Monthly Archives: January 2006

Fool’s Errand, by Robin Hobb

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FitzChivalry Farseer has spent the fifteen years since Assassin’s Quest rusticating in a small cottage far from the Queen’s court under the name of “Tom Badgerlock”. Almost everyone who knew him thinks him dead, and after the tumultuous and agonizing events of the Farseer trilogy one imagines that he and his wolf companion needed the rest.

Much has changed in the fifteen years since the end of the Red Ship war. Chade Fallstar, FitzChivalry’s old teacher, is now Queen Kettricken’s chief advisor. Prince Dutiful, the heir to the throne, is in his teens and will soon be betrothed to a lady of the Outislands. And FitzChivalry’s unique talents will soon be required by his Queen.

There are two major kinds of magic in Hobb’s world: the Wit and the Skill. The Skill allows the one Skilled to communicate telepathically with others who are Skilled, to see things that are far off, and to mentally influence the lesser or un-Skilled. In recent years, training in the Skill has been the purview of the royal family; it is consequently highly regarded. The Wit, by comparison, is the subject of many a gruesome legend. Those afflicted with the Wit, it is said, may talk to beasts and command them to do their bidding–and in time they become beasts in human form. It is the Wit that creates the bond between Fitz and his companion wolf. There are many with the Wit in the Six Duchies, but few speak of it openly; the Witted have often been persecuted, most recently during the reign of the usurper King Regal. Feelings against the Witted run high.

So it has often been–but there are two new developments. First, a secret society known only as the Piebalds is agitating, so they claim, for full acceptance of the Witted in society; and one of their tactics is to publically denounce those Witted who will not help them. And second, Prince Dutiful has been gifted with both the Wit and the Skill. Things are going to become very interesting….

Hobbs is frequently a little too mean to her characters, in my view, but she has restrained herself somewhat in this case; as a result, I enjoyed reading the book more than some of its predecessors. On the other hand, the major conflicts are less interesting. You win some, you lose some. Anyway, I enjoyed it enough to go looking for the sequel, Golden Fool, which I’m reading now.

Photografee

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20060120-073121.jpg

20060120-073121.jpg,
originally uploaded by will.duquette.

In a fit of madness I got myself a new camera last week, and naturally I’ve been taking pictures with it. I have pretensions of learning how to compose pictures properly and how to adjust the exposure to best effect; I’m not there yet. Most of the pictures I’ll be taking will be family snapshots, which I don’t intend to share with the world, but there will be others as well, of which this is one. It’s a picture of a new antenna at JPL; I gather that it’s part of a prototype antenna array which will be used to track some upcoming missions. It’s on a hill just above the building my office is in; I see it like this every morning. That gray and blue thing in front of it is the back end of a cherrypicker they use when working on things in the dish.

It’s Been An Interesting Day…

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…but then, any day on which you need to go out and buy a pair of bolt cutters is likely to be an interesting day.

It’s like this. There’s a single door between our kitchen and the rest of the house. This door has a lock on it, for no reason I’ve ever understood. It’s the kind with the little doohickey in the center of the knob that you push in and turn clockwise to lock the door. From the other side–the kitchen side–you can only lock and unlock it with the key, which was lost untold ages ago.

Today, my almost two-year-old daughter Mary pushed in the little doohickey, and turned it counterclockwise, and then closed the door, locking herself, her sister, and her mother into the kitchen–or, really, as the kitchen has a door to the outside, out of the rest of the house.

Our house has two other outside doors, and Jane had her keys; it should have been the work of a moment to step outside, go round to the front door, and voila, problem solved. Except that our children had officiously set the security chain on the front door. And on the back door.

At this point, Jane had two options. She could call a locksmith, or she could call me. Our local locksmith charges $90 for a housecall, and as I’ll come home for free she called me. I went to Orchard Supply for a pair of bolt cutters ($30), and shortly thereafter we had one fewer security chain and the run of the house.

I don’t think I’ll be replacing the security chain, incidentally; snipping through it took about half-a-second, and I’m sure all the crooks know this perfectly well.

Whilst at OSH, in any effort to prevent any repetition of the problem, I bought a new non-locking doorknob set, and my first task after unlocking the door was to remove the old lockset and install the new set. I got out my handy-dandy Leatherman multitool, flicked out the screwdriver, and prepared to get to work.

And promptly discovered that there were no screws on the doorknob assembly on either side of the door. I spent a good ten minutes looking it over, and frankly I’m still not sure how to remove the old lockset.

Through A Scanner, Oddly

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I’ve got a friend who’s seriously into view cameras–you know, those old-fashioned cameras with the accordion bellows and the black cloth you duck under draped over the back and the little squeeze bulb and the Great Big Plates that you insert into the camera after you’ve composed the picture you’re looking for. Actually, I don’t know whether Ted’s cameras have either the black cloth or the squeeze bulb, but you get the idea. View cameras are mechanically very simple, but you can do things with them you can’t do with normal cameras.

I’ve always said that almost everything interesting is done by folks who are utterly nuts, and this site just goes to show (click through to one of the mirrors). Several years ago this guy decided to try making a home-built digital view camera out of a cardboard box, duct tape, and a cheap flatbed scanner. He was so impressed with the results that it became an obsession. And I have to admit, it’s pretty cool. You see, a scanner doesn’t scan a page all at once; it’s like a copier, it scans the page slowly from one end to the other. And when the scanner is attached to a view camera lens, and there’s movement in the scene…..well, the results can be quite striking.

Fancy Nancy, written by Jane O’Connor, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser

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Fancy Nancy is a picture book I picked up for my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter the other day. It’s illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. The cover illustration shows a little girl with poofed-up hair wearing a tiara and a hair ribbon, high-heeled shoes with lacy socks, a lacy dress with a long train (really, a bedsheet tucked into a ribbon), and cat’s-eye sunglasses. She’s carrying an umbrella and a large feather. Let me be perfectly clear–this is not a too-little girl dressed up to be sexy for a beauty contest; this is a little girl who has dressed up to be “fancy” by her own lights, using the materials at hand.

I took one look, and said, “Good grief, that’s Anne!”

It turns out that Nancy has a problem. She loves to be fancy: to dress in fancy clothes, with fancy accessories, to do fancy things, and to use fancy words. Her family, alas (a mother, a father, and a sister) are not fancy; in fact, they tend to the plain. It’s a distressing situation, and so she arranges to give her family lessons in being fancy, culminating in the entire family going out to dinner dressed as fancy as they can (by Nancy’s lights), calling each other “Darling” and extending their pinkies while eating their pizza. All eyes are upon them from the moment they enter the pizza parlor, and Nancy is sure that everything thinks they must be movie stars.

Allow me to describe the father’s fancy attire. He’s wearing one of his own pin-stripe suits, some kind of scarf tied around his neck sort like a cravat, and a top hat, and he’s carrying a cane. Well, really, the top hot is a prop from Nancy’s magic kit, meaning that it’s far too small, and the cane is the magician’s wand. He wears them with a certain flair and panache, and with oceans of good humor. (Good humor which I intend to lack, utterly lack, if push ever comes to shove. I am Not Fancy, and I intend to stay that way.)

Anne loves the book, not at all to my surprise. Jane captured her feelings about it, thus:

Well, you see, I really like it because it is lovely and so beautiful. It is my favorite book in the world. I have a chair like her and I do fancy just like her. I do it all the time. She makes her
family so beautiful.

The chair Anne mentions is one of those bent-wire chairs with a heart-shaped back and little round black seat, the kind that’s supposed to go with a vanity table. It used to be my mother-in-law’s, but somehow Anne inherited during Mom’s recent move. And indeed, Fancy Nancy has one just like it, except that Nancy’s is pink and Anne’s is brass. That only makes Nancy’s chair better, of course.

Having gotten Anne’s opinion, Jane went on to get David’s; he’s my eldest at going-on-nine. Here’s what he had to say:

It wasn’t really a good book for boys because mostly it is all about a girl. It is not very interesting but TOO fancy. She did not have any brothers so they wouldn’t have to dress up. I do not like to dress up. I would recommend this book for girls ONLY.

Do you detect a certain lack of enthusiasm? I have to admit, I’d agree with him completely, except that I now have a fancy daughter. Anne sometimes leaves Jane and I at a loss–Jane’s no more fancy than I am–but I’m really very sorry that my own mother didn’t live long enough to know Anne. I think they’d have understood each other.

1632, 1633, 1634: The Galileo Affair, Ring of Fire, by Eric Flint

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I have to admire Eric Flint; 1632 exemplifies the rule that
if you can’t make something plausible, make it as fun as you can. Flint
wanted to see what would happen if you magically moved a West Virginian
mining town (Grantville, by name) from the present day United States to
Germany, specifically Thuringia, smack-dab in the middle of the 30 Years
War: 1632. One day in 2000, during a wedding reception, Grantville
experienced a sudden earthquake and power failure. Citizens who were
outside reported seeing a “ring of fire” in all directions. And when
they went to investigate, there they were–in Germany, at a very bad time.

What caused the Grantville Disaster, as it came to be known back in 2000?
It seems a bit of cosmic debris, remnant of the production of a piece of
performance art by a super-advanced yet highly irresponsible race called
the Assisti, struck the Earth just so…

As I say, if you can’t come up with anything plausible, let your
imagination go to work and have as much fun as you can.

So what happens when American values meet religious intolerance, rapine,
and royalty? Therein hangs the tale related in these books.
1632 details the arrival of Grantville in Thuringia and their
initial attempts to survive and thrive in an immediately hostile
environment. By 1633 the local threat has mostly been dealt
with, but the great powers, notably France and Austria, are getting
involved. Grantville has to step up war production, and support their
allies with everything they have, plus they must send out envoys seeking
new allies. By 1634 the situation has ramified
considerably, so much so that a single book is no longer sufficient to
cover their entire year. There are ultimately going to be at least three
books (if I recall correctly) covering 1634;
1634: The Galileo Affair is simply the first. Although,
“first” only in the sense that it’s the first to be written and
published; the books will take place concurrently. This reflect’s
Flint’s view of history–the world’s a big place, and everything more or
less happens at once, and develops in ways you wouldn’t expect. And
this, in turn, has drive Flint’s use of collaborators.

Flint has always enjoyed working with collaborators; most of his books
are collaborations. 1633 was written with
David Weber, for example, and
1634: The Galileo Affair was written with
Andrew Dennis. In this case, though, he’s a man with a
method. If history is messy, with all sorts of unpredictable things
going on, and if you want to produce a series based on an alternate
history, what better way to simulate it than to allow other authors to
play in your world–and then embrace their creations and allow them to
influence your own work?

That’s the story behind Ring of Fire, which is an anthology
of short stories and novellas set in Flint’s world. It’s a neat
collection; I have only one criticism of it, which is that it was
published in paperback after the publication of
1632 and 1634: The Galileo Affair, despite
being published earlier in hardcover. As many of the characters in the
later two books stem from stories in this anthology, there was an
annoying sense of already knowing how the story was going to turn out.

Anyway, this is all good stuff; both Jane and I are
eagerly looking forward to future volumes, of which there are going to be
many: in addition to the direct sequels, Flint’s evidently planning a
couple of spin-off series. One will involve yet another community
transplanted from one time and place to another (though not from present
day); the other will take place in the far future, and will involve the
Assisti getting their comeuppance. Taken all together, it ought to keep
him busy for a while.

Flint is a history buff; he’s also fond of working with collaborators,
and this extended series

Shuffling the Songs

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Jaquandor has a new meme–old to him, apparently, but new to me: load your music library (in iTunes, in my case) shuffle it, and read off the first ten tracks. Well, why not? Here’s mine.

1. “Long White Cadillac”, The Blasters. Straight-ahead old-fashioned rock’n’roll from the punk/new wave scene.

2. “Boy From New York City”, The Manhattan Transfer. It rather shocks the me I used to be that I actually like this song.

3. “Man Machines”, Pete Townshend, from The Iron Man sound track. I like the album, but this isn’t the best song on it.

4. “Streets of Fire”, Bruce Springsteen, from Darkness on the Edge of Town. I’m afraid Springsteen doesn’t grab me the way he used to.

5. “Too Late To Cry”, The Stanley Brothers. Old-time Bluegrass.

6. “The Guns of the Magnificent Seven”, Boiled in Lead. An odd track by a very odd Celtic Folk band from (I believe) Southern California.

7. “Kalamazoo”, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, from In The Digital Mood. This album was recorded early in the digital era with all of Miller’s original band (except for Miller himself, of course). It’s a gem.

8. “Democratic Circus”, the Talking Heads, from Naked. If this one vanished, I don’t think I’d miss it.

9. “40”, U2, from War. I don’t think I’d miss this one either.

10. “Rio Grande”, Leonard Warren, from Lebendige Vergangenheit. Warren was an up-and-coming American opera singer around 1950 or so; he’d be much better known, I suspect, but he died young, which rather terminated his career. This is an unusual album–it’s Warren singing a variety of folk standards, American patriotic tunes, and Kipling poems set to music. I got it as a premium from our local public classical station, KUSC, and I’ve never regretted it.

Well, that’s an eclectic selection. I don’t know that it’s particularly representative of my tests in any other way, but it is suitably eclectic.