Ambrose & Elsewhere

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.

Stephen Robinett (a.k.a. “Tak Hallus”) is dead–and has been, it seems, since 2003.

He sort of fell out of the field by the 1980s, and personally I thought it was a mistake to drop his pseudonym: “Tak Hallus” is weird and instantly memorable, whereas I can never remember if his real name has a final “e” or not without looking it up (and I’m a huge fan). But reading his Stargate as a serial in Analog was one of the highlights of my teenage geekdom, and I know that I’m not alone in this. It seems weird that his passing went unremarked for so long in the field, now that we are Living In The Future and know everything before it happens, and also what two flavors of talking head think about it.

1. This is bad. What is M. Night Shyamalan thinking? I’m speaking as one of the three people on the face of this planet who actually liked The Village. But I’m about done with him, at this point.

2. This is good. Happy 191st birthday, Emily Brontë.

My Blog Gate post of the week is up at last, a review of Matthew Goodman’s The Sun and the Moon. Executive summary: I really liked it.

If I had picked a Dunsany novel likely to be adapted as a movie, My Talks with Dean Spanley wouldn’t have been it. But this does look like it might be a lot of fun. They’re certainly working with a great cast.

[Seen at theinferior4.]

1. Ho ho ho ho Mr Vorkos you’re going to be Vorkos-again! And again and again, we hope.

2. More news on Berlusconi’s shady dealings about hideous decrepit old bodies–not his own this time, though (thank God).

The news report describes the tombs as “Phoenician” but, since Sardinia was a Carthaginian possession until the Romans beat them up and took their elephants and islands away from them, “Punic” might be the better word.