Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:30 PM

I knew when I signed up for this class that the workload was going to be massive. However, no matter how much I remind myself of that, it doesn't help when it does consume my whole weekend. In the meantime, here are some stories I've seen over the weekend that I want to call attention to:

• Is That Legal, the blog that's been all over Rep. Coble's ignorant racist remarks on the Japanese internment during WW2, has uncovered another underreported gem in the Patriot Act. It is now law that before anyone can close on a real estate transaction, the lawyer "must first check a federal database to ascertain whether either seller or buyer is a "Specially Designated National"--that is, a person or entity on a "terrorist list" compiled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department. And here's the kicker: if seller or buyer is on the list, then the lawyer must (a) report the fact to the federal government, (b) delay the closing, and (c) not tell the client(s) that the lawyer has done (a) and (b). Two things jump out at me here. First, this is a spot where the reach of the USA PATRIOT Act is just enormous. It affects every single real estate transaction in the nation. ...Second, the USA PATRIOT Act here seems to tamper with the attorney-client relationship in a fundamental way." Talk about intrusive! [As seen on Atrios]
• Yesterday, I linked to an Altercation piece describing the new Bush doctrine -- how we plan to be "the bully on the block." Digby links to some primary documents if you want to read the originals. He also links to more analysis of the plan, calling it "an obsolete military doctrine before it has even been tried." [Building a new Maginot line, anyone?]
• And speaking of French military triumphs and defeats, Molly Ivins defends them against some of the recent slurs aimed their way. To wit: "George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried." That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler." Way to go, Molly!
• If you haven't heard the latest from Iraq yet, "So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." In fact, [CBS News Correspondent Mark] Phillips says the source used another cruderword. The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they've found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong." [via Atrios]
• Recently Slate had an amazing article titled The George W. Diet which pointed out the absurdity of current budgetary policy:

  Suppose you had a friend who was grossly overweight for years but lately had been looking very trim. Suddenly, though, he puts on 30 or 40 pounds and is waddling around like his old porcine self. He explains that he's found a marvelous new diet: "You eat like a pig and stop exercising until you get so fat that you just have to lose weight." Would you say that your friend is kidding himself?
  And if your friend went on to complain that he was getting fat because other people were eating too much, and this diet was the only way to stop these other people from putting those unsightly pounds on him, would you think his self-delusion was becoming clinical? Or would you start to suspect that the joke is on you?
  Yet this is essentially the logic adopted by the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership to rationalize turning the federal budget surplus back into huge deficits.

• A few other good articles in Slate include the Pentagon itself dissing SDI as not only premature but possibly counterproductive. And the recent Book Club review of A Consumer's Republic (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) provided a fascinating look at post-WW2 American history, including how the GI Bill probably caused the setback in women's societal advancement, as described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Inneresting stuff.
• Nathan Newman points out how 'Leave No Child Behind' is ruining American schools. Its evaluation methods flunk schools that are considered "stellar" by any other standard. I've said it before, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the "Leave No Child Behind" Act is actually designed to make public schools fail in order to promote vouchers.
• The notion of corporate personhood may be approaching its end. As I mentioned earlier Thom Hartmann's book Unequal protection found "The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County [v. the Southern Pacific Railroad]. ... [C]orporate personhood was ?provided? -- in the headnote, instead of the formal written decision of the Supreme Court." A new book review notes that in a 1978 case, Rehnquist wrote that he disagreed with Santa Clara County, but was forced to comply with precedent it set. Now that it's been shown that what he disliked wasn't part of the decision, he may feel freer to rule his conscience (against corporate personhood). Also, there's a major corporate personhood case coming up this April, so let's hope that's enough time for this book's influence to spread. Maybe I should send them a copy. [Review seen on SCOTUSBlog, which is produced by the law firm representing Nike.]
• For more Supreme Court speculation, a Boston Phoenix article reports on a lesser known sodomy case which the court hasn't yet decided whether to hear. This concerns age of consent laws, and the article is fascinating.
• In good news, the provision of the Homeland Security bill that protected vaccine makers from lawsuits has been repealed! Frist may try other tactics, but we've got a respite. And back in December, the White House ordered the EPA to not release a planned asbestos warning about asbestos in . Well, that too has been reversed!
• Irony is not yet dead (even though the Pope has condemned sarcasm). From a letter in today's Washington Post: "The United States yesterday "urged China not to use the war on terrorism to crack down on political dissent."" Meanwhile, they've filed briefs trying to prevent the march in NYC over the weekend. After the date of the march was set but before the march took place, the government raised terror alerts to Orange based upon false information. As the inaccuracy of their sources were revealed, they announced that if no attacks happened the weekend of the march, they'd think about lowering the alert again. Hmmm...
• Speaking of marches, MoveOn.Org has announced a Virtual March on Washington. They're calling on Americans to flood the Senate with calls, faxes, and letters on February 26th. Protest from the comfort and safety of your own home, office or whereever. Read the details and sign up!
• Here's another nasty consequence of media consolidation. News Corp. (owned by Rupert Murdoch) owns the L.A. Dodgers which employed Sandy Koufax. A NewsCorp-owned newspaper reported in its gossip column that Koufax (who worked for the NewsCorp-owned Dodgers) was cooperating with an impending biography to be published by another NewsCorp company only because the author of said biography "promised to keep it secret that he is gay." As Keith Olbermann explains, "The same corporation that published the rumor is actually the source of the rumor. It also profited from the alleged blackmail and employed the victim." Koufax was so disgusted with the attempted outing that he's quit the Dodgers rather than continue to work for the conglomerate. "Their book. Their tabloid. Their team. Their scandal. It is a spectacular example of synergy, working at its most efficient (when all moral, ethical and professional standards have been eliminated from the process and thus cannot gum up the works). ... This is the triangulation of swine -- three bullies beating up one kid called decency."
• Speaking of privacy, from a social informatics POV, Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet is a fascinating piece. What happens when an e-mail gets forwarded beyond where its author wants, and what can (or should) be done about it? I mean it -- though it may not seem like important news, it's both worthwhile and thought-provoking.
• A picture's worth a thousand words. I've written before about how notions of fairness can be abused by giving unjustified weight to "opposing opinions." Take a look at this Amptoon on objectivity-as-bias.
• Here's a fun piece (found when chaining through the blogosphere) on how snow removal services disprove the tenets of doctrinaire libertarianism. Heh. Any libertarians care to address that issue?
• LISNews (that's news about Library & Information Science -- not a site devoted to me) lists some pickup lines for librarians. One of my favorites: "Your spouse will never know. Under the Patriot Act, I can't tell anyone you've been here!"

Finally, I don't know if I say this often enough, but I love my husband very much. For breakfast this morning, he made me poached eggs on sliced avocado on toast, all drizzled with hollandaise sauce. [Kinda lke eggs benedict, but with avocados instead of ham.] Dee-licious! And a minor sigh. So many of my favorite foods -- such as sushi, hollandaise sauce, Caesar's salad, and most ways I like eggs for breakfast -- involve raw or undercooked "animal foods," making them verboten for pregnant women. I'm not expecting yet, but how can I survive nine physically stressful months without such delicacies?

Oh yeah: It has now been 523 days since President Bush said all we want is Osama brought to justice, dead or alive, and 322 days since American citizen Jose Padilla was placed in a military prison for an indefinite period of time without charge, trial or due process of law.

And that's all the news I have time to blog at the moment.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 AM

Despite all the "fifteen minutes and you're hungry again" jokes, if you eat enough sushi, it really fills you up and can keep you not-hungry for hours. So, I'll just remind folks once again that Sushi Corner, just behind Main Street in downtown Melrose, serves all-you-can-eat sushi weekday lunches for $19.95. Ooh yummy. This is the second time I've done this, and it's both a good value and quite filling. I'm not a big eater, so after each visit I tallied up what I actually ate. Eight or nine rolls that list for $30 - $35. That was lunch and I still wasn't hungry at ten pm (okay, we had ice cream sundaes around six-ish, but still...)

Anyway, much of yesterday was spent celebrating Ian's birthday. As a gift, I upgraded his LiveJournal account, which gives him new features, including the domain http://xiphias.livejournal.com/, which you can add to your bookmarks. [Unfortunately, this happened just as LJ was victimized by a several-day-long DDOS attack, rendering most of the servers inaccessible.] Along with their gifts for Ian, my mother sent a red silk cheung-sam dress she made just for me. Wow, it looks good. It's a little too cold and slushy to wear it outside, but it's a knockout.

After lunch, we caught a matinee of Daredevil. Decent flick, not much to say about it, though the trailer for X-Men 2 looks amazing! At the theater, I saw a poster for the upcoming film Bend it like Beckham. I just read a summary and caught the trailer -- it looks like a lot of fun. They're comparing it to Billy Elliott (the inner city kid who wants to perform ballet). This movie is about a girl from a traditional Indian family who wants to play soccer. Some of the lines in the trailer are hilarious (particularly those by her mother). Upcoming Movies notes that soccer movies generally fail in the United States. Maybe they should double-feature this with Shaolin Soccer.

I know I haven't posted much in the way of news lately. Part of it is because the delicate balance between school, job-hunting, writing fiction, and newsblogging, something has to give and in this case it's been the blogging. I've also been falling prey to outrage overload. The news seems so unrelentingly over-the-top bad, that I just can't keep up. But I'll take a little time now to round up some stories that have caught my attention over the last week.

• On Altercation (scroll down to the Feb. 19th entry), Michael Tomasky has a very scary piece on the new Bush Doctrine -- which has actually been planned by Cheney's team since the first Bush administration. Ten years ago, a document called the Defense Planning Guidance spelled out their vision.

  It said that the United States had to be, as Colin Powell put it at the time, the bully on the block. This meant that other nations would have to understand that its our world, theyre just living in it; no other superpower could even think about emerging; collective action was rejected (NATO won a partial exemption here, but only partial) in favor of ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted; preventive military action would prove necessary, somewhere, just to make the point that it was our prerogative to do so (the DPG mentioned Poland, Lithuania, the Philippines, North Korea, and Iraq); and more. The writing of the document was overseen by Paul Wolfowitz. When it was leaked, it was widely denounced as bellicose to the point of being unhinged. Bush 41 said this aint our policy, noway nohow.

  Terrifying stuff. Tomasky continues by showing how some of the Bush administration's current moves -- priorities that seem otherwise inexplicable -- fit within this framework. This does not describe the American ideals I grew up believing in. This does not describe a country I want to live in.
• When I read this Slate story, I honestly swore aloud. Most of the talk about Bush's proposed budget talks only about it's sheer size, but not so much about the items contained within. Well, guess what, not only are they spending more on SDI missile defense than ever before, but "Rumsfeld has asked Congress to exempt Missile Defense from the law that requires all weapons systems to undergo operational tests before being deployed in the field." In other words, they want to spend all this money on something that won't even work! This is stupid! [Personally, I've done enough QE and design to come to the conclusion that the missle defense program as currently proposed is too flawed a concept to ever work right.]
• In the wake of the first USA PATRIOT Act, a Vermont bookseller has decided to purge all customer records. Too bad that the only way to protect one's right to read is to purposely blind onesself (to the detriment of customer service). This is one bookstore that won't be able to provide the "other people who bought X also bought Y" lists. On the other hand, if you're feeling provocative, someone's already come up with the So you'd like to ... Have The F.B.I. Start A File On You list. On a related note, Timothy Burke (whose weblog doesn't have any handy links to specific entries, so scroll down to Feb. 7) found somebody who diagrammed the "buddy books" to demonstrate a clear left/right schism.
• Timothy Burke also (on his second Feb. 7th entry) asks some good questions about torture and expediency. [T]he [New York] Times reports that the federal government believes they may have to transfer Moussaouis trial to a military tribunal in order to avoid granting his lawyers motion that they be allowed to question Ramzi bin al- Shibh, the alleged al-Qaeda intermediary who carried messages between the 9/ 11 conspirators and al-Qaedas top leadership. Bin al-Shibh, who was captured last October, is allegedly being "interrogated overseas". The Times also [...] quotes a federal law enforcement official who says that they also do not want to disrupt psychological games they are playing with al-Shibh." If our government is now torturing our enemies, eradicating civil liberties, trying to repress dissent to its policies, and plans to kill thousands of innocent civilians in a preemptive attack because we feel threatened by their government, then what precisely differentiates us from al-Qaeda??
• Paul Krugman talks about how our administration is much better at "martial plans, not Marshall Plans: billions for offense, not one cent for reconstruction." You did hear that the bloated Bush budget didn't include anything for rebuilding Afghanistan. Not only won't we keep it at this rate, but we may make matters worse in the long run. The new coalition government opposes unambiguous protection of women's rights. And on a historical note, Neil Gabler reminds us that the proper venue for comparison is neither Vietnam nor WWII, but the Spanish-American War. (Remember the Maine?)
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden presents the case for judicious paranoia, and Julien Sanchez gives historical precedents for such distrust of our government. "The Pentagon had plans, documents declassified only recently, after 40 years, to launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. as a pretext for war. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a matter of public record."
• Molly Ivins writes about how the Bush administration's easy insults of its opponents are harming efforts at diplomacy. These guys really need to reread Andrew Carnegie. Then again, if the Altercation story is correct, they may be doing this intentionally, which may be scarier than incompetence.
• Tom Friedman recently commented that "Going to someone else's country is a sign you respect his opinion. This Bush team has done no such hands-on spade work. Its members think diplomacy is a phone call. They don't like to travel. Seeing senior Bush officials abroad for any length of time has become like rare-bird sightings. It's probably because they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they're each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors." One blog (I can't recall which now) provided further evidence for how weak Colin Powell's position is within the administration that he really can't leave without being undercut.

• Though I've been sitting on this for a while, William Raspberry made a good point about Powell's presentation to the United Nations: "But [Powell] did not make the case for war. Indeed, in a perverse way he made the opposite case. Our ability to know what is going on in Iraq's secretive society is nothing short of stunning. Doesn't it follow that we will know, in advance, of Iraq's intention to launch an attack? Doesn't Hussein now know that we'll know -- and that we are prepared to act?"
• In more minor tidbits,
  • Avedon found a great quote: "For 50 years, the United States contained the Soviet Union. What seems to be becoming apparent, at least in terms of the global ambitions and bellicose threats of policymakers in the current administration, is that for 50 years the Soviet Union may also have been containing us."
  • So has Tom Spencer: "George W. Bush lives at the intersection of faith and inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially in a time of trouble."
  • And Follow me here has some great anti-war slogans, including "Bush has it backwards--abortion is surgical; bombing is murder" More are available at Alternet.
  • Bill Berkowitz reports on a local organization that's trying to detect and correct government misinformation. I wonder if they're interested in hiring a research librarian?
• Many, many, many bloggers have been mocking the new iconographic instructions from the Department of Homeland Security website. However, I haven't yet seen anybody comment that all the images are of caucasian males dressed professionally -- upper-class white men, in other words. The government didn't bother to use gender and race neutral outlines as in traffic signs. Is this a subtle hint where the government's priorities really lie, or is it just another example of the unconscious racism/sexism/classism of the universal male?
• Next month will be the four-hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth I's death. And the Christian Science Monitor reports on two new museum exhibits on her life -- one in Washington DC, the other in California. Whimper! I wanna go!
• CSM also has a funny piece about Middle Eastern standup comics. "I don't want to go to war with Iraq," [Maz Jobrani] says onstage, "because Iran sounds a lot like Iraq, and if there's one president who can mess that up, it's President Bush. He's not too good with the alphabet."

That's probably enough for now. This should give you plenty of reading material for the weekend. Enjoy! Mine will be spent working on a paper for class.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:00 AM

Here's a most public wish to my husband that he have a most marvelous birthday today. [And if anyone in the Boston area wants to join us for an all-you-can-eat sushi lunch followed by a matinee (probably Daredevil) give us a call or drop us a line. The more, the merrier!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:35 AM

Sure enough, after I published chapters 1 through 3 of my story, I've gotten stuck on Chapter 4. If Draco is chatty and makes quips, he feels out of character. If he's too angry for words, the conversation becomes one-sided and boring. And Dumbledore has some important information to convey, so I can't just omit the scene.

And now I have the added pressure of readers to please. Of course, my husband is always ever so supportive. When I complained to him about the pressure I felt to 'put up or shut up' he pointed out that by posting the first chapters, I've denied myself the latter option -- all I can do is 'put up' (or give up, I suppose). I love my husband.

Speaking of fanfic, in the past I praised a comedy of manners fanfic titled Lust over Pendle. Well, to my great delight, the author has written a prequel, titled Not a Whisper. Not quite as silly as LoP can get, but still fun and greatly appreciated.

In the news, I find a tragically funny story in the Washington Post. In the wake of this weekend's Orange alerts, the new Transportation Security Administration instructed local police and officials to conduct random inspections of cars coming to airports:

Police at Harrisburg International Airport in Pennsylvania have been sweetening the inspections by passing out lollipops to targeted drivers. "It's so we don't intimidate," said Alfred Testa Jr., the airport's aviation director. "The policemen are very polite. They will have a smile on their face."

For those who remember the Animaniacs, "Sorry about your civil liberties. How about a fat-free frozen yogurt?"

Another Washington Post article links to the Naval Safety Center's Photo of the Week feature. Military officials realized how boring safety lessons can be -- so they've added actual photos of things not to do. Some are funny, others are cringeworthy.

On Usenet, somebody was commenting on the Homeland Security advice to wrap homes in plastic and duct tape, and wondered whether they had hired Christo. The response: "Nope, it was Red Green." Hey, if the terrorists don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. This should be fodder for some good comedy.

PS: Public grumbles to (a) people who don't shovel their sidewalks (particularly those with perfectly shoveled driveways), (b) people who only shovel the sidwalks between their front door and driveway, and (c) jerks who park in front of our driveway (fortunately, we found him in the nearby dentist office so the snowplow can excavate our driveway).

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 PM

Since the start of the year, I've mentioned several times that I've been writing a story in the Harry Potter universe. Well, I finally got the nerves to publically post the first three chapters. They're now available for reading on Schnoogle (a site for "novel-length" fanfics).

This is a big leap for me, the first major work of fiction I've written since my thesis twelve years ago.

Although these are the only chapters completed so far, I have already worked out the full six-month-long plot. I know what's going to happen, I just have to write down exactly how. And since I hate being left hanging by incomplete stories, posting the first chapters is my commitment that I will finish the whole tale. (My goal is to get it all done before Book Five is released.)

So, please read, review, and hopefully enjoy.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:01 PM

Record 24 hour snowfall and record snowstorm snowfall set at Boston

As of 7 AM Logan airport in east Boston had measured 27.5 inches of snowfall. This eclipsed the previous 24 hour snowfall record of 25.4 inches set during the April fools day blizzard of March 31St and April 1St of 1997.

The total of 27.5 inches also set the record for greatest snowstorm snowfall total. The previous record was 27.1 inches set February 6th and 7th 1978.

National Weather Service Taunton MA
715 AM EST Tue Feb 18 2003

Needless to say, we've cancelled all our appointments for the day (at least, the ones that weren't cancelled by the other party) and are staying home. Ian's shoveled out the walks, and we're trying to engage a plowing service for our driveway. [Fortunately, this is school vacation week, meaning one set of tenants is out of town, and the other (a teacher and student) don't have work or school. So, we're all sitting tight.

Anyway, as long as we're housebound, let's see what else has been happening in the news:

• Ian wrote a recent history of the United States that's worth reading.
• My friend Teddywolf also dispenses words of wisdom.
• The Christian Science Monitor talks about the notion that the nation's intelligence agencies should serve the public, not just politicians. And Sean Gonsalves takes a little time to remind us of COINTELPRO and warn about current trends towards a national security state.
• I found two good pieces on Hesiod's blog, one pointing out how unprepared our troops are for nuclear/biological/chemical warfare. Retired Col. Hackworth says, "What they?ve been saying to me is that they don?t trust their gear. They don?t think it will work in a desert environment where it?s burning hot. A soldier without confidence is in trouble." Hesiod also notes the similarities between the way some military officials are talking and the way the BATF sounded right before the attack on David Koresh in Waco. This does not bode well, people...
• On the positive side, looks like the Pentagon has backed away from its plans to cremate all war dead.
• A Boston Globe article about mandatory licensing of psychics gives me all kinds of story ideas...
• Finally, a recent article on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me gives away one of the secrets I long since figured out: They get many of their stories from Obscure Store.

It has now been 519 days since President Bush said all we want is Osama brought to justice, dead or alive, and 318 days since American citizen Jose Padilla was placed in a military prison for an indefinite period of time without charge, trial or due process of law.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:00 PM

Okay, David Brin certainly made an impactu upon Boskone, as you can see by the responses to author Bluejo's confession that she dumped cola on his head. Based on both the quantity and content of these comments, Brin seems to have a knack for antagonising others. [Before the cola incident, I heard others complaining about Brin's behavior in the Tolkein panel.]

Ian and I were trying to figure out what separates him from Harlan Ellison, who also has a reputation for disagreeability. But the difference is that Harlan seems to do his homework and respects thinking people who challenge him. When I saw Harlan at MIT last year(?) a student in the audience stood up and prefaced his question with something like "You'll probably think I'm stupid, but..." and Harlan spent most of his answer telling the kid he was not stupid, but praising him for standing up and not regurgitating what would make other people happy. Although it would take a hell of a lot of research, it might be possible to change Harlan's mind -- or at least get him concede to agree to disagree on that subject. [Those with personal knowledge of Harlan are free to correct me on this.]

But Brin's mind seemed made up already. No matter how many people after the talk wanted to rebut his points -- including folks from Arisia, attending members of college SF clubs, and so on -- he wasn't budging. Apparently, it's been over five years since someone pointed out to him that the demographics of his talk does not equate to the demographics of the con as a whole, but he's still using that example.

BTW: I was just Googling on David Brin and graying of fandom to see what he'd said on this in the past. Although I corrected it in time, a typo in my search terms reminded me of Emily Litella:

screechy old-lady voice: I just want to say that I've been hearing a lot of complaints recently about the Gaying of Fandom. And, frankly I don't see any problem with it. Isn't that part of what these cons are for? To get laid? Especially since there's sure no way most fen are going to get anywhere with mundanes. Sex has always been a part of cons. Haven't you ever heard the term Dirty Old Pro? The early writers were randy little fucks, let me tell you. And there sure aren't enough women at these cons for everyone, so why's everybody all up in arms because some folks want to get their jollies sleeping with others of the same sex? What's that? The graying of fandom? oh. Never mind!

I probably shouldn't've posted that, should I?

Added slightly later: I just found out that Brin was invited to Vericon for this year's con, but declined due to other commitments. And yet, he still used Harvard as an example in his speech. What do you think -- ignorant or dishonest?

Ian's response: There's a certain amount of chutzpah needed to harangue a room full of people who are doing outreach to young fen for not doing enough, when you, yourself, won't show up at a college convention.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:00 AM

Needless to say, having been at a con all weekend, I'm a bit behind in the news. So, I'm playing catchup this morning.

• The big news this weekend were the worldwide anti-war protests. Wish I could've been there. As usual, Atrios is chock full of good stuff, including two Bush administration attempts here and here to prevent Americans from participating in anti-war marches/rallies. [DailyKos found a third, reported here.] In the Presidential oath of office, Bush swore he would "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Maybe someone ought to remind Bush and Ashcroft that the First Amendment respects "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"
• Of course, the big news in the blogosphere (at least according to the Blogdex rankings) is that Google is buying Blogger (technically, they're buying Pyra, its parent company, but Blogger is the better known name, which is why I'm wording it this way). Interesting possibilities. Many of the links at the bottom of the article discuss the possibilities. Keep in mind that Blogger stores all my posts in their databases and publishes them on this website. So, having access to that backend will make Google spidering much, much faster. Maybe they can use this to improve Google News. Or, maybe they could aggregate some of the most popular sites into their own salon-type magazine. As one Slashdot poster put it, " Google didn't just buy Atrios [blogspot.com] or Dave Barry [blogspot.com], they bought the medium." And, this fits the pattern they set by buying Deja two years ago (wow - almost two years to the day!), "giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses (Slashdot again). So, Page Rank, Deja, blogs... is this a pattern of following the popularity contests?
• And, while reading about that story, I discovered LongBets.org, a really nifty site where, for example, you can witness a $10,000 wager between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil over whether machine intelligence will pass the Turing Test by 2029. Nifty stuff.
• Did you hear the one about the Department of Defense video on how to apply the Freedom of Information Act that can't be released to FOIA requests because it violates copyrights? I can't tell whether this is sad or hysterical.
• Although it's been getting a bit too dogmatic of late, today's Boondocks manages to succinctly capture some of the idiocy/irony in current foreign policy.
• As seen on PAD's journal, preliminary artwork for the Buffy animated series.
• Firecat shared an interesting report on the cat genome project, which is proving surprising applications for humans.

We're still waiting for the anticipated massive snowstorm to hit this area. I have plans to meet a friend at school around noon; I'm still not sure whether I'm going to contact her and cancel or not.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:44 PM

Well, this weekend Ian and I attended Boskone 40, a science fiction convention which has been around longer than the Super Bowl. We had a lot of fun, as usual. Boskone is a much lower-key con than Arisia, but that's part of its charm. After many, many years at the Tara Hotel in Framingham, this year they moved back into Boston proper. I'll confess, we initially didn't buy memberships for this year's con, because we figured it would be a shakedown cruise for the new location. But at Arisia, we gave in and good thing too, because we had a wonderful time.

The new location, adjacent to the Hynes Convention Center, was great. It enabled us to do a commuter con, riding the T there and back. This will also be (part of) the location of the Boston 2004 WorldCon, which I'm already looking forward to. The con also seemed to do more to reach out to younger fen. Since I've been aware of local fandom, Boskone has always had an older, more staid image than Arisia (more on this in a bit), but this year they had a gaming room and an anime room that looked like it was always packed, and I noticed more younger fen than I have in previous years.

Some highlights:

• After seeing him on several panels, Bruce Coville seems like a really nifty guy. I definitely want to read more of his work.
• Although I arrived late, the first panel I attended was a fascinating one speculating what fandom (and the world) would've been like if Star Trek and Star Wars never existed. Really interesting notion which might make an interesting setting for a story. [Among other changes, the whole idea of letterwriting campaigns to save TV shows, which now happens every time a program is threatened with cancellation, started with Star Trek.]
• Another fun panel was on Libraries and the SF Fan. Considering how many early SF writers acknowledge personal debts to libraries, why are there so few librarian characters in SF? [There are more in fantasy, though that comes partly out of the Lovecraft tradition.] Fred Lerner pointed me towards his story "Rosetta Stone," which someone described as "the first sf story where the science in question is library science," and mentioned an upcoming Gregory Benford story ("Wall of Hydrogen"?) also focusing on libraries, which I'm looking forward to. Since the genre can support anthologies on all kinds of unlikely subjects (recent ones include Alternate Gettysburgs and Dangerous vegetables), hopefully we're not too far away from a library anthology (maybe I should start writing something just in case). Anyway, great wide-ranging conversation, which we continued for another half-hour in the hallways.
• From Fred Lerner (on another panel), I also learned a new and useful word. Bismaak It comes from the Norn language (a variant of Norwegian that died out within the last century) and means to talk and talk and talk about something without ever doing anything. Like I said, useful term. I suspect I'll add that to my regular vocabulary.
• Let's see... I did something helpful and stupid that managed to cost me almost $20. A long time ago, Neil Gaiman wrote in his journal about an upcoming book called Fairy Feller's Master Stroke about the famous painting. Ever since I heard it, I wanted it, but it wasn't out yet. At a dealer's table, I saw somebody carrying the book in paperback. "Oh, cool!" I said, "I didn't realize it was out!" She sounded iffy about it, so I gushed and raved a bit more. And, I managed to convince her to purchase it (for $15). I told the dealer that I wanted a copy too. Unfortunately, that was the last copy they had in paperback, and the hardcover cost $40. Aargh! I angsted back and forth, but by the end of the con the dealer dropped all his prices by 20%, so I picked up a hardcover for $32. Still, I'm annoyed that I cost myself the chance to get a copy for $15.
• As is typical for weekend cons, there was a Saturday evening Havdalah scheduled. I am becoming more convinced of the need for a Jew-Con of some form. There are just too many interesting halachic discussions of a science fiction nature.
  • For example, a day on Mars is 24.6 hours. If Jews colonize Mars and keep a Martian calendar, it will quickly become unsynchronized with that of Earth. How would they schedule the holidays?
  • There are also plans extant to regularlize the Earth calendar by adding an extra day that's not part of any week, so everything would line up evenly year after year. But since Jews celebrate Shabbos every seventh day independent of the majority calendar, imagine the chaos when Shabbos falls on a Wednesday.
  • Of course, my favorite remains how to build a kosher mikvah on a starship. Because FTL transport is a fantasy, humanity will likely colonize the stars in generation ships. But without the ability to use a mikveh, that simply wouldn't work for observant Jews...
  On the Jewish holiday of Shavu'ot, it's traditional to stay up all night studying and discussing Torah. I want to organize an all-nighter "Shavuacon" where we can focus on these kinds of issues. At Boskone, I told a few more people about it, and we may actually get something going for this year.
• Saturday night, we party-hopped. The Tor Books party was definitely the best. Hosted by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, it had more authors per square foot than I'd seen anywhere else at the con. Not just authors, but great authors. The few surfaces that weren't covered in people (it was crowded) were littered with book covers. When I looked at them, they seemed to fall into two groups -- 'read it (and loved it)' or 'want to read that.' What a publisher!

Finally, I simply must write about David Brin, the Guest of Honor. Let me preface by saying that I love his fiction. But his keynote speech really rubbed me the wrong way. There's a common plaint 'the graying of fandom,' decrying how kids and new readers aren't joining fandom or going to cons. That was his topic, along with his suggestions for how to attract new readers and new fen. The problem was, as Ian put it, he didn't let ignorance get in the way of his dogmatism.

So, David Brin went on to complain about how few young faces he saw in this con. But since I've been in fandom, Boskone has always been a haven for the more mature fan. And if you read about its history, that's intentional. Arisia courts the youthful crowd, with a program mix more geared towards goth, fetish, costuming, gaming, anime, and so forth. In fact, as I mentioned at the beginning, Ian and I noticed that this year's Boskone really did seem to be doing much more outreach towards younger fen, and we saw many more kids and teens around than in the past. [I realized later, that as he was asking fandom to ask itself what kinds of things do and don't attract young fen, that GoH speeches generally don't attract young fen (this is only my second or third in over a decade of congoing), so he was setting himself up for a fall by trying to ask demographic questions based on the audience of his speech.]

But David Brin noticed none of that, and didn't seem to care about the local fan dynamics. None of that mattered as he came up with activist ideas wholly divorced from the reality. For one example of the kind of rhetoric that only displayed his ignorance, he suggested fandom 'adopt' high school and college groups. "Take MIT. No, MIT doesn't need help. Take Harvard." Excuse me, but if he had done any homework, he would've known that Harvard has been running a SF con for three years running. I raised my hand and told him so, and he was surprised. And many other people also pointed out counter-examples to his argument demonstrating that young fandom is booming. But despite all that, he didn't seem to recognize that our points showed the falsity of his doom-and-gloom arguments. Instead, he kept waving his increasingly threadbare flag trying to rally the troops. [I'm rather glad that Tamora Pierce didn't hear him talking about the need for more YA books, though maybe she should've been there to rip him a new one as she explained the facts.]

In the end, it felt like he was drawing an us vs. them line between congoers and young folks that isn't at all relevant to Ian and I (or others in our age-bracket who we talked to at the con). Everything he said about reaching out to the younguns only seemed to show how out of touch he was with what was going on in fandom. As I said, I really do like David Brin's fiction, but most of the non-fiction ideas I've heard him espouse seem rather half-baked.

All in all, it was a fun con. We forgot to buy memberships for next year before we left, but we'll definitely be back.