You could tell us all who you voted for.

Well, then I’d have to admit that I didn’t get around to mailing in my ballot and am going to have to spend the evening rummaging around for my PIN number and frantically reading all the short submissions that have been posted to the web, wouldn’t I? :)

So far I’ve read exactly:

• 0 novel nominees (a new record!);
• 1 novella nominee;
• 2.5 novelette nominees;
• 0 short story nominees;
• 0 related book nominees;
• 2 semiprozine nominees.
• 2 fan writer nominees

I haven’t seen any of the DPSF nominees, haven’t read any of the fanzines, can’t see a reason to distinguish between the nominees for best professional editor, and am familiar with the work of only one fan artist.

I guess I could vote for DPLF and pro artist with a clear conscience, but other than that? Almost none of my original nominees made the final ballot. . . I’ll probably skim the shorter stuff that’s posted on the web and see if any of it is sufficiently grabby, sticky, or zingy to make me feel like finishing it.

I like pie. Especially rhubarb. Or cherry. Or lemon meringue. If I'm feeling particularly indulgent, hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream.

I've only read 3 of the novels but was able to cast that vote with a clear conscience. How is it that you've yet to read The Scar?

I’m waiting till I’m next in England — that was supposed to be early July, but it’s going to end up being early October — so I can pick up a copy of the edition that matches my copy of Perdido Street Station without having to pay shipping charges. Yeah, I’m a nut. :)

The United States.

Building democracy one snatch-and-grab at a time.

We’re keeping them in solitary confinement until they’re ready for democracy.

You're going to buy matching editions of China's stuff?

David, my hat is off to you.

Speaking of democracy, there’s the question of whether the time-honored political strategy of voting for the candidate most likely to beat the candidate you most hate is really appropriate for the Hugos.

Jon, I do my best to get matching editions of everything that comes in matching editions. I’m still pissed at Knopf for never releasing The Amber Spyglass in the original trade paperback edition used for The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife.

But that’s okay since I’m getting rid of them; I only really liked Compass and someone gave me a copy of the British version of that, Northern Lights. (That’ll teach ‘em.)

Hey, cheerier news: Poindexter to resign.

Retired Adm. John Poindexter, who created a firestorm this week with his plan to create a futures market that would capitalize on predicting terror attacks, will resign in coming weeks from his post at the Pentagon, a senior defense official said Thursday. The official said the research that Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program (TIA) were conducting had become just too "unorthodox."

Yes, unorthodox. That was the problem.

There’s something sad — if typical — about the fact that it took a sensationalized misunderstanding of a weird-ass DARPA program to take down a convicted perjurer and obstructer of justice who conspired to subvert the Constitution.

With IRV that's a pretty dumb strategy, so it wouldn't apply well to the Hugos. Speaking of which, it looks like the recall may cause IRV to not happen in San Francisco until the *next* city council election.

Hey, no complaints here. Tax evasion charges got Al Capone off the streets, so whatever works is good enough for me.

No fair. You say biscuits and I think fluffy goodness not digestives.

Digestives do sound pretty icky. I prefer "tea cookie."

McVitie's chocolate-coated digestives are readily available in Japan and make an excellent dessert when topped with sauteed bananas.

Ah, digestive biscuits. To me, they will always taste like Sweden. That is to say: fairly healthy, somewhat dull, vaguely socialist. I didn't know you could get them in America! How -- well, "exciting" is not the right word...

It has been my experience that biscuits are best in the south and digestives are best in Britain.

Sorry, Gwenda! The English language, it gets you every time. I don’t think there is any acceptable store-bought substitute for that sort of biscuit. Some day I hope to actually encounter those biscuits on their home territory.

Tea cookies are all very well, Rachel, but they don’t pack well and aren’t very good with cheese and summer sausage. :)

Nicole, the first time I had McVitie’s was in the Fujitsu company canteen in Kamata. I’m surprised they do so well in Japan — but then, this is the country that brought us CalorieMate.

Sigh. Gwenda's making me miss the South. I haven't had biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast in ages. I've been missing eastern North Carolina barbecue something fierce lately, too. I need to take a visit back home...

Good lord, that's a lot of comments. Practically Eekhoutian.

I have McVities in my local grocery store -- lemme know next time you're down here, or remind me next time I head up thataway, and I'll get you some. If you're really desperate, I could probably mail 'em to you.

Did you end up reading any more of the short fiction?

Re voting for candidate most likely to beat the one you hate, an addendum to aphrael's comment: to get the most mileage out of that approach while using IRV, just rank the most-likely-to-beat item somewhere in your list, and don't list the one you hate at all. That way your real preference will be noted (and possibly ignored), but the most-likely-to-beat one will still get your vote if comes down to a choice between that and the one you hate. Of course, there may be associated ethical questions involved in some contexts: like, is it okay to vote for a story you haven't read, by an author you like, in preference to a story you have read and hated? I wouldn't vote for a story I haven't read at all, but I've come close to doing it with a story I've only read part of.

I ended up skimming “Wild Girls” and “Madonna of the Maquiladora” before deciding that this was The Wrong Approach and just voting for the stories I’d already read and liked. I probably could have voted for The Scar without reading it — having heard Mr. M. read, oh, two or three thousand words of it at Conjosé — but decided to be honest about it and leave the category blank.

Most of the stuff I tried to read, my Blue Line of Death came brutally early, even though I promised myself after “The Political Officer” that I wouldn’t let that happen any more. I think of some of the stuff from past years that I think was fully deserving of a Hugo even though the prose was on the pedestrian side — A Fire Upon The Deep, say, for pure high concept — and wonder whether I’d even get myself to read it today; I’m sure I’m missing out. Can’t figure out when I got to be such a Style Monkey.

The biscuits were an impulse buy, Jed — I’m sure there’s somewhere I can find McVitie’s up here.

I really will have to check out the South one of these years. I’ve been to Charleston once, that’s about it; and I spent most of that visit in a motel bed with a 102° fever, so it hardly counts.

Although it's possible that yes, you might be "missing out" on good stories or ideas by not reading all the way to the end of every story you start,

1. There are a lot of stories out there, so get cracking if you aren't willing to miss any, and

2. Life is too short to read things you don't enjoy reading. (Unless it's like homework or research or for some other end.)

My $0.02, anyway.

Hey, Tim: come to think of it, I was held at gunpoint in North Carolina -- so I guess it shares a li'l bit in common with your current neighborhood after all! Now you just need to work on importing the biscuits and barbeque.

David wrote: "Can’t figure out when I got to be such a Style Monkey." Well, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but the SH contracts are coated with a skin-penetrating drug that turns writers into Style Monkeys.

Strange Horizons: Taking over the world, one writer at a time.

In this case I think the drugs found someone who was naturally susceptible.