Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Hurray!

Fortunately for blogger modesty, Truth Laid Bear will soon offer blogger pajamas…

“It takes a Viking to raze a village.”

Tshirt of Edward C. Scarborough,  radiation physicist and hard-sci fi fan, in town from Flower Mound, TX

“Jackson’s Lord of the Ring movies opened up those stories to a new worldwide audience that never had access to them before. I loved that.”

Noreascon
committee member TR Smith, dragging her suitcase through the hall so
she could depart directly for Kosovo on behalf of the State
Department.

“I’m carrying a practice halberd, four feet long with a leather head. Foot soldiers used these to attack knights on horses. A
real halberd would have a metal head and be about two feet longer, but a
real one would be really hard not to kill people with.

Andy aka “Roman dude,” preparing to give a demo for Higgins Armory Sword Guild.

“Andy’s
padded doublet is a style from the late 1400s; mine is from the 1500s.
If you wear them under armor, they have buckles to hold the armor in
place. The demo of fighting in armor is at noon.”

Frank of Phoenix Swords, also on deck to demo some knightly fighting techniques.

“The movie I, Robot
is an action movie–that’s its genre. But aside from that, it’s
faithful to Asimov’s work. It even includes the Zeroth Law of robotics,
which wasn’t present in Asimov’s earliest stories. Robots matured as
Asimov wrote about them.”

John Pellet, nuclear engineer and space-opera fan from Arlington, TX.

Today, I’m headed for the huge sci-fi Worldcon aka Noreascon as a participant, not a blogger. I missed getting Eastern Standard Tribe autographed by Cory Doctorow  at sxsw, so I hope I manage to catch up with him here. BTW, Cory has been posting tons of Flickr photos online.

Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Robert Silverberg, and both Tor-blogging Haydens are also there–wow. I can hardly wait!

There’s a new blog in town, I just found out from Zoe at GreenPass, devoting itself with grumpy single-mindedness to pointing out anti-feminist blog remarks.

Zoe says
that words like “pussy” and “bitch-slap” don’t bother her–I have to
admit they bother me a lot.  People who use them seem to imagine an
audience I’m not part of–an all-male audience.

Did you see the story about 14 Middle Eastern men flying to LA whose behavior spooked a WSJ reporter?

The reporter may have over-reacted to innocent activities. If you read
Annie Jacobson’s story believing (as authorities later told her told
her) that the men were all in a band flying to an engagement, you see
it with different eyes.

Jacobson was unnerved when men in different seating groups swapped
significant glances–maybe they weren’t being sneaky by sitting
separately, maybe they just couldn’t all get seats
together. She thought they might have planned making a bomb in the
bathroom–but maybe they were conspiring to get high in there. She was
upset that a man coming out of the bathroom pantomimed to his friend
the action of cutting his own throat and saying “no”–maybe he was just
dramatizing the disgusting state that he’d found the bathroom in.

How can we keep terrorists out of airlines? I
strongly disagree with Annie Jacobson’s conclusion that racial profiling
is the best answer to this real and serious question. I strongly
disagree with James Lileks’s idea that we should happily throw civil
liberties out the window to ensure our safety. Uh huh–is that the kind of safety Israelis enjoy from Palestinians?

 I even more strongly disagree with some of my fellow
liberals. Instead of using this story as a springboard to discuss
government response to terrorism, many are sticking to diatribes
against the writer. She is a racist who thinks “flying while brown”
should be a crime. She got upset just because they used the rest room.
She is nothing but an emotional woman, a hysterical woman, a housewife,
a soccer mom–and her husband is a bigger pussy than she is. And the
flight attendant who tried to calm her fears should be fired at
once–so should security officials who later told her the men were a
band. Maybe the men were trying to put their fellow passengers in fear
of their lives just for fun, and they’re entitled to do so because
Annie Jacobson is such a racist….Or maybe she made a lot of this
stuff up anyway.*

Really, people, get a grip. Even if you could prove to the world that
Annie Jacobson is more evil than Hannibal Lecter, does that solve the
problem of balancing airplane security with civil liberties and common
sense? Wouldn’t you rather make a contribution to that more important
question?

So, taking my own advice, I think that prosthetic shoes, etc. should
not be off-limits to airport security searches. I think the rule that
you can’t question more than two people of any ethnic group, if such a
rule exists, is dangerous hooey. I think that questioning people about
their flight plans, etc. does not violate their civil liberties. I
think that people who do weird stuff on airliners should be told by
flight attendants to behave themselves. I think that airline passengers
who intentionally scare other airline passengers should be charged with
assault.

And I think political discussions should try to steer clear of personal attacks on people who hold opposing viewpoints.

That didn’t used to be me. In my youth, I was happy to lend what I saw
as a helping hand to the few people who asked me for spare change on
the rare occasions I visited a big city.

Harvard Square, contrary to its liberal reputation, has soured me on
the whole panhandling scene. You can’t walk through it without getting
hit up by three or four large, able-bodied, aggressive regulars. These
are not homeless, jobless, needy people–these are successful
businessmen whose business is embarassing tourists and shy young
couples with their shouted “requests.”

Last summer, there was a beggar who kept a dog chained on top of a
supermarket cart, with a cardboard sign saying, “Please, we need to
eat.” It didn’t seem like much of a life for the dog, but I figured it
would be a cruel world that took away some guy’s pet because he was
homeless.

Today, I saw him again–I don’t know if he was somehow un-homeless when
the weather was bad or whether begging is just some kind of a summer
hobby. Last year’s dog is gone–the man has upgraded to two pets, a
puppy and an old cat.

What irks me the most about all this is that Harvard Square makes
homelessness look cozy, cuddly, and safe to young people like Io Nachtwey, murdered in 2001 by 6 “friends” she met there. Teens
from the suburbs hang out in the “Pit”, begging for spare change when
they run out of cigarettes, and every summer a few of them decide to
shed the hassles of home for an exciting lifestyle under the
stars.

Cambridge officials reject the idea of shooing kids away from the Pit
because they would then go somewhere even less safe. On the other hand,
the Cambridge officials have no way to keep the Pit kids safe there, or
to deter unsavory types from preying on them.

Isn’t there some middle ground possible here? I don’t want to
criminalize homelessness or begging–but couldn’t we do something about
the guy with the dog and the cat? And maybe, next to the Pit, a
memorial to Io Nachtwey would remind kids that the “freedom” of
homelessness can have real costs.

I want to blog about my summer reading list, but before I do….

Have you ever noticed that some books have really embarassing titles? Three examples, two from my past and one from my future:

Liberated Parents, Liberated Children by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Sounds like a road map for ultra-PC families who roast tofu marshmallows over a nightly bonfire of burning bras–in fact, it’s good-humored, fiction-ified practicalia based on Haim Ginott’s theories.

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Conjures up–I don’t really want to say. This sci-fi-fantasy classic would be a non-stop page-turner–but not in public places, not with that title.

What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson

It’s on my summer list, but I’m planning to tote it around in a plain brown wrapper. Po Bronson interviewed a ton of people with interesting stories based on that question, and I’m looking forward to reading it, okay?

Forgive the light blogging, my real life has been so topsy-turvy recently.

On May 27, I had two daughters going to school and living in apartments and a tidy garage with space for my car inside.

Kaboom!

On May 31, I had a garage full of plywood, cinderblocks, and two
apartments worth of furniture plus two daughters who just graduated and
moved and were busily getting packed to go biking in France.

Two dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts helped us endorphinate during the move
itself.  But now–the girls are both gone–Frank and I are packing
to join them.

Meanwhile, there’s something eerie about seeing the normal equipment of
daily life–sofas, sweaters, dishes–uprooted from “permanence” and lugged
outdoors into a UHaul van. And there’s something uncanny about going out to
the garage to get my gardening gloves and seeing the ghostly shapes of
familiar stuff unfamiliarly stacked up on top of other stuff.

So, if I’m still vibrating, that’s probably why.

I heard an amazing story from AI guru Gerry Sussman this afternoon, which I quote here from memory:

Clearly, his clock re-setting didn’t impair Sussman’s energy or creativity–check out this fragment of a recent biography:

This experiment might be worth trying–and, as Sussman pointed out,
computers have made it much easier to generate random numbers mod 24.

Go check out Jim Moore’s gorgeous springtime photos. I guarantee you will want to join Gilbert and Sullivan in a loud chorus of tra la….