Old People Read New SF - Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar (review)

I'm one of the old people, and this is a new sf.  My review, among all the other old people's is here, at James Nicoll's site.

I had to cut down as my  initial review was way outside the guidelines.

What do you think about modernizing fairy stories? Does it work?

More Koningrooibekkie in SJC

Here are a couple of better pictures of a San Juan Capistrano Koningrooibekkie taken last week in my yard. 

 

Astonishing little thing, it appears at sunrise and then makes itself scarce.
(previously)

Video tour of Tower House, with Jimmy Page

Channel 4 has screened a wonderful tour of the epic Tower House, Jimmy Page's home since 1972, designed by William Burges as a showcase of his architectural and decorative talents.

Jimmy points out a crack in the plaster

London is currently undergoing an epidemic of basement-building, or "undergrounding", as rich people with limited property sizes and listed facades dig deep under their houses in order to expand. Page's neighbor Robbie Williams is digging such a basement and the vibration and possible soil movement is threatening to damage Tower House. The neighbor on the other side is also having soil work done. Page is a very private man and I'm positive he wouldn't invite cameras in otherwise, but this is the third or fourth piece I've seen on his attempt to stop the possibly damaging "improvements" going on around him.

For us it's a rare opportunity to see this intricate and ornate castle-sized artwork. It's disheartening that we might be seeing it for the first and last time if the threats materialize. I can't imagine what it's like to live here. Page must not be able to smoke, or cook or do anything that will damage the more than a century old paint. I know he can't play music there, as the vibrations can crack the mouldings and carvings.

I can't embed the video, but it can be played on Channel 4's website, here and is definitely worth the click.

RIP Laurie Collins (The Collins Kids)

Nikki Kreuzer via Third Man Records reports that Laurie Collins, sister of Larry Collins and member of rockabilly group the Collins Kids has passed away at 76.

Grandis Day Gecko shedding

For those who have not seen this miracle of nature, Mr Fatty the Day Gecko is shedding. Geckos shed their skin in more-or-less one piece. They can't just shrug it off like a snake, because they've got legs (and they know how to use them), but they let the old, dry skin split and get as much off in one piece as they can. Fatty's a bit old and sluggish nowadays and sometimes gets a bit of stuck shed we have to work on together the next day. Generally speaking though, he goes from dull green to white to bright green in a few hours like a proper lizard.

The head skin peels back first, presumably because that ensures they can breathe and see for the duration.  The rest of the skin is loose from the body but doesn't spring away like the head. It peels away more slowly, and in the case of the tail end (and sometimes the femoral pores and toes) the lizard needs to chew the last bits away.

ThThe



TheThe 

Yes, his substrate's brown. It's just compost tea from the organic soil in his planties. Ignore it.

Current list of great band names for future use

The Sheep Looked at Johnny
G-Clef Wine
Is This Love or Just Confucian?
Llanfair of the Vanities
Pledge of A Legion
Steakhouse of the August Moon
St.Ereos
Mucosa Es Su Casa
Mike O'Riza and the Fun Guys
Torc Understeer
St. John the Kangaroo Blues Band
Ike and Turner Corner
Dank Whale
Xie Xie La Femme
Venus in Furze
Duke Newcome
Richard Gere de Lyon
Thelementary Skool
To Your Battered Squaddies Go
Back Florist Ghetto


And a phrase from Mick Farren's Give The Anarchist a Cigarette, where he is disparaging the tent-dwelling boggies (as he calls them) of Phun City:

Ewok Bivouac

On the other hand, if you would like to automatically generate a name, an album title, and an album cover, my blog has a handy meme for generating all three for your first CD here.

Dead pool

dead pool

Deadpool.

I guess it was a raccoon attack. The pond was devastated on Sunday night.

John Galt, the Great White Goldfish has gone, along with his six red goldfish companions. The tiny mosquito fish are still alive. The water lilly was shredded into tiny pieces, presumably by the raccoon standing on its horizontal trunk as it dug in the water. There may be a growing point left alive - I'll leave it there to see if it resprouts.

The pump and filters were taken to pieces and strewn around in the silt. There must be a hole in the liner as several inches of water leaked out.

Goodbye little goldfishes. I guess you had a good run (or swim). 

Comic-Con report, 2018

The ticket rationing system of San Diego Comic Con is well-known; it's why we only got two days there this year, and considered ourselves lucky to get that much.  It worked out well in many ways. Four solid days of walking from one end of the convention center to the other every waking hour is too much. I'm not sure quite how big the convention center is, but on Thursday this year, it worked out to six and a half miles of walking. The other vicissitudes of a four-day run include staying in a backwater Hotel Du Seed (usual daily rate $40, Comic Con daily rate $150) for three nights, the morning run for the trolley and the evening London-tube-style crush on the trolley back, and of course the abominable drive from Orange County to San Diego and back.

Carlsbad Lagoon from the train

This year we took Amtrak.  It takes about half an hour longer than driving but you don't have to pay $25 to park at the end, and there's no stress. Just sit down and watch the Pacific drift by in air-conditioned, wi-fi supplied, 120v power-available comfort. And if you go business class, for an extra $11, you get a snack kit with about ten small items to unwrap and sample, almost as much fun in itself as a Comic Con exclusive Funko Pop or something, along with a free glass of wine. On Thursday we took the coach down and business class back in the evening. We Jack-Spratted the goodies. STB had twenty-five piece of carbohydrate to unpack and gobble on the train back, and I had eight ounces (two packs) of olives and four ounces (two packs) of cheese spread and two glasses of basic Chardonnay. (STB called it my Rubbish Mediterranean Diet and indeed I paid gastro-intestinally for it the next day.)

For the Sunday travel, we booked too late to get business class, but due to a little bird telling us what's what, we got on the train back at the right stop to get a seat. Literally hundreds of people who did not know the (not very) secret had to stand. It didn't help that Del Mar fair started the same day, so all the people who got on there, and all the people who got on at Legoland, also had to stand.

That's the logistics. So what the what happened at Comic Con itself?

We don't usually go to the big panels. Jodie Whittaker was there for Doctor Who. Bryan Cranston was there for Breaking Bad. Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. All kinds of big names were on panels in the giant room known as Hall H. But the line for Hall H is literally more than 12 hours long, so the only way in is to start lining up the day before and miss literally everything in the whole con until you're inside, when, presumably, you do not give up your seat except under threat of death.  And once inside, you find, you may be seventy or 100 rows back from the stage and watching the action on video screens, just like being at home. Yes, you 'see' Jodie Whittaker in person, about the size of a pinhead. If you want to see her speak, you're just watching the screen.

We just go to the smaller panels in rooms ranging from 100 to 1,000 people. Oh, and the dealers' floor. Comic-Con has a huge exhibition. There are about 5,500 lots, though some dealers are on huge lots with multiple numbers so there may not be that many exhibitors. These range from premieres of new sci-fi shows with giant robots, explosions and earsplitting audio to tiny pitches from first-time authors of self-published books sitting behind a table with a vinyl banner showcasing their name and the cover, and a few dozen of their books in piles.  Comic books range from dollar an issue to the serious auctioneers who have bullet-proof glass booths showcasing issues valued at $10,000 or more. There are figurines from bobbleheads to mass-produced figurines to exclusive handmade sculptures to props used in movies with little price tags attached. (The tags are little. The prices are large.) The whole floor heaves with literally 100,000 people attempting to thread through the whole exhibition without any traffic lights or lane markings to aid them. Occasionally whole rows or columns come to a halt because a line for an exclusive item is being marched somewhere or compacted to save space.  It's like driving a mule cart in Cairo traffic, except you don't have a mule or a cart, and every fifth or sixth person you are trying to pass, undertake or get around is an 8-foot robot or smol dinosaur costume operated by a rapidly-deteriorating six year old human.

After being in this strangely post-apocalyptic crush for a few hours, you can go to the mezzanine, buy a burrito or some loaded nachos, and sit down to watch it happen to other people a couple of feet below you for a while. The existence of the mezzanine, with its quiet cafe, fandom panels and tables for groups like the SCA and Furries, is a bit secret (or maybe nobody likes the SCA or Furries) and I won't blow it except to say that the word 'mezzanine' is not particularly obscure, so you could look it up and then find the actual place if you really wanted. Outside the door of this quiet area, the SCA organizes swordfights.

Sword fight outside the mezzanine area

Many would-be exhibitors have realized that paying for a Comic-Con pitch and spending three and a half days behind a literal moat of living, shuffling humans is not the best way to obtain attention. Instead they book empty stores, bars, Petco Park, parking lots, tram stop rain shelters, the street, pedicabs, random homeless people, glamorous models, teams of actors on the street costumed as zombies, etc., and put on full shows with them, outside the convention center. Somewhere in this unadvertised mass it is quite possible to see the biggest names and extravaganzas of the con without actually paying for a con ticket. If you're short of cash, try this method.

In the past I would have recommended Tides, a tiny sit-down cafe hidden behind a billboard at the far north end of the convention center. Alas, they changed their format this year and instead of buying usual cafeteria fare from a till operative, they've changed to charging you $25 before you go in the room (clutching your one paper plate) where you're faced with three or so metal buckets filled with sugared meat and dried tofu along with "teriyaki sauce" (brown sugar-water), rice and some bitter salad greens. That was the "Asian buffet". Apparently the next day's was a "Mediterranean buffet" and the next day some other thing, but I'm sure they were all sugared meat and bitter greens. In mitigation, the carrot cake was splendid and STB said the chocolate cake was good too. If you like sugar, it might be the cafe for you.

The panels: this is what we did between this people watching.

Thursday Panels
Writing and Drawing the Past
As with many con panels, it's sometimes hard to reconstruct why people put the panel together they did. Jen Wang, for instance, was talking about/promoting The Prince and the Dressmaker, which looks enchanting. We learned it's about a prince in Paris in the past who likes wearing dresses, which didn't seem to require as much historical accuracy as fellow panel-member Jason Lutes' Berlin, which is about the Weimar Republic.  Is TPatD about Chevalier d'Eon? No, it's made up.  She did a lot of research, but technically it's not historical fiction. Jason Lutes said he'd spent over twenty years researching material and drawing Berlin. I was going to ask him during the Q&A if he preferred first-hand accounts or translations. No need. He said right out during the panel that he couldn't read German. Dude. In 20 years you can learn to read German. German kids do it in six. I did learn something new - that historical comic book artists use a lot of old postcards as references, and postcards are/were heavily airbrushed.

2001: A Space Odyssey 50th Anniversary Panel
The panel included Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) and others. It's always great fun to listen to actors from classic movies tell their stories about how they came up with their characters and lines. This pair's banter is well-honed, but it's good to hear and the upcoming remastered 2001 looks amazing. It'll be available from October 30.

The Treasury of British Comics: Can a Forgotten Archive Teach Us About Comics in the 21st Century?
I assumed this would be about "a treasury of comics" in the same way that there is always a "bumper book of fairy tales" or a "monster book of spells" - i.e. a phrase meaning "a lot" in our golden childhood lexicon and in Harry Potter (same thing). It didn't. There is actually a whole bunch (technical term) of British comics from the non-IPC (non-Leo Baxendale) stable that was about to be dis-treasured, and these guys bought the whole lot. I believe they said 61,000 pages of things like Bunty, Jinty, Misty and Whizzer and Chips. I remember them very well. These are being reissued but being unassuming British people, they didn't quite make clear to me in what format or what name you can obtain them. I particularly enjoyed them talking about comic book character Faceache without realizing the American audience don't know the slang term "face ache" meaning a miserable person you don't want to be seen with. The audience probably just heard it as "argle-bargle" and assumed it meant, I don't know, cavey cavey or something.

Misty, girls' horror comic

A Celebration of Mary Shelley
The creator of Frankenstein (and his monster) was a 17 year old who lived with her married boyfriend and lived quite a life. The panel had quite a lot to say about her and about the different editions of Frankenstein. Spoiler: yes, she did write it by herself.

Sunday Panels
The Beatles: Yellow Submarine Surfaces in a New Graphic Novel
This looks like a fun book to pick up. Unfortunately, by the time we realized we'd been sent to the wrong part of the exhibition area, it was sold out. (It goes on unlimited sale next month.) The panel was interesting mainly because the Americans on the panel had studied the movie Yellow Submarine in much the same way that academics study Hittite potsherds. They'd carefully transcribed the words and thought hard about what colors were "psychedelic" and (although I ironically didn't ask to check) it certainly seemed they'd never thought to ask an English person, a Liverpudlian, or an old person who has taken acid, or even Alan Aldridge (who only passed away last year) about what any of it might mean/might have looked like.  At one point Bill Morrison said he'd spent ages trying to figure out what George Harrison said about the Blue Meanies' dogs (in the film) and eventually worked out it was "Cavey, cavey," which, Bill said, "was some kind of English expression." Well, nearly. It's from 'cave canem'- Latin for Beware of the Dog.  I guess it is "English" as we pronounce the "v" as "veh" rather than "weh", but it's hardly a long-lost Anglo-Saxon expostulation.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=118606 Photo by Radomil 01.10.2004

Enter the Fun Zone: New Immersive Arcades and eSports Stadiums
An exciting panel on the future of augmented reality - for STB. For me, a chance to catch up on my Twitter. I was astonished to learn that most leisure activities (like going to the movies) cost around 15c a minute. Interactive media can charge up to $10 a minute. Quite a business opportunity.


Inside the Comic Con Museum
There's going to be a Comic-Con museum, folks! (And that's it.)

How I Got Here: Paths to Comics
An odd one this as I think of Cory Doctorow and Nalo Hopkinson as second if not first tier writers, and yet this was not fully attended. Hopkinson I could have listened to for hours and Doctorow told a funny story about his dad's fairy tales, which started out in Grimm world and always ended with the proletariat seizing control of the means of production.

Wally Wingert: I Was Cosplay Before Cosplay Was Cool!
He has been dressing up as TV characters since he was 4, and had entertaining tales to tell about it.

Home made blue cheese taste test

My first homemade cheese is now on the table. It's not my first homemade cheese, it's the first one to ripen. The Wensleydales and Cheddars are still in the wine fridge, doing their fermentation thing.

I used this recipe, more or less. It includes pictures and tips at every step.

I started on 06/07/18. I did not follow the recipe exactly.  I used half cup of yogurt instead of yogurt starter. I tried to follow the method exactly but being new at cheese, I made a few elementary errors. 

After draining curds insufficiently, tried to pack them in metal mold. Tipping them from one end to the other of this mold didn’t work – they were too sloppy and fell apart. As an emergency, I quickly boiled some muslin and rehung the curds.When they stopped dripping I put them in a probably insufficiently sterilized too-small smaller mold on not very sterilized mats. From there tipped every 15 minutes for an hour, every hour for three hours and then overnight at RT.  I smoothed it off  06/11/18, poked holes in it, and put into cheese fridge in a closed box for humidity. I calculated it would take 2.5 months to ripen, which would make it September first, and from then it could be refrigerated for up to 2 months. It was fully ripened by 7/20 – I could tell because a litttle tongue of soft cheese leaked out of the blue rind. 

It is extraordinarily good. Mild and soft. 

Koningrooibekkie in SJC

Found this bird scratching around the bird feeder last week. It showed up at dawn for two or three days. It's like a tiny magpie.  Sorry about the photo quality but it's also very shy.

Peromyscus friend Carroll managed to ID it. It's a pintailed whydah, an African bird known as a Koningrooibekkie in its native land. Apparently they've been seen in Orange County for at least the last five years and are probably breeding in the wild.  There is a concern that this species may be laying its eggs in finch nests, to parasitize the hapless parents as cuckoos and cowbirds do. This one didn't seem to be 'with' anyone, finch or female whydah, but I'll keep an eye out.

Here's a professional photograph she found. (I don't know who took it but will credit or take it down as requested, if the photographer lets me know.)

What spectacular tails they have!

Bird watching special

I wonder what sort of finch this is? I can't find it in my California birds book.  First time visitor!

Review: The City Born Great, by N. K. Jemisin (Old People Read New SFF)

James Nicoll, the SF reviewer extraordinaire, has had a long running web blog series in which young people read old SF and review it. Spoiler: The results were, generally, that young people did not see the restless beauty and godlike mastery in 40s, 50s and 60s science fiction that we oldies, who read it as it came out, were wont to see in it. They often saw Hugo-winning work as sexist, ludicrous and stiff.

So James has initiated a series in which old people read new (online accessible) SFF. I was going to say, to see if older people feel a similar generation gap, but come to think of it, he hasn't actually said that.

I am one of the old people. In this first post, we are reviewing N K Jemisin's The City Born Great.

Read the story at this link (but don't read the website's introduction until afterwards!) and then read our old farty reviews at this link.

If you want to read the older Young People Read Old SF reviews, they are all at the same website. And very informative they are too.

Illustration for the Tor website publication by Richie Pope

Medusa's Ankles, a short video with Jason Isaacs

The legendary Jason Isaacs, in a short (20 minutes) adaptation of an AS Byatt short story, Medusa's Ankles.  As usual, he's great, but as usual he's not the hero so his character falls disappointingly short in morals, ethics and intelligence.

His smarmy hairdresser is certainly miles away from his ruthless, coarse Zhukov in Death of Stalin (which I forgot to review here), but he's just as compelling.

Alas, the last scene (without Isaacs) is disappointing. I checked the original text, and it's what she wrote - basically boils down to "Oh, your new hairdo...you look beautiful. Why didn't you do that before?" I preferred the meek tiger she was before.  But we can't blame that on Jason. (Or on Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), who directed it.)



MEDUSA'S ANKLES from MEDUSA'S ANKLES on Vimeo.

For those of you who missed Death of Stalin, here's a taste of Jason Isaacs as Zhukov. It's an odd little film - a lot of moral questions with no answers - but superbly acted and directed.

Cementgate - the Operation Backyard Brawl Hobo Camp

The latest Qanon-style conspiracy theory: A group of armed men has discovered something that looks, to normies, to be an abandoned hobo camp but is actually a major child-kidnapping and torture site linked to Pizzagate, the Rothschilds, the Clinton foundation, Da Joos, cement (cement? yes, cement) and the spirally-triangular symbol that seems really important to people like this but I've never found out what it is.

The police and a cadaver dog checked it out and, yep, it's a hobo camp. But to the Veterans on Patrol people, that's just evidence that the cover-up goes all the way to the top.

More info (and I don't recommend you doing this unless you have alcohol to hand) at Twitter hashtag #OperationBackyardBrawl

The twitter thread spelling this all out is by JJ McNabb and starts here:

There's a one-sided standoff shaping up in Tucson, Arizona.  A group called Veterans on Patrol, headed up by a guy who has never served in the military, found an abandoned homeless camp.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) June 5, 2018

Threadreaderapp doesn't seem to be unrolling for this thread, so you have to actually go to Twitter and read it, how 2015 is that.

This JJ McNab seems to be an interesting twitterer...

Walmart and detention camps

Talking of conspiracy theories, remember this one? For years, right wing conspiracy theorists have claimed that various Walmarts, which have been suddenly closing 'for plumbing repairs', are in reality being taken over by FEMA, who are turning them into detention camps for patriots.

FEMA's association with Walmart started in the eighties with Project Nine Aught Eight, the name of the project to ensure government continuity after a devastating incident (i.e. nuclear war, in those days), when Walmart was one of the major companies consulted. The cover story for the agents' questions was that these big companies all have disaster plans, and so would be able to provide good information. The actual agreements were for rentals of their facilities as bases.

FEMA, as we all know, branched out into less existentially threatening disasters, with results that I'm going to characterize as 'mixed', though I'm sure if you lived in New Orleans or Puerto Rico you'd be less polite. It runs a lot of simulations to check how well it would respond in a real emergency, and these simulations themselves lead to conspiracy theories - because in a fake crisis, you obviously have to employ 'crisis actors' and once you've got them on the books, what other things are they going to be used for? (Nudge nudge wink wink.) The military also run training simulations, and nothing makes patriots more suspicious than soldiers running around in America. A combination of a black president and the Jade Helm 15 military exercise led to much outcry that the military was getting ready to round up good old boys and stick them in...Walmarts. They'd be aided and abetted by Chinese troops who would be outfitted with gear and arms stored in...repurposed Walmarts.

Obama, although remaining sinisterly dusky, did not lock up all the patriots and now we have a new president. We also have hundreds of missing refugee children and several hundred newly separated refugee children. This week we have a US senator trying to get into a supposed detention center for the newer refugee children in McAllen, Texas, housed in a... Walmart.

Look at the Jeff Merkley video. Pretty similar to the one above (minus the apocalyptic music), no?

I can't tell if this means a) The wingnuts are correct and closed Walmarts are detention centers or b) this timeline is being written by a hack who is reusing tropes because they can't come up with a new twist.
Addendum: The camp admits it is real: http://www.4-traders.com/WAL-MART-STORES-4841/news/Wal-Mart-Stores-Southwest-Key-Programs-regrets-denying-Sen-Merkley-entry-26731183/
1. Project 908 https://bit.ly/2JxBtkE
2. FEMA https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-history-of-fema/
3. 2015 Jade Helm 15 military training theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theories
4. 2015 Walmart closure theories https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walmartyrs-to-the-cause/
5. 2018 Children's detention center claim https://twitter.com/JeffMerkley/status/1004182037132136449