Between Stars -- On Stars

Wednesday morning, I had taken Metro-North down from New Haven to NY for the NYU Commencement ceremony at Yankee Stadium. I was all dolled up in my suit and tie and had my cap and gown (and umbrella) in my lap for much of the ride. An older woman in my compartment saw the purple robe and the cap and smiled and said "Congratulations," to which I replied with a full-hearted "Thank you."

Later that morning, I was waiting outside Gate 8 with many other degree candidates from the variety of schools under the NYU umbrella, most of them undergraduates, and I saw the very same woman, now donning her very own cap and gown. I smiled, nodded, and told her, "Congratulations," to which she replied, blushing, with an effusive and earnest "Thank you."

I bicycled from home to Bryant-Lake Bowl this morning, taking the Midtown Greenway. Greenway = AWESOME. Half an hour to Uptown through wildflowers, gardens, between old restored warehouse and manufacturing buildings, birds singing, kids playing soccer at Kix Field, and no automobile traffic. My legs were a mite wobbly when I got back, and I was sweaty as a sweaty thing, but I was also full of exercise and self-determination endorphins.

And what I went to Bryant-Lake Bowl for was the monthly Fiber Brunch, which I've been meaning to get to for, well, months. Doreen runs a terrific get-together. And we had extra big fun, because the cast of the Princess Bride Drinking Game show asked if they could use the theater stage to rehearse. Of course we warned them that we could all recite entire scenes, but would try to contain ourselves. They were terrific, and lots of fun to knit to. ("Inconceivable! *drink!*)

Now I'm having a beer. Because that's what you do after a bike ride.

About four years ago here on the blog, I mentioned the concept of "giraffe rules" [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. As I said at the time:

“Please don’t eat the giraffe” rules […] are the kinds of rules any society has which no one ever thinks to spell out in so many words, until someone comes along who tries to eat the giraffe. If you’re a parent, you’re pretty familiar with these rules, because kids are always finding some giraffe to eat. If you hang out with writers, many of whom are the beneficiaries of what at the kindest could be called quirky socialization, you run into some of these same rules. (And of course, there are places in the world where “Please don’t eat the giraffe” may well be a needed social rule.)

So a while ago, the_child commented that she thought that Mother of the Child and I weren't very good parents.

"Why?" I asked her, quite curious about this utterance.

"Because you don't give me very many rules."

"Well," I pointed out, "You don't need a lot rules. You pretty much behave yourself. Parents make rules when kids do things they shouldn't."

Such as trying to eat the giraffe.

There are so many unwritten rules in society. Not just unwritten, but even unconscious. A favorite example of mine is the priority of seating in an automobile. With the partial exception of a socially flat group of peers (such as high school kids of the same gender and clique in the same year-class), we almost always know who's going to sit where in a car without having to ask. If you begin to pick at how that works, it's a pretty complex hierarchy with a lot of exception management. Who owns the vehicle? Who has the keys? Who is dating or married to whom? Who's infirm or elderly? Who's exceptionally tall or short? What's the gender mix? What's the age mix? And even for peers, there's a protocol. Calling "shotgun", for example.

Yet no one ever sits down and explains this to people. We all just know, by some magic osmosis. We'll call these shotgun rules.

So there are giraffe rules, which are so obvious they aren't normally stated at all, then there are the shotgun rules which are the opposite of obvious, maybe even vanishingly subtle, but they aren't normally stated either. And believe me, being a parent brings both sets of rules to consciousness, especially if you have a kid like mine, who spends a lot of time analyzing other people's behavior. Or likewise if your kid's on the autism spectrum, you spend a lot of time explaining these rules.

What are your favorite examples of giraffe rules? What are your favorite examples of shotgun rules?

Today is the second full day of Paradise Lost, the writing conference I'm at in San Antonio. We've got a good crew here, including fellow pro mentors John Joseph Adams and Steven Brust, as well as organizer Sean Kelley, my good friends @dratz and Mrs. @dratz, and ton of other fun, interesting people, including a guest appearance from creed_of_hubris yesterday evening, and a guest appearance from my cousin the park ranger this coming evening.

So far we've eaten way too much food, hot tubbed, drank, engaged in deeply inappropriate conversation, played several games of Bang!, drank, critiqued, discussed submittals and editorial etiquette, drank, eaten way too much food, talked a lot about writing, and drank.

Why the hell do I come to these things anyway? Oh, the food. And drinking. (Though in truth, very little of that for me and my liver.)

It's a fun group having a fun time being writers together. I like this part of the writing life, a lot.

Meanwhile, I have a lecture to go be a part of shortly.

Your Saturday moment of zen.



Flower. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

The current photo series is from my 'favorites' file, hence the dates jumping about



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Study: Organic food turns people into jerks — Heh. Who knew? (Snurched from @jackwilliambell.)

Hybrid: 1910 — A somewhat peculiar piece of railroading history.

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit

Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon

Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find — Study of tree rings, corals and ice cores finds unnatural spike in temperatures that lines up with manmade climate change. Amazing how the liberals even manage to get tree rings and coral reefs onto the climate change conspiracy. Good thing we have the GOP to remind us that the truth isn't before our lying eyes.

Legal Experts: Sodomy Is a Civil Right — Unfortunately, so is bigotry. And hypocrisy. (Via danjite.)

Gay Marriage: The Republican Love Affair With the Past — In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. To be fair to the conservative viewpoint, we've all seen how places like Canada and Massachusetts have collapsed into apocalyptic Socialist hells since the advent of gay marriage. I mean, just look at the divorce rates in Massachusetts compared to the good, American gay-hating Red states. Oh, wait, never mind.

?otd: How many MC's must get dissed?

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5/19/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA, not to mention a full day of conferencing and critique)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

These words were hard won, between 6 a.m. alarms and dentist appointments and the vicissitudes of bedtime. (I cannot support the awkward adverbs and comma splices in Magic Tree House. And I know I'm judgey, but those kids are only a year apart.)

The Poison Court
Words today: 918
Words total: 5501
Reason for stopping: end of scene, days without 8 hours of sleep
Mean things: Finally made it to the inconvenient corpse.
Deaths: See above.

Finally murdered someone. Now I need to figure out why he was murdered and by whom. And how that ties in to the larger plot I think I have figured out.

We're talking about Celia Jerome's newest Willow Tate novel Life Guards in the Hamptons over at the DAW Books blog (dawbooks)! Swing on by and check it out!

....that there's going to be an Annual Booksale when I get back from WisCon, as there are giant boxes of books all over my house again.

You have been forewarned!

Also, I will be doing an r/Fantasy (that's Reddit) Ask Me Anything on June 5th. Questions may be posted all day in the appropriate thread, and I will answer them in the evening.

Because y'all don't get enough of a chance to listen to me babble...

I keep mentioning that I came to realize while I wrote my latest book, Arctic Rising, that the US Military was one of the largest investors in green technology. Why? They anticipate that having more control over your own ability to *move* gives you an upper hand in war. By helping green tech along to the point where it can become cheaper (and in some cases it already is in certain military applications) they’ve been the leading edge (let us not forget the military’s role in giving us the internet via DARPA).

However, even the military has now fallen into the middle of the culture wars, as conservatives ban it from using/helping develop alternative fuels:

On Monday, the U.S. Navy will officially announce the ships for its demonstration of the “Great Green Fleet” — an entire aircraft carrier strike group powered by biofuels and other eco-friendly energy sources. If a powerful congressional panel has its way, it could be the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels to run its ships and jets.

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying an alternative fuel that costs more than a “traditional fossil fuel.”

Imagine that phrase wrapped around any other technology:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced weaponry that costs more than “traditional weaponry.”

Or:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced armor that costs more than “traditional armor.”

Or:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced fighter planes that cost more than “traditional planes.”

It’s a fairly stunning move.

Mabus and his allies countered that the Republicans were taking an overly-simplistic view of things. Of course relatively small batches of a new fuel are going to be expensive — just like the original, 5GB iPod cost $400 and held fewer songs than today’s $129 model, which holds 8 GB. That’s the nature of research and development. With development time and big enough purchases, the costs of biofuels will come down, they argued; already, the price has dropped in half since 2009.

“It’s a false choice to say that we should concentrate on more ships versus a different kind of fuel. If we don’t get a different kind of fuel, if we don’t have a secure domestic supply of energy at an affordable price… the ships and the planes may not be able to be used because we can’t get the fuel,” Mabus told the Senate Subcommittee on Water and Power in March.

What’s more, Mabus added, there’s a value in a more stable, domestic supply of fuel; every time the price of oil goes up by a dollar per barrel, it costs the Navy $31 million. “We simply buy too much fossil fuels from places that are either actually or potentially volatile, from places that may or may not have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We would never let these places build our ships, our aircraft, our ground vehicles, but we do give them a say on whether those ships steam, aircraft fly, or ground vehicles operate because we buy so much energy from them.”

A fairly stunning step backwards, as the US military was one of the few places really helping the US keep up on the advances needed in alternative fuels.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.