A bit of “local color.”
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DISTAL MUSE – OBSERVATIONS, OPINIONS, EPHEMERA, & VIEWS
When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about. Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page. This one, in fact:
My caption for it was “What more is there to say?” Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion. As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.
It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity. …
Couple of things. One, as noted in the previous post, I’m going to Bouchercon, here in St. Louis this year. The other event coming up—well, Archon, of course, the first weekend of October, but I always try to be there—will be the local independent bookstores bus tour on October 22nd, via St. Louis Alliance. I’ll be at the Book House on Manchester Road from 11:00 AM on and then with readers for lunch. Check the Alliance web page for details.
Today I spent doing some catch-up stuff. Company left this morning, so I cleaned up a bit, walked the dog, then got together with Scott Phillips in U City for coffee. …
Really, I’ve been up since 5:20 already. We have company coming into town, so most of the day so far has been taken up with cleaning the house and arranging the guest room—which is at all other times my office.
But I sometimes feel that just being able to get up in the morning and do anything constructive is a minor miracle. Oh, nothing significant about that thought. Usually it’s a matter of choosing among several options and then deciding whether I have either the imagination or the energy to tackle any of them. I often have a period of enervation after completing a novel and the older I get the more intense they seem to be.…
The Hugo Awards for 2011 have been presented. The winners are:
Another outspoken advocate of Public Morals has been caught with a hand slipping into the cookie jar of Craig’s List sex. Yes, he’s loudly anti-gay and, yes, he’s a Republican.
Now, I don’t for a second believe being a Republican has anything to do with this, any more than I believe being Catholic has anything to do with pedophilic priests. I think we largely have the cart turned ’round the wrong way. I think there is something about both organizations that attract such people, and while you can lay full blame on the Catholic Church for coddling these criminals, you can’t really blame them for creating them. …
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my favorite science pop star. He is right up there with Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in terms of ability and scope and style when it comes to explaining science to the public. I’ve heard that a follow-up mini-series to Sagan’s superb Cosmos is in the works with Tyson as the narrator.
After this, I have to say, I love this guy:
Back in the Seventies, Robert A. Heinlein testified before congress about the benefits of the space program—the ones people don’t generally know about. Among some of them was the surprising fact that suicides among seniors was sharply down since the Gemini program and the announcement of the Apollo program.…
Marty Halpern has an anthology coming out, filled with alien contact stories. I think it’s going to be a really cool book, not just because one of my stories will be in it, but because everyone else who is in it is a really good writer, and, well, Marty has been doing blog posts about each story.
Here’s the one for mine. But check out the rest of them, too, and then plan on buying the anthology when it comes out. It would make a great Christmas gift, a whole book full of bizarre, well-written, idea-rich alien contact stories. Remember, too, you need to buy multiple copies—one for the office, one for your bedside, one for the bathroom, and one to carry with you, and one to give to a friend.…
Steel-trap smiles made room on the stage, a shuffle of seats, a place where chances die or lives are made, all the welcome of the seen-it-befores and the willingly-impressed, squeezed into a need for the new, hope for discovery, and fear of not-good-enough.
The room itself prepared for betrayal, but the ears plugged back into the main artery, on the off that something might open a vein or just shut out the silence.
The Kid opened his case and took out a pair of hands. Everyone gasped at the tendons and callouses, the length of the reach and the curl of long use. …