MemeMachineGo!

Salon is in big trouble. They have only the money for 3 more months of operation.

Now, I've taken a great deal of enjoyment from Salon over the years. They have good original articles, good interviews and book and film reviews, and they run some of the best comics out there — This Modern World, Story Minute, Tom the Dancing Bug. I would hate to lose it.

So I just signed up for a 2-year subscription. It may sound quixotic, but if even half their readers subscribed they'd be in the black.

Let's not let this commons be a tragedy, eh?

That's the subject line of the spam that pushed me over the edge. Lately half the stuff landing in my personal mailbox has been spam. So I finally jumped on the SpamAssassion bandwagon, including it in my Perl Mail::Audit-based filter, using the rules posted by Kickstart70 in a Boing Boing discussion.

It has worked literally perfectly so far. All of the spam and only the spam has gone to my Spambox.

I hate to think of how much computation is done every single time something hits my mailbox, though.

Eliot of Follow Me Here is a psychiatrist, and one the the best things about his (even otherwise superlative) blog is his commentary on mental health issues. Recently, he wrote about the modern use of anti-depressants.

The smiling faces of recovered patients in the ads are false promises that these are 'happy pills' that can take away our troubles. Instead, as I explain to my patients, what the medications do is more akin to Freud's famous dictum about the goal of psychoanalysis being to turn neurotic unhappiness into ordinary, everyday unhappiness. If someone has something to be distressed about, they'll usually still be distressed about it after antidepressant therapy. In fact, they may be more distressed about it, i.e. more able to feel their distress, and certainly more able to function in the face of such distress. I often analogize medication to a bicycle — it'll get you where you need to get faster and more efficiently than walking, but you still need to do the pedalling.

Last night I listened to Neil Gaiman read the entirety of Coraline, his latest book, live at a church here in Berkeley. How cool is that?

It's a very good book and he's a very good reader. I found myself wondering how often subsequent to Dickens have there been authors who have commanded an audience of hundreds for a night of reading aloud?

To state the obvious, I think a lot of Gaiman's success is our hunger for myth. And the mass-media largely does a lousy job of serving up things with genuine mythic resonance and depth (largely I said — yes, there are exceptions.)

The audience wasn't so Goth-dominated as I expected (from what I've seen at previous signings and readings he's done in Berkeley.) There really were all sorts of ages, shapes and clothes colors present.

I bought the book, which was not only signed, but had a doodle of a rat inside.

Biking home, I came to a 4-way stop intersection near my house. I respect stop signs, and slow to a crawl, to a point at which I could come to a full stop in just a few inches if I had to, but I generally avoid coming to an absolute stop — it makes it a lot harder to get going again than if I don't.

But last night there was a car approaching fast from my left, and I mistrusted the driver's intent to stop, so I did come to a full stop, with my foot down, to see what the car would do.

The driver slowed ever so slightly, ran the stop, then saw me and finally stopped a full car length into the intersection. Then ensued an awkward pause with me, as always, loath to get in front of a demonstrably careless operator of a deadly weapon and her not knowing my intent.

Finally I broke the stalemate and biked past. She yelled something out the window about it being a 4-way stop as if I'd been in the wrong. I yelled back something about her lack of respect for this fact. She asked "you were already stopped?" "Yes." "You were already stopped" "Yes" "I'm really sorry," she said with apparent sincerity, which contrition would've done me a whole lot of good if I'd exercised my right of way and ended up in the hospital. Apparently from her perspective she hadn't seen me till she was already running the stop sign, therefore, I must've been running my stop sign.

Admittedly, my side-visibility could be better and that intersection, while adequately lit, isn't as well lit as much of Berkeley. Maybe it's time for Hokey Spokes.

On Boing Boing Cory described being robbed and in the ensuing discussion, it turns out that the incident supports everyone's thoughts on crime, urban living, politics, drugs, gentrification and more, no matter how wildly mutually exclusive the thoughts are.

Sometimes not thinking I know everything seems downright isolating.

I wonder how often and how profoundly we might be applying these filters to more direct sensory evidence — things that would seem to be less subject to interpretation... engaging in positive or negative hallucination (perceiving things that aren't there or not perceiving things that are there, respectively) so as to ensure that what we perceive supports our beliefs.

In The Illuminatus Trilogy, everyone is brainwashed to not see the fnords. A character breaks free of this conditioning and suddenly sees fnords everywhere. What they are is never defined. When I first read it at 16, I was convinced they referred to subliminal advertising. I now laugh at how narrow a view I took.

I started reading B-May when he worked security for the olympics. More recently, he's on jury duty:

Other things jurors may not do:

~ Pay attention to the court clerk play PC solitaire, to the exclusion of testimony.
~ Lose yourself in trying to understand the Court Reporters crazy keyboard.
~ Laugh audibly at the unflattering caricature that Juror # 11 has drafted of Plaintiff's counsel.
~ Sneak into Family Court on breaks and listen to people fight over child support and alimony.

Reminiscent of Skippy's List of things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the military.

...or, what people are willing to think about.

Over at Vegan Porn, Herman comments:

I'm at my work picnic, and people are talking to this guy about UFOs like they're talking about painting a house, but if I make one mention of the fact that chickens spend their entire lives in a space the size of a sheet of paper (we're at a restaurant with "BBQ" in the name), I'm the freak?!?

Tom Tomorrow writes:

You see where I'm going with this? If you're out there on the right, or even in that sensible neocon center, you're probably not smelling the gas. You're probably not exposed to the overwhelming mass of sheer ignorant hatred that's out there, coiled and waiting. You're probably not subject to a constant barrage of email that reminds of you of this on a daily, even hourly basis, that makes you wonder, for the first time in your life, even including the years of Reagan and Bush the elder, if this country is actually, literally, genuinely headed for something more frightening than you'd ever thought possible.

And I, for one, find it wholly plausible. Last weekend was San Francisco Gay Pride Weekend. 'round here, it's really easy to forget that anyone perceives anything unusual about someone being gay. Well, at least for me as a straight... don't know what the view is from the inside. I haven't heard my openly gay and bi friends complain, but I haven't asked, either. But I digress.

So it's easy to forget that for what's probably a million or millions of people in the U.S. it's the greatest abomination imaginable. That people openly take pride in it, the greatest travesty there could be — the profoundest failure of our society and country. That for them, it had might as well be what Infant-rapist Pride Weekend would be for the rest of us.

I'm using homophobia as an example here both because Pride Weekend was so recent and because it's something you can still find people being explicit and vocal about, whereas misogyny and racism has gone more underground. But there are also people for whom miscegenation, women doing "men's work", blacks having money and power are just as great travesties.

It's a potential powder keg. Is it going to go off, or is my title entry going to be shown to be stupidly melodramatic?

I don't know. One thing that is encouraging is that I can point to explicit racism and misogyny being untenable public positions. And the civil rights and women's liberation movements are just plain older and more mature than the gay rights movement. Maybe in another fifteen years, it'll nationally be as much no big deal as it is in the Bay Area today.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. — Thomas Jefferson

But if so, it won't be through inaction.

Since Sumana linked to this, I've been peeling my bananas from the bottom. They peel faster and neater that way. Try it.

For most of the past several years, laundry day has meant attaching my B.O.B. Yak trailer to my bike, putting my laundry basket in it, as well as filling my baskets with large bags of laundry, and biking to a laundromat. Lots of fun to try to time it around the weather during the rainy season.

At the end of last year, I bought a washing machine. If I'd had any idea how relatively cheap they were and how long I'd be in my current home, I'd've done it long ago.

I only have the washer, not a drier, or even an external clothesline. I hang my t-shirts on plastic hangers, and put everything else on drying racks. This appeals to me in a couple of ways: I'm consuming no energy to dry the clothes, and there's less wear and tear on the clothes and they'll last longer.

The only catch is it takes about three days for a pair of jeans or thick socks to fully dry under those conditions: I need to plan ahead in a way I wouldn't have to if I used a drier.

This is a running theme in consuming less: one needs to learn to do without the convenience of lameness. In many cases it needn't incur any penalty to one's standard of living... if one plans ahead, and doesn't count on using a car to run last minute errands because you forgot to pick something up, or catching a fast food cheeseburger because you didn't pack a lunch. I consider the mindfulness it encourages to be a good, useful, and healthy thing of itself.

And having all my underwear on display makes a great conversation piece for visitors.

Yesterday, I did something that will affect every day of my life. I bought panniers and removed the folding wire baskets on my bike rack.

Now the big advantage of the baskets is that they were there all the time. Couldn't forget them, always ready if I acquired cargo unexpectedly, so securely attached and so inexpensive that there were no worries of theft. And the big disadvantage is that they were there all the time — I was always carrying their weight, need them or not.

So far, I'm pleased with the panniers. They're capacious and easy to put on and take off, and they weigh less than the baskets.

And tonight I biked someplace where I knew I could bring my bike inside, so I didn't carry my lock. I didn't need to bring anything, so I left the panniers behind.

And I just flew! I could not believe how light and fast my bike felt — it was like a whole new bike — I could feel the difference in the center of gravity. Can't wait to do more recreational riding on my newly lightweight bike.

So I've been reading Perdido Street Station and enjoying it a lot, but recently encountered something that threw me way out of the book. A character is riding on a train.

Gravity pulled her to the west as the train turned.

Gravity had nothing to do with it! Aie aie aaaiiiiiiieeee!

Frickin' philosophy majors.

(Mieville is pursuing a Ph.D. in International Relations on the Philosophy of International Law.) (And, as it happens, I have a B.S. in philosophy.)

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Evil:

"There is something very vampire-like about the United States," [Jemiah] Jefferson says. "Charming, attractive, downright sexy, but sucking all the life and resources out of the planet, and making most of the rest of the world want to do so too."

I find that analogy brilliant. (Apropos of little, I met Jemiah at Johnzo's birthday party last year.) Also from the article:

"9-11 resembled cheap, lazy fiction," says horror author Neil Gaiman [...] "and because it did, it made it strange for writers to decide what is valid artistically."

Any regular readers of MMG! know that I like science. I am angered by its abuses. I'm skeptical and question methodologies and whether good science has been done even when I'm sympathetic to a given outcome.

But I'm not a dogmatic determinist materialist who's overattached to the idea that we already know everything and so anything we can't readily explain mustn't exist. In other words, not like the people who have co-opted the term 'skeptic.'

In fact, I'm a new age flake. Several of the The Right to Write exercises are heavily new agey. In the one I did Saturday, you engage in a question and answer session with your unconscious. Writing as quickly as you can, not letting the pen stop (i.e. not stopping to think), one writes questions, and sees what answers come up.

One rather specific and concrete message I received: change the chain on my bike. As an urban cyclist, I routinely stake my life on my bike responding as expected. If my chain were to break and suddenly immobilize me when I was changing lanes to get into a left turn lane, it could be all over. And as I mentioned, the chain did break recently.

I've changed the chain myself, but I also thought the whole drive train could use taking apart and cleaning, and I don't have all the appropriate tools for that. So I was thinking I should call my bike mechanic.

And Monday night, he biked up alongside me when I was biking from work. Now it's not remarkable for me to see him — he's a bike messenger and his rounds frequently take him on the same roads I take from work. But not even once before have we encountered each other going in the same direction.

Numerous woo-woo sources comment on instances of fortunate synchronicity arising as one leads a more congruent life, and more aligns the conscious and unconscious minds. They counsel making a friend of synchronicity.

This is the first thing that has seemed like that to me.

(Wonder how many people I lost there.)

I'm trying Mozilla. There are some things I really miss about Opera, but the fact that Mozilla's Javascript works more reliably (I couldn't read the comments in Movable Type blogs in Opera) and it doesn't crash routinely on Salon are big plusses.

But the best thing about Mozilla is that when you go to Sluggy Freelance, the bookmark icon changes into a tiny picture of Torg's head.

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a while — I applied to college: the City College of San Francisco, a 2-year school. I'm taking a voice class for actors (in service of my improv performance.)

I could take it on a non-credit basis in which case it would cost about $80 and I couldn't register till the night of the class by which time it could be full. Or, I could do the paperwork to apply to the school and apply for non-matriculating status, and it would cost about $50, and I get a grade. I don't pretend to understand this, but, ok, fine, I'll do the extra paperwork to save $30.

I was afraid I'd have to round up all my transcripts — having taken courses for credit at four different colleges that would be a nuisance. So I was happy to see I'd been accepted immediately after finishing their on-line application form. CCSF plays by different rules than I'm used to: basically, being a California resident is good enough for them.

Having attended some outrageously expensive workshops and seminars subsequent to college, this feels functionally free. I'll literally spend more money taking BART to the city to get to the class for the semester than on the class itself.

Some friends of mine were at the Jim Gunn Writers Workshop and one of them passed on my How to Fail at Writing. I'm told he read it aloud at the close of the workshop.

Cool.

A quote from each of the last couple of 'invitations' I've read in The Right to Write:

If you keep writing, you'll publish. If you keep focusing on publishing, you may not write.

It is almost impossible to be honest and boring at the same time.

Apropos of the latter, one of the improv books I've read is Truth in Comedy. Its thesis: get up there and be honest. The laughter of recognition will get you much further and much more reliably than cleverness. Or, as Steve Barnes puts it in his audio writing course, "You can run out of clever, but you can't run out of you."

Readercon, the world's all-time greatest science fiction convention, is over. A great many very smart things were said, there was the usual laughter till tears at the Kirk M. Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, and I acquired many books at the Bookshop.

But it goes deeper than that. Readercon feels like going home — it reminds me of who I am, and what I want in my life.

More about Readercon later; it's late and I have to get some sleep. Tomorrow, I actually rent a car — it'll be the first time behind the wheel in several years. (People of the East Coast: stay off the sidewalks.) Blogging will continue to be intermittent during my travels.

Welcome to Boing Boing readers brought here by Cory's recent plug — I regret only that it comes while my posting will be so irregular. Feel free to peruse the archives.

Hey, Jym! Feel free to post more in my absence. And remember, Kevin, no wild parties and don't forget to water the plants.

Holy crap. The U.S. government plans to recruit one million spies in the pilot stage of Operation TIPS.

Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.[...]

Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows these workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity

Will repatriate for food.

(Via New World Disorder where Jason understandably expresses gratitude for his Canadianness)

=v= Critical Mass, the monthly bicycle ride/demonstration that's spread to 300 locations worldwide, is rapidly approaching its 10-year anniversary. Here in San Francisco, where the first ride took place, some of us are putting together a huge celebration.

Beth made a big bold poster that looks like this one, except that it now has a big red "10 Years" graphic made from a Golden Gate Bridge pylon and a cruiser bike. Hugh made a giant cartoon poster, one panel of which can be seen in this Critical Mass Missive flier (be advised, it's over 40kb in PDF format).

The third poster can be seen online: Mona's velorutionary angel. An homage to the posters of Alphonse Mucha, this one invites close inspection because of its fine detail and, of course, exquisite beauty. I've been posting handbill-sized copies of this, but people keep swiping them as keepsakes. It seems as if half the city's smitten with this angel.

San Francisco has spent tons of cash on supposedly-Parisian-style poster kiosks. To complete the effect, they should all be displaying 12-foot-tall versions of this poster, as a city beautification project.

=v= This is nominally about comics, but it's really about writing. The Baltimore City Paper runs a column named "Funny Paper," whose authors read and review the funny pages. They can get smarmy and nasty, but they do it well.

The June 30th Dennis the Menace strip was penned before the recent Pledge of Allegiance controversy, but printed in the midst of it. One panel has Margaret saying "one nation under God," to which Dennis adds, "He's the HEAD HONCHO!" Funny Paper remarks, "That'll show those treasonous pagan bastards of the Ninth Circuit!" And then:

Somewhere, six feet under the fruited plain, the corpse of Hank Ketcham stirs from its fitful dreams of Swiss mountain sunlight and rolls over in dismay. Its dead bony hand scrabbles restlessly at the earth, fumbling for a chilled martini.

Truly inspiring. I'm left with chills, shaken and stirred.

A German teenager wants to be a vampire. So he ripped the heart out of a nonagenarian. Last year he assaulted a girl he'd determined was a vampire, trying to force her to bite his neck

Tom Tomorrow writes about Operation TIPS:

Facism is a term thrown about too freely, and I don't believe we're at a point that its use is justified — but an oppressive and intrusive government, however you want to label it, does not ride into town wearing the uniforms and waving the flags of recognizable evil. It creeps in slowly, wrapped in the flag of your own country, and speaking the language of patriotism and duty, and at each step along the way, its actions seem plausible and defensible — until one morning you wake up and realize the gulf between the way things were and the way things are has grown so wide that there is no going back.

The more you drive, the less intelligent you are — Tracey Walter as Miller in Alex Cox's Repo Man

So, driving has been less harrowing than expected. Took just a few minutes to get used to handling the car and performing the peculiar multivariable calculus involved in getting where I'm going without collision. I'm driving a Mazda Protege, even smaller and less powerful than the Oppressor, the Dodge Shadow I had for five years in New Jersey (so called because it was white, it was American, and it was polluting the environment.)

Thought I was being clever when I packed: brought the cassette-head out and cigarette-lighter power that came with the portable CD player I got a few years ago, and my MD player and MDs. Got the car. No cassette player, no stereo in, it did have a CD player. Doh.

So Madeleine took me to a used CD store. Best find: a Disappear Fear disc, plus Harry Chapin, the Beatles, Tori Amos, and Madeleine gave me a spare Therapy Sisters CD she had, so I was spared trying to find listenable radio between Boston and NYC.

For five years, more than five years ago now, I drove New Jersey to the Boston area several times a year. It was strange to see all the old landmarks. The Dutch and English and Indian names. The FOOD BOOKS sign on I-84 just over the Connecticut border from Massachusetts — I still have never been there, but I respect their priorities. The Rein's Deli billboard.

But don't mistake this for nostalgia for driving: still can't fathom why there are people who actually like it.

Been hanging out with the fambly, much of the raison d'etre for this trip.

Thursday, my mother said to me and one of my sisters "I think our children turned out so well despite their parents, not because of them."

In hindsight, I think she may have been waiting for us to contradict her.

My sister Kathleen and I contemplated seeing a movie. She made some passing reference to how of course I wouldn't be interested in seeing "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood". Actually, that is one of the current movies I have some interest in seeing, and I said so. She expressed surprise, but then noted that this had previously come up in discussion with her best friend, who's a geek girl, who had said "Your brother isn't like other guys. He'd probably be interested in seeing it."

Found it striking that she, with whom I really have only a glancing acquaintance, would get this where my sister wouldn't. Some ways, geekiness is thicker than blood.

Her conclusion becomes only all the more glaringly obvious as I look at my brother-in-law's Maxim's, which are quick to presuppose what all men are interested in. Sex and scantily-clad women. OK. Gadgets. Eh, it's a fair cop. Video games. I can understand the appeal, but don't do 'em myself. But drinking, cars, sports, tv? Uh, no.

Home.

=v= Zed and I keep having these weird synchronicities. Not long ago he mentioned that he was driving a car, but he had no way of knowing that I was, too. I realize that, for most people, this is not an unusual event, much less a synchronicity, but Zed and I have each been living car-free for years.

I was on a getaway weekend to the foothills of the Sierras, and that's another synchronicity: the last time I took a trip out there by car, I was a temporary roadie for disappear fear. I hated the drive so much I realized I never wanted to take a car there again, so for the last few years I've been making the trip by bike.

For some reason, riding across the scorching Central Valley in the middle of summer isn't something even my most hardcore biker friends consider fun, and it's been a lonely pursuit. So when my housemates hatched a plan to rent a car and drive out for a little vacation, I joined in. We had a wonderful time, but Geeze Louise, the drive there and back!

We went there via I-80, which is wall-to-wall sprawl with a tunnel of cars running through it. One housemate conjectured that the population of the highway just from the Bay Area through Sacramento was in the millions. Most cars were single-occupant vehicles (SOVs), and far too many of them were also SUVs. We took I-580 back and could see the advancing walls of sprawl stretching west to meet the ones stretching east from the Bay Area. Yow! Are we having Los Angeles yet?

(I finally got a look at the offices of my former employers, supposedly in a location convenient to the BART commuter rail station. This station is supposed to meet "transit-oriented design" objectives, but it's located in the middle of I-580, and surrounded by a vast sea of parking spaces. It's a long walk just to get out of the station, and then of course you've got more vast seas of parking spaces to traverse.)

Being in the car retraumatized me, undoing many of the salubrious effects of the vacation itself. Now I'm back home, back with my bike, and (Synchronicity Alert #3) I kiss the sweet ground!

Crow adopts kitten.

Alabama activates a tank batallion for homeland defense.

(Title from Tom Lehrer's Who's Next?; link via New World Disorder)

=v= According to this article in the Village Voice, if you've got a "preferred customer" discount card of some sort, the type they use to track your grocery store purchases, that information is now being considered for use in the hunt for potential terrorists. Perhaps you'll make the short list if you buy too much falafel and hummus?

I've heard rumors of "card-swapping parties" (wink wink nudge nudge) where folks exchange these cards with the deliberate intention of tainting the data collection. It's pretty easy to use fake names on these, though perhaps that will soon change in the name of homeland security.

Also, a member of the secretive Muted Horn writes:

People in the grocery line are using their member cards on my purchases to speed me through the line, 'cause I refuse to get one. I'm not exactly sure why this started all of a sudden, though; I haven't asked anyone yet, I just say thanks and move on. I hope that it skews the grocery store databases.

(Via Follow Me Here and the Muted Horn)

A friend and I were discussing whether one had room in a short story (under 7500 words) to fit the classic 7 point plot structure, complete with repeated attempts to solve the problem that result in failure as the stakes rise. As delineated in Algis Budrys' Writing to the Point:

1. a character
2. in a context
3. has a problem
4. s/he tries to solve the problem
5. and fails — tries and fails twice more, stakes escalating
6. victory or death
7. validation (denouement)

I can hear the knees jerking out there about how this is a trite formula for predictable action stories, yadda yadda yadda. But if you look at it, it's impossible to avoid most of these — the presence of any sort of conflict alone instantly implies the first 4. It's formulaic to the extent that it calls for a given number of attempts and failures, calls for clear success and failure at the climax, and calls for a well-defined beginning, middle and end. And no one claims that all stories should or must have all of these elements in an overt fashion.

Anyway, my friend didn't think there was room in a short story to really fit all this in, at least not without being so skeletal as to not be interesting. So I took it as a challenge to see if I could find one that did. Analyzing successful stories is one of the standard bits of advice for writers I've always meant to get to, but never have — here was a good excuse.

Now here's the surprise — thus far, 3 out of 3 stories analyzed did map to this without strain. Two of the stories were based on physical rather than emotional movement, but the neatest correspondence was in Jim Kelly's "Itsy Bitsy Spider", a story based on emotional movement almost to the exclusion of physical.

I went into this assuming that actually finding things that mapped so easily outside of the most straightforward genre problem-solving fiction would be relatively rare. With my inconclusive sample size thus far, I may have to revise that opinion.

It's Marissa's birthday! (The latter link isn't live yet as of this typing, but she's the most reliable daily web journalist on the block, so I'm sure it will be soon.)

Everyone wish Marissa a happy birthday — her email's on her website, or, heck, just comment on this entry.

A new study suggests that a shortage of dopamine in the brain results in a sadly impoverished dogmatically materialist/determinist worldview.

That suggests that paranormal thoughts are associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain, and the L-dopa makes sceptics less sceptical. "Dopamine seems to help people see patterns," says Brugger.

(Thanks, Suzanne!)

In ways I'm still playing catch-up from having been away, and I've been busy which has resulted in less blogging than while I was away. Ah, well. As I've said, the unlived life is not worth blogging, and if I have to choose between my blog and having a life, I'll take the latter.

Went to the Farmer's Market on Saturday like I do every Saturday I can. Besides the health benefits to eating fresh, organic produce, besides the environmental benefits of eating organic, locally grown produce, I enjoy being at least enough in touch with nature despite my citified existence to see the changes in season reflected in what food's available.

And I make no bones about playing favorites: I like the summer best. Basil, summer squash, berries, melons. Bell peppers, peaches and tomatoes have finally arrived in a big way. I've been having fresh veggies and fruit every meal.

Speaking of which, it's time for breakfast.

=v= I've been a fan of In Passing ever since Zed made me aware of it. It's a blog devoted to overheard conversations, primarily in the fine city of Berkeley.

I live in nearby San Francisco, and while Our Fair City doesn't have a blog devoted to that sort of thing, we do have Mighty Girl, and she overhears a thing or two. Problem is, the stuff she hears scares the bejeepers outta me sometimes.

I think that, as a public service, every city should have at least one such blog. It'll help folks figure what cities they'd like to visit or live in.

I flew Southwest back and forth to the east coast recently. On the little packet of peanuts they gave out, y'know, as part of the junk food to anesthetize the passengers, it said: "Processed in a plant that processes peanuts."

Today is the deadline for Hugo voting. (For any non-sf geek readers, the Hugos are annual best-of-the-year science fiction awards voted on by sf fans.) Reading the Hugo nominees has dominated by fiction reading recently, but last week I finally finished Perdido Street Station and this weekend I bought The Bones of the Earth (when Le Guin's not cleaving in the reader's skull with PATRIARCHY BAD she still tells one hell of a story) and finished the short fiction, and cast my vote.

All in all, the state of the art seems pretty good. All of the novels were enjoyable reads and I'd recommend most of them. American Gods remains my favorite. Only one of the short fiction nominees had me gnashing my teeth with how bad it was, and several others left me cold, but there were a lot of really good ones.

Ultimately it's a relief to no longer feel the self-imposed weight of being a responsible voter hanging over me. I'm reading a nice fluffy fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones called Deep Secret to celebrate — it was recently mentioned on Neil Gaiman's journal; apparently he appears in it (part of it is set at a British sf convention.)