Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

The Moon Eats Venus

I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I’ve never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night’s sleep every night I’d be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive Insurance commercials.) So I finally gave up about 5:15 and got dressed. I went out on the back deck to see what I could see of the Moon and Venus, to find that the positioning was optimal bad vis-a-vis the huge pine tree behind the house. My eastern horizon is very good, where I have an eastern horizon–and alas, the Moon was rising right behind the tree.

However, by 6 AM the pair had cleared the tree, and were getting very close. I put my Canon G-10 on its greatest zoom, propped the camera on the deck railing, and took some shots. The sky was getting pretty light at that point and I knew I wouldn’t get much contrast, but there’s something a little subtle and spooky about what I did get, and I’m quite happy with the shot overall. When I knew that the occultation was only a few minutes off, I went back in and got Carol up. We both watched it from the deck, passing my 8 X 50s back and forth and marvelling at the terrific weather.

I haven’t seen a lot of planetary occultations, and there’s a fundamental difference between those of planets and stars: Stars are point sources of light. When a star goes behind the Moon, it blinks out instantly. Planets fade as their disks are covered by the Moon’s limb over a period of a few minutes. As I watched Venus dim, I realized that this was the first planetary occultation I’ve watched through binoculars. Every other occasion (I think maybe three) I was watching through one of my big scopes. I regret a little not having put the 8″ scope on the back deck last night, but experience has shown that the deck is not a very steady platform for observing. (And the driveway looks west, with the house blocking the eastern horizon completely.) There’s something to be said for brand-new experiences. Why always do everything the same way?

The Google Books Settlement

Apr 19th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

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My miscellaneous low-priority do-it list has gotten mighty long since January, and every so often I set aside some time to knock off a few items. This morning something interesting bubbled up to the top of the stack: Claim my books under the Google Books Settlement. I’ve known about this for quite some time and haven’t had the mental bandwidth to look into it deeply, but having been roused by rowdy dogs this morning a little earlier than I’d like, I sat down here and read the material.

I’m not quite sure what to think. Google is helping to create a registry of old books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. This is a very good thing, and I signed up to support that effort if nothing else. What Google intends to do is create a legal framework for making those old books available as paid ebooks, and give authors (and where publishers still have rights, publishers) a portion of the take. Google has already scanned a great many books, including a few of my own, and if I can pick up a few quarters by buying in to the system, I will. (Alas, I doubt my 1987 work Turbo Pascal Solutions is going to be a hot seller.)

Mostly, I want the problem of orphan books to be finessed, and I want it finessed without Big Media’s copyright lobby shaping it so that it routes all the money to them and leaves the rest of us penniless in the dust. People gripe about Google’s interest in the whole thing–they could make an enormous amount of money here if this thing catches on, and in essence become the planet’s largest publisher–but the idea is sound and Google may be the best that we can do.

If anyone has any interest in this, go to the Google Books Settlement Site and read the sizeable FAQ. I especially encourage any of my author friends who have published books to decide what they think about the whole thing, and either sign in or opt out. Signing up can be done until January 5, 2010, but opting out must be done by May 5, 2009. I’m guessing that popular authors and their heirs will opt out, figuring they may be able to get a better deal somewhere, and the great starving writer masses (who know that there are no deals on their horizon) will sign on. And that’s actually a good thing: The great starving writer masses deserve a way to get whatever scraps may fall from the ebooks publishing table, as the publishing industry generally becomes more and more of a “winner takes all” kind of business.

The framework has not yet been completely created, but it’ll happen over time, and it will be very interesting to see if anything comes of it long-term. I’m watching the whole business closely and will report here from time to time, especially once I finish the Book That Ate 2009.

Cuisine

Apr 15th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

For those who care, I’m 124,266 words in at the moment, shooting for 175,000. Chapter 10 must be submitted before the end of April, and I’m rustier on some of this stuff than I thought.

I recognize that I’m way overdue for writing something profound here, but my head’s still too full of conditional jump instructions. So I’ll punt and offer something less than profound: Whether or not the book cover at left is funny depends heavily on whether or not you have very young children underfoot.

(Couldn’t they have drawn Pooh stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce?)

Boy, That Took a While…

Apr 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

…but it’s over. (No, not the book.) I’ve felt this way a time or two. The best example is the day I woke up after graduating from college. I remember thinking: Yikes! It’s over! I’m done! I don’t ever have to go back there! (I enjoyed high school a lot more than college.)

On January 14, 2008 I started in on a major dental project. My long-time readers have seen me post reports here from time to time. It involved removing the two botched sets of joined crowns that I had had installed in September 2001–which took almost four hours and a fortune in carbide burrs all by itself–a gingivectomy all the way around my lowers and parts of my uppers, two root canals, an extraction, a bone graft, an implant, and an immense amount of fussy work to create 25 individual crowns and a bridge over the bone-eroded gap where I haven’t had a tooth since 1991.

Today I went in and had the last crown attached to the implant post that was inserted November 6. Dr. Seaman used a little torque wrench to tighten it down, and even quoted me a torque value in newton-meters, which I have already forgotten. This one was easy, as there was no biological material involved. Some cranking and torque wrenching and a little grinding to get the bite right, but there was that thought again as I got in the car to head home: It’s over!

It’s not entirely true that I never have to go back there. Bionic or not, teeth need cleaning and looking over a couple of times a year, and I’m happy to go back for that. I now have 28 chewing surfaces for the first time in a long time, with nothing loose, nothing bleeding, and nothing inflamed; in short, everything is as it should be.

Let me reiterate: I’m as nervous as anyone about the state of the world today (though I worry about different things than most people) but as much as I enjoyed the early 1960s and even the late 1970s, I would never go back in time unless I knew that I could fast-forward again for dental work. I miss 60’s Sunshine Pop and sometimes I miss my hair, but I’ve had enough agonizingly crude dental work done in the last 50 years to kiss the point in time I’m standing on and shout to the sky: God bless the 21st Century!

The Last 290 Miles…

Mar 31st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

…were without incident, but not without irritation: Virtually the entire 200 miles to Denver I had to fight a 30 MPH crosswind, and I was very glad that our good bright sun had dried out the roads before we left Ogallala at 11:00 AM. QBit started getting kennel fever in the great big featureless nowhere that I-76 crosses in northeast Colorado, and Carol had to put him in her lap to keep him from chewing a leg off.

We took a short detour up to Lake McConaughy before setting out this morning, and found that the lake is now two feet higher than we’ve ever seen it, and higher in fact than it’s been since the now-fading drought got serious in 2001. Whatever’s been eating Nebraska’s climate seems to have gotten fixed somehow, and since our atmospheric CO2 level has kept increasing all the while, I can only conclude that–gasp!–climate changes all by itself, in ways that we simply can’t predict because, like the Wizard of Oz admitted in the basket of the Omaha State Fair balloon, we don’t know how it works.

Anyway. The short form is that we’re back in Colorado Springs, where last Thursday’s blizzard shows a bare few remnants in habitual shadows but has otherwise melted into the soil. The house smells like plasticizers (as it always does when we’re gone for a month) but the plants survived, and although we’re exhausted and will be digging out for a day or two, the trip is over and I can get back to work on the book. I’m a little late with Chapter 8, but I’m now 105,000 words in (of about 175,000 words total) and I suspect I’ll make the rest of the deadlines with a little scrambled eggs and caffeine.

Aero Gets the Point

Mar 30th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

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We made 460 miles today, from West Des Moines to Ogallala, Nebraska. I would have posted last night, save that the iBahn Internet system used by the Sheraton in West Des Moines simply wouldn’t work. They want $10 a day for the service, which could not complete a DHCP transaction to save its pointless little life. They gave me my money back, at least. And let’s be clear on this: The hotel is excellent, with some of the best beds we’ve found anywhere along I-80. The food is great, the service wonderful…why is Internet access so hard for them? i-Bah-n.

So here we are, at the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala, watching an already soggy world freeze solid right outside our window, while the wind howls like something out of a bad Vincent Price movie. (So much for Global Warming.) The last 50 miles were a bit of a thrill ride. It had been sunny and 62 degrees noonish when we blew through Omaha (which, alas, has recently begun looking like the name of our President, at least from the corner of my eye) with the temps dropping steadily after that, amidst a constant 25 MPH crosswind. Come North Platte we were seeing light rain, which soon turned to sloppy snow. By the time we got off I-80, things were starting to look like black ice, and I was very glad to be done with the day’s wander.

But enough about the weather. On Sunday, Aero decided that pulled pork trumps the desire to jump on the other contestants, and on the second day of the Clinton Iowa Kennel Club dog show, he beat Leeward’s Ron Stoppable and got his sixth point. (Ron, a formidable 2-year-old recently arrived from Finland, got the point on Saturday by beating Aero.) Nine more (plus a second major win, meaning a win against at least three other dogs of his sex) and he’s an official champion.

It was the way we like our dog shows: two contestants, and each one takes home a point. Nobody loses, everybody gets some pulled pork, and the whole gang goes home happy. If only the Hugo Awards and government bailouts would work as well.

Mike Sargent 1969-2009

Mar 22nd, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I am still sick and numb. My good friend Jim Strickland messaged me Friday morning to let me know that our mutual friend Mike Sargent had been killed by a 20-year-old drunk in a pickup truck Thursday night on his way home from work. I’ve been trying to get myself to write something here since then, and, well, failed.

I hadn’t known Mike very long. Jim introduced us a year or so ago, and we became fast friends, though Mike’s work schedule generally didn’t allow him to attend our semiregular Saturday night nerd parties. But my own schedule allowed Mike and me to do some geeky things like spend a couple of Monday afternoon hours recently at the moving sale of the enormous greasy pile of geek detritus known as OEM Parts in Colorado Springs, where I have found everything from exotic resistors to kite sticks. He and his wife Peggy cooked a spectacular Mardi Gras cajun feast for us back in February, and that was the last time I saw them. Mike and I were planning an expedition up into Fishers Canyon when the weather improved, and I am going to miss that opportunity greatly. Mike was beginning to explore his powers as an SF writer, and we were already discussing a promising concept for a Drumlins story targeted at the shared world anthology I still intend to do.

Mike was spectacularly intelligent, and unusual in a way that matters a great deal to me: He was a great raving optimist, with a faith in the benevolence of the future that I strive for but often fail to achieve. He contributed to The Speculist, a podcast-oriented futurist site where the optimism is so intense it approaches mania. When I’ve had enough of phony climate catastrophism and Obamanomics, I go spend half an hour there to get my spirits back up. The Speculist belongs on my blogroll and yours, and deserves a regular read. (I don’t technically have a blogroll and need to establish one soonest, for this and other good topic-oriented sites.)

I’d say more but I’m not sure I can. I’m at that age where my older friends have begun to die, simply because that’s the part of the curve that they’re on. The curve is changing shape in response to our still-early efforts at life extension–one of Mike’s favorite topics–and had Mike been allowed to remain on the curve, he might well have hit the point where the curve breaks free of the grave and goes asymptotic for parts (truly) unknown. I’ll give it a good shot but I’m sure I’m already too old for that, just as sure as Mike was way too young to die.

Farewell, good friend, and keep your faith in the future. You (and I) will live to see it, just not from here.

Top O’ the Genome To You!

Mar 17th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

St. Patrick’s day, albeit one marred by a headcold due to lack of sleep. I had one (very) Irish grandmother, and St. Patrick’s Day was always a big deal at our house, though less so since my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann left us in 1965, and my Aunt Kathleen (Sade’s daughter) in 1999. If I don’t get too wobbly today, I’ll be going over to Gretchen’s this evening for a corned beef feast. I’m not quite Irish enough to be wild about boiled cabbage, but corned beef, bring it on! (We’ll be having Diet Green River on the side–sodas don’t get no greener than that!)

I wish I still had a cartoon I cut out of a magazine many years ago, of a mitered bishop behind the wheel of a convertible, with the back seat full of goofy-looking snakes, and the caption, “St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland.”

And I sometimes look out at the pantheon of ethnic saints and wish there were one for thoroughgoing mongrels like myself. I had an Irish grandparent and a German grandparent, and ostensibly two Polish grandparents–but my Polish grandmother is said to have had a French mother (this has not been proven) and they both had Austrian citizenship, though what that may mean ethnically is unclear. So I’m all over the map. Is there a St. Heinz somewhere, with eight great-grandparents of entirely separate ethnicities? How about a St. Heinz’ Day feast, in which no two items can be from the same country?

If there’s no guy (or gal) like that in the Calendar of Saints, could we please canonize one soonest?

In the meantime, I will close with the first stanza of one of my favorite prayers, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” which captures the faith that filled the man, and the gonzo exuberance that drove him:

I arise today by the power of heaven!
Invoking the Trinity;
Believing in the Threeness,
Confessing the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation!

Amen!

Notes on the Great Kid Adventure

Mar 10th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Well, last night I ran down to Midway Airport and picked up Gretchen and Bill, and calmly handed kids, cat, and household back to them after four interesting days. Carol and I then retired to the condo and slept for ten hours. We had a good time and learned a lot about small children, and I’ll put down some notes here while everything’s still fresh in my mind:

Katie knows us as Kayol and Jep. Those are good enough names to use in an SF story someday. (Tucked away for future use.)
One wonders what posessed A. A. Milne (apart from simple ignorance of future cultural conventions–how dare he!) to call a teddy bear “Pooh” in a world of still-diapered but rapidly linguistifying children.
Joe’s O’s are a standard at Gretchen’s house, and Katie calls them “yoats,” which is as good a generic term for the genre as I could think of beyond “oat toruses.”
I built a Sphinx for Katie out of supersize Mega Bloks, and while I was still puzzling out how to attach a head, Katie grew impatient and asked, “What is?” I agonized over how to answer a question like that when baby sister Julie crawled over and demolished it. Problem solved. Whew.
The one sure way to make Julie quit fussing and smile is to get in her face and sing do-wop songs. I got very good at singing the intro to the Marcels’ cover of “Blue Moon,” if half an octave higher than their seminal bass man. “Ba-ba bomp ba-ba bomp ba bom ba bom bomp…” She also responded well to “On the Road to Shambala,” at least the parts without genuine words other than “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”
We watched a lot of videos. Katie is very fond of Rocky & Bullwinkle, who (by the way) will be 50 years old later this year. She didn’t have the CD set with the Metal-Munching Moon Mice, but we did see the counterfeit boxtops adventure, which sent an eerie shiver down my spine. Swap in bankers and the Fed for Boris Badenov and see what you get.
Pertinent to the above: The infectious Muppets cover of Mah-Na Mah-Na (see my entry for April 15, 2007) was the very first musical number on the very first episode of the Muppet Show (1976). We saw it several times this weekend, mon dieu.
I had forgotten how much I admired the Muppets brand of comedy. Something definitely went right in the 70s. Even the guest star fashions weren’t as bad as I had expected, though I saw things I hadn’t seen in a while. (Does anybody even remember what “espadrilles” are?) And watching one of the Muppets slobber paint on a taciturn, toga-clad Candace Bergen was worth the price of admission.
Katie seems to like kites, though Carol thinks that “fly kite!” (as Katie puts it) is now code for running around in circles in the big field outside their back gate. No matter–we didn’t have ideal kite weather, and the kite we were trying to fly is arguably an antique and probably not up to much rough handling. When we’re here in better weather, I will build a kite tailored to 2-year-olds and we will wait for a dry and blustery day.

All in all, a complete success. Carol and I are now fairly sure we made the right decision in not having children of our own, but borrowing them occasionally may not be a bad idea.

Baby (and Non-Baby) Talk

Mar 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Managing small children is a gene I think I was born without, so it’s as remarkable to me as to you that Carol and I are spending a long weekend in Des Plaines looking after our two newest godchildren, aged 27 months and 10 months. Their parents are taking their first (short) vacation together absent offspring since Katie Beth’s birth in November 2006, and although we were well-briefed on things like which girl got what foods and where the mother lode of baby socks is, we knew it would be quite an education.

Katie is picking up language with frightening speed. When I last saw her she was just discovering the bare bones of complete sentences and most of her words had to be understood from context if they were to be understood at all. Now, well, we’re on the verge of genuine conversation.

Example: Yesterday we were sitting on the couch and looking at the photo montage my mother had on her wall the last few years of her life. When I asked Katie, “Where’s mommy?” she she pointed unerringly to Gretchen’s face on their 1994 wedding photo. Ditto “Where’s daddy?” and Katie’s finger pointed to Bill. The montage is short on recent photos of certain people (like me) and when I asked her, “Where’s Uncle Jeff?” she pointed to a photo of my father instead of a shot of me in college, when I still had abundant hair. I chewed my tongue for a second but let it go; she was born five years after her last grandparent died, and the whole notion of “grandparents” may have to await the birth of abstract reasoning.

So we went on to the other photos in the montage. “Who’s this?” I asked, pointing to a 1957 photo of Gretchen at one year.

“Baby,” said Katie, referring to her little sister Julie, who in truth strongly resembles her mother at that age.

“No, that’s mommy!” I said.

She looked at me very funny. “What you talk about?” was her response.

But that wasn’t the best of it. Earlier this week, just after we had arrived in town and come by with QBit and Aero, QBit hit the jackpot when he discovered a very stale scone that Katie had dropped behind the livingroom couch eons ago. Carol took it away from him, and in a fit of pique he decided to go hunting. We saw him make a beeline for the stairs to the second story, and I ran right after him, remembering certain adventures up there last summer when he had dug a dirty diaper out of the wastebasket in the bathroom and was furiously shredding it to get at the gooey chocolate center. Katie ran after the both of us, and as I reached the top of the stairs and almost had QBit in my grip, Katie announced at the top of her little lungs: “Doggie chew poop!”

Except that this time, I had grabbed him before he reached the bathroom, and nothing got chewed. Doggie spent most of the rest of that evening in his kennel, but I found it remarkable that Katie would remember an event that had occurred eight months earlier, when she was only nineteen months old and spoke primarily in monosyllables. (Especially the ever-popular “No!” which QBit can’t say and rarely understands.)

We flew Gretchen’s 25-year old winged fabric box kite at the playground yesterday, while Julie chewed the plastic reel holding the string and Katie chased the kite’s shadow on the grass. It’s hard work, this kid stuff, even for the kids–and we all slept very well last night. This morning at breakfast, Carol grabbed Katie’s piece of toast to cut it up for her, and Katie made her wishes plain: “Come back with that!”
The next time we’re here, well, she may not be quoting Shakespeare, but she may be quoting Space Cat. We’ll do our best to make it so.