Ambrose & Elsewhere

Two squirrels, both alike in dignity,
in the Great Black Swamp, where we lay our scene,
from innate squirr’liness run up two trees
in one synchronic rush ‘cross lawny green.
What antic maze, more mad than mating fit,
posses’t the sciurids wild to wildly roam
through street and yard in simultaneous snit
and so adorn the trees of neighbr’ing homes?
Was it the speeding cyclist drove them mad?
The SUVs that hulked along the curb?
Or bright October air that made them glad
until their squirr’ly brains became disturbed?
Damn if I know. I just pedall’d past
as brace of squirrels stood arbor-bound, aghast.

_____

Actually, I think it was walnut intoxication. All the squirrels in town have been acting crazy lately, and the many black-walnut trees in town have been dropping ripe walnuts for weeks so, on the post-hoc-propter-hoc principle that never fails, I conclude the two things have something to do with each other. But none of that fit the meter. I expect Shakespeare had the same sort of problem.

It turns out there is a cure for the summertime blues. Fall!

This Crooked Way is now in stock at Amazon.com. It should be hitting actual shelves in brick-and-mortar stores fairly soon.

It’s already been reviewed, not wholly favorably, by Publishers Weekly. (They didn’t like the ending though they say nice things about some of the episodes.)

1. The obligatory Disney-buys-Marvel joke: “High School Musical: Xavier Institute Edition”. Let’s face it: it couldn’t suck worse than X-Men 3.

2. My son is back and better than ever. His cat Lewis, however, has developed some weird attachment issues from the separation. For instance, Lewis kept running around to block me as I was trying to leave the house this morning–and I’m not even his tertiary Comfort Person. But it seems that nowadays no one is allowed to leave the house without his written permission, and he doesn’t know how to write.

3. My friend Howard Jones got a big splash in the Wall Street Journal for his collections of Harold Lamb’s adventure fiction. A belated “Yay!” for that–they really are great books and Howard has done incredible work bringing the stories back to light.

4. I was reading Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds last night and I saw that Iambilichus claimed the mys- in mystery comes from Greek μῦς (“mouse”). So every mys-tery is really a mouse-tery. This strikes me both as a pretty unlikely etymology and as totally awesome. This fourth item might seem to violate the “Three-Thing Day” rule–unless it is really the first item over again, eternally recurring, like a mouse swallowing his own tail.

1. Inglourious Basterds: The Dirty Dozen meets Mission Impossible in the 7th Circle of Hell. This is not a negative review, unless it sounds like one to you.

2. My son is in out of town this week for a professional conference. It makes me feel impossibly old to type that–and, more importantly, I’m missing him a lot. Still, it’s pretty cool and I hope it goes well for him.

3. It was back to classes for me today. Things have gone pretty well so far: minimal-to-acceptable casualties.

I’m going to drop out of my usual apolitical mode to salute Barney Frank for saying what needs to be said to a certain faction in the so-called debate about health care. There are legitimate, if somewhat hard-hearted, arguments that might be made against the Democratic health-care proposals (e.g., their respective price-tags and who is going to pay for them). But no valid argument involves comparisons to Hitler or Stalin.

Last Friday I fell off my bike again, but this time I swear it was not my fault. I came around a turn in the bike trail and there was a fair-sized tree down across the pavement. I tried to stop by a combination of braking, turning slightly, and rolling on the ground. It was the last one that finally worked.

My left hip and the first two fingers of my left hand took most of my weight. The bruise on my left hip is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever seen on a body that wasn’t in a hospital; I’m almost proud of it. But it’s the sprained fingers that have really been incapacitating for writing or reading, which is a significant portion of what I do. I’m by no means a ten-finger typist. But I am an almost wholly unconscious typist: I think of what I want to say and some clicking sounds are emitted by the keyboard and the words go up on the screen. Except for the past week or so the clicks have been accompanied by the muttered refrain, “Ow… ow… ow…” as I moved the injured fingers without thinking about it. So, in short, I didn’t get much writing done, including this week’s Blog Gate post.

I finally did put something up today. For one thing, the sprained fingers are healing up and, for another, I was outraged/annoyed/totally unsurprised by a gross blog-post from someone whose work I once made some effort to like, and then gave up from dislike of the man himself. This got me thinking, if that’s not too strong a word, about the cost/benefit ratio of author-blogging. (Thanks, if that’s not too strong a word, to james_nicoll for the link, and to kythiaranos for the snarky phrase “Blog against Blogging Week”–which I thought was a brilliantly original coinage of my own until I googled it.)

1. Errol Morris has Part 1 of “Seven Lies About Lying” at the NYT website (registration may be required). I’m not sure I can buy the pedantic distinction between lying and deception, but it’s an interesting stretch of text, illustrated by some hoax-a-licious 19th century posters (for those who were intrigued by last week’s review of The Sun and the Moon).

2. This just in: crows are smart. You know this. I know this. Morlock knows this. Even Aesop knows this and he’s been dead for 2500 years or so, definitely hampering his cognitive faculties. But now the NYT knows this, which makes all the difference, I guess.

3. The Kepler spacecraft has already detected an exoplanet. That a spacecraft designed to detect planets has detected a planet may not seem newsworthy. But I just think it’s cool we have a spacecraft aloft whose job it is to find planets.

1. My Blog Gate post for this week is a review/reader’s memoir of Stargate by Tak Hallus (a.k.a. Stephen Robinett), as a belated memorial to the late author.

2. You’ve probably heard by now, but Baen’s Universe is closing. I have mixed feelings about this. I hate to see another market close, but after my original subscription lapsed I never got enough oomph up to renew–I wanted to like the zine more than I actually liked it. And the art on the site always bites my eye in a really unpleasant way. De gustibus. This may be more evidence that “professional” rates are unsustainable for short fiction, though.

3. I renewed my SFWA membership. I have mixed feelings about this, too. But the current administration has been so heroic in tackling things that had to be tackled (e.g. the new website) that I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch by voting with my feet while marching to the beat of a different drummer. (When my feelings are mixed, my metaphors follow.)

4. SF Signal asked me, among others of greater note, about the Hugos in this week’s Mind Meld feature.

5. Is right out.

The Vortex Cannon: useful and beautiful.