perfidy

Walking around town over lunch, I ran into a protest happening at McPherson Square. There, right under the General's Horse's Ass, were a bunch of people in red hats shouting a lot. So far, so typical. Goofy sartorial choices go hand in hand with loud shouting in DC. As I got close enough to read the signs, I became sorely befuddled. For the signs read something like this:

Which seemed to me like Bush was fighting AIDS, and these people would like it if he'd just stop. This message was in stark contrast to the rather fey appearance of most of the protestors.

The group sponsoring the protest can be found here, but I found no evidence of the mysterious signs at their site. Sadly, I didn't have my phone with me, else I would have snapped a few pics.

Then, when I finally arrived at the Chinese buffet, I noticed for the first time that behind the counter was displayed a Kimber Mfg. calendar. Kimber, as in the firearms manufacturer responsible for my own personal weapon, the Kimber Custom .45ACP. A weapon that, I might add, is fully illegal for Chinese restaurateurs in DC to own.

And Friday, the smelliest bum I have ever encountered assaulted another, less smelly bum right outside my office. This match-up was not as impressive as those offered by Bumfights empresssario (and now felon) xxx, but I did see the less loathsome bum do about a 4.5 40 trying to escape either a) his opponent's fearsome martial arts skills; or b) the aftermath of said bum's use of his own pants as a porta-john. Two police officers and several security guards did nothing but smile patronizingly. Eventually, one of the building maintenance staff came along and hosed down the spot where the violent bum had been standing.

And one of these days, I will discover the mysteries of 1086 Vermont Ave., NW. I think it may be... a brothel. The prostitutes are usually out on the street over the noon hour, then retire to wherever prostitutes hang out whilst their clients are working; and then stand watch for most of the evening. Some even are still working at six or seven in the morning, or so I have been told. I'm usually not in that early, but I have reliable sources. (The guards at my building.) Apparently there is a brisk trade in illicit sex in the alley behind my office building at all hours of the day.

Well, there are a lot of lobbyists around.

This week's Carnival of the Recipes is up at Pajamapundits.com. Don't go hungry.

Elisa has Carnival of Music #20 up, go check it out. Faced with a total lack of submissions, she has heroically put together an excellent carnival. To prevent this sort of cruelty, make your submissions to next week's here. And for those who have just joined us, we here at Perfidy hosted last week's carnival. 
 

On this day in history...

Male Colorado voters make the morally correct but tactically foolish decision to grant the vote to the women of that state. Twenty-three years later and also on this day, Jeanette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the US Congress.

Interestingly, many of the colonies had at least some provision for women voting. New Jersey was the last of these to remove that privilege in 1807. Some states allowed women to vote in school board elections throughout the nineteenth century, and several of the territories preceded Colorado in granting women's suffrage.

I am reminded of a Man Show skit where Adam and the other dude go to a county fair and set up a booth for an "End the Suffrage of Women" movement. Playing on the similarity of the words 'suffrage' and 'suffering.' they convinced several well-meaning but rather dim women to sign. They even got one woman to volunteer to help get signatures. In her defense, she spoke very poor english. But the best part was the reaction of the very few people who actually knew what suffrage is. One elderly gentleman was on the verge of violence. Another, a young protester hippie type woman, patiently tried to explain to the non-english speaker that what she was doing was not a good thing, and that the nice young men were in fact making fun of her.

It's day four of the novel writing, and I have two days worth in the can. Unlike the madly prolific EDog (7500 words) I am having trouble achieving, let alone maintaining, the required clip of 1667 words a day. Still, this is the most fiction I have ever written in such a small period of time. I've been significantly more productive many times on the non-fiction side, and that leaves me some small hope that I can eventually pick up the pace.

Funny thing, though, writing non fiction is for me easy. You all may argue amongst yourselves about the quality of that writing, but at least the production of it is no real burden for me. It generally flows out my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen without skull sweat, headaches or worry. Fiction, on the other hand, hurts my brain. I'm not sure about the deep psychological reasons for it - but some part of me seems to think that fiction is vastly more important than non fiction. There is a pressure in me to make sure that it is really good before writing it, let alone letting others see it. I don't feel that at all with the non-fiction. Maybe because I always wanted to be an author of sf novels, I can't afford to fail. I didn't grow up wanting to be an essayist or blogger and perhaps that is why it feels easier. It's difficult, too, to post these things. I cringe before clicking the submit button. Even telling you that I cringe before clicking the button is easier than letting you see the fiction. Let us hope that this all builds character.

Aside from the neurosis and paranoia, I am also thinking harder on all of this than even the more complicated posts, or on term papers back in school. This is a good thing, I believe, but it is tiring. Writing five hundred words of fiction is more tiring than a day's worth of heavy blogging, even if it only takes an hour. Trying to keep in my head the evolving characters and plot is not so hard, but applying that knowledge consistently is. I've wasted a fair chunk of time writing background material, even though I'd promised myself not to. But it is so much easier - it's more like nonfiction.

And of course, it's easier to write this post than to write the next chapter. If I can avoid Civ IV tonight, hopefully I can get a couple more in the bag.

Mind lives in – is – a narrow wedge of utter blackness. Within the light drinking skin are engines, weapons and the mind that humans call hk-55 or, sometimes, baby. Baby is a hole in the darkness of space, coasting in the vast emptiness on the edge of the system.

Five hours away is oscar-5, the sole focus of baby's attention. Emissions still dribble from the target, indicating to baby's hunter mind either carelessness or high cunning of a variety she has only encountered once since her pod arrived in this space. Baby's podmates are spread across a cubic day, senses straining the void. They all hope for ambush, for sport; though they will never tell the people.

Baby ponders the target. Intelligence sub-agencies have categorized this contact according to a Byzantine taxonomy laboriously constructed from the evidence of probes, hk's, warships, killers, and the wreckage of thousands of softkilled targets. Baby knows the details in the new parts of her mind, but doesn't care. Only if something surprising had surfaced in the analysis would she have paid close attention. She savors the emissions, smelling the minute dimpling of spacetime, and the wake of its passage.

It's a big one, and slow. It must have been climbing upsystem for years before we arrived. She'd been seeing more of these lately. The fast movers only met their fate faster. She knows her prey, and knows what surprises they are capable of.

Emission spike! This tastes like fear. Now silence, but this prey is too late to discipline. Baby ansibles her new podmates.

message-id: [9198d4ee0.511030705q94e4aff4f].
date: 21 apr 2105 16:59:57 -9120 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: list: taskgroup 14.9/55 [deltagreen].
subject: oscar-5
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 1024bit.
authenticator: 2g6.h249.56j.204/word of the day is gumbo
message reads:
sensor spike/emission quiet
indic. target aware
group close, patt.5/2
group 360/60 outwatch, maintain emcon
baby softkill, gunnr sift ashes

Four pings. Her pod will watch for sharks, while she closes with the target. None knew exactly what made the target spook. Perhaps an attentive eye saw a shadow drift before a distant star. Or maybe simply fear. Very reasonable fear. It mattered not - the hunters were too close. Baby coasts on. Her vector will in time bring her within range of the slowmover regardless of how it maneuvers. She understands the complexities of orbital mechanics and maneuver in flat space as she had once understood currents and cold water. She remembers the water, before the people had taken her, and remade her. But she was happy. This was hunting like nothing she had known, and better by far.

Spread apart more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to the sun, Baby's taskgroup responds instantly to the causal channel message. The other hunter killers bend their trajectories on quiet streams of fast ions. They will provide outwatch, high cover. Two were heading downsystem, spinward of the target. Shaping course to box the slowmover, they are on the opposite side and their drives invisible, pointed away from both to the target and what remains of life in system. The third hunter killer is upsystem of baby, thrusting down and watching in. Gunnr coasts in baby's wake. She will not take part in the battle, but feast on the remains.

***

Over at FARK, folks are working on a series of Magic: the Gathering cards devoted to political and cultural issues.

Some are better than others of course, but a few really shine for me:

Personal fave below the fold:

The USS Constitution, flagship of task force 14-9, is mostly quiet. Quiet because it is nighttime according to the ship clocks, clocks now running faster than at any time in the last two (or six) years since the ship finished breaking down to non-relativistic speeds on a torch of antimatter. Quiet because it is a warship. Quiet because it is following the wake of four relativistic kill vehicles that, though they left three years Earth time after the fleet, they arrived here only two weeks ago, local time. They didn’t have to slow down gently. They would go from within a loud shout of C to nothing in a fraction of a second, imparting all of their energy of motion in a cataclysm more ferocious by far than the asteroid which once, long ago, ended the dinosaurs on far away Earth.

In the cold depths, just outside the cometary halo, the three suns of the Centauri were bright pinpoints of yellow, yellow and red. Long, needle-like and black, the RKVs had exhausted all but a tiny fraction of their antimatter fuel accelerating out from Earth’s fractured moon to travel twenty-four trillion miles at 92% of the speed of light. Half a year out, the shipminds absorbed the sensor take from the starwisp probes that preceded them. The probes, in their hundreds, had wafted into the system months earlier. Only hundreds of grams in weight, their gossamer wings brought a simple payload, a fabricator seed enveloped in bardo cone insulation. The solar wind of the destination stars slowed the wisps to manageable speeds, so that when the seed hit a useful body the fabricator seed would survive the impact. Once planted in a cometary body the seed, powered by a small subcritical isotope pile and informed by a carbon matrix library of designs, set about constructing a small but powerful observatory from the dirty ice.

On the Constitution, the crew and the shipmind's military intelligence sub-agencies analyze the fresh data and compared it with the picture generated by Big Eye, the carefully hidden, extremely long baseline interferometer observatory in the Oort Cloud four light years behind. Many emission sources had gone dark, others were dramatically dimmer. The enemy attempted to hide, no matter how impossible it was to hide a system-wide information and industrial ecology.

The four killers divide and divide again, fissioning into 256 needles, every one of which harbored a fragment of the shipmind, a reservoir of antimatter for terminal guidance, and a target. Each mirv moved through the darkness at 92 percent of the speed of light. Each mirv headed was for the most populous inhabited bodies orbiting the three stars of the system. Each mirv had, by right of its fantastic momentum, enough kinetic energy to sere a continent to ashes, or break to pieces a medium sized asteroid. The mirved RKVs jockey for position as final orders are ansibled to the killers. The minds of the ships, weak AI inhabiting a nucleus of quantum foam around which orbited a constellation of submolar processors, intend only destruction.

***

The world seemed small as Captain Sely left command space and settled into the confines of his mind. Agencies and voices clamored for attention at the edges of his consciousness, but he pushes them aside. For now, coffee is the top of the agenda. Caffeine to restore alertness, and to dull the pain of living a wider life than God intended.

Sely unfolded his wiry frame from the acceleration couch he had occupied for the last seventy-two hours. The last dribbles of shockgel disappeared into the fabric of the couch as he floated toward the desk at the opposite side of the cabin. Looking around the spacious cabin, he smiled at the thought that despite years in the vastness of interstellar space, space was what he would miss most when in a few hours the ship would collapse in on itself, hollow spaces mostly disappearing to make the ship ready for combat. The easy days of the long passage were almost gone.

Work-ups for the coming weeks were going well – a quick inner glance and training information scrolled across his vision for a moment before flicking away – the crew was tight. As well they should be, he thought, after two years of unending practice in the simulation spaces. Fleet two-shop had digested the intel dump from the probe network, and had fed the final targets into the killers. His own intel group even now was cataloguing targets, and working with ops to spin up a target matrix for 14-9's area of responsibility.

For now, though… Coffee. Sely opened a small cabinet and removed something that looked like a large syringe. Which in a way, it was. Almost a century of hard-won experience had shown that a French press was the only traditional method of coffee preparation even remotely suitable for freefall. Filling a bulb with coffee, he drifted over to his desk.

He could never avoid looking at the old-style photograph clipped to the top of the desk. A picture of woman and child, his wife and daughter. Dead since the invaders dropped some very, very large rocks on his home. And on the homes of almost two billion others. Sely and his son had been in the moon. Not that they escaped anything save death there.

A redness flicked at the edges of his vision. Sely's medical automation asking permission to adjust his cognition to dampen out anguish, and replace it with calmness and focus. Sely brushed this aside as he always did. Only in combat would he accept that sort of meddling. In combat, he never needed it.

Sely looked about him and contemplated the small bubble of air and light and heat that encased him. I've had two years of respite from horror, he thought. And used it to plan the visitation of horror. Now the planning is nearly done. Soon, it will be killing time.

***

OK folks, I need a ruling on something.

As my fellow Ministers and a few readers are aware, I have a second regular job at night at a certain armed courier company. Let's call it "ArmCo". I work with a few young men who are smart, funny, and have much more on the ball than a pitiless, soulless career at ArmCo might suggest. They know it too, but are still a little too unseasoned to understand how little time they have left before they're out of better job options and ArmCo is the best of the bad ones. We have alot of laughs though, and get along great.

At night we usually get everything done early, and have alot of time to gab. Despite whatever meandering twists and turns the conversations might take, astute observers will realize there are really only two topics: chicks, and zombies.

So.

Until last night, those two themes were separated by a vast and yawning gulf. Until last night, they were safely kept far apart. Until last night, there was absolutely no consideration of the unholy and just deeply weird repercussions that might arise from carnal relations with the undead. Until last night, when sort of mostly out of the blue, Dan asked,

"Say I'm tappin' a zombie chick, right? A chick who used to be hot and maybe still looked mostly normal. And say she doesn't bite me or anything. Would I then become a zombie?"

...

Huh.

...

Huh.

...

Here's my reasoning thus far (accept the premise as is. Dan is a former Marine who was wounded and medically discharged. He doesn't have a plate in his head or anything, but he sometimes lets you think he does. Just roll with it):

One the one hand, it would seem that fluid exchange is the essence (to reference both comically brilliant mathematician John Nash AND comically brilliant fictional character General Jack T. Ripper) of zombie creation. That is, some fluid from an existing zombie enters the body of normal human, typically by way of open wound, and presto-changeo the human becomes a zombie in some certain time.

But upon reflection, I'm not sure we ever clearly understand which fluid is the medium for infection: saliva? Blood? Bile? Um, other..? To be sure it depends on the zombies we're talking about: Romero zombies are pretty unambiguously bite/saliva driven, as 28 Days Later zombies (arguably not zombies, but leave it alone for now) were clearly the blood-spewing-and-sharing variety.

As Dan didn't specify which universe his hot zombie chick came from, I focused instead on what I was given: one female zombie. No open wounds. No blood. No other possibility for fluid exchange outside the naughty bits. Would Dan then become an undead Dan? What about with a condom?

I went round and round with this, but just couldn't come down definitively on one side or the other.

There is a passage in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting that goes:

Spud turns and says something to Renton, who can't hear him above a song by the Farm, which, Renton considers, like all their songs, is listenable only if you're E'd out of your box, and if you're E'd out of your box it would be a waste listening to The Farm, you'd be better off at some rave freaking out to heavy techno-sounds.

New Orleans stoner-rock trio Suplecs are a bit like this. On one hand they are heavy and fast. On the other hand the guitars sound like they were recorded in a closet, their riffs are boring, and their overall vibe recalls all the million stoner-metal bands I've already heard. And for my money if you have to get high to appreciate something, there's no there, there in the first place.

For the most part this is the way I feel about stoner-rock in general, or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days. I remember a few years ago when the Queens of the Stone Age first came up hearing from all quarters how great and original they were, how great their songs were, how heavy they sounded and so on. Then I heard the band and they were ok, sure, but nothing to write home about. Then I realized that most of the people who had been crowing about QOTSA so hard were also habitual stoners: mystery solved. Since then a good handful of similar bands have crossed my path: Kyuss, Nashville Pussy, Fu Manchu, and Gov't Mule, just to name a few that come to mind. Some of them are really good no matter your chemical status, but I always have the sneaking suspicion that they would be better if you were too high to see: a bad sign, for my money.

Suplecs don't seem to have figured out yet what kind of band they want to be, and it shows. "Tsunami," the first song on their latest album, Powtin' On The Outside, Pawty On The Inside lifts its riff from an old Scorpions song. They even want you to know it, since the first word of each verse is "Blackout!" just like the Germans wrote it. The very next track, "Black Cloud" contains the stanza,

If life is a bowl of cherries, how come I'm in the pits?
If life is a bowl of cherries, smells like shit 'n' I'm eatin' it.
Cuz I've been feedin' it, now I gotta deal with it."

What? Are these guys kidding?

About two thirds of Powtin' is this kind of goofy thrash metal, but a few songs switch things up by including either sincere ('serious') angst-laden lyrics and metal screams or Gov't Mule style instrumental space jams. "Gotta Pain," alternates metal screams with generic impassioned teenage alienation, "End of Me" is a barstool blooze revved up to 200 RPM, and "Cities of the Dead" is a six-minute jam instrumental that builds and builds but never really comes into focus or gets anywhere. On "Welcome Home" and the finale "Meatballs and Spaghetti" the band combine all of these into one unwieldy whole.

After a half dozen listens I keep expecting the various ideas swirling around to take shape and turn into something with momentum, but they never really do. Choruses don't quite come together, drama never unfolds, and the ever-present sludgy riffs spin their wheels in the mud. The most compelling music on the album is the untitled bonus track, which is about three and a half minutes of fairly groovy jamming; nothing special in and of itself, but far more accessible and coherent than any of the ten official songs that came before.

If Suplecs figure out which thing they want to do well, they probably have one or two solid albums in them. But Powtin' On The Inside, Pawty On The Outside is nothing special, a half-baked (ooh! A pun!) mess of sludgy thrash, noodly jams, and odds and ends that sound too much like other bands to really make much of an impression. I don't really smoke the reefer, so I have no idea what changes if you were to get baked and give Powtin' a spin. But I do know that if that were to happen, there are many albums I'd much rather have around than this one.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org.