strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Dec 31 03: startling
Finally. I look forward to seeing what happens next. But at this point I really should be in bed.
zen moment
I’ve been trying to clean up my desk before tomorrow night’s New Year’s wingding. (Yes, really.) Amongst the clippings and junk mail and reciepts and ‘missing’ CDs and dormant wristwatches and unused Post-It Notes(tm) and spare swimsuits and unanswered pleas for money to good causes and catalogs and souvenirs of distant places and books that need returning to friends and photographs and bills that have been paid and need filing and pamphlets for bookbindery classes and articles that must be read: something that I once clipped from a manuscript I was editing, back during my first tenure as a fixer of textbooks. It used to hang above my desk. I may yet have it framed. I present it without further comment.
Use the Section Opener
The iguana—compared to a human being with a normal body temperature of 98.6° F—is a large, bright green lizard with a long, striped tail.
Dec 28 03: applesauced
Tummy much better now, thanks. While noroviral infection is both nasty and brutish, it is also short.
jeepers!
Not long ago I asked what we’d live for now that the Lord of the Rings movies are over and done with. Well, the easiest answer is that we don’t have to make such calls just yet, because we can still quiver with anticipation over the Extended Edition DVD (presumably coming out late 2004).
But what will get us from now to then? I offer this potential touchstone: Sky Captain.
1930s New York! Gigantic robots! Heroic pilots! Plucky gal reporters! Personally, I’d say that this sounds like a blast and a half. The site doesn’t have much to offer yet, although I applaud the audio controls that give the browser the ability to twiddle the music, explosions, and propellor drone independently of one another. The trailer is much fun.
Finally, a challenge to the geeky: what television show’s theme song has been recut and used in the background of the trailer? (A: Stargate: SG-1 (Actually, I don’t know why I’m asking this question. Either you’d have recognized it without my help or you don’t know what I’m talking about anyway. Never mind.))
Dec 27 03: correction
In the interest of journalistic integrity: when I said on Thursday that
I also dodged the bullet that was Avery’s holiday gift to her houseful of adoring relatives: the stomach flu!
I spoke prematurely.
Oog.
Dec 25 03: meanwhiles
[DATELINE: CALIFORNIA] In the last week I have:
- Seen The Return of the King—twice! Highly recommended! Yes, it takes a long time to end; yes, the Scouring of the Shire is missing; yes, there are a few rather goofy-sappy moments. But still. I sat through the Battle for the Pellenor Fields with my jaw hanging open and my hands in front of my mouth and my eyes wide as they would go. Oh, man, was that fun. What the hell do we do now?
- Survived a tour of Suburban Christmas Shopping Hell;
- Spent untold hours dandling the Delicious Niece upon my knee. I also dodged the bullet that was Avery’s holiday gift to her houseful of adoring relatives: the stomach flu!
- Eaten way too much;
- Slept in repeatedly;
- Watched a great deal of rain fall upon Northen California;
- Failed to feel a big quake that hit the other day—it was quite some distance south of here.
Oh, and I got that twenty-pound, two-volume Complete Far Side from Dad. If you don’t hear much from me in the next few weeks this may be why. I mean, it’s a coffee-table book that can serve as an actual coffee table in times of need! How extravagantly cool is that?
And now the relatives are here! Time for more food! Wheeee!
Whether or not you even celebrate Christmas, I hope you get everything your heart desires.
Dec 18 03: geek-happy
The office is rapidly emptying out as we all scramble off to the holiday party, which is up near Lincoln Center. And then—and then!—I’m going to see Return of the King.
So not even articles like this one about the retconning of the White House website or this one about how things work in the House of Representatives can bring me down. Even though they probably should. How excited am I? Very very excited. I am practically vibrating with joy.
Oh boy oh boy!
Dec 17 03: hide and/or seek
If we can find Saddam in a hole under a rug next to a shack in a desert, why haven’t we been able to find the source of the leak in the Valerie Plame case, who is somewhere in the West Wing of the White House?
(Yeah, remember her? Plame was a CIA undercover agent whose cover was blown by a high-ranking Bush administration official. Why? Because the White House was angry at her husband, who pointed out that Bush lied in his 2003 State of the Union Address. Revealing the name of a covert agent constitutes an act of treason, as defined by legislation signed by Bush I. And yet.)
ethical moment
Ah yes. Christmas in New York, that joyful time of year that raises questions in our hearts about things that really matter. Questions like: May I employ a cattle-prod while attempting to walk through Midtown, so long as I only use it on tourists?
Discuss.
Dec 15 03: accretion
The observant browser will notice that I’ve put a few new toys into play tonight. (This is the sort of thing that always ends up getting done after midnight. It’s in my nature.) I’ll be tinkering with them over the next few days. Let me know if you have any opinions pertaining thereto; otherwise, enjoy.
Dec 14 03: noise/signal
My webhost’s reporting system provides me with, among other things, a list of sites who have been directing traffic into this website. I was looking at my site’s statistics this evening and was intrigued to discover that this weblog was suddenly the focus of all kinds of new attention. Or something. A number of the referring URLs I’d seen before—largely flash-mob reporting sites (remember those?) and weblog trackers. But then there were these others: All kinds of domains I’d never heard of. Who were these people? I started checking them out.
Shortly, I realized that I’d been baited. There was nothing to be seen anywhere about my own site. On the other hand, I got an eyeful of all kinds of other material.
Welcome to the latest frontier of spam. It’s not enough that they fill your email inbox. It’s not enough to use webcrawlers to plaster your blog’s comment threads with ads for hott barely legal teenz n0w!! Now they’re filling your server’s traffic analyzers with bogus information about who’s linking to you—purely so you’ll become curious and follow the trail back to yet another cartload of advertising for animated lolitas, physiological enhancements, mortgage providers, nude celebrities, and pirated software. What had been a useful tool for webmasters is now just another frelling billboard, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Soon, it would seem, they will be everywhere. All aspects of human civilization will become lost behind a drifting field of pop-up ads. They’ll meander across your computer screens, your televisions, the insides of your eyelids. They’ll be embossed upon your bedsheets by nanotech built into the laundry detergent. The fillings in your teeth will ring with jingles and whispered come-ons. Cut open an eggplant and the seeds will spell out slogans and URLs. The reflection in your bathroom mirror will critique your anatomy as you step out of the shower.
Any information on how to set up filters in my traffic analyzer can be left in the comment threads and will be accepted with great joy and gratitude. In the meantime, I’ll be plotting a firebombing campaign against a number of entrepreneurial types. Anybody who wants to join that can leave me a note as well.
Dec 11 03: answers
Well, after much digging around and resourceful question-asking and generally obsessive behavior, the mystery of parahexavoctal has been…not solved so much as concluded. Here’s what I got:
Parahexavoctal adj. having something equivalent to, but distinct from, six…um…
vocts.
In other words, it don’t mean nothing. Apparently I misremembered the lettercol. It was talking about the origin of the name of a different character, specifically Lord Thezmothete. (‘Thesmothete’ means ‘lawgiver.’ Lord T. is a semi-omnipotent being and the Prime Mover for Buck’s particular chunk of universe.) Parahexavoctal just sounds like an interesting word. That’s all.
Another tantalizing Mystery of the Universe, gone piffle in a trice. Phooey. Still, I won’t stew over it. Amarity is for suckers.
Thanks go out to Peter, who was the only one who even tried to help me out. Fat lot of fun the rest of you were.
Dec 9 03: back
Found Eric, alive and well and still Eric. Gratifying. Within 18 hours of posting that entry, I heard from two other old friends, in an equally out-of-the-blue fashion. And discovered that at least one other still reads my blog despite the pressures of newish motherhood. (Hi, J.) Cool, and also weird. Mostly just cool.
Perhaps there’s something in the air: a front, some kind of emotional pressure wave that rides ahead of things like first-winter-snowfalls, prompting us to reach out as the skies darken and the houses get chilly.
And now I should really be in bed. I have swim practice in five and one-half hours. Urrgh.
etymological corner!
A joyous event transpired today. I finally got my copy of Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary! I’d been looking for a decent copy all over the internet for years. And lo, I found one, and it’s a like-new hardcover of the 1994 revised edition, and I’m so happy.
Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words was compiled by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, who was (a) the daughter of Jascha Heifetz and (b) an accomplished violinist and composer in her own right and (c) a logophile. I first heard about it when it was mentioned by Phil Foglio in a lettercol for his comic Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire. Which is a lovely bit of SF, equal parts hilarious and inventive, with the occasional burst of “wow, smart little twist there, Phil.” Oh, and also a bunch of space ninjas during this one bit. Loved the ninjas. And a species that looks like Churchy LaFemme, sort of, only with fezzes. I always wondered if that was deliberate…wait; where was I? Right. His BG series “The Gallimaufry” is chock-full of interesting words. Some of them character names, e.g. Security Chief Parahexavoctal. He mentioned the book as one of his primary sources for such things. He also declined to define parahexavoctal, the tease, saying we’d have to look it up.
It’s not in the book. Aaaaaargh! I shall send a note to Phil forthwith.
Still, it’s well worth the $12.95 I paid for it. I read Paul the better entries during television commercials and such. A steal! I should note that it’s not so ‘like-new’ as the seller and I (well, as I) thought it was. I found a single pencil mark in it. Somebody circled the final word in this entry:
amarity (a-mar’i-te”) n. biterness.
[sic]. Shocking, really. Surely this sort of thing doesn’t happen in more reputable dictionaries. It also occurs to me that they don’t say whether amarity is a quality of flavor or an emotional state. Maybe both. Why not?
Anyway. Can anybody define “parahexavoctal” for me? You there—have a go at it. Go on. What do you think it means?
Dec 2 03: gone
On a truly random impulse, I decided to seek out a fraternity brother of mine today on the Internet. Eric was a remarkable guy, back in the day. He was a Cornell architecture student, which meant that he was (a) wildly creative and (b) really smart and (c) hugely driven to do the work his degree required of him, which was a lot, and (d) chronically sleep deprived as a result. I loved spending time with him. He made me feel like the random images and ideas and half-formed jokes that rattled around my head were interesting and worth using. He let me hang out in his room when I was depressed and wouldn’t tell anybody why.
His mother saved my life once, although I don’t think she realized it at the time. It was during a low point in the great Machismo Summer of 1990: I was heartsick and lonely and was about to go wandering out into the evening to stare off a bridge for a while. Eric was in the kitchen with his mother, Susan, who was visiting from California. She was an artist. She had a fascinating accent (English-moved-to-South-Africa parents, although she was raised in Brazil) and a gentle voice. They were cooking themselves a meal. I think she could tell that I hadn’t been eating my vegetables lately—or perhaps, given that I was a college student, she just took it as a given. She handed me a golden bell pepper that had been intended for their salad and I wolfed it down. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I hung about in the kitchen as they cooked. Susan was, as it turned out, a spectacular chef. Somehow, in the space of ten minutes, the company and that pepper put the spring back into my step. I left Susan and Eric to their meal. I don’t know where I went, when I strolled out into the twilight, but I remember feeling good to be alive.
Later I found out that Susan was famous: that she was in fact Susan Seddon Boulet, an painter of the visionary school with a big following. I still preferred to remember her for the pepper.
After he left Ithaca he went back to the Bay Area, so I would see him every now and then. He lived in a converted warehouse space in Emeryville for a while. It was full of random peculiar small-press magazines and half-finished paintings and assorted percussion instruments and pieces of junk that might look good in a sculpture someday. A couple of years after I moved to New York I lost touch with him. I heard through friends that he had taken up tattooing—that he was going to be a tattoo artist, that he had been practicing on the backs of his hands and on navel oranges. To my knowledge, none of the folks I know know where he is today. He wandered off the map and didn’t come back.
Eric is one of those friends that you stop seeing but you never stop wondering how they are. So today I looked him up.
It didn’t really pan out. Google knows a lot of Erics, but I could only find him once among the crowd. It was a reference on a bulletin board devoted to the San Francisco Goth scene: a woman talking about how this guy she used to know named Eric had been so close to his mother and had taken it so hard when she died….
Susan Seddon Boulet died of breast cancer in 1997. An artists’ fellowship was established in her memory, but I can’t find anything online more recent than 2000. The goth woman in San Francisco lost track of Eric in 1998.
I guess the world is like this, although it’s something I hate to admit. People go away.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I should probably stop. Thank you Susan, for saving my life, or at least making me eat my vegetables. Thank you Eric, for being an enigmatic and inspiring object on the plains of memory. Are you out there?
UPDATED: An obsessive brain is good for a thing or two. Turns out that Eric is alive and well and even married, and I’ve found someone who can get a note to him for me. Maybe we’ll quickly go back to only speaking once a year, but still. The world is more fun when you know for sure that such people are yet in it.