The Aerie
Wow. I'm a hard one to apall, but I've managed it today.
Apparently the mercenaries that the U.S. is hiring in Iraq are going on killing sprees among innocent people according to the British Telegraph which reported the story. I won't hold my breath to see the video on U.S. television. of course. Not with our so-called "free press*" ("*free press" is a registered trademark of Rupert Murdoch, not to be used without the written permission of Fox Broadcasting").
Outlandish you say? Unbelievable? Yes it is, it's as unbelievable as the video that the mercenaries posted on the Internet!
[insert gape-jawed stare here]
This video, for those of you who don't wish to view it, shows the view out the back window of a truck as it drives down various busy roads in Iraq. The shot looks disturbingly like any suburban freeway in the United States. Then the clatter of automatic weapon fire accompanies puffs of smoke from just off camera, and the cars following the camera swerve and crash as their drivers are shot!
[insert flabbergasted obscenities of rage]
What? What? What is going on here!? I pay my taxes so that Halliburton an hire mercenaries to do this?
Meanwhile back in the U.S., the unravelling of the corrupt cronyist kleptocracy running this country continues. You may not know who Jack Abramoff or "Duke" Cunningham are right now, but believe me, by this time next year you will be so tired of hearing their names you'll want to puke. And if you already know who they are, you already want to puke.
These guys are the edges of the corruption in our capitol city - the guys too hamfisted and stupid to keep their nasty activities quiet. Like cockroaches, for every Abramoff or Duke you see, there are a dozen beady-eyed schemers taking money under the table. And I realized that's a mixed metaphor, but one CAN have cockroaches under a table, so it kind of works.
The only good part is that these greedy, craven morons are cowards. The reason Cunningham pled guilty is because he's agreed to give evidence against the other participants in his crooked deals. And so it will go, and so it will go, all the way to the top. President Bush is going to be handing out so many pardons that Avery will come out with a line of stationery just for the purpose.
Have you ever had your house burn down? I know that I haven't. But assuming everybody is out safe, I can imagine it's a terribly helpless feeling, watching it burn and trying to encompass what the next steps are. I imagine that's how it feels, and if so it is similar to how many Americans feel watching our nation these days.
To those of you not from this nation, believe me, from inside here it doesn't seem to make any more sense. I get the notion that the culture of Washington D.C. has become so detached from the day-to-day reality of the average citizen that they simply have no idea of how bad this looks from the outside. And in many cases, the participants in this madness have deluded themselves into believing that they are above and separate from the mundane needs of the United States. I think many of them are so blinkered and blind that they can't even encompass the idea that what they are doing could actually destroy the nation, or cripple the world.
So we're committing war atrocities in Iraq, war crimes at torture centers elsewhere, and we've made the First Classic Blunder of getting involved in a land war in, well, if not Asia, the Mid East. At home our electoral system is compromised (Google "Diebold" for more), our economy has been squandered, corporations are running the government, and our congress is divided between angry, brutal little men and cowards.
That's what it seems like to me, at least - that Washington D.C. has gone mad with power, privilege, and self-importance. Ideology, privilege, entitlement, denial, delusion, self-aggrandizement, rationalization, war, and madness seem to have infected our national capitol. Like watching one's house burn down, the rest of us can only gape at the spectacle and wonder what will be left when it finishes consuming itself.
Hopefully we'll survive this paroxysm of self-destruction. And if we do I'm sure that history will look back at these days when "Intelligent Design" is being taught in our schools and whole towns are still living in tents three months after Hurricane Katrina, and history will wonder just what the heck was wrong with people back in 2005.
Well we're coming into the Home Stretch for Nanowrimo, and I'm not optimistic about my chances. I've written about 31,000 words so far, a little more than half of the 50,000 required, and I'd have to write 5000 words a day for the next for days to make the goal. But, who knows, I know other folks have done it. Maybe I can too.
In the midst of this I've been getting my November "Dad and Kid Days" accomplished. Am I procrastinating? Making excuses for failure? Or is it important to me? It's hard to judge my own motives.
My oldest son and I went to the Mall of America and had a nice time. Anyone who's been to the Mall knows that it's larger than a football stadium, with three levels. We walked around all three levels, with him talking almost the entire time. From a fourteen year old, this was exceptional. Never mind that he was talking almost exclusively about role-playing games and MechWarrior tactics - at least he was actually talking to me, and I could vaguely follow what he was saying. Such a gift!
We had dinner at a food court, and the food was dreadful. That's a word that's been coming to mind recently about a lot of things: dreadful. I've been experiencing a lot of dreadful things recently: I read Hal Clement's "Half Life," and found it perfectly dreadful. I really respect Clement's writing, but this one felt like a toss-off or a gedanken experiment abandoned halfway through. Basically a bunch of scientists explore Ganymede or Titan or someplace and look at a lot of ice and rock and patches of corrosive goo that might or might not be alive, the end. Dreadful.
Now I'm reading "Eldest," the latest novel by the prodigal author of "Eregon." Dreadful. Okay, not totally dreadful, but I really, really tire of fantasy novels that simply take for granted the conventions of Tolkeinesque elves, dwarves, dragons, and an idealized Medieval setting.
That's just cheap and lazy, like having half your book written for you before you start. Give me Hal Clement's wonderful "Mission of Gravity" anytime: an entire culture and adventure, built upwards from the laws of physics on a high-gravity planet, featuring likable characters who just so happen to be armored caterpillars. Give me Barker's "Tekumel," based at least on something other than whitewashed Western European mythology. Such books are like food-court Chinese food: bland, and dreadful. (You like the tie-back to the prior topic? That's one of those writer's-tricks.)
The redeeming thing about reading "Eldest" at the moment is studying how the author gets away with taking events that could be described in ten pages and drawing them out over several hundred. Inasmuch as I keep getting bogged down at the 2/3rds point in my novels, where the plot complexity and resolution leave me tangled in threads and unable to move forwards, it is interesting studying how another author fearlessly plods on, offering pages of eventless narrative, and somehow gets away with it. I'm having trouble writing a single evening's native dance, this guy manages to write twelve pages about a fellow having dinner.
Dinner at the food court was dreadful. I ordered two "spicy" entrees and fried rice from "Panda Express," and I had no hopes at all that it would be any good, and I was right. For some incomprehensible reason they kept the hot mustard packets and chopsticks behind the counter. Apparently they can be somehow combined into lethal weapons or something, so I had to request each individually from a surly youth, the mustard in anticipation of the dreadfulness of the food.
I was right, it was as bland as bland could be, even with the mustard. If someone told me afterwards that I'd eaten tofu lightly fried in lard I'd have believed it easily. There were a couple of those little black Asian peppers and I ate half of one just looking for some flavor - the result was a mouthful of bland fire. It burns without flavor, the culinary equivalent of phosphorescent light that shines without heat.
But dinner was the only dreadful thing about my evening with my son, though - it was a lot of fun to be with him, although we inevitably ended up at the Monster's Den playing Halo 2. I was dreadful at it, as usual. (Okay, two dreadful things.) There is no way a 43-year-old man can compete with a teenaged boy for reaction time. I would hide somewhere, and one of these kids would teleport into existence with their back to me. Before I could adjust my aim the tiny bit necessary to fire, these kids would whirl, spot me, and blow me away, dashing off before my body had hit the floor.
Before leaving the Mall we stopped at the Barnes and Noble. I sat and read a book on the benches next to the magazine section while the boy went and checked whether an old gift card that he had found had any money on it. While I was reading a fellow with a magazine came and sat down on the other end of the bench. At one point he sneezed, and glancing over I saw him sneeze a second time - directly onto the pages of the Newsweek he was holding. Then he nonchalantly continued reading the now biohazardous article, and when he was done he returned it to the shelf.
Dreadful. (three)
Last night was Youngest Son's turn. I had seen advertisements for the "Jump to Japan" exhibit of Anime at the Children's Museum in St. Paul, and I had wanted to take him to that, but he was very reluctant. He was afraid he'd be too old for the museum, and he turned out to be right. The display wasn't exactly dreadful, but it was depressing for a number of reasons.
First, it was expensive - $9 apiece for museum admission. Second the show was very small, just a few displays in a 400 or 500 square foot space. Several displays were simply too young for an 11-year-old boy. A fur-covered hamster-bus in front of a large diorama of "life size" anime characters took up about a quarter of the space.
A small, tattered "library" of Manga -- a genre infamous for violence and sometimes even sex -- contained carefully innocuous booklets of almost no interest to anyone. One portrayed the adventures of two guys who apparently made sushi for a living: endless scenes of people in suits, two guys in aprons and paper hats serving platters, and excited, angry guys in suits who apparently didn't like the sushi (it was all in Japanese). Manga is not worthy of its name if it features a pair of fellows in paper hats and aprons on the cover. (Irate fans of "Incredible Sushi Duo" or whatever this Japanese Manga might be called are advised to send complaints to I@dontcare.com)
The most interesting display was a computer hooked to a camera pointing at small stages where one could use wooden figures to create animated scenes, frame by frame. It was pretty easy to make a smooth, stop-motion movie of several seconds duration.
Afterwards we went to Blockbuster, where the boy rented some Anime, and then to the Chatterbox Pub for dinner. My wife recommended it because one could rent old Atari and Nintendo video games and play while eating dinner. Unfortunately, these games held little interest for a boy raised on Halo 2, but he did play a bit of Mario Brothers 3 and we had a good time.
Then it was off to... the Monster's Den, where we played cooperative Halo 2 (as opposed to the previous evening's player-versus-player Halo 2). This suited me, as I stink badly at both but in cooperative mode my son could help haul me through the video story. Boy, if you haven't played these video games, they are quite sophisticated, with beautiful graphics and elaborate, cinematic storylines punctuating long periods of shooting things. I found my niche as a sniper: the boy would hurtle headlong into swarms of evil aliens and undead - I'd hang back with my telescopic sight and pick off the monsters from a safe distance. Much less frustrating than being repeatedly stomped down by young whippersnappers the night before.
(I'm sitting at the Urban Bean cafe right now, and some nitwit has just started a cell phone conversation. I'm thirty feet away from him and when he said "Hello!" I nearly jumped out of my skin, because he bellowed it so loudly. He has apparently gone to the wrong place, and in so doing confused a local friend sufficiently to send that fellow way out of town to a different wrong location, and so he is announcing his imbicility to the entire cafe. I'm resisting the urge to hurl my coffee mug at him.)
Well, my daughter has decided to postpone Dad and Daughter's Day in the interests of homework, so today is devoted solely to Nanowrimo or, as you can see, the procrastination thereof. And now, having written about 1500 words that won't count toward's today's total, I guess I'd better get back to it.
(Oh geeze, the friend of the cell-phone-boor has arrived, and he's still bellowing in his cell-phone-voice to this fellow sitting across the table from him. So I get to listen to their gossip... oh, this fellow is his Narco-Anonymous sponsor! They're reviewing his Twelve Steps! And his HIV diagnosis! At a bellow!)
(Where's my coffee mug?)
Thanksgiving was tolerable. We spent it jammed into my mother-in-law's townhouse: Ten adults and nine kids ranging in age from 1-14, in about 1200 square feet. TV playing football most of the time. I was supposed to be working on my Nanowrimo novel, but I had a little trouble getting work done seeing that anytime I opened the laptop little tiny hands would reach in and rap on the keyboard.
I dreaded the day, since hanging around with her family tends to drive my lovely wife crazy. Sure enough within minutes of arriving she was being abused by her relatives - laughing, smiling, everybody smiling and saying horrible things. Ah, the holidays...
So here I am at work, on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I don't know why I'm here. Oh yeah, that's right - I'm paid hourly.
So I took part of today off on my timesheet, but I'm working a few hours. Mostly trying to get started on this big report due in two weeks. Hard to be motivated, though, since only I and my cube partner, Silent McWordless, are apparently in the building today.
We're getting our first "real" snow today. Three inches or so coming down this morning.
I shoulda stood in bed. Last night at 3:00 a.m., for no apparent reason, I had to hustle downstairs and worship the porcelan god. I have no idea why - my stomach was empty. I just sat there, miserable, eyes streaming, wondering "Well what the heck is this?"
This morning I approached food very cautiously, but no problems, um, "came up." Tea... fine. Bagel... no problem. So I am not sure what the heck was going on last night. Maybe it was just a practice barf, just getting me in shape for the upcoming (ha!) Urplympics.
Well, I suppose I should get back to earning my money.
No vast insights in today's blog - just a quick note or two in order to confirm my continued existence. As one might have anticipated, life got stupid when work resumed last week, and then the entire weekend was spent on various time-consuming pursuits so that last week eased into this week with no discernable seam.
Friday night we went to see the new Harry Potter movie, which has to be evaluated as "creditable." They did about the best job they could have done condensing a 700 page book into a 150-minute movie, and I don't think the Dursley's or Winky will be missed. I still assert that book 4 was when Rowling figured out that she could tell her editors to go sod off and then wrote whatever came into her billion-dollar head. Certainly the editing job accomplished by the movie screenwriters demonstrates that the book COULD have been edited down to 400 words with practically no loss of quality.
Anyway Friday night was Harry Potter, Saturday morning I think I managed to go to the gym? It's all a blur. Oh, oh, I remember now - we went to the annual coffee fest at Calhoun Square, which I've managed to miss for the last five years. That's right. Too much caffeine, even restricting myself to decaf. Then we shopped for some birthday presents, and then hey presto it's off dinner on Saturday evening.
Sunday was the Hellish Day of Housecleaning for my youngest boy's party - yes we've had our last 11-year-old family birthday party until the grandkids show up. I cleaned the living room, which desperately needed it - dust buffalo, anyone? However, while beating the living room carpet with a baseball bat, one of the laundry-pole's hooks poked through the carpet. So at some point a new carpet will be needed - hopefully soon, I hate that rug. But I didn't damage it on purpose... really!
The families arrived, crammed themselves into the house, ate, sang, watched presents, and ate cake, and left. And then it was time to go back to work. Last night the wife and I had an appointment, followed by dinner at Old Country for the youngest lad's ACTUAL birthday. Tonight we have to go to a church potluck for some unfathomable reason.
It's like a bloody roller-coaster. Tomorrow threatens to maybe actually be a regular day, with like an evening in it and everything. Then we have Thanksgiving, which we will be thankful to survive with any sanity. My wife's sister's have been popping out the kids like crazy over the last few years, and we all get to visit grandma's single-level townhouse for Thanksgiving. The Shrine of the TV will of course be showing football, meaning that half a dozen bored wound-up kids will be hanging all over every surface, while the in-laws push each other's buttons all night.
But now it's off to the potluck at church. For this I'm an atheist? I must not be doing this right.
So I'm sitting here at the Blue Moon working on Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month. My spouse and I are writing with our friends Terri and Ellis... Ellis being the Ellis of http://www.ellis-music.com, and everyone here is trying to do Nanowrimo.
The entire time I've been listening to my iPod shuffle which, if you know from the iPod Shuffle, means I don't have a track list or any indicators.
So we're at adjacent tables, typing, and Ellis and I are on the bench along the wall and alluvasudden Leo Kottke wraps up his song and on the iPod comes... Ellis!
I felt a little weird, because here I am listening to Ellis, and Ellis is sitting next to me. I didn't want to say anything to make her feel, I don't know, self-conscious or something, but I wanted to tell somebody so I passed the headphones over to Theresa. She of course immediately spilled the beans, but it didn't seem to bother Ellis at all. I guess that's one of the costs of celebrity!
I actually had something like this happen once. I went to the library and had to ask a librarian a question. I handed my library card to a fellow sitting at a computer terminal. He got a funny look on his face and swiveled the monitor around to show me that he was looking at the website, where my book 'Mitlanyal' was listed for sale.
That was weird, but only in a pleasant way - so hopefully it was just as pleasant for Ellis!
Japanese space exploration doesn't make the news very often. I haven't been watching the televised news, so I don't know whether this got reviewed on the big news broadcasts or not. And I doubt whether this aspect of it has been explored. But Japan is on the verge of becoming a new world power by landing a probe on an asteroid.
Why?
Because while space is very large, very cold, and very black, space has other characteristics.
Space is very, very high. If you drop something from outer space, it will hit the ground hard. Really hard. Wiping-out-the-dinosaurs hard.
Space is also very, very smooth. Think about the fine Minnesota sport of curling: big, heavy stones are slid carefully along the ice in a game of frozen shuffleboard. One of the elements of the game is that once you start the rocks sliding, the smooth ice does very little to slow the rock down. Sweepers try to add and remove ice chips in order to affect the speed of the stones, but they slide for a long time on a fairly small push.
Space is smoother.
So Japan is trying to land its Hayabusa exploratory probe on an asteroid named Itokawa, and then retrieve samples and return to earth. Great, terrific science, love it.
But what if. What if instead of a science probe, something rather simpler was landed on the asteroid. What if instead of a science probe, an engine was landed on Itokawa.
It's a non-trivial proposition for sure. But Hayabusa addresses the greatest portion of them: flying to the asteroid; landing on it with precision; flying back to Earth.
Depending on the particular asteroid selected, Japan could do something simpler than land and return a robotic probe. Japan could land a motor. Land it in a very precise location. Adjust it with gimbals so it's pointing in exactly the right direction. Then fire it.
The asteroid changes course. With great precision, the asteroid starts heading for Earth. And because space is so smooth, all it has to do is be put on course for Earth, and it will keep going without any additional pushing. It doesn't have to get to Earth fast. Just nudge it along and wait.
Japan can do that now. Then they can make their demands. Or possibly not: maybe they choose a fairly small asteroid, and drop it very precisely on one of their enemies.
The impact could be more powerful than any existing single nuclear weapon. The only radioactivity it would release would come from the nuclear plants in the area. A nice, clean, precise, lethal and unstoppable non-nuclear weapon, with more power than a nuclear weapon.
This may sound like science fiction, but now that Japan has landed a probe on an asteroid, it's just science.
To think about what this is like, imagine that you're living with your neighbors at the bottom of a tall cliff. One of your neighbors builds a long pole, and reaches way, way up the cliff, and starts poking at one of the boulders high overhead. Everyone is very impressed.
Then at the back of the crowd someone says "Hey, couldn't he knock that down on our heads?"
The U.S. is currently fighting a lot of wars. The War in Iraq. The War on Terror. The War on Drugs. And the only successful war, the War on Good Taste.
But we're not paying attention to science. We're losing ground on engineering. And we're gutting our space administration.
Now another country is demonstrating the ability to rendezvous with an asteroid, and return to Earth.
Sure they're Japan. They're our ally. They have no cause to attack us. But they CAN. And while we waste so many resources on these other fruitless wars, we ignore an entirely new potential thrat.
We went to see a sneak-preview of "Zathura" last night - it was pretty good. And I don't say that just because it's an implied quid pro quo between Colombia Pictures, Air America Radio, and me, the guy who got $40 of movie tickets for free. It was exciting and fun and had parts you could see coming a mile away, and parts you couldn't, and it was all the better for it. I certainly liked it lots better than "Jumanji," which did absolutely nothing for me. And it didn't hurt that my two sons saw it with us, meaning they got hit with a moral sledgehammer labelled "Love thy brother as thyself." Those boys could use a little anti-bicker spray.
Nanowrimo continues unabated. Of course, these two weeks are gravy - the hard stuff comes next week when I start my new contract job at The One Who Is, and suddenly I'm trying to cram 1667 words a day in alongside an actualy job. You mean I have to work? It's, like, so unfahr, gawd!
Dearest Daughter was not in attendance for the film, which worked out since we only got four tickets. She was at dress rehearsal for her school play, which opens tonight. We're already planning to go on Saturday, but it sounds like we're also going to go tonight, just because.
My Number One Son is Supposedly on the lighting crew for this play, but he has spent an awfully suspicious number of afternoons home rather than working on the lights. And he wasn't required for the rehearsal. We had to push him to be involved in the theater, and there's only so much pushing you can do before you find yourself standing behind him, manipulating his limbs like a puppet. So we'll see - he doesn't have to participate in theater, as far as I'm concerned, but I want him to participate in SOMETHING. I don't want him coasting through high school without making some connections with someone or something.
Well, I've managed to procrastinate on my writing for long enough today - time to get to it!
Oh, it's Red-Letter Day around here... the twins got their braces off! Today, together, at the same time! This is pretty notable, because my Dear Daughter has had braces for a mind-boggling five years, while Number One Son has only had braces for two. Somehow they managed to finish up at the same time. Twins, I guess!
They look wonderful, and I can tell they're very happy.
Meanwhile, I'm working on my Nanowrimo. Story-wise and plot-wise it's coming right along. My pre-Nano research has paid off, as I have encountered all sorts of wild coincidences and weird facts that can color the story.
I'm up to about 14,000 words so far - about on track.
Today a book I ordered showed up that's going to help - "The Realm of a Rain-Queen" (1943) is a scholarly book about anthropological studies of the Lovedu people. I don't know if I'm going to be able to incorporate a lot of it in this draft of the book, but I suspect on the second draft I'll be able to add tons of cultural imagery.
Reading at random, I've learned that the Lobedu people greet each other contextually - that is, with greetings that correspond to whatever the other person is doing. So if you see a woman carrying wood, you say "Bring the wood," to which she will reply "The wood is here." A lot of greetings are based around food, so if someone comes from a distant trip you say "What do they eat there?" to which the pilgrim will reply "They are starving," regardless of how much food the distant people might have.
Ooh, and I just opened up the back - it's got a freakin' fold-out color map! Yeah baby!
But it's 328 pages of really dense 8-point text. I don't see myself reading all that - or even a good part of that - while trying to write 1667 words a day!
But for now things are going well. I start the new contract in a week!
According to this article in The New Scientist magazine, an enterprising 15-year-old boy pieced together the secret of his donor father's identity using new services, such as commercial DNA testing.
What a fantastic story, and what a resourceful young man.
As a reunited adoptee and one of the founders of Bastard Nation I have to say that I am encouraged by this lad's ability to unearth his heritage. But I am disturbed that a child undertook all the cost and risk involved in meeting this stranger, and that the donor agency stresses the confidentiality of the adult donor over the emotional and physical well-being of the searching child.
The forgotten member of the anonymous donor contract is the offspring. These persons did not agree to the contract of anonymity. The fact of their conception does not obligate them to adhere to a contract to which they did not agree. Likewise, adoptees all over the world are held to adoption contracts and promises to which they were not a party.
Adopted persons and donor offspring are more vulnerable than other citizens to genetically-inherited vulnerabilities to disease. They do not have contact with blood relatives, increasing the difficulty of locating organ or marrow donations. And these liabilities are handed down to their own offspring, who certainly have no responsibility for the conditions under which their parents were conceived.
Adoption and sperm donorship are excellent and necessary institutions. But for too long agencies have made promises that they have no right making in order to facilitate their business. And they maintain policies of secrecy and privileged information without appropriate oversight: policies that deny the rights of the adult citizens who emerge from their practices.
It is long past time that these organizations revisit the core beliefs that underly their placement policies: that children are a commodity, that secrecy is beneficial to the donor or adoption process, and that they have any right at all to keep from adult citizens the personal and medical information that can profoundly affect the lives of those citizens and their own chilren.
And as this story indicates, if these agencies cannot grow and change they will be bypassed. Mightn't it have been better in this case for the 15 year old to be encouraged to wait until he was an adult, with the understanding that at that time he would have the right to contact his biological father? Wouldn't it have been better if, refusing to accept that delay, he and his parents could have received counselling in concert with the meeting with his biological father? Instead, a child took matters into his own hands and faced all the risks without any professional guidance.
Secrets and lies are not an appropriate foundation for such well-intentioned businesses as donor banks and adoption agencies. It's long since past time that these ill-considered secrecy policies be discarded, and open practices be put into place to protect all parties and guarantee the full rights of everyone involved - including the adults who trace their origins to these organizations.