Chrononautic Log: life

September 5, 2006

It’s a long time since I posted any pictures, and I know not all y’all are into the minutiae of scientifictional politics. Plus, I now have visitors in town, and have therefore actually been going places and seeing things worth taking pictures of.

Figure 1. Preparation for guests: living room, empty, but livable.

Figure 1. Sunday morning: living room, being lived in.

More pictures after the cut.

(Continued)

Comments (9)

September 3, 2006

. . . not necessarily in that order.

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Update (Sun. 9/3) Y’all who posted your original comments in indisputably public places, if any of you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to them, I can take those down too.

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Just so y’all know, I’m on Central European Time and I’ll be going to sleep in short order, so while, as previously noted, I’m happy to take quotes down at the original poster’s request, this will probably not happen instantly.

Update (Sat. 9/2): Okay, it’s 12:30AM CET (3:30PM Pacific time); I really am going to sleep now. (Don’t be surprised if I don’t have time tomorrow to read every flame you leave this [North American] evening. But I’ll do my best.)

A quick roundup of some of the discussion arising from the recent unpleasantness, divided into three categories:

• Typical
• Depressing
• Encouraging

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Updated: Fixed internal links, added second post from Bear.

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Updated: Added context at Ms. Datlow’s request.

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Updated: Removed Beth Bernobich quote at her request, and added a pointer to the good work she and Jim Hines are doing at bellwether_talk.

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Updated: Removed Raymond E. Feist quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed William Sanders quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Vera Nazarian quote at her request.

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Updated: Removed Jane Yolen quote at her request.

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Updated: Added link from Shalanna Collins quote to her comments below.

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Updated: Removed Jack Skillingstead quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Harry Turtledove quote at his request.

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Note: I’ve made public, here, excerpts from several posts from what is technically a private newsgroup, albeit one open to hundreds if not thousands of readers. I didn’t do this lightly. If anyone I’ve quoted would prefer not to stand behind those words in public I will be happy to remove them. Likewise, if my quotation misrepresents what you said, I apologize, and will be happy to fix it if you let me know.

Those of you who think something should be done about this may be interested to know that my access to the SFWA forums has been suspended.

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Typical:

• William Sanders:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Shalanna Collins:

  I think I know what a "GROPE" would look like, and I didn't SEE any naughty patting, touching, squeezing (oops, invoking the Journey song there for a moment.) Nevertheless, a very contrite apology was publicly posted all over the net. ... This was just a momentary tweak, not assault or murder or what-have-you, for goodness' sake. I don't condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them, but seriously, this isn't some big ponderous Sin.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/31)

  Ed.: Ms. Collins doesn’t condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them — except, apparently, when it’s perpetrated by a famous author. She also seems to be somewhat confused about the meaning of “contrite,” and possibly “apology.”

  Update: Ms. Collins has commented here.

Depressing:

• Beth Bernobich

  Text removed at original poster’s request. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Beth approved, at all, of what Harlan did, and I’m sorry I gave that impression. I simply found one parenthetical remark she made to be deeply depressing. Beth is on the side of the angels, as you can see at the bellwether_talk LJ community she and Jim Hines have set up to discuss the problem of sexism in the SF community.

• Raymond E. Feist

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Vera Nazarian

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Ellen Datlow (Updated)

  I was offline for a day or two after the con and then when I got back I discovered this whole brouhaha over Harlan's baby schtick -and that's what it was. A schtick of Harlan acting like a baby. Thus, he went up to the mike when Connie called him up -- he put the mike (a round one) into his mouth, swallowing it like a lollipop, Connie took it gently out of his mouth and wiped it off. He gurgled -- like a baby -- and then grabbed her breast like a baby and she smacked his hand off. A few seconds later she kissed him.... Cmon people. Please put this into perspective. It was NOT sexual assault. It was a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top. I was not offended as a woman watching this. I thought it was silly (but yes, I admit I personally thought the schtick funny). I also know that Connie and Harlan have a history of ribbing each other. I've seen it in the past. So please keep the incident in context and calm down.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/30)

  Ed.: Ellen, you grew up with these people. You’ve had time to get used to the way they behave and come to terms with it. We haven’t. And I don’t think we should have to.

• Jack Skillingstead:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

Encouraging:

• Ed Champion:

  It’s one thing to goof around at a party — when the people know the other people involved and a little bit of this kind of nonsense sometimes occurs.

  But when a woman goes up on stage and cannot be respected as a writer, particularly a writer who’s as great as Connie Willis, when she must be groped and demeaned as a sex object in front of an audience, then the time has come to re-evaluate the merits of the organization that hosts the awards ceremony, as well as the has-been "legends" who go up to claim and present awards.

  (“Harlan Ellison: The Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction,” 2006/08/28)

• Gavin Grant:

  Worldcon: sorry, the eejit has put you on the spot and a public statement is needed.

  What’s up with these dirty old men? They’re taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.

  (“Harlan Ellison: eejit,” 2006/08/28)

• Alan DeNiro:

  It makes me wonder — how must a woman just entering the field feel about this? Younger female readers? What could they possibly think about this? Could they possiblly think anything good about SF/F? As a field? A community?

  (“Down the Rabbit Hole,” 2006/08/28)

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

  Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. ... [T]he basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. ... You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

  It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

  (“LAcon IV,” 2006/08/28)

• Ben Rosenbaum:

  Here's the context: it seems that a lot of men — particularly, to hear women my age tell it, older, powerful men — in science fiction feel like women's bodies are fair game. Whether it's for a gag, a thrill, or a "sit down and shut the fuck up, bitch", this kind of thing goes on beyond the Hugo stage. A lot.

  As it does in the wider world. A friend of mine who attended the Hugos had just been tit-grabbed by a stranger riding by on a bicycle in the street outside the Hugos the night before. Just for a minute of fun, because she was a woman, he brought her to tears of rage. For her, you grabbing Connie — and Connie's first horrified reaction before she covered beautifully and went on with the show — was the same damn thing, and the message was: you're not safe anywhere.

  . . . Mind, I'm not worried about Connie. For one thing, Connie's no victim, and for another, that's between you and her.

  No, I'm talking about the atmosphere in science fiction. We applauded a sexual assault at the Hugos, and now the web is full of folks saying "what's the big deal? get over it". I don't think I need to tell you that that is fucked up.

  Ed.: At time of press, Mr. Rosenbaum’s open letter has as yet gone unanswered except by one Mr. Goldberg, whose plaintive “What more do you guys want?” is undermined by his less than perceptive “Harlan has apologized profusely.”

  (“What I Told Harlan Ellison,” 2006/08/28)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  It's not just the tit-grab. It's also poking Rachel in the stomach uninvited.

  When I say "This is so not okay," I mean the pattern of treating women as if their personal space is not sovereign.

  Rachel and Connie are both strong women, and more than capable of standing up to Harlan. They get to decide how they want to respond to a given incident directed at them. (And both seem to have.) But I think, as a community, we need to say "This type of behavior is beyond the pale and will not be tolerated."

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Zoë Selengut:

  ...for fuck's sake, this is not just another "being a jerk" incident. ... It's a whole universe away from mere snottiness, drama-queenage, or provocative whatever. This is disgustingly sexist behavior, and it is not okay to class rank sexism under the jerk umbrella, as if it's something we'd all do if we lacked social graces and let our id take control. Being a rude and abrasive person is one thing, and treating women's bodies like public property is another.... It drives me nuts to see this classed in the same category as other amusing Ellison anecdotes (I admit, I do find a lot of them amusing, or did.) It's not. the same. thing.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Jane Yolen:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Susan Marie Groppi:

  I think a lot of people might be misunderstanding the outrage here — it's not just about what happened to Connie at the Hugos. It's about what's been happening to women in this community for a long time now. Pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/30)

• Harry Turtledove:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Meghan McCarron:

  And will this be the only time we talk about behaviors like this? And will we just talk about the most visible, shocking examples, or will we dig down into why their is an environment in our genre and at our conventions where this seems acceptable? ... I've seen variations of 'dirty old man' thrown around a lot in these discussions, but when those dirty old men are gone, I'm not exactly confident that women in the genre will no longer be treated in ways designed to make them feel like objects.

  (“On Harlangate, briefly,” 2006/08/31)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  What we are witnessing is the dying convulsion of a certain kind of privilege. And as in any case where somebody is having an unfair advantage taken away, many of the ones who have come to rely on that advantage are pretty upset about it, and are going to be bitter about lost dominance.

  It may take about a hundred years to change society. But no matter how angry many of us are that men will still attempt to assert social and sexual dominance over women in a crude and obvious fashion, the fact of the matter is that a sea-change is underway. And every time somebody says "Hey, that is not okay," and other people back him or her up, we get a little closer to equality.

  (“What we are witnessing,” 2006/09/01)

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For my own part: This is just not cool. It’s not “not cool if” (as in, not cool if Connie wasn't in on the gag); it’s not “not cool because” (as in, not cool because Harlan has a history of bad behavior); it’s just fundamentally not cool.

And the fact that so many people have rushed to defend it, or minimize it, or attack the people who’ve called bullshit on it, says more about the unreconstructed state of our field than the original incident.

And that is what’s gotta change.

Comments (195)

September 2, 2006

As of today, my access to SFF.net has been suspended for wilful violation of the member policies. The administrators of SFF.net are, of course, entirely within their rights to do this (and, really, given that the policy is there, I would expect responsible administrators to do no less). I won’t say that I had the policy in front of me when I violated it, but I knew that if I posted those quotes something like this was a likely consequence.

As I said yesterday, I did not post those quotes lightly. This is not just another internet slapfight.

Comments (56)

August 14, 2006

Figure 1. Some of the logos have changed. And I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. But it’s a start.

(b3co.com. Via all sorts of people.)

Comments (2)

August 6, 2006

So, as you might have guessed, last weekend I bopped down to Paris. Because that’s the sort of thing you can do here.

This was my first trip to Paris since I was about three feet tall, and all I can remember from that trip is that it was cloudy and we couldn’t go any higher than the second level of the Eiffel Tower. This time, there wasn’t much point in trying to fit the Complete Paris Experience into twenty-four hours; I figured if I managed to intercept Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in the middle of Jeff’s European tour and maybe hit the Musée des Arts et Métiers — in honor of my teenage obsession with Foucault’s Pendulum (the book, that is) — I’d be doing okay.

Result: success!

Not only were the VanderMeers cool people to meet, at long last — the best we’d managed to date was forty seconds in a WFC elevator — they were great people to wander around Paris with, drink with, and generally hang out with.

I got in around 2:00 Saturday afternoon. Being me, I decided to walk from the Gare de l’Est to my hotel over by L’Opéra. On the map it’s pretty straightforward, but, being me, I only memorized about half the street names, and I overestimated my sense of direction by about 90 degrees, so it took me about an hour longer than it should have. But if I hadn’t, I never would have got to see three dead rats hanging in a window.

But if you want to see them, you’ll have to continue on, below the jump . . .

(Continued)

Comments (6)

July 30, 2006

Comments (4)

July 26, 2006

Update: Something tells me that nobody is going to want to talk about anything but what I say about superheroes.

Maybe I can’t make it to Susan’s birthday party, but at least I can answer a few questions. (This will all be on the test, so pay attention!)

1. Robots or superheroes?

   It pains me to say this, but . . . robots.

   I’m too much the postmodernist now not to want to turn things over to see what crawls in the shade of their dark undersides. (My enjoyment of too many fantasy stories, for instance, is now marred by the antidemocratic subtext of any story that involves placing the “rightful” king on the throne.)

   And as much as I enjoy the four-color craziness of the Golden Age and applaud the bright-eyed enthusiasm of Siegel and Schuster, I can’t forget that “superheroes” also means Steve Ditko and Frank Miller and Mike Grell. It’s Mr. A and Rorschach and Women in Refrigerators Syndrome.

   It’s the underlying assumption that civil society is a failure, that to be a suspect is to be a criminal, that “extraordinary rendition” is the only road to justice. It’s an ugly world and it’s not the world I live in.

   If it was just that some superheroes were written that way, that would be one thing, but as it is, I think it’s the only way superheroes actually make sense, and guys like Ditko and Miller and Grell are just more up-front about it.

   I haven’t yet found an inescapable ruinous subtext for robots, so: robots.

2. What did you like best about Oxford?

   The sense of history, I think. Not just that the university was anywhere up to nine hundred years old, but that when I worked on the papers for my courses on colonial Indian history, I did it in a building constructed in the 1880s as a training center for the Indian Civil Service. And that I was preceded at the the college I attended by both John le Carré and Dr. Seuss.

   (Plus, getting my master’s from a world-class university finally erased the shame of the grades I got my junior year of high school.)

3. The Arbitrary Fortune Fairy gives you five thousand dollars, but you have to spend it in the next 72 hours. What do you spend it on?

   If I’d responded to this in a timely manner, the answer to this would have been obvious: fly to Vegas for the aforementioned birthday party.

   As it is, the answer would probably still involve plane tickets in some way, but possibly also more prosaic things, like buying a television. Or maybe I'd fly to Florida for a long weekend, get myself a motorcycle license, and spend whatever was left on a used Ducati.

   (Still, I’d be regretting Vegas.)

4. I’m not a fan of those “if you could live in any past time or place” questions, so I’m not going to ask that. But I am going to ask this: if you could bring the dominant clothing style from any past time or place back into fashion, what would it be?

   I won’t presume to speak for women’s fashion (though, in passing, I’ll note that I’m partial to the Twenties and Thirties), but for men’s, it would be some era in which hats were worn and suits had waistcoats and more than three buttons. Like, say, this one.

5. Which author, living or dead, would you most like to be favorably compared to?

   John le Carré. Particularly, John le Carré any time from Tinker, Tailor to A Perfect Spy, but I’d settle for the John le Carré of any era.

Extra credit

Almost two and a half years ago, Gwenda asked me five questions, too. I wrote three answers, got stuck, and never posted any of them. So, long overdue:

1. If you could be any font, which would you be and why?

   Caslon. Classic but not antiquarian, elegant but understated; deceptively readable, but capable of cloaking with apparent respectability the most radical sentiments.

2. Why zeppelins?

   It’s a class thing, I think — that nostalgia for an age in which air travel was a luxury available only to the leisured wealthy is of a piece, I'm sure, with the nostalgia for ocean liners, railways, Edwardian shooting parties. For more proximate causes, Michael Moorcock and his Oswald Bastable stories (which, it should be noted, make airships into instrument of colonial liberation struggle and anarchist revolution) and then to Hayao Miyazaki, with his floating castles and ominous flying battleships and daring air pirates.

3. What thing/person/situation that you’ve encountered in a foreign country struck you as strangest at the time?

   Coming out of the Bahnhof Lichtenberg onto the streets of East Berlin after a week and a half in the then-Soviet Union, starving and culture-shocked, only to hear the familiar melody of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega.

4. Did you have access to a well-stocked library, home or outside-the-home, as a kid? If so, what was it like? If not, what kind of books did you generally have access to?

   Oh, yeah. I grew up in a house (well, several houses, in sequence) full of books. History, archaeology, classics, mysteries, SF, contemporary fiction and gonzo journalism, architecture, cartoons, you name it.

5. What is the most lost you’ve ever been?

   You know, I don't get lost much. Or maybe I do, but I don't realize that's what it is. But the most disoriented I've been was boarding a Tokyo subway and finding on it a map that bore no apparent relation to the one I was familiar with. It took me quite some panicked moments to figure out that they did actually connect up in a couple of places, and what I was seeing was not the map of Bizarro Tokyo but of the interlocking private system that takes over some of the lines as in the southern suburbs.

Figure 1. Me as a font.

Comments (15)

July 25, 2006

My mother and her partner just took a road trip down to New Mexico to check out an Earthship: a passively-heated and -cooled, semi-subterranean off-the-grid house made largely out of used tires, glass bottles, and other recycled materials. You can see some photos here.

Figure 1. The bridge.

In the current hemisphere-wide heat wave, a life underground is starting to look pretty attractive . . .

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If you rewind to the beginning of the slideshow you’ll see some very Iain Banks pictures of Hoover Dam; or if you go forward a little you can see photos of the very same café where Kelly and I frantically tried to finish our Rio Hondo stories while Gavin watched the footie.

Comments (1)

July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

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July 4, 2006

I don’t care! I’ve got the new Ditty Bops album! God bless you, Steve Jobs!

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Update: These girls were born to cover “Bye Bye Love.”

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June 30, 2006

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June 29, 2006

You are turning me into a night person. With a day job.

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“. . . but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting.”

— Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

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June 28, 2006

— and I didn’t put this in the title because I don’t mean it literally and I didn’t want to scare anybody — that maybe that “Screwfly Solution” dream was prophetic. (And before you freak out, it was a dream about the story, not a dream of the story.) No, I haven’t been having sudden irrepressible urges to rape and kill, and no I don’t think I’ve noticed any uptick in the global rate of other guys having them, either.

Like I said, I don’t mean it literally.

But if somebody was to present me with evidence that in a more general way, some sort of space alien terror weapon was fucking with our collective emotional state . . . let’s just say I wouldn’t be entirely suprised.

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June 27, 2006

Unbelievable thunderstorms here from some time before two this morning till some time after three, or maybe it was some time after four. Seriously, you should have seen, heard, smelled this thing, it was tropical.

When I woke up it was out of a dream of working on the William James steampunk adventure novel that I’m half-convinced Susan and I need to write some day. Only in the dream version of the novel, Louis Agassiz was being carted around in a big glass fishtank full of dirty water like a Guild Steersman from Dune. And I remember thinking “Uh-oh; this is one of those ‘gun on the mantlepiece’ things, isn’t it? Guy living in fishtank + Amazon expedition = we’re going to have to write a scene were somebody kills Agassiz by dumping a load of piranhas into the tank, aren’t we?”

(And now you know where I get my ideas.)

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P.S. No, Jeremy’s not crazy: when I first posted this there was an analogy about sleeping through the Blitz. But I decided the Agassiz story was more interesting.

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Not you guys! You’re totally my peeps, no question. These guys. (To clarify: that’s the people being talked about there, not the people doing the talking. Well, some of the people in the comments section are also not my people. But the “Brights,” definitely not my people. ’Cause I know some people who don’t believe what they believe who are pretty damn bright, and to not realize how bright those people are, you’d have to be pretty damn Dim.)

Next time I go to a mainstream SF convention, I’m getting myself a T-shirt that says FANS ARE NOT SLANS.

(And if I was less easygoing, I might get one that says JUST BECAUSE WE’RE BOTH ATHEISTS DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT A NARROW-MINDED BIGOT. But I’m usually not that confrontational. Maybe I just need one that says STEVEN JAY GOULD HAS A POSSE.)

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June 26, 2006

Okay, when three attractive, intelligent, and discerning women tell you the facial hair should go, it’s probably time for the facial hair to go.

Abstract art installation or not.

(And the rest of the skull?)

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June 25, 2006

Basel, late April through early June.

Figure 1. So that’s where they keep it.

Figure 1. May day.

Figure 1. Monsoon season.

Figure 1. This poster kills fascists.

Figure 1. Poor misunderstood Peter.

Figure 1. Striking fear into every heart in Germany, I’m sure.

Figure 1. Live Cup action.

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June 22, 2006

Memo to self: Just because you had an idea for a story in the middle of the night does not mean it’s a good idea to go googling “The Screwfly Solution” before breakfast.

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June 19, 2006

Back in Basel. Showered, shaved, clothed, and fed. Awake, for the moment, but I doubt it’ll last. More sometime after midnight, I suspect.

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Sitting in the Costa Coffee in good old Heathrow Terminal 4. Got about twenty minutes before they start boarding my flight to Zürich and the last airborne leg of my journey back from the desert. I recommend the Chicken & Bacon Club Feast, although it is not in fact a feast.

Apologies to anyone I didn’t call last week, or didn’t get through to. Thunderstorm came through a couple of days in, knocked out the one cell tower my Euro-phone would talk to, didn’t get fixed till right before we left. But my DSL modem did turn up right before I got on the road (broadband, bitches!) and I’ll be getting my Skype on soon as I get back to Basel.

New Mexico was a blast. Fabulous writers, fabulous scenery, fabulous food. (I particularly recommend Walter’s gumbo, Maureen’s vegetarian coconut shrimp, and Jay’s momos.) Opinion was divided on my story, but people seemed to like my tomato curry. (Maureen and I were the only cooks to leave no leftovers. We win!) Had possibly the best eight-dollar meal of my life at a little bar / grill / convenience store in Arroyo Seco: one styrofoam pint green chile stew, three perfectly fried chicken taquitos. Drank my share of Negra Modelo with lime and also Kameron Hurley’s since she wasn’t there and the beer was. Also, lemongrass ice cream is Da Bomb.

And the writers, did I mention the writers? Walter, Mikey, Howard, Maureen, Gavin, Kelly, Jay, Daniel, Paolo, Carrie, Nina, Ray, Ted — best critique group evar. I could feel myself getting smarter all week long.

And the scenery. God, I miss the desert already. And the mountains. They just don’t make ’em like that anywhere else.

I’m not supposed to be thinking about what I’m doing after Switzerland, but I hear there’s a lot of bioinformatics in Santa Fe.

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June 10, 2006

Didn’t drink at the airport. Did drink on the plane, a little. I think they put something in those airline Bacardi bottles that makes you sober up again fifteen minutes after you finish one. Did watch a scratchy tape of X-Men 2. (Airline version. Patrick Stewart: “Oh, my Gosh, William, what have you done?”) Did read Babel-17 and Empire Star. Did lose one of the little rubber thingies on my fancy Sony earphones. Didn’t sleep, much. Didn’t write, much.

Thought about drinking here at DFW but I’d probably miss my flight. Hoping that if I sleep from here to Albuquerque I might actually function for a few hours after I get in. Looking forward to a nice early jet-lag morning tomorrow.

P.S. Send more drunk emails.

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Not convinced, eh?

Me neither.

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Update: There’s a young guy here in the departure lounge with a rock festival T-shirt and a big glass of beer. Because that’s what you drink at 9:30 in the morning, I guess.

I can’t tell if that would be a good idea or a really bad idea.

Comments (2)

June 5, 2006

1. Jesus Christ, I am in such fucking denial.
2. Sleep, jetlag, writing, something about laundry
3. No, like, I didn’t leave the house yesterday. I just sat around writing email and watching Battlestar Galactica and eating Top Ramen.
4. Really, was it crazier than usual this year, or was it just me?
5. Alan “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” DeNiro is a god-damned genius.
6. You know, I really don’t want to be one of those apocryphal fans who has no contact with their fellow human beings outside the con scene. Even the WisCon scene. Maybe I should have gotten that Ph.D. after all. Or moved to New York.
7. Okay, half of Rio Hondo’s already sent out RTF copies of their stories. I really should get to work here.
8. DENIAL! God!
9. Love,
10. Scary Editor Moles

Comments (13)

June 3, 2006

So, as expected, my DSL modem apparently arrived, was found undeliverable, and was shipped back while I was at/around WisCon. They say they’re sending me another one. One hopes it will get here before I leave for Rio Hondo.

But! I think I finally figured out how to get my unnecessarily fancy computer to connect to the internet through my unnecessarily fancy cell phone. I’m sure it’ll be dog-slow, but at least now maybe I’ll be able to write email as well as read it. (The phone, by itself, will log into my Gmail account. The phone will display my mail, in postage-stamp sized chunks. The phone will let me laboriously thumb in a reply of up to 2000 characters. The phone will let me press the send button. The phone will then chew the reply up, spit it out, and laugh at me.)

Which is good, because the chairs in this internet café get kind of uncomfortable after the first three or four hours, and I’m always convinced that everybody over there wakes up and starts talking right after I shut down.

Comments (0)

May 31, 2006

1. Jesus Christ, I am so fucking jet-lagged.
2. Wasn’t I supposed to be writing something?
3. I got way less sleep this weekend than I ever did in college and still I was always the first one to crash.
4. No, really, I mean, like, twenty hours sleep in four days.
5. Worth it, though. If my brain would work all the time the way it was working on Sunday, I’d be almost half as smart as Chip Delany.
6. Also, I have the coolest friends on the planet. I have the coolest friends in human history. I just don’t have a rocket car.
7. Anyway: Intimacy or sex? (And don’t say both/and, ’cause, like, duh.)
8. If I wake up at 3AM and can’t get back to sleep there’s gonna be trouble.
9. Love,
10. Scary Editor Moles

(Love means never having to say you’re sorry to Meghan for stealing her idea. Right? I hope so.)

Comments (10)

May 30, 2006

My con report:

So there’s this kid, and he’s surrounded by candy, all his favorite kinds of candy. The kid is not eating the candy. Instead the kid is crying. The kid is crying because if he eats any one piece of candy, that means that at that moment, he’s not eating all the other pieces of candy.

In case there’s anyone I didn’t tell this to already, that was my weekend.

Also: I just dreamed that we all met up for a sort of PartyAtMyHouseCon in, I think it was supposed to be Kinshasa? And not a good neighborhood in Kinshasa. And even though it wasn’t the real Kinshasa, and even though I really want to see all you guys again, it didn’t seem like a very good idea. So, somewhere else, okay?

Plane to Dallas in four hours. Plane to Zürich forty minutes after it lands in Dallas. Ugh. Condolences to everyone who had plane trouble yesterday; I’ll try to get my fair share in today.

I’d settle for either a rocket car or a zeppelin, you know?

Missing you already —

— David aka Scary Editor Moles

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* Named for a Terry Pratchett character in, mm, think it was The Wee Free Men.

Comments (2)

May 22, 2006

Nothing like waking up sure you’ve totally overslept and finding it’s still five minutes to six a.m.

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May 19, 2006

Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?

You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out.

(Via Patrick.)

Comments (0)

May 17, 2006

Figure 1. Technology, schmechnology.

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May 13, 2006

The nameless dread thing? Figured it out. My problem, not yours. Never mind.

Comments (2)

May 12, 2006

Why do I suddenly feel like something awful is about to happen and I’ve forgotten to prepare for it? (And why am I asking you when hardly any of you are awake?)

Comments (8)

April 23, 2006

So Saturday Thursday [Saturday? What? — ed.] evening I caught the overnight train to Florence. Because this is Europe and you can do stuff like that here.

Figure 1. What I woke up to: the Bologna train station. Now you know where baloney comes from.

Figure 2. The view from the train. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Italy looks a lot like Mendocino County.

And also because my friend Fran and her family had flown over from the States and rented a Tuscan farmhouse for the week. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Fran since I’d figured out the train schedule — the best I’d been able to do was send a fax c/o the owners of the farmhouse, something like “I ought to make it to Montevarchi about nineish” — but I figured with a fair bit of Spanish and a little Latin, I could manage Italy on my own if I had to.

Figure 3. Firenze S.M.N. I don’t know if this was really the longest train platform I’d ever walked down, but I was glad I didn’t have much luggage.

Figure 4. It’s kind of like Penn Station, only without that whole freaky troglodyte cave thing.

The overnight train was about 45 minutes late, but because Europe is a civilized society I had half a dozen local train choices and made it to Montevarchi right on schedule. (I did have to pay an extra five euros on the train because I hadn’t figured out I needed to get my ticket stamped, but I’ve learned plenty more expensive lessons than that.)

Fran and her dad John met me at the train station just as if we’d planned the whole thing, and we drove up to the farmhouse. Fran’s mom, Linda, and her sister Jenny made breakfast. We sat on the front porch eating frittata and toast and fruit and drinking Sienese coffee and watching the fog burn off.

Figure 5. Nothing but rolling hills covered with grapevines and olive trees — I don’t know how Fran and her folks put up with this for a whole week.

Figure 6. I think Italy gets a better grade of sunlight than Switzerland.

The house they’d rented was one of half a dozen or so on the grounds of the Fattoria Petrolo, a working winery and olive farm that was at least a couple of hundred years old. After breakfast Fran and John and I hiked up to the office so John could get on line and try to find them a hotel room for their last two nights. (As it turned out, on line didn’t work — booked solid, or so they claimed — but accepting the Petrolo folks’ offer of phoning the hotel and being Italian at them worked fine.)

Figure 7. The road up to the main villa. Look at those flowers — you’d almost think it was spring, or something.

Figure 8. I figured it wasn’t fair just to take pictures of the back of Fran’s head.

While John was dealing with that, Fran and I went on over the hill to look at the rest of the Fattoria.

Figure 9. Looking from the main villa down toward the church.

Figure 10. The church.

Figure 11. I was trying to take a picture of the tower up on the top of the hill, but my phone doesn’t have a zoom lens.

Figure 12. Looking back toward the main villa.

Figure 13. And again.

We went back to the villa and cleaned up, and then Fran and John and Tony (Jenny’s husband) and I went wine tasting while Linda and Jenny and Jenny’s nearly-two-year-old daughter Josephine went into town.

The first winery we hit was only just open — the kid who ran the place (I say kid, but he was probably thirty) had to run up the road ahead of us and drop the chain between the gates, and he couldn’t find his corkscrew till Fran pointed out that it was sitting next to the sink where he’d just rinsed out four glasses for us.

Figure 14. I have a bad habit of photographing buildings and machinery instead of people. I’m trying to work on it. (Cool tractor, though, ain’t it?)

He’d just bottled the wine on Monday. Considering that, and that it was mostly Merlot, it wasn’t half bad — simple but drinkable. And only six euros a bottle. John and Fran both thought it was the sort of thing Linda would like, and John bought three bottles.

(Full disclosure: I was bored with Merlot long before Sideways. I never even saw Sideways. If you like Merlot, please drink it, and if anybody gives you crap about it, let me know so I can smack ’em for you.)

The next winery, I wasn’t clever enough to take any pictures of. It was a little more established, and the wine was a little more expensive — eight euros — but it was good stuff; mostly Sangiovese, with a bit of a couple of other varietals none of us had ever heard of. John bought two bottles and I brought one back for myself.

Then we kept going up over the hills toward Chianti proper, but we didn’t make it that far. The thing about traveling with Fran is, she works for the California Culinary Academy, and her job is arranging student internships. So when you’re with Fran it can be hard to throw a rock without hitting a five-star restaurant where she knows the chef and two or three of the chef’s student assistants.

In this case we didn’t have to throw a rock; we just happened on the sign for Badia a Coltibuono, a winery, restaurant, and B&B on the grounds of a converted monastery. Fran just wanted to stop and say hi, but once we made it as far as the restaurant it was hard to pass up lunch. I had an aubergine purée with sheeps-cheese gelato followed by pork chops with . . . well, damn if I can remember, but it was good.

Figure 15. Badia a Coltibuono. Did I photograph the part of the monastery with the restaurant in it, where we actually were? No I did not. On the other hand, there’s this great church tower.

Chianti’s heraldic emblem is a black rooster. We asked Chef Paolo if he knew the story behind it, and he didn’t, so we spent a while trying to make one up — I think a plague of weevils was involved somewhere — but after a little research he came back and told us that it was in memory of the rooster that alerted the Sienese to the approach of the Florentine army and saved Chianti from Florinese domination. (Which was suspiciously similar to John’s explanation of why the rooster was the emblem of Oporto in Portugal, but I suppose everywhere in Europe with a rooster for an emblem must have more or less the same story.)

Then I had some fruit flan with candied orange peel and pistachio sauce. And several bites of Fran’s chocolate torte. Plus we drank a couple of bottles of the estate’s Chianti Classico, since by that point it was pretty clear we weren’t going to make it to any more wineries.

Figure 16. Me, Fran, and Tony. Let’s try to figure out what kind of pictures my phonecam sucks at taking, and take those. But if you look closely you can see some barrels with that black rooster logo in the photographs on either side of my head.

We came back to the farmhouse and sat on the porch talking and drinking for four or five hours . . .

Figure 17. Linda, Jenny, Josie, Fran (a.k.a. “Auntie Beanie”) and Tony.

Figure 18. John, Jenny, Josie, Fran and Tony. The great thing about digital is that you can just take a hell of a lot of pictures instead of waiting for everybody to get settled.

Figure 19. John, Jenny, Linda, Josie, Tony, Fran. Getting a little closer to an actual family portrait.

Figure 20. Here we go.

Figure 21. Now let’s get me in there, courtesy of Linda. Josie’s wine is watered — yes, we’re giving a two-year-old her own glass of wine; can you tell we’re in Europe? — but she’s still more interested in it than in being photographed.

Figure 22. Okay, now everyone’s looking at the camera, except Tony. This is either just before or just after I managed to spill that glass of wine on Jenny and Fran simultaneously.

. . . after which Linda cooked up a feast every bit as satisfying as lunch, if simpler: lamb, chicken, pork, salad, risotto, pasta — it was their last night at the farmhouse, so there was a fridge to empty out.

Then we opened a couple more bottles of wine and sat and drank and talked some more while the sun went down and the stars came out.

Figure 23. Evening in Tuscany. Again: How could anyone put up with this?

It’s a difficult life.

The next morning, early, John took one of the rental cars and took Jenny and Tony and Josephine to the Pisa airport. Fran and Linda and I packed up the other car and followed about an hour later.

Figure 24. Man, I’d hate to wake up to this every morning.

Figure 25. Another of my photographic weaknesses, besides buildings and machines, is pictures taken through windows.

Figure 26. It didn’t really look much like this, but you take a picture straight into the sun with no filter, you don’t expect much.

I’d been a bit irritated, when I made my train reservations back in Basel, that I hadn’t been able to get a direct return train from Florence, and was going to have to change trains in Milan. But again things worked out just as if we’d planned the whole thing: Fran and John and Linda were headed in that direction anyway, and since my train from Milan didn’t leave till five, we had plenty of time.

When Linda said that I ought to get a look at the Leaning Tower while I was here, I kind of figured we’d take a quick spin around it in the car, like Brandon and I did with the St. Louis Arch, and then get back on the autostrada. As far as I was concerned, I’d already had a fantastic trip, and I would have been able to go home contented.

But, like I said, we had plenty of time.

Figure 27. Getting out of the car in Pisa, two blocks from the Leaning Tower. This is the moment when I finally turned to Fran and whispered “Holy shit, I’m in fuckin’ Italy.”

Fran and I were going to climb the tower, but they only let so many people up in it at a time, and it would have been a good hour before we’d have been able to get a time slot.

Figure 28. You’ve been seeing pictures of it all your life. Those pictures, let me tell you, completely fail to capture the reality of standing in front of it. Which fact I will attempt to demonstrate by showing you yet another picture.

It’s probably just as well, since from the top of it I doubt I’d have been able to keep myself from phoning everyone I know in the States and saying “Yeah, I know it’s three in the morning where you are, but I’m standing on top of the goddamn Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

(At this point I should note that this was only my second trip to Italy ever, and that when I took the first one I was about three years old.)

Figure 29. It’s not just the tower. The baptistry, left, and the Duomo, right. Why the top of the baptistry looks like a medieval Chinese helmet I’m not really sure. But according to John it was the baptistry that was supposed to be the architectural star of the place. Show-off tower.

Figure 30. Again, it’s not just the tower — look at the last five arches on the lower left. See how they don’t line up? It’s really too bad they invented all this beautiful architecture before they invented geology and structural engineering.

So instead we just walked around the Piazza. Fran and I bought some postcards. They were selling all kinds of other stuff as well — from your normal touristy stuff, like Leaning Coffee Cups and Leaning Tower refrigerator magnets, to your abnormal touristy stuff, like bad imitation Japanese swords and Playboy Bunny t-shirts. Plus there were some African guys selling watches — I’m pretty sure I saw a Seiko I lost in Tokyo seven or eight years ago. But Fran just bought a tote bag for one of her coworkers back home, and her folks bought some non-leaning salt and pepper shakers. I stuck to postcards.

Figure 31. Fran and me: circumstantial evidence that we were actually there. By this point Linda was getting pretty good with the phonecam.

Then we had another pretty good lunch, at some little cafe that was between the Piazza and where we’d parked the car. And then we got back on the autostrada.

From Pisa we drove up along the coast to Genoa, and then north to Milan from there. I don’t remember where all we passed through — other than Carrara, where we drove past yards full of enough marble blocks to build a medium-sized pyramid — but it was beautiful. I wasn’t clever enough to take pictures of the drive, but if you’ve driven Highway 101 in California, it looked a lot like that. Like all different parts of 101, from Santa Barbara up to maybe Ukiah, but without the ten-lane suburban nightmare stretch from San Jose to San Francisco.

Actually, most of what I saw of the Italian countryside, from when I first woke up on Friday, somehwere north of Bologna, felt like one part of Northern California or another. It felt like home. Except that all the towns were Italian, with monasteries perched on the hilltops and terra-cotta apartment buildings in the valleys, but I could live with that.

I think I need to talk my new employers into opening an office in Tuscany.

They dropped me off at the central train station in Milan. Milan didn’t remind me of California; it was more like Madrid, tree-lined avenues with lots of big blocky buildings with iron balconies and painted shutters and graffitti from ground level as far up the walls as a hand and a spray can could reach. I didn’t get any pictures of that, either, but I did get some of Milan Centrale, a Mussolini-era monster that by weight, at least, must be one of the world’s larger train stations.

Figure 32. Milan Centrale. I’m not sure they have enough kiosks.

Figure 33. The Fascists, like the Nazis, clearly had what William Gibson called “a scary excess of design talent.”

Figure 34. Viva Roma Nova Eterna.

Figure 35. Germany has western pulps, Italy has Diabolik comic books. Tells you everything you need to know, really.

Figure 36. Yep, it’s a train station.

I bought a can of Chinotto and sat and read for an hour or so till my train pulled in.

Then it was back to Switzerland. Which suddenly seemed a lot less isolated and a lot easier not to take too seriously.

Viva Italia!

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April 20, 2006

I tried to Flickrize these, but I ran out of bandwidth, so you’ll have to settle for the low-res versions for now.

First, the neighborhood. So far the only notable landmark I’ve discovered is this place . . .

. . . which at first I thought was a Swiss Army officer candidate school, but which turned out to be . . .

. . . a Salvation Army officer candidate school.

Now, on to the apartment. The first thing you see when you come in is, of course, the bathroom.

Aside from the lack of storage space (a theme to be repeated), it’s a clear win over the bathroom at my place in Seattle. Note the orange shower curtain. Orange (hi, Greg) is also going to be a repeated theme here. There’s an orange-and-white bathmat, too but you can’t really see it in the picture.

Turn right to see the main bedroom. This picture was taken after they delivered everything except the one piece of furniture I really needed, namely the bed.

This is the first wardrobe I’ve ever owned. Coincidentally, this is the first place I’ve lived (and that includes the 20 m² rathole I rented on my first solo trip to Japan) with zero closet space.

Note that at least one, probably two, and possibly all three of the doors are upside down. By the time I’d assembled it that far, though, I already had one Band-Aid on my thumb from using the can opener on my Swiss Army knife as a screwdriver. Plus, I’d burned through more than half of the second season of Futurama, and I wasn’t going to go through the rest of it taking those doors off and putting them on again.

Bed! Delivered yesterday, at long last. Exactly the same model I had in the States, only this time I didn’t screw up and slice through some of the straps holding the slats in place. I was going to get something cheaper, but once I saw this one again in the showroom I decided a little breath of familiarity would go a long way toward making me feel at home. Anyway, the frame wasn’t much of the overall cost and the cheaper mattresses all sucked.

Note the sheets, pillowcases and whatnot. This is how the orange thing got started. What can I say, it was dark, cold, and wet when I bought them, and Manor was having its Blaxploitation “Feel Africa” sale:

The sale runs through the end of the month, so after my next paycheck I’m definitely going back for more orange stuff. (Actual plates, for instance — eating off paper is entertaining for a little while, but it gets old. Besides, right now I’m not getting any mileage out of my dishwasher.)

The view from the bedroom’s balcony. When the weather warms up I’m going to get a little table and a couple of chairs for it. And a pitcher of margaritas.

Leaving the bedroom, or turning left from the front door, we have the living room. Was I smart enough to take a picture from an angle that would make narrative sense? No.

Instead we get this angle. That’s the door we came through to the left of the bookshelf, with the umbrella on the doorknob and the coat hanging from the back. Not a lot of books on the shelf yet, but I’m working on it. The other door leads to the guest bedroom.

There’s nothing orange in here yet, unless you count the orange logo on the Coop bag, but I’ll fix that before too long.

And another angle on the living room, this one taken from the kitchen and showing off my fancy metal-and-glass coffee table and my fancy cheap-ass chair that’s supposed to tide me over till I get a couch. (Note also the printer on the kitchen table — both power outlets and flat surfaces are in kind of short supply at the moment.)

If I stick my head out the living room window, I can see this clock. Don’t know what the building is, but the clock’s surprisingly handy. Not only can you set your watch by it, it rings out every quarter-hour (one ring on the :15, two on the :30, three on the :45, four on the hour) and tolls the hour. Kind of nice to be lying in bed and know that it’s only three AM without having to get up and look at a clock.

The kitchen! No garbage disposal, of course, but everything else — you can see the dishwasher peeking in to the right of the sink. Had a bad moment when I thought the oven was busted, but then I found the circuit breakers. Note again the printer. (Having my own printer again is almost as exciting as having my own bed.)

My enormous refrigerator. (Well, enormous compared to the tiny dorm fridge in the company flat. And while I’m sure it’s significantly smaller than the one I had in Seattle, it feels like there’s at least as much usable space. I think having it more or less at eye level — freezer underneath — is a nice touch.) Note the emphasis on packaged foods — kind of unavoidable when I haven’t got any pots or pans yet.

Now, leaving the kitchen and crossing the living room (hopefully remembering to close the refrigerator door), last but not least, we have the guest bedroom:

Okay, maybe it is least. But by the time you come visit there ought to be a desk and some more bookshelves and maybe even a guest bed. Also by then I ought to have gotten rid of this junk:

Actually, there’s even more junk now, since that was taken before I started in on the bed. But I’ll get it cleaned up — honest.

Finally, in case there was any doubt as to where all that furniture was coming from:

Comments (7)

April 17, 2006

Or, Kameron Hurley is a genius.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought myself for quite some time:

I don’t believe people live without friendship, without laughter, without any joy in their lives. Women who’ve had cliterodectimies do, in fact, still have a sense of humor and take joy (or not) in their children (maybe they take joy in flowers instead. Or making pottery. Or whatever). Even slaves dance. Abused women have been known to sing.

It’s important to remember that.

And not just when you’re reading Touched by Venom.

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So, the reason that I haven’t been posting much about the whole Swiss thing, the last two or three weeks, is that I’ve been increasingly stressed out over still being stuck in a company-rented studio after more than a month—not that there’s anything wrong with it, but last weekend I calculated that (figuring from when I left Seattle), I’d been on the road, living out of a suitcase, for seventy days. I’m not sure whether that’s a record for me or not—the time, when I was fourteen, between when my family left San Diego and when we found a house in Tokyo must have been almost as long, if not longer—but the inability to completely unpack or completely relax, the slight but undeniable conditionality of any privacy I might have, was really starting to get to me. I had a couple of weekends here and there where I decided I wasn’t really up for anything but sitting on the couch playing video games, and at least one Sunday where I never left the studio or even got out of my bathrobe, but it’s only in the last week or two that the idea I should have moved to New York or LA or Tokyo has (however briefly) crossed my mind, or that I had to remind myself that Switzerland Is Not The Enemy.

(It’s nothing, really; not even as bad as I expected it to be before I came over. You should have seen what I thought of Tokyo that first year. But I destroyed those notebooks, so you can’t.)

But! All that’s over now. (And just in time, since someone else was expecting to move into the company studio Sunday.) I have an apartment.

Figure 1. The top balcony’s mine. And no, the building next door doesn’t actually curve like that.

Figure 1. Floor plan. Both of these pictures stolen from the real estate listing site, since apparently the cable for my digital camera wasn’t in my bag like I thought it was. More later.

The address, for those interested in such things: Hagentalerstrasse 15, CH-4055 Basel, Switzerland. (Apparently apartment numbers aren’t used here—perhaps because that would encourage having one’s mail delivered even when one hasn’t made one’s name known to the building owners. Those following along at home will also note the use of ‘ss’ instead of ‘ß’. You think that’s odd, you should see the way they spell actual Swiss German.)

Anyhow: I haven’t really slept in my own bed yet, since IKEA managed somehow to deliver some important parts of it—like the mattress—to someone else and say they can’t get me a replacement till Wednesday morning. (I picked up a sort of minimal futon for 30 francs to use in the interim.) And I don’t have a couch since I used up most of my furniture budget for this month on the bed.

But I have an apartment! So I guess I’m staying.

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March 26, 2006

Figure 1. I hear you.

Figure 2. If we stay very still perhaps they’ll go away.

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March 23, 2006

With my shiny new Swiss Nokia I’ve finally joined Generation Cameraphone, and can now inflict even more pictures on the Intarwebs.

Figure 1. Grossbasel’s heraldic beast.

Figure 2. Kleinbasel’s heraldic giant.

Comments (3)

March 21, 2006

Still no apartment. Looked at another place yesterday evening, a shiny new two-bedroom that I liked quite a bit. Unfortunately the people living in it aren’t actually planning to get out till July. Doubly unfortunately, I liked it enough that I’m not sure I could be satisfied now with the place I looked at on Friday. But there’s plenty more where that came from.

On the other hand, I got paid today! Sorta. I haven’t got a bank account yet — applied online for a Post Office account (yes, the Post Office is a bank here, more or less — another clue that Switzerland and Japan are closely related) after discovering the ridiculous (by U. ‘Free Steak Knives With Checking Account’ S. standards) fees charged by the likes of UBS, but probably won’t actually have an account for a couple of weeks. So instead of a paycheck I got an advance of as much cash as I felt safe carrying — a few days’ pay, enough to get me through that couple of weeks in terms of groceries and pocket money.

It all feels weirdly 19th-century, but I guess that’s sort of the point of moving to Europe, isn’t it?

Now I’ve stayed at work way too late, and it’s time to blow my wage packet on curry and beer.

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