Ahem: "Fifty years ago — on Jan. 11, 1971 — journalist Don Hoefler started a three-part series in Electronic News about the Bay Area semiconductor industry titled 'Silicon Valley U.S.A.'" Hoefler hadn't invented the name, but this was the first time it was used in print.
It took a while to propagate. I'd already been living in Silicon Valley for a decade at the time, but it took yet another decade before I heard the name, though by then I was already well aware of its manifestations. I knew people who were early employees at Apple, for instance, because they were also science-fiction fans as I was. But though I'm electronically enhanced in a way - I'm the librarian who took away your card catalog and replaced it with a computer database, literally so in the case of a couple local colleges - I've never worked for a tech firm, though I had a narrow escape or two.
The linked article says that Silicon Valley is now so famous that people know where it is who couldn't find San Jose, the largest city in the area, on a map. I'm not so sure about that, or at least that it's always been this way. Silicon Valley was already as famous, and not nearly so tattered in reputation, in the mid 1990s as it is today, and that's when I was visiting a Brit who, on my mentioning an association with the place, hauled out an atlas and asked me to point out exactly where Silicon Valley was, anyway.
I defined it, at least then, as a concept rather than a place, but it did have a geographical location, and I identified that as the contiguous area where electronics seemed to be the principal industry: centered on the area just west/northwest of San Jose (Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino) and radiating as far NW as Redwood City, to the north to Fremont, and to the east and south through San Jose to its far-side fringes. Living as I do now in Sunnyvale directly on the Cupertino border, half a mile from both the old Apple hq and its new spaceship, I'm still right in the middle, but that doesn't mean I can get a good cellphone signal at home.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, January 11, 2021
Sunday, January 10, 2021
another 48-hour Shakespeare play festival
Silicon Valley Shakespeare does this annually: giving teams each with 4 actors, a writer, and a director 48 hours to write and rehearse a 10-minute skit based on a given Shakespeare play and employing a given premise, each different for each skit, and then perform them before an audience when the 48 hours are up. I've seen these before, and they can be pretty funny.
This year, of course, they had to be done over Zoom, and all eight were performed live as we watched them, so the premises were also all pandemic-based. Rather brilliantly, most took the characters and concept of the play and translated them to a contemporary setting, so the Zoom was integral to the plot and not just to the performance; a couple even threw in references to Wednesday's coup. Strangely, two of them were about cooking competitions, and a third also mentioned food: Macbeth as a corporate virtual happy hour meeting, with Mackers trying to hide what he'd been doing over at Duncan's place, pretending that the red stuff on his hands was cranberries he'd been crushing for juice by hand. "I like it tart," he says. "You know, in Scotland we don't sweeten things, we tartan them."
That was the most groanworthy line of the evening, and Max Tachis, the writer, also earns points for creative use of the chat function, having M. and Lady M. exchanging messages about the murder plot that they don't realize aren't private and the other characters can see them.
Better still was Ross Arden Harkness's "Blow Zoom and Crack Your Cheeks," in which a modern Lear convenes his daughters (all excellently characterized) online to tell them the terms of his will, but his Zoom feed keeps freezing at critical moments, so they can't figure out what he's telling them. (Rather than actually attempting to freeze the feed, the actor playing Lear just stopped talking or moving and then cut his feed. It worked well enough.)
But the best of all was "The Scourge of Verona" by Anne Yumi Kobori, initially a comedy but which turns into a tragedy when Juliet's father murders Romeo for possession of the last roll of toilet paper in the city. The Nurse, played by a man in falsetto, was especially good, but what made this play particularly outstanding in the bunch was the author's ability to write much of her contemporary dialogue in Shakespearean verse form.
I voted for those two in the audience poll, and I guess others agreed because they won the poll. But everything was at least interesting. A good evening "out" and the most refreshing I've had in a while.
This year, of course, they had to be done over Zoom, and all eight were performed live as we watched them, so the premises were also all pandemic-based. Rather brilliantly, most took the characters and concept of the play and translated them to a contemporary setting, so the Zoom was integral to the plot and not just to the performance; a couple even threw in references to Wednesday's coup. Strangely, two of them were about cooking competitions, and a third also mentioned food: Macbeth as a corporate virtual happy hour meeting, with Mackers trying to hide what he'd been doing over at Duncan's place, pretending that the red stuff on his hands was cranberries he'd been crushing for juice by hand. "I like it tart," he says. "You know, in Scotland we don't sweeten things, we tartan them."
That was the most groanworthy line of the evening, and Max Tachis, the writer, also earns points for creative use of the chat function, having M. and Lady M. exchanging messages about the murder plot that they don't realize aren't private and the other characters can see them.
Better still was Ross Arden Harkness's "Blow Zoom and Crack Your Cheeks," in which a modern Lear convenes his daughters (all excellently characterized) online to tell them the terms of his will, but his Zoom feed keeps freezing at critical moments, so they can't figure out what he's telling them. (Rather than actually attempting to freeze the feed, the actor playing Lear just stopped talking or moving and then cut his feed. It worked well enough.)
But the best of all was "The Scourge of Verona" by Anne Yumi Kobori, initially a comedy but which turns into a tragedy when Juliet's father murders Romeo for possession of the last roll of toilet paper in the city. The Nurse, played by a man in falsetto, was especially good, but what made this play particularly outstanding in the bunch was the author's ability to write much of her contemporary dialogue in Shakespearean verse form.
I voted for those two in the audience poll, and I guess others agreed because they won the poll. But everything was at least interesting. A good evening "out" and the most refreshing I've had in a while.
Saturday, January 9, 2021
quasigrecian thoughts
1. I rarely listen to podcasts, so the link text on a Slate advice column one, "My co-worker changed their name to something that sounds like a private part," will have to remain a mystery. What could the name be? Dick?
2. Speaking of which, the prompt identifications and arrests of Lectern Man, Viking Helmet Man, and Dick-Pointing Man are minor but gratifying follow-ups to Wednesday's disaster. May they have long spells in small locked rooms to contemplate their brief moments of glory.
3. B's reaction to the whole thing has been to dig out our recording of Sondheim's Assassins and play that as her choice of music while washing dishes.
4. I was planning on making a post out of judicious quotes from the Congressional Record by the senators in the election debate - I was most struck by Mitt Romney's "No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters, particularly when the President will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth" - but collecting an assemblage seemed beside the point now.
4a. But what I do want to draw attention to is a House speech by Chip Roy (R-TX). In opposing the challenge to the results, he said that he was taking this stand despite his profound disagreements with those who, he said, "wish to remake America into a socialist welfare state." And he embarked on a short list of his policy disagreements, which all reminded me of right-wing caricatures rather than what progressives really stand for. I suspect I know where he's getting this guff from. I lack the dedication to go after them all, but there's one I particularly want to draw attention to. Roy said, "We can't even agree that there is man and woman." And by gum, there it is, British-style TERFmania, projected from the mouth of a conservative Republican congressman in the U.S. It's the notion that the existence of trans people erases the difference between the sexes, when in fact it reinforces it - if there were no sexes, what would be the point of transitioning? - that really gives the flavor.
5. Our local paper has a transportation q-and-a column called "Mr. Roadshow," very useful for its info on road closing and repairs, driving tips, and so on, but sometimes it goes off-topic. The latest was a fierce argument over whether it's insulting to address women of age as "young lady." The defenses rather sounded like the infamous John Wilson, H.R. Haldeman's lawyer, who muttered that Senator Inouye was "a little Jap," and claimed that there was nothing wrong with saying that because he himself wouldn't mind being called "a little American."
5a. Anyway, a more agreeable digression in the Mr. Roadshow column was Mrs. Roadshow's recipe for shrimp with pasta. It looked about my speed, and we had all the staple ingredients already in stock, so I bought shrimp and made it tonight. Delicious, another addition to my repertoire.
6. Speaking of buying, the great tension-maker of our weekly grocery pickup order is the bag of kale. B. uses this to make salads for lunch, so we buy a 10-ounce bag every week. The problem is the expiration date. Kale goes bad (the technical term B. uses is "stinky") a day or two before the date marked on the bag (something it has in common with seafood, which was responsible for my bout of food poisoning a couple months ago, and nothing else), so if we get a bag that's got a week or less to go, it'll go bad before the next shopping. There's room for special comments on the order form, but these are not always seen by the pickers. What I've taken to doing is submitting a second weekly order to another store in the chain, one we ceased using regularly because their customer service is spotty, and ordering the kale again if we need it (along with anything else the first store was out of, and various items this store carries but the other doesn't). So far we've been lucky with this method.
2. Speaking of which, the prompt identifications and arrests of Lectern Man, Viking Helmet Man, and Dick-Pointing Man are minor but gratifying follow-ups to Wednesday's disaster. May they have long spells in small locked rooms to contemplate their brief moments of glory.
3. B's reaction to the whole thing has been to dig out our recording of Sondheim's Assassins and play that as her choice of music while washing dishes.
4. I was planning on making a post out of judicious quotes from the Congressional Record by the senators in the election debate - I was most struck by Mitt Romney's "No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters, particularly when the President will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth" - but collecting an assemblage seemed beside the point now.
4a. But what I do want to draw attention to is a House speech by Chip Roy (R-TX). In opposing the challenge to the results, he said that he was taking this stand despite his profound disagreements with those who, he said, "wish to remake America into a socialist welfare state." And he embarked on a short list of his policy disagreements, which all reminded me of right-wing caricatures rather than what progressives really stand for. I suspect I know where he's getting this guff from. I lack the dedication to go after them all, but there's one I particularly want to draw attention to. Roy said, "We can't even agree that there is man and woman." And by gum, there it is, British-style TERFmania, projected from the mouth of a conservative Republican congressman in the U.S. It's the notion that the existence of trans people erases the difference between the sexes, when in fact it reinforces it - if there were no sexes, what would be the point of transitioning? - that really gives the flavor.
5. Our local paper has a transportation q-and-a column called "Mr. Roadshow," very useful for its info on road closing and repairs, driving tips, and so on, but sometimes it goes off-topic. The latest was a fierce argument over whether it's insulting to address women of age as "young lady." The defenses rather sounded like the infamous John Wilson, H.R. Haldeman's lawyer, who muttered that Senator Inouye was "a little Jap," and claimed that there was nothing wrong with saying that because he himself wouldn't mind being called "a little American."
5a. Anyway, a more agreeable digression in the Mr. Roadshow column was Mrs. Roadshow's recipe for shrimp with pasta. It looked about my speed, and we had all the staple ingredients already in stock, so I bought shrimp and made it tonight. Delicious, another addition to my repertoire.
6. Speaking of buying, the great tension-maker of our weekly grocery pickup order is the bag of kale. B. uses this to make salads for lunch, so we buy a 10-ounce bag every week. The problem is the expiration date. Kale goes bad (the technical term B. uses is "stinky") a day or two before the date marked on the bag (something it has in common with seafood, which was responsible for my bout of food poisoning a couple months ago, and nothing else), so if we get a bag that's got a week or less to go, it'll go bad before the next shopping. There's room for special comments on the order form, but these are not always seen by the pickers. What I've taken to doing is submitting a second weekly order to another store in the chain, one we ceased using regularly because their customer service is spotty, and ordering the kale again if we need it (along with anything else the first store was out of, and various items this store carries but the other doesn't). So far we've been lucky with this method.
Friday, January 8, 2021
DT agony-stes
I must say it's kind of awesome watching what seems like the entire known universe rising in revulsion against the Giant Orange Slug. For nearly five years now we've wondered what it would take to break the spell of this monster, as he committed one tone-deaf atrocity after another. But as with Nixon and the "smoking gun" tape, there turned out to be something beyond the pale, and directly inciting a seditious terrorist coup to attack the Congress for the formal proceedings of certifying the electoral vote, plus gloating afterwards as if he'd done something really nifty, turned out to be it.
Shall we have impeachment, resignation, the 25th? All kinds of previously unlikely officials, including some Republicans, are signing up for one or another pathway, falling over themselves in their eagerness to get him out before another two weeks can pass. He's been permanently banned from Twitter. A university that awarded him an honorary degree decades ago has rescinded it. The Joint Chiefs have been asked not to let him blow up the world (a similar request was made about Nixon). His enablers have been caught up in it as well: Hawley lost his book deal; Democrats have demanded that he and Cruz resign. The rioters are facing felony murder charges for the death of the cop they clocked over the head with a fire extinguisher. (That's the least of what they deserve.) And so on.
It goes on and on, and I've seen nothing like it since the final act of Watergate. Like then, we've narrowly avoided something truly awful, so the reaction is hardly disproportionate. As with Meghan McCain suddenly realizing that parental leave is a good idea after all, it took people long enough to realize the magnitude of the problem, but it's welcome once it's come.
Shall we have impeachment, resignation, the 25th? All kinds of previously unlikely officials, including some Republicans, are signing up for one or another pathway, falling over themselves in their eagerness to get him out before another two weeks can pass. He's been permanently banned from Twitter. A university that awarded him an honorary degree decades ago has rescinded it. The Joint Chiefs have been asked not to let him blow up the world (a similar request was made about Nixon). His enablers have been caught up in it as well: Hawley lost his book deal; Democrats have demanded that he and Cruz resign. The rioters are facing felony murder charges for the death of the cop they clocked over the head with a fire extinguisher. (That's the least of what they deserve.) And so on.
It goes on and on, and I've seen nothing like it since the final act of Watergate. Like then, we've narrowly avoided something truly awful, so the reaction is hardly disproportionate. As with Meghan McCain suddenly realizing that parental leave is a good idea after all, it took people long enough to realize the magnitude of the problem, but it's welcome once it's come.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
electoral unvote
Right now an actual attempted coup is going on, as a mob storms the Capitol (not "protesters": protesters are not so violent). Clearly they are not interested in accepting Ted Cruz's proposal for an electoral commission to calmly and impartially judge the claims of irregularity.
In the meantime, though, I watched the Senate proceedings in the Arizona case as far as they went, before they were shut down (ironically, as a pro-objection senator was speaking). In an attempt to make some observations before either a) every other commenter in the world has had their say, or b) before our system of government breaks down completely, I'd like to focus on Cruz's speech. Cruz says that he doesn't want to overturn the vote certificates per se, just to appoint a commission to examine the "evidence." I put that in quotes because, of course, there is no evidence. The state executives, the legislatures, the courts have all had an opportunity to have their say, and they've all either rejected the case or declined the opportunity to try. So what could a commission do?
It was Pat Toomey, the senator speaking next, who in the course of what was otherwise an airy objection to making Congress the arbiter of state votes, made the substantive objection. What criteria would the commission use to determine fairness of election? And how on earth would they get this done in two weeks?
(Cruz got his inspiration from the electoral commission of 1877, whose replication was obviated by the electoral act of 1887, but let that pass. Let us also let pass that it was created because of some states submitting two competing certificates, something that hasn't happened today. That commission, by the way, had not two weeks but a whole month to do its work, and even that wasn't enough. Instead of coming to a conclusion on the merits, after weeks of partisan deadlock they fashioned a hasty dirty compromise by which the party of the North got the presidency and the party of the South got Reconstruction ended so that they could impose Jim Crow. (I'm not calling them "Republicans" and "Democrats" because they have nothing in common with the parties of those names today.))
Cruz says that if you believe the charges are false, you have nothing to fear from a commission. Yeah, right: that's like saying that if you're innocent you have nothing to fear from the police. But even if that's so: Cruz keeps harping on the 39% of people he says think there was fraud (which includes, he pointed out, a few Democrats: what he didn't point out is that they think the fraud came from Trump and the Russians), but does he really think a hastily-assembled commission could quell an opinion that the combined executives, legislatures, and courts of the states in question could not? Needless to add, the only reason these 39% are objecting anyway is because Cruz's allies goaded them into it by raising these specious charges in the first place. They make this stuff up, they prod people into believing it, then they use that belief as evidence that there's something really there.
In the meantime, though, I watched the Senate proceedings in the Arizona case as far as they went, before they were shut down (ironically, as a pro-objection senator was speaking). In an attempt to make some observations before either a) every other commenter in the world has had their say, or b) before our system of government breaks down completely, I'd like to focus on Cruz's speech. Cruz says that he doesn't want to overturn the vote certificates per se, just to appoint a commission to examine the "evidence." I put that in quotes because, of course, there is no evidence. The state executives, the legislatures, the courts have all had an opportunity to have their say, and they've all either rejected the case or declined the opportunity to try. So what could a commission do?
It was Pat Toomey, the senator speaking next, who in the course of what was otherwise an airy objection to making Congress the arbiter of state votes, made the substantive objection. What criteria would the commission use to determine fairness of election? And how on earth would they get this done in two weeks?
(Cruz got his inspiration from the electoral commission of 1877, whose replication was obviated by the electoral act of 1887, but let that pass. Let us also let pass that it was created because of some states submitting two competing certificates, something that hasn't happened today. That commission, by the way, had not two weeks but a whole month to do its work, and even that wasn't enough. Instead of coming to a conclusion on the merits, after weeks of partisan deadlock they fashioned a hasty dirty compromise by which the party of the North got the presidency and the party of the South got Reconstruction ended so that they could impose Jim Crow. (I'm not calling them "Republicans" and "Democrats" because they have nothing in common with the parties of those names today.))
Cruz says that if you believe the charges are false, you have nothing to fear from a commission. Yeah, right: that's like saying that if you're innocent you have nothing to fear from the police. But even if that's so: Cruz keeps harping on the 39% of people he says think there was fraud (which includes, he pointed out, a few Democrats: what he didn't point out is that they think the fraud came from Trump and the Russians), but does he really think a hastily-assembled commission could quell an opinion that the combined executives, legislatures, and courts of the states in question could not? Needless to add, the only reason these 39% are objecting anyway is because Cruz's allies goaded them into it by raising these specious charges in the first place. They make this stuff up, they prod people into believing it, then they use that belief as evidence that there's something really there.
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
social distancing
Despite my pledge not to go anywhere or do anything, I went out on two major errands today, intended to ensure that two things important to me remain in good running shape, my car and my cat.
First was taking Maia back to the vet for a teeth cleaning. This was relatively easy from a virus-safety point of view. You phone the vet when you arrive and the tech comes out to the car, takes (and brings back) the cat carrier from the passenger-side door, and conducts the paperwork from that location also. Everyone's masked except for the cat.
For the cat, however, this is not so easy. Maia is hard to pin down when a carrier is in the offing, and this time I resorted to trickery, due to the requirement that she not have any food in the morning. Both cats rushed into the bathroom, where the food is kept, ahead of me, which made it easy to shut the door behind them. Then when I opened the shower stall, revealing the cat carrier that had been secreted there the previous night, she gave a wail of dismay and huddled on the floor, but offered no resistance when I picked her up. Then I went back to the bedroom to report to a still-drowsing B. "We have capture," I said, which is what you say when the CSM docks with the LM.
Maia came through the procedure fine, and so did my car through its regular servicing. I'd last been there in July, when I could see that the pandemic restrictions were well-enforced there, and I waited over in the sales area away from the other customers. I did that again this time, hoping to avoid too much contact, even though the incidence of infection has much increased since then. But I need my car to stay in good working condition.
I'm particularly concerned about the new more contagious strand of virus. That's already in California, and has been detected as far north as San Bernardino. Since that's in the same state it may not seem very far, but California is big: that's 400 miles from here, as far as Baltimore is from Boston (6 to 8 states, depending on what route you take). So I thought it best to go now, before things get worse.
Another thing they have in places like San Bernardino that we don't have here is anti-mask protesters. What is with these people? What is so horrible about a basic and non-intrusive safety precaution? B., as a former retail clerk, is particularly incensed about the attacks on clerks for trying to enforce the house rules. If you don't like the rules, go shop somewhere else. Good luck at finding one, though.
Tomorrow I think I'll watch, or at least begin to watch, the Congressional proceedings with the electoral vote. They meet at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST, and I wonder what they will do.
First was taking Maia back to the vet for a teeth cleaning. This was relatively easy from a virus-safety point of view. You phone the vet when you arrive and the tech comes out to the car, takes (and brings back) the cat carrier from the passenger-side door, and conducts the paperwork from that location also. Everyone's masked except for the cat.
For the cat, however, this is not so easy. Maia is hard to pin down when a carrier is in the offing, and this time I resorted to trickery, due to the requirement that she not have any food in the morning. Both cats rushed into the bathroom, where the food is kept, ahead of me, which made it easy to shut the door behind them. Then when I opened the shower stall, revealing the cat carrier that had been secreted there the previous night, she gave a wail of dismay and huddled on the floor, but offered no resistance when I picked her up. Then I went back to the bedroom to report to a still-drowsing B. "We have capture," I said, which is what you say when the CSM docks with the LM.
Maia came through the procedure fine, and so did my car through its regular servicing. I'd last been there in July, when I could see that the pandemic restrictions were well-enforced there, and I waited over in the sales area away from the other customers. I did that again this time, hoping to avoid too much contact, even though the incidence of infection has much increased since then. But I need my car to stay in good working condition.
I'm particularly concerned about the new more contagious strand of virus. That's already in California, and has been detected as far north as San Bernardino. Since that's in the same state it may not seem very far, but California is big: that's 400 miles from here, as far as Baltimore is from Boston (6 to 8 states, depending on what route you take). So I thought it best to go now, before things get worse.
Another thing they have in places like San Bernardino that we don't have here is anti-mask protesters. What is with these people? What is so horrible about a basic and non-intrusive safety precaution? B., as a former retail clerk, is particularly incensed about the attacks on clerks for trying to enforce the house rules. If you don't like the rules, go shop somewhere else. Good luck at finding one, though.
Tomorrow I think I'll watch, or at least begin to watch, the Congressional proceedings with the electoral vote. They meet at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST, and I wonder what they will do.
Monday, January 4, 2021
notes of the days
1. One on my reading list has provided, not just cities visited in 2020, but cities not visited, i.e. those for which trips were cancelled. That hadn't occurred to me to do, even though for a while I was posting a monthly list of concerts not attended on the same basis. I think it hadn't occurred to me because I don't always know exactly where I would be staying. But I can say that known trips for the year that didn't take place would have taken me to:
Upland, IN
Albuquerque, NM
Montgomery County, MD
Ashland, OR, and Seattle, WA (by car)
2. I didn't participate in the "round-the-world" sf-fannish New Year's Eve party, but I did log in for the (British) Tolkien Society's Tolkien's Birthday toast (he's 129) on Sunday. I had a glass of the Chaucer's Mead that B. had bought for the holidays, appropriate both because this was a mead-ing and because Chaucer was an author that Tolkien actually liked, a rare find indeed. We had the traditional toasts, to the Queen (told you they were British), to Absent Friends, and to The Professor; TS chair Shaun Gunner read aloud the scene of Bilbo's Birthday speech (ending with Bilbo's last words, "I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE!" and not recounting what happens next), and then we split up into randomly-assigned breakout rooms to chat with our fellow members. Mine included two people I already knew, plus several cats in different households. I regretted that my cats were usually asleep at this hour, but the others told me that no, when I was out of the room for a bit a cat made an appearance on my video feed. "Was it the dilute orange one?" I asked. Yes, they confirmed. "I thought so. His name is Tybalt," I said.
3. Those awkward night hours when I can't go back to sleep but am too tired to work are a good time for watching movies, though they leave me easily impatient. Going over what's new on Amazon this month that I hadn't seen had me turning off both Face/Off and Donnie Brasco after a few minutes each because even the good guys were totally repulsive characters, and why is a guy called "Lefty" when he's conspicuously right-handed? On the other hand, Escape from Alcatraz, even though I knew already it would be more a prison-life movie than an exciting-escape movie, was so excellently directed and paced that I found it totally engrossing. Even better watching than Clint Eastwood being strong and silent as the chief escapee, was the sadistic prison warden who was played by - of all people - Patrick McGoohan. Uttering the same kind of authoritarian blither that so enraged his character in The Prisoner when it came from various Number Twos, he was cold and smug, McGoohan's acting specialty. Consequently the sound of thunder, exactly like that which begins The Prisoner's opening credits, and a shot of a helicopter landing on a beach, struck me as Prisoner references likewise. And it's a movie about prisoners, right? Right.
4. There's been an enormous amount of coverage of the tape of DT's phone call to the Georgia election officials (the state Secretary of State and his lawyer). Setting new records for horrifying, even from this source, it is best characterized by Dan Rather's tweet, "It's like telling the Nixon tapes to 'hold my beer.'" Numerous articles on the legal implications, of which the best I've read is this one, point out that DT's only possible defense against prosecution for attempted election fraud is that he really believes the guff he's spewing out. (Fraud has to be conscious.) Which he must believe, otherwise there's be no force in his threatening Raffensperger and Germany with their own prosecutions for fraud for having suppressed the alternative universe in which DT won. But there's a huge flaw in his taking this approach, and it was Jonathan Chait who best pointed it out: he "does not sound like a man who believes he has uncovered a serious crime. He sounds, instead, like a man who is engaged in a negotiation, offering his counterpart a cover story he can use to deliver the goods. ... He doesn’t care what process or rationale Raffensperger employs to arrive at that bottom line, any more than he cared what section of the Ukrainian criminal code Zelensky would charge Biden with supposedly violating." So as we already knew, at heart he's a mobster. He should be a character in Donnie Brasco. Then I could turn him off after 15 minutes and not have to think about it further.
Upland, IN
Albuquerque, NM
Montgomery County, MD
Ashland, OR, and Seattle, WA (by car)
2. I didn't participate in the "round-the-world" sf-fannish New Year's Eve party, but I did log in for the (British) Tolkien Society's Tolkien's Birthday toast (he's 129) on Sunday. I had a glass of the Chaucer's Mead that B. had bought for the holidays, appropriate both because this was a mead-ing and because Chaucer was an author that Tolkien actually liked, a rare find indeed. We had the traditional toasts, to the Queen (told you they were British), to Absent Friends, and to The Professor; TS chair Shaun Gunner read aloud the scene of Bilbo's Birthday speech (ending with Bilbo's last words, "I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE!" and not recounting what happens next), and then we split up into randomly-assigned breakout rooms to chat with our fellow members. Mine included two people I already knew, plus several cats in different households. I regretted that my cats were usually asleep at this hour, but the others told me that no, when I was out of the room for a bit a cat made an appearance on my video feed. "Was it the dilute orange one?" I asked. Yes, they confirmed. "I thought so. His name is Tybalt," I said.
3. Those awkward night hours when I can't go back to sleep but am too tired to work are a good time for watching movies, though they leave me easily impatient. Going over what's new on Amazon this month that I hadn't seen had me turning off both Face/Off and Donnie Brasco after a few minutes each because even the good guys were totally repulsive characters, and why is a guy called "Lefty" when he's conspicuously right-handed? On the other hand, Escape from Alcatraz, even though I knew already it would be more a prison-life movie than an exciting-escape movie, was so excellently directed and paced that I found it totally engrossing. Even better watching than Clint Eastwood being strong and silent as the chief escapee, was the sadistic prison warden who was played by - of all people - Patrick McGoohan. Uttering the same kind of authoritarian blither that so enraged his character in The Prisoner when it came from various Number Twos, he was cold and smug, McGoohan's acting specialty. Consequently the sound of thunder, exactly like that which begins The Prisoner's opening credits, and a shot of a helicopter landing on a beach, struck me as Prisoner references likewise. And it's a movie about prisoners, right? Right.
4. There's been an enormous amount of coverage of the tape of DT's phone call to the Georgia election officials (the state Secretary of State and his lawyer). Setting new records for horrifying, even from this source, it is best characterized by Dan Rather's tweet, "It's like telling the Nixon tapes to 'hold my beer.'" Numerous articles on the legal implications, of which the best I've read is this one, point out that DT's only possible defense against prosecution for attempted election fraud is that he really believes the guff he's spewing out. (Fraud has to be conscious.) Which he must believe, otherwise there's be no force in his threatening Raffensperger and Germany with their own prosecutions for fraud for having suppressed the alternative universe in which DT won. But there's a huge flaw in his taking this approach, and it was Jonathan Chait who best pointed it out: he "does not sound like a man who believes he has uncovered a serious crime. He sounds, instead, like a man who is engaged in a negotiation, offering his counterpart a cover story he can use to deliver the goods. ... He doesn’t care what process or rationale Raffensperger employs to arrive at that bottom line, any more than he cared what section of the Ukrainian criminal code Zelensky would charge Biden with supposedly violating." So as we already knew, at heart he's a mobster. He should be a character in Donnie Brasco. Then I could turn him off after 15 minutes and not have to think about it further.
Sunday, January 3, 2021
books of 2020
Several people on my reading list have submitted lists of the books they read last year, a meme I don't recall having been used very commonly in previous years. I feel moved sort of to follow suit.
These are not by any means all the books I read last year, but they are the ones I either reviewed or otherwise substantially alluded to in blog posts. They include finishing up a year-and-a-half reading project of the "American Presidents" series, but they don't include the next concerted reading project I undertook, since I saved up reviews of those and, as I'm just now finishing it, will publish them shortly.
Much of my leisure reading, especially in the pandemic season, has been directed through a list I've been keeping of books that attracted my attention through others' reviews, news articles, etc. I look up a sequence of these in a library catalog and check out as a batch the next three or four that the library has.
Also note that, of the 45 books listed here, only 3 are fiction, and two of those were read more through obligation than spontaneous curiosity. That's a typical ratio for my reading.
On Division by Goldie Goldbloom (Farrar Straus Giroux)
The Canons of Fantasy: Lands of High Adventure by Patrick Moran (Cambridge UP)
The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy by C. Palmer-Patel (Routledge)
A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic by James Gifford (ELS Editions)
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (New York University Press)
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century by Maria Sachiko Cecire (University of Minnesota Press)
The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun (Rising Sun Press)
Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Desirina Boskovich (Abrams Image)
MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon)
What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She by Dennis Baron (Liveright)
Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia (Basic Books)
Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table by Kit Chapman (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Dominion by Peter Ackroyd (St Martins)
Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff (Harper)
A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster)
Cold Fire: Kennedy's Northern Frontier by John Boyko (Knopf)
The Collapse of the Third Republic by William L. Shirer (Simon & Schuster)
John F. Kennedy by Alan Brinkley (Times Books)
Lyndon B. Johnson by Charles Peters (Times Books)
Richard M. Nixon by Elizabeth Drew (Times Books)
Gerald R. Ford by Douglas Brinkley (Times Books)
Jimmy Carter by Julian E. Zelizer (Times Books)
Ronald Reagan by Jacob Weisberg (Times Books)
George H.W. Bush by Timothy Naftali (Times Books)
Bill Clinton by Michael Tomasky (Times Books)
George W. Bush by James Mann (Times Books)
The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln by Sidney Blumenthal (Simon & Schuster)
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton (Simon & Schuster)
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
The Bible Doesn't Say That by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman (St Martin's)
Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Atlantic Monthly)
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (Doubleday)
Enough's Enough by Calvin Trillin (Ticknor & Fields)
You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia by Jack Lynch (Bloomsbury Press)
In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs edited by Andrew Blauner (Blue Rider Press)
Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music (and Why We Should, Like, Care) by John McWhorter (Gotham Books)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins)
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton UP)
First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama by Joshua Kendall (Grand Central)
The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus M. Bordewich (Simon & Schuster)
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna (Random House)
Countdown: An Autobiography by Frank Borman with Robert J. Serling (Silver Arrow Books)
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris (Penguin)
The White House Mess by Christopher Buckley (Knopf)
A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Crown)
These are not by any means all the books I read last year, but they are the ones I either reviewed or otherwise substantially alluded to in blog posts. They include finishing up a year-and-a-half reading project of the "American Presidents" series, but they don't include the next concerted reading project I undertook, since I saved up reviews of those and, as I'm just now finishing it, will publish them shortly.
Much of my leisure reading, especially in the pandemic season, has been directed through a list I've been keeping of books that attracted my attention through others' reviews, news articles, etc. I look up a sequence of these in a library catalog and check out as a batch the next three or four that the library has.
Also note that, of the 45 books listed here, only 3 are fiction, and two of those were read more through obligation than spontaneous curiosity. That's a typical ratio for my reading.
On Division by Goldie Goldbloom (Farrar Straus Giroux)
The Canons of Fantasy: Lands of High Adventure by Patrick Moran (Cambridge UP)
The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy by C. Palmer-Patel (Routledge)
A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic by James Gifford (ELS Editions)
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (New York University Press)
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century by Maria Sachiko Cecire (University of Minnesota Press)
The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun (Rising Sun Press)
Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Desirina Boskovich (Abrams Image)
MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon)
What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She by Dennis Baron (Liveright)
Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia (Basic Books)
Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table by Kit Chapman (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Dominion by Peter Ackroyd (St Martins)
Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff (Harper)
A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster)
Cold Fire: Kennedy's Northern Frontier by John Boyko (Knopf)
The Collapse of the Third Republic by William L. Shirer (Simon & Schuster)
John F. Kennedy by Alan Brinkley (Times Books)
Lyndon B. Johnson by Charles Peters (Times Books)
Richard M. Nixon by Elizabeth Drew (Times Books)
Gerald R. Ford by Douglas Brinkley (Times Books)
Jimmy Carter by Julian E. Zelizer (Times Books)
Ronald Reagan by Jacob Weisberg (Times Books)
George H.W. Bush by Timothy Naftali (Times Books)
Bill Clinton by Michael Tomasky (Times Books)
George W. Bush by James Mann (Times Books)
The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln by Sidney Blumenthal (Simon & Schuster)
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton (Simon & Schuster)
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
The Bible Doesn't Say That by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman (St Martin's)
Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Atlantic Monthly)
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (Doubleday)
Enough's Enough by Calvin Trillin (Ticknor & Fields)
You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia by Jack Lynch (Bloomsbury Press)
In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs edited by Andrew Blauner (Blue Rider Press)
Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music (and Why We Should, Like, Care) by John McWhorter (Gotham Books)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins)
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton UP)
First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama by Joshua Kendall (Grand Central)
The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus M. Bordewich (Simon & Schuster)
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna (Random House)
Countdown: An Autobiography by Frank Borman with Robert J. Serling (Silver Arrow Books)
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris (Penguin)
The White House Mess by Christopher Buckley (Knopf)
A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Crown)
Saturday, January 2, 2021
bureaucratic mysteryscape
The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA) made me eligible for California state unemployment insurance, even though I had been working only irregularly. Back in March I filled out an application. Every two weeks I fill out a form to certify that I'm available for work: they add another $300 or so to my account and send an e-mail telling me how much more I'm still entitled to on my claim, which is still about $1000.
But the PUA originally expired at the end of the year, and this week's email says, "YOUR CLAIM HAS ENDED. IF YOU HAVE ALREADY FILED YOUR NEXT CLAIM, YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONTACT THE DEPARTMENT. IF YOU NEED TO FILE YOUR NEXT CLAIM, VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT WWW.EDD.CA.GOV," which is where I already am.
But when I go to file a new claim, it says, "If you filed an Unemployment Insurance claim less than 12 months ago and stopped certifying for benefits, you must reopen your existing claim. To reopen your claim, select Previous to return to UI Online and select Register or Manage."
So I go back to "Register or Manage," which is where I usually go to certify myself, and on the Benefits online page it says, "Federal legislation was signed to extend the PUA program. We are working to complete the necessary programming to make these new benefits available. If you already have a PUA claim on file: You do not need to submit a new application."
So it would be accurate to say that I do not know what to do. I do know that it will be basically impossible to contact the state's unemployment department and ask. Anybody have any ideas?
But the PUA originally expired at the end of the year, and this week's email says, "YOUR CLAIM HAS ENDED. IF YOU HAVE ALREADY FILED YOUR NEXT CLAIM, YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONTACT THE DEPARTMENT. IF YOU NEED TO FILE YOUR NEXT CLAIM, VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT WWW.EDD.CA.GOV," which is where I already am.
But when I go to file a new claim, it says, "If you filed an Unemployment Insurance claim less than 12 months ago and stopped certifying for benefits, you must reopen your existing claim. To reopen your claim, select Previous to return to UI Online and select Register or Manage."
So I go back to "Register or Manage," which is where I usually go to certify myself, and on the Benefits online page it says, "Federal legislation was signed to extend the PUA program. We are working to complete the necessary programming to make these new benefits available. If you already have a PUA claim on file: You do not need to submit a new application."
So it would be accurate to say that I do not know what to do. I do know that it will be basically impossible to contact the state's unemployment department and ask. Anybody have any ideas?
Friday, January 1, 2021
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