19 Dec 2005

More of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

posted in: science, space | 0

Let’s start with the Good. Astronomy Magazine has a year-end wrap-up of the top ten stories of the year. Ordinarily I feel pretty jaded about lists like that, but 2005 really was an extraordinary year in astronomy. Here are a few of the highlights:

  • An outburst of energy from a magnetar (highly magnetized neutron star) on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • Space shuttle Discovery returns to space. (If temporarily.)
  • The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity—designed to work for 3 months—are still exploring, almost two years into their mission.
  • We got to play cosmic Whack-a-Mole as Deep Impact smacked Comet 9P/Tempel and brought back tons of information about comet structure.
  • A tenth planet? Maybe—it’s up to the astronomical semanticists. I’m pulling for tenth planethood and the name Xena for 2003UB313.
  • Titan! We had ringside seats for Huygens’ landing on Saturn’s cloudy moon. Fantastic!

Still with the Good, but closer to home, my local paper just ran a nice story about my soon-to-appear novel, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. You can even read it online. (By the way, if any of you sees the book in a store, please post and let me know. The writer is usually the last to know that his book is out.)

All right. The Bad.

What else? Bush. This time it’s news of his almost-certainly illegal wiretap spying on American citizens following 9/11. And he’s still claiming it’s within his constitutional powers! I guess, if you believe you’re anointed by God, you think these things. Like you think it’s okay to be free to torture people, even though you of course would never actually do it.

Did I say that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was safe for the moment? Only a moment, as it turns out. They’re at it again, and this time they might sleaze it through—by attaching it as an amendment to a military bill, which will probably be voted on in the next two days. If you oppose this drilling, as I do, call your senators!

There is Good in all of this, however. Increasingly, moderate Republicans are stirring, recognizing that the radical right has gotten out of control. Kudos to Senator McCain for sticking to his guns on the ban on torture! Thank God for people of integrity on both sides of the aisle. And kudos to the Iraqi people for turning out in record numbers for their election. Despite my criticism of the war, I do want to see things turn around for that embattled nation.

The Ugly.

Manufacturers have been putting lead in vinyl lunch boxes made for children. According to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (quoted at snopes.com), the amount is small. But why should there be any?

So go back and read the Good part. No reason to end this on a downer.

12 Dec 2005

Autographed Books Make Great Gifts

posted in: writing | 0

Lots of people like to give personalized, autographed books for special occasions (like Christmas). I have most of my books available for sale, including the majority of the out-of-print titles, and I’m happy to sign and personalize any copy that’s ordered directly from me.

Between now and Christmas, I’m offering a 15% discount on the price of any book that’s listed on my web site. You can see a price list at http://www.starrigger.net/order_blank.htm. (I’m coming in a little late with this, I know. But better late than never, I hope.) Most books are at cover price before the discount. Some out-of-print titles in short supply are priced higher.

If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, just subtract the 15% and tell me it’s because of this offer. This is not a high-tech operation, unless you consider Paypal to be high tech. (Hm. OK, I guess it is, when you get right down to it. But I don’t have a shopping cart or anything like that—just an order blank you can print out and mail, or send by email.)

I now return you to your regularly scheduled wait for a new blog entry.

8 Dec 2005

Farewell, Little Sam

posted in: farewells, tributes | 0

We said a last good-bye to our elderly beagle, Sam, today. He’d gone blind and mostly deaf, and was failing in other ways. So we took him to the vet to release him from his body. I believe it was the right thing to do, but it’s so hard. Sam had been with us for about eight years. We guessed he was six or seven when we took him in from a family that couldn’t keep him, but they had taken him in as a stray, so nobody knew his real age or his past.

He was a big-hearted little guy, though he was also the most trying dog to live with we’ve ever owned—obsessed with food and prone to accidents in the house. But we loved him anyway. We still remember how he sprang to our cat’s defense when a visiting husky went after her: Sam jumped right into the breach and raised holy hell until we got there to intervene. And when Moonlight (the cat) and Hermione (our boxer) got into a tiff over a fallen piece of cold broccoli on the floor, it was Sam who swooped in and gulped it down before either of them could react. And when our kids were first learning piano, Sam and Hermione formed a wonderful Ahhh-ooohhh! chorus.

Sam’s on the rainbow bridge now, but here he is with his buddies during easier times.

2 Dec 2005

Kudos to Julia

posted in: science fiction | 0

Did I mention that my daughter Julia recently won a cash award for a short SF story she wrote for last summer’s international science fiction writing contest? (It was sponsored by a consortium that included UNESCO, the European Space Agency, and other groups I’ve never heard of—and also, in the U.S., the National Space Society.)

She got word last summer that she’d won the U.S. portion of the competition for middle school aged kids, and that her story was going on for international judging. She didn’t win that final stage, and had assumed that her only prize was the knowledge that she’d won the U.S. section. But several months later, out of the blue, came a check in the mail. At age 13, she’s now earned more per word for a short story sale than I ever have in my entire career! You go!

1 Dec 2005

Harry Potter 4

posted in: science fiction | 0

One of the things my family did on Thanksgiving was to go see the new Harry Potter movie, Goblet of Fire. I quite enjoyed it—although I found myself thinking of an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which, during a particularly long sequence of gloomily lit black-and-white scenes (involving some sort of swamp creature) one of the robots turned to the others and said, “We should all get together and buy this movie a light.” That’s kind of how I felt about Goblet of Fire.

The kids enjoyed the movie, but less so than the gr’ups. I’m not sure if it’s because of the increasingly dark character of the films (both literally and figuratively) or because of all the parts that were cut. I may have benefited from not remembering the books very well. When the third movie came out, both girls foamed at the mouth about what an abomination it was—though they later softened to conceding that it was possible to enjoy it if they thought of it just as a movie and not as an adaptation of a book they loved. Still, everyone in my family agrees that—never mind what the critics say—the first two movies were the best.

I’ve been working hard on Sunborn, which is why I haven’t been posting much here lately. If you don’t see me much for a while, that’s probably a good sign.

24 Nov 2005

Happy Thanksgiving, Globally Speaking

posted in: blogging, public affairs | 0

Here in the United States, we have a holiday called Thanksgiving, a day on which we pause to reflect with gratitude on all of the blessings that we have received over the past year. Also, we generally have a big meal with family and/or friends, during which we stuff ourselves with roast turkey*, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry relish, yams, and other good things from the kitchen. Then we roll away from the table, and the football fans watch football (no, not soccer—football, the game where oversized lunks knock each other down to get control of an oval inflated ball), and everyone else waits until they’re hungry enough to go for leftovers.

(*Vegetarians sometimes try eating a product called “Tofurkey,” which is an attempt to make tofu taste like turkey. We tried it one year, because we all like tofu. I have never tasted anything so vile in my life. Unless—no wait, there was something worse—it was “Tofuti,” a substitute for ice cream. Oh God, the memory. I do not recommend it.)

All of this is a long introduction to my saying Happy Thanksgiving! to everyone, whether or not you happen to celebrate it as a holiday in your country. We all have things to be grateful for, and one of the things I’m grateful for is that I’ve had visitors to this blog (and to my writing web sites) from so many places around the world. A while ago, I ran a list of countries I’d noted from a casual scan of the web logs. Here it is again:

Canada, England, Singapore, Iran, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Slovenia, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, England, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Lithuania, and Mauritius.

Since then, I’ve had visitors from:

Argentina
Austria
Belarus
Belgium
Bolivia
Chile
China
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cyprus
Denmark
Ecuador
Egypt
Estonia
Finland
Georgia
Greece
Indonesia
Kenya
Mexico
Morocco
Republic of Korea
Romania
Russian Federation
South Africa
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Switzerland
Thailand
Turkey
Uganda
Vietnam

There may be others I’ve missed, since my log-checking is anything but rigorous.

To all of you, best wishes and Happy Thanksgiving!

21 Nov 2005

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

posted in: writing | 0

The writing retreat was fabulous. I got more writing done per day there than I had been getting done in a long time at home, and that’s on top of spending time out hiking and enjoying sand, wind, and sea of Cape Cod. I’m back home now, and the trick is going to be finding a way to keep it up.

The carrot on a stick is in front of me, though. (Or maybe it’s a whip at my back.) My editor has put Sunborn in the schedule for fall of 2007, which means he needs it turned in by fall of 2006. Which sounds like a long way off, but trust me, for a long book with serious issues, it’s not. So I am hard at work. And must leave off the blog for now.

15 Nov 2005

Writing Retreat

posted in: science fiction, writing | 0

Wow. There’s nothing like getting away from the daily grind and sitting in a beautiful location. Near the ocean. Fire in a fireplace. Peace and solitude. (The jacuzzi turned out to be at another place, where I am not; but that’s okay, I don’t even mind.) I’m already making better progress on the book. Plus, I spent a couple of hours walking along the salt marsh and the beach, watching crows, playing chicken with the waves (and losing). This is great. I should do it more often.

Something about a fire in a fireplace and writing: they go together like, I don’t know, wine and cheese. (Hey, there’s an idea…)

14 Nov 2005

This & That

posted in: public affairs | 0

I’ve been intending to post on several topics over the last week, but just haven’t had a chance. So let me now say “Bravo!” to the members of Congress—especially those Republicans who had the courage to buck their own party—who put a stop (at least for now) to the ill-conceived attempt to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil companies. And similarly to the members of Congress who put a stop (at least for now) to the Bush administration’s efforts to slash social programs to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief, while giving a further tax cut to the wealthy.

And let me give a loud raspberry to Sony, for their dangerous and idiotic mission to install spyware and out-of-control copy-protection on computers playing their music CDs. I’m glad they backed down in the face of pressure, but they didn’t admit to doing anything wrong, and they didn’t promise not to try again. Now, I own a fair number of pieces of Sony electronics, including a Net MD Walkman, a mini-CD-playing equivalent to an MP3 player. I love the Walkman (though, now that my daughter has an iPod, my Walkman seems old fashioned), but the biggest drawback to it is that it doesn’t play MP3 files directly, but converts them first to a proprietary Sony format. All part of Sony’s obsession with anti-piracy protection, I guess. I sympathize with the desire to protect their copyright, but I think the best way to do that is to keep doing what they’re already doing—sell music for download at a reasonable price.

Good news at our house when a Panasonic device we call “Grabber” came back from a factory warranty repair. It’s a DVD recorder combined with a Tivo-like digital video recorder—and I just love it. It leaves the VCR back in the 20th Century, from whence it came. Besides automatically recording current shows I want to see, straight from the cable box, it’ll enable me to gradually burn to DVD all those tapes full of movies and Star Treks and West Wings and Actors Studios that threaten to overwhelm our house.

The best news is that I’m heading off tomorrow for a three and a half day writing retreat, at a bed and breakfast at an undisclosed location. In sybaritic solitude, I hope to recover some peace of mind and mental clarity, and basically press Reset on my brain. No schedule to keep, no dogs to walk, no hundred chores to keep track of. Just me, my laptop, my Walkman, and nature. Oh—and the fireplace and jacuzzi. It was my wife’s idea, and she set it all up, and I love her, and may she live forever.

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