Gramarye

flickr:Egyptian Goose

I work next to the Lake Merritt Channel, which means that I get see a lot of waterfowl on a daily basis. Mostly it’s your basic ducks and geese, but we get some others, too — herons, egrets, cormorants, etc. I’m not a bird-watcher by any stretch of the imagination, and I know next to nothing about birds. However, when I saw this at work the other day, it was immediately apparent that it was not one of the regulars.

When I first saw it, it was standing on one leg and had its head entirely concealed under its wings, and standing perfectly still, so that it was like the ornithological equivalent of those classical statues that are down to one limb and a torso after several thousand years of weather and vandalism and whatnot.

Eventually the head popped up, although the second leg either doesn’t exist or is kept in an undisclosed location against a time of need, like the Vice President.

Even after I had determined that there was a whole or mostly whole bird there, I couldn’t place it. My first guess was that it was a mutant albino goose or swan that had some serious hygiene problems, but subsequent investigations by Renee and Rosie turned up something called an Egyptian Goose, a species native to Africa that pops up in other places mostly after having escaped or been released from captivity. (The population at Lake Merritt is probably on the run from the Oakland Zoo.)

We sent the pictures to a birdwatcher friend for confirmation, but the resemblance is pretty clear.

But it’s still ugly as sin.

Well, here’s the stages of my reaction to the news regarding Garber’s new show.

# Garber has a new show? Excellent. I’ll watch Jack Bristow in anything. At least, I’ll try.
# Even if it’s about lawyers.
# Prophwhatnow?
# Aren’t they worried about pulling a ??Book of Daniel?? and getting slammed for no good reason by the religious right?
# Wait, Garber isn’t the prophet?
# Wait, Johnny Lee Miller _is_ the prophet?
# Wait, Johnny Lee Miller *still has a career*?

I’m not sure how to feel.

Victor Garber gives law another try - TV Squad

“Google Search: suspenders a trend for 2007?”

Seriously, never before have I felt so much like I was living in ??Bloom County??. Next, the Egg Nog council of America will be sending me bribes to get me to post about the fact that America’s all agog about egg nog blogs……

And I sure as hell hope that suspenders won’t be a trend for ‘07, because when my idiosyncrasies happen to match up coincidentally with fashion trends, the results tend to be dangerous….

This is some bits of my half of an IM conversation that I want to have somewhere available for future reference, and this is good a place as any:

bq. 8:20
Mmm.
8:20
I think redundant may have been an inadeqate word choice.
8:20
Let’s go with “obsolete”
8:21
In other words, Cyberpunk is a step backwards.
8:21
No…
8:21
Here we go:
8:22
_Cyberpunk is such that its best next step is a step that occurred before it._
8:42
(Oh, btw, I think my problem with cyberpunk might be related to the fact that I think of SF more as a subset of philosophy than of literature.)
8:43
(And the problem is comparable to my problem with existentialism, which is that _anything I can do with existentialism, I can do with pragmatism cleaner, faster, and better, and the world already had pragmatism before existentialism existed._)
8:47
I.e., I don’t need all the “plugging shit into your head” trappings to have a dystopian future in which brain-computer interfaces lead to interesting problems.
8:48
Zelazny did that in the 60’s with “Dream Master,” using relatively mundane inferences about medical technology and social conditions.
8:49
Dream Master is better than (and far more disturbing than) any of the cyberpunk novels I’ve read, with the exception of “The Fortunate Fall.”
8:50
And since _I read SF as thought experiments (i.e., tools for thinking) rather than as art_, my immediate response to cyberpunk is typically, “I can do that better, faster, and cleaner with Zelazny/Delany/Sturgeon.”

You remember the Sega CD game Sewer Shark, right? Of course you do, because you owned a Sega CD, and you played ??Sewer Shark??, which was a categorically awful game. Why did you play it? Maybe because of the MST3K-quality writing and correspondingly excellent acting. Maybe because of the addictively repetitive gameplay and fuzzy, ugly art. Maybe because you couldn’t afford to buy real games. Maybe because you put it in to test the system, the disk got stuck, and you were afraid to force, it, and thus were unable to play anything else.

I’m going to have to assume you’ve played it, because I can’t find the screenshot I want. For reasons known only to the “tentacle-bearing eldritch space gods of the internet”:http://brentter.com/?p=57 ??Sewer Shark?? is like the only video game that’s under-represented in the online cultural mythos rather than over-represented. (And no, the poor quality of the game can’t possibly explain this phenomenon.)

Anyway, let me try to explain the premise a bit, in order to make clear what’s happening in the image below. In the future, mankind no longer lives on the surface of the world, it lives underground. In sewers. If you saw ??The Matrix??, it’s a lot like that, only instead of evil AIs running the show, it’s a sinister government that wants you to go out and kill sewer rats and mutant alligators. Really, really big sewer rats and mutant alligators. You have a little help with this, from a guy who sits behind you and yells at you while you simultaneously fly your sewer-traversing craft (sort of like a small BART train with a gatling gun) and serve as gunner. You’d think the shouting guy could help you out with at least one of these tasks, but apparently spouting an endless stream of PG-rated deprecations at you is already a full-time position.

There is also a mandatory neurotic robot that flies ahead of you and gives you theoretically useful information about which way to turn next; this is fine and good, except that at some point the robot craps out, and you have to be guided by a mystical creature that none of the characters can identify, because it’s totally alien to their stunningly dystopian world, or something (it’s a seagull; the first time I saw it, I assumed I was supposed to kill it). All of which — _all_ of which — I mention only by way of setting up this photo:

It’s a crow (by which I mean “some member of the genus _corvus_” — I have no idea what species) which I came across while walking to 7-11. It was sitting on the sidewalk about eight or so feet away from me, drinking melting ice from the street (yes, there was ice on the street — it’s been freakishly cold here, by Bay Area standards, anyway). Normally, the crows around here keep their distance, and after pausing just long enough for me to _almost_ get a nice shot of it drinking the street, it took off, giving me an excellent shot of its ass receding towards a nearby laundromat.

Now, it just so happens that, in addition to being proof that I’m just not fast enough on the draw, this is an excellent reproduction of the ??Sewer Shark?? mystery seagull leading the protagonist to glory, or a rat-induced death, or some combination thereof. Those of you who have not played the game will simply have to take my word that it’s hilarious, which it absolutely is.

If for some reason that doesn’t convince you of the hilariousness of the similarity or of the value of the time I just took from you, let me make it up to you with this picture of a bar of soap that is cracking in such a way as to make it vaguely resemble a brain:

Boy, it’s not often that I nearly kill myself cooking dinner. And no, there was no burning or stabbing; I simply managed to turn cayenne pepper into an aerosol. Basically, I was performing WWI-era chemical warfare on myself, right in my kitchen. (Well, not *my* kitchen. I was helping my family make dinner prior to exploiting their cable in the interest of watching the new Sci-fi series, ??Dresden Files??, also known as ??Law and Order: Magical Victims Unit??.)

We were working with a severely limited ingredient set. Tofu, onions and whatever ingredients were handy (a-1, vinegar, sesame seeds, hot sauce, and pepper were involved), to which were added frozen hash browns (to fulfill my sister’s daily requirements for potatoes and grease) and a can of garbanzo beans.

The garbanzo beans started out as a joke, but then I put a pan on the stove and some butter and cayenne in the pan. Apparently a little too much cayenne, because suddenly breathing was very, very difficult, and we basically had to evacuate the kitchen. In fact, pretty much everyone went outside until it dissipated, with me making a few short trips to get the garbanzos in the pan and cover it.

Now, I don’t now how much experience you have with cayenne, but inhaling it is bad. It hurts, it’s sure as hell an asthma trigger, and it sort of sits in your windpipe and broods for a while, jumping back into action if given half a chance. (To add insult to injury, some of it wound up in my eye, and that’s just…no fun at all.)

So, basically, the meal tried to kill me, but I certainly wasn’t going to let that stop me. Not only did I insist on cooking the bastards, but I was damn well going to make them tasty. I threw in all the above seasonings, along with whatever else was handy, including some cinnamon and chocolate, plus some more butter.

Weird? Yes, but not nearly as weird as the fact that they were actually quite good. Weirdly good, and with a final flavor that didn’t bear an obvious relationship to the initial ingredients. Would I have rather had tamari, garlic, and a few other things? Of course. Would I have not had the meal try to kill me? Of course. But I looked that meal square in the eye, cooked, and ate it, and I’m feeling a real kinship with Ernest Hemingway right now.

Well, maybe not Hemingway. Maybe just Anthony Bourdain.

My favorite piece of software (ever), Scrivener, has reached 1.0, and is available for sale at $34.99, which is extremely an extremely reasonable price for the functionality provided.

Scrivener is intended primarily for novel-writing, although its features can be applied to many other tasks. With one of the best full-screen modes out there, it’s great for composing text, and with hierarchical outlining and index-card overview, it’s great for planning and organizing. Basically, it’s just great.

If you have a device that runs OSX and allows you to install applications, then by all means, buy yourself a copy.

If you’re a cheapskate or a starving student, there’s also a fully functional but older version, “Scrivener gold,”:http://www.literatureandlatte.com/freestuff/ScrivScreens.html available for download for free.

Literature and Latte - Scrivener