspect of ShojoBeat, aside from Nana, was the preview chapters. The first chapter of Beauty is the Beast warned me off of that title, and I bought the Kamikaze Girls GN based on that preview. But most months, it was just the six stand-bys and a lot of articles aimed at the sixteen-year-old female audience which I, if you haven't noticed previously, am not a representative sample thereof.

Anyways, this way I get the omake chapters at the end of each volume, which I had been missing out on. Now when is someone going to publish Neighborhood Story in the States?

There's a forest fire over in Bald Eagle Valley, reportedly on the other side of Rt.220 , which is kicking up enough smoke to be seen from the office, here south of Bellefonte. No sign of it in the news-sites yet. They're still concentrating on the Centre Hall elementary school evacuation which caused our front-office secretary to have to go & pick up her son.

Whoops, never mind, there it is. They say it's actually on this side of Rt. 220, on the side of Bald Eagle Mountain opposite the Bald Eagle High School campus.

Huh. One of the farmhouse families on upper Valentine Hill have hired a Mennonite or Amish (or possibly Brethren) work crew to repair their roof. Bunch of unmarried young Pennsylvania Dutch were swarming over the roof, tossing shingles into a large dumpster as I walked up this morning. They get to work early, the Dutch do.

Still not sure how to identify which sect is which just by looking at 'em. I'd have guessed Amish from the straw hats & industriousness. The secretary up front corrected my misapprehension that Amish can't get around like I thought - apparently there's a significant business to be done in ferrying Amish folk around by willing English. They apparently will pay 81 cents a mile for this service. She has a relative who bought a big van to move Amish work crews around from job to job, or just out to things like doctor's appointments.

I saw that the Wide-Awakes were getting ready to do one of their semi-regular Torchlight Parades to "Take Back the Night", while walking on campus yesterday afternoon. I was dropping in on the kids at PSSFS, since they were holding their meetings the same night I swing by State College to pick up my comics from the 'Swap. As usual, they're having membership quorum problems. I ended up talking politics with some of them. One kid was a RA, and had to leave partway through the meeting to go along with the parade & track down people shouting from dorm windows at the paraders. He wasn't thrilled with the prospect, but stoutly defended the university policy of punishing morons for their exercise of free speech. The opinion that morons have first amendment rights like any other member of society seems to be the minority view on campus anymore.

Apparently the College Republicans are poking the left with sticks again, this time on the subject of illegal immigration. They *were* going to do some damnfool provocative stunt involving "catching an illegal immigrant", with CR types dressed in orange to signify their illegality, and rewarding folks for turning them in. This thankfully went by the wayside, and they got together with the Latino Caucus to do something more reasonable and college-boring, like holding a community meeting. In the meantime, their pointy-stick-poking had provoked some lefty types into getting together a direct-action group called, creepily, "True Voices" or something like that, which was indulging in minor illegalities of their own, like stealing shirts from USG. This is why poking people with pointy sticks is never a good idea. Even the YAF guy at the meeting was irked enough to be labeling the people nominally on his side "nativist" and conceding the "True Voices" point that there were "racists" among the College Republicans. Well, I haven't talked to the CR folks since the presidential election, so maybe things have changed over there, but they weren't, as a group, racist the last time I talked with them. Bah.

But hey! Won last night's tournament at HiWay. Pizza *and* victory. A good night.

Steve Sailer posted a link in a comment at Albion's Seedlings to this review in which he talks about why crime families are *families* - the lowered transaction costs allowed by familial ties in an extra-legal environment like the criminal underground - and how this operates in other, less criminal environments like the diamond trade, & explains why endogamous minorities tend to dominate certain subeconomies where high levels of trust are beneficial. Very interesting.

Important post on the virtues of hanging around with happy people. Especially important given that historically I've been a pretty angry, hostile, mean-spirited sort of wight. I was a real ball of rage throughout my early twenties, to be honest. But I'm trying to do better these days.

Via the Instapundit, who is pretty much the online embodiment of the "happy-people makes for happiness" principle. Reading his blog leaves me feeling almost... pleasant.

I had to go down into town early yesterday, so I had more time in the evening than is usual on a weekday. Discovered that they have evening games at the little league park up on the other side of 5th Avenue on weeknights. Watched about five innings instead of going on the walk I had planned. I had thought that co-ed little league teams was a hollywood invention - but sure enough, the announcer introduced "Brittany" and "Dakota" along with "Chandler" and at least three "Tyler"s. Doesn't anyone name their kids "Mary" or "Dave" or "Bill" anymore? I thought one kid had a normal "Steven", until he came around again in the batting rotation & I realized I was just mis-hearing "Evan". Sigh.

The little league park has two small fields, which is about all they need when it comes to little league. They try hard, but the parents' cars, trucks and minivans, pulled up almost to the fence in lieu of bleachers, were in no danger of getting dinged by a home run. You couldn't say the same about the cars in the parking lot proper, which were menaced by three wild fouls while I was watching. Luckily, a row of ball-eating poplars were planted along the verge, and mostly caught said pop fouls before hitting the properly parked vehicles.

It really is a nice location, especially the upper field, which commands a royal view of the Spring Creek water gap, the Bald Eagles rising closely on either side like the high walls of a vaster baseball stadium. The view from home plate must be spectacular in high summer. The fence surrounding the field obscures the rather grotty extension of the park, which is built on landfill, and pretty rubbled and low-quality landfill at that. At some point they're going to be able to put a third field in as the landfill advances the hillside over the ravine to the north, but until then it isn't the sort of space that delights the eye.

Walking home later that evening, I noticed that town was full of motorcycles roaring by in formation, getting more and more numerous as I got closer to home. Yep, it was what I thought - a biker had passed to the great highway beyond, and his or her compadres were holding a viewing at Wetzels' at the front of the block. There were Harleys parked en enchelon along every street, and on the sidewalk in front of the Presbyterian church across the way. Bikers in full traditional costume were waiting in line outside of the funeral home, mixed in with folks in more standard mourning gear, suits and ties and the like. Luckily, they weren't as loud as the bikers can sometimes get - I only heard the roar of an overrevved engine once or twice the rest of the evening. Not nearly as bad as the Cruise, really.

I present to you the Citrus connoisseur. I used to love Mello Yello, in the sense of "I used to love staying awake late into the night and shaking like a hypercaffienated leaf on a sugar bender". I once drank four cans of that foul, astringent yellow-green stuff & spent the next hour-and-a-half jogging through East Campus until I burned off my overdose.

I was walking around Parkview Heights Sunday morning when a retired gentleman in his pajamas out collecting his newspaper inquired of me whether I had brought the good weather with me. I replied that rather, the good weather had brought me in its train. I hadn't been out that far towards Zion in a good many years - usually I act as if Bellefonte comes to a hard stop at the Lutheran Church & the Junior High campus.

That end of town has grown greatly, if not quite as wildly as the construction along Blanchard and upper Valentine Hill Road. There's an entire neighborhood of McMansions going up about three-fourths of the way out to the Rt 26/I-99 highway, and I had fun wandering around, playing "spot the architectural reference".

The designs were very pseudo-Victorian, with a lot of obvious references to various buildings in town. The wooden gables'-eave-guards I mentioned before were present in a number of these brand-new buildings. None of them had the "spar-pointed-down" design, but since that can easily be confused for something blasphemous when looked at in the wrong light, I can see what this would be the case. Far more popular are the "captain's wheel" section, with two or three examples scattered around the front end of the development. One building had the "organic wooden vine" eaves-guard design, but it wasn't a particularly well-executed version, being rather brutish and fat-fingered.

There were a lot of large gables, and a good deal of cleverness exercised in the service of said gables. I think I rather saw more full-size gabling going on than dormers, which I suppose makes sense. Dormers are either extensions of old buildings - not to be expected in new construction - or constructs designed to let light into garrets & other servants'-quarters, which shouldn't be expected in McMansions, which aren't designed in the expectation of the need to house large platoons of live-in servantry.

One building was pretty much perfect - fine colors, good use of materials, well-balanced proportions, fine details - except for the fact that the architect or construction-company had put in many strong, balanced, large gables, and then left their interiors blank and unadorned. The architectural equivalent of whitespace. I found myself wishing for it those scale-tiles you see on a certain class of wooden-construction Victorian. Oh, well. I'm sure the inhabitants will spot the need in a year or two - the one thing you can rely on is the occupants' need for decoration & adornment. An excess of asceticism is a rare fault indeed.

Not so rare, however, are the obscenities inflicted upon an innocent world by the architects of the Long Sixties. On the road I followed into the new neighborhood was a massive construct which could have been confused for some institutional monstrosity like a bureaucrats' hive or an office hovel for pyschiatrists were it not for its location in the heart of a residential zone and its total lack of professional signage. It had the oversize, overlong institutional windows with their excess of viewage from the exterior - no privacy for *that* family, no indeed! It also had the brick-and-concreted Mondarian-style walkway-screen which reminded me so forcefully of the ugliness the late Sixties inflicted upon the educational landscape in junior high schools and dorm-building complexes like East Halls throughout this afflicted commonwealth.

Speaking of large, inexplicable homes along Summit Drive, the vast ranch at the top of the hill is for sale - a property so large they had to put *two* signs in to clarify what all was up for sale. Whoa! That's a lot of money for a ranch! But it really is a vast ranch. I've always referred to it as more of a "compound" than a "home". I pictured the inhabitants as one of those sprawling extended-family patriarchies, like a clan of Mormons. Huh, there *is* a basement. I had been wondering...

Ow. I did something to my neck yesterday evening. Ow.

I expected to be able to get home yesterday afternoon in the void behind the first big cloudburst that took out our power at work for a good hour or so, leaving us on the generator & our guests from John Deere in the dark in the conference room. (Oops.)

Then I saw that there was a secondary knock-on storm coming on fast behind the first squall line, about two and half to three hours behind and closing. Talked with someone in support, we estimated that I had maybe about forty-five minutes, which was just enough time to get down to town if I booked & made good time. Well, I made it in under forty-five minutes, but it seems that storms can hurry too, and the rain-front caught me about a block and a half from my front door. Didn't get too soaked, and managed to spare my copy of Dies the Fire from any water-damage, so no harm no foul.

I drove in to work this morning. Cloudbursts are one thing, but they're threatening hail & high winds today.

When I went out front of my building to put out the trash & grab my mail, there was a cop there talking to the lady from upstairs & the other tenant. Asked what was wrong, and they said that the upstairs lady's kid had "run away". Since I had just yelled at said kid on Tuesday for throwing his smoked-out butts off the upstairs balcony onto my front stoop, and he didn't look any too disgruntled at the time, I have no idea what's up with that. The other woman commented about how she never sees me but it's late at night. Yes, dear, I have a job, this means I'm not about in daylight on weekdays.

I don't know why I care, the tenants in the other part of the building come and go often enough that I never bother to learn their names.

Nice morning, much more clear than the weather-reports had led me to expect. Mountains are still that beaten red-bronze color that comes right before the greening, and with the slight morning mist, I fancied the Bald Eagles were a new-forged blade steaming from the quenching-bucket. Helped me feel warmer - I had foregone the jacket, and it was just a hair too cool on the walk up Valentine Hill. I'll be wishing for this early-morning coolness come July, mark my words.

Valentine Hill Road runs through an odd patch of land down at the base of the hill, in the little canyon that Logan Run drains. Between the hillside and the industrial strip are a bunch of nice little houses and a generous scatter of small ponds, streams, and springs in a watery tangle which manages to be neither polluted, nor stagnant, nor noxious. Quite pleasant in a noisy industrial-clanging sort of way, with a passel of white ducks in residence and all sorts of greenery. Almost English-garden in its charm.

The guys at work are big-time spelunkers, and have been buzzing about a sinkhole dig over by Penn's Cave east of Centre Hall. They almost talked me into going along last weekend, until I remembered that what we were talking about was heavy labour in a muddy hole in early spring and decided to do, er, something else. Anything else. They came back on Monday very proud of their progress in cleaning out the big muddy hole. They have great hopes of it becoming a proper cave.

Did you know that many caves get that way by human intervention? Apparently it's a thing with spelunkers. They find likely sinkholes, and do a lot of digging & clearing & hauling to get the trash & rubbish out, & let the water flow through cleanly. The hope is that there are voids behind or below said clogged sinkholes, which once exposed could be explored by eager, very, very muddy spelunkers.

Well, it's a hobby. My comment was that mucking about in a cave with an active stream pouring into it sounded like a recipe for an underground drowning, and they assured me that this was what they had weather reports for. After all, we work with meteorologists, don't we?

Ran into a retired lady walking on North Ridge on Saturday, and we had a talk about houses and property taxes. Little old ladies vote, people. They vote in battalions, regiments, brigades - little old ladies vote. And from conversations in Centre County over the last three years, I think I can safely conclude, sweet little old ladies are mightily, mightily pissed about property taxes. This particular sweet little old lady was pretty close to demanding the lynching of State Rep. Herman, and he isn't even her representative. She just saw him on public-access television, obstructing the passage of a property tax bill, and blew her top at it.

Lynn Swann, are you listening? Property taxes. Property taxes. Property taxes. It's the golden wedge issue this year, if you ask me.

Seeing as it's starting to get into walking weather, I was getting into parts of Bellefonte & environs I don't usually go, this weekend past. For one thing, they've put in a bike path out along Airport Road towards a park I hadn't been out to before, yclept "Governors' Park". Nice little public sort of place, plenty of pavilions for office parties & the like, a couple soccer fields & a softball field, & most importantly, a public swimming pool with no posted rates. Will have to find out if it's a free pool, or if not, how much. I really ought to take up swimming now that I'm not quite as much of a whale as I used to be.

There's another park on the other end of town, far side of Spring Creek, tucked in between the stream and Porter Street where no-one but maniacs and trout fishermen would ever go. As such, it's not exactly a family-friendly or foot-friendly sort of place, just three acres of woodlot & a half-dozen preachy, faded placards about stream environmental recovery & the evils of old industrial dams.

Lastly, I went wandering down the very far end of Half Moon Hill, got directions from the guy at the end of the road about how to get across Buffalo Run to Coleville, and then proceeded to bugger up following the directions to the extent that I had to bushwhack my way up a steep near-cliff-like hill because it was either that or slide into Buffalo Run, which had come slap square up against the north face of Half Moon. Once I finished hauling my carcass up the hill by pulling on small trees & rocks, I found myself in the guy's back yard. Ran into him again on my way back into town, and he laughed at me & told me to check for ticks when I got home, as the brush I had been through was allegedly full of 'em. No need for suspense - I was tick-free - but geez, I think I can skip any return visits to that particular part of God's Green Paradise.

Oh, yes. I've started walking to work, those days it isn't like to rain. I can use the exercise, and would prefer to not waste the ready, given how stratospheric-bound the gas prices seem bent.

Perhaps I don't know Dan Simmons like I ought to - I've never been fond of his fiction, though I have read some of his books - but I didn't expect something like this from him. It's a pretty hard short-story-cum-essay, with a point-of-view straight out of the little green footballs Jacksonian end of the political field. Is this another symptom of what Jim Geraghty called the Tipping Point?

I don't know, tell me Simmons is actually a centre-right type like Orson Scott Card or a libertarian-right type like Steve Stirling.

H/T Vodkapundit.

The original manga version of Aishiteruze Baby is considerably better than the average anime version, which ran last year on Japanese television. Having read the first volume from Viz, I can see why the anime was so - hrm, underwhelming?

The story - a high school lothario with an emotionally underequipped family & no particular motivation to do much of anything gets saddled with the care of a cute five-year-old cousin abandoned by her runaway mother - had potential, and some of that potential shone through the poor art and under-nourished dialog which otherwise tarnished and diminished its execution in the TV series. This is because the manga clearly would make a poor storyboard set for a television production, and a worse script.

The mangaka, Youko Maki, clearly prefers to write via layout and composition rather than dialog and plotting. All of the emotional beats are carried by panel-work and page composition rather than dialog and conversation, with the usual shoujo-style use of ziptone and abstraction to give the art flavor & some visual flair. Don't get me wrong - the art is fairly high-quality, and the way it's deployed maximizes the impact of Maki's technical skill.

It's a very impressive first volume, but it also shows clear signs of improvement which suggests that it was an early work. For one thing, Maki's ambitious use of paneling for emotional impact over-stretches her compositional skills several times in the first chapter; some of the panel flow can be a little hard to follow, even for someone who's been reading unflipped for a number of years. This isn't Fruits Basket, at least in the first few chapters. But Maki clearly has Takaya-esque ambitions.

Strangely enough, Fruits Basket, which similarly relies on layout and composition for emotional resonance, didn't have this problem when it was adapted for a TV series. Perhaps this is the result of director Akitaro Daichi's hack brilliance? I keep calling him a hack, but his body of work suggests otherwise... Maybe I'm just confusing lack of ego for lack of genius? Possibly it's that Fruits Basket is brimming over with enough plot and dialog for three other stories, and doesn't need the compositional assist to keep it interesting and engaging.

What has happened to all the genius directors and writers in the last few years, anyways? The only working in TV that I can think of is batty old Shoji Kawamori & his tinsel-trash Sousei no Aquarion. What's Konaka up to these days? Air Gear? Oh, for the love of god...

Bruce Sterling really is an exhausting kind of guy. If I understand his current drift, CafePress is a sort of version 0.01 factory for the production of "spimes", which he defines as "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system". The t-shirts and mugs and mousepads produced by CafePress would be fully-fledged spimes if they came with RFIDs and were engineered to self-destruct on command like that bizarre polymer which biodegrades into fertilizer & viable sunflower seed.

Not that this whole "Internet of Things"/"Spime" thing is a *new* thing from Sterling. The construction-materials-with-built-in-directions which his protagonists use to build their research labs in Distraction strike me as an early version of the spime, if an unnamed version thereof.

I really ought to blogroll Mely, from whom I ganked this. Next time I remember to open the templates before starting a post, I promise...

I was visiting a friend down in Gaithersburg who gets the Washington Times deadtree, and there was this article in the Sunday paper. We checked twice to make sure it wasn't the April 1st edition. A bunch of "explorers" with GPS packs & a low sense for high drama decided to make like Stanley & go off on a dangerous, romantic, and violent trip to find the source of the Nile, as if it hasn't been known for over a hundred years now. The group of folk visiting around said friend's dining room table got into an argument over what the proper definition of a river-source ought to be, as the intrepid explorers had apparently made their "find" by re-defining the source to be the most distant point of the Nile watershed.

It all seemed as silly as the Pluto "Planet/Kuiper object" argument, I said, which sent us barking off on another goofy argument. Fanboys - what can you do? Play Puerto Rico, I guess - with the new expansion rules! Now even more dodgy about the whole slave-economy thing! I won by making my very own triangular trade between a hospice & the expansion set's black market and church, thus allowing me to generate extra "colonists", sell them on the black market for buildings, and use the church to launder kickbacks in the building process. I kicked much ass, being as evil as the game allowed.

Claymore sounded good in theory. A shounen (actually seinen... whoops) fantasy action-manga about female demon-hunters who are themselves half-demon? It's the sort of thing I usually adore, if done at all well. Think Buffy, Devilman Lady, Vampire Princess Miyu. Good stuff.

Well, that's the theory. Suppose I should have actually taken a look at the art before putting it on order with the 'Swap. It's... damned stiff. The default posture of characters is an alarmed rictus, and they don't generally break out of said rictus unless it's fight-fight time. The fights, the artist can handle - looks a little like Parasyte on an arty day. The backgrounds are not too bad, if a little generic. Speaking of generic, the writing is terribly, terribly schematic. Reads like an outline of a story proposal rather than the story itself, let alone any dialog or narrative portion thereof. There aren't really many characters, for that matter, and we're given little reason to care about any of the three which survive the first volume uneviscerated.

Why should I give the manga a second volume to collect itself? There has to be some reason it was picked up by Viz. It's always possible that it's a first work, and thus needs a couple chapters to loosen up... hmm, the artist seems to have another long-running manga under his belt. In fact, the artist is a sixteen-year veteran. Blech. Have I just talked myself out of this particular waste of money? Maybe.

Busy week... just got back from my first doctor's appointment in a dozen years. What is it with public spaces & the encroachment of blaring cable TV? The bars with loud, distracting television sets are annoying enough, but doctors' office lobbies are supposed to be quiet, solemn spaces, where a man can read his book in peace and await his cue. CNN Headline News chattering from the corner is deeply unwelcome, if you ask me.

The doctor says I'm perfectly fine, BTW. I was just getting pestered about having a "primary care physician" for the insurance forms, and needed to actually see a doctor in order to make one appear on the forms. Or something like that.

Dang. Was I the only one who didn't know that Dylan wrote a pro-Israel song right after the Osirak bombing:

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him.
He was supposed to feel bad.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Not sure if I like the way he repeats the catch-phrase after every short stanza like that, but I admire the intent behind the song. Wonder what it sounds like... Infidels, eh?

Came across the reference in a Tim Blair comment thread on Billy Bragg, whom I also had never heard of until NPR started flogging him in glowing terms as if he were the second coming of Pete Seeger. The bits of "music" accompanying those NPR bits sounded absolutely horrible, and Bragg himself sounds like a tedious piece of work who'd make Joan Baez seem sociable & sensible in comparison. For what it's worth.

Stanislaw Lem died. He wasn't one of my favorite writers - of the two, I'm much more fond of Phil Dick - but he was a landmark of sorts.

H/T Doktor Frank.

Reading a potato-growers industry magazine as assigned non-busy-work by the boss, and there's an agribusiness profile of Okray Farms which fails at one of the most basic tasks of a business profile - bothering to give the reader simple information such as where the business is located. I had to google them to find out that they're a Wisconsin grower.

The next article is written by "Voscar", no last name. Or, possibly, no first name. Hard to tell with a name like that. What, are goths now getting jobs as feature writers for agricultural industry magazines? Maybe it's the name, Spudman. Who wouldn't want to write for a publication called Spudman?

"Which brings us to Larry Samuel, who aims to do for the American wealthy what Margaret Mead did for the Samoans."

What, lie, commit research fraud, and portray his subjects as promiscuous slatterns for the purposes of subtle and not-so-subtle political manipulation of the data?

Don't read that article. It's an IQ-point-sucking-machine. I feel you dumber for having read it. See? Beforehand, I would have *thought* I was less intelligent. Now I "feel" "dumber". Daniel Gross, give me back my wits!

We went down to the Bellefonte Wok for lunch, which is something I used to do all the time, back before I became a diet nazi. Turns out my office-mate went to high school with Andy, the owner of the Wok, which makes Andy a lot younger than he looks. Andy wanted to know where I had gotten to, because I used to be a semi-daily regular. Well, he was half-joking, because it was physically obvious where I had gotten to, given the missing 90 lbs & the loose-fitting clothes and all.

I explained that part of losing the weight was *not* eating every other meal at the local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, no matter how delicious the chicken-and-broccoli & chicken teriyaki skewers might be. Andy nodded wisely & said that it was all a matter of watching your portions, which is just what everybody says, but really, being told to watch my portions by the proprietor of an all-you-can-eat buffet is a bit of something, isn't it? Like being catechized by Moloch.

Groovy, daddy-O. [Snap,snap!]

Via th' Blogfadda, he ain't no Mr. Jones.

Anyone seen Maynard?

Hah! Beards are back! It only took ninety years & the better part of my grandparents' lifetimes! The article is full of the usual coastal musing about zeitgeist & reactions against metrosexuality and all that rubbish. To be honest, I wear a beard because I don't care to shave. That, and it keeps the wind off my face in the cold months.

Via Ann Althouse, who is resolutely opposed to hairy males. Given the fact that she had to put up with smelly, bearded hippies in the Sixties, I can't say I can blame her.

Oh, this is good. Three hostages were "found" according to Agence France-Presse. According to a - perhaps more thorough, perhaps less biased - CP (Canadian Press News Service?), the three "peace activists" were freed by a military operation. Never attribute to a military operation what can be obscured by the passive voice and some vigorous handwaving, eh, AFP? Bah.

Later versions of the AFP report seem to have been merged with less-insane BBC and unknown (AP?) wire service reporting.

Via Iraqi Coalition Casualties news aggregator.

This is pretty harsh. An Iraqi doctor in Kirkuk was a member of an insurgent cell, and under the chaos of emergency-room chaos in a violent city, managed to kill dozens of wounded Iraqi soldiers and police by lethal injection over a nine-month period before his cell leader was captured and ratted him out. Let me repeat that one - he was caught because his line-of-command was captured. If not, he'd still be murdering helpless wounded soldiers while pretending to be a hard-working, selfless professional. "Insurgent" really seems to be the wrong term of art in cases like this. "Serial killer" seems more appropriate.

But keep this in mind the next time you see an outraged quote in the paper from an Iraqi morgue attendant or doctor. The enemy aren't all street scum, drug addicts and bearded lunatics. Some are a more subtle species of monster.

Via the Iraqi Coalition Casualties aggregator.

Gah! Somebody bought a crate of Nestle-brand water "to serve at conferences" here at work. First of all, it's unnatural to have the name "Nestle" on a bottle of water. Nestle is chocolate, not fru-fru bottled water, bedamme! Secondly, this is Bellefonte. Note the derivation, beautiful spring. The whole town gets its water from a vast roaring beast known as "the Big Spring". Not only is the town water taken from a pure mountain spring, it's bottled and sold as such. We get spring water on tap in this town! To pay per bottle for it is nigh on blasphemy!

Speaking of blasphemy & water bills, the borough delivered the water bill for February for the church across the street to my box on Saturday. Fifteen days late & to the wrong address - way to go, post office!

Hm. Jim Morrow's the Last Witchfinder just showed up from Amazon. I remember him talking about it at that ParaCon reunion Fred organized in, hrm, 2000 I think? It's been a while since the Eternal Footman. For those in the area, he's one of our local writers. Or he was, last time I checked - he hasn't moved, has he, Fred?

Back when I was working for the Kerrs at Nittany Office Supplies, I found myself selling Jim a ream of old-fashioned continuous-feed computer paper and some pencil lead, probably for this book. He apparently writes long-hand on a scroll of computer paper, sort of like Kerouac & his taped-together roll of paper in a typewriter for On the Road.

Below the cut is that long-promised photoessay on the Union Cemetary Gatehouse here in Bellefonte, concentrating on a strange late-Victorian-era architectural detail, the impaled gable. Images courtesy of Jason Gullickson of mylens. Click the "+" for more.

This is a building standing on the northwest corner of the Union Cemetary property in central Bellefonte, arching over the entrance to the cemetary from Howard Street. Union Cemetary is an old hilltop-style cemetary behind the county courthouse complex on High Street, between Howard and High Streets.
Union Cemetary inspired this poem not long after I first moved into Bellefonte. It's a grand old cemetary, which holds the graves of three Pennsylvania governors, including Civil War-era Governor Andrew Curtin, his brother the general, and an interesting scatter of nearly-anonymous USCT graves at the foot of the hill among the "colored" section which testified to Bellefonte's prewar service as one of the stops on a spur of the Underground Railroad.
As you can see, the Gatehouse is clearly a neo-Gothic building, albeit a rather modest and unassuming specimen of the species. It has three sharply-defined gables in the front, and four gables in the back:

The Gatehouse looks like a stylistic whole from the streetfront, but as you can see from the rear view, it has had at least one extension built in the century or so since its initial construction, and possibly two if that unbalanced dormer on the right-centre of the building is what it looks like - an extension built on an earlier, more-harmonically balanced extension from the rear of the original right-rear of the building. You can't quite see it here, but that lower "gable" on the left hand side is actually a detached shed located across a patio & artificial spring from the proper left-rear of the Gatehouse itself.

As you can see from both the front and rear images, the house actually arches across a functioning entrance to the cemetary, a paved road wide enough & substantial enough to take your Expedition-class SUV without strain - I ought to know, I've dodged such beasts more than once, walking under that arch. Another obvious later addition is the ungainly concrete-brick chimney to the right of the gateway arch. Looks like heck, especially compared with the period clay chimney-pot at the far right, but the probable inherent ineffeciency of that very clay chimney-pot is most likely what inspired that concrete chimney addition.

This view here demonstrates some of the more exccentric elements of the Gatehouse, and of this class of Victorian construction in Bellefonte in general. First is the peculiar steep roof detail in between the gables. Note how the slope of the roof in between the "v" makes a sharp diagonal overhang with the face of the building itself.

But the second, more interesting, element, are the beasties resting in the peaks of each of the three front gables. There are wooden posts jutting downward from each gable-peak, looking for all the world like a set of stair-bannisters nailed upside down into the cleft formed by each gable's sides. It would be peculiar enough if this were an architectural detail unique to the Gatehouse - the crotchet of some crazed do-it-yourself-er Victorian, but it seems as if these "spar pointed down" gable-impalements were some kind of craze among the lesser lights of Victorian Bellefonte at its influential height. I haven't found any of these impaled gables among the buildings put up by those who actually ran the town in those heady days, but minor buildings, built no doubt by the lesser landed folk and the middle-middle class, can be found in certain parts of town with said spar-impaled gables.

There is the Gatehouse, of course, but you can also find these impaled gables in the surviving neo-Gothic houses along High Street south of Union Cemetary as well. Here is what must be the most outrageous example of an impaled gable, in which the spar has actually been run through the roofline of the gable, and protrudes from the gable like a giant's sewing-needle. You'll also note the wooden detail-work visible around the central spar, which would have left the impression of a less intrusive, harmonious whole in the gable-assemblange - if the architect had not then allowed the central spar to jut skyward like a wooden lighting-rod! The peculiarity becomes more acute when you realize that there seems to be no lighting rod at all in this agglomeration - that seems to be all wood in there. Surprisingly enough, this building has not yet been struck with lightning, or at least, not enough to cause its destruction in the century or so since its construction.

Oh, by the way? Nothing has made me more inclined towards the pro-life point of view than this ongoing nonsense about "Roe for men". I thought it was monstrous when I first heard about it on NPR last week, and it certainly hasn't grown on me in the interim.

So we've gone from "men not telling women what to do with their bodies - let 'em kill fetuses!" to "men telling women what to do with their bodies - force 'em to kill fetuses!", have we? You don't even need to believe that a fetus is a baby to find this all really, really maddening.

Why do I bother with cable? I mean, I haven't managed to keep current on a single show I set out to watch this season. I've pretty much given up on sitting down to watch the Shield or Battlestar Galactica - the Shield because I kept falling asleep or getting distracted by the State of the Union or just plain old forgetting that it was on; Battlestar Galactica because it's on Friday nights for the love of Zod, and as unlikely as it seemed when I was younger, I've somehow managed to grow a life in my dotage - more often than not, I'm out & about on Friday nights.

Bwa!

In the defense of the mother, I suspect this is some kind of Chinese-calligraphy take on Andy Warhol. The examples look far too neat & clean to be real calligraphy, though. At least not the Japanese version of calligraphy. Slop & spastic incoherence seem to pass for passion & artistry in the work I've seen. I suspect this means that I don't "get" calligraphy.

I've been watching Blue Seed this week, from a big pile of borrowed DVDs from Big Dave. Back when I first encountered this series, I didn't really warm to it, and to be honest, I only watched two episodes. The combination of what looked like typical schoolgirl-tentacle foolishness & way, way too much emphasis on the heroine's panties conspired to send me off in search of less goofy pastures. Those elements are still there - although the whole tentacle thing proved to be a first-few-episode sort of thing - but with age comes patience, I suppose, and the show is proving to be not bad for what it is.

What Blue Seed *is*, is a blend of the usual kind of teenage-protagonist angst-fest aimed at the high school/junior high school market, and the sort of workplace/ensemble procedural aimed at the older college-age fanboy market segment. They pull this off by introducing a miko/designated virgin-sacrifice schoolgirl, Momiji of "legendary Izumo", and inserting her into a semi-secret government anti-monster agency staffed by the usual suspects. So it's a schoolgirl *in* a workplace-ensemble show - kind of like Witch Hunter Robin, except that nobody ever thought to force Robin to go to school... ANYways -

Momiji has been raised from infancy with the understanding that she's special, and precious, and is expected to be willing to be sacrificed - literally, life & all - "for the good of Japan", in the undescribed eventuality no-one around her bothers to explain or elaborate upon. This leaves her a little unprepared when a strange, rather supernatural guy shows up and threatens to kill her, but the extingencies of plot and contrivance eventually leads said male-lead, Kusinagi, to become her monstrous knight-protector as she jets off to Tokyo to work for the government, hunting down & fighting the plant-like "Aragami" which her specialness is destined to combat. Sort of. It gets kind of complicated, in the bludgeony, ponderous fashion that -Nineties TV anime often demonstrated.

The politics of Blue Seed are pretty fascinating from a historical perspective. The manga and TV were written in the ugly aftermath of the collapse of the Bubble Economy. This was the period in which the failure of a mad speculation-fed private-sector construction boom was followed in turn by an equally mad public-sector explosion of civil-engineering boondoggles, each more wasteful than the last. It seemed from this end of the Pacific as if the Japanese government was determined to cover every square foot of their country, rural, urban & waterway, with ferroconcrete in a desperate Keynsian war against recession & desperate denial of the death of the Japan of the Future.

This scramble for construction is in every episode of Blue Seed either as part of the plot, or as busy-work going on in the background. Not that this was unusual for the anime of the early Nineties - but the *way* that Blue Seed deals with this real-estate lunacy is somewhat unusual. Almost all of the monstrous outbreaks of Aragami un-naturalness are directly or indirectly associated with "unnatural Japan" - a distinct and damning comparison of nature-loving traditional "old Japan" with drunken, busy, ugly "modern Japan". The usual episode is "construction company destroys vital element of traditional Japanese countryside, Aragami start killing people, starting with the construction workers". As the series grinds on, you get more and more of a feeling that the writers think that the humans have it coming. All the philosophical arguments get handed to the villains, who become more and more sympathetic, or at least, talkative.

I haven't finished watching the show yet, but as an eco-reactionary text, it's quite striking. Can't say that I *like* the politics all that much, but it isn't finger-nails-down-the-chalkboard irritating. At least it's the villains spouting all the "old ways are best, nature unspoiled, damn all modernity anyways, kill off most of humanity for sustainability!" horseshit. Even if you get the idea that we're supposed to be ambivalent-to-sympathetic to the monster-Luddites.

Hmm, the storm which barely dusted Bellefonte has apparently encased State College in inches of ice, and the folks from State College are trickling in to work full of horror stories of wrecks & road-ice.

Next Wednesday, March 15th, is the fourth annual Eat A Tasty Animal For PETA Day. I'm debating whether to attempt to cook a steak here at work, or just throw up my hands, admit that I'm no kind of cook, & head on up to Garfield's at the mall for lunch on the 15th.

Around one in five adults smoke these days. And I swear every single one of them play in the bar-sponsored free poker tournaments. *Cough* *cough*.

Link via Adam C at RedHot.

Update: the endlessly cynical Minuteman thinks that the Post has got it wrong, and that it's all about the bootlegging and the Prohibition and the taxation. Eh, I've never been able to take the idea of cigarette bootlegging seriously, and the article specifically notes a wide-spread shift from branded cigarettes to the much cheaper generics, which suggests that your average smoker gets around tax hikes by sticking it to Big Brand Tobacco, rather than trying to dodge the taxman.

There's a sign up for the new development on Benner Pike above Bellefonte - "Skyview Terrace". My parents' first house was on a Skyview Terrace. That's a hell of a coincidence. We'll see if there's anything in my price range in a few years... looks like at least a few of the buildings will be duplexes or townhouses, so you never can tell.

Mmm. Not sure what I think of Monster yet. I really want to think highly of it, and there's strong design, layout & composition reasons for loving that manga's visual style & presentation. It's also an adult story about adults doing adult, normal, non-risque things without much in the way of fantasy or science-fiction elements, which is a nice change of pace. The author has a reputation for excellence for things like 20th Century Boys, Mr. Keaton & Yawara. All well & to the good.

But the writer goes & throws out his whole plot-arc & theme in one sharp-edged, undigested, vomitious mass at the end of the first volume, blowing any credit he'd earned for subtlety or lightness of touch in the preceding chapters. Lame, lame, lame. Even if it was laid out in a fine, stylized, handsome fashion. Like using a Stradivarius as a club, really.

Do better, mangaka. That's an order.

You know, reading all the blogs going on about the Oscars, I realized that I haven't seen a movie in the theatres in about three months. Maybe I'll go see Ultraviolet if Dave has the time between packing next weekend & I don't end up spending the weekend driving down to Harrisburg or something stupid like that.

Doesn't help when the local in-walking-distance theatre keeps booking crap like 8 Below for multiple weekends.

Nothing much going on, somebody on the Con's staff has had a massive brain fart, and I'm halfway worried that I might find it necessary to go down to the meeting on Saturday, which I had rather preferred not to, if at all possible... Ran into Jason Gullickson while we were both out walking yesterday afternoon, and we went over to the Union Cemetary neighborhood to take some photos of the distinctive Victorian-era architecture along High Street and Howard Street on either side of the cemetary. At some point I hope to get ahold of the images & put together a bit of something. Later in the week, possibly.

I've been mostly sitting around, watching old anime. Irresponsible Captain Tylor, notably, thinking of the late Jeff Thompson, and wondering how it is that someone so young died so unexpectedly. I kept waiting for someone to post about how it was all a stupid, sick joke of the sort fans historically have been guilty of playing on each other.

Didn't do well at the HiWay championship last night, and went on to lose some money at the home game after all of us went out before the final table, but at least I got free pizza and a t-shirt out of the experience, so I shouldn't bitch too hard. Especially after the guy who came in second to me at the last championship told me that he had *not* gotten the cash prize I had thought went to second-place, and had been a little peeved that I had run off so fast after being the only one "in the money". I owe him a drink next time, I guess.

I think I need a break from the home game - I'm not doing well at all, and not really enjoying myself at them.

My friend Ben is moving to Denver today. We were helping him haul stuff down to the car & trailer, and moving his abandoned furniture down to the curb. About the only good thing about friends moving away is the opportunity to scavenge decent furniture from their abandons. I finally got rid of that couch with no back legs in exchange for one with, y'know, legs. And a shelf. You can never have enough shelving.

Ben is hauling whatever will fit into his little Civic hatchback & the biggest trailer that U-Haul would rent him. It's got a "45 MPH" limit sign on it, but he's talking about taking the interstates to Colorado. I told him I'm worried about that big trailer flipping his little car if it gets wobbly. Not exactly the best time of year to be driving cross-country, either. Be careful, Ben.

Woo-hoo! Lookit those clods fly!

The last three days, they've been dynamiting in the fields on the other side of the Restek running track/leechfield. I talked to a worker, and he said that they were putting in a sewer main tap for a new three-hundred-unit residential subdivision, connecting into the county sewers via our industrial park's system.

They're dynamiting because this whole ridge is about three inches of topsoil on top of solid dolomite. If you need to do any sort of serious landscaping or ground work, you're going to need to break out the explosives, because you aren't gonna get anywhere with simple digging machinery. Probably explains why the development of this area has been so painfully slow - too expensive in comparison with the other possible projects on more forgiving plots.

Monkey money?!? MONKEY MONEY?!? An Indian who runs an Rotterdam-based steel-making conglomerate makes a hostile takeover bid for a rival European steelmaking firm and the head of that firm has the brass-balls gall to refer to said Indian's offer as "monkey money"?

OK, Europeans don't get to call Americans "racist" any more. I revoke their stone-throwing privileges until they get some shutters installed over the glass shingles.

"Monkey money". Christ on a crutch.

I see that it's supposedly some sort of French idiom. I don't goddamn care. It sure as hell sounds prejudiced in English, and I'll bet you my nest egg that Mittal does the majority of his business in English, just like every other Anglo-Dutch or international-Indian businessman on the face of the planet. And I'm also pretty sure that if an American businessman of the status and alleged calibre of someone like Guy Dolle produced such a racially-charged brainfart as "monkey money" in earshot of the American press, he'd be running a hot-dog stand in Omaha inside of a month. If he was particularly young - more likely he'd be clipping coupons in Boca for the rest of his very, very long retirement.

Pretty good Swann article in Sports Illustrated.

Via a link on RedHot from Mark Kilmer.

I was watching my uncle get an editor's award on C-SPAN last night, which meant wading through a lot of other newspaper folk getting their awards. (Well, more like skimming through - I kept flipping back and forth from watching a DVD of Akira.) He was given it by Ben Bradlee. I thought Bradlee was dead?

My mother called partway through, and I ended up swearing like a sailor in front of her about that idiot editorial cartoonist who spent fifteen minutes reading his cartoons out loud. One presumes that if the association gave you an award for your work, they would BE FAMILIAR WITH IT, YOU FOOL! Also, he didn't say word one about the Danish matter, but found the time to whinge comically about NSA monitoring. Yeah, you brave, brilliant artist, go ahead and "make mock o' uniforms that guard you" - you know they'll not CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF & BURN YOUR HOUSE like certain other folk whom apparently don't exist in your cartoon world outside of Hillary Clinton in a burkha. Wonder if that has anything to do with the whole "chop your head off & burn your house" factor?

Bah.

Oh, well. Congrats, Uncle Ron.

Article on the move of "space opera" from pejorative insult to semi-legitimate subgenre. I think the authors exaggerate the ignorance of post-1975 fans as to the original, pejorative sense of the term; also, their definition of modern, 1980s-era space opera as being generally optimistic is rather... myopic, given the examples offered. How are the collected works of Iain M. Banks particularly optimistic, even in comparison with the gloomy bastards of the New Wave?

Found it via Coffee & Ink.

Yezidis! Michael Totten met with the "Baba Sheikh" - introduced to him as a sort of "pope of the Yezidi" - and visited a temple-town called Lalish in Kurdistan, which the Yezidi call their "Mecca". Deeply cool.

Chizumatic & Steve Den Beste are back.

Bill Bennett & Alan Dershowitz:

We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree...

What two perspectives are those, social paleo-conservatism and newly-minted neo-conservatism? I mean, Alan Dershowitz wrote a book semi-in-favor of judicial torture, for the love of mike. You don't slide much further to the right of that without getting into Franco territory, to slide deeper into Godwin territory myself.

No arguments with the substance of their argument - I'm not too sweet on the supine mainstream press on a good day when they *aren't* bearing the throat to aggrieved violent street-thugs & bearded maniacs. But ad hominem has a value independent of invective - who makes the argument informs the value of the argument in a practical fashion.

A voice testifying against interest is more interesting and more convincing than a person arguing his or her own case, to the benefit of his or her own intellectual trend or inclination. This is why a "hey! this liberal is talking up a conservative argument" or "wow! look at this reactionary attacking this Republican administration" only has impact for the first few iterations for any particular actor before that actor expends his or her "testimony against interest" ad hominem value, and becomes a voice for the side he or she is now habitually supports.

I'm thinking in particular of Roger L. Simon and Christopher Hitchens, who both played the "leftist in support of the war" hand so hard that they're essentially spent as voices of the "left", and probably Pat Buchanan & the Lew Rockwell libertarians for counter-examples thereof on the left, although I don't pay close attention to the leftward version of this phenomenon, and those might not be the best possible examples.

Via Glenn, who bought the "two perspectives" line hook & sinker.