Howdy! I’ve got nothing of value to say today because I spent the entire day mucking about with a programming project (Snit, if anyone’s interested). The work’s going well, I’ve made some real progress, and I’ve had a ball. But as I’ve been reading neither books nor blogs, there’s no grist for the mill.

Unless you’d like me to explain how I coaxed that last 23 microseconds out of Snit method invocations….

Any takers?

Thought not.

But I promise I’m taking the rest of the evening off from programming, so I might have something to say tomorrow.

I’ve been using a Macintosh Powerbook as my main home computer for a year and a few months now, and I couldn’t be happier. In fact, when my work PC came due for replacement I replaced it with yet another Powerbook. And it works great. However, just recently I ran into a problem.

Our project is producing a large software system. And when you’ve got a large software system you need to have a large Operator’s Manual. And MS Word is, quite frankly, a lousy tool for creating large Operator’s Manuals; it’s the only program I ever managed to crash on Windows 2000, and that was because I loaded a draft of one of our previous manuals into it. Consequently, we’ve been using FrameMaker for our manuals for the last release or so.

Now, I have a copy of FrameMaker for MS Windows. I do not have a copy of FrameMaker for Mac OS X. And I’m not going to have a copy of FrameMaker for Mac OS X, because a few months ago Adobe pulled the plug on FrameMaker; they don’t sell it anymore. Oh, I could probably scrounge up a copy somewhere on my own, but I tried going through official channels and the official channels ran dry. What to do?

So a few days ago I ordered a copy of Virtual PC, which is a really cool piece of software. It emulates a PC’s hardware, processor and all, in software, on your Mac. And you can install pretty much any PC operating system you like into it. The version I got came with Windows 2000 pre-installed, that being what I needed. I dragged the application from the CD to my desktop, double-clicked it, and in moments I had a window on my screen in which I could see the familiar Windows 2000 boot screen. I had to run through the usual set up malarkey, which required a restart of Windows 2000; then I installed FrameMaker from the original CD, which required yet another restart of Windows 2000; and then I tried running it, and for a big mondo application, it’s really pretty zippy.

And the neatest part is that although the installation process took three full boots of Windows 2000, I didn’t have to reboot OS X even once.

I think this might be the best of all possible worlds–I’ve now got an installation of Windows that goes away when I don’t need it, which is most of the time.

We’ve gotten several hundred pieces of comment spam today, which added to the several hundred pieces we got yesterday have annoyed me greatly, so I’ve disabled comments for the time being.

Update: I’ve enabled comments again.

What can I say about a classic like this?

I was tired, I had finished Russian Bride, and I needed a
pleasant, familiar, comforting book, something I could fall into with speed,
something as comfortable and satisfying as a pair of tennis shoes at the end of a day
of hiking in heavy boots.

And darned if I didn’t stay up way past my bedtime to finish it.
(That was the subsequent evening, of course. Pride and Prejudice
is too long to read in a single evening.)

This is the true story of a nice guy who loved not wisely but too well
and got his heart ripped to shreds for it.

Steven Alexander, the author, is the nice guy; and Natasha, his Russian
bride, is the one who ripped his heart to shreds. In a nutshell,
Fifty years of age, Alexander has a successful career as a salesman
but hasn’t as yet found Miss Right. An elderly couple, close friends of
Alexanders, live in a retirement home run by Russian emigrés, and
he becomes acquainted with a number of the Russian women who work there.
They are friendly, attractive, hard-working, good cooks, and they take
excellent care of his friends. He begins to think that perhaps a Russian
woman would suit him very well.

He goes on-line and finds a site with personal ads from Russian women who
are interested in meeting Americans. And after a lot of hesitation, he
sends a letter to a beautiful woman named Natasha, through a translation
service. She responds. One of his friends from the retirement home
visits St. Petersburg and meets Natasha; when she returns, she tells him
that he should go to Russia and do the same.

And he goes, and he meets her, and eventually she comes to the United States
to see if she’ll like it here, and after several weeks
he asks her to marry him, and she says yes. And so they are wed.

And that’s when the trouble starts. I’ll leave it at that, so as not to
spoil Alexander’s story; I’ll just say that it’s a painful, unpleasant tale,
just chock full of important life lessons: never underestimate the power
of cultural differences; judge people by their actions, not their words;
marry in haste, repent at leisure; don’t marry anyone expecting to
change them afterwards; if your friends don’t like your beloved, you should pay
attention.

Alexander’s not a professional writer, and it shows; his prose has a
plain-spoken artlessness about it, as though he’s telling you the
story over a beer after a long day.

The book has two serious faults. First, the section from the beginning
of the book up to the wedding is too long, and frequently dull; it’s as
though he’s building a court case and doesn’t want to exclude the
smallest scrap of evidence. After the wedding it becomes quite gripping,
rather like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Second, possibly due
to 20-20 hindsight, he lays out the case clearly enough that the reader
can see the train wreck coming almost from the first moment he meets
Natasha in St. Petersburg. The impending doom kept making me cringe.

When I finished the book I put it down, and I went and found Jane and I gave her a hug, and I told her, “Jane, anything you’d like me to do, you got it.”

This is the Lovecraft/Wodehouse parody I
mentioned,
a couple of months ago. I wanted to dig into it immediately on arrival,
naturally, but I restrained myself because I wanted to see if I could
turn the silly bit from the above link into a full-length story. I got
a fair ways, then ran out of gas. And then, a few days ago, I really
needed something to distract me from Russian Bride, of which
you’ll hear more in the next day or so. And Scream for Jeeves
was just sitting there, and, well, here we are.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is, the book really is
genuinely funny. It contains three Jeeves and Bertie stories, each of which follows
the classic pattern: an old friend of Bertie’s requires his help–well,
Jeeves’ help, really–and Bertie clusters round, Jeeves saving the day.
The author has Bertie Wooster’s narrative style down pat.

At the same time, each story is a retelling of a classic Lovecraft tale,
with admixtures from various others.
And here’s the first bit of bad news: the three Lovecraft tales are
“The Rats in the Walls”, “Cool Air”, and “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward”. The first of the three is one of my favorites, but I fear
I’ve never much cared for the other two, and that was a disappointment.
I had visions of Bertie vacationing in the shadowy town of Innsmouth:
“A bit scaly, what, Jeeves? I mean to say, you’d think they were
all French.” “Indeed, sir, the residents do seem to have a batrachian
aspect.” But no, it was not to be.

One gag that’s repeated in each story is a conversation between Bertie
and one of the other characters in which the other character speaks in
dark purple Lovecraftian prose and Bertie is simply himself. The
difference in style is quite funny–for awhile. The other character
never responds to Bertie’s inanities, indeed, never seems to notice them.

On the other hand, there are some really good bits; I rather liked the
idea of Bertie Wooster and Charles Dexter Ward treating Erich Zann to some
old Broadway showtunes. Plus, there are some neat illustrations by
J.C. Eckhardt.

No matter who benefits, as Phil at Brandywine Books points out, revisionism is a bad thing, even in a good cause. I’ll go a step farther; it’s a bad thing, especially in a good cause.

This is good news, if true. (Via NQCBSEI.)

Every so often I’m moved to say a few words about the difference between intolerance and disagreement. It isn’t intolerant to tell someone, “I think your religious beliefs are untrue.” Depending on how you say it, you might or might not be polite, and you might or might not be offensive–as if that were the end of the world. But it isn’t intolerant.

No, intolerance looks like this: in Pakistan this past April, a Christian teenager was tortured to death by Islamic seminarians determined to convert him to Islam. The teenager, whose name was Javaid Anjum, resisted for five days of torment.

He was given electric shocks repeatedly to various parts of his body including his ears, which damaged his hearing. His right arm and fingers were fractured and his nails were pulled out. His feet were swollen from beating and he suffered contusions and lacerations all over his body. He received many internal injuries, and besides the two failed kidneys the doctors’ report notes that he passed blood or pus instead of urine. In many places his skin appeared blackened and oozed pus and he could barely move.

Eventually, the future imams took him to the police station and accused him of theft. He died in the hospital several days later. Meanwhile, the seminarians were not punished; the chief constable apparently thought that what had happened was God’s will.

An aside to certain folks in the Middle East–this is what martyrs really look like.

Oh, and what did Javaid do to deserve this treatment? The seminarians found Javaid drinking water from a tap outside the school.

(Via CANN.)

I have just discovered the reason for my esteemed co-blogger’s unwonted silence–not only unwonted but unwanted, as it turns out. It seems that she mixed her mammals, which you should never, ever do.

Some days ago, she was riding a large mammal of the equine variety in company with several others, including her daughter (the proximate cause of this unusual horsiness). It was a beautiful evening, the breeze was cool, the sky was sunny, the fields were….fields. Now, the first thing about horses is that they really are quite amazingly tall. And the second thing about horses is that they have minds of their own–and those minds really are quite amazingly small. If she’d been riding, say, an ATV, then our Deb would be feeling fine at the moment. ATVs are much lower to the ground, and what’s more important they don’t spook when two deer pop out of the brush at them. And if they did, and you fell off the ATV’s back onto your own (your left shoe scribing a perfect arc over the saddle horn the ATV hasn’t got) you wouldn’t have nearly as far to fall.

As I say, it’s dangerous to mix your mammals; it can leave you feeling truly wretched the next day. According to Deb she has no broken bones (except possibly for a hairline fracture in one clavicle), but she’s got a surfeit of angry muscles, tendons, and maybe even a disgruntled rotator cuff. (You can buy stock in the Advil company if you like.) Today is the first day she’s felt physically able to sit in a chair and type.

She hopes to have some reviews for us Real Soon Now (westerns, oddly enough); in the meantime, you can leave a Get Well note in the comments, below, or e-mail one to her directly.