Ambrose & Elsewhere

Isn’t there a giant virus inside this thing?

Stardate 4307.1. Do not enter the zone of negative energy!

1. My Blog Gate post for the week is up. This one is about legends, the pirate queen of Ireland, phlegm and other types of humor.

2. Morlock may be immune from fire, but he has been Kindled.

I expected this to be all over my flist today, what with the densely layered genre refs (especially a great turn on the novel Dune around the 11 minute mark). But maybe people are paying more attention to things that are really happening. Which, on balance, is probably a Good Thing.

But for those who need a break, here’s John Hodgman (the Daily Show’s “resident Expert”, PC from the Mac commercials, etc) at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner.

As he mentions, Obama was his warm-up act, and the President did pretty well too. He’s no John McCain as far as telling jokes goes; he has trouble keeping a straight face. But the Rahm-vs-camel joke was pretty good, and there were some other nicely placed zingers.

1. Because it’s always Wednesday somewhere, if only in our hearts, I just put up my Blog Gate post of the week. It’s about whether Classical or Norse mythology has better monsters, which is a dumb thing to argue about really, except the other guy started it.

2. I tossed my melted mind into this week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question being “What real-life city seems the most fantastical or science fictional to you?” No prizes for predicting my answer.

Here’s an Iran story I didn’t see on television (which has been beyond worthless in covering the aftermath of the election, if that’s the right word): the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri has apparently come out strongly against the validity of the official results.

1. Happy Bloomsday.

2. Stately, plump James Enge was biking last night when he (i.e. I) realized something about being middle-aged. I don’t have any first wind anymore. As recently as my thirties (which is not too recent, I guess), when I exercised I would start out with a lot of energy, then flag after a while (15 or 20 seconds, perhaps) and finally get a second wind as endorphins or something kicked in. Now I don’t have that first wind: I’m groaning from the second I hit the road (or the rowing machine, as the case may be). If I stick with it, though, the second wind still comes along, as strong or stronger than it used to. If it ever stops showing up I think I’ll give up every pretense of fitness and settle down to becoming perfectly spherical, which is where my natural talents seem to lie anyway.

3. Who do I root for in this battle of dinosaurs, Berlusconi vs. Murdoch? I suppose it’s too much to hope for that they will plunge together down the chasm into the Reichenbach Falls.

In a recent and valuable appreciation of Lord Dunsany on Tor.com, Jo Walton issued the following pronouncement that sort of freaked me out.

Lord Dunsany wasn’t writing fantasy, because what he was writing was defining the space in which fantasy could later happen.

I think it makes sense to draw a line between the modern fantasy genre and the work in older traditions which has influenced modern fantasy. Beowulf and the Odyssey aren’t fantasy fiction in the sense that The Hobbit is.

But British writers had been writing straight-up fantasy for half a century before Dunsany started publishing. MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin or Morris’ The Well at the World’s End are fantasy in precisely the same sense that Tolkien’s fiction is, and they’re obviously part of a continuous genre tradition.

And this notion that genre-establishing work can or should be categorically excluded from the genre it establishes strikes me as inherently untenable.

If it’s Wednesday, it must be time for some whining, puling excuses about why my Blog Gate post of the week is late. Only this time it’s actually early. (I was avoiding other work, naturally.) It’s just some incoherent thoughts about a fantasy epic which, in some ways, is too brilliant to cohere.

It had been so long since I hit pavement that the first signals from my nerves were a little hard to decode.

“Hey! Is this pain? Pain and biking don’t mix! Go back and make sure the nerves know what they’re talking about!”

Then I remembered I was rolling in the street with the bike on top of me. So I figured maybe it was pain after all.

Nothing very serious, though. What happened was that a puppy, being chased by a peace officer (doubling as animal control, apparently), ran into the street right in front of me, stopped suddenly, and gave me the old deer-in-the-headlights look. I managed to brake before I slammed into him, but Newton’s First Law of Motion carried me off the saddle and onto the street. Pretty light consequences: some road rash on my forearm and hand, and some bloodstains on a shirt I don’t like much. (Laundry day was several days ago, only it never happened.)

Here’s the thing: this happened about a block away from the place where a squirrel bounced off my bike last fall. And the place seems to have more roadkill than any comparable stretch of road in town (though I can’t claim to have made a scientific study).

The only rational explanation is that there is some aura of doom about the road that impels cute fuzzy creatures to seek their destruction on it.

Which is fine with me. I mean, if they like it. But why involve me and my shiny new bike in their bloodstained deeds of terror and despair?

Is it crazy that this image Do not look behind the curtain!