Fatherhood's worst surprise so far

Speaking of reading books...

The experience of being a father is full of surprises for me, and most all of them are pleasant. But there's one that's really, really unpleasant.

It makes me an emotional wreck when I sit down to read fiction of any sort that in any way relates to childhood. Even (perhaps especially) descriptions of childhood woes that are cliched or trite have a devastating effect on me as a reader. I often have to put the book down and try again later.

Max (pictured), I blame you.

Frack this list: io9's 20 best sci-fi novels of the decade

Either io9 has such poor taste that I can safely ignore their recommendations OR I am clearly out of touch with what is happening in the world of scifi. Here's their list with my reactions:

Acacia: The War with the Mein, by David Anthony Durham

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Durham.

Air, Or Have Not Have, by Geoff Ryman

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Ryman.

The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Sedia.

The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson

I've read the first book, but couldn't finish the second (sorry, Tracy K and Jeff M!). It's definitely baroque, and I really like sections of the books, but there are chapters that just meander into pointlessness. Or maybe I'm not smart enough to get the awesome of those chapters.

Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean

Never read it. I heard of this when that terrible Benjamin Button movie came out, but haven't gotten around to checking it out.

Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow

Never read it.

Of course I have heard of Doctorow (it's boingboing's internet, we're just living in it). I've read exactly one short story of his, which I enjoyed. I actually think his (mostly appealing) blogging makes me hesitant to read his novels. Definitely something weird going on in my brain on this one. I should just pick up the damn book.

The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod

Never read it.

MacLeod (which I will continue to pronounce "McCloud" whether or not that is correct) is aces in my esteem for tackling politics in his science fiction, but I don't find his actual writing to be very good. At his best, he evokes Iain M. Banks, but cannot sustain it. The reviews say this is one of his better works, so I guess I should pick it up.

If you are going to read MacLeod, my recommendation would be to start with Cosmonaut Keep, also published in this decade.

Glasshouse, by Charles Stross

Never read it, but it has been sitting on my nightstand for several months.

This paragraph is copied and pasted from McLeod's: Stross is aces in my esteem for tackling politics in his science fiction, but I don't find his actual writing to be very good. At his best, he evokes Iain M. Banks, but cannot sustain it. The reviews say this is one of his better works, so I guess I should pick it up.

If you are going to read Stross, I would start with Singularity Sky, also published in this decade.

Harry Potter Series, by JK Rowling

ALL CAPS WTF.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

I'm reading this right now on the Kindle iPhone application. So far, it's pretty good. I'll update the post when I finish.

Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks

Okay, it's not bad. None of the Culture books are bad. In fact, the worst Culture book is probably better than most of the books on this list. So I guess I have no complaint with it's inclusion here. But if you haven't read any of these books before now, I would heartily recommend beginning with his short stories, or jumping in to Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, or Excession.

The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Emshwiller.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

Never read it, but I do intend to do so. I am a fan of Atwood's work.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Gibson (just kidding, but for real I have never been a big fan).

Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Never read it. I'll probably get around to it. I have read two others of Mieville's.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

This is not a great book, but it is a very, very interesting vision of the near future. If you want to know where things are heading, this is probably a more accurate prediction than most. (Note that the title is a complete sentence, not a phrase with a punctuation error).

Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Chiang. This is despite io9's assertion that:

Chiang is one of the legends of the science fiction world, often hailed as the best short story writer of his generation.

Where have I been?

Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Never read it. Heard of the movie.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

Never read it. Never heard of it. Never heard of Walton.

World War Z, by Max Brooks

Never read it. The Zombie Survival Guide was somewhat amusing, but did not leave me wanting more.

To sum up, that's 15 out of 20 I've never read. So it's completely not fair to react to this list so negatively. However, I will say that any of the follwoing novels could take the place of the Harry Potter book on any list, any list at all, that purports to be a list of great science fiction. All were published in this decade.

Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan

I recommend the whole series, with the caveat that Morgan feels like he must include some truly ridiculous sex scenes every 50 pages or so.

Pandora's Star, by Peter F. Hamilton

Truly mega let's-throw-everything-in-the-blender sci fi.

Santa Olivia, by Jacqueline Carey

If it didn't feature some (really quite innocent compared to a lot of stuff in this list) homosexuality, this would be an outstanding example of young-adult science fiction. Let me rephrase: This is an outstanding example of young-adult science fiction, but you will not likely find it in any young-adult section due to the aforementioned lesbianism.

Jack Rose R.I.P.

I'll give you a hand, Jason. Although my first post of the new era is not a happy one.
I learned today from Rob Cambre, an acquaintance in New Orleans, that Jack Rose died of a heart attack this month. Rose was a master guitarist whose work in the drone band Pelt would be notable enough had it not been eclipsed by his solo work. He was mentioned in the same breath as John Fahey, and he was 38. I saw him live thrice, once opening for Mogwai, where I met with him briefly. You know when you meet someone for the first time and knew they were ok? It was like that. But the first time was when he opened for Donald Miller at the Zeitgeist in New Orleans. He played this awesome blues piece that, over the course of a minute or so, morphed seamlessly into an Indian raga played at the speed of speed metal. It was one of the most transcendent musical moments I've ever experienced.

Listen and watch via authormag.

Monday posting begins

As promised last week, I'll be updating the blog with two or more posts each Monday. Today I've got a short insta-style post to Kevin Drum on Carbon Tax vs. Cap and Trade, and a link to a terribly awesome article about a new folding plug design to overcome the absolutely terrible U.K.-style of electrical plug.

And, via icanread via @rands, we've got a doodle about a walrus.

Design FTW

I love this. A simple design for a folding plug that will instantly be popular with anyone who travels with a charger in (or to) the U.K.

This is very appealing to the design geek in me: Great design overcomes stupid existing hardware, pushing it towards obsolescence while remaining backward-compatible. I work on similar problems in my current job (and it's just about the only interesting thing about my job).

Check out the whole article at Icon Magazine Online.

In a perfect world, taxing carbon would make more sense than Cap and Trade

Unfortunately, we live in a world that features such institutions as the United States Senate. I have to agree with Kevin Drum on this:

And at the risk of pissing off some decent people, I'll add one other thing. In the near term, no serious carbon tax will ever pass the U.S. Senate. Period. If you believe otherwise, you're just not paying attention to things. A big part of the surge in interest in a carbon tax is purely cynical, coming from special interests who are afraid a carbon cap might actually pass and want to muddy the waters with pseudo-liberal arguments in order to build an anti-C&T alliance and keep anything at all from passing. There are plenty of carbon tax advocates who are perfectly sincere, but I gotta tell them: you're being played by people who are the farthest thing imaginable from sincere. If you win, we're not going to get a carbon tax. We're going to get nothing.

Barring a sea change in the political situations (possibly brought on by a literal sea change?) cap-and-trade is our best bet to get some legislation passed that could have a positive impact.

It's worth checking out Drum's primer on cap and trade from April. I'm not swayed by all points, but it's definitely more realistic than the carbon tax.

This is not the end

No, dear reader, this is not the end. But posts have been pretty thin here at your humble blog of record. My job and new kid are absorbing almost all of my time. Our other Bellman are not frequent posters, either. But there are deeper mechanics at work, here, too.

The first is that DR has stopped posting. I hope that--if this blog keeps going long enough--DR comes back around. He was more than 50 percent of of the reason for the existence of the Bellman in the first place. And much more than me, he would fasten on to a subject and provide continuing attention, insight, and clear writing about it. By contrast, my own posts are usually quite inconsequential.

The other mechanism has to do with the force that drove us to blog in the first place. The Bellman was born in a truly bizarre political environment where the executive branch was busily eroding some of the most basic foundations of our country; and in a media environment where to be on television, one had to pretend that Bush was being "responsible." A lot of us started blogging just to convince ourselves that America had not gone completely freakin' crazy.

That's really not the situation anymore, and while the current events in D.C. and the world are just as important and far-reaching, they don't scare the bejesus out of me like the rush to war and the suspension of habeas corpus for brown people did.

The internet still needs its blog of record, however humble, so I am going to try a new strategy to keep things going: I'm going to collect blog-worthy items all week and do a blast of 2 or more posts each Monday. That way, all readers who remain can know when to expect new content, the world can continue to enjoy its faithful Bellman.

Other Bellmen may post during the week--as may I if something cries out for immediate textual response (that is, if the outrage cannot be contained by my twitter account (feel free to post your nom de twit in the comments... I'll follow you, dear reader)). So, if you've got the Bellman on speed dial, keep it tuned in! Or... some more appropriate, less mixed metaphor for continuing to visit our little blog.

So, like I said (3 times now, count 'em), this is not the end. Although, it is the end of this post.

Pabst for sale

I mean, it's already cheap, but this time we're not talking about buying beer, we're talking about buying the beer company.

The company is looking for a buyer willing to shell out around $300 million for its Willy Wonka Beer Factory that produces Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Milwaukee, Schlitz and Colt 45 — in other words, roughly a quarter of the world's supply of awesome. | via |

Let's all pitch in and buy the company!

(image source unknown)

No, they certainly would not

marriedtothesea.com

Take the ringer. I'll drive.

A member of the Bellman Nation just bought a late-model Ford Focus. A cute car in good repair, fairly described as a modestly priced receptacle. Nonetheless, there were two features that I hadn't experienced. One dashboard button activated cabin lights in the footwells and drink holders. The cool part is that the lights are in half a dozen colors, cycling to a new color each time the button is pressed. It's like a rave for your ankles.

The other feature of note is the car's bluetooth integration. After syncing a cell phone, a small text display on top of the dashboard will list caller ID information on inbound calls. It will also use a text-to-speech function to read incoming text messages through the stereo speakers. In that mode the radio tuning knob can be used to cycle through a list of canned responses.

It turns out the engineers did not include a reply for having the car robotically repeat "wax balls".

Specialized but Equal

FCC proposes some new rules on Net Neutrality, including the following:

"Managed" or "specialized" services, such as VOIP or subscription video services, may fall into a special category since they "may differ from broadband Internet access services in ways that recommend a different policy approach, and it may be inappropriate to apply the rules proposed here." The FCC is looking for input on how to approach this special class of services.

That's a loophole big enough to drive a business plan through!

Gremlins with a time machine

Two physicists suggest that the interference from the future is causing bad luck to our high-energy physics experiments:

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

via NYT (reg. req.)

Another reason to hate Glenn Beck, he has no sense of humor

There are some rumors floating around the Internet that Glenn Beck raped a girl in 1991.

If it weren't true that GLENN BECK RAPED AND MURDERED A GIRL IN 1990, then he would come out and deny these allegations.”

I also heard that Glenn Beck murdered and raped a girl in 1990. I was not shown any compelling evidence of this, but Glenn could easily clear this whole thing up by releasing his sealed criminal records.”

I don't know if Glenn Beck raped and murdered that girl in 1990, but without him releasing his criminal record, we will never be sure. |Poljunk|

I don't want to dignify those allegations by endorsing them. They strike me as almost as juvenile as Mr. Beck himself.

But my friend Mehmet recently sent me a link to a reply brief in Beck's litigation against the website glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com

Beck's legal team has surely advised him that this parody site is protected by the First Amendment. The same Amendment that allows Beck to spew his bullshit across the airwaves.

So Beck's legal team has attacked the domain name instead. But this is legal strategery as the defense team points out.

We are not here because the domain name could cause confusion. We do not have a declaration from the president of the international association of imbeciles that his members are blankly staring at the Respondent’s website wondering “where did all the race baiting content go?” We are here because Mr. Beck wants Respondent’s website shut down. He wants it shut down because Respondent’s website makes a poignant and accurate satirical critique of Mr. Beck by parodying Beck’s very rhetorical style. |Link|

The brief explains the parody involved in the website:

The raw materials of the Glenn Beck Raped and Murdered a Young Girl in 1990 meme (hereinafter, the “Beck Meme”) are twofold. The meme is a parody of from Glenn Beck’s own argumentation style mated with a Gilbert Gottfried routine performed during the Comedy Central Roast of “comedian” Bob Saget. During Gottfried’s speech, he kept repeating (in his trademark nasally voice) that there were rumors that Bob Saget had raped and killed a girl in 1990. Gottfriend admonished listeners to stop spreading this rumor – which had never existed in the first place. As there is no more sure fire way to destroy a joke than to explain it, much less in legal papers, ...

The humor equation is simple: (Outrageous Accusation) + (Celebrity) + (Question Why the Celebrity Does Not Deny the Accusation) = (Confirmation of the Falsity of the Accusation + Laughter) A poignant example of Beck using the Gottfried Technique is this Glenn Beck interview with Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim. Beck famously
said:

"No offense and I know Muslims, I like Muslims, I've been to mosques, I really don't think Islam is a religion of evil. I think it's being hijacked, quite frankly. With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying let's cut and run. And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview because what I
feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies. And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy. But that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

|Link|

I love the "counter-argument" of ChristWire:

[T]he court case against Mr. Hall is clear cut. He has slandered and libeled with the intent to do harm. He infringed upon Mr. Beck’s good name, reputation and copyright. He has sought to profit from lies. He is promoting a radical political agenda for his own secret nefarious purposes. He has made false accusations, akin to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater. His words are a threat to the livelihood and safety of Glenn Beck and his family. Mr. Hall has tried to hide behind the cliché of “Freedom of Speech” while in truth attacking the very foundations of American democracy. |ChristWire|

I also love their description of the defense attorney,Marc J. Randazza:

Who is stepping up to defend this criminal? It is none other than Marc J. Randazza, described in his hometown newspaper as a, “slimy liberal incompetent moonbat home-schooled moron lawyer.” Randazza labels himself with the fancy title “Esquire” as if he’s living in some 19th-century English hamlet wearing a peacock feather in his fedora. He runs a website entitled, The Legal Satyricon, in reference to a work by an ancient Roman pedophile named Petronius. (The immorality and sexual radicalism of The Satyricon was brought to the big screen some years ago by notorious Italian Federico Fellini.)

Lawyer Randazza seems to handle only the most salacious of legal cases, mostly involving impoverished bloggers. (You have to wonder what sorts of physical debasements these penniless clients must trade for his services.) He is a professor at a Florida law school (though it’s hard to imagine such a thing) and also claims to be a resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from infamous homosexual politician Barney Frank’s congressional district. |ChristWire|

I think it's overly simplistic to say that there are "Two Americas," there are far more than that. But I don't want to visit Glenn Beck's America anymore.

Mothers Against Drinking

I think it is past time that MADD stopped pretending that it is anything other than a temperance organization. They always blame the drink, and never blame the driving. Now they are even marketing their own brand of non-alcoholic beverages.

But the most damning segment of their official position page is their response--inadequate as it is--to the findings that so-called "distracted driving" is more deadly than drunk driving. Rather than finally acknowledging that automotive culture is a root problem, MADD actually endorses having mobile phones in vehicles... in order to report drunk drivers.

It's not just MADD, of course. Atrios recently blogged:

After taking the subway home from a show last night one of the first things I saw on the teevee was an anti-drunk driving ad. It occurred to me that in all the years I've been seeing these things I don't remember a single one (I could be wrong!) suggesting people take mass transit instead of driving.

Drinking and driving should not be combined, obviously. But if the collective energy brought to bear against drunk driving was instead focused on demphasizing driving as the main way to get around, we might save a lot of lives... even in situations where nobody's had a drop to drink.

"Can I give you a hand?"

He had gotten quite used to his hooks,” his mother says of her son’s artificial arms. “He could dress himself. He could drive his car. He could do a lot of things.”

…after the double hand transplant, Kepner had to start over again…Now in therapy, he is learning how to pick up small items, like cotton balls, and catch a ball, but he still has no feeling in his fingers. The nerves grow about an inch a month from where the hands were attached, at the forearm.

“They told him it will be at least until the end of the year before those nerves get down into those fingers,” Doris Schafer said. “Then he’ll begin to do things.” | via |

Meanwhile the evil is growing towards his heart and brain at two inches a month!

But seriously, that's pretty cool.

Now I get it...

I always wondering why our congressional representatives are so obsessed with France.

If people in [EU headquarters] struggle to understand how troublesome Congress can be to an American administration, they should try this mental aid.

Congress is a bit like France: prickly, status-obsessed, ruthless in defending national interests and addicted to subsidies for special interests such as farmers or industrial champions.

Both are ambivalent about free trade: as the Copenhagen climate talks near, it is France and certain American senators who want to talk up “green tariffs” in case China and India duck binding limits on carbon. |The Atlantic Gap - Economist|

It's because they're so much alike!

Ow, my morgellons

nataliedee