I'm Going to Haiti to Do Earthquake Relief Work

I am leaving this coming Sunday, February 14, to travel to Haiti. I shall be working with the volunteer deployment of Hands On Disaster Response in Leyogann, roughly twenty miles west of Port-au-Prince. I shall be arriving in Haiti on Monday, February 15 and to remain there for four weeks.

I would like your help. I am out of pocket $750 for my plane tickets, and would welcome any contribution you would be willing to make to cover my airfare. I am not a 501(c)3 organization, and these donations are not tax-deductible. If you want a tax deduction, I would recommend giving directly to Hands On Disaster Response, Partners in Health, or Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). Any donations I receive in excess of my airfare will be divided equally between these three organizations.

Wish me luck!

Tags: haiti earthquake volunteer donate work travel leogann handsondisasterresponse hodr

Thomas M. Disch 1940-2008

Thomas M. Disch was found dead in his apartment in New York City, apparently a suicide. Quoth Ellen Datlow:

I've just found out that Tom Disch committed suicide in his apartment on July 4th. He was found by a friend who lives a few blocks away.

I'm shocked, saddened, but not very surprised. Tom had been depressed for several years and was especially hit by the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor. He also was very worried about being evicted from the rent controlled apartment he lived in for decades.

Disch was one of science fiction's Greatest Generation, the cohort of writers that included Ursula Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ, who had been cultivated by editor Cele Goldsmith during her tenure as editor of Amazing Stories. Among his novels are 334, Camp Concentration, The Genocides, On Wings of Song, and The M.D.; and many of his stories are collected in Fundamental Disch.

I met him only once, twenty-six years ago, when he was guest of honor at Norwescon, just outside Seattle, in 1982. I remember Dick Lupoff interviewing him on the first night of the convention, and the chemistry between the two was phenomenal, making the interview a masterpiece of comedy. I was convulsed with laughter (and perhaps I should wonder what they thought of me).

NB: Ellen Datlow gives Disch's date of death as July 4; Wikipedia currently lists it without citation as July 2.

Tags: thomas m. disch science fiction sf suicide ellen datlow obituary dick lupoff norwescon cele goldsmith

Rory Root 1957-2008

image source: Comic Relief

Rory Root, founder and owner of the groundbreaking comic book retail store Comic Relief, and titan among comics retailers and the world of comics publishing in general, died on Monday, May 19, 2008, from complications from surgery. He was fifty years old.

Rory was a friend of twenty years. I came to know him because he was good friends of the owners of The Other Change of Hobbit. My partner Debbie Notkin was one of those owners, and over the years I had done various sorts of work for the store. But that's just how I met him. Over time, I played in his home poker game; then he played in my home poker game. He came to our parties. We went to his parties. While I was still working with OCOH, Rory would often snag us up to go to dinner after a signing at Comic Relief.

Rory was gregarious and affable, utterly likable, and big-hearted. When I walked into his store and he was around, as often as not he would thrust something into my hands and say, "Here, take this!" Sometimes he did it when we met on the street. And I note from the many reminiscences about him that have popped up on the Web the past couple of days, I was far from the only one.

He was a titan of comics retailing, more than just the owner of a single store. His knowledge of the field, both about the artistic content and the business, was unparalleled, and he shared his knowledge generously with everyone, helping new artists or publishers get started, and helping customers find what they wanted --sometimes before they knew they wanted it. He was active with libraries and with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. He was very pro-active about helping different artists' work be seen and different voices heard.

And of course, I liked him. I enjoyed standing on the sidewalk outside his store and shooting the breeze with him, or talking over the card table, or gossiping at a restaurant, or, or, or.... I'm going to miss him a lot.

I have no information yet about funeral or memorial services. Such information, when it becomes available will be on the Comic Relief Web pages.

Tags: rory root obituary comics death memorial comic relief

As I Please Celebrates Its Fifth Blogiversary

Happy Birthday Originally uploaded by ameliatzeni.

Five years ago today, I posted my first entry to As I Please.

Thanks to all my loyal readers — and I continue to be amazed that I have them.

My next milestone will happen next month, when, unless things go very much amiss, I expect to collect my first Google AdSense check.

Tags: anniversary blogiversary five years blogging adsense

Microsoft Office for Mac Launch Party

2008 Macworld Blast with Devo Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Macworld is at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week. Debbie's office is across Market Street from the Warfield, a concert hall. I met her after work last night, and saw the marquee lit up: "2008 MACWORLD BLAST — Microsoft Office for Mac Launch Party — with DEVO."

Sometimes life does not permit itself to be parodied. Who could outdo the real thing?

Europe Trip: Part 3 of 3 - Amsterdam

Westerkerk Originally uploaded by abostick59.

After six nights in Lund this past June and two nights in Copenhagen, we spent five nights in Amsterdam as the guests of Julie Phillips and Jan van Houten, before returning home by way of a ferry across the North Sea to London. I kept a journal thoughout this trip. Here is that journal, lightly edited to remove some non-travel-related material.

Thanks once again to Kathy Walton for goosing me into putting this trip report together.

Europe Trip: Part 1 of 3 - Lund
Europe Trip: Part 2 of 3 - Copenhagen

6-26-2007

Tuesday morning in Amsterdam.

I awoke several times in the night, disturbed by sore throat, clogged sinuses, and dry mouth. At 5:00 AM, I got up to take a Loratidin and some ibuprofen, and these made things much more comfortable for me.

After getting my writing done, and eating some breakfast, Debbie and I got our act together to go out exploring the city. Before we left, Debbie had done a load of laundry, and we had hung it up on a rack indoors to dry. Debbie's idea was just to walk around, getting a feel for the place. We had a general idea of finding a place where we could both eat and use free wifi for internet connectivity. We walked east into the center of the city, then south a ways, then to the north again. We had found one internet cafe that was also a "coffeeshop," i.e. a place to smoke marijuana and hashish. We decided to hold that out in reserve, and kept looking.

Eventually we got to the stage where hunger was more important than internet, and we chose a Chinese restaurant to eat our lunch. I had a very tasty barbecue pork with noodle soup, and Debbie had duck, barbecue pork, and crispy pork over rice.

Red Light District Originally uploaded by abostick59.

From there we explored into the city center, seeking the red-light district, which is said to be interesting and fun during the day. We found its edges and skirted them for a while, then consulted a map and turned inward, northward, towards the Oude Kerke. We found the red light district, and were impressed. We didn't actually walk down any of the very narrow lanes lined with prostitutes' windows.

Dam Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We sat in the Dam for a while, then sought out the Internet cafe and coffeeshop we had found before. It turned out that they hand no wireless, only desktop computers on which one could rent time. We opted to rent a half hour and to buy a joint for me to smoke. It was a mild weed, easy for me to control the buzz I got, and I wound up smoking the whole thing.

Then we went walking in search of the waterfront. I had gotten my directions turned around, and we walked south, away from the river, following a canal as it looped around the center of the city, and then joined the Amstel river. Debbie got tired and unhappy, and said she wanted to get something to drink. We found a cafe and got seated under the broad umbrellas. I ordered capuccino and she ordered hot chocolate. While we drank our hot drinks, the skies opened up and it began to thunder. We stayed outside for a while, but the wind picked up also, and we were at length compelled to move inside.

While we finished our drinks, I ascertained from the guidebook our location, at the Waterlooplein, and found that we were one tram-ride away from the Westermarkt stop close to Julie and Jan's apartment. So when the rain let up we went to the tram stop and caught a tram that took us home. The tram operator waved away Debbie's strippenkart — the multiple-use ticket used for transit here — so we wound up getting home for free.

We walked a main street until we found a wine shop to buy a bottle of wine for dinner — Debbie picked out a Beaujolais — and then returned to Jan and Julie's flat. We vegetated for a while until dinner, and had a pleasant meal of pasta with a Bolognese sauce that Julie had thrown together. Jan and Julie showed us historical atlases of the city and the region, and then we spent the later part of the evening relaxing. I worked through a bunch of sudoku puzzles. We wound up going to bed shortly before 11:00 PM.

6-27-2007

Wednesday morning in Amsterdam. Yesterday was a cold, wet, and blustery day. Debbie went off to the Anne Frank Museum, which is a short walk from here, while I did my morning writing. She came back with the report that there is a cafe with free wifi and Internet access there. We went out to have bagels with lox and cream cheese, and spent time on the net. I did the most cursory sweep of the net, not really having the attention span to devote to it.

After our Internet breakfast, we returned to the flat, and prepared to set out for the day. Our original plan was museums, but I wanted more time to walk around the city, and Debbie was seeming unhappy and grumpy. I suggested that we go our separate ways, and she was uncomfortable with that. I went on to say that what I really wanted to do was explore the city, and she responded really positively, and so we prepared to set out.

Emily Dickinson House Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We walked north along the nearest canal until we came to the waterfront, and headed along it to the central train station. Then we walked back into the city until we came to the Dam. This seemed like a good time to go to a coffeeshop, and so I bought a lighter at a souvenir store, and we picked a comfortable-looking place. There I bought a gram of sensimilla for fifteen euros. I had to roll my own joint this time, and rolled a small one using only a smallish fraction of the weed. Debbie and I shared the joint, smoking it down to a moderate-sized roach. Then we went on our way again, this time looking for the Emily Dickinson house. This house has a verse of Dickinson's painted on its wall, and as far as we know has no other connection with her.

Bronze Komodo Dragons Originally uploaded by abostick59.

The curves of the streets and canals are confusing, but at length we did find the house. I got some pictures, and also pictures of a grassy square in which were placed cast bronze statues of Komodo dragons.

Hemp Shop Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Then we headed back on the tram to the area where we planned to have dinner, at an Indonesian restaurant, where Debbie was hoping to eat a rijsttafel. We had considerable time until dinner at that point, so she suggested that we split up. She browsed some bookstores, and I went wandering towards the Dam and the Red Light District, taking pictures of what caught my eye and was photographable.

Then we rendezvoused for dinner, which was excellent. We ordered the smallest of the three choices, with eleven dishes (including a dish of coconut condiment) and it turned out to be more than we could eat.

Rijsttafel Originally uploaded by abostick59.

After dinner, carrying our packed leftovers, we walked once more to the Dam and the city center. We stopped off in the same coffeeshop for coffee and tea and to smoke a bit more, then we went windowshopping for a gift for our friend Phoenix Jackson back home. We found a hemp pouch at the Hash Museum, and then headed back home.

Once here, we had a long conversation with Julie, sitting in our bedroom, about how she came to live in Amsterdam. I get the impression that she is hungry for English-language conversation. Then to bed.

6-28-2007

Thursday morning in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam Canal Boat Tour Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Yesterday I was a bit slow to get up, but I wrote my dreaming and morning writing, and then followed Debbie to the cafe beside the Anne Frank Huis for Internet connectivity. I was able only to read some headlines and upload some pictures to Flickr before it was time for us to catch our tour boat, leaving right there on the canal, to circle the city and take us to the museum quarter.

Amsterdam Grafitti Art Originally uploaded by abostick59.

It was a long boat ride — the Anne Frank Huis is the last stop on a seven-stop route around the city, and the museum quarter was stop number six, so we saw virtually the whole tour, including a stretch on the river Ij, which serves as Amsterdam's waterfront. I took lots of pictures.

We got to the museum quarter and first went to the Van Gogh museum. This seemed somewhat of a disappointment, as what it seemed to have, mostly, was a collection of Van Gogh's minor work, with a few of the more known pieces, including some of the self-portraits and "Wheatfield with Crows." We wound up staying there only about an hour.

We had lunch in a cafe — I ate a hamburger and fried potatoes, Debbie had a pannekoek with ham — and then went to the Rijksmuseum. We didn't spend that much time here, either, although there was much more to see. These seem to be pictures that one would have to get to know to really appreciate. There were a number of Rembrandts, including "The Night Watch," some Vermeers, and a number of notable paintings by an artist named Van Steen.

We left the museum and waited for the next boat, which was due in about ten minutes after we arrived — it was at this point 4:30 PM. We took the boat the one stop back to the Anne Frank Huis, and then walked along the Rosengracht to find a coffeeshop to smoke and have a Coke, and then find something to bring back to contribute to dinner. Debbie had hoped to find some good bread; but the only bread store we saw was closed. We settled for a chunk of aged gouda cheese from a delicatessen.

Jan and Julie's Balcony Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Then back to the flat, where Jan and Julie and the kids, Eise and Josske, were all there. The plan for dinner was pannekoeken, and the cheese was a good contribution to the side. It is quite tasty.

The remainder of the evening was quiet. Debbie and Julie talked some in the living room; I drafted a brief blog post on which to hang one of yesterday's photographs.

Today the plan is for me to head to the cafe for breakfast and Internet for a while, and then for us to go with Julie to the Hague, to look at some museums and see sights, and to be Julie's entourage when she reads from the Tiptree biography at a bookstore there. Tomorrow we take the train to the ferry to Britain, and thence take another train to London. That trip will take about eleven hours all told, and we are both looking forward to it.

6-29-2007

Friday morning in Amsterdam.

Yesterday, after finishing my morning writing, I took my PowerBook to the lunch cafe by the Anne Frank Huis to connect with the Internet, check email, and so forth. Lynn Kendall was online, and so I chatted with her for a bit. While I did so, I uploaded the post to As I Please that I had drafted the night before and filled in the links to the relevant picture on Flickr.

I returned to the apartment just before 11:00 AM, as planned, so as to be ready for Julie when she was ready for the three of us to head off to the Hague. Between one thing and another we weren't out the door until about 11:45, and we got to Central Station just at noon. We got train tickets and sandwiches, and then got on our train, which whisked us away across the flat Dutch countryside.

The Hague Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We tunneled under Schiphol Airport, and passed through Leiden before arriving at the Hague just about at 1:00 PM. We walked from the station to the center of town, where the houses of parliament and the Mauritshuis are located. The Mauritshuis is a museum of old Dutch master paintings, including some of those of Jan Vermeer, including "Girl with a Pearl Earring." We wandered slowly through the halls of the museum, taking more time or less with the various paintings as we gauged their interest. Some of the use of light in landscape paintings reminded me of the Hudson River School in America, and I wondered about the possible connection, given the fact that the first Europeans to settle the Hudson River valley were Dutch.

Beach at Scheveningen Originally uploaded by abostick59.

After finishing in the museum, we sat for a bit in a plaza. Then we took a bus to Scheveningen, the adjoining beach town. There we stopped for drinks in a beach club, then walked along the beach as far as the lower walkway went, to the end of the long row of beach clubs. We then crossed inland and walked back along the road. We found a sculpture garden full of bronze sculptures, sort of in the manner of the style of William Joyce, illustrating various scenes from children's stories. The artist's name was Tom Otterness.

Tom Otterness Sculpture Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We caught a tram back to the Hague, and went to the bookstore where Julie would be reading that evening. She checked in with the manager, and got some recommendations of good place to eat.

We ate at a nearby restaurant that at night was also a music venue. Their sound system played American jazz, R&B (such as Aretha Franklin), and some early rock & roll (like Elvis Presley's "That's All Right"). Debbie and I ordered hambugers, which turned out to be enormous, and Julie had a ribeye steak.

Julie Phillips Reads Originally uploaded by abostick59.

The reading went nominally. Julie was anxious about what she would read and how she presented it, but it seemed to me that everything went fine. Because Julie had asked, Debbie gave some advice as to how to make her presentation tighter. But we all agreed that it went well as it did.

Tiptree Books on Display Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We got to the train station just a couple of minutes too late to catch the direct train to Amsterdam, so instead we took a local train to Haarlem that passed through Leiden. On the platform in Leiden Debbie noticed that the train across the platform was going to Amsterdam, so we quickly left to change trains. We got home shortly past 10:00 PM. Debbie and Julie sorted out the details of our train-and-ferry trip to London today, and discovered that we were to have received in the mail train tickets for the leg from Amsterdam to the ferry terminal on the North Sea. Debbie sent a not-quite-panicky email to the people who took the reservation, and also noted that they open at 8:15 AM. This morning she called them and was told that we should buy one-way tickets to the ferry and get refunded when we pick up our tickets at the ferry terminal. All seems to be well.

6-30-2007

Saturday, en route from London to New York.

Yesterday was almost completely smooth travel. We put ourselves together in the morning and said our goodbyes to Jan, Julie, and Jooske (Eise had gone somewhere, to school perhaps, before we got up). We walked to the Internet cafe to have breakfast and catch up on email. Then we took the tram to Centraal Stazione. Debbie had been told by the people who arranged our trip to London to buy one-way tickets to Hoek van Holland and get reimbursed by the ferry operators. The train ride was a bit anxious-making, involving changing trains in Schiedam on a rainy platform, waiting for the correct train, and not being sure we were going the correct direction. But it all worked out, and the train platform in Hoek van Holland was a short walk away from the ferry terminal.

But boarding was too quick to settle out the train tickets, and so we hustled onto the ferry. The boat was huge, rather like a cruise ship; except that it was loading a cargo of eighteen-wheel trailer trucks. We spent essentially all our time on the lounge deck, which had restaurants, a duty-free shop, blackjack table and roulette wheel, bar, movie theater, and other amenities. The experience was like a cross between riding on a plane or train and spending time in a spacious and comfortable departure lounge waiting to board that plane or train.

We had "deck seats," which turned out to be seating in an enclosed, reserved area where free coffee, tea and soft drinks were provided. At the price they were charging in the restaurant for cokes and coffee, I think I made up the extra price of the reserved seat in consumed beverages, although perhaps Debbie did not.

I did a bunch of sudoku puzzles. Debbie and I watched two episodes of Firefly. The voyage was about six hours all told. Debarking was slow, complicated by a bus ride from the vehicle deck to the passenger facilities of the port. Passport control was incredibly slow, apparently because the manager was watching over the young clerks who were therefore being very thorough with every arriving passenger.

We got our train refund settled out at the ticket counter, and waited for our train for London. We had missed, thanks to the passport line, the 9:00 PM train, so we had to wait for the 10:00. This required a change of trains, which fortunately was well-timed and quick. But it was approaching midnight when we arrived at Liverpool Street Station and transferred to the tube. We went to the King's Cross/St. Pancras station, which ought to have been a short walk to our hotel for the night. But because we hadn't noticed that the street we wanted changed its name as it crossed Euston Road, we walked too far and looped around back. We found the hotel by guesswork that turned out to be inspired. We checked in at about quarter of one in the morning.

The clock in the room didn't work, so I set up my PowerBook to function as an alarm clock. But my sleep was anxious, and I woke several times to check the time, the last one being 6:00, at which point I decided to get up and shower.

Betwen one thing and another weh got out of the hotel at the time we expected to, 7:30 AM, but the train took longer than we anticipated to get to the airport, and we were there after 8:30. The airline whisked us through an otherwise horrendously long checkout line, and sent us up to Security, which was nominally slow. We made our plane with time to spare, but not much. Once we were seated in the plane and everything was okay, I went to pieces for a while, tearing up. Not enough sleep, no food, and the relief of stress. I napped while the plane took off and got up to altitude; once cabin service started I turned to writing.

7-2-2007

Monday morning I missed yesterday's writing, because I was tired and jetlagged.

On Saturday the flight from London to New York was nominal. I slept some on the plane, I watched a movie (The Lion in Winter), I did sudoku puzzles, and so on. The seat was reasonably comfortable.

Once we arrived in New York, we had to wait in a significant line to get through passport control. Then we had to wait in a brief line to get our luggage through customs. Then another significant line to the counter to re-check our suitcase. From there, we discovered that we were outside the security cordon, so we had to wait in yet another line to be passed through the metal detectors once again. This is not okay.

We found our gate, and found a restaurant where we could get something to eat. Debbie had a chicken quesedilla, and I had a teriyaki chicken stir-fry which was lacking in vegetables for four dollars more than Debbie's meal, while looking like less food value.

The plane from JFK to SFO was much more cramped and crowded than the transatlantic plane. American Airlines is pretty thoroughly committed to the policy of torturing economy passengers on its domestic flights, while providing business and first class passengers with exaggeratedly comfortable seats. This is a villainous policy.

We survived the flight, and after a wait at the carousel to pick up our suitcase, we met Lynn Kendall at the curbside. Lynn drove us home.

Europe Trip: Part 2 of 3 - Copenhagen

Swans Originally uploaded by abostick59.

It is my practice to try to write five hundred words of something every day, ideally first thing in the morning. By the rules I have set myself, they can be about anything at all, or nothing, but generally what they turn out to be is reporting on the events of the previous day. I have been doing this since the beginning of the year, and I kept it up through Debbie's and my vacation in Europe last June. It has been this morning writing, with the non-travel-related bits taken out, that is the basis for this trip report.

Europe Trip: Part 1 of 3 - Lund
Europe Trip: Part 3 of 3 - Amsterdam

6-23-2007

Saturday morning, in Copenhagen.

Yesterday morning, I wrote while eating breakfast. The plan was that David would meet us at the hotel at 10:00 AM, which he did. We got packed, and checked out, and headed up to the Kulturen Museet to check out the Midsummer preparations. It had rained heavily durning the night, and it was still steadily sprinkling. Nothing would really start happening until noon. We decided to go to the Villa Nottle and hang out there, deciding what to do next.

What we decided was that Debbie, Cathy, and Emma would go to the Midsummer activities, while David, Akiva, and I stayed behind in the apartment. I would meet Debbie at the hotel at 1:30 PM, where we would pick up our luggage and head for the train station. Which is what we did.

We caught the train for Copenhagen just before 2:00 PM, and arrived at about 3:00. We found our way to the hotel, a couple of blocks away from the central train station, and got checked in.

We talked some about what to do. Debbie had been feeling the burden of planning everything and through it on me. That afternoon was the best time, it seemed , to visit Christiania, the self-proclaimed free city on the site of old military barracks. I mapped out a route to walk there, and we followed it.

I don't know how to describe Christiania. Debbie seemed to have a sense of how it worked and what the mindset was in a way that continues to escape me.

We walked along Pusher Street and found a food court where we could buy hamburgers and pommes frittes. Deb had been feeling quite hungry. I had hoped that food would help Debbie's mood, and perhaps it did. Afterwards, we walked through more residential and pastoral parts of the place, and talked about what it meant.

Then we headed back. We walked together to the Christianhavn Metro station. Deb had said earlier about what would be best for her would be to be alone for a while. I suggested that she take some sort of transit back to the hotel, while I walked. She had said that walking was out of the question for her. She agreed readily. I walked back along a different route, along the pedestrian mall that was the main tourist shopping district in the city. I got to the hotel room perhaps ten minutes before Debbie did.

After sitting and doing not much of anything, I got the computer set up to use the hotel's free wifi. It was after 9:00 PM at this point, and I didn't have much mindshare left for actual surfing or blogging.

We watched an episode of Firefly using my PowerBook as a DVD player, and I went to sleep immediately afterwards. I was woken up by the sound of voices in the street at about 4:00 AM (it was quite light), but soon fell asleep again. We roused ourselves at 8 (Deb had been up earlier, using the computer) to go downstairs for breakfast. We came back up, and I got this writing done.

6-24-2007

It is Sunday morning in Copenhagen. We have to get checked out of the hotel before 11:00 AM, and we have a 6:10 PM plane to catch to Amsterdam.

Blegdamsvej 17 Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Yesterday, we set out first to find Blegsdamvej 17, the site of what was once the home provided by the Carlsberg brewery to a distinguished Danish scientist and, when occupied by Niels Bohr was later converted into the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the 1920s and 30s, it was the epicenter of the quantum revolution. Everyone who was anyone in the world of physics theory eventually made the pilgrimage to Blegdamsvej, and it sometimes seems like if one did and one managed to live long enough, one would eventually receive a Nobel Prize for one's role in the development of quantum theory.

So I have made my own pilgrimage, and got an assortment of pictures. Unfortunately, it was not the sort of place that was prepared for or welcoming of tourists. Debbie and I had cold drinks in a cafe across the street.

Oestre Anlaeg Vista Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We then walked through a series of parks, past the seventeenth-century earthwork fortification that guards the harbor, and had lunch in a cafe on the edge of Churchillparken. From there we walked along the waterfront to see the Little Mermaid. The statue was a tourist magnet, and at the same time I found myself tearing up at the thought of the story of the unfortunate woman of the sea who gave up everything she knew for the love of a sailor, and spent the rest of her days on land, every step feeling like walking on knives. She sits on a rock on the harborside and stares wistfully back at her home.

The Little Mermaid Originally uploaded by abostick59.

I had been telling Debbie earlier that Copenhagen, being a seaport capital, was more cosmopolitan and worldly than even Paris or London. The story of the Little Mermaid is a dream-expression of that cosmopolitan nature, the foreign-born sailor's wife pining for her home. I wonder what women gazed at her over the years and saw themselves?

Then we found the Museum of the Danish Resistance (which turned out to be the front side of the building of which the cafe where we ate was the back). We spent maybe forty-five minutes there looking at the relics of the history of Denmark during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation.

From there, we made our way back to the hotel, and took some downtime. After that, we went out again to walk through the shopping district and find the restaurant, Riz Raz, that David and Cathy had recommended to us. It was perfectly adequate for the money, but nothing special. Then we walked back, while I ate an ice cream cone. An episode of Firefly ("Objects in Space") and then bed. I slept soundly, but we were both woken by the sound of nearby fireworks some time like midnight.

6-25-2007

Monday morning in Amsterdam.

Botanical Garden, Copenhagen Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Yesterday morning we got up for breakfast some time around 8;00 AM, although it isn't clear, because the church bells that normally rang at 8 other mornings rang at 9:30 on Sunday morning. I finished my writing and was on the Internet, uploading some photographs to Flickr so I could post one or two to As I Please. I had just started to draft a post when the time came to pack up our things so we could check out of the hotel before 11:00 AM.

The plan for the day we had settled on was to take the S-Train to Østerport, walk through the same park we had walked through before, and arrive at the Botanical Gardens and spend some time there. If timing worked, it was my thought that we would also look at the National Art Museum, the massive edifice in the park, but we never got to it.

Hothouse Canopy Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We spent a little time in the hothouse, which was very warm and muggy, filled with tropical plants and trees. We climbed a spiral staircase and walked around the canopy of this forest. Then we went outside and sat for a while, looking at the vista of the gardens, with a round lily pond nearby and a larger lake further away.

Debbie and I walked around the lake in the gardens. We watched the ducks and other waterbirds (including some sort of crane or heron) in the lake. We found a place by the water to sit. Ducks approached us, hoping that we would be feeding them bread. We also saw turtles, one having climbed onto a log floating in the lake, and one poking its head above the water close to us.

We wandered on through the gardens, visiting the cactus hothouse, disappointed that the orchid hothouse was closed to the public. Then we left in search of food, wandering around a large block until we found a storefront that sold bagels and salads, with ice cream on the side. We each had a bagel with a topping, and a soft drink.

From there we walked through the Botanical Gardens again to the other side, across a plaza, and down one of the pedestrian malls back towards the Tivoli Gardens, the central railway station, and our hotel. We sat in the hotel lobby for a while until it was time to take the train to the airport.

The airport was an unexpected hassle. The line to check in was long and slow. Security was easy (although a guard took my backpack apart, searching for God knows what), but once through it, we had a wait to find out just from where our plane would be departing. Apparently, gates at Copenhagen airport are not assigned until the last minute. A long walk to the gate, and another wait until they announced boarding — getting into a line and waiting for a while before they slowly let us on the plane, checking each passenger's boarding pass and passport. The plane was completely full, but I wasn't too uncomfortable, and the flight was not long. I had a window seat, and was able to see sundogs reflected off the cloud cover beneath us.

Once we landed in Amsterdam, it was an even longer walk to the baggage claim area. I began to notice something about the Netherlands and its people: their sense of way and movement clash dramatically with mine, leaving me with the impression that they are intolerably rude. Part of me feels like I am an Ugly American for saying this; and at the same time I didn't feel this way in Sweden or Denmark.

Our train connections were easy and quick. Julie Phillips' directions to her family's flat were clear and easy to follow. The last straw of rudeness for me was the Dutchman who rode his bicycle onto the tram platform to consult the map, leaving no room for me to haul the wheeled suitcase past him. But it was just a short walk to the flat, and Julie and her husband Jan van Houten made us feel very welcome. I was too exhausted and cranky to show my appreciation, however.

As I woke up in the night, I became aware that I was getting a sore throat, and I definitely have one now. I don't feel otherwise under the weather, but I am concerned. I will try to take care of myself while trying to enjoy this city.

Europe Trip: Part 1 of 3 - Lund

Skårby Stone - Lund Kulturen Museet Originally uploaded by abostick59.

In June my partner Debbie Notkin and I traveled to northern Europe, to visit her brother David Notkin, who had been on sabbatical for a year at the University of Lund in Sweden, and David's family: Cathy Tuttle, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Emma Notkin and their nine-year-old son Akiva Notkin. Debbie and I also spent some time in Copenhagen, in Denmark, and the better part of a week in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, staying with Julie Phillips, her husband Jan van Houten, and their son Eise and daughter Jooske.

Kathy Walton prodded me into putting this trip report together, lightly edited from my daily journal.

Europe Trip: Part 2 of 3 - Copenhagen
Europe Trip: Part 3 of 3 - Amsterdam

6-17-2007

It's 7:00 AM British summer time, which means that it's 11 PM yesterday in San Francisco.

The flight from Boston to London was uneventful, but rather more comfortable than the leg from San Francisco to Boston. One surprising thing about it was that the cabin crew ran out of afternoon snacks before they served the rear of the cabin. They'd had an accurate head count; it's just that the airline hadn't provided enough food. The flight attendants seemed genuinely mortified, so it did not appear to be a regular event.

We had a long wait in line at Immigration at Heathrow, but everything else was nominal. We took the shuttle bus to our airport hotel, checked in, had a late meal, and went to bed at 11:30 PM local time. Up at 4:30 AM to make our flight to Copenhagen.

Debbie had made a major blunder of memory: she remembered our flight as being on SAS when in fact it was on British Airways. The bad news was that this meant we had to make haste from Terminal 3 to Terminal 4. The good news was that because Terminal 3 is legendarily slow, we had arrived in plenty of time to get to the right place and checked in. All's well that ends well; now we are on the plane, waiting to depart, while the ground crew double-checks the baggage. There was a discrepancy in the bag count, apparently, and the security protocol requires them to double-check, matching bags to people on the manifest. It means that we sit here and wait until the cross-check is complete.

I am feeling tired and frustrated and irritable. I got at most two hour's sleep on the overnight journey from San Francisco to London, and only five hour's sleep in our layover. I want to rest.

I'm in a middle seat here, and Debbie is on the aisle. I'm feeling a bit cramped, largely because I'm writing. If the computer were put away, I would have more room and be more comfortable. Once I'm done here, I will try to get some more sleep.

Apparently at the Copenhagen airport we go downstairs to take a train — the train to Malmö — which goes over a bridge from Heligoland to Scandanavia. That should be interesting.

I made one crucial omission when packing: I did not remember to include the charger for the battery for my camera. That means that I only have so much battery with which to take pictures. I have not been in a picture-taking mood, but I do well on vacations, and I would like to document this trip at least some.

Reading Michael Pollan on an airplane leads me to make the connection between Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and American airline seating configurations. This British Airways plane is comparably spacious to the American Airlines flight to London — which was a miracle of spaciousness compared to the AA domestic flights I have taken recently. Comparing beakless chickens in egglaying cages to people crammed into tiny seats — the similarity seems to me to be the indifference to the possibility that the crammed subjects suffer. Another thought that comes to mind are the "stress positions" used by abusive police and military authorities with the excuse that it isn't really torture.

Hotel Room View Originally uploaded by abostick59.

6-18-2007

We are in Lund, Sweden. Yesterday was a very long day.

The flight to Copenhagen was an easy one, once the ground crew found a way to sort out the luggage situation. I tried without success to sleep, and then took my book out to read, finishing it. When we got off the plane, the airport seemed deserted. The short line at the passport control checkpoint was just people ahead of us from the plane — our seats were close to the front. We made our way to the baggage claim area and waited while bags began to appear on the carousel.

My name was paged, in English, but in an announcement that didn't quite make sense. After a few moments' confusion we found the proper baggage handling desk, behind which was a woman who told me that my bag had not arrived with the plane, and that British Airways would arrange to have it delivered to us in Lund. I filled out a form that included my home address and phone, and our hotel address, plus David Notkin's mobile phone number.

We found our way to the train station where we would catch the train to Sweden. Just as Debbie had found a telephone and was attempting to use a credit card to call her brother, a train pulled into the station, and I called Debbie away from the phone. In that moment of confusion, apparently, she left behind the credit card. The train's arrival turned out to be a false alarm — the annunciators told us not to board. Four minutes behind it was the train to Malmö, which we caught with no problem, and learned would take us to Lund. Forty-five minutes later, including a ten minute stop in the central Malmö station, we were in Lund.

We were in Lund without any Swedish kroner, and unable to find a telephone, and when we did find it Debbie was unable to make it work with another credit card — it was at this point that we discovered that the previous card was missing. At length, Debbie went to an ATM and withdrew two thousand kroner with her ATM card. She bought me a sandwich in a store across the street, and while I sat with it, eating, she used the change to try the phone again, and reached David. After a brief wait, David, Cathy, and Emma came to meet us and escort us to our hotel.

I was in something of a state at this point, feeling too sleepy to think straight. The sandwich helped some, and so I imagined that Debbie could use food too.

Cathy and Emma went off on an errand to a pharmacist, while David took us to the hotel to get us checked in. We got our room keys, but it turned out that we had to wait a while for our room to be ready. We went outside and up the street a bit to a cafe, where I got some iced tea, and Debbie got a Greek salad. We talked with David some. At length, Cathy and Emma showed up, and Cathy passed me a box of loratadine — generic for Claritin — which was a great relief as my sinuses had been clogging and my eyes itching in reaction to the local pollen.

Debbie and I took our stuff to the room, and I fell over. Debbie went off to the family's apartment for a while. Then she came to doze with me on the bed.

At 7:30 PM, we met the family for dinner at another cafe, around the corner in a different direction. This time both Emma and Akiva joined us. Afterwards we walked to the apartment.

We returned to the hotel at approximately 10:00 PM, and went straight to bed. I read for a while (Half-Life by Shelly Jackson, one of this year's two Tiptree winners) and then went to sleep.

We woke up early, about 4:00 AM. We lay in bed for a while, and then at about 5:30 we got up and put one of the DVDs I had brought along into Cinnamon, and sat on the couch to watch. The DVD was Walk the Line. It was a smart thing to do, being relatively restful. Debbie took a shower, and I organized the money in my belt pouch. Then I got to my morning writing, which was interrupted by a woman from the hotel delivering a very nice breakfast of tea, toast, boiled eggs, yogurt, juice, and cheese. It was quite satisfying to eat while I wrote.

Lund Street Scene Originally uploaded by abostick59.

6-19-2007

Tuesday morning in Lund. Debbie and I spent the day taking it easy. After breakfast we went out to look at the nearby farmer's market, and walked to the train station so that Deb could buy a phone card. She used it to call the credit card company to report the missing card. We were walking towards the family apartment when we encountered David and Akiva. David was taking Akiva to the train to go meet some friends somewhere. Debbie and I waited a few minutes in a park by a fountain while David dropped Akiva off. When he rejoined us, we walked to the apartment, passing by the clinic where Emma had recently gotten medical help. David stressed how simple and cheap it was for her to get medical care, comparing it to someone in a similar situation visiting in the USA.

we got to the apartment and got settled in. It was easy hanging out at the Villa Nottle. People came in and out during the course of the day: a friend of Emma's; a colleague of David's, and so on. People went out on various errands, e.g. Debbie and Emma to the library. I went out in the afternoon to get a lunch. The place I had intended to go closed at 3:30 PM, and I had gone out at 3:20. So I wandered for a bit and found a pizza place where I got a smallish whole pizza to myself.

Afterwards, I went back and got some Internet time.

Cathy prepared a lovely dinner for the six of us: spaghetti with a variety of sauces to choose from to top it. The prize was one of garlic cloves that had been marinating for days in and sauteed in olive oil. There was also a tomato sauce, a jar of pesto that I didn't get a chance to try, and plenty of cheese to be freshly grated upon the pasta. Also bread, peas, carrot sticks, and fresh tomatoes. It was quite tasty, and the family company was pleasant.

Our suitcase is still missing. The British Airways' Web site luggage tracker indicates that it has been "located, awaiting confirmation." Debbie says if we don't get it by 2:00 PM this afternoon, she is going to turn into a flaming bitch, directed towards the airline.

We got back to the hotel room in the middle of the evening, about 8:30 or so. I washed my T-shirt, socks, and underwear in a bathroom sink and hung them over the radiator in the room to dry. We awoke at the time the clock said was 3:00 AM ... but after resting for a while and getting more sleep, the hotel maid knocked on our door at about 6 by that clock, which was really 8:00 AM. That clock was running slow, and so we got about two hours more sleep than we had thought.

6-20-2007

It's early Wednesday morning in Lund. I woke up between 4:30 and 4:45 AM and got up to piss, and have been unable to get back to sleep.

Yesterday after a leisurely breakfast, I took a shower (but not washing my hair) and we headed up to the Villa Nottle. We caught up on the Internet and made plans for the day. At length, Debbie and I accompanied David and Akiva to a bus stop across the street, waiting for the bus on which to put Akiva to visit friends. Then David pointed us to a museum in which we were interested, the Sketch Museum, and then headed off to his office. Before we went to the museum, though, we ate lunch at a falafel-and-kebab place on the edge of the University campus. I had a falafel plate that included french fries and a salad. Debbie got a falafel wrap that was too big for her. She wound up eating only half, wrapping it up, and stashing it in her belt pouch.

The Sketch Museum is a collection of drafts and sketches made by a variety of artists of work displayed in public places such as city halls, auditoria, public parks, and so on. I thought its organization was too overwhelming, with lots of things packed together, making it difficult for me to pick out something at which to look closely. If a person really cared, one could spend days and days in that museum working through it, getting a feeling for its contents. My eyes were glazing over after something like an hour, so where Debbie's.

Afterwards, we walked towards the apartment. Debbie changed course to check out church on the corner opposite to the apartment, while I went straight back. I got caught up in working out a sudoku puzzle that on the comics page of a local newspaper laying around the living room. Emma sat in a corner, reading and net surfing.

The family gathered together again in the early evening. David went to the bus stop to meet Akiva, and the rest of us started out to the same pizza restaurant where I had lunch on Monday. We reunited on the walk there. The conversation over dinner revolved around a topic that Akiva brought up: why are actors in a film more notable and famous than the director?

We returned to the apartment after eating, and Emma set up the laptop she uses so that she and Debbie (and anyone else who was interested, including me) could watch a favorite movie of hers: She's the Man, somewhat loosely adapted from Twelfth Night by Shakespeare. It was basically entertaining, but parts of it were painful, and it was imbued by a particular sort of gender essentialism that runs contrary to the cross-dressing fun that is the heart of the story. I found it interesting that the lead actress looked kind of boring to me when she was presenting as a girl, but done up as a boy she looked really hot to my eye, in ways that the born-boys in the film simply did not.

I was moved by the ending, which surprised me. Perhaps I was moved by the ending of the movie I wanted it to be.

We got back to the room shortly after 10:00 PM, which was good. Unfortunately, my sleep schedule hadn't adjusted yet, and I was awake (as I said) early in the morning.

6-21-2007

After finishing yesterday's breakfast, I showered and — at last! — washed my hair, which badly needed it. Debbie was ready before I was, and went down to the cafe outside.

I went out and found David and Debbie at the cafe. Deb was ordering her drink and ordered a cappucino for me. We sat and talked for a while, drinking our respective drinks. When Debbie and I had finished, we went for a short walk to the Tiger 10-kroner store to see what sort of tchachkes might be available. I didn't see anything I wanted enough to buy, but Debbie found a couple of things for house gifts

We returned to the cafe and saw that Emma had joined her father. I joked, "Jeeze, David, we leave you for five minutes and come back to find you with a hot babe!" We sat for a little bit, then went on our separate ways, with Emma leading Debbie and I to the grounds of her school. The school had been there and in continuous operation since the eleventh century, although none of the buildings were that old.

From there, Emma led us home, and we hung out there (me on the Internet) until David rejoined us. Debbie and I ate lunch of leftover pizza and falafel from the day before.

Lundagard Fountain Originally uploaded by abostick59.

David showed us where the Kulturen museum was located, on the far side of the Lundagard, then headed off on his own business. Debbie and I went into the museum, which seems to be a historical museum of the region with a vast collecion of archaeological material. They had special exhibits of modernist art (which we didn't see) and on the art of sexual desire (which we did). The desire exhibit struck me as lukewarm as an art exhibit, but I was entertained by the way in which the exhibition was fairly explicit (with giant drawings of erect penii as direction markers) and at the same time having young children — some accompanied by parents, others not — passing through it.

Interior of Lund Cathedral Originally uploaded by abostick59.

After we were museumed out, we went to the old cathedral to catch the English-language tour, but found that we were early. Debbie was grouchy and unhappy, and I decided that both of us were better off if we went our separate ways, so I returned to the apartment, where I poured over a sudoku puzzle for a while until I fell asleep, waking at around 5 PM when Debbie returned.

The family (sans Cathy) went out to dinner at an Indian buffet. We returned to the apartment to play Apples to Apples, but I kept nodding off, and bowed out of the game. At eight Debbie and I returned to our hotel, where I, at least, fell over into bed. I woke for a while around 3 AM, but got back to fitful sleep until Deb woke me at 7:00.

6-22-2007

Thursday morning in Lund. It is Midsummer Day, and the rain is pouring down. It rained all night.

Yesterday, after finishing my morning writing, we headed up to the Villa Nottle. The day was to be an expedition to the Swedish countryside. We were to go in two cars, accompanied by Emma's friend Laura and Laura's mother Eva. Debbie and I rode along with Emma in the car driven by David; Cathy, Akiva, and Laura rode in Eva's car.

It was our first chance to see how the city of Lund fit into the surrounding landscape. We have hitherto been walking around what is actually a fairly small area, lined with cobblestone streets and filled with old buildings. Following the main road out of town let us see how the medieval town center related to the more modern outskirts as well as the surrounding farmlands. Sweden is not heavily populated: it is about the size of California, and is occupied by some nine million people. Once we left the city, which took only about five minutes of driving, we were in the open countryside.

Viking Figurehead Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Our first destination was Foteviken, a restoration of a Viking settlement just outside Höllviken, a town on the coast whose name translates into "Viking Hall." Officially, Foteviken is an active restoration and museum of Viking lifestyle, akin to Old Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg in the US. People dress in Viking clothing and carry out typical daily tasks — smithing, fishing, making clothes, and so on. There is also, though, a strong element of the community members having chosen this lifestyle, as if they were opting out of larger society and choosing to live a simpler life as Vikings. I didn't think of it then, but the word coming to my mind now is "byworlders" (from the Poul Anderson story of the same title). Opting out is on my mind, because of Michal Pollan's profile of the grass farmers in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Cathy Tuttle has been studying sustainable living while she has been living here. I feel as if I am missing an opportunity to learn something about it from her.

Thinghöll of Foteviken Originally uploaded by abostick59.

We were given an English-language tour of Foteviken by the community's leader. He showed us a couple of houses and the main hall — the Thinghöll — as well as some of the structures where work was done: the smithy, a wool-working area, and so on. He told us of the Viking Market that would take place the next week when Vikings from all over the world would gather at Foteviken. The gathering Vikings would be much more like Creative Anachronists than the dedicated byworlders here. I thought of the stories I had heard from the 1975 Aussiecon, where Vikings, described as the Australian analog of the SCA, put on a fighting demonstration.

After the tour, we visited the burial mound of King Fote, who gives Foteviken its name. Then we had a picnic lunch.

From there we drove to Skanör, a fishing and beach resort town a few kilometers away, and sat on the beach for a while. I took my sandals and socks off and wet my feet in the Öresund, then sat for a while on the sand with Cathy and Eva. Debbie and David sat on the seawall and talked alone, and the kids played in the water.

Färsk Fisk Originally uploaded by abostick59.

All day, the weather was grey and overcast, which made the beach tolerable, as at that time of day I don't think I would have lasted long under the full strength of the sun.

At length we got back together again, and drove back to Lund. I was nodding off in my seat by the time we got back.

The late afternoon and evening was spent in the Villa Nottle. I copied photographs from my camera to my PowerBook, and uploaded the best of them to Flickr. From there, I used one to anchor a brief vacation-blogging post to As I Please. Cathy prepared a lovely meal of salmon, with rice and peas to go along with it. I nodded off over the computer until it was time to go back to the hotel, where I went straight to bed.

"Emily Dickinson" House in Amsterdam

Emily Dickinson House Originally uploaded by abostick59.

In Amsterdam, on Marnixstraat where it crosses the Leidsegracht canal, is a house which is decorated with verse by Emily Dickinson. It isn't noted in the tourguides. Debbie had heard about it from a friend at her work who had seen it.

It has no significance except that someone once thought it would be a neat thing to do to adorn the side of their house with this verse:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.
One clover and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Blegdamsvej 17

Blegdamsvej 17 Originally uploaded by abostick59.

I am a fanboy at heart, and my first education was in physics. So it was natural that the one place in Copenhagen that I most wanted to see was Blegdamsvej 17, the site of the Niels Bohr Institutet and the Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Fysik, funded by the Carlsberg brewery. From its founding in 1920 through the beginning of the Second World War, Blegdamsvej 17 was the epicenter of the quantum revolution that reshaped physics. Everyone who was anyone in theoretical physics made their way there at one time or another. I learned the history of that remarkable time in George Gamow's book Thirty Years that Shook Physics, which I read as a teenager.

So I have made my own pilgrimage to Blegdamsvej 17. They are not particularly adapted to receiving tourists, but I did take pictures from the outside.

Vacation in Sweden

Färsk Fisk Originally uploaded by abostick59.

I haven't been posting as assiduously as some people might like in recent days, because I am on vacation in Lund, in southern Sweden. Debbie's brother, David Notkin, has been on sabbatical for a year at the university there. We wanted to visit at midsummer, when the days are longest.

We went on a day trip today to Foteviken and Skanör, on the Öresund, the straight that separates Denmark from Sweden and that joins the North and Baltic seas. Tomorrow afternoon we're going to Copenhagen for two nights, and after that we'll be spending a week in Amsterdam.

Back Online

The Spicejar server is now back online, after a planned seven-hour outage. This was the day that our contractor upgraded our electrical wiring as part of our kitchen remodel.

Kitchen Remodel Provokes Memories

We're having our kitchen redone. And before the new floor, cabinets, counters, and appliances go in, the old ones have to be torn out.

I got a look at our kitchen after the first day the work crew got started in earnest. This is what I saw:

Kitchen Wreckage
Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Seeing this was intense; it gave me a powerful flashback:

Windows and Blinds
Originally uploaded by abostick59.

Still in Saigon Biloxi.

Lethargy and Name Dropping before Wiscon

So here I am in Madison, Wisconsin. I was up waaaay too early yesterday morning so I could catch a plane at SFO, and arrived, after a two-hour layover in St. Louis, at Dane County Airport in the early evening.

I had a pleasant dinner of take-home pizza with my partner Debbie Notkin, Jim Hudson, Diane Martin, and the far-traveling Joan Haran. Then Debbie and I hopped into a van to drive to Milwaukee to pick up Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman at the airport and bring them back to the Madison Concourse. The talk in the van on the way back to Madison was a delight, but Debbie and I didn't get back to chez Hudson-Martin until well after midnight. Which wouldn't have seemed late to my jetlagged self if I'd hadn't been awake since oh-dark-hundred that morning.

At any rate, I slept rather late this morning and have been groggy and headachy all day, despite infusions of strong tea. And I have nothing to post about. The perfidy of Monica Goodling? The cravenness of the Democratic congressional leadership? Nothing to say that other people aren't saying. Not even Mark Gritter's graph of Chinese Poker hand strength can inspire me to write.

I know what I need: Guest bloggers. Are there any D-Listers out there who want a shot at the big time to move from the micro-stakes to the dime-and-quarter tables?

What It's Like to Be Shot At

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has another dynamite post up at Making Light (yes, I know that phrase is redundant) pertaining to the Virginia Tech shooting spree last Monday. It largely consists of lengthy quotes from two other posts. The first, promoted from Making Light's comments is a detailed description of what it takes to be competent to carry a gun, to answer the people who think that arming eighteen-year-olds on a college campus is a safe way to curb campus violence.

The second is by one Libby Spencer, who has no patience with John Derbyshire's macho blustering in which he asserted that the students at Virginia Tech were cowards for not taking out the shooter while he was reloading.

It’s so easy to be brave if you’ve never actually faced down a gunman, Spencer writes. I have. Twice. So I found this fool Derbyshire and his loyal fan’s insipid posts especially offensive. They should keep their adolescent daydreams of glory to themselves until after they’ve looked down the barrel of a gun wielded by a hostile hand. Spencer goes on to describe her experiences at gunpoint.

No one knows what they will do at gunpoint until they find out. John Derbyshire sounds to me like he's imagining himself to be a comic-book hero up against Imperial stormtroopers who can't shoot straight. When the real bullets start flying, it isn't like the comic books.

This happened about fourteen years or so ago.

Debbie and I had been out for a pleasant evening. We hopped on BART and went to the Paramount Theater to watch a classic movie for cheap. As it happened, that night, I was one of the lucky winners of Deco-Win, and my prize was dinner for two at Mexicali Rose. Naturally, after the movie was over we walked twelve blocks to Mexicali Rose to claim my prize. We had a lovely meal. When it was over, it was late enough and we were tired enough not to want to walk all the way back to the BART station, so we chose to take a taxi home instead.

We rode in the cab to the north end of Oakland. The cab turned off of Shattuck Avenue onto our street and pulled over in front of our house. Debbie, in the right-hand seat was paying the driver. I opened the left-hand passenger door, got out, and closed the door. Debbie got out of her side of the cab.

I heard a noise behind me and turned to look. A car heading south on Shattuck had stopped. I heard a loud pop and saw a flash from the car. Without taking time to think, I knew it was gunfire. There was no time to think logically -- what I did do was immediately try to present as small a profile to the shooter as I could, by dropping to the ground, prone, with my feet pointed towards the car with the shooter.

There was more popping. One of the taxi's doors slammed. Its wheels squealed, and it drove away.

The car on Shattuck drove away also. I chanced a look behind me and saw that the coast seemed to be clear. Debbie was nowhere to be seen -- she had gotten back into the cab when the firing started. I got up and ran up the steps, unlocked the door, and closed it behind me.

The action was over, and I could think again. I was unharmed and relatively safe, but where was Debbie? She was in the taxi as it drove off. Had she been hit? The enormity of what had just happened was starting to sink in: without my knowing who or why, someone had just tried to kill me. I grew more worried about Debbie.

I called 911 to report the shooting. I explained to the dispatcher that I was unhurt, but I didn't know what became of my partner in the taxi. She told me to wait, that police officers would be there shortly. I believe that after about half an hour with no police showing up, I called 911 again to relay my concern about Debbie. I hadn't heard from her, and was afraid she was in the hospital. The dispatcher asked me what color was the taxi. I remembered it being yellow. (It was actually two-toned, part of the fleet of Metro Yellow Taxi Co., with blue lower body and yellow canopy.) My memory of the rest of the evening is vague.

Debbie tells me she got back into the cab when the shooting started. The driver gunned the accelerator and took off. The cab driver was angry, thinking that we were drug dealers who had lured him into the middle of some kind of war. He wouldn't drive her home again. Eventually they wound up by Alta Bates hospital, where Debbie found a pay phone and called home. Not long after that the driver took her to the corner nearest to our house -- but would not turn onto our street -- and Debbie was home, to my immense relief.

At some point the police came by to take statements, and they told us that there had been reports of someone firing up a nearby street earlier in the evening. Some time, I think that night, because the streets were completely clear, I went to the intersection and looked around, and found some shell casings -- something close to .38 caliber or 9 mm. I still have one of them among some old kipple I keep on a bookshelf in my room.

Debbie had been carrying a canvas bag with a manuscript in it that she had been working on, some sort of editing project or other. In the next day or so, she turned her attention to the manuscript and discovered that the pages were dented. Evidently a bullet hit the manuscript in the bag, which Deb says she was carrying in front of her thigh. She tells me she has no recollection of the bullet's impact, however.

Redesign in Progress

You might be noticing changes in how As I Please looks. I'm in the middle of a redesign.

Safari users: If the sight looks a little peculiar, try clearing out your browser cache and reloading.

UPDATE: The redesign is now largely complete. I may tweak a few details about how CSS renders some things in the sidebars, but the important work is done.

What do you think of As I Please's new look? Is your browser choking on anything?

Pizza Gadget and Real Pizza

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing points us to this countertop pizza cooker, highligted at Tokyomango:

This open-air, ovenless pizza cooker will cook up to a 12-inch pizza using its upper and lower electric heaters. The flavor might not be as good as the conventional brick oven, but who has the money — never mind the space — to install one these days? This one's just a little under $70. Available here.

(That "pizza" looks suspiciously like a tortilla covered with grated cheese and hot peppers, in effect an open-faced nacho.)

Who needs a brick oven to turn out high-quality pizza? Just yesterday I made for my guests delicious pizza, baked on the baking stone I use in my very conventional gas oven. The baking stone costs $40, slightly more than half the price of a silly gadget that clutters up your counter when not in use. Earthenware tile from a building supply store is even cheaper, and gives results just as good.

I make my pizza crust out of the same dough that I bake into sourdough bread. One batch makes enough dough for nine 12-inch pizzas (or for three 12-inch pizzas and two batards of bread, which is what I made yesterday). For a sauce I just simmer some canned whole tomatoes over low heat, together with a couple of cloves of minced garlic, a teaspoon each of basil and oregano, and a bay leaf, for half an hour, then I purée it. That batch of sauce, three cups of grated mozarella cheese, half of a pepperoni, thinly sliced, from The Fatted Calf artisanal charcuterie, and some shiitake mushrooms made three tasty and elegant 12-inch pizzas that our guests gobbled up with much gusto.

Potlatch 16

I'm finishing up the weekend here in Portland, Oregon, attending Potlatch 16.

I'm having a lovely time with old friends and new. Ursula Le Guin has informed me that I am not a book, much to my relief.

Spam Subject in Cyrillic

From one D. B. Cerdyukov: Kursy v tsentrye Moskvy. Courses at Moscow Centre? Is that sly old dog Karla still teaching them?

Lazyweb Help Wanted: Public Spaces for Meetings

I am looking for ideas to explore about publicly available spaces for discussion or support groups to hold meetings in the Bay Area, preferably in the Berkeley/Oakland area or in San Francisco.

This was a sticking point for a project that has been on the back burner for more than a year; and I've been thinking about another project for which it is a key issue. I'm tired of it being a sticking point, and I want to get good information.

Desired features:

• Convenient to reliable and timely public transportation, such as BART, Muni, A/C Transit, etc.
  
• Easily accessible for people with disabilities.
  
• Private and quiet, so meetings aren't interrupted or disrupted by members of the general public.
  
• Low in cost — the cheaper the better; free is ideal. I want neither to carry the cost of renting space myself nor have to dun meeting participants for more than a buck or two to cover expenses.
  
• (less important than the others) Spacious enough to allow participants to stand up and move around as well as sit.
  

My own living room would do for a start; but while it's free, private, and close to good transit, it dramatically flunks on disability access, and it doesn't offer much room for participants to move around. This is the case with just about any private home: unless they are specifically built with accessibility in mind, they generally aren't accesible.

Hotel meeting rooms fit every criterion except cost. What about restaurants' banquet rooms? Churches, synagogues, etc.? Masonic lodges? Service organizations, such as the Lions', Rotarians, etc.? Schools? Community centers? Some sort of venue that I'm overlooking?

I am eager to receive the advice of anyone reading this with relevant experience in the area. Thanks in advance.

Lee Hoffman 1932-2007

Teresa at Making Light reports that Lee Hoffman died of a massive heart attack. Geri Sullivan adds that Hoffman's death took place on Tuesday, February 6.

I met Hoffman in 1977, at SunCon, the World Science Fiction Convention held that year in Miami Beach, Florida. She was a folk hero to those of us young SF fans (like Gary Farber or Joe Siclari) who cared about the history of our community as could be gleaned from writing that lives on in old fanzines.

So raise a glass in remembrance. The world is a bit dimmer for her passing, but a lot brighter for her having lived. Ave atque vale.

Kill Your Television

Our own true Debbie Notkin spent a week on vacation, and wound up watching a lot of television. It seems that the remote control for the TV where she was vacationing didn't have a Mute button, so she wound up hearing a lot of advertisements:

...TV advertising appears to have shifted to focus almost entirely on what you can do to change your appearance for the “better,” while exhorting you to keep eating junk and never, ever, use your body for any kind of pleasurable movement except on an exercise bike in front of the TV. Or maybe it was always that bad, and I just don’t remember. (I think I remember more ads for clothes, or housewares, or activities.)

Aside from being alternately frustrated, enraged, and fascinated by what I saw, I came away a little chastened: I think one of the reasons that it’s easy (well, easier) for me to maintain my basic satisfaction with my own body is that I’ve cut dozens if not hundreds, of negative messages a day out of my life.

Here at As I Please International World Headquarters, we don't actually want to kill our television, because we like watching DVDs from Netflix too much. But we rarely watch commercial broadcast television, so we don't see many ads.

"Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants"

Both Elf Sternberg and Lori Selke point us to Unhappy Meals, written for this week's New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan begins his essay on nutrients, nutritionism, and healthy eating in true journalistic pyramid form:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ...

Once he gets going, Pollan takes off from the evolving, contradictory claims of medical science about what we should be eating and why and unfolds them into an indictment of what he calls "nutritionism" — not a science, but an ideology about healthy eating. The key premise of of nutritionism is that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. Since nutrients, Pollan writes, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

I'm not doing the essay justice. Read the whole thing.

Birth of a Card Shark

Yesterday I went down into the basement and dragged out the trunk where I keep a bunch of old papers, so I could bring to light the notebooks where I kept a diary from 1977 to 1980. I've been reading them from the beginning, finding them compelling despite their jejeune character. (I have what is perhaps an unhealthy appetite for my own writing, be it journal entries, old Usenet posts archived on Google Groups, or blog posts.)

Here is what I wrote about my first big win at poker. It takes place at SunCon, the World Science Fiction Convention held over Labor Day weekend in 1977 in Miami Beach, Florida. I was eighteen years old. It took place on Friday night and Saturday morning, September 2-3, 1977.

Later, I ran into Mike [Glicksohn] once more. He and a small entourage were going to their rooms to pick up money and cards for a poker game. I decided to join them, picked up a couple of bottles of Guinness from my room, and we all went up to one of the suites on the 14th floor [of the Fontainebleau Hotel]. Mike went off for a while to make a phone call, and when he got back the game began.

I had originally intended to spend not more than $5 in the game. This was the first all night poker game I had been to, and I fully expected to have bad luck. However, at one point there was no limit placed on the pot, so the betting was high. My cards were reasonably good, so I stayed in. I won the hand, to my relief (I was risking too much for my comfort). The game continued at the quarter or dime ante level for a while, then the stakes went up again, and I won again. This happened one more time, and I cleaned out Mike's money, leaving me with an IOU of $24.50 from him. We played at the dime level for the rest of the evening, and we quit at 5 AM. My total winnings were ~$150.

Mike Glicksohn was the only person named in my diary, but if memory serves, Ted Pauls was also in the game. And maybe Ron Bounds...?

That win was the high water mark of my poker career, until I began playing public cardroom poker twenty years later, in 1997.

Bread Pr0n

Getting ready for our annual New Year's Day open house, I turned our kitchen into a sourdough bread production line. Here is the result:

I had to abort one batch before the final rising, leaving me with some extra starter. Does anyone want some? First come, first served.

John M. Ford

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
        who used to
        ride a watersmooth-silver
                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                 Jesus

he was a handsome man
                      and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

(e. e. cummings)

I've Joined Netflix at Last...

... and I'm looking for movies to put into my queue.

This one looks good: a comedy for everyone who ever prayed for release from the bondage that is high school:

My Netflix account is the same as my email address, if you want to friend me there.

(via skippy)

Gods in Chains

We need not always weep and mourn (Let my people go)
And wear these slavery chains forlorn (Let my people go)
—trad.

Octavia Butler: June 22, 1947-February 25, 2006

The announcement was made at the banquet today in at Potlatch 15 in Seattle: Octavia Butler, author of (among other things) The Parable of the Sower, the Xenogenesis trilogy, Blood Child, and Fledgling died yesterday. The news turned up on Steve Barnes' blog and has been confirmed by the King County, Washington, coroner.

I did not know her at all well, so the news doesn't directly affect me, but Butler is dear to many people who are dear to me, and their grief is palpable.

One of the Things I Noticed in Biloxi....

One of the things I noticed in Biloxi last month was every time a white person said something that began "I've got nothing against blacks...", or "I'm not prejudiced of course...", or "I'm no racist...", they invariably finished the sentence with something that sounded racist, at least covertly. For example:

"... I just don't get along with people with attitude problems." And it's just coincidence that these people are black.

"... but this is a bad part of town, with lots of crime and drugs." Why, precisely, do you need deny your racism in order to say that?

"... but a lot of these people in East Biloxi are sitting around waiting for a handout." Apart from the covert equation of "black" with "welfare bum", perhaps this isn't quite the right thing to say to someone who has just finished clearing from the side of your house for free the fallen tree that a contractor would have charged you $2000 to remove.

Biloxi Photos

I've uploaded to my Flickr account some photographs I took while I was in Biloxi.

I'm Home

I'm home again. Actually, I've been home since last Thursday night (October 27).

I'd bought a round trip ticket and arbitrarily chose a return flight 28 days after my departure for Biloxi. As time progressed, I expected that I would want to change my reservation, postponing my return. However, during the weekend before my scheduled return I experienced a very intense need to come home and be close to the people I love, and chose to take my scheduled flight home.

I didn't dream very much at all when I was in Biloxi – at least, not dreams that I could recall in the morning. Every night since my return, though, I've dreamed about living in or cleaning up piles of debris.

Meet on the Ledge

I've been working with Hands On USA, a sister organization to Hands On Thailand, formed in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami last Christmas. Today, Wednesday, is our day off, for people who have been working hard for the previous six days.

The best part of my workday is the morning, when the crews are heading out into the field. I can't explain the feeling of joy and pride that I feel when the trucks pulling the front-loaders and back-hoes pull out of the parking lot. Part of it is that the heavy equipment can make my own work easier. I've been working on a tree crew, cutting up fallen trees and hauling them to the curb to be loaded into dump trucks hired by the city. One front-loader can make a big difference in how long it takes to get a massive trunk out of a yard.

One part of my being here that has surprised me has been my exposure to different music: while I've been driven around from job to job, there has generally been a CD playing in the car or pickup truck. I have a new-found appreciation for Willie Nelson, and for an Austin singer-songwriter named Bob Schneider. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," quipped Noel Coward in Private Lives. "Cheap" isn't fair, but the power is there: Dave Matthews singing "Where Are You Going" brought unexpected tears to my eyes.

There's a guitar here in the church meeting hall that is the Hands On USA headquarters, and it's available to anyone who wants to play it. That guitar has been quite a consolation to me; I've been playing it every chance I get. And I'm using it to get under my fingers a song that's been an earworm for me the past few days:

Now I see I'm all alone
But that's the only way to be
You'll have yor chance again
Then you can do the work for me....

What's Good About Sunglasses

The sun's bright out there
Sunglasses keep the glare out of your eyes
If you're working
Cleaning debris
Sunglasses'll protect your eyes from
Dust, wood chips, stuff flying around in the air
Even working inside, they'll keep off the dust and black mold
Remember, though
If you're talking to the woman whose
House you're ripping up
The last remnants of whose life
You're piling up on the street for the city to haul away
Take your sunglasses off
So she can look you in the eye
See that you're a human being just like she is
But put them on again when you're through talking
Because the really great thing about sunglasses is
They hide the tears

for Veronica

Vicissitudes

I'm back now - I've actually been home since Sunday - from two weeks in Portland for school. I had been hoping to make updates while I was gone. Unfortunately, the hard drive of my PowerBook more-or-less crashed on the train ride up to Porland, rendering the machine unusable. I had very little Internet access while I was gone, and blogging had to take a back seat.

The good news is that I had made a full backup just two nights before departing, and that when I got home I was able to get the PowerBook to limp along well enough to copy the relative handful of files that had been modified since then. I've set up the files I need to get things done on the Spicejar server, and taken the laptop in to the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced. It will be away for something like a week.

Now I'm getting along with using a FreeBSD box as an office machine. There are learning curve issues - cutting and pasting in X11 is ... different. But I'm coping.

Meanwhile, I had been planning on returning to the gym and getting back on the exercise wagon. It's been two years or so since I was working out regularly, and I've gained a bit of weight, gotten a bit soft. I had been telling myself, "I'll get to it after this ... once that is out of the way. ..." The latest "this" was my trip to Portland. On Monday, I got my ducks in a row and went to the 24 Hour Fitness to start out by working my legs, abs, and back. It felt good, although I seem to be appallingly out of shape. I felt a little stiff on Tuesday, but returned to the gym to work on my upper body.

Wednesday my legs were terribly stiff and sore, and my arms started to feel it. Today my legs are mostly recovered, but my upper body, particularly my triceps, are in agony. Getting back to working out after a break is always a bit of a trial, but this is the worst it has ever been for me. I'll get over it, though, and I have the good feeling of working out regularly to look forward to.

I've Suffered for My Art, Now It's Your Turn

I had been thinking that my term paper was going to be due soon. Then on Tuesday night I found in my inbox the email from the instructor saying that the paper was due on Friday. The good news was that I had blocked the thing out in my head; the bad news was that I had to actually write it.

So I pulled it together and wrote it, finishing it late last night. Debbie very kindly gave it an editorial once-over to catch the inevitable doubled words and infelicities of prose.

So what's a blogger to do when he's just sweat some blood over an 1800-word essay for a class? Why, post it on his blog, of course! I have just done so for your delectation and delight.

(What is it about that dreary, dry style of academic exposition that is so damnably seductive to writers?)

Anna Vargo

Anna Vargo died this morning at 12:02 AM PST, after an all-too-brief struggle with cancer.

I don't have much more to say than that. D. Potter is coming over this morning so she and I can spend some time commiserating before Debbie's and my Second Sunday salon gets going in the afternoon.

This Age Wanted Heroes

Shut up. Listen. There is something calling, Paulinka. If you still retain a shred of decency you can hear it – it's a dim terrible voice that's calling – a bass howl, like a cow in a slaughterhouse, but far, far off... It is calling us to action, calling us to stand against the calamity, to spare nothing, not our blood, nor our happiness, nor our lives in the struggle to stop the dreadful day that's burning now in oil flames on the horizon. What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle, but unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient. The best of us, lacking. The most decent, not decent enough. The kindest, too cruel, the most loving too full of hate, the wisest, too stupid, the fittest unfit to take up the burden of the times. The Enemy has a voice like seven thunders. What chance did that dim voice ever have? Marvel that anyone heard it instead of wondering why nobody did anything, marvel that we heard it, we who have no right to hear it – NO RIGHT! And it would be a mercy not to. But mercy ... is a thing ... no one remembers its face anymore. The best would be that time would stop right now, in this middling moment of awfulness, before the very worst arrives. We'd all be spared more than telling. That would be best.

(Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day)

Anna Vargo Recovering From Surgery

Avedon Carol passes on the word that Anna Vargo has just had cancer surgery this week. The procedure went well, and she is doing as best as can be expected for someone recovering from major abdominal surgery.

More information is available at Anna's page on CaringBridge, including a guestbook where friends, family, and others who care can leave messages and good wishes.

"Well, I'm Back," He Said.

I pulled into the garage just on the dot of 9:30 PM last night, having been on the road since 11 that morning. I hauled my luggage up the stairs, greeted Debbie, called D. and Lynn to tell them I had gotten home, brushed my teeth, and fell over into bed.

I've got to put my notes into order, and read a ton of books I brought home with me. (The good news is that all these new books are trade books, not textbooks or professional books, so the I paid for the dozen-plus titles I bought what I might have spent on just one or two textbooks.) Also, the spicejar.org server has been wheezing and coughing lately, and needs some detailed attention.

Back to School

It's official: Starting next month, I will be a student again, entering the master's degree program in conflict facilitation offered by the Process Work Center of Portland.

It's a three-year program, involving a residency of ten days each semester in Oregon, and work and study at home for the remainder of the semester.

The decision to do this is nowhere near as sudden as this announcement. I've been set on this path for something like a year and a half. I was late with the application, not getting it in until July 1. I received the official notice of acceptance in yesterday's mail.

I'm looking for a very different kind of graduate school experience than my previous one, at Caltech.

Worldwork Open Forum in Berkeley, 7:00 PM 4/28/04

In case you've been wondering just what it is I've been doing that has kept me away from the Oaks' Wednsday night tournaments, here is your chance to find out:

Experience Worldwork!

Open Community Forum, 7:00 PM 4/28/04

Explore issues of importance to you in a facilitated setting.

Examples might include: the war in Iraq; parking in your neighborhood; racism; organic food in the Berkeley Unified School District; etc.

The facilitator, Lane Arye, Ph.D., has worked on community building in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and in Oakland.

Wednesday, April 28, 2004, 7:00-10:00 PM

1452 Cornell Avenue. Berkeley (Please park in church lot across street)

For more information, contact Gabriel Todd (510) 428-9958 or Lane (510) 558-8805

Recommended contribution: $5. No on turned away. Everyone is welcome.

Namarië

Hidden in the comments of Making Light is Tom Whitmore's announcement that The Other Change of Hobbit will be closing at the end of May this year.

This is a big deal for me, as you might expect from the passing of a community focal point, one where I found one of the great loves of my life working behind the counter. As well as finding love there, I've made friends there; worked there; had mind-changing experiences among the shelves; and spent many, many hours browsing, reading, talking, and living.

I will be greatly sorry to see the bookstore close.

At the same time, I have some understanding of what a burden the store has been to Tom and co-owner Dave Nee. Sorry as I am to see it close, I have been privately rooting for them to close it, for their own sakes, for years. I wish Tom and Dave the very best, and that having laid aside that burden, their lives will have room to become richer in the things that matter. I know that if that happens, given who they are, they cannot help but enrich the world around them as well.

On the Road

I'm on the road again, and will be blogging, umm, intermittently.

Right now at this moment, I'm in Seattle, attending Potlatch 13. The hotel has opened up its wireless access to the convention membership; Cory Doctorow would be ecstatic.

On Monday, I'm driving down to Newport, Oregon, to attend the Global Process Institute's Worldwork on the Oregon Coast, and will be there until March 9, at which point I'll be driving home.

Valentine's Day

I spent the first part of the morning with Debbie, catching up with her after my having gone for the week before at Esalen. I told her Esalen stories, and also about how things are developing with my new sweetie Lynn, whom I had visited on my drive home the afternoon before.

We went out to breakfast, and then drove in two cars to return the car I had rented for my trip down the coast. From there, I dropped Deb off at the BART station so she could be Girl Editor at a writer's conference in the city.

Genuinely on my own for the first time in a week, I headed to the Oaks Club, and sat down in a brand-new 15-30 hold'em game. (It was old enough, though, that I had to post behind the button to get a hand.) I started out with mediocre luck, having my QQ cracked by AK (I got cute and checkraised the flop when an ace flopped, silly me). But then Lynda Ebner sat down in the box to deal, and my luck turned. The deck ran over me like a Mack truck while she dealt.

I had been chatting with her, asking if she had gotten any valentines. She answered that Wayne, the shift manager, had brought a large box of chocolates and the staff had decimated it in just a few minutes. She dealt me a winning hand: suited AK flopped top pair. Then, in the big blind, I caught the king and queen of spades, with five limpers – in the 15-30 game! – so naturally I raised. The flop came low and rainbow, with one card of my suit, and I figured that overcards plus a backdoor flush draw was enough for checking and calling one bet. The nine of spades fell on the turn, so I was committed to see the river, which obliged me by also being a spade. Dennis Dahlgren paid me off. I said to Lynda, "What sort of chocolates do you like?" "See's," she said without missing a beat.

I kept winning, sometimes outrageously, such as when pocket eights beat 5-3 when the board was 4 5 6 7, as well as more than my fair share of hands like AK, AQ, and AJ that flopped top pair and held up. By the time Lynda's push came along, my stack had grown from $400 to $1200.

At two o'clock, I picked up my chips, now more than $1300 worth, even though one of the local live ones (who had won the Oaks' tournament the previous Wednesday) sat down. Juicy though the prospect was of playing with him, I had more errands to run.

Off to the Berkeley Farmer's Market to get ingredients for dinner: Andouille sausage, garlic, and crimini mushrooms for a spaghetti sauce; some mixed greens for a salad, and a dozen roses as a Valentine's offering for D. Potter. I took a side trip to See's Candy, on Shattuck, to get boxes of chocolate: one each for Debbie and for Lynda Ebner. Hey, an $800 down on Valentine's Day is worth a box of chocolates.

I went back to the Oaks, only to find that Lynda had left early. The dealer captain said that he could make sure she got her box of chocolates. From there I went to D.'s apartment, to deliver the roses. D was not home, so I left the flowers on her bed, next to her iBook, and went home.

I went home, and began the long, slow process of getting caught up with my LiveJournal friends list. The process was all the slower because Lynn showed up on IM and we chatted through the afternoon, until it was time for each of us to start dinner. Somewhere along the line, D. crept in through the front door and up the stairs, leaving a bouquet of flowers on the newell post. I didn't find this out until she told me when I called her later. The sneak.

I fixed, as I said, a spaghetti sauce with Andouille sausage, onions, and mushrooms. Debbie came home shortly after seven, and we ate at about 8:00. afterwards, my lack of sleep from the previous week caught up with me, and I fell over.

All in all, a whole lot of love in the day. And a juicy win at the poker table. A person can't ask for much more than that.

Isabell S. Notkin 1917-2003

Isabell Notkin, Debbie's mother, died in her sleep this morning at approximately 6:15 AM, at University of Washington Medical Center, in the company of her family.

Debbie got a call from her brother, David, last Tuesday evening, saying that Isabell was not feeling well and had been checked into the hospital. On Wednesday David suggested that Debbie come up over the weekend, and by Thursday he was asking her to fly up the next day. On Friday, Debbie and I flew together to Seattle. We've been here since, helping David, his wife – Cathy Tuttle – and their children – Emma and Akiva – deal with Isabell's final crisis and its aftermath.

Her funeral will be held tomorrow afternoon at Bikur Cholim Cemetary, in Seattle. Those who knew Isabell may wish to make a donation in her memory to the Fremont Public Association, a community service group on whose board of directors Isabell served.

As Debbie put it, with Isabell's passing, the world is now a less generous place. But her generosity lives on in the hearts of everyone she had reached in her life, to say nothing of her children and grandchildren, who continue to embody the values and joy in life that they learned and inherited from Isabell.

O Brave New World

Just when I was beginning to suspect that my life is not in fact being scripted by Thomas Pynchon (or perhaps Douglas Adams) comes the news that a woman for whose affections I once made a serious play has been listed as one of Scotland's 50 most eligible women.

"One of Scotland's 50 most eligible women." Roll that phrase around in your mouth for its savor.

As Paul Krassner (among many others) has observed: It's tough to be a satirist, when real life is so delightfully surreal.

(Hey, Lillian! La Forêt des Singes, Saturday at noon! Will you be there?)

Sunspots

As the sun headed for the horizon this evening, it shone through a gap in the Venetian blinds covering the western window of our living room, effectively a pinhole. The light shining through that pinhole reached the door in the hall, about five yards away.

I looked at the round spot of light; then I grabbed a blank sheet of paper and held it perpendicular to the sunlight.

Circumstance had created a pinhole camera image of the sun. And there on its face were three sunspots, two of them being rather substantial.

Later, I found that Avedon Carol had linked to this report on solar flares.

Lemonade

There's a Santa Ana wind blowing, and it's hot – just the time for a cool drink of lemonade. There were enough ripe on the tree in our back yard that I could make some.

This is my own recipe, that I put together after researching how to make lemonade on the Web. Some people might think it's too tart; but I find it just right. (The fix for tartness is to make it with more sugar.)

Lemonade

Juice from 6 lemons (about 1 cup)
6 cups water

Grated peel from one lemon
4 Tbsb (1/4 cup) sugar
1 cup water

Dissolve the sugar in the single cup of water in a small saucepan. Add the grated lemon peel. Put the saucepan on high heat and allow it to come to a boil. Boil for two minutes. Remove from heat.

Squeeze the juice from the six lemons. Pour it through a strainer into a pitcher. Add the 6 cups water to the pitcher and stir briefly.

Pour the lemon peel syrup through the strainer into the pitcher. Discard the contents of the strainer.

Stir the pitcher thoroughly. The lemonade can now be served immediately over ice, or refrigerated to be served chilled later.

Makes approximately 2 quarts.

How I Bake Sourdough Bread

The recipe I use routinely for baking bread is the recipe for "San Francisco Sourdough" recipe from pp. 190-191 of Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker: Classic Regional Breads from Europe and America.

The key difference between baking with natural leavening, i.e. sourdough starter, and commercial manufactured yeast is that the starter must be grown and risen ("refreshed") multiple times before it is formed into loaves for its final rising.

When you make bread with commercial yeast, you can add as much yeast as you need to ferment starches in the dough and produce the gas that inflates the crumb. With natural leavening, the yeasts in the starter must be allowed to grow and multiply until there are enough of them to do the same job.

The recipe I use takes three refreshments, taking something like a day and a half from the time I put the first ingredients together to the time I take the baked bread out of the oven.

On the morning before the day I plan to bake, I begin my first refreshment:

1/2 cup (approximately) of sourdough starter
1/2 cup very warm water
1 cup flour
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Place the starter in a small mixing bowl, and add the warm water. With a fork, mash the starter around in the water until it softens and begins to dissolve, and continue mixing and beating it (like a batter) until the consistency of the liquid is smooth.

Add flour to the liquid a little at a time, and blend it in. Eventually the liquid will become a paste, and then a dough. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, scraping out the drier bits of dough and remnants of flour. Knead the dough mixture until it is smooth.

Place the resulting ball of dough in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and leave in a warm, draft-free place to rise. (I use my gas oven, kept warm by its pilot light.)

Allow this dough to rise for six hours or more. The ideal time to move to the next stage is just after the dough has risen to its full extent and starts to fall back. Letting it wait longer is not detrimental, though.

At the end of this process, scrape the resulting risen dough (it's called a "sponge") onto a floured surface. Divide it into two equal pieces (I use a pastry knife, a broad square of sheet-metal with a wooden handle on one side, for this; it is easy enough to make do with a butter knife). The sponge can be gooey and sticky, making it difficult to handle. It can be tamed by sprinkling it with liberal quantities of flour. Set aside one of the two pieces: it is your starter for the next time you bake.

The other piece of sponge goes into the next step, the second refreshment:

The sponge from the previous refreshment
3/4 cup cool water
1 3/4 cup flour
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Place the sponge in a bowl, and pour the water over it. Mash the starter around in the water with a fork, as before, until it softens and dissolves, and continue beating the mixture until it becomes a liquid of smooth consistency.

Gradually add the flour to the mixture, blending it with the fork. As the mixture thickens, you may wish to switch over to stirring with a wooden spoon. (I use not a spoon, but a bamboo paddle intended for serving rice. It does double-duty as a mixing spoon and as a dough scraper quite admirably.) When the mixture has transformed from liquid into dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, scraping the remnants out of the bowl, and knead it for a couple of minutes, until its consistency is smooth.

(Notice that this procedure is almost identical to that of the first refreshment, except with more flour and water added.)

Place the ball of dough in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and place in a warm, draft-free place to rise.

Again, the ideal time to move to the next step is just after the sponge has risen to its full extent and begun to diminish. Letting it go for longer, though, does not cause problems (except the top dries and hardens if you let it go for too long). Personally, I leave it to rise overnight.

Then, on the following morning, I begin the final refreshment:

All of the sponge from the previous stage
2 1/4 cups of lukewarm water
5 cups flour
1 Tbsp salt
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Mix the sponge and the water together thoroughly, until the resulting liquid has a smooth consistency. (At home, I do this with my Kitchenaid mixer, using its paddle attachment. If you don't have a mixer, or if you insist that the bread you make be completely handmade, this can be done instead with a fork and a wooden spoon, as before.) Gradually add the flour and mix it in. (With my mixer, I switch from the paddle to the dough hook after adding the second cup of flour).

When all of the flour is blended in, leave the dough in its mixing bowl to sit for fifteen minutes or so. This lets a process known as "autolysis" take place. The water in the dough soaks into the gluten of the wheat flour, and the fibers of gluten protein loosen and relax. This makes for a slacker dough, much easier to knead than if the pause is omitted.

Knead the dough until it has a smooth consistency, without lumps (a minute or two in a mixer, or perhaps three to five minutes by hand). Now flatten and stretch the dough, until it is something like a foot square and something like a half to three quarters of an inch thick.

Sprinkle this square of dough evenly with half of the salt (1/2 Tbsp). Fold the dough over onto itself, so that you have a thin layer of salt between two layers of dough. Flatten this rectangle of dough out, and fold it again. Repeat again, for a total of eight times. You theoretically have a lump of dough with 32 salty layers in it, at this point. Take the dough, and knead it in the conventional manner for a minute or two.

Do the same thing again: stretch the dough into a flat square, sprinkle it with the remaining salt, and fold and stretch, again for a total of eight folds. Again, knead the resulting dough in the conventional manner for a minute or two.

The purpose of this peculiar procedure, which you won't find outlined in any cookbook that I know of, is because salt should be the last thing you add to a bread dough. Many bread recipes have you add the salt to the water, before the flour. This is a mistake. Subjecting the yeast to the salty water will kill a substantial fraction; the surviving yeast will rise rather less vigorously.

Now that you've worked the salt into it, put the dough into a large mixing bowl, covered with a damp cloth, and let it rise in a warm, draft-free place until it has doubled in bulk. This takes something like two or three hours.

Turn the risen dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gently knead it a couple of times. This is called "knocking it down" or "giving it a turn." Return it to the mixing bowl, cover it with the damp cloth, and allow to rise for a while more, forty-five minutes to an hour.

Now it's time to make the loaves. I usually divide this much dough into thirds, and put one portion into a loaf pan for sandwich bread. The other two portions I form into freeform batards. These batards I lay in a couche, a heavily floured flaxen cloth. Let the loaves rise for one more hour.

Preheat the oven to 450ºF. I bake my bread on a baking stone in my oven, and this demands substantial preheating time. When the oven is ready, move the freeform loaves onto a sheet of parchment paper, leaving plenty of room between them for expansion. I take a spray bottle filled with water and mist the loaves, both the freeform and the one in the loaf pan. Then I slash the loaves with a very sharp knife: several diagonal slashes on the batards, and one slash lenghtwise along the top of the pan loaf. Using a peel, I slide the batards onto the baking stone in the oven, and then I place the loaf pan on a wire rack above it.

After a minute, I open the oven and thoroughly spray the loaves with the spray bottle. I do this again at two minutes, four minutes, and ten minutes. I check occasionally to see how done the loaves look. When the crust is thoroughly golden-brown, I take out the batards. This is usually after about twenty-five minutes of baking. I leave the sandwich loaf in for about ten minutes more, until its upper crust is a rich, darker brown (but not burnt).

Allow the loaves to cool on a wire rack.

There is nothing quite like freshly baked bread, still warm from the oven. The very first time I baked bread, twenty years ago, I had no notion of what I was doing, beyond the instructions in the cookbook, and the results were adequately edible ... and the people at the potluck for which I baked it were enthusiastic about it. Even mediocre bread tastes like ambrosia just after it comes out of the oven.

A Note on Ingredients

Flour: I use flour specially prepared for bread-baking. By preference I use King Arthur Bread Flour, but this is sporadically unavailable at my grocer. When I can't get it, I use Gold Medal "Better For Bread" flour. Bread flour is made from a harder wheat with a higher gluten content than all-purpose flour. It also contains traces of barley flour and ascorbic acid, both of which encourage yeast growth and activity.

Water: The microorganisms in sourdough starter are yeast and lactobacilli living in symbiosis. (It's the activity of the lactobacilli that create the sour flavor.) The chlorine in tap water, being intended to sterilize it, can kill the lactobacilli. To prevent this, I use filtered water. As an alternative, you can let tap water sit in an open container for a day so the chlorine can outgas.

Salt: I use sea salt for my baking. You don't have to go overboard with fancy flakes or pyramid-shaped crystals. In fact, it's better to have fine-ground salt so that it dissolves and works into the dough more quickly. If you have a choice between coarse-flaked sea salt and Morton's iodized salt, go for the Morton's. My grocer carries Salina Antica, a reasonably priced Italian import that is finely ground.

Starter: With flour, water, and a little bit of patience, you can conjure a working starter out of the air in your kitchen. That's what I did. My starter has been going for about two years now. You can find instructions on how to do so on pp 31-32 of The Village Baker. The trick is to make a walnut-sized ball of dough with 1/4 cup flour and 2 tbsp filtered water, and leave it in a dish on a shelf or windowsill for a few days. If the exterior is dry and wrinkled, but the interior is sweet-smelling and bubbly, you have succeeded. Peel away the dry rind and mix the remainder with a half-cup of flour and quarter-cup of filtered water, knead it, and let it rise for a day. Refresh it again, with a cup of flour and a half-cup of water, and you're in business. Half of this is your ongoing starter, and the other half can be used to start a batch of bread.

You can also get starter from a friend (I have been known to share mine with people who ask nicely). You can order starters from an online retail outlet, Sourdoughs International, which offers sourdough starter cultures from around the world, including "Original San Francisco" as well as Yukon, France, Russia, Egypt, and other countries.

That Morning

We were lying in bed, taking our lazy time before getting up. The telephone rang; Deb went to answer it.

It was Guy Thomas our downstairs neighbor Fred Teti, calling, telling us that the World Trade Center in New York had been attacked. Deb relayed the information to me.

"Oh, fuck!" I said. "Osama bin Laden." (The flash of insight was motivated strictly by my understanding that bin Laden's organization had been behind the 1993 truck bombing of the WTC.)

"Palestine is going to be glass," Debbie said.

"We're at war," I said, getting out of bed. "On the wrong bloody side."

I turned on the radio to listen to events as they unfolded. The Pentagon had been hit too, and there were also reports of a carbomb in front of the State Department. Eyewitnesses in New York were saying they couldn't see one of the two towers of the WTC.

After a few minutes, I turned the radio off again. We would find out more soon enough, but in the meanwhile, I knew just how crazymaking it would be to try to follow the media coverage.

Lying unfinished at my bedside was a book: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. As the nation prepared for a war of revenge on Afghanistan, I couldn't bring myself to finish a book that began with Dr. William Brydon's sole survival of the retreat from Kabul.

We didn't bomb the West Bank into trinitite, at least. What actually happened was bad enough.

D. Potter Safe With Us

We didn't have to resort to our fallback — a brace of lawyers serving a writ of habeas corpus — to get D. Potter sprung from Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center yesterday, but there were moments when it seemed as if Debbie Notkin and I might need to do so.

All's well that ends well, though, and D. is now safely ensconced in the Spicejar.Org International World Headquarters, on the top floor of our gleaming chrome and steel skyscraper, just below the zeppelin mooring mast.

She's wearing a cast that runs from her left wrist to just below her shoulder. Six weeks' recovery time, say the doctors. Wish her well.

@#$%&* %$#@!

D. Potter tripped and broke her left elbow yesterday morning. She spent the day in Kaiser Hospital's emergency room, and had surgery on that elbow last night. She's still in the hospital today. When Debbie Notkin called the nurses' station on her floor, they told her that D. would very likely stay one more night in the hospital.

When D. is released, Debbie and I will be taking her in, at least for a few days. D.'s friends are welcome to send cards or flowers here, or call her here. (If you need the address and/or phone number, email me or leave a response here.)

(Meanwhile, today is my last day on crutches for my own broken toe. I've had essentially no pain since last Sunday night, and it has been difficult to force myself to take the crutches seriously. They have been a big enough nuisance that I've been tempted to throw them aside many times.)

%$#@!

So I was a bit clumsy. When walking from the living room into my bedroom, yesterday afternoon, I accidentally kicked the bookcase right beside the door and snagged my left little toe upon it. I cursed, held my foot, and jumped up and down a couple of times, just like a caricature of someone who has stubbed their toe.

Then I looked down at my foot and saw that little toe sticking out to the side at an angle it really shouldn't. Whoops. Ouch.

I spent the afternoon and early evening in the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente, waiting to have my foot X-rayed and to have a physician strap the poor toe to its neighbor. The toe has a fracture, and I am to go about on crutches until a podiatrist gives me the go-ahead to walk normally again.

My foot hurt like the dickens all afternoon and into the evening. Today, though, there is almost no pain at all. Now I'm waiting to hear from the podiatrist's office, to find out when I can be seen.

Back From Chelan

We had a lovely time on Lake Chelan, with Debbie's brother, David Notkin; David's wife, Cathy Tuttle; their children, Emma and Akiva; and David and Debbie's mother, Isabell Notkin. We stayed at Kelly's Resort, with the family divided between two cabins in the woods.

I brought some sourdough starter along, and was able to bake three loaves of bread in the kitchen of our cabin. It turned out reasonably well, considering that I had none of my baking paraphernalia with me (no baking stone, no spray bottle, no parchment paper, no dough knife). Everyone else thought the bread was marvelous; I know what it could be, though, and judged it merely good enough for the circumstances.

I also brought chips along, because David's a serious poker player, but we never did get a game going. Instead, we played a lot of Dictionary, and David took on Debbie at Anagrams.

Emma taught us to play a wonderful bluffing card game called B.S. All the cards are dealt to all the players. Each player discards face down between one and four cards, supposedly of a given rank — first player discards aces, second player deuces, and so on. After a player discards kings, the next player discards aces. If you don't have anything in your hand of that rank, then you lie! If you think the person who has discarded has lied, you challenge by saying "B.S.!" The discarded cards are revealed: if the discarder has lied, then she must take the muck into her hand; but if she was truthful then the challenger must take the muck. Once the next player discards, it's too late to challenge. The winner is the first player to discard (unchallenged) her last card(s). Play can continue until two players remain, at which point the player holding the most cards is the biggest loser.

It's a deceptively simple game; children can play it straightforwardly, but it engaged my poker brain thoroughly, as card sense and player-reading makes it quite interesting.

I came away from the game thinking that I'd love to watch a matchup among people like Men Nguyen, Dan Negreanu, Layne Flack, and Phil Hellmuth. Or even among the usual suspects like Bill Chen, Patti Beadles, JP Massar, or Spencer Sun. There's going to be card playing at Peter "Fold'em" Secor's party this Saturday; I'm going to see if I can drum up interest in a game of B.S. It should be easy enough to play it for money stakes — perhaps as a reverse freezeout (four players put up $25 [or $2.50, or whatever] each. First player out gets $50, second $30, and third $20; or maybe $60, $30, and $10).

The highlight of the week for me was when I took the ferry on Wednesday to Stehekin, at the far end of the lake, and stayed there for two days at the Stehekin Valley Ranch. Deb joined me on Thursday. The Stehekin Valley is isolated, accessible only by boat or plane (or by hiking in over the mountain passes), with no telephones or electrical power. You go there to be isolated, surrounded by the Cascade mountain range. The buildings of the ranch were maybe fifty yards from the foot of a mountain maybe a mile and a half high, whose rocky and icy peak was only something like three or four miles away in a straight line. The mountain peak on the other side of the river was almost as close. The view from the porch of the dining hall, up the valley, included McGregor Peak and the glacier on that mountain's uppermost slopes. If you love mountain vistas, this is a great place to see them.

Wednesday afternoon, after getting settled in my cabin, I went for a walk, two miles up the dirt road to a trailhead, then on a two-and-a-half-mile hike along the Agnes Gorge. I was completely on foot, like I had gone for a walk, no pack, no water bottle, nothing. (Perhaps I was being foolish — but I did put on sunscreen.) At the trailhead I crossed out of the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area into the North Cascades National Park; and about a mile along the trail crossed into the Glacier Peak Wilderness. I had walked into the wilderness! Way cool!

The scenery ranged from shady pine forest to open mountainside meadows with thrilling views of the surroundings. Early on the trail I could see McGregor Peak behind me. Then, after crossing into the wilderness, the trail rounded a bend and entered a meadow, and ahead of me was the sight of the still-more-magnificent Agnes Mountain. The gorge itself was hidden for much of the walk, until the end, when the trail wound along close to its edge, and I could look down and see the rushing rapids below me. The trail ended beside a hundred-foot waterfall.

The hike was incredibly satisfying to me, to be close to the mountains and the creeks and the forest, completely alone, like I had eluded the consensual hallucination that comprises the maya of civilization and had found myself walking in the real world.

Debbie joined me on Thursday, and we left on Friday, the 4th, to rendezvous with the family and return to Seattle. That night Debbie and I went to Jane Hawkins' new house, next door to her old one in Wallingford, to have dinner with her, Luke McGuff, Vonda McIntyre, and Rich and Linda McAllister (who were in town for Westercon). Afterwards we sat on the roof of the garage of Vonda's house to watch the fireworks over Lake Union. This turned out to be the best fireworks display I have ever seen.

And home again the next day. We spent some time at the Doubletree Inn, across from SeaTac airport, to catch a tiny bit of Westercon. Debbie had to meet with Geri Sullivan about a project to which Geri is contributing; I hung out for a while in the bar, reading, occasionally chatting with familiar people who came by. Then we flew home.

Off to Lake Chelan

I'm going to be off for a week. Debbie and I are off to Lake Chelan, Washington to spend the week with her brother and his family. Don't expect updates soon.

At Wiscon

I'm now in Madison, Wisconsin, staying at the home of Jim Hudson and Diane Martin. Tomorrow, Debbie and I move into the Madison Concourse Hotel, where Wiscon 27 is taking place. Maybe I'll come home with stories to tell.