Memnison Journal

..by Scott Lynch, is a heck of a rip-snorter read.  Funny, dynamic, byzantine in its plots and descriptions, and a total mess in its background universe - but you don’t care, because the plot and the characters keep things going quite nicely.

I was at a con some time ago, in a panel that called on the participants to try to pull up a single page from a favorite book and sell the audience on ‘hey, I should read that one.’  LOCKE LAMORA was the big favorite in that panel, and I took notice.  Not long ago, it came out in paperback, and I picked up a copy and read it in the hospital.

I’ve never gone quite that nuts for the picaresque adventures-of-a-thief- in-the-decadent-city sort of fantasy, so I was a hard sell for this, but Lynch does a superb job of Telling The Reader Enough To Keep Them Hooked and getting the Gentlemen Bastards a fun, roguish turn that keeps you reading, and eventually caring about how the lead character is going to get their butt out of this one in one piece.  He got me jiggered a half-dozen different ways; I was astonished to see one character who I thought was going to be the Big Hidden Foe get snuffed out about halfway through, and I’ll predict that the story will lead you on a merry chase.

Highly recommended, especially for people who are big into fantasy role playing, who will eat this one up with a snow shovel.  9 out of 10.

Just got out of the hospital; they went first to Unisyn and then to Vancomycin when that didn’t do much.  I went in feeling sick, horrible and in a lot of pain; my appetite came back, and I feel tons better, but I still easily tire.

Short call from the docs is that I have picked up MRSA-CA, and I have two weeks worth of Bactrim to take for it; the swelling is WAY down from what it was.  We have to sterilize the crap out of the house areas, however, and work won’t let me back in without some sort of not-contagious-anymore statement from the docs.  At the earliest, I wouldn’t be back until the middle of next week without that statement, in any event.  If they need that statement, I may be working at home for a while….

Many thanks for the kind thoughts here.  Many, many thanks.

I’ve been fighting off a huge boil infection since early this month, and the oral antibiotics are not cutting it…it’s getting larger and painful, and has never drained properly.  I went into my doc today, and she’s sending me to the hospital for intravenous antibiotics to fight the thing.  I do not know when I’ll be back out.  At present, the boil runs from my left ear about two-thirds of the way down my face; most of it is obscured by my beard, or people would be ralphing at it.  It’s really swollen and painful.  Vertigo’s still there, too.  Very tired.

I’ll stick my head back in when I can.  If you really need to get ahold of me, there’s always  contacting Susan via susan at sisterfar dot com.   I just want this behind me…and I want to be home for Mere’s Eighth Birthday this weekend.

Well, this is coming out way too late for Christmas, but crikey, it’s coming out right on top of my birthday.  Holy Jebus Hermione Crissake, but this looks good.

Finished IN THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD by David Kowalski, a new Australian AH writer, with great joy to be over and done with the thing. It’s a great example of What Not To Do in writing AH…

In some AH novels, the writer is so enthralled with the whole layout of what they’ve created that the whizbang just goes on forever in huge, long detail. Tons of characters, a zillion point-of-view characters, lots of gimmicks from the New World, and so on and on and on. The problem is that an editor should step in and say – you are killing the pacing of the book dead as can be with all of this.

I mean, I love epic sweep. Big scale is fine. But have a heart on your readers! An endless trudge of stuff to get anywhere with the plot is maddening.

From other interviews of the writer, I got the impression that he had an idea as to what he wanted to do, and worked with some historically versed people to mold things so that it would make some internally consistency and be moderately credible. Very good. But his enthusiasm for throwing in more and more stuff (the escape from New York for the characters was particularly clunky) just made me feel like I was paddling through fudge.

Short idea of the situation: the McGuffin of the book is the Titanic, and a time traveler messing around with not just the fate of the Titanic (avoid the iceberg) but as to who got off the thing and survived. I thought the narrow change was good, and the actual use of the Kennedy family in the story wasn’t bad short of this weird Dealy Plaza thing that didn’t make any sense but was intended to be a cute mirror of that dreadful day in Dallas.

The world of 2012 is interesting; Germany and Japan have become the superpowers, but it’s an Imperial German, not Nazi Germany. Lots of weird tech, heavy on airships, and so on. The Confederacy rises again. Roswell and Groom Lake get thrown in.

Recommended only for the folks who have the strength of will and patience to slog through it. Or serious Titanic and weird AH buffs. Rating – 5 out of 10, dropped two points for ‘Christ, when is he going to get somewhere with this?’

For the last week and a half, I’ve had a nasty boil on my face; a lot of people didn’t catch on because my scruffy beard hid it at Windycon, but I was in some pain from it and majorly tired and out of it.  Since then, the antibiotics have been reducing it, but they’ve also been playing hob with my GI tract…*sigh*

On Tuesday morning, I realized that I had to make an appointment with the doctor to get a look at it and another course of pills, and as my usual doc wasn’t in the clinic, I took on a young and very green person who strongly suggested that I go over to urgent care and have them open the thing up.  I was going to do that after work on Wednesday, but fate caught up with me.

As I was getting up Wednesday morning, I suddenly had a crick in my neck, a leaky boil, and really paralyzing attacks of vertigo, and I managed to get up and out into the living room before I realized that there was no way I was going in to work today; Mere and Susan went in without me (Mere’s off this week) and I ended up sitting up in my recliner, dozing and hoping this would go away.

By around 10, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t.   My MIL drove me to the emergency room at Loyola, after helping me dress, and I staggered out of the car and into a wheelchair, totally clammy and out of it with the horrible vertigo.  They pretty rapidly got me through the usual login and triage procedings, and quite quickly into a resident taking my history.

The attending was pretty speedy too, and she said (after going over my history with her) that my vertigo was probably caused by the infection; they could give me a shot of compazine and a script for meclizine (both are anti-vertigo drugs) and I’d just have to wait it out.  So go home, keep at the antibiotics, let the thing heal and Take It Really Easy.  Don’t push the vertigo.

About that time, the power went out all over the hospital.  They went on reserve, which for them meant that you had limited lighting, but little else, and since the place lives and dies by computer, anything high-tech was out to lunch for a while.  So we sat.  The staff couldn’t order up the shot, or the prescriptions, until things came back up.

We finally got out of there in time to pick up Susan and Mere at a CTA train station not far away, and take them home, with a stop to replace some clothing for Mere and for all of us to get something to eat.  Afterwards, Connie and Susan went off to get the oysters and a few other things for the Thanksgiving Day dinner while Mere and I stayed home and kept quiet.

The vertigo, alas, comes back when I’m laying down, and my stuffy nose is impossible to tame; I can’t take decongestants on the anti-vertigo drugs.   So I’m up typing this for you-all, and then I’ll be sleeping sitting up in my recliner, with no CPAP.  Joy of joys.

Our usual contribution to the Thanksgiving table (which has generally been at my aunt-in-law’s place) has been pies (pumpkin at the least) and my mom’s oyster dressing.  We decided to snazz it up after seeing a Paula Deen recipe for oyster dressing the other day that sounded pretty good, and so we’ll see if it goes over better than before (only the Rittenhouse clan would touch the earlier stuff).

Here’s a few foodie items for you for the day:

• The never ending supply of things people will deep-fry and eat.  Like Coca-Cola. 
• More notes on Canadian coke and ketchup, and why they’re better than the US brands.

*thump*bwamp*baboomba*  (SFW, but loud)

I have to hand it to them.  This took some doing, and I’m sure the crowd loved it.

Including Hard Gay merchandise, Darth Maul and Rudolph, and horse pictures to sell Big Boy condoms.  *whinny*

• Recycling silicon chip level pure stuff to use for solar panels
• Sunny Queensland town to become pure solar in two years
• The waste heat recovery business in Chicago
• The climate debate in a nutshell
• Reusing chopsticks and bras

15 laterals in sequence to win the big game against Communist Martyrs High. (youtube)

When we brought Mere back to bed the other night, someone (Dash) was snoozing and waiting for her, and we laid her down and ran for the camera. Meanwhile, they snuggled right in to each other.

Mere is very proud of her progress in third grade on things like cursive handwriting; to her, it’s a sign of Being A Big Kid and Advanced, et cetera. She likes to practice this, and was working on a small whiteboard, and I asked her to do it with her signature and I’d photograph it for posterity. She thought for a minute, agreed, and proceeded to do it - and then add Sissy and Ally’s names to the mix.

One problem; the final N in Harrington looks more like an M, and I think she’s misspelled Ally’s middle name…oh, well. Posterity is as posterity does.

My mother in law Connie, trying to manage a fight between two of her grandchildren (my BIL’s kids) with one calling on our house phone and the other calling on her cell phone to complain about each other.  (Photo after the jump)   The standard routine here recently has been to Hand The Phone To Grandma when someone calls.   Hopefully, not over dinner…

Of course, I’m Mr. Provincial; I’ve only visited three countries in my life; the USA, Canada and China (when we went to get Meredith). And this hit other people far worse; my friend Adam, who lives in a suburb of Amsterdam, has been telling us for a long time about the crushing problem of being paid by his US freelance sites in US dollars and having to live in Euros. In 2000, Euros were around US$ 0.80; now, a Euro is worth around US$1.50, nearly twice as much. I’m sure that other readers have their own stories on this.

Now, look at this graph. And this one. The oil prices have gone skyrocketing since George W. Bush came into office - from $25 a barrel to nearly $100 - quadrupling in price. Every day and in every way, Americans are paying a Bush Tax that they don’t understand, due to the Bush administration’s mishandling of the economy, of the direct costs of the war, or because he’s promoted a spend-borrowed-money economy where as Lloyd Bentsen once said, “You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you the illusion of prosperity too.”

In our case, that number of hot checks are all around us.