Review: Led Zeppelin "Four Symbols" Thirty three and a third books

, 33 1/3 Erik Davis Continuum books 2007.

This tiny book (177 two-thirds height pages) is a treasure trove. I enjoyed it immensely and I'd like to recommend it to you.



My opinion may be biased, of course. I liked it because almost everything I read there I wished I had said myself, and in a few cases, I actually have. It's an examination of the fourth Led Zeppelin album. (Davis can't bring himself to call it "Led Zeppelin's Fourth Album" or "Led Zeppelin IV" and definitely can't bring himself to call it Zoso. He settles for using the four symbols themselves as the title, which is possible in print as the characters were sent out in lead type to likely reviewers when the album came out. Since they don't exist in Unicode (by which I suppose I mean I can't find them) it makes it rather harder to title this commentary.)

A long time fan, introduced to the study of magic by the silent and "ominously puffy" example of Jimmy Page, Davis calls himself an "occulture critic". His task is to try to "articulate the mythic imagination at work in Zeppelin's music by submitting in a half remembered way, to their daemonic intensity". (p10) (He is careful to explain the difference between 'daemonic' and 'demonic'.)

His long-term interest in the band gives him a perfect perspective. For instance, I've often wondered why critics in the Seventies declared John Bonham to be a powerful but swing-free and ham-handed drummer, whereas nowadays he is officially recognized as weakly godlike and Most Amazing. Davis writes:

Zeppelin was not pure. This love of mixture and slop gave their music and beats an almost prophetic force. In the 1970s, Zeppelin's rhythms sounded, well, rather leaden. But as Robert Palmer noted in 1990, after years of hip hop and crunchy rhythms, "the lurching beats and staggered rhythms sound a lot different: they swung like mad." (p84)

His mention that, in California, "by 1971 the bloom was off the counterculture rose" opened up a new perspective for me. I had not thought of the early Seventies California singer-songwriters as sitting among the debris of a Summer of Love that had collapsed like a stoner-built geodesic dome, nor had I really thought of Going to California as capturing that 'autumnal' (as he says) melancholy vibe.

And face it, you have to admire a writer who can craft a sentence like:

But Plant's pedal doesn't really hit the metal until
where his wanderings become
a bona fide quest, like The Odyssey or The Hobbit or Bill
and Ted's Excellent Adventure. (p75)

His insights are many. Discussing the creation of The Battle of Evermore, he contrasts Robert Plant's assertion that he had just read a book on the Scottish border wars with the mythological groundwork of the song and says, "sparks don't really fly unless myth is forged against the unyielding anvil of actual events." His theory about Stairway to Heaven – that it is a song about buying the song Stairway to Heaven – sounds wacky until you remember that, yeah, actually the song does say that, explicitly, in so many words. And who else would casually mention that "Percy…winds down the phonograph road"? Of course – the winding road is the groove itself! Why didn't I think of that?

Like most insanely detailed fanterpretations, the book tells us more about its writer than it does about Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. But in constructing such a work, Davis has performed a kind of active Sonar ping; although the communication is entirely his creation, the detail of the wavefront as it bounces off our own preconceptions tells us much about the shape and location of the record as it appears in our own minds. His trip down the winding road of the album – from the eager panting of the Black Dog before the first track starts, to the drowning, drain-circling maelstrom of engulfment that ends When the Levee Breaks, is an eye-opening journey.

Denver, again.

Black Helicopters spotted over Denver, according to the Colorado Independent.

While the commotion was taking place last evening, The Rocky Mountain News published an article with the title “Choppers are training for convention,” a report that cited the Denver police department as saying that the U.S. Department of Justice was maneuvering for the upcoming convention in Denver.But that angle quickly disappeared, replaced with today's claim by the Rocky that the exercise was a routine practice for the “global war on terrorism,” not in preparation for the August convention.




Black Helicopters are widely regarded as the beat policeman of the New World Order.

Wikipedia article on Black Helicopters.

Riffs? Yeah! Can U dig it?

The Guardian's music blog has a v. v. interesting article called School of rock: Reappraising the riff, on riffage. It's a little bit descriptive, a little bit how-to, and in the great British tradition ends with a breathtaking insult at the end.

There's little point excerpting it, so if you can indeed dig it, why not read the whole thing? Learn how the Devil's Interval and syncopation make riffs great.

The title of this piece comes from Pop Will Eat Itself's Can U Dig It? I'm going to quote them here because lyric sites are so spyware and ad-ridden it's not worth sending you there for the (otherwise persuasive) benefit of not being issued with a DMC take-down order myself.

We dig TV we dig remote control,
We dig the Furry Freak Brothers and the Twilight Zone,
We dig Marvel and D.C., we dig Run-DMC,
We dig Renegade Soundwave and AC/DC
(Can U dig it?)
Bruce Wayne auf weidersehn, Dirty Harry, Make my day,
Terminator, hit the north, Alan Moore knows the score,
Riffs? Yeah! Can U dig it?
Riffs? Yeah! Can U dig it?
We dig Optimus Prime and not Galvetron,
We dig The Leader of the Pack and the Do-Ron-Ron,
Spinderella and Bruce Lee, Good, Bad and the Ugly,
V for Vendetta and Into the Groovy.
(Can U dig it?)

Click on the pic below for a stompin' YouTube video of same, with bonus extra unadvertised track.



Lovely riff, what? I know all the words to that song and I sing it out loud in my car when it jukeboxes itself to the front of the shuffle queue. How many of its pop culture references do YOU still remember, loyal readers?

After Zeppelin, PWEI are probably my favorite band. (Off to listen to their verson of Love Missile F1-11)

Octopuses - new facts to impress your friends!

From Oceangal, news of a fascinating Octopus discovery.



According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, based on research at Sea Life centers across Europe, octopuses don't have eight legs. They have two legs and six arms. Researchers looking into whether octopuses were right-handed or left-handed found that they were ambidextrously third-from-the-front handed, and that two of their hands are legs, anyway.

This means that when another smart-alec friend says to you, "Man -the featherless biped!" you can reply, "No - octopus the featherless biped!" And then you can argue about the plural. (It's bipodes.[1])

[1] Only kidding. It's bipeds.

Denver International Airport

I'm flying home today from DIA – the well-known headquarters of the Illuminati, where they have carved out a survival area for themselves under the Mile High plain of Denver.







Pics courtesy of the site linked below

There are many grotesque murals here in the terminals, a gargoyle, and a Masonic dedication plaque. The murals show what the New World Order elites plan for the world. They include depictions of three caskets holding dead people of different races, signifying the death of many peoples. A little girl is holding a Mayan tablet, signifying the end of the world at the close of the Mayan calendar in 2012. Cities and forests are shown in flames, and a green giant is seen destroying a city. Women are seen carrying dead babies and a German boy with an iron fist is shown collecting the weapons of the world and destroying them.

There are thousands of brass floor inlays. They have fascinating designs -words (some place names, some unknown) and fossils. Any idea what language these are?



The patterns are fossils, representing extinction. This one is also pentaradially symmetric, like the Pentagon or a pentagram.





So much material was removed during the building of DIA (even though the area is flat), that some people are convinced there is a secret city under here. This is apparently where the masters will retire to oversee the destruction of the world and the creation of the New World Order.

Here is a short video.

[Video has been removed]

More information at the website here.

Denvention, Sunday

At an unreasonably early Sunday hour of 10am, there was a panel called De revolutione scientiarum, or Could the scientific revolution have happened three centuries sooner? I shall never know the answer to that as the panel chose to discuss Greek and Arabic philosophy instead. Not that this was a bad thing – everyone seemed to know what he was talking about – but it was fairly heavy going.

They went off topic early, after deciding that "might have been" was a tough topic as the unintended consequences of any change rapidly outweighed the intended consequences. For instance, who at the end of WWI could have guessed that the sudden availability of cheap automobiles would radically change the mating habits of teenagers?

Another interesting thought: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" signaled the revolution that led to science. Beforehand, the heavens and earth were gods themselves, and not subject to investigation. One would not seek to understand the properties of Mars or Poseidon if they were conscious beings.

The next one was quite philosophical too. In How Will The Future Remember the 20th Century, Harry Turtledove, James Morrow and Nancy Kress discussed what a human a thousand years from now might remember about the 20th century.

Morrow thought that the 20th century had seen the beginnings of positive changes, for instance multiculturalism (signaling the beginning of the end of racism and sexism). Nancy Kress thought he was overly optimistic. He thought that it signaled the end of the belief in invisible friends controlling us. Nancy Kress thought he was not only wrong in that thought, but was incorrect, as spirituality was an important component of being human and should not diminish. Kress thought that humans could not escape our genetic make-up (which she says was honed on the savannahs) and were geared to suspicion, greed, fighting and so forth. Morrow thought that her philosophy, genetic determinism overlaid with faith in a spiritual component, was incoherent. Turtledove invented the word "dogmatotropic" to describe how people actively seek dogmas, and wants credit for it, so you read it here first, folks.

"How" will people remember us led to other discussions – will there be people? Will they remember us with human brains or some other technology? Will there only be one sort of people? Since we look back to the past and look for those strands that "led to us", they may do the same with the 20th Century.

What does stand out? The incredible body count of the last 100 years? Gandhi? The Atom Bomb? Antibiotics – or will it be the century that antibiotics actually worked, as one audience member asked.

Excellent discussion from some seasoned thinkers.

Last panel – The Coming Thing – what's next and newest in SF. Only Lou Anders turned up to this. Charlie Stross blew it off and Daniel Abraham sent his apologies. Luckily Walter Jon Williams was in the audience and was press-ganged into an involuntary panel-crash. Another wide ranging discussion at which I deduced that most books were written by authors who put all the genre names in a hat and pick two out at random. Whatever those two are, the book becomes. Werewolves and Detectives? Right. Vampires and cowboys? Why not?

The upshot seemed to be that the paranormal romance genre was saturated and something new was expected but I'm not going to tell you what it was. Hee hee.

WJW said that most SF is no longer a book with SF on the spine. It is movies, comics, TV. The writers do not consider themselves SF writers and the readers are plentiful and young. The trick will be to capture this audience for SF. For instance cover art was described as a "mating call". The jacket is a pretty flower to entice a bee to land there. If you want the bee, you need to make it attractive. And it better match what the bee wants, because he won't make the same mistake twice.

And that was my Worldcon.

Denvention, Saturday Part II

"The Bad Guy in the White Hat: Changing Images of Heroes and Villains", with James Morrow, John Moore, Mario Acevedo and Rob Gates. Many people there seemed to be writers, and indeed the last few panels I attended here did have a workshoppy feel. Morrow was thoughtful, well-read and well-spoken and very much impressed me. Among other things, he said that the default for fantasy was Manichaeism (that good and evil are separate and opposed, and in a battle for control of the world). He also said that good can imagine what it is like to be evil (and choose not to do it) but evil cannot imagine what it is like to be good. (CF Sauron not even imagining that the Fellowship would seek to destroy the ring rather than use it for their own ends.)

Apparently 1% to 4% of the population is psychopathic, in that they set out to achieve their own ends without considering the effects of their actions on others. Villains have to have a belief that they are doing the right thing. They don't think that they are being evil; they are just working towards other goals. An example given was Osama bin Laden, who is a villain to many and a hero to some. The overall gist of the conversation did seem to be that villains have always been more complex than Black Hats and White Hats (a visual signal from the silent film era, when it was impossible to shoehorn much exposition into the piece).

There was a discussion of creators changing their minds, as if embarrassed about their previous definitions of good and evil – Han Solo no longer shooting first, as the 'new' Star Wars was marketed to kids rather than young adults, the change in E.T. in rerelease, where the Secret Service Agents, who had previously been wearing guns, were now shown to be carrying only flashlights, and Harry Potter, where Harry's dad James was originally shown to be a shining example, but as the books progressed and the readership grew older, became a much more grey character, with several flaws.

The panel and audience brought up many examples of villains in film and literature – Darth Vader, who was originally a genocidal villain (redeemed at the end; unsuccessfully in Jim Morrow's eyes), then developed as a character who had initially been good but flawed in the new trilogy. Quills was mentioned, in that de Sade was a depraved but self-aware character presented as more reasonable than the other main character who was depraved and did not admit it. (Similarly for Sweeney Todd – the hero being a self-aware killer versus the depraved judge who claimed to be otherwise.) The TV series Dexter apparently features a serial killer who only kills serial killers, a tactic that allows him to live with himself.

The conversation turned to women and GLBT villains – the latter more acceptable according to Rob Gates (who runs the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards) and the former less acceptable, possibly for PC reasons, but also because male readers do not find it satisfying to have a female character killed. (Also, the major reason to kill a female character – because she goes against her nature and becomes a sexual being – is now unfashionable, according to one audience member who clearly had not seen the band the other night singing about "cougars" and how they "aren't right". Then again, she did sound to be from Australia, which is a civilized country.)

Talking of women and sex, the next panel was on the subject of Writing SF Erotica. Interesting panel; not particularly well-moderated, which meant that the conversation rambled a little and didn't answer the question in the handbook, "How far has SF come since Barbarella?" However, it did answer a number of unasked questions, such as the existence of a website which uses artists' maquettes to model threesomes in every combination of sexes and positions, so that you can describe accurately whose thigh is near whose ear without bending yourself into a pretzel trying to do it yourself. (No, I don't have the URL. I will Google it later.) Some very good writing tips at this, another workshoppy panel.


In between the villains and the threesomes, we had the 2008 Hugo Awards, another star studded fanstravaganza.

Denvention, Saturday part I

A full day today.

I started with one of the guilty pleasures of a con - going to hear editors and publishers' readers read the worst things that float to the top of the slush pile. (The "slush pile" being the name for the unsolicited submissions they receive.) It's a guilty pleasure because no one likes ripping another writer's work apart in public, but they are often so rippable - so funny - that it's impossible not to like the experience.

This year the editors must have felt subconsciously guilty too, because two out of three of them forgot their folder of slush pile gems. Erin Evans of Wizards of the Coast was the exception, and she not only cross referenced the slushees' names against the con-goers lists, but also stuck mainly to cover letters and query letters rather than the fiction itself. This allowed us in the audience to hear some of the hubris, and some of the complete lack of social skills, of the authors rather than their inability to write English. As usual, it was rib-ticklingly funny.

Ms. Evans told the tale of one person who first told the Wizards of the Coast staff that they were going to Hell ( WotC also runs Dungeons and Dragons), but finished off with a plaintive plea to buy his/her manuscript first. The others agreed - if you want to sell your work don't do that.

In fact don't do that was the theme for a lot of the excerpts, so I learned a lot.

Then a panel on Copyright, DRM and so forth in which Brad Templeton of the EFF and Jim Minz, Baen editor, acquitted themselves very well. Fascinating subject, but too long to go into here. Sample sound bite from Baen: If someone is never going to pay for an ebook, then it is not worth the investment in cash to put on DRM to prevent him stealing it. It's a waste of money.

Brad Templeton also pointed out that by moving your files into the "cloud" (cyberspace) as opposed to a computer under your control in your home, you were "erasing the Fourth Amendment" for yourself as it guarantees rights against unreasonable searches and siezures in your home, not in files in someone else's custody (except in named areas such as email, medical records and banking records).

A panel on the phenomenon of Harry Potter followed, at which I mainly wrote down tips on what people love about Potter for my own use.

Denvention, Friday Lucky 08/08/08

I went to the Masquerade tonight. I love the Masquerade.

Here's the Legendary Black Beast of Arrrghhh!, the winner of the Holy Hand-Grenade Award. (Darren Best and Marian O'Brien Clark) BTW, the Masquerade wasn't held here, by the Men's. This is just the staging/photo area. As usual, it was held in a big theater with lighting, sound and video screens.



I also liked the costume for Garuda, and an alternate history set with Charles II and a Mexican Ambassador. The Masquerade Master of Ceremonies was Wil McCarthy.

Earlier I'd been to a panel on Alternate Histories with Harry Turtledove, Steve Stirling, Charlie Stross and others. Why do SF writers like alternate histories? In your own life you have moments you realize later were pivotal and you should have done the other thing – if you hadn't missed the bus to the interview you would have stayed in a different job and so you wouldn't have met your wife.

Writing alternative histories is a way to change things and do the right thing (or explore the wrong thing). There's also the fact that your readership is partially with you already. The background is familiar to them, and you just have to explain the changes. (Hey, this means it is historical fan fiction!) A lot of interesting ideas from a very high powered panel. All agreed that WWII stories were overdone, and all seemed to agree that The Great War was far more important, and more pivotal (WWII being really just a rematch of a war that hadn't ended decisively) and that stories set in a changed Great War would be welcome. Plan 1919 was cited as a good turning point. Half a dozen other starting points for WWI, which would have seen the countries in different states of readiness, were cited.

At the end of the panel, one member of the audience asked, "Are there any stories of smaller, more domestic changes that could have changed the world, or are they all politics and technology?" which shut the panel up immediately. I suggested the discovery/invention of contraception a thousand years ago. A gentleman next to her suggested a theory of disease that could have led to prevention or containment strategies would have changed the world utterly.

Then I went to a panel on republishing older SF works, and included quite a bit on electronic publishing and audio publishing and had some good insights into what a publisher looks for in a book in terms of sales expectations, placement in Barnes and Noble (critical) and so on.

Erik Mona said that his republished older works astonished (and pleased) younger readers who couldn't understand how in the 'old days' a pulp author could tell a whole tale – including beginning, middle and end – in 200 pages. They thought that books had to be 600 pages long (and presumably had been avoiding them for that reason).

Then I went to a panel on Dark Destinies – The Worst Future You Can Imagine, with Wil McCarthy and Michael Swanwick. The latter went straight onto my list of erudite must-see-next-time authors, with a very considered set of answers. (McCarthy was pretty good too, but Swanwick was excellent.) Some things I picked up were: Don't make your endings all dark or all light – they'll seem trite. Remember that every ending is a beginning for a new story. Evil people have rational explanations for everything they do. They aren't evil for a living. Zombies – being overwhelmed by a mass of mindless people – were very popular, as were "marching morons" scenarios. Complete control (24 hour surveillance), losing the control of your body to someone else but being forced to remain and spectate, and the possibility of losing your sense of self or identity were cited as very scary scenarios for most people.

Talking of the Masquerade and MC Wil McCarthy, Wil told what he said was the world's oldest written joke, which was:

Q: What lies beside a man's thigh and likes to poke the hole that has often been poked before?

A: A key.

I think this is a good excuse to have another couple of pictures of Jimmy Page, don't you?

Edited 08/09/08 because now I know the name of the Masquerade entry above.

My Denvention, Thursday, Part 1

Denvention, Thursday

I'm still in Denver.

You thought I was kidding about the Blue Bear. It was still banging at the door wanting in this morning.



I missed most of "Chronological Dissonance: Modern Archetypes & Morals in a Historical Setting". The take home lesson seemed to be that if you don't want your historical or foreign characters to sound like your drinking buddies or coffee group, then read primary sources to get a feel of what it was like to live in that time or culture. There was some discussion on whether the difference between them and us you see there (in e.g. the Odyssey) was due to the literary conventions of the writer or an actual difference in the way the people saw things. Interesting stuff, but I won't dilate on it here.

A not so interesting panel of "Trends in New SF- Where are we going and why?" (which the panel decided was actually "New Trends in SF"). Panel members were Charles Brown, Jim Minz, Ken Scholes, Sheila Williams and Gary something. The picture of them below is the panel reacting to a survey one of them had done on LJ which said, among other things, that a new trend in SF was multiculturalism. One of the others replied that multiculturalism in SF was actually very old.

[Photobucket has eaten picture]

I know appearances can be deceptive, but have a look the photo and estimate an answer the following question:

Q: Given that multiculturalism in SF is "old", what effect has it had on the faces we see on convention panels?

A:

Other points: Small Press – printing is now cheap enough to make it viable; games and movies, rather than pointing in new directions are perennially 30 years behind print; Young Adult is big big big; cellphone novels are big in Japan; movies now have a small press – it's called YouTube.

My Denvention, Thursday, part II

A panel on "Aliens – writing what you don't know" was fascinating. Larry Niven and LE Modesitt, moderated by Jetse DeVries, discussed how to get the "other" into aliens. I'm tempted to snark that three older male Westerners probably have more aliens to study than most. 94% of the world already looks and/or acts differently from them so they have lots of models. Modesitt was erudite and charming and indeed says that he gets his "aliens" from the range of human behavior he sees around him. Niven builds aliens mechanistically. He starts with the strange chemistry, physiology and morphology, builds a set of thought patterns based on that, and a culture based on those thought patterns. Then he brings in the humans and has the 'natural' reaction take place. They agreed to disagree. Modesitt remarked that The New Scientist recently had published something showing that men and women were physiologically so different that they really were alien to each other. (New Scientist keeps publishing this 'news' and although I haven't read this one, I think that a good re-read of "The Mismeasure of Man" should take care of any lingering doubts that it's made up.) It was good to see two greats of the field discussing one of the most important techniques in SF – creation of 'the other', the 'monster' that acts as a mirror of our human values and is a primary tool in making SF interesting.

Then a panel on Fan Fiction. See if you can spot a difference between this panel and all the previous ones:



Also, the audience was at least 95% female, and, very cheeringly, about 90% under 40. Since everyone in the room was a practitioner, rather than a consumer listening to the producer, the conversation was very different from the previous panels. No resolutions to anything, of course – panels are a sort of live-action blog comments section with the main difference being that there isn't a rule that everyone has to start arguing over the plural of octopus.

Last meeting before suppertime was "Torchwood: Doctor Who for Grown-Ups?" which was packed, and very vociferous and included a number of people, gay and presumably straight, who liked it for the gay sex. Ah, teh gay sex! It was almost like being back on line again, with my people, instead of out in real-life fandom.

On the way back to the hotel, there was a live band playing in a tent on the street to a couple thousand drunks being canvassed by the army recruiters. Don't know what the gig was, but as we walked by, the song they were playing was about a "Cougar call". "They look good, but something's not right," the band sang about "cougars" (older women who are cruising for men). It's interesting that outside the convention it seems everyone is pretty decided on 'the other", "the alien", "the monster" – it is women over 40 who want a man. This desire is apparently so unnatural that it triggers the humor response (humor being related to the attack response in that it is a short circuited version of the same thing) when played to drunks.

Blogging from the Worldcon

I'm blogging…oh, I love that word – It makes me feel so semi-professional… from Denvention, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. Fen (Science Fiction fans) refer to this yearly event as the Worldcon. Most people so far who know I'm going to Denver have asked me if I'm here for the Democratic Convention. To which I say, "There's a Democratic Convention?" Anyway, I think that's next week. Obama will be in the house to sweep away any remaining elves or Ancient Ones.

Science Fiction is about the Shock of the New, about Cognitive Dissonance. Today the most cognitively dissonant thing occurred when I stepped outside of the convention center. No, not the giant blue bear that's hammering at the entrance doors, but the fact that in Denver, they keep water in the sky and it falls on your head in drops as you are walking back to the hotel. I'm told this is called 'precipitation' or 'rain' for short.

It completely took me by surprise, despite the following things being true for me:
1. I used to live in England, which also had this feature
2. Southern California has had 'rain' as recently as two years ago and I should have remembered it
3. My two hour flight to Denver was delayed by two hours because of a thunderstorm at Denver International Airport. And when the pilot said this – because of course he didn't tell us we weren't going to take off until after we'd been shoehorned into the cabin – I said "Typical! There's a thunderstorm every day there in the summer – I've been delayed at Denver before!"

Still it was a bit of a surprise. I was not wearing any wet weather gear, which according to someone I overheard in the elevator later, is called 'a hoodie'. I must get me one of these things.
The convention so far has featured the least organized line for badges I've ever encountered, but that might be some sort of a teething problem. I've been to several panels – one on the early reading of Tolkien, which seemed to alternate between people who read Tolkien early (in the 50s and 60s) and people who read Tolkien while young (we all seemed to start around 12). I was probably hoping for something different, a journey through the relationship between beatniks, hippies and Tolkien, but I can't say the panelists were wrong in the tack they took and they were certainly very interesting. One asked, "Can you imagine what it was like to read 'The Two Towers' when it first came out in the 50s and then have to wait almost a year for 'Return of the King' to be published? There are probably people still in asylums who went mad wondering how the fellowship would get out of their predicaments." To which I wanted to answer, "Yes, I waited for the last Harry Potter book and it's exactly the same thing!" But I thought the room would rise up and suppress me, so I didn't.

Then I went to a panel on how to schmooze, featuring John Scalzi, who could schmooze anyone at any time, and so was a great panelist. Some of this was general (how not to be a wallflower at a party) but since this is Worldcon and the panel included a Famous Person and an Agent, it also talked a bit about schmoozing for business and meeting famous people. Things I learned included:

• "Hello" is a great opener. It's tried and tested and always works, if only because the automatic response "hello" is generated, so you have the other party's attention
• It's okay to have a squee moment when you meet a hero - they do actually like it - but get over it and get on to the interesting stuff if you want to get anything out of the encounter
• Find common ground for a discussion, even if it's the weather or the flight in
• If you're meeting someone who is at a convention, you can get an idea of what interests them from their panels. Use an item they discussed as an 'in'
• If you meet someone who is in conversation with others as you go up to them, listen for a while to get the gist of the conversation and ease your way into it that way
• Remember the other person is always the most interesting and don't try to monopolize the conversation with tales of ME!!!11!
• If you've met someone before and they say, "And what have you been up to lately?" Don't say, "Same old same old" or "Not so much". They've probably forgotten how they know yo and this is your chance to remind them who you are and what you do.
• If someone gives you a business card or tells you to drop by their website, do it. Follow up with a "I so enjoyed meeting you at Worldcon and having that conversation about…" on their guest book or email. They'll remember you much better after a follow up
  If your conversation about the weather is returned by an invitation to talk about yourself or your book, have an elevator speech ready. Use tiers – one sentence to describe the concept and then thirty seconds to round it out. One panelist described her book as "CSI with a Mae West AI" which I can see would generate attention for the next thirty seconds. John Scalzi, once invited to pitch his second book before he had actually written it, came up with "Man solves diplomatic incident through action scenes and snappy dialogue." Very clever
• If you are invited to follow up with something more, do follow submission guidelines and don't trust simply to "Remember me? We had the conversation about the weather at the Worldcon."

The last panel was on whether the ubiquity of Google means people don't have to learn anything any longer. I didn't take notes but the general conclusion seemed to be, "Kids of today with their long hair and so called music. They don't know anything. It wasn't like that in my day. Get off my lawn!" Plus there were a number of contributions from a representative of Google who was in the audience with a suspiciously generic black suit and a generic name "Tom". Methinks he was a spy. Not that he could have spied much as Google already knows everything about me, including many things I don't even know about myself.

I didn't go to the opening ceremony, because I was tired by then. I think that's why they usually put them at the start. However, Denvention is all about breaking the rules! And Klingons.

Wonderful World of MP3

It came to my attention the other day that not everyone knows about MP3 blogs. Unsurprising - they are shy, retiring creatures. But they have been around since at least 2003, and they are a wonderful resource for a music fan.

An MP3 Blog is a blog which offers access to digitized music that isn't available anywhere else. There is usually a short post, which explains the significance and impact of the track or album, there's a picture of the cover and then there's a link to Rapidshare or other download site.

MP3 Blogs pride themselves on offering rare, unavailable music. If you need the latest Miley Cyrus offering, you would want to look elsewhere. But yesterday I downloaded a Peter Wyngarde album from 1970. I found The Groupies on MP3. I'm currently listening to Graham Bond's Holy Magick. If you're seeking something you've heard about but can't find in the usual outlets, search the blogs.

I usually search using Addictomatic http://addictomatic.com/ . Google's pretty useless for this type of search. Type in your keywords as usual and Addictomatic will separate the results into types - including blogs ("bloglines"). Look through the results for an MP3 download. Then download it from the offered site. (These are not P2P, or peer-to-peer downloads that require a seeder. The files are already there in cyberspace and you're downloading it to your hard drive without other computers sharing the task.) Usually the files are zipped - they end in .rar. Save the files in a folder and use Winrar to unpack them. If there is a part 2, download it into the same folder before unpacking. Winrar will sew all the files together automatically. You can play these files with Windows Media Player, or put them on an MP3 player.

Some people won't use MP3 blogs because, well, because they're MP3s, which is a low-end, lossy way to encode music. Fine- if you can find a torrent or other source of FLAC or WMA files, take those. For most of this type of track, the only way you're going to hear them is on MP3 - so you might as well go for it.

One plea though - if you like an MP3 and you find the music is available somewhere on CD, please go ahead and buy it. Artists have to eat too. In fact, if it wasn't creeping me out so much, I'd buy the Graham Bond album on import even though Bond no longer needs to eat.

Search Engines:

Addictomatic http://addictomatic.com/

The Hype Machine http://hypem.com/

A Few Individual Blogs:
Anomalous Mind
TWILIGHTZONE!
Floodlit Footprint
Lost-In-Tyme

Edit: Sitemeter's problems now over

If your blog does not load in Internet Explorer, you need to remove the Sitemeter code until the problem is fixed. How do you know if the problem is Sitemeter? Go to www.sitemeter.com and if the page does not load, it means the problem is not yet fixed. The text of the error is “Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site.”

Here is an article on the Sitemeter problem. Go to One Project Closer

The site includes full instructions on how to Fix the IE error on Wordpress, Blogger, and Other Sites.

I will try to replace my old blog template and blogroll tomorrow. Goodnight, all!

Update: Back to normal. Sitemeter apparently interacted badly with a hidden bug in Internet Explorer and an upgrade led to this being brought out in spectacular fashion.

Problems here at Blogger...

If you have had difficulty getting to this site today...my apologies.

So have I.

It seems to be related to the Sitemeter (hit counter). Since the blog was inaccessible, and Sitemeter's site was inaccessible, the only way I could clear it was to brute-force revert the blog to the original look (it's called Classic!) and discard every change I've ever made to the layout.

Apologies to those on the blogroll who have disappeared, and those enjoying the rare time I used an LJ-Cut. Hopefully whatever is ailing Sitemeter will go away and I can go back to my custom template. In the meantime, here is some soothing music.



Jimmy Page laying it on with a trowel. Somewhere Leon Theremin is smiling.