- Hurricane activity is at a 45-year low, and no major hurricane has achieved landfall on US soil in almost ten years. Tornadoes have been pretty scarce recently as well. Then again, it’s mid-April and snowing like hell outside right now. Two outa three ain’t bad.
- The Food Babe gets her you-know-what handed to her. This, after all, is the woman who said, “There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” Wow. I probably shouldn’t exist, then. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- More evidence that salt isn’t the demon that government guidelines insist that it is. Remember, you can do the experiment on this one, as it applies to yourself: Give up salt for a month and record your blood pressure every day. Then go back on salt and record your blood pressure every day. If your BP doesn’t change significantly, you can pretty much assume that salt isn’t an issue.
- Red meat is not the enemy. And yes, the science is complicated. What science isn’t?
- Crickets are not superfood. Who knew?
- Carol and I have tried this Moscato and found it good.
- Someone pointed out that my Low-Voltage Tubes page on junkbox.com had gotten corrupted. Indeed it had–and I had unknowingly copied that corruption (which was present in my HTML source files)–onto all the backups I have here. So I pulled a trick I had thought about for a long time: I looked up the site on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and checked their images of junkbox.com until I found one with an intact copy of the article. I then just lifted the portion of the file that had gotten corrupt and dropped it into the newest copy of the corrupted file. Fixed.
- Amazon has a new contract with Harper-Collins that gives the publisher full agency; that is, the freedom to set its own prices. Amazon is posting a notice on the sales pages of full-agency titles telling the customer that the publisher has set the price, not Amazon.
- Here’s some actual data crunching of the Sad Puppies phenomenon, along with a good deal of sane and rational analysis. Stop hurling hate, and understand what’s going on. Hating isn’t helping your cause one bit.
- ESR thinks that the real problem dividing SFF right now is literary status envy. The piece goes back to last summer, which was before the whole industry went nuts over Sad Puppies. Worth reading, maybe twice.
- If you’re an SP3 supporter, you can get all kinds of Sad Puppies 3 merchandise at the logo artist’s Cafe Press studio shop.
April, 2015:
Odd Lots
Carol and Dash Get Back to the Show Circuit
It’s been a tough three years for Carol. Her mom’s final year and passing, and then three foot surgeries that took literally a year to fully recover from; well, things like that would slow me down too. So it was with some celebration and a little apprehension that we took off for something we haven’t done in almost three years: a dog show.
We rolled into the Terry-All Kennel Club Dog Show up in Brighton, Colorado on Friday afternoon. Dog shows require a sort of “home base” where you can set up a grooming table and get the contestants in shape for the show ring. Grooming space can be either paid or unpaid. At the Adams County fairgrounds, the difference between paid and free grooming space is whether or not you have walls. Unpaid grooming space is in the cattle pens, which are just that: A roofed area divided into pens by pipe railings. Paid grooming space gets you walls, in an arena building used for showing and auctioning cattle.
What you don’t get either way is a floor. This is cattle country. You get good Colorado brown dirt, liberally mixed with grass and hay preprocessed by various large animals. Eat your lunch carefully: The Five-Second Rule does not apply.
Carol paid for grooming space in the arena building, and we were right by one of the building’s six doors. The light was good; power was available. Alas, we had a howling wind most of the weekend that was not named Mariah (maybe Manure-ah?) which blew in through the rear doors, picked up brown dust as it went, and deposited it upon all and sundry before exiting out the front doors. Breathing second-hand smoke in my youth was bad enough. Meditate for a moment on breathing second-hand cattle feed.
Oh, and we have blinding-white dogs. The challenge should be obvious.
Carol met that challenge in high style, granted that all of us came home crunching dust between our teeth. Dash never set foot in the dirt, nor did the rest of the Pack, all of whom were with us and three of whom were entered.
Friday night was an AKC-sanctioned B match for Bichons, which our club organized. (Many thanks to Tammy Singer for doing most of the legwork!) A “B match” is a sort of practice match for dog handlers, basically identical to a real AKC show ring (including an AKC registered judge) except that points are not awarded. In a B match, dogs older than 7 years may be entered in the Veterans class whether they’re neutered or not. QBit, now ten, and Jack, now eight, were both elegible. Carol got their coats in shape, and QBit took first in the class. Jack has a much better coat and looked quite sharp, but QBit (above) has the confident personality preferred by judges, which Jack simply lacks.
Saturday and Sunday were the real show, in which only Dash may compete. (He still has the family jewels, irrespective of regular threats from both Carol and myself.) This was a biggish show for Bichons, with 16 entered, though several did not show and at most I counted 13 Bichons at one time.
Some of them were spectacular, like Lorrie Carlton‘s Flynn, who pretty much swept the field on Saturday and went on to take first place in the Non-Sporting Group. It was a good weekend for Bichons: The breed won Best in Group for both Saturday and Sunday.
Where Dash beat all Bichon comers was in the Owner / Handler class, which means dogs presented in the ring (“handled”) by their registered owners. Dog showing is a competitive business, and there are a fair number of dogs shown by professional handlers who are paid to take dogs around the country on the show circuit to gather wins. Flynn is one of these. To keep professional handlers from sweeping all awards, there is a separate class for people (like us) who do their own handling. Dash won best in the Owner / Handler class on Sunday, which means Carol could show him against other Best of Breeds in the Non-Sporting Group also shown by their owners. After a little touch-up by the formidable Bichon groomer / handler Ellen Perry, Dash went around the ring and landed third place in the Non-Sporting Group. This was the biggest win Carol and I have ever nailed in showing our Bichons, and made the whole windy, dusty, exhausting outing worthwhile.
I was in my grubbies in the photo above (taken by Patrina Walters Odette) because I was not doing any handling on Sunday, and schlepping equipment around at this particular show is always a pretty dusty business.
Dust notwithstanding, it was great time and we had a chance to catch up with members of the club we don’t see very often. We also got to meet a couple of new puppy contenders worth watching in coming years. Our next show is in Longmont in mid-May, but we’re likely to leave most of the Pack with Jimi. There will be no B match, and QBit, Aero, and Jack will not be competing. So it will be a simpler project in many ways, as well as a cleaner one.
It took us all day to wash the dust out of everything…except the dogs. That’s another day entirely. Maybe two.
The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 5
(This series began here.)
I held back Part 5 of this series because the Hugo nomination finalists were announced yesterday, and I wanted to see whether the Sad Puppies (and a separate but related slate, Rabid Puppies) would make their mark on the ballot. The answer is, egad: What a broom does.
But I’ll get back to that.
First I wanted to mention a little pushback on a different subtopic of the series: The Human Wave. A guy I’ve known (if vaguely) for a long time backchanelled me a short note, the gist of which was this: “So you want to destroy literary SF.”
This is a familiar tactic in many brainless headbumps I’ve seen down the years: When somebody proposes that something you oppose should be permitted, you strike back by accusing them of wanting everything except what they propose to be forbidden. This tactic probably has a name, and a place of honor in some online Gallery Of Stupid Argument Tricks. I mention it simply to point out the general level at which much discussion of SFF issues these days operates.
I told him to go back and read the series again, quoting the significant bits.
I’ll say in summary what I said here: The Human Wave is about allowing things, not forbidding things. Yes, what the Human Wave stands against is mostly a certain brand of pessimistic literary fussiness. The solution, however, is to broaden the field. Do litfic if you want. But don’t claim that litfic is the best or only thing worth writing. If the Human Wave movement pushes literary SF out of the spotlight, that’s a choice made by the readers, not me. My take: We need a much, much bigger spotlight.
Now, to the Hugo nominations. The full list from Locus is here. I’ve been a little out of touch with recent SFF (for reasons laid out earlier in this series) and am not familiar with most of them. I got a little discouraged last year when I picked up Redshirts, which turned out to be the biggest piece of crap I’d read out of all Hugo novel winners. (I have not read every single one, obviously, so bigger stinkers than that may be still be lurking somewhere in the past.)
The really, really big question on everyone’s minds today is whether the Puppies had any effect on the final ballot. Mike Glyer did an excellent summary on File 770, with more detailed analysis here. Two-digit takeaway: 71% of the finalists were on either Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies, or both. Only 24 finalists were not on either slate. A record 2,122 valid nominations were submitted. John C. Wright picked up six slots, a new record for a single year. Some other notes:
- Brad Torgersen, coordinator of Sad Puppies 3, was very careful to keep everything legal and above-board. Even Patrick Nielsen-Hayden admitted that the Sad Puppies campaign had broken no rules.
- Sad Puppies concept creator Larry Correia withdrew his nomination for Best Novel, received for Monster Hunter Nemesis . He did not want anyone to be able to say that he proposed Sad Puppies just to win awards. He now has the moral high ground against any accusations of corruption that will invariably be thrown his way. Larry’s a class act, in spades.
- There will be a Sad Puppies 4, to be coordinated next year by Kate Paulk.
Heads are now exploding all over the Internet, which is the least surprising thing about the whole kerfuffle. Puppy haters are trying to figure out what changes might be made to the Hugo rules to make such a sweep impossible. The truth is that as long as you have supporting memberships who can vote, slatemakers will offer slates to their supporters. Eliminating supporting memberships would make Worldcon financially impossible. (I don’t see anybody complaining about the additional money that all those Puppy supporters added to Worldcon coffers.)
So: If you want to stop the Sad Puppies, you have to propose your own slates. (And have the followers to vote them, which is really the hard part.) Bored Beavers? Aggrieved Alligators? Mourning Meerkats? Go for it. The goal is to reduce monoculture, and broaden the spotlight. That’s ultimately what the Puppies thing is about. Let 2E20 slates bloom!
Boxes, Staging, and the Miraculous Irishman
I know. I’ve been gone almost three weeks, which for Contra is a long time. Where have I been? Well, c’mon, where do I usually go?
We had a serious and difficult mission this time. Carol and I co-own a condo in Chicago suburb Des Plaines with our older nephew Brian, and have since 2007. Brian needed a place to live, and Carol needed a place to stay while she was looking after her mom’s needs during Delores’ last years. Carol’s mom is now Home, and Brian is married and has his own place down in the city. So it was time to sell the condo. Long past time, in fact.
Having been mostly vacant for over a year, the place was dusty and cluttered. So for two weeks we sifted and sorted and dusted and scrubbed and re-polished the oak cabinets. Brian and Alexis took trunks full of stuff home, and Carol and I shipped five biggish boxes back here, loaded to bulging with clothes, kitchen gadgets, towels, plastic hangers, stuffed animals, books, odd computer parts, and much else. (The boxes arrived yesterday, and my initial reaction to the pile on the front porch was: What the hell is all this stuff?)
One subtask was to sell the bedroom set in the second bedroom. It was a nice, rugged item, bought in 1977 and used by Carol’s parents for a long time. Carol figured out Craigslist, and listed it. Then the weirdness began. Many people inquired about it, some of them clearly on the far slopes of the sanity bell curve. A few came to see it. Some thought we were giving it away. Sorry, folks. “$100” is not a computer backplane. Several more seemed willing to pay for it, but had no idea how to get it home and broadly hinted that we should deliver.
Time was running out. We tried to give it to the Salvation Army, but they were unable to get a truck out for it any time soon. Getting the place ready to sell meant rearranging furniture, but until the bedroom set was gone we couldn’t even begin. Not quite three days before we had to hop a plane home, Carol got a text from an Irish chap who said he loved the photos and would bring his pickup over to get it. When he arrived with a hand-cart, he handed me $100, scratched his chin, and then got it out the door, down the elevator, and into his Dodge pickup truck all by himself. He was chatty, and all the time that he was strongarming dressers while talking about growing up near Ulster and encouraging me to indeed visit County Mayo, from which my Irish forbears fled bad harvests in the 1880s, I was boggling at the main force he was exerting, he who was barely my height and 47 years old. It’s not like he looked like a linebacker. Then again, my father didn’t either, as certain North Side toughs learned to their sorrow in 1939.
With the bedroom set gone, Brian and I shifted some desks and things around to make the now-vacant second bedroom look like an office, while Carol and Ali staged the condo. “Staging” means making it look like a model home. Some of this involves removing personal items and photos of relatives, and the rest getting the towels to hang just so in the bathrooms. Carol set the table as elegantly as Corelle would allow. Ali directed Brian and me in shifting the livingroom furniture here and there to get a balanced look. Four hours before our flight back, we looked around and said, Damn, is this our condo?
The unit is now listed on MLS, and our Realtor lady is actively showing it.
We’ll miss the condo. It served us well during a difficult time in our lives. Freeing up our equity will making certain things possible, like a winter place in Scottsdale. We’ll be exceedingly thankful when it sells. (I am already thankful to my late, beloved, and very Irish godmother Aunt Kathleen for sending us a muscular Irishman just when we needed him the most.)
And now, boy, is there some work to do, work that (huzzah!) has nothing whatsoever to do with real estate. More on this tomorrow.
