People say there's nothing good about New Jersey. Its got trampy fat women cheating on their spouses. Its got druggies and mafia. It is the very definition of Sleaze. But people need to remember there's something good about New Jersey. Its far far away.
Yep. Glad its over there, not over here. New York City is the same kind of feeling. I love that New York exists. Its a place for New Yorkers to be, instead of here. They can torment each other, and have TV shows I don't have to watch, and I never plan to visit on purpose, ever, unless there's a plague (always include the possibility of a plague), and its all 3000 miles away. And they mostly don't leave because they've been successfully indoctrinated into believing that New York is the best place on Earth. And for their sake, it is. Because if they came here the rest of us would chase them out of town with pitchforks and torches. New York ought to be its own country, with special entry permits, and exploding collars to prevent them from leaving. For now, the psychological version of the collars is working, but I never want those things to escape. New York is monsters. It ought to keep attracting them from the general population and just concentrate on each other. Never leave.
Someday I kinda hope that we won't see New York TV broadcast here in California, and that California will ignore New York, and Los Angeles because they aren't for People so much as cockroach-things. And San Francisco is just getting more and more expensive. They can keep concentrating the snobs and paying through the nose for water supply piped in from Yosemite, from Hetch Hetchy. California has its own destiny, and we won't achieve that so long as New Yorkers are looking down their nose where we can see them. We know they're socialist bigots who hate everyone. We know that. We don't need constant reminders. If we couldn't see them, or New Jersey, on television they might stop being a bad influence of people who could potentially do better things with their lives than emulate fat cheating whores on Jersey Shores.
This is a big part of why I am a fan of not turning on the TV. We basically get the weather report and the stocks and that's about it from this country. Everything out of DC is bad news. Everything out of New York is horrifying snobbery and socialist propaganda to a background of murder reports where race is carefully excluded. We don't want to be associated with New York out here. Its less savory than Tijuana or Mexico City. There's this whole huge country out here and its nothing like New York. Or New Jersey. You Easterners should deal with them. They're YOUR PROBLEM. I'll watch Top Gear on BBC, and Dad likes Midsommer Murders (same as The Stig), and I've always got time for a California's Gold re-run because Huell Howser was a good man who saw the best in people, much nicer than me. For the rest, I'll take a walk or read a book or cook some delicious food. I don't need to abuse myself putting up with New Yorkers. They can go straight to hell, of course... they're already there. In the civilized world, the places that aren't New York, we already know that New York is hell because it is full of demons. They're on TV bragging about it.
Flowers are up. Leaves are out and growing bigger fast. We had rain yesterday morning, but it was gone in a few hours and dried out by mid afternoon. It was clear last night, and its warming up fast today. Beautiful sharp blue sky, breeze, and the neighborhood sound of what sounds like a leaf grinder somewhere close by. This neighborhood has farms around it, ones that have gone to seed, because it is hard to make a living farming, and its a lot more work than people think.
We are supposed to get 80'F days by this weekend. Maybe that will happen. We had a couple warm days a week ago. Upside of the drought is the plants are going nuts a bit early. And the warm weather encourages the flowers. Every yard with tulip bulbs has them up and brilliant, and in the forests, wild iris are doing the same thing. The Sierras are famous for flowers. The dogwood is budding so I expect those will flower out pretty soon. We also have leaves on the sheltered fig tree, the one against the house, and its just a matter of time before the big one leafs out. Probably in the next couple weeks. Despite it dropping to 40'F last night, that's not freezing so that's probably as cold as it will get for the rest of the spring and summer.
There's many cheerful sounds this morning. People tidying up after the rain, the garbage truck rumbling around, and folks are still adjusting to Daylight Savings Time. Dad and I both slept in till after it started getting light out. We're both up late, reading books. Good for your noggin to read, you know. I even reactivated my Goodreads account. If I'm going to be a volunteer librarian, I should be reading a couple books a week, not just fan fiction of dubious quality. I can't do boating because my insulin pump isn't waterproof, and anybody who goes boating knows you eventually end up in the water.
Looks fun, right? That's nearby, just up the hill about 15 miles. Small sailboats on lakes are really fun. They do flip over, and the winds tend to be unreliable, but they're small and the lakes aren't too big so its fine. Some people paddleboard, others row, and most have a bass boat to fish, though the lake is full of mercury so its not such a great thing to eat those fish. There's a mine at the bottom, which was dammed up and flooded for the local water supply. Seeing a connection there between eccentric behavior and water supply?
Anyway, use proper filters so you're not consuming as much of it. Time for my walk. Cheers!
Novellists have the dubious requirement of knowing everything about which they write. It becomes painfully obvious when they don't. You can't write a smarter character than you are yourself, for instance, because you literally cannot think like they do. My divorce taught me that I literally cannot understand women, so I've opted not to write from their perspective again if I can possibly help it. I suspect my male readers will feel kinship over this when I finally get around to publishing novels again, and women will feel a sense of relief for not being mischaracterized, when they aren't outraged that I refuse to try. Probably.
I spent years researching the last ice age, and the critters that lived during it, because I learned while getting my geology degree that ice ages only take breaks, they don't really end until something really substantial, like supervolcanoes erupting or comets hit the earth, or the sun suddenly increases its output during just the right phase of the Milancovic cycle, none of which involves burning coal or petroleum. Funny, right? So anyway, I learned that the glaciers will come back and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that it can happen in only 40 years, during half a normal person's lifetime. The Russians claim only 20 years, and Wrangell Island, where it was found, is their territory so they have primacy on the evidence, but also reason for further funding despite the cheapness of Vodka. Cigars and Coeds are still requirements for proper research. And Russian Tobacco is famously awful. I also learned that Eastern Siberia, oddly enough, did not get glaciers. The river valleys that braid and flood north of the Sea of Okhotsk, west of Kamchatka, did not freeze solid. They got snow, but the snow would also melt every spring. So it was relatively mild to live there and its a major settlement area of prehistoric man. Most of the eventual immigrants that settled North, Central, and South America came from there originally.
I also learned about the huge predators, the places that didn't get glaciers along the coastlines, the banana belt that runs down the back of the Rockies in which both animals and people moved to land in the plains, and keep in mind that it was wetter and more treed then, but also that soil was still recovering from previous glacial advances, and there were giant animals running around, including 400 pound beavers. 900 pound solid shelled, vicious relatives of the Moa who spent most of their time in South America but eventually got up here, lions with forebrains as big as our own that may have been sapient, super-vicious sabercats which were like a combination of a Mike Tyson proportioned fighter that had its hands and feet tipped by ripping claws like something from a horror movie, only this actually existed and may be the origin of why "SHH!" is universal for our entire species. It probably ate many of us. There were also dire wolves, an actual species not just a Hobbit monster, which were 4-5 feet at the shoulder and weighed 200 pounds, and could run and run. There were ground sloths that weighed 5000 pounds and were probably fast, not slow. Would we call them giant ground fasts? We also had hippos and camels came from here and antelope and the cheetahs that ate them, and lots of critters slightly smaller than you find in Africa but largely the same otherwise. Millions of pelicans still winter up in Three Forks Montana, 1000 miles from the ocean, because that's where they go. Where they've always gone. America is a really weird continent, geologically and geographically.
We also had really weird weather during the ice age. We would get serious torrential rains, of 125 inches a year in San Francisco and Oakland, and when man finally came there, the very tall redwoods on the hills above Oakland were visible out to sea before you could see San Francisco itself, merely a low peninsula then. Picture that.
I learned all this because I was researching for a novel I wanted to write about the glaciers coming back, and asinine fools with DNA coding technology decide to bring back the ice age mammals and loose them on the rest of us to be eaten and trampled, mostly because they can and know better than to leave them extinct so we have something to eat. Did I mention I have a low opinion of people? Life offers many opportunities to observe just how horrible people are. Any time you think you'd seen the worst possible thing, someone new does something worse. Small wonder apocalypse novels remain a popular genre of scifi, because all the bad people die off, or most of them anyway.
Well, I had better get back to my obscure Terry Pratchett research. Any author who sells this many million books is worth study. See what I can emulate for similar results.
Progress is Forward. When things get worse, like they are now, that's Anti-Gress. You are a Peasant. You deserve Anti-Gress.
California has decided that they think that chickens deserve bigger cages. Rather than pass a law that chickens raised in California require x amount of square feet of living space each, or a smaller number when shared with a combined flock of birds in a huge coop, which allows them to exercise, NO, California passed a law that any eggs sold in California had to come from birds getting this space requirement met. This has really irritated folks in other states who can't afford to tear down all their cages and rebuild them to meet California standards which could change again next year when they sell eggs nationally, including to California, despite being over 1400 miles away. So they're suing California in federal court in Fresno. Oops. Somehow, I think California eggs are going to get more expensive, and egg producers in the state will be the real winners.
Another bizarre thing is a few years ago, some crank got video of a condor eating pebbles and claimed they were lead bullets. To correct this terrible movie prank, instead of investigating properly, the govt passed a law that banned lead bullets. No, really. Banned them. Apparently, police officers now just use harsh language against villains, who are not terribly interested in following this particular law. Which you can avoid by going out of state to buy bullets. As long as you don't bring any fruits or vegetables back across the border with you. The law doesn't ban shooting bullets, just buying them here. It doesn't ban making them either.
I knew a guy who did this, in Sunnyvale. He moved to Maine after he retired, but this is a real thing. You add a bit of Antimony or Tin to the mix to make them a little harder, and thus safer to shoot in an old fashioned gun.
Birds do eat pebbles, you know. Their stomachs need them to help grind the seeds they eat so they can digest them. If you don't provide coarse sand and pebbles to chickens, they won't lay eggs and will gradually starve to death. I kept chickens as a child, so I know this. If you would like to know what it is like to keep chicken, I can suggest a cost effective duplication of the experience. First, set your alarm to 4:30 AM every day, even Sunday. Keep hitting the snooze, but understand it will keep waking you up every 8-10 minutes until you finally get up. Hens, even without a rooster, start making noise enough to wake you at 4:30, the very first inklings of light on the horizon. In the summer, it is even earlier. Especially if you are further north.
Next, teepee your car and throw eggs at your garage. Do this weekly, because your neighbors are being woken by your chickens making noise every morning. They are pissed off at you and want you to die. Those chickens are the reason.
Next, buy 3 dozen medium (not large) eggs at the discount grocery, put them in your fridge, and try to eat at least them every day before the week is up, somehow. At the end of the week, buy 3 dozen more. Realistically, if you have hens laying eggs, you won't be able to give them all away, and you'll get sick of them after a while. But you'll keep getting more. And they're all smaller eggs, some of them brown, some white, and they'll taste good but you'll get tired of it.
Next, scatter 3 pounds of cornmeal outside your door. Now, watch all the ants show up. Collect dog poop and keep it wet for a week, and then at the end of the week, scrape it up and pile it somewhere you can still smell it. This isn't actually as bad as chicken crap. Chicken crap attracts more ants, due to the undigested corn.
This is like the easy version of owning chickens, and you'll note that a dozen eggs is about $2/doz. at most discount groceries, and maybe a buck more at a fancier grocery, compared to the irritation of raising chickens yourself. Just buy the eggs. That's what I learned.
California also passed a law requiring all firearms to stamp their serial number of shell casings once fired, so when these casings eject, the number is identifiable. This is a really silly idea. For example, responsible people who go to a safe range to practice eject their brass all over the place. A murder could pick up a spent case off the floor and drop it at a murder scene, just to make trouble for that law abiding citizen. And criminals get their guns from Arizona anyway, since gun runners buy them there on vacation and take them back for cash sale in Oakland to drug dealers and murderers. I met someone who claimed to make a decent salary doing that. He might have been lying, but I think he was just gleefully evil. So stamping casings? Silly. More hilariously, it does nothing to the bullet itself so that still kills someone without an identifying mark. And all revolvers leave the cases in the cylinder, so you can remove those somewhere else. Or reuse them. So this stamping thing is only really valid if manufacturers comply and it is quite stupid.
Smith and Wesson is already pulling out of California, as is Ruger, and other handgun makers will probably stop selling in California, so self defense will come down to long guns and rocks. And not going to stupid places where you're likely to get shot by someone with a gun that doesn't microstamp the spent case before ejecting. Oh, and its not against the law to accidently destroy the stamp, or replace the part, like the hammer, which makes the stamp, and the law does not cover replacement parts or require validation that stamps can be read. It was thought up by a moron, who deserves to drown in a rainstorm by looking up to see what that funny wet thing is. Durr! Pity that's a myth.
In any case, for a more charming and humorous note, I give you this:
Now remember what they said, why these things exist? The miners were too poor to afford proper driving licenses, so they rode motorbikes. Anti-Gress means that, like banning self defense from hoodlums with guns, someday gasoline powered cars will be so expensive that electric cars will be nearly as much but the only legal option so nobody will own them and you'll be riding a scooter or motorcycle, unless its raining. At which point, your legally-a-motorcycle Reliant Robin will be your car out of the rain. Except they roll over.
So obvious, switch things so its 2 in the front and 1 in the rear. Still a 3-wheel, still a motorcycle according to state law, still avoids the car ban, but still not all that safe.
But that's okay if you get hurt rolling over, because only human beings have electric cars, and you're just huddled masses, the Poor, and you don't deserve to move safely. You ought to be at home tending your chickens, not clogging up the roads for decent people who can afford $65K electric cars. They don't have to wait in the dark for a bus to take them from night school, unarmed, because they are rich people are you are not.
Enjoy your SUV for now. Enjoy your bubblecar, too. The govt is about to remove the ban on oil exports from the USA after approving the Keystone XL pipeline, and the price of oil will rise about $18/bbl to $120/bbl, which means your gasoline will cost another 30 cents a gallon. That's IF Russia isn't embargoed over seizing Crimea, cutting off 25% of the world's oil supply and Europe's natural gas. The war in Ukraine could easily cause the oil supply to jump $50/bbl in a week, meaning you'd be looking at $5.50-$7/gal for your gasoline or diesel fuel. Or possibly more, Peasant, because you aren't worthy enough, and taxing you so rich people can ride electric cars in the fast lane, while you mutter along in the rain our your scooter, that's Anti-Gress. This is what your future holds. This is what you voted for.
All that fracking will make the oil companies rich. If you own oil company stocks, you'll get a piece of that. If you don't, you'll just pay more for gas, and pay more taxes on gasoline which will happen because most will be exported rather than used here. After all, the upside of 27% unemployment in the USA today is less gasoline being used, which justifies exporting it for big $$$ profits. And poisoning wells. Ahem.
That and waking up at 4:30 AM from the neighbors hens clucking loudly, but would you like a boiled egg? C'mon, just eat one more. It's all the protein you deserve, Peasant. LOL.
So Wynton Marsalis came to Grass Valley last night and played a concert here with his Jazz At Lincoln Center Band. They were very good. Possibly the best. No missed notes, lots of skill and talent and ability. It was expensive, $65 a ticket, and you had to buy your general admission 6 months ago to have a hope of getting in. They played for just less than 2 hours, and it was exquisite. I have seen Wynton Marsalis live. I can die happy and fulfilled.
He played a lot of Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and a lot of obscure Jazz with the band, as well as "Its Not Easy Being Green" which is a Kermit The Frog tune. It is certainly strange living in a town rich enough to draw one of the greatest living jazz musicians. Part of that is Ted Nash, who is in the band, is from here. A few years ago, he convinced the band to detour here and play a concert, and found they could fill the Veterans Memorial Hall with paying customers, so it is now part of the regular schedule in their tour. Their sound engineer was very good too, because he subtly adjusted the mics on the different sections so you could hear what you're meant to hear in the arrangements. Big Band Jazz is arranged, rather than freeform. It is more like Classical Music in that respect, which is what Wynton Marsalis got famous for in the 1980's, when I first started listen to him.
The seats at the hall remain uncomfortable, since the place is actually an indoor basketball court with hard bench seats above and folding metal chairs below. They have other concerts there, and sometimes plays, and I imagine you could have a small convention of some kind. They want to bring in seat backs and pads so folks have somewhere more comfortable to sit, and I wish we'd brought pads to sit on, but we thought we'd get the better chairs by coming an hour early. Everybody else thought that too, so we ended up in line behind 300 people, and the comfy chairs were long gone. Oh well. Dad asked me if I recognized any friends and I had to say no, that I don't have any friends up here. I can't say that is sad, of course, because people only let you down if you trust them enough to give them a chance. And they mostly aren't worth it. Yet another reason to love books. Books are better than friends.
While we waited the hour between seating and the start of the concert, I read on my Electric Book (+2). Guards!Guards! is quite hilarious and I had to stifle my giggles as the story progressed. Later, during intermission, I read it some more. It really does fit into a larger shirt pocket. And its very easy to adjust the light so it doesn't glare. I'm still very pleased with it.
I played D&D when I was a teenager, or tried to. The trouble with D&D is it appeals to kids with poor social skills, but requires well organized kids with sufficient social skills to get other kids with the same interests together, often enough, to play a game like Dungeons and Dragons. Honestly, video games like Fable and Dungeon Siege were a huge relief, because they did the math for you, and let you play alone rather than deal with kids with severe personality disorders that liked D&D in the first place. Its heaven for kids with Autism, but only for them. Sigh.
Really, the badness of D&D is what got me writing fiction in the first place. Rather than trying to convince a bunchy of autistic kids to follow a story I'd prepared for them, I just wrote the damn story. Strangely enough, this is sufficient motivation. By the time I'd graduated high school and gone to college, I was able to write full novels, which is a lot easier than you'd think. If you simmered a story in your noggin for a month or two, it could erupt out of you like a pot boiling over. I'd write it down, and thanks to computers, you can add lines wherever you need to. Keep expanding ideas while the rightness of something told you this was the correct solution. Artists believe what they are creating is right, that it needs to exist. That it is creating itself and they are just the medium imposing the rightness back into the universe where it belongs, defined as they know it should be. Creation is very obsessive. Strangely, when technology took all the irritating table calculations from D&D and put them into a computer, which did those on the fly so combat could actually move in real time, it was so much better. But it wasn't a story so much. Only the very best RPG video games are stories, like Fable, and the rest are more of a slog like most video games, of jumping and smashing and the same stuff popping out of the same damned barrel. I hate ROM games. This is why Diablo 2 was one of the best ever. The maps changed every time you played, and the barrels got a random item each time. Sometimes just money or junk, but sometimes something you'd actually use. That was more like life, the randomness. Life isn't so predictable.
I got my Kindle Paperwhite (+2) today. I've been charging it. I loaded a Terry Pratchett book on it, "Guards! Guards!" which like all Terry Pratchett novels are a joke every paragraph. I am impressed with this level of dedication. That's a lot of work, writing prose that funny, that consistently. I uploaded some of the freeware archive stuff from Gutenberg onto it. Works. The bookmarks, in particular, work. You gotta like that. They also transfer from one device to another, like my PC. So you can shift back and forth and the device you're using knows. The size is perfect. It actually DOES fit into a shirt pocket. Amazing, right? And you can easily adjust brightness and font size and turn pages. Its really well thought out, and very light weight and 8 weeks of battery life. This is good technology. And its an electric book, a library of books with a screen of optopixels I learned about back in 1992. Very low power consumption, mushrooms of silicon with a very precise shape to work. Its neat. And I understand how it works at the quantum level, because that's how I learned about it first. People like to think that Quantum Mechanics is mystical and nobody understands it, but we use it every day. That's how cellphones and computers work. Don't confuse your OWN ignorance with the engineers use of advanced physics. Quantum mechanics is everywhere. It won't make a good fresh baked scone taste better because you included a pinch of allspice in it, but it will find your recipe quicker. And show it to you.
The electric book makes me somewhat more geeky, but I'm almost certified to shelve books at the library and I've got another job interview. And this time probably isn't hiring for mammary glands so I may even be hired. You never can tell.
I continue to listen to Unbeaten Tracks of Japan and I think my mother would have really liked this book. She might have wanted to go and hike through the mountains and the river valleys of Japan today. No malaria now, and people wear clothes, and there are convenience stores and actual hospitals and pharmacies and such so folks are healthy, even if they are very few away from Tokyo. I am starting to think that times are so terrible in the boonies, for so long, that going to Tokyo is a Sure Thing(tm) in Japan, which is why people put up with the overcrowding and the high costs there. Still, the mountains sound really neat to me. Wish I spoke Japanese. I think a mountain bike and panniers would be a fair way to see the place, at the same pace as Isabella Bird, but perhaps a scooter would be less destructive to the body and give you more energy to look around. Only thing better would be a citycar with the windows down, ones you could put up when it rained. From the sound of the story, it rained all the time, and the sweaty summers must be very much like The South here. Complete with thunderstorms. The downside of the electric book is it doesn't support audio. The upside is that it is thinner than the pictures show it. And I'm pretty happy about that. I can't think that road houses are still around after all the kids who could have been maintaining them, have long since moved to Tokyo, and everybody drives cars or takes the train or a bus. What will this place be like when its as poor as Japan was 140 years ago? Will we be covered in flea bites, mosquitos, and suffer a 30% death rate from malaria? I wonder.
I've been watching an anime (Japanese animation) called Golden Time. It's about college students, in law school in Tokyo, and their messy pasts and love lives. It's about how who you were defines who you are, and how when plans fail you can find yourself really lost. I know all about THAT. The dating scene at this college is pretty desperate too, and those with any self respect at all are surrounded by those who lack it. That's like real college. You have to respect an anime that shows teenagers what college life is actually like, and how unpleasant romance is going to be. I wish American women would understand that, but whatever. They're clueless or mean beyond words. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground.
Last season, there was even an amusing anime, a comedy, called Servant Service, which is about how college graduates with mediocre grades could take the civil service exams, something we have here too, and get jobs working at a local city govt office accomplishing filing of properly filled out forms, and directing poor people which lines to stand in for assistance. Its pretty awful work, but if you're not a great student, this is what you do. In the story, there were some amusing romantic relationships, but romance in anime is usually either tragic, where one dies, or comedic, where events conspire to prevent happiness and in Japan, they fade to black with the kiss. They'll give you nudity, but won't admit people have relationships beyond a kiss. I think, maybe, this could be a cultural problem. Upside to college stories is you get really messed up circumstances, believable ones, for why things aren't working for couples. Beyond the usual "money".
Golden Time has some pretty serious adult themes in it, like obsession and codependency and grief and betrayal and even really serious injury. In many ways it is similar to Honey and Clover, which is two seasons long, the first being mostly charming and the second being a serious tear-jerker with a gut-stab of an ending. I keep wondering if this show will do similar, but it is made by the same group that made Tora Dora, which did eventually pull off a happy resolution. Hard to say. This isn't a simple and limited high-school world, but an adult college with adult problems, like alcoholism, cultists, sexual consequences, and walking wounded resulting from all the trauma they've survived. It isn't easy. I'd say that Golden Time is how I would have written it, which surprises me most of all. I would have written a story like this. And that's the highest praise I can give.
