Weekend Video: Damage, plus something shorter

Here's a touching, lushly animated short video which might ultimately be a poke at the eye of someone's ex-girlfriend. Russians. What can you say that hasn't been said a thousand times in books best measured by the pound?



Damage A Short Film from Vladimir Vlasenko on Vimeo.

And a quick one to clear the palate.


Huh? from Paul Rayment on Vimeo.

Have a great weekend.

Weekend Video: Solus

This week's video is a pretty, deliberately simple, story about searching for what you need in the universe. And finding it, and finding what you were looking for, too.

Take a few minutes and enjoy the stunning colors, and affecting music. Then take some more time and let the story unfold for you over a couple of days.



SOLUS from Identity Visuals on Vimeo.

Identity Visuals has a more detailed description of the whats and the hows that's worth reading, too.

Have a great weekend.

The Most Wonderfullest Length of Time of the Year

It's the holiday season. With the whoop-de-do.

You know. THE holidays. Things kick off with Thanksgiving, carry on with--depending on your ethnicity and religious background--St. Nicholas day, or Chanukah, and jump into high gear right around now with Christmas celebrations. The Muslim calendar and the various Western calendar don't sync up in a 1:1 way, and this year a couple of Muslim holidays occur during the Holiday Season--Arba'een, and Mawlid an-Nab.

Solstice for humanists and science pagans, yule for the drinkers and mystical pagans, and holiday parties schools and in homes for children, families, and friends, and so on.

After Christmas day, there's a whiplash-causing slowdown in public celebrations, a collective hiccup leaping the culture to New Year's Eve, as if nothing interesting happens in the intervening week, and the sooner we all forget about Little Drummer Boys, Noel, and Just a Half a Drink More the better off we'll be. So unless you actually celebrate Kwanzaa, you should only pay attention to it to the degree that you can make cheap, lazy jokes about it.

That paragraph was a long sentence crabbing about a couple of different holiday season trends. Because crabbing about holidays is part of the fun. My son and I sat near an older pair of couples at a too-tasty-to-be-good-for-you chain restaurant last night, and I got to hear rather a lot of crabbing about the relative merits of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays," and whose feelings getting hurt count for more.

But wait! Just because Christmas day, and even New Year's eve, is over doesn't bring the holiday season to an end. Twelve Days of Christmas is a tradition carrying forward from Christmas day, the First Day of Christmas. This overlaps the Holy Day of the Solemnity of Mary, and (depending on your calculus) either overlaps or is the asymptote of Epiphany. And for many people, if your tree is till up now, you're really milking the season.

Of course, when we're dealing with Time, Celebrations, and Season things rarely have firm cut-offs, and the holiday season is an excellent example. There's Epiphany, and then there are two or even three more possible dates for Christmas, depending on your ethnicity and faith tradition.

And… and… for the really ambitious, I'd say the Holiday Season really extends from Halloween through Ground Hog Day. Which is more than a quarter of the year, just like a real season (in those parts of the world with four seasons… whoa).

So I say, enjoy the most expansive holiday season you can. Be kind, be generous, be open, remember the love of those who left, and consider hopes those to come. Let it become a habit for the whole year round.

200 Words on Footwear

I have recently started wearing  slippers. Slippers. On my feet. Not every minute of the day, of course, but generally. Especially when I have to go into the garage to get a soda, or a frozem pizza or something.

This is a pretty new development. I have owned slippers almost my entire life, and up until just about a month ago never really found them comfortable. Too warm. And they’re still pretty warm, actually.

But they keep my feet dry when I go out to make sure the dryer vent is covered or something.

Also: I like Izod socks. This is an unsolicieted remark, alas. Last year I made a road trip to Chicago. For reasons I don’t actually know, one of the demands of the trip was that I wear red socks. As it turns out, red socks are pretty difficult to come by. I stopped at an outlet mall with small hope.

Small hope going in, but success coming out! The Izod socks proved to be very comfortable, and wore like iron. Except they got chewed up by a lost insole. But the replacement pair, also from the Izod outlet is performing up to snuff, which is great.

More than a Holiday Hippo Masseuse

As we enter the end-of-year, everyone-gets-a-holiday season, odd are pretty good that, at some point, you'll encounter the Ur-Urban Fantasy Christmas Song*.

 I am talking about "I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," which you knew. Because, as everybody knows, only a hippopotamus will do.

What you might not know is that a few years after endearing herself to children the world 'round with dreams of impossible pets, and simultaneously sprinkling them with nightmares of the omnivore water horse in the garage, because mom is a more reliable source of information than teacher, Gayla Peevey entered a new phase of her career under a new name. I especially like this because pen names are fun.

True to her genre roots, among the cuts she released as Jamie Horton was "Robot Man." It was a bigger hit later for Connie Francis, but what wasn't? What's great about this song is... what's not great about this song? Robots! Love! And so on!

* Nearly all the "facts" in this post are made-up. Get the truth here. It's out there. Sorry. It's not out there. The site is down now (in 2022).

Weekend Video: Première Plume

Here's a final project from a student somewhere in Belgium.

I like the colors, and I like the character design. It reminds me a bit of Battle of the Planets (which is what I watched)*.

But totally not Battle of the Planets in what's going on here.

Sometimes little bird people need a moment to understand that the yearnings of their loved one's hearts call them to strange changes. Or something. Take a moment and enjoy Première Plume.


Première plume from marie magro on Vimeo.

Have a great weekend.
__________
*Holy cow, things get strange and complicated from an era when Japanese animation got pulled across the Pacific and re-dubbed, and re-edited for a middle American youth audience. What can you remember, what did you put together from missed episodes, what did you hear got cut from the original material? It's like watching Cirque du Soleil from a distance through a slice of baby Swiss cheese with cotton in your ears. So, since I brought all this up, here are a couple of additional videos for your weekend.

O! The trumpets!





The teeth! The TEETH! Show me those TEETH!



That's all for now. Seriously.

Science, fiction, snow, and creatures

It’s snowy. It’s mid-November.

There’s been a snow day for the oldest. In mid-November!

Holy cow. Here’s the science fiction part: I’m happy about it.

Seriously; so I guess that’s not all that fictiony.

Winter is rolling in, and things are looking up. But there are some vacant houses around, some of them even pretty close. Close enough to walk by. My dad came in today to tell me that the house one over from the amazing guy next door had a tauntaun looking in the front window.

Hang on. That’s pretty science fictiony, but it’s pretty wrong, and sort of backward. It was a standard poodle, actually. And apparently it was inside the house. The vacant house had a poodle in it, looking out the window at the snow.

Snow in November.

Well, look at that... huh.

When I was younger, there were things I cared about acquiring which now I wouldn't seriously consider were they to stop my my house and say, "hi! I'd be a neat thing for you to have," much less having to go out and buy. 

This isn't to say they're frivolous, but rather that my tastes, and priorities, have changed. I still hold on to kind of a lot of these things. Should I get rid of them? Probably. Will I? Probably not any time soon.

I like having them, and I still value the experience of having acquired them. I like sharing them. Like I'm about to do.

A bunch of these things are comic books, holy crap. I use a service called Stash My Comics (stop by, say hi!). Over the course of this past year, I've been cataloging my holdings, and, according to my wife, rather often been saying, "well, look at that... huh." She keeps waiting for that "huh" to be follow up with, "and this one's worth eighty thousand dollars." That not going to happen.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen.

My holdings only come to a few long boxes and a couple of short boxes. I have about half a long box, and that will wrap up to cataloging part of the project. Here's last night's surprise issue. 

I'd have to do a review of my holdings, and I'd probably find that I'm wrong, but I think I have about seven issues of X-Men comics ranging across a variety of titles and eras. Marvel was my publisher of choice in junior high, when I used to play RPG's such as Marvel Super Heroes. But I was more of a Power Man & Iron Fist guy. And a bit more Iron Fist than Power Man. Also, Marvel had Star Trek at the time, and that was pretty cool. Mostly, though, I bought smatterings of interesting looking back issues when I had a handful of cash and could get to a flea market. I was in junior high, and this was the mid-1980's, so the ready supply of current comic books was, for me, limited to spinner racks in grocery stores. I liked the idea of subscribing to comic books in the mail, but could never quite get my act together to do it. But I never did care much about the X-Men.

So what am I doing with Days of Futures Past, in the first edition, sitting in a long box, and probably never been out of its bag since I bought it brand new and read it in about an hour? 

I do not know. 

SMC lists it as a trade paperback, but I'd call it Prestige Format, since that's what DC was calling that sort of thing at the time. And, at that time, I was a DC guy, having started buying comic books in college, when I had more ready cash, and more ability to get around. The first comic book I bought in the era of buying too many comic books was Batman: Year One, part 4. Off a spinner rack at the grocery store. Then I learned that there were stores where you could go to buy current issues, and recent back issues, and even older issues, without having to play the crap-shoot of a flea market.

So I started spending too much money on comic books, which included buying things like Days of Futures Past for (from the perspective of twenty years or more later) no clear reason.

Weekend Video: Let There Be Sound

I really enjoyed this student film.

It reminded me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, while not being derivative or even homage-y. It just seems to come from the same place. Wherever that is.

It's... oh. It's a bit vulgar, so there's that, too, somewhat more so than Slartibartfast. Which, in the final moments, I guess, is apt.

Enough throat clearing. Enjoy.

Let There Be Sound from Tom, Dick & Harry on Vimeo.

Have a good weekend. I have a fundraiser, child's holiday public performance, and furniture moving on my agenda.

Liking TV shows children like

I was just watching my three-year old watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. She was sitting on a table, smiling. Smiling, that is, until Dad Tiger tells Daniel that it’s time for bed. Then she frowned for a moment. The smile came back pretty quick, but even in the morning, it’s clear that the idea of going to bed is like a trip to the dentist. Something that’s a good idea, but doesn’t sound like a good idea.

I’m really glad that public TV has a place for Fred Rogers more than a decade after he died. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is not really retread of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, even though it shares some structural similarities. It really is a fairly typical young child’s show teaching life lessons with a host character who talks to the viewer. What it shares with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, something that really makes it uncommon among children’s shows, is that it shows interactions between children and grown-ups. It’s not unique in this way; both Sesame Street and Arthur share this characteristic.

The reason it isn’t really a retread of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is that these interactions are between on-screen characters. There really was no children’s cast on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Mister Rogers spoke directly to each child watching the show. This individual connection in a mass medium was his seemingly magical humanity. It's why people who grew up with the show still love Mr. Rogers. It’s different from these other shows, where there’s minimal engagement directly with the viewer.

But watching my daughter watch the show, she’s engaged. She talks to the characters, sings along, dances when they dance, and talks about the lessons for hours and days after.

Different is just different, and worth exploring celebrating. Just like Mister Rogers always said.

Weekend Video: Ghost V

Because I can't give up on Robert Sheckley. I mean, I don't want to give up on his work, and have no plans to. But there's a lot of it, holy cow. 

The one collection I've picked up is a brick of a book. The Masque of Mañana is slightly oversize in its cover dimensions, and then it's, like, nearly 600 pages of short stories. My library will want it back before I'm able to get through it. They'll want it back again, in fact. Last time I got about three stories into it, what with one thing and another.

Anyway.

Here's a two-part animation adapting one of his stories about a guy, and the monsters of his youth getting him spooked when he's a grown-up. N. Latinsky did a nice job with the look and feel of this.

Ghost V: Part 1




Ghost V: Part 2



Have a great weekend.

What do I read when I'm not here?

A few thoughts on some of the books I’ve been reading lately, but haven’t yet finished...

Eternity’s End by Jeffery A. Carver.

Space Opera! Galaxy-spanning empires, over-lapping spheres of influence, trippy FTL technology, and at the center of the novel, the very human character of Renwald Legroeder, wrongly accused of complicity in the loss of his ship to pirates. Carver does a great job balancing a large cast, a huge universe, and one person’s story to survive, clear his name, and regain a measure of the ordinary human life that was stolen from him. He has to work with mysterious aliens who share humanity’s mistrust of the other, trust new friends, and new enemies. Although this isn’t the first book in the Star Rigger cycle, I feel well taken care of by the author.

Ulysses by James Joyce

So much has been written about this novel, that I don’t feel an introduction is really necessary. I am enjoying it. This is the third or fourth time I’ve made a serious stab at reading it, and I’ve gotten about 20% so far. My approach is to enjoy what I can, gloss over what I’m missing, and not worry too much about the rest of it. Keeping in mind that almost all if it is Bloom’s POV (either visually, or the other senses) helps. Also, taking it easy--two or three or maybe five pages a session--keeps the pressure off.

The Jefferson Bible

This is a cut & past job of The Bible by Thomas Jefferson. This edition only contains his clippings form the King James Version (his full project included Greek and other languages). Basically, Jefferson said, “huh, I don’t think this fits,” to a lot of the material, and kept very little narrative stuff. It’s almost entirely quotes from Jesus, with a bit of framing dialog from the Apostles. Beyond that, there’s not a lot to say--it’s The Bible, after all.

The Masque of Mañana by Robert Sheckley

This is a 2005 selection of Sheckley’s short work. It’s a hefty tome, and I’ve only read a couple of stories.

There’s a famous bit of praise where Douglas Adams, who had been compared--favorably--with Sheckley, pointed out that Sheckley is the better writer. Adams also said he hadn’t heard of him until Adams was already established, so that’s probably good, because if he had heard of him, he would probably not become a writer. So, if you like Adams, I guess watch out to have your Adams circuits blown!

Or, more reasonably, expect to enjoy yourself. I’ll report back on this one in the future.

What have you been reading lately, or what do you think I should be reading?

200 Words of Thanks

Thank you.

This project is only half complete without your presence, and a bunch of you have shown up in the last week.

Most of you have visited the Phil Strobe Facebook page. A few of you have taken a moment to visit my G+ page. Some of you have even gone so far as to buy my first publication.

Thank you all for all of that. I hope you’re enjoying things so far. Please let me know.

I am hard at work on the next publication, and am getting the Kindle edition ready for publication. I will certainly let you all know when those things are ready. But in the meanwhile, I’ll be here posting away. Three days weekly, short, and somewhat chatty.

And so, something chatty. Last Friday was Halloween. One of my children is old enough that, when he’s a grown-up, this will be a Halloween that sets the standard for what Halloween is supposed to be. It rained most of the day, was blowy and quite cold most of the afternoon, and when it came time for Trick-or-Treat, things were dry and just cold enough that two hours on the streets was plenty.

Thank you.

Weekend Videos: Brain Lapse + Wanda the Witch

I wish I had something clever to say about this. Or even coherent. But I don't, and I've watched this I don't know how many times.

Brain Lapse from Jake Fried on Vimeo.

This one, on the other hand, is totally something from my childhood. It lurks in corners of my brain, and recently got dredged out when Netflix started streaming first season episodes of Sesame Street. I have a pre-schooler, and we watch Sesame Street. There is nothing like this on Sesame Street these days.

 
I'm still riding high on getting "The World is Bigger than an Ell" out there in the world, so I'm going to have a great weekend. I hope you do, too.

On Nook! The World is Bigger than an Ell

I'm really happy to announce that "The World is Bigger than an Ell" is  available at the Barnes & Nobel e-book store. Nook readers can now download it directly from their favorite retailer!

I hope Nook readers enjoy the story, as well as the bonus material. I included two additional short works with "The World is Bigger than an Ell," the first is called "Because Love Resists Narrative," a villanelle (which is a form of poem), and "Meet Ashley's Neighbor," a short-short episode in a serial character sketch. 

Ready? Here's the link!

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-world-is-bigger-than-an-ell-phil-strobe/1120651937?ean=2940046370027

On Kobo!: The World is Bigger than an Ell

Hey, gang!

Excellent news! Smashwords has accepted "The World is Bigger than an Ell" for distribution to other e-book retailers!

It's now available at the Kobo store. This is especially exciting to me, since Kobo specializes in distributing its e-readers through independent bookstores. And I love independent book stores.

In addition to the branded Kobo e-reader, Kobo has e-reader apps for your desktop and tablets, and for iOS, Android, and Windows operating systems.

Here's the link for the Kobo store's page for "The World is Bigger and an Ell!"

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-world-is-bigger-than-an-ell

Have a great night!

Now Available: The World is Bigger than an Ell

Sorry about that.

But, on the other hand, I have some fantastic news! I mean I'm really excited about this.

"The World is Bigger than an Ell" is now available at Smashwords!

I wrote it, and it's there and ready! It comes with two bonus items.

"The World is Bigger than an Ell" is about a man who develops a vision problem. Rather than the things in the world, he starts to see the shapes of things defined by the descriptions of them. Words begin to dominate his world in a way he'd never expected.

In addition, there's a villanelle called "Because Love Resists Narrative," about falling, and a super short called "Meet Ashley's Neighbor." Ashley's neighbor has problems.

I hope you enjoy it. I had a good time getting it ready for you.

Weekend Video: Comic Book Heaven

I promise you this is not a sad documentary.


Comic Book Heaven from E.J. McLeavey-Fisher on Vimeo.

Seriously. Not sad.

I had a filling installed this week. I went to my new dentist a week ago or so, and he said, "we should take care of that. It's small now, and should be pretty easy. Come in next week."

So I came in next week, and I got it taken care of. He was not the first, or even the second, dentist to tell me to come in and get that taken care of. I do not have dentist anxiety. Have I mentioned that, in my household, "a trip to the dentist," is an idiom for an idea that sounds like a good idea, but really is more like a pain to get through?

Anyway.

The family of numbing agents related to Novocain don't work so well for me, and I have unusually hard enamel. That's what they tell me about my enamel. I don't need to be told the numbing agent isn't working. I can figure that out for myself. And I'm sitting there in the chair, and it's tilted way back, and I have my hands stuck in my pockets to keep my wallet from falling out, and the dentist gives me a little topical, and then gives me a shot of something, and then comes back four minutes later.

I don't know how long I'm there, but only about three songs play on the radio overhead, and we're done.

And that experience at the dentist is a sadder story than this documentary about Comic Book Heaven.

Weekend Video: "Five Second Story: Autumn"

The end of summer is right around the corner. I can feel it in the wind, and smell it in the forests around here. Because the world is tilted. So enjoy a very short short video called "Five Second Story: Autumn."


Five Second Story: Autumn from Vincent Lammers on Vimeo.

Tilted makes the world go. Around here, anyway. Other places? Maybe not so much. 

Autumn will be here before you know it. Watch out for critters bonking around.

Ba-da-dahm-dahm!

I've been watching The Rockford Files lately during nap time. It's a good way to keep the laundry going, and I can bring it up on the tablet when doing dishes.

It's a good show for being made aware of how much things have changed. For instance, holy cow there are a lot of pay phones. They're everywhere! And a lot of kinds of booths, and mounts. A lot of design work went into phone kiosks, back when everyone used pay phones.

I've also been interested by just how many things we take for granted were already in the air in the mid-1970's. Season 4 is a big one for almost-weekly "A Very Special..." theme episodes where things revolve around Making A Point about racism, sexism, ageism (!), and so on. 

Season 5 toned down the "everything this time is about the Theme" aspects of it, but layered in cultural references. There have been a couple of episodes so far where the central character is a successful business woman. In one, we were lead to expect her to be the villain, but she was just hard-driving. In the other, she was the victim but self-absorbed. But it's the small things, details that could be one way, but were another, or could even be left unaddressed. 

The one I keep coming back to is a second-tier character in a murder about... oh, it's The Rockford Files, so it doesn't really matter, the story is convoluted. But this second-tier character is nicknamed Captain Crunch, and when Rockford asks someone about him, he's asked if he's planning to make some long distance phone calls. It's 1978, and what could be an easy-to-digest cops-n-robbers show is making casual references to underground system hacking. It was big news as far back as 1971, when John Draper (the real-world phreaker called Captain Crunch) was quoted in an Esquire article. 

But it's still, even in a world with only three TV networks and an active magazine culture, it's a fairly obscure thing to just toss into the story for no good plot reason. So anyway. In addition be being full of high-speed car chases, laconic pacing, and folksy charms, it's a show papered over in a strange sort of timeless contemporaneousness. 

200 Words on Modern Dentistry

I have a dentist appointment later today. It's my first trip to this person. I wasn't really very happy with where I was going to before. It's a practice, with a flashy name, and no pattern for which of the staff dentists I was going to see. The last time I was there they took my blood pressure. The cuff hurt, and when I mentioned this, the whoever-but-not-a-dentist said that it does that. So that's when I decided to find a new dentist. Ideally, a dentist whose name is on the door.

We'll see how it goes. The previous practice seems to be an exemplar of a family idiom we have, "a trip to the dentist." As in, "Hey, that sounds like a trip to the dentist!" Which means an idea that sounds good a good idea, but really isn't a good idea at all. I mean, it's not a bad idea, just more unpleasant than fun. Like the Unpleasant:Fun ratio exceeds 1.

On the other hand, when I leave the dentist, I like the way my teeth feel, except for the residual polish grit. That's when I get a drive through cheeseburger.

Also: I have very hard teeth. 

Weekend Video: hadopelagic

I like the loopy, bulbous, somewhat wormy look in action here. I like it a lot. I'm also a fan of the color palate. On the whole, I think it looks great.


hadopelagic from kanahebi on Vimeo.

And just because they're coming for you doesn't mean they're not so cute about it!

Have a great weekend. I'll mostly be celebrating our son's birthday.

More Charlie? A Newly published chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!?!

Here's some news from The Guardian. 

Or, sort of, not really news? 

It's the 50th anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a new edition of the book is out, and a chapter from an early draft, but not included in the final book, is available.

It's always great to have more Roald Dahl available, so yay for us! 

Also: it's just a draft; it's short, and--crucially--it wasn't included in the final book. So what do we take from it. I think if we take anything more from it than the simple pleasure of a few more paragraphs of that wild, cruel, fantastical world, then we're committing some sort of literary overdraft. It's just a bit of fluff, it doesn't tell us anything new about the book we have, or give us anything reason to reconsider what we have already decided about the book. It's not apocrypha. It's noodling around with some ideas that either didn't make the cut, or got adapted and integrated into the book we have in some other way.

Of course, there is so much in that little chapter to enjoy, and wonder at, that I'm now ready to pull my copy of the book down from the shelf for a quick re-read.

And if some newly exposed material sends readers back to this remarkable work, then what else does it really have to be?

200 Words on Comic Books

My relationship with comic books is fraught! I can't hardly stand it! They're art, you see.

Comic books are literature, and they're graphic arts. They're stories to divert, and myths to edify. They're genre, they're media, they're artifacts of the times. They document, reflect, and they hope. They make people into eye candy. They glorify violence, and they parody glory. They satirize pedestals, and build them.

They take our money, and then ask to be stuffed into plastic bags, hoping someday to repay our wallets. They take our love, our dedication to the stories we love, and every few years change the rules, destroy the universe, and ask us to fall in love with those people all over again for the very first time. Then we wonder if all those people we cared so much about in our past, for good or ill, are still worth that effort. Like people from high school, or college, or past jobs, these comic book people pull at our hearts.

Comic books are more than super heroes, and some of my favorites are, for instance, non-continuity titles. Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Brought to Light. Grey.

Comic books. Difficult to love, like buttery escargot.

Weekend Video: Dripped

Sometimes creating things is a hunger you just can't avoid.

Dripped from ChezEddy on Vimeo.

And sometimes the art you create is wildly different from what you set out to do.

Coming Soon! The World is Bigger than an Ell

"The World is Bigger than an Ell" is in final review for submission to the e-pub platforms! I'm very excited. The cover art just came back from the artist Stephen Brom, and I am very pleased. I feel the art and text design each reflect the theme and central concern of the story very well. The spiraling vine pulls the eye deeper into the image. I like the way the text design reflects the story's concern with how words shape and convey meaning.

Here's a short excerpt:

In spring it was more words on more things than just stop signs. When the leaves began to bud, I saw green letters popping out of brown limbs and branches. When I looked closely, I saw the word “leaf” in green letters on a green background, wriggling smack up against a brown on brown “branch.” It went on like this, more words showing up on more things every day for weeks. On Summer Solstice, we had dinner with my wife’s family. This was our thing, a thing like clockwork, twice a year, under the turning of the sky.

I expect to have the final read-through of the story ready for formatting according to the e-publishing guidelines by the end of the weekend. "The World is Bigger than an Ell" is a short story of about 3500 words, and will come bundled with a couple of bonus short-shorts.

Happy Labor Day!

I hope you had a great time enjoying the Labor Day festivities in your life. We did. Here's something we did that turned out to be pretty fun.

Who doesn't like water balloons, after all?

Weekend Video: The Nether Regions

We all have problems, at least sometimes. I'm taking care of some things in storage. Enjoy some crabbing from the universe's crabbiest crabcake.


The Nether Regions from WÖNKY Films on Vimeo.

Also enjoy the long weekend.

200 Words on Doctor Who

Here's what I like. Pizza.

Once a week we have pizza for dinner. We get our pizza, and we sit around figuring out what to watch on Netflix.

Here's what's great about pizza. You can get any kind of pizza you want. Everything from just plain cheese on a wafer-thin crust, on up to what might be characterized as a cheesy meat stew in a crust so constructed as to practically be a bowel. Or ethnicize your pizza, like Hawaiian or Mexican. Or you can just go wild on your own, no red sauce, bleu cheese, apple slices.

You know? Anything can be a pizza, just put it on a crust of some sort. I'm surprised we don't call apple pie with a slice of cheese on it a pizza.

And yet, every week our pizza is a pizza. Sometimes it's a fantastic pizza. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a strange pizza, and sometimes if Raffaele Esposito saw it, he'd be all, "hey! Get out of my recipe book!"

And I always like pizza, and I always will. But no matter how much I like pizza, sometimes when pizza night rolls around, what I really want is a patty melt. 

200 Words on Short Stories

I love these. Short stories. Around the almost ten thousand word I feel like things are getting bloated. Genre stories lord over realistic stories.

I get enough realism daily. I like my life, and a lot of it is a lot of fun. But some parts of it are pretty sucky. The "pretty sucky" umbrella covers parts of everyone's life.

Which is why genre short stories are so great. Being short means they don't have to linger over pages of detailed world building. They can just sketch out the parts that they need. There's magic, or space aliens. These details don't have to make sense like a geometric proof does. They just have to feel right. Feeling right is better than "pretty sucky."

Also great about genre short stories is they can serve to gloss "pretty sucky," without making a show about it, because the suck is wearing a mask, like werewolves or spacesuits. The story of the people, or the things, who are, as Ford Prefect once pointed out, "are also people," is dancing in front of you, and only later do you realize that the suck is in there, and I feel like suck shared is suck diminished. 

Weekend Video: Time Travel Lover

What a sweet use of the time travel "when I get back I'm going to put the key right here/no, I'm going to put a magnet over here and pull the key/nope, then I'm going to..." trope. Also, there's a great character who really, really wants things to be different. 

Time Travel Lover from Elisha Yaffe on Vimeo.

Not safe for work. Seriously. But then, you probably shouldn't be watching ten minute videos at work anyway.

The Most Useful Parenting Advice I Can Offer

When a little one goes for something inappropriate, gently take her aside, and say, "that's a tool, not a toy."

Don't bother with a big ol' buncha talktalk about what a tool is. Not necessarily. Gauge things. The important part is that there's a simple difference between tools and toys. What that difference is, and the nuances involved, will become clear with time, just like with anything. 

200 Words on a Squandered Education

Oh crap. Here are some authors I read in the course of my education. Toni Morrison. James Joyce. Carl Jung. John C. Calhoun. Publius. Adrienne Rich. James Burke. Jane Addams. Pearl S. Buck. Gabriel García Márquez. Adam Smith.

You get the idea.

For pleasure I read Annie Dillard. John McPhee. Scott Russell Sanders. Wendell Berry. Gabriel Jospovici. Benjamin Hoff. Stephen Mitchell.

I also read some James Blish (the Star Trek material), some Arthur C. Clark. A little bit of Larry Niven. A couple of the Star Wars novels. A lot of mainstream comic books, and some not-so-mainstream comic books. Too much Douglas Adams. Probably the right amount of Neil Gaiman, with a touch of Terry Pratchett.

I told someone once that they couldn't pay me enough to read the Earthsea books. I regret that. I should have read Octavia Butler, Alfred Bester, Ursula Le Guin, and the list is, nearly, endless.

I finally managed to read The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, shortly before the first movie came out in 2001, which is about 20 years late. I mean, considering how much time I spent playing D&D and so on.

Of course, there's always a lot to read. 

Weekend Video: 2001, man, It's a Trip. Or, you know, a movie about a talking computer.

I love this movie, so here are a couple of clips which both claim primacy. One is "official," and the other is "original."

Here's the original.

Among the things about this I really enjoy is the fact that it's open to the accusation that "the preview shows you the whole movie!" Welll..... yes. And no.

Here's the official one because it just looks cool.



Enjoy your weekend, ok?

200 Words on the Dishes

Do you meditate?

Really meditate as a serious practice? Under the guidance of a master, a program, or even some book you grabbed used when you were an undergrad and poking around the back room of some herbalist store while the person you were dating stood with a fistful of incense and a face of uncertainty about whether the burner shaped like a highly polished little plank would be better than the one that looked like a little dude with an elephant's head?

Me neither.

But I do wash dishes. I particularly wash bottles because the rate the littlest one drinks demands the practice. Sink. Water. Dish soap. Bottles, and bottle parts. Scrubber. Towel. Time.

It is the time that goes into this that turns this from a chore into a practice that is to meditation as balled up printer paper tossed into a trashcan is to basketball. 

It’s a popular thing to say that it takes 10,000 hours doing something in a really focused way before you’re actually good at it. I have three children, and I have become actually good at it more than once.

When the littlest one is weaned, I may have to take up scrimshaw.