Category Archives: Books & Writing

And I’m Back

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Well, as back as I ever am these days.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and I just had to let something go. Can’t skip out on work or the cats will start supplementing their diets by nibbling on my extremities. Can’t avoid doing the taxes; the less said about that non-option, the better. And there was other stuff I’m not ready to talk about that also couldn’t wait.

And then there was the other stuff. Stuff I wanted to do, sure, but it took time and attention.

We bought a new mattress, for instance. Our old one was old. As Maggie put it, “old enough to vote, maybe even old enough to drink”. Not that it ever registered to vote (or if it did, we never saw a ballot come in the mail), nor did we ever catch it getting shit-faced in front of the TV*. Mattress shopping in a “post”-COVID environment is nerve-wracking–“who’s been sprawled on this test mattress before me” isn’t a question you want to be asking yourself every five minutes–but I have to say that it was worth it. My back hurts much less now than it did in the days before twelve inches of memory foam entered our lives. And when it comes to nigh-indescribable joy, there isn’t much that can top being able to slide out of bed without springs creaking and the whole mattress shifting when one of us needs to answer a late-night/early morning phone call from Mother Nature.

* Yes, we do have a TV in the bedroom. Doesn’t everyone? I mean, it’s the most comfortable place to kick back and watch hours of programming–as long as your mattress isn’t belching stale beer scent in your face.

The real biggie, though–the thing that has monopolized my so-called free time for the past couple of weeks–is a new computer.

A digression.

Long-time readers may recall that when I started this blog a decade ago(!), I was primarily a Linux user. If I needed Windows for something, I’d either fire up a virtual machine or one of the far too many older machines piled in my office. Before that, I’d bounced from Atari to DOS to early Windows, early Mac, early Linux, back to Windows, back to Linux, and around and around I goes, and where I stops, well, you get the idea.

Over the past few years–since Microsoft introduced WSL (essentially, Linux running inside of Windows), I’ve been moving more and more to Windows Land. Most things I wanted to do were just as easy in Windows 10 as Linux, and for the few that weren’t, WSL has served admirably.

But.

It was time for a change. I’ve been tied to a desktop with my last couple of “main machines”, but I wanted to return to a more portable system. It was a pain in the neck to move my email over to the loyal Surface Go when I needed to be out and about. And to be blunt, the Surface Go’s keyboard really wasn’t suitable for extended typing. A blog post, maybe. A novel, nope.

So I started looking at laptops. And I was seduced.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I’ve once again become an Apple user. Specifically, I found a very good deal on a lightly used MacBook Air–so lightly used that the Apple logo stickers were still in the box. Yes, the new one with an M2. In that lovely Midnight* color. With 8 gigs of RAM and 512 of storage.

* Mind you, it’s not the color I associate with the middle of the night; it’s not nearly dark enough for that. But then, Apple is the company that can declare pink to be “Rose Gold” and have the entire world agree with them, so if they want to call charcoal gray “Midnight”, I’m hardly in a position to dispute the matter.

And, yes, most of the software I need is just as available in Appleville as in Windows Land or Linuxton. Not surprising, that latter: MacOS is, after all, also a UNIX-variant. Call it a second cousin once removed to Linux.

I had the Mac about 90% set up the way I wanted it within two days. Microsoft Office downloaded from the Apple App Store and activated flawlessly when I signed in. Web browsers installed easily and synchronized their settings with the Windows versions. Migrating my email took less than half an hour. Most of the rest of those two days was taken up with finding replacements for smaller programs (a music tag editor, an image viewer that wouldn’t try to take over my entire picture library,…) and tweaking a few tiny Linux command line programs I’d written to run in the Mac’s Terminal*.

* Did you know every Mac has an easily accessible command line? It does, and it works almost identically with it’s Linux brethren. A victory for those of us who would rather type “for i in * ; do [something] ; done” than use mouse clicks to select a bunch of files and do [something] to each one, one at a time.

I can’t work without my dual-monitor setup: one big one for whatever I’m actively doing and a smaller one off to the side to hold my email so I can just glance over at it from time to time. The Air officially only supports one external display. Enter a hub that uses some sweet software trickery to support a second external screen. Works like magic. So now I have to figure out what I’m going to put on the third screen–the one built into the MacBook.

You want to hear something funny? The one thing that took the longest and threatened to entirely derail my Macgration was this blog. Seriously.

Another digression.

This blog runs on a platform called WordPress. About two years ago, WordPress made a major change to the software’s built-in editor. I won’t bore you with the details, but the result of the change was that I could no longer write my posts offline in whatever tool I wanted to use, save it on my own hard drive, and then copy it up to the blog. I had to use their new editor, which I found totally incomprehensible and which didn’t (and still doesn’t) allow for a local save. I nearly gave up the blog. And then I discovered that there was a way to hook Word into WordPress.

It’s true: the day was, in actual fact, saved by Microsoft.

Guess what doesn’t work in the Macintosh version of Word. Again, to avoid boring you, I won’t go into the reasons why it doesn’t work. Nor will I go through all the gyrations I went through trying to either make it work or find an acceptable replacement.

Long story short, remember what I said up above about using a virtual machine on Linux to run the occasional Windows program I couldn’t do without? I’m doing that again.

A small (30GB or so) chunk of the hard drive holds a Windows virtual machine with nothing but Microsoft Office installed. Word is hooked into WordPress* and I’m able to write my posts, save them on my computer, and hit the Publish button, just like before.

Once again, the day is saved by Microsoft.

Anyway.

I mentioned up above that the new machine has 8GB of memory. I was worried that wouldn’t be enough, but you know what? It seems to be plenty. As I write this, I’ve got the Windows virtual machine going, a video playing for background noise, four web browsers open to various pages I’ve been consulting, my email, two Terminal sessions doing things via remote connections to my Windows and Linux machines, and about half a dozen utility programs doing things like monitoring my available memory.

It’s all running smoothly. If the computer is swapping programs in and out of working memory, it’s doing it so smoothly and quietly that I can’t see it happening. No audio or video skips, no hesitation switching over to the email or toggling from one browser to another.

Let me close here with a couple of quotes from old blog posts:

There’s been a longstanding perception that Apple computers feel slow … No matter how fast the computer is getting work done, the user interface has often felt sluggish … I can’t imagine an M1 Ultra machine feeling sluggish.

I can’t speak for the M1 Ultra, but boy-howdy does this M2 feel the exact antithesis of sluggish.

There’s a notch at the top of the display for the camera … I kind of like the idea. Gives more physical space for the screen, and if you’ve got so much stuff in your Menu Bar that it runs into the notch, you probably ought to slim things down a bit anyway.

At the moment, I count 18 things in my Menu Bar, including the clock. Works just fine on the big monitor, where there’s no notch. Over on the built-in screen, though, only the clock and 12 icons are visible. Picture me blushing. I’ve at least arranged them so the ones that get hidden are the ones I’m least likely to need. Nobody really uses their Dropbox and OneDrive Menu Bar icons, right?

And, finally:

But with the exception of the shared photos mess, I’m genuinely impressed with what’s coming. Maybe not quite enough to buy a Mac, and definitely not enough to replace my Pixel phone with an iPhone.

I’m still not anywhere within seventeen million parsecs of getting an iPhone.

SAST 23

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Why, yes, it has been an obnoxious month. How did you guess?

Something about the missed posts, right? Yeah, sorry about that. Too much going on, not enough sleep. It adds up to a lack of focus and ability to concentrate. And you know what that leads to.

Yup. SAST

Starting with a follow-up thought on the new MLB rules.

Now that I’ve watched a couple of games with those rules in effect, I have to say they’re not having as big an effect as I’d thought they would. Yes, the pitch clock is keeping things moving; I still have mixed feelings about that, but I’m leaning a little more toward the positive. The psychological battle between pitcher and batter can be exciting, but too often it degenerates into a rote call-and-response. So I favor anything that forces the players to find new ways to unsettle each other–though I have to admit, I do wonder how Ichiro would have coped with the pitch clock.

My biggest concern around the pitch clock and its associated rule changes is the limitation on how many times the pitcher can attempt a pickoff. Sure, unlimited tosses got abused from time to time. But I do worry that limiting the pitcher to no more than two attempts will put too much power on the batter’s side. Pitchers and catchers are either going to have to find other ways to hold the runner on–quick pitch and a snap throw from the plate, anyone?–or speed up their routine even further so the runner doesn’t have time to set himself and steal.

And, while I’m not looking forward to a game being decided on a clock violation, I have to admit it’s really not that different from a game-ending balk*. I expect we’ll see several clock-offs this year, but the numbers should drop quickly as players get more accustomed to the clock.

* That’s happened less than two dozen times in MLB history, by the way.

Moving on.

You may have noticed that St. Patrick’s Day was last week. As usual, America celebrated–if you can call it that–the occasion with green clothing, alcohol, and sales on “traditionally Irish” merchandise. Our local supermarket got into the act, of course, but it seems their ad crew started the celebration a little too early. By the look of things, the entire staff was either drunk or working through a hangover:

“Green Cabage” is a steal at 39 cents a pound, and ten pounds of “Patatoes” for five bucks isn’t bad either.

But I have to wonder about that “Guines Pub Draught”. We exclusively use Guinness in soups and stews; I don’t think I’m ready to try replacing it with a brew whose name sounds like a cheap copycat product, even at the remarkably low price of fifteen dollars.

Moving on one more time.

Saturday will be the tenth anniversary of this blog.

It’s traditional to mark significant anniversaries with noise and spectacle. I don’t think I’m going to do that. For one thing, the 25th is a work day. For another, Sunday is a far more important anniversary: the 44th anniversary of the day Maggie and I met. Forty-four isn’t one of those “significant” numbers, but since the blog anniversary never could have happened without her support, I’d rather devote what time I have available this weekend to her.

Next Week

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This time next week, I’ll be on my way to Sedalia for the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival.

Yes, there’s an actual, in-person festival happening this year.

Is this a good idea? Well… On one forepaw, it is Missouri–which the Mayo Clinic says has the 40th lowest percentage of the population fully vaccinated. And we won’t even talk about masking.

On the other forepaw, the performers and audience are coming from all over the world. I suspect as a group they’re going to be more highly vaccinated than the people who live there. And there’s nothing stopping me, or anyone else in attendance, from wearing a mask.

In truth, the exposure risk seems on a par with what I experience dealing with the public every day at work.

So there’s that.

To be honest, I’m no more immune to the lure of “Get out of the house and do something normal” than anyone else. But this isn’t solely an exercise in COVID denial.

The cancelation of the 2020 festival was a big disappointment, even more so than the reasons why canceling everything else that spring and summer disappointed everyone. That was, if you recall, the Year of the Woman, marking the hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote in the US. And the Sedalia festival was going all-in on the theme, emphasizing female performers and composers.

And on a more personal level, 2020 was going to be the year the SJRF’s Ragtime Kid program–funded by donations to the Foundation in Dad’s memory–would debut. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

We used the time to refine our concepts, figuring to go live with the 2021 festival. Which also didn’t happen.

So now we’ve got 2021 and 2022 Ragtime Kids to introduce. Somebody’s got to be there to represent, right?

As if three-plus days of good music and catching up with friends we haven’t seen in three years isn’t enough incentive to attend*.

* And, of course, Sedalia is just about halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. That’s prime BBQ country; hard to resist for a family that travels on its stomach as much as mine.

All of which is a long-winded lead-up to letting y’all know that there won’t be a Wednesday post next week. I’ll do my best to cue up a Friday post so nobody feels fuzzy-deprived, and I expect everything to be back to normal on June 8.

And, of course, this is also a commercial message, reminding you that the Foundation will still cheerfully accept donations in Dad’s memory and use them to support the Ragtime Kid program. Contact information is here.

A Dream and a Nightmare

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You decide which is which.

Story the First: I dreamt I had moved to a small town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Not so small that it couldn’t support a community orchestra, however. Because I joined the group when the organizers came around.

Our first concert–some indefinite period the future–was going to be an all-Bernstein program. We all show up for the first rehearsal, and it’s obvious that, while some of us might* be accomplished musicians, as a group we don’t have Clue One what the heck we’re doing.

* Strong emphasis on the “might”.

So we start setting up our instruments, looking over the sheet music, and all the things that occupy musicians’ time while they wait for the conductor: calling our loved ones, making dental appointments, playing Wordle, and so on.

Someone steps onto the podium and taps his baton for our attention.

There’s a mass intake of breath. Our conductor is none other than Leonard Bernstein himself*.

* For the record, I’m well aware Mr. Bernstein died more than three decades ago. Tell that to my subconscious.

In some little Podunk town. For a community orchestra that had never played together before.

Leonard Effin’ Bernstein.

We all clearly knew disaster awaited us, but when Leonard Bernstein tells you to play, you play.

I consider it a blessing that I woke up just as the baton swept down to launch us into West Side Story.

The moral here should be obvious. Should be.

“Don’t reach for the stars; they’ll come to you.” Nah. “Follow your leader.” Nuh-uh. “Practice? Who needs practice?” Uh…

Story the Second: As I’ve mentioned before, I have mixed feelings about Google Assistant’s Commute notification feature. A couple of days ago, I was leaning decidedly toward the negative, thanks to a notification foul-up of epic proportions, but unimportant details.

So I was ranting in a generally Maggie-facing direction; a rant which began “Have I mentioned how much I hate Google?”

When I ran down, I picked up my book and flopped on the bed next to Maggie and started to read. And then, because I do have my occasional episodes of mush, I turned to her and said, “No matter how much I hate Google, I love you more.”

There was a second of silence, perhaps a sliver of a second more, as she prepared to say, “Aww,” and then a voice was heard from the bookshelf where my phone sits while charging.

“I can’t feel romantic love but I think you are wonderful.”

Yes, my phone had misinterpreted “hate Google” as “Hey, Google” and thought I was addressing her*.

* Yes, I do consider my phone to be female. And I have no intention of analyzing why.

While I suppose it’s a relief to know that my phone has no desire to supplant my wife in my affections (yet), I’m not entirely sure I needed to know that I am a figure of wonder and (I suppose) awe.

Talk about inflating one’s sense of self-worth.

And, no question about the moral here: Big Brother is, in solemn truth, always listening.

An Extended Response to a Recent Comment

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There are stories everywhere.

“Why did this happen?”

“How did it go down?”

Answer the reporters’ traditional questions–who, what, when, where, why, and how–and you’re telling a story.

Interesting point, though: you don’t need to answer all of the questions to make it a story. Sometimes each answer is its own story. And each story leads to more questions and more stories.

As a writer, it’s my job to tell stories. And because I write fiction, I’m supposed to make up those stories.

Every story has a starting point. Even the fictional stories. Maybe it was the who: many writers start with the characters and watch them interact. Sometimes it’s the what or the how: where would a locked room mystery be without the what and the how?

Just to be totally clear, darn near everything I write here on the blog is a story. And, guess what? Most of them are at least somewhat fictional. If I start with a news story, and I don’t know the answer to one of those questions, most likely I’m going to make something up. Because you (usually) don’t tell a story by not answering questions.

Put it another way: “How can you tell when a writer is making something up?” “He’s writing*.”

* A more accurate answer would be “He’s alive” but that doesn’t call back to the old joke about lawyers as well.

Because I’m the only person telling stories on this site–ignoring the ones that you all tell when you comment (remember what I said about stories leading to more stories?)–they have a number of common elements; if you read for a while, you’ll see similar word choices, subjects, and tonalities cropping up again and again.

My tastes run toward snark and satire, so when I have to make something up for a story, chances are I’m going to come up with something intended to trigger a smirk or a snicker.

What constitutes humor, snark, satire, and parody is heavily influenced by culture. It’s easy to miss those elements if you’re coming from a different cultural matrix.

One important point: making up answers for “why” can be risky. Oddly enough, some people take offense when certain motives are attributed to them. That being the case, I try not to fictionalize human motivations when writing about stories I’ve picked up from the news.

The key word in the previous sentence is, of course “human”. Cats, by and large, are unwilling to go to the hassle of filing lawsuits and–Grumpy Cat notwithstanding–don’t have money to pay lawyers.

Another One

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Can you stand another music post? If not, feel free to skip today’s post. I promise I won’t be offended.

It struck me the other day that there’s a medical crisis on our hands. It’s not as flashy as the current pandemic, but it’s been slowly building for the past eighty years or more.

Tony Bennett, of course, left his heart in San Francisco.

Sammy Kaye, Charlie Spivak, Jo Stafford, and the gods only know how many others left their tickers at the Stage Door Canteen.

And that only begins to cover the extent of the problem.

Pepe Llorens’ heart is in Barcelona. Nadia’s is in somewhere California–or perhaps scattered in pieces around the state. Want to check Herb Jeffries’ cardiac health? Better head for Mississippi.

It gets worse.

Edmund Hockridge deposited his heart in an English garden, Linda Scott abandoned hers in the balcony of her local theater–last row, third seat; if she ever wants it back, at least she knows where to look for it. And poor Ernie Tubb left half of his in Texas and the other half in Tennessee.

I could go on, but you get the gist.

Eighty years of research and yet medical science has yet to find a way to keep singer’s hearts in their chests where they belong.

It’s a crying shame.

Changing tracks (sorry).

Anyone else remember the Andrews Sisters “Three Little Sisters“?

The punch line of the song is the one about “tell it to the marine“. But in which sense?

The original meaning, dating back to at least the early 1800s, implies “because nobody else is dumb enough to believe it”. But the more recent American implication–circa 1900–is “because they’re the only ones who can do something about it.”

So which is it: are the girls going out on the town, or entertaining the troops at home?

Either way, it’s not a flattering portrait of those teenagers.

Of course it’s possible the song doesn’t know the whole story. Maybe whatever it is the young woman are doing is fully consensual, and the magazine bit is just a cover story for the girls’ parents, the armed forces censors, and anyone else who might get their hands on their letters.

Remember, no email or social media in 1942.

Now that I think about it, the song does say they’ll be “true until the boys came back”. Not a word about their plans for thereafter.

Let us not forget that Kerista was founded in the mid-Fifties. The philosophical underpinnings didn’t come out of nowhere.

I’m sure it purely coincidental that the founder, John Presmont, was–if contemporary accounts can be believed–an Air Force officer during World War 2. Still…one can only wonder how the Summer of Love might have evolved had there been four little sisters.