- Stumbled on this by accident: A YouTube group that offers audio book summaries/reviews, doing their thing on my x64 assembly book. Short listen (2:40), and not a bad summary for such a short clip.
- And while we’re talking YouTube, here’s a podcast interview with me now on YouTube, during which I talk about all kinds of things with Jim Lawless.
- I recently discovered British classical composer Doreen Carwithen 1922-2003, and on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, allow me to suggest the third movement of her Suffolk Suite, composed in 1964. Although nominally a tune for Morris dancers, Suffolk Suite III has a decidedly Irish air about it. It’s on YouTube, as are the other movements of the suite if you’re interested.
- Carol and I attend St. Patrick’s parish here in Scottsdale, and every Friday during Lent they have a fish fry in the parish hall. The fish was excellent, and I allowed myself to eat the fries that came with it, carbs though they be. (Once a week won’t kill me.) One of the parish volunteers wore a green T-shirt with “Pat on the back” printed in front, and an old portrait of St. Patrick himself reproduced (in white) on the back. Clever enough for a giggle or two. Again, the food was great and we sat at a table with friends, talking about all sorts of things.
- Michael Covington sent me a link to an article by Stephen Wolfram in which he explains what ChatGPT is doing and how it works. It’s not cutting-edge, having been published in early 2023, but it’s a good place to start if you want to know what’s inside the concept of large language models (LLMs).
Odd Lots
The Everything Machine Is Live!
My newest novel, The Everything Machine, is now available on Amazon’s Kindle store. And thereby hangs a tale. A long tale. I don’t think I’ll be able to tell the whole story today. What I’ll do instead is post the book’s description on Amazon:
Carrying 800 passengers and their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony, starship Origen’s hyperdrive self-destructs, marooning its passengers near an Earth-twin planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. While settling in, the inadvertent colonists name their world Valeron, and discover that Valeron is scattered with hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines—but there are no aliens nor any other trace of them.
Each replicator is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl half-full of fine silver dust. Beside the bowl are two waist-high pillars about 8 inches in diameter, one pale silver, the other pale gold. Tap on either pillar, and the pillar makes a sound like a drum, one pillar high, the other low. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any sequence, and something surfaces in the bowl of dust. Simple sequences create simple and useful things like shovels, knives, rope, saws, lamps, glue and much else. Complex or random sequences create strangely shaped forms of silver-gray metal with no obvious use. 256 taps on the pillars can create any of 2256 different things; in scientific notation, 1.16 X 1077.
That’s just short of one thing for every atom in the observable universe.
The artifacts are dubbed “drumlins,” for the sounds the pillars make, and the replicators called “thingmakers.” Drumlins have strange properties. Although virtually indestructible, drumlins can change shape, especially when doing so will protect a human being from injury. Drumlin knives will not cut living human tissue, but they will cut living animal tissue or human corpses. Press a drumlin knife against your palm, and it will flow and flatten out to a disk. Pull the knife away, and it will slowly return to its true form as a knife. Some claim that drumlins read human minds and grant wishes. Others insist they are haunted by invisible and perhaps hostile intelligences.
After 250 years on Valeron, the colony prospers. Starship Origen is still in orbit, and a cult-like research organization called the Bitspace Institute vows to repair Origen’s hyperdrive and return to Earth. With millions of drumlins catalogued using the thingmakers, Valeron’s people live well and begin to lose interest in returning to Earth. This threatens the Institute’s mission, prompting it to launch a covert effort to undermine public faith in drumlins. A low-key war begins between the Institute and those who value drumlins–including farmers, other rural folk, an order of mystical women, and several peculiar teen girls who have an unexplained rapport with the thingmakers and their mysterious masters.
The ebook is $3.99. The 377-page paperback is $14.99. The cover was designed and drawn by artist/author/Renaissance woman Cedar Sanderson.
The storyline defies easy categorization. Looked at from one angle it appears to be hard SF. There are starships. And AIs. From another angle it looks like a space western. The Republic of Valeron resembles America in the early 1890s. Valeron City, the capital, has just started running streetcar lines down its main streets, powered by a new dynamo on a river upstream from the city. People ride horses. They pack 6-guns. (Or, if you’re in the Bitspace Institute, 11-guns.) Thingmakers and drumlins are everywhere. There are pinlamp drumlins in many different sizes. Lighting is provided by pinlamps. The thingmakers can provide most other household goods as well, although the thingmaker’s size limits its creation of larger objects. The Institute is developing vacuum tubes and 2-way radios. The Grange (a farmers’ organization that might be characterized as rural Masons) has drumlin radios—and keeps them a secret.
I don’t want to spill a great deal more here. There are a lot of ideas, but in truth, what I was striving for in this novel are interesting characters who struggle, learn, and grow. Characterization was always the hardest part of writing my own fiction. I took great pains this time to make my characters come alive, and my alpha readers seem to think I succeeded.
So go get it. And if you like it, please review it—not only on Amazon but on your blogs and social network accounts. The biggest problem indie authors face is reader discovery. I’m going to post notices on X and Facebook and see how things go. My guess is that characterization is a cakewalk next to indie book promotion.
What a Difference Four Years Makes…to KDP
Well, in a couple of days I’m going to flip the switch and ask KDP to publish The Everything Machine, my first novel since 2021—if Complete Sentences really counts as a novel, of which I’m not entirely sure. I’ve already uploaded both ebook and paperback editions, and I’m only waiting for a final proof copy to get here. Amazon says tomorrow—and it’s been bang-on with delivery times for the first two proof copies I ordered across the past month or so.
I knew going in that there would be some changes to KDP. Amazon has sent me half a dozen emails reminding me that as of March 18, KDP will no longer accept mobi files. Mobi has been Kindle’s flagship file type probably as long as there’s been Kindle.I’ve seen no explanation, but after 3/18 only kpf (Kindle Create) epub, or docx files will be accepted. This doesn’t slow me down in the least. The Jutoh ebook editor that I use can export epubs as well as anything else in current use.
What surprised me more was the addition of spell-checking on uploaded ebooks. Out of the novel’s 130,000 words, the spellchecker called out 30-odd items as possible misspellings. Then it was courteous enough to send me an email listing them all. Out of those 30-odd, only four were actually misspelled words. The rest were character dialect or Jeff inventions, including metarhythmic, wubbled, birdoculars, bitspace, rectored, pinlight, fancraft, fauciam (Latin) recursor, bookspring, bitbags, gatherum (without omnium in front of it) and vuldt.
There are some asterisks: Although I invented the word “vuldt” when I was in high school, “Vuldt” is actually a Dutch surname. It must be a very rare surname, since none of the other surnames I used in the novel came up as misspellings. It didn’t like “steerskin,” even though it’s a reasonably common term.
Weirdest of all, it didn’t like the word “leptal.” Why? Because “leptal” isn’t a word. At best it’s the trademarked name of an antiseizure drug. But I was lead-pipe certain that “leptal” is the opposite of “dextral,” a real word meaning right-handed chirality. Alas, the real word for left-handed chirality is “sinistral.” (Recall the two old words from heraldry for right and left: “dexter” and “sinister.” ) As best I can tell, I was reaching for the word for left-handed chirality and inadvertently made up my own.
The spellchecker gave me the option of ignoring any of the highlighted words, which was handy. I fixed the typos in the epub and replaced “leptal” with “dextral,” because it didn’t matter which chirality I called out. The Hilbert stardrive has two chiral cables in its big ring, and which one I cited had no effect on the plot. Later, I fixed the typos in the paperback’s PDF. I uploaded corrected versions of both epub and PDF.
Now, we wait. Trust me, you’ll see the announcement here and a lot of other places when Amazon OKs the uploads and publishes them.
Creatine
Carol and I have done weight training almost continuously since 2004. (We dropped it during the turbulent couple of years we were moving from Colorado Springs down here to Scottsdale.) About a month or so ago, my trainer at the gym recommended a supplement called creatine, which I’d never heard of. He said it helps build muscle. That’s what we pay him for, so if there’s something that supports that goal, I’m willing to try it.
Creatine is yet another chemical that the body manufactures for its own use in keeping muscles and skeletal infrastructure healthy. And like so much else, as people get older they produce less internally. So given that we’re now in our 70s, well, like I said before: I’m willing to try it. Creatine is widely used by bodybuilders. Carol and I are not bodybuilders. We’re mostly trying to keep what muscle we have and maybe put on a little more. Some research suggests creatine improves brain health and may put off or reduce the effects of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Good if true, but evidence there is thin.
In truth, what sold me on creatine is its role in providing energy to the body. Creatine increases the body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is part of a complicated system for delivering chemical energy to cells. Across the last five years or so, my personal energy levels have fallen. I’m an old guy; that happens. But supplementing creatine provides more of the body’s “energy currency,” as explained in the NIH paper linked above. (Yeah, it’s a slog, but read it!) More on this shortly.
As a supplement, creatine monohydrate is a white powder that you can buy in both flavored and unflavored forms. I bought a jar of the unflavored Sunwarrior brand at the Natural Grocer store nearby. It dissolves readily in water or almost any water-based liquid. The jar comes with a scoop to measure out 5 grams. We take 5 grams daily. Carol puts it in her daily protein shake. I currently put it in sugar-free Activia liquid probiotic yogurt. (I recently had an infected tooth and had to take a course of strong antibiotics. The doc said eat probiotic yogurt for awhile to counteract whatever havoc the pills may have committed on my gut biome.)
What I’d really prefer (and will probably switch to soon) is putting my 5 grams of creatine into my daily iced coffee, which I drink about 10 AM. Many people put it in tea, but since I’m prone to kidney stones (which tea can cause) I’m going with coffee.
But…some online articles suggest that caffeine partially inhibits the effects of creatine. That bothered me until I found another Healthline article citing some solid 2017 research putting that rumor to rest. So once I run out of those cute little Activia Dailies, my creatine is going in my coffee.
As with any change in diet or meds, placebo may have something to do with it, but I <i>do</i> feel a little more energetic than in previous years. We’ll see if that continues as time goes on.
There’s one more thing about creatine that you need to be aware of, and it does bother me a little: Creatine promotes water retention in the body. In the month that I’ve been taking creatine, I’ve gained a little over four pounds. Our diet here is low-carb and I’ve hovered close to 150 for some years. Our diet hasn’t changed, so what’s with those four new pounds? Water. It makes me wonder if I’ve been a little bit dehydrated ever since we moved back to single-digit-humidity Arizona in 2015. Possible; hard to know. As with any significant supplement, it would be worth asking your doc about it. I’m just telling you that it seems to work and does not appear to have a downside if you don’t overdo it. Let me know of current or future results if you’re taking it too.
Odd Lots
- That’ll leave a mark, Mark: Unsealed emails indicate that Meta downloaded 81.7 terabytes of pirated books from sites like Anna’s Archive and LibGen. Why? To train their AIs. Most people would consider that a violation of copyright law all by itself apart from seeding the monster files while torrenting them.
- After hearing how bad eggs are for your cardiovascular health for literally decades, new research on the over-70 set finds that people in that age bracket who eat eggs six or seven days a week see a 29% reduction in heart disease. I have an extra-large egg every morning (I used to have two, until I realized one would carry me to lunch) and am much relieved. Carbs are the enemy. Eggs are your allies.
- Warner Brothers has dropped more than 30 of its feature-length films on YouTube without charge, including Waiting for Guffman and Oh, God! Note that this isn’t the YouTube paid service, but just plain, ordinary free YouTube. People wonder why, though I’d guess that WB is trying to establish itself as “the good guy” vis-a-vis old content, unlike The Mouse House, which cannot let anything go no matter how old or bad it is.
- As my regular readers know, I’m not much of a fan of AI—but I am a huge fan of nuclear power. What AI seems best at right now is persuading power utilities to put unused (“zombie”) nuclear plants back online, or even—egad!—building new ones. TechCrunch has a decent story. Me? More AI! More AI!
- I remember reading about this, um, eccentric—who claimed alien visitation and is now being sued by investors who were persuaded that he had invented an antigravity machine. Here’s the whole long-form story, from Bloomberg.
- Lazarus 3.8, a bugfix release, is now available. Worth it. Really. Pascal isn’t dead.
- From robocop to rolocop: Spherical Chinese robots are hitting Chinese streets to assist police in chasing crooks and breaking up riots. One plus: They’re pretty rugged. I can think of some minuses, and I’ll bet you can too.
- Here’s a world map showing what the commonest last name is in every country on Earth. Here? Smith. Same in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Who could have guessed?
- In the first cut of Google’s AI Super Bowl ad, the ad claimed that Gouda cheese represents from 50 to 60 percent of all cheese consumed here on Earth. They fixed it with a little non-artificial intelligence, heh. Ok, one could argue the point, since a lot of stuff labeled “cheese” isn’t really cheese as I understand the term—but even Velveeta doesn’t have numbers like that. Come for the football, stay for the Super Bowl AI hallucination about…cheese.
Seven Hundred…What?
In a box on the floor of my walk-in closet are all the vinyl LPs Carol and I decided to keep. Some few we now have on CD or MP3; most are obscure, with just a few in the middle. Somewhere in there is a Steeleye Span LP I very much enjoyed, Now We Are Six. It’s almost entirely “traditional” material, indicating folk songs going (often) waythehell back. However, Steeleye Span recorded them using modern-day rock instrumentation, and I was surprised back in the ‘80s at how seamlessly the combo worked.
Well, one of those traditional songs popped into my head the other day, as music from my past often does. The song is “Seven Hundred Elves,” and you can catch it on YouTube if you like that sort of thing. It’s fluky enough to expand on a little. This flukiness was apparent to me way back in 1984.
The song is a ballad (lyrics here, on Mudcat) about a farmer who strikes out into the west (of what land we aren’t told) to find a place to build his farm. He brings his hawk and his hound, and evidently some big axes and serious muscle. He starts cutting down trees and eating the deer, and eventually word gets back to the elves. So the elves descend on the farmer’s house to make their preferences known. The farmer, knowing that creatures like elves are non-Christian, sets up crosses all over his little farmhouse, and the elves run screaming in all directions.
Farmer 1, elves 0.
Now, for the flukiness:
All the elves from out the wood began to dance and spring
And marched towards the farmer’s house, their lengthy tails to swing.
Huh? Ok, I’m no expert on folklore. But if you’re going to write fantasy, you have to read it. I’ve read quite a bit, and never once have I seen mention of elves with tails. Lengthy tails, at that. And even if said elves were on the small size, seven hundred of them would be piled up twenty deep around the house.
I’m pretty sure they aren’t elves. My guess is that they’re…monkeys.
I’ve read that over in India (I think) hordes of monkeys sometimes descend on villages and become serious nuisances. Lengthy tails swinging? Sure. Foul and grim? Well, what do monkeys throw at each other?
There is some evidence that the song is an adaptation of an old Danish ballad. The Danish version speaks of trolls, not elves. And I think trolls are even less likely to have lengthy tails than elves. Alas, I don’t think Denmark ever had native monkeys in their ecosphere. But suppose, just suppose, that the story ultimately came to the Danes from south Asia, where monkeys are native? That would work.
Which brings me to the point of this morning’s wander, an insight I had back in 1984: Could mythical creatures like elves and dwarves and pixies and so on be ancestral memories of now-extinct hominids? (Yeah, I know, monkeys are not hominids. I’m broadening the concept here.) Homo floresiensis were only 3’6” tall. We don’t know how tall the Denisovians were from a couple of bones and a few teeth. In general, our hominid forerunners were smaller than we are. Even the Neanderthals were short, if wide and probably mondo muscular. I could see them inspiring dwarves, if not elves.
And who knows what hominids and monkeys and other primates we’ve not yet found fossils for? The Homo floresiensis fossils weren’t discovered until 2003, Denisovians until 2010. Maybe there were cold-weather monkeys. The Denisovians lived (among other places) in Siberia.
Quick aside: Tolkien didn’t invent the word “hobbit.” There are some old 19th century booklets called The Denham Tracts listing all kinds of mythical creatures, including hobbits. The whole list is there on Wikipedia, with most having their own Wiki pages. If you’re tired of writing stories about elves and dwarves, well, you’ve got a lot more to choose from.
Again, my point here is that ancient tales handed down for thousands of years could well be inspired by long-extinct primates, most of which we have no evidence for. As for what inspired mythical giants, well, given how short other hominids were, dare I suggest…us?
I so dare. And I will dare until we find some (provably genuine) 8-foot-tall hominid skeletons.
As we used to say in the ‘60s: Crazy world, ain’t it?
Grok Explains the Weevils
I told a joke on Twitter/X. Although it wasn’t much of a joke, it was subtle, or at least I thought so. Twitter has a new feature called Grok, which is an AI that (supposedly) explains posts. I wondered if Grok would get my joke. I might as well copy’n’paste the whole thing here:
Me:
The US government chooses two boll weevils every four years and leases them to the people. This makes the Feds the lessor of two weevils. And the weevils? They’re having a boll.
Grok:
The term "lessor of two weevils" is a play on the phrase "lesser of two evils," which refers to choosing the less unpleasant of two poor options. This phrase is commonly used in political discourse to describe situations where voters choose between two undesirable candidates.
The "boll weevil" in politics historically refers to conservative Democrats, particularly from the Southern United States, who supported some Republican policies during the Reagan administration. This term draws from the insect’s difficulty to eradicate, symbolizing the political resilience of these Democrats.
Jeff Duntemann’s post humorously suggests that in the U.S. political system, the government essentially leases out these conservative figures (boll weevils) to the public every election cycle, playing on the idea of political figures being somewhat unavoidable or persistent like pests.
It came to me as a silly play on words (“lessor of two weevils”) with the rest built around it to make it an actual joke. I wondered if most readers would understand the word “lessor,” which I don’t see much in my reading and don’t recall ever hearing it used in conversation.
Now, I myself didn’t know that “boll weevils” had once been used as a slur against conservative Democrats. I certainly haven’t read it with respect to modern politics. If I had, I would have created the joke another way. I simply meant to imply that the government chooses a couple of weevils every four years, and leases them to the public. We pay officials with our taxes during the time we “lease” them, but never own them. This makes the Feds a “lessor”.
So Grok didn’t get the joke as I intended it to be gotten, but read it as Reagan-era humor. So it goes. My opinion of AI hasn’t changed. It’s a massive pattern-matcher without any least cognizance that its explanations may simply be wrong.
I’ll play with Grok some more to see how well it “explains” additional posts, mine and others’.
Lots of DDJ’s Text Has Gone Online
Ok, this is probably illegitimate, but it’s one way to get access to literally all my DDJ “Structured Programming” columns, which appeared from 1989-1994. In fact, even I don’t have the files containing the text of many of those columns anymore, so I’m going to download them before circumstances force the poster to take them all down.
My column was distinctive due to a trick I shamelessly copied from Isaac Asimov’s long-running science columns in Fantasy and Science Fiction: Start with a funny but pertinent story. I picked one at random, and it turned out to be one of the better ones. Below is the opener for my January 1992 column, about event-driven programming, which I was studying at the time using Turbo Vision. (I was 39.) It’s just the intro, which lays out an experience I had that most of you have heard of. It really did happen, really. I couldn’t make anything like this up.
Chewing the Wrapper
Jeff Duntemann KG7JF
It was 1971, and I was a college sophomore at a beer bust put on by a fraternity hungry enough for pledges to admit anyone. I was dressed in a bright yellow sweater and bright purple bell-bottoms, trying very hard to grow my hair without realizing the ultimate futility of the effort. (Can you picture me with shoulder-length hair? Sigh. I can’t either.)
As often happens at parties, an impassioned discussion between two people begins to attract a crowd, and before long a considerable fraction of the party was watching me debate some half-sloshed prelaw type on the merits of bringing the United Nations into the Vietnam conflict. Or maybe it was the moral imperative of passing the E.R.A. I forget–because all the while I was half-watching a pretty young woman who was hanging on my every word, following my discourse with this look of unbelieving awe on her face.
Shall we say this was not an everyday occurrence, and her interest inspired me to even greater heights of eloquence. Was it my sweater? My sideburns? Or could it be that at least one girl in this five-and-dime college appreciated the power of brains over biceps?
The prelaw slurred some minor insult at me and slunk away, defeated. The crowd wandered off–but she hung on, eyes like sapphires riveted upon me, and in our single moment of intimacy she breathlessly revealed the secret of her admiration: "You know, you always talk in complete sentences!"
My God! She had thrown away the gum and was chewing the wrapper! What about my passion? What about my social awareness? What about my obvious allegiance to the greater good of mankind? No matter–she went home with some football player, and I went home with my complete sentences. I guess in the long run we both got what we deserved. [Note well: By 1971 Carol and I were a very close couple, and I had no interest in the girl as a girl. Her remark just made for a good story.]
There’s a lesson here. Rarely are our creative efforts admired for what we as creators consider most admirable. Isaac Newton wanted to be remembered for his theology–calculus was just a throwaway. The seminal object-orientation of Smalltalk was ignored for 15 years because people were too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing at its primordial GUI.
I expect this will happen more and more these days, as it ironically grows easier and easier to create a flashy user interface and positively murder to sort out an application’s internals. It’s humbling to keep in mind as you struggle to master event-driven programming under Turbo Vision or Windows: They’re not going to admire the intricate subtlety or robustness of your event loop. They’re going to admire the color coordination of your scroll bars.
A New Year, A New Book (Almost)
Happy new year to everybody out there! May it indeed be happy, healthy, successful, safe, and fulfilling. Carol and I and Dash are still in good shape. Dash is 15 1/2, so he’s slowing down. Carol and I, well, we’re in damn good shape for being in our 70s. July will be 56 years since we met. October will bring our 49th wedding anniversary. We are more deeply in love and friendship than ever before.
It may not be what I’m remembered for in years to come, if I’m remembered at all…but my relationship with Carol is what I consider the finest thing I have ever accomplished, and she what I am by far the most thankful for. Every year brings more and better for us. Yes, friendship is the cornerstone of our love, and how it all came about. Every year that passes makes that clearer.
But friendship is also the cornerstone of the human spirit, and I’m thankful for all the years that many of you have been reading me here and elsewhere, and offering me comments and suggestions and commendations. Stick with me; more words are on their way.
The Everything Machine, my fourth novel (or fifth, if Drumlin Circus counts as a novel) hits the streets this year. It’s the “big” drumlins story, set in the same universe as The Cunning Blood, but on the other side of the galaxy. It incorporates my novelette “Drumlin Boiler,” which Asimov’s published in 2002. The manuscript is complete. I’m in discussion with an artist for a cover. I wrote the back cover copy yesterday afternoon. We’re getting there.
I did a long, close copy edit on it across the last couple of weeks. Some people have suggested that I should hire an editor to do a pass over it. I considered for some time, and finally decided against it. One reason is that while there’s plenty of action in The Everything Machine, what I put most of my energy into was the creation of the characters. Characterization was always my weak spot as a writer. This project has been a deliberate effort to improve that skill. I’m still an ideas guy, but this time, I’m giving my characters equal time with what I consider my finest SF concept in all the years I’ve been writing. There’s deliberate nuance in the characterization, and I’m leery of having someone else miss that nuance and unintentionally polish it away.
One of my alpha readers gave me a compliment that suggests it’s working: Joe said that he could always tell which character is speaking in the story, and that each has a distinctive voice and presence. Here’s an example of how I’m trying to do this:
Orsi staggered back, his eyes widening. “So you are the girl who tortured Gad Roche…with your mind.”
Maristella bit her lower lip. “That shitpile had a gun to my head. I did what I hadta do.” Maristella pointed down at the deck. “So do we got us a deal or not?”
Orsi took several long breaths. McKinnon thought he was trembling. “Prove to me…that this is…a starship.”
Consul David Orsi is weak, taking intermittent breaths, and coughing a great deal. Maristella is a bright 15-year-old farm girl who had been tossed out of grade school for being “weird.” The Bitspace Institute murdered her father and is holding her mother captive. She is angry, and more bitter than a teen girl should be.
I’m expecting some grumbling about how complicated the story is. There are several story arcs and more major characters than I’ve put in a novel before. I think it works, and my alpha readers think it works. We’ll see how it goes over with the readership at large.
It’s taken more time than my other novels, in part because I’m not 50 anymore, and in part because I had to set it aside for a year to update my assembly language book. I rewrote several parts of it more than once. I got the idea waaaaaaay back in 1997, and it will be a boggling relief once it’s finally completed and on sale.
I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, there are electronics to play with, and a solar maximum to allow station K7JPD to be heard farther off than California. I’m guessing that it’s going to be a mighty good year. So good luck and make it happen!
Odd Christmas Lots
- Be careful with your art and writing, making sure it can’t be misconstrued. (See above.) In the original draft of my story “Whale Meat” (which I wrote when I was 18) I used the word “frot” as the name of a magical power. I thought I invented the word. A friend later took me aside and told me what “frot” meant. I gulped and changed it to “zot.”
- My old friend Lee Hart took a forgotten 1844 Charles Dickens Christmas story, trimmed it down some, and modernized some Victorian archaisms. It’s free and very much worth reading. The Chimes is a short novel (about 20,000 words) so budget some time. I did a copy/paste into a Word .docx, so I could control the type size for the sake of these old eyes.
- While we’re talking Christmas stories, just a reminder that my Christmas story “The Camel’s Question” is still available for 99c on Amazon. More on the story in this entry from a few days back.
- While troubleshooting my Lionel ZW train transformer, I ran across a nice article on the ZW, which Lionel sold from 1948 to 1966. I may try to repair my ZW, though it won’t happen in time for Christmas this year. Or I may just hunt around on eBay until I find another one.
- (Not Christmas, but timely): The Altair 8800 personal computer, the one that began the desktop computer revolution, went on the market 50 years ago last Thursday, on December 19, 1974. I found it at the same site with the ZW article. Other interesting stuff there too.
- Our favorite spiked egg nog is Van Der Haute Egg Nog Traditional. Review here. We get it from Safeway, because Total Wine doesn’t carry it, nor Fry’s, though I won’t claim that no Kroger grocery does. Jewel-Osco carries it, if that’s your local store.
- If you’re mulling the issue of spiced holiday wines, consider Firebrand Spiced Red Wine, which Total Wine carries. It’s a sweet red with cinnamon, vanilla and fruit flavors that most people would consider a dessert wine. There is no vintage year on the label, which for wines of this sort really isn’t an issue.
- Sarah Hoyt recently published a book of four SF-flavored Christmas stories, called Christmas in the Stars. $2.99 on Kindle. I bought it but haven’t read it yet, although I’ve always enjoyed Sarah’s writing. And it’s making me wonder if there’s an AI SF story I could spin about Christmas. I haven’t written a short story since 2008, so it’s about time.
- Some of my older readers will know why lead tinsel was a forbidden pleasure back in the 50s and 60s. Well, you can buy it on eBay. Just search for “lead tinsel.” No shortage of choices. (It seems like the Germans may still use it!)
