Memnison Journal

This is consolidated from several sources, about the Turkish novel, METAL STORM or METAL FURTINA in Turkish, about a Bush-invades-Turkey-for-its-goodies war in 2007.  It’s written from a Turkish POV, and sounds as if it’s we-stomped-those- Americans fantasy fulfillment, selling 600,000 copies since 2004.

It’s exactly that - an adolescent ripoff of Tom Clancyish thrillers, with lots of evil Americans and brave Turks, and echoes back against the present difficulties that we’re dealing with in US-Turkish relations.  Lots of conspiracy theory stuff here that feeds on big-cojones masculine fantasies on how the little guy gets back at the big, rich bully and shows him what Real Turkish men can do.   But it reflects a public desire to see the US taken down a whole bunch of pegs and also the mindless belligerence of the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy.

This is all stuff that I’m on:

Saturday, 11-12 am Are there any more Dangerous Visions? (Narita B)

When Harlan Ellison published Dangerous Visions in 1967, his goal was to publish fiction that couldn’t be published anywhere else. When William Sanders began publishing the on-line ‘zine Helix SF in 2006, he had a similar goal. But in 2007, is there really any dangerous and subversive SF that can’t be published?

Saturday 4-5 pm  The Con of Cons (Michigan) 

Come and hear horror stories about when things didn’t go right at conventions. Hear stories of such famous disasters as Dripclave or about minor headaches such as disappearing GoHs.

Sunday, 2-3pm,  Stand Alone Novels (Narita A/B)

What Next? Come prepared to tell the panelists what books you enjoy and have read and they’ll make suggestions for what you should read next. The only stipulation is that they are limited to novels which are not part of a series.

And this sounds like Mere-bait on Friday night:

Narita A/B: Kids’ Dance Party: The Waterson boys will host a dance party for all the kids at the con. Come ready to move to the music selected by Windycon’s youngest programming participants.

“Never forget me I am Nirodh!”  (somewhat NSFW, youtube)

Mere and Susan worked their butts off this weekend to repaint and redo Mere’s room; the progress on this (picture-wise) can be seen here.  The above is from Mere’s first night in the new bed; Susan is reading Mere’s Ramona book to her.  Notice Dash snoozing at their feet.

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we’d have had to hunt him down. And once we’d done that and we’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we’d have had to put another government in its place.

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney,  1991

Turns out that the big ol’ fence on the Mexican border is being built with Chinese-made steel. Needless to say, the nativists who are big for the fence in the first place didn’t like that.

With the rise in the Iowa polls of Mike Huckabee to a tie in second place, it looks as if Sam Brownback is getting out of of the Republican nomination race because he can’t get interest and money.  And I think that’s going to help Huckabee.  Also, this poll of the Iowa Republicans saying that a majority want the troops out in six months was a jolter.

Interesting bit on why the interest groups within the Republican Party are coming out and demanding their pound of flesh this time around.   Money quote:

There aren’t any more conservative check boxes than there have ever been, but the pandering demands are so much greater that their existence is way more obvious than it has been in the past. It doesn’t help that many of the leading candidates really aren’t natural allies of all the conservative interest groups, which means that they have to pander even more obsequiously than usual in order to prove their bona fides (cf. Mitt Romney, above).

I’ve been amazed at how the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Jay Rockefeller, seems to be caving on the issue of amnesty for the Telecoms allowing the Feds to use their facilities to spy on the American people.  This may have something to do with the matter…sheesh.

McCain says there’s no possibility of a independent bid  if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination.   I didn’t expect it this time.

Hey, Zach?  I think this puts the rumors of Jeb Bush running to rest for good.

Ben Stein supporting Al Franken for Senate in Minnesota was my wake-up news piece of the morning…Stein’s pretty conservative.

Yes, I still like John Edwards for President, and would love to see him do well in Iowa.  I still don’t care for Hillary in a whole bunch of ways, including this one.

No, I was not at the original Woodstock; I was way too young, and my dad would have never allowed it.  I did go to the site in 1989, after reading the books about it and on the way to the Boston Worldcon, and I was impressed with the natural amphitheater setup of the site.

Apparently, some folks finally decided to use it as an outdoor theater site, and the things is supposed to open up next year; I’m not sure what I think of this, but I hope it works out well; as I’ve discovered, there’s no way you can put tangible memories in wax and hope they always stay the same.  However, there was a earmark for the Museum on the site in the new budget bill, sponsored by Schumer and Hillary Clinton, and Senate GOP dueds shot it down with a ‘nailed Clinton and her hippies, heh heh - see, we *are* fiscal conservatives!’ comment.

Dudes, freakin’ spare me that fiscal conservatives crud.   The entire earmark system is way out of control on both sides.

Aka Paul Gadzikowski, from his dailies many years back - with a beardless, much younger me talking to Paul about Heinlein / M*A*S*H crossovers.  (Note: I usually don’t care for crossovers, I’ve not a media fan, and I never cared for the TV show M*A*S*H.  I’m also known as a hard-science SF person.)   The full four-panel strip is here….

From an unfinished art piece in my collection:

The present altered schedule for us three going out to Detroit to (1) deliver frozen stuff and (2) pick up my MIL, and probably (3) go to the zoo and (4) Windsor is not this weekend, but the weekend of the 26th-28th of October.  FYI.

Years and years ago, I was an idiot and playing around with one of those ding-dong laser pointers, and managed to flash myself in the eyes with the thing.  Didn’t do anything at first, and then it hurt like a MF’er and left my vision impaired for a few weeks.  At the time, I was terribly frightened about what I’d done, and ended up going to a local optometrist or something, who basically prescribed $450 worth of glasses - which rapidly became useless, as my eyes healed and my clear vision came back.

Now, I tend to wear reading glasses a lot - presbyopia forced me into it.  They’re cheapies from the drugstore, of course.  The tireder I am, the more I need ‘em.

Susan, on the other hand, has been  wearing glasses for a LONG time.  She was trying out contacts for a while, but as I recall, her prescription eventually got bad enough that she gave them up.  And over the last few years, she’s been thinking wistfully about getting Lasik surgery on her eyes - especially after presbyopia hit her and she was forced into bifocals (which she hates as a bloody nuisance).

Recently, I was looking at out medical spending account, and while my / our health has been problematic, it hasn’t raised welts on us financially enough, and I reckoned that we’d end the year with a large surplus.  I figured - well, some dental work would work to erase that if the three of us went in for stuff, but Susan said - hey, what about Lasik?

It’s still bloody expensive, but she’s found a deal for it through our pretty good medical system - and both of us were surpised to find out that she’s a good candidate for the surgery, after a very thorough review of her eyes by the docs.  ( I figured her astigmatism would do her in, but apparently not.)  So, she’s going in for surgery on December 3rd; the docs say that she’ll only be out of commission for a day or so.

Mere has stated quite clearly that she can’t imagine Mommy Without Glasses.  She’s asked me if I wouldn’t like Mommy without her glasses, and I said - well, every girl or woman I can recall that I’ve ever went out with either wore ‘em or contacts.   So I’ve always assume that I *liked* women in glasses.  But I reassured Mere that it wouldn’t bother me at all, and would make Mommy happy, and a happy Mommy is a very very good thing indeed.

Of course, I could never imagine someone sticking a laser in my eye ever again, but….

Japanese program on learning English, sort of (you tube, NSFW on audio)

A nod to Dave and Shelley on this one.  Figures…

I mean, normally, you don’t look for the obits unless there’s a reason, but the writing on the Telegraph Obits are so good and often weird:

Back in Ibiza, his affairs continued, his taste running to the exotic, including Chinese waiters, Moroccan gigolos, Spanish garage attendants, Barbadian shop assistants, even a hunchbacked Haitian dwarf.

Now, how often do you read something like that in the local paper, let alone the obituary column? Or this:

In 1960 he apprehended the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal chief who had eaten the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the man’s ability to acquire money on demand that he had — understandably — decided to try to assimilate his powers.

It was not so much this particular misdemeanour that bothered Muffett; what really worried him was the fact that a UN delegation was due to visit the area, and “I wasn’t about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step.”

Great stuff.

Tasty.  Part of my long romance with shortwave radios.