giantsloth

I flipped over to the fairly active Facebook page of one of my relatives. Ex-military, ex-cop, conservative gun-toting Trumper who allegedly loves Jesus. I do this from time to time, in an effort to understand the what/why/how of these folks. But I don't think I can do it any longer. I've seen enough.

What strikes me about the memes that he reposts is how old they are. It's the same regurgitated stuff from months or years ago. It has nothing to do with what's specifically happening right now. And half the time the posts aren't even ideologically sound from a right-wing point of view. He'll repost General Petraeus praising the military, even though the right-wingers hate Petraeus now because of his views on gun control. Basically any post that praises veterans will get passed along no matter who said it, then one of his buddies will show up in the comments to say "hey, uh, remember, we hate the Democrats/liberals/Socialists/commies, and that's who you're quoting here."

Other recent posts include the gumball immigrants video (ancient, and so thoroughly disproven), a ton of stuff about term limits, a vile cops vs. BLM post, and one about how HRC is hypocritical to ask to see Trump's tax returns when, y'know, she deleted "those emails."

So, I'm done. I try not to read comments online, especially on news stories, and I often fail. But I really think I'm done looking at this stuff.

Back when I was a full-time freelancer, I interviewed one of the founders of Netflix. It wasn't for a specific assignment; he was just passing through town and someone in press relations hooked us up. I got the spiel and was so convinced that I signed up for an account with my own money. It's possible that they comped me to begin with; I don't recall--but soon enough I was happily paying my own way, and have done so continuously for well over a decade now. But now the overall story, a cliche but a true one, is the Failed Promise of the Internet. Back when it was just DVDs in the mail, I could rent titles that would never end up in a local video rental place. I poured in a ton of ratings so that the mysterious Netflix engine would figure out my tastes, and would suggest movies I'd never heard of. So now, in a world where content streams in over the network, where the most obscure movies should be available instantly, what do I get? A dumber suggestion system, and a vastly reduced selection of movies. You can stream TWIN PEAKS, for example, but no movies directed by David Lynch are streamable from Netflix. Unless you've just got to have constant content coming down the network pipe, the overall technology of circa-2001 Netflix is superior to that of today. Which is a wordy preface to this opinion piece, worth reading, by Felix Salmon:

Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms

And yeah, gas stations used to have smiling uniformed attendants, and jumbo jets used to have piano lounges. Progress.

A couple things. First thing, a new story of mine is up on Electric Velocipede Issue 23: Through the Uprights. Read it or don't.

Second, completely unrelated thing. We were driving out for a Sunday hike recently and we passed a trailer that had two flagpoles in the front yard. On one flagpole, a rebel flag (aka Confederate flag). On the other flagpole, Old Glory. Now, I'm sure I've seen this pairing before. And I'm sure it makes perfect sense to the inhabitants of that trailer. But this was the first time it struck me: NO. You've got to pick one. You either get your CSA, Lost Cause, revisionist b.s. about "state's rights," and not-so-crypto-racism, or you get the USA. You know, the Union. The folks flying the Stars & Stripes, albeit with 33 to 35 stars at the time of the war. You can't claim both sets.

WisCon blew by even more quickly this year. One minute we were riding in from Truax Field in the hotel shuttle van, the next we were hopping in the Rowe-Bond's Honda Fit for a leisurely drive through Indiana. My con reports are pretty much cliché at this point: it was great to see friends, I did not get enough conversation time with any of them, some folks I missed entirely and that bums me out, I prefer readings to panels, beer is delicious.

The Delicious Beer track started early, during our layover at O'Hare, when I discovered Goose Island Matilda, a Belgian strong pale ale. Further delicious beers included Monk's Café Flemish Sour Red Ale, New Glarus Raspberry Tart, and Ommegang BPA. Many of these were consumed at Cooper's Tavern, a gastropub on the capitol square in Madison. Recommended, especially if you can get The Snug, the little table-sized room where the bartender waits on you via a little puppet-show door in the wall. We also got supper one night at Icon, the tapas place on State Street. Now that I think about it, this was a really top-notch year for food and bevs. We had humongous breakfast crepes at the farmers' market on Saturday morning. We had brownies and bourbon balls from the Tiptree Bake Sale. We had the local meat and cheese platter at a late lunch with Eileen Gunn and Carol Emshwiller in The Bar. I never got to try the Writer's Block, a raspberry margarita from the drink menu that bartender Brian makes every year for the convention, but it looked good on paper.

Items acquired in the dealers' room: The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1, as well as a bunch of stuff from PM Press. For a bunch of anarchists, PM Press sure does a great job with consistent and beautiful graphic design.

Readings attended: only three, but that still meant I heard Alan DeNiro, Karen Joy Fowler, Hiromi Goto, Mary Doria Russell, Gwenda Bond, Christopher Rowe, Genevieve Valentine, Amal El-Mohtar, Meghan McCarron, David Moles, Ben Rosenbaum, Geoff Ryman, and Jen Volant. That's a lot of talent, right there. I was particularly moved by the short-short that Hiromi Goto read about memory and social media. There were a lot of other people whose readings I missed, dangit.

I read a new proto-story and that was fun but even more fun was reading the beginning of Carol Emshwiller's "Draculalucard" for the panel where Karen Fowler and Eileen Gunn and Pat Murphy and I celebrated Carol's work. Pat read a relatively new story from Carol, "Uncle E," and that really got to me, hearing Pat read it aloud (I had read it in print just before the con). Speaking of Carol: The Emshwillerians.

Panels attended: The Trials, Joys and Tribulations of Tiptree Jury Duty. There were plenty of other panels that looked interesting, but none of them trumped fiction or sleep.

Parties attended: a bunch, but the three pillars were the Rabid Transit karaoke dance party, the Strange Horizons tea party, and the Genderfloomp dance party. One of these days I will stop being such a persnickety weirdo about the songs I will dance to.

And that's about it, I guess. I'm ready for WisCon 2012, yep.

And, dang, am I enthusiastic about the deconstructo-folk of Alasdair Roberts and all his various running buddies. So, take a few minutes, good people, and give these videos a look and a listen.

The Bonnie Banks o' Airdrie
Home Lights Tour
Bonnie Susie Cleland

And I still do. Robert Culp died yesterday. Tonight I mixed myself a martini and watched an episode of I SPY, the show that he and Bill Cosby starred in for three seasons in the 1960s. I watched "Home to Judgment," which Culp also wrote, probably the darkest and grittiest episode of the series. And that was how I said goodbye to this guy I never knew.

I'm not here to convince you that I SPY was the greatest TV show of all time. I'm here to tell you that it was wildly important to me, a kid growing up watching Bob Gordon Theater on WSJS/WXII, where you might see a syndicated episode of I SPY or STAR TREK or MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or THE INVADERS or THE TWILIGHT ZONE or THE WILD WILD WEST on any given Sunday afternoon. There were Westerns, too, but I never much cared for them. In between the shows Bob Gordon would do really bad ventriloquism, and would teach you how to fold a dollar bill into a bowtie. Anyway, I SPY: TV's "swift and swinging spies," that was how it was hyped. Yeah, they were two stylish guys wisecracking their way through the Cold War, and how much weight do I, does anyone, want to put on that? Not too much. But then again, what came through in every episode, in every scene, was that Culp and Cosby really were friends. That they really cared about each other in real life and in fake life as a couple of globe-trotting spies. And yeah, it was groundbreaking for its time, that one of these guys happened to be white and one happened to be black, and how that was handled. Just now, watching "Home to Judgment," there's a scene at the top where Culp is lying up in a barn loft, gravely injured. The bad guys are closing in. But Cosby walks by, on the drive below the barn, and gestures to Culp that things are going to be OK. "Don't worry, I'm your friend, and we're going to get through this." That's what that gesture says to me.

"Don't worry, I'm your friend, and we're going to get through this," that's a pretty important statement.

Last weekend was the fourth year in a row where we spent some time with friends (and several thousand other people) at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. So at this point, it's a tradition. barbmg  and I did a quick sprint through some DC area tourist attractions first. Arlington National Cemetery, I hadn't been there since I was a kid, and had never been up the hill to Arlington House, which is undergoing renovation but you can still walk through several rooms, and under the arch where Mary Custis and Robert E. Lee were married. Took the metro into DC for a sprint through the National Museum of Natural History, then a more leisurely stroll through the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden.

In mostly unrelated news (although I did have a delicious mojito at one point during our sojourn to Crownsville), I was surprised to find that I've only had 57 of the 100 drinks on the Anvil bar bucket list: dirtykitchenadventures.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/anvils-list/. I plan to remedy that, and to make plenty of the 57 cocktails I've already had. Tonight, a Brandy Alexander (one of the 57 I've already had so far in this life). Creamy, dessert-y, no point in having more than one, no point in making them if you don't have fresh whole nutmeg to grate on top. For those folks playing at home, the proportions I used are from Paul Harrington's excellent COCKTAIL book: 3/4 oz. brandy, 3/4 oz. creme de cacao, 1/2 oz. cream.

One down, ninety-nine to go.

Roasted red onion, roasted organic chicken breast, just olive oil and pepper and some lemon slices in the oven with those two. Half an avocado. A gimlet, with bitters (the Philip Marlowe variant) to cut the sweetness of Rose's Lime Juice. There are many worse things to have for dinner on a Tuesday night.

For those keeping score at home, the Bachelor Week(TM) cocktail on Sunday night was a martini (Bombay gin, Noilly Prat vermouth, manzanilla olive), and last night it was a 20th Century cocktail. Tomorrow night, who knows?

I should probably mention my so-far-wonderful holidays ... Barb and I saw Hilton in Winston-Salem Monday night. I went back yesterday and after doing the present thing with my mother and sister, and after reading the first third of LOOKING FOR ALASKA, I went out to Elliott's Revue to talk to my ol' friend Phil. We talked about movies, theater, music, humans, philosophy, tonal consistency, poetic inconsistency, and a few other things, and it was exactly the kind of talking I enjoy.

But instead of spieling more about holidays, I'm going to mention photography. A few of my freelance articles have been published with photos I've taken. But I'm pretty sure I just got my first credit for a photo-as-photo-and-only-photo in a dead-tree publication. So if you pick up the second edition of NORTH CAROLINA AFIELD: A Guide to Nature Conservancy Projects in North Carolina, you'll see (among many other things) my photo of the Cape Fear River. It was a pro sale, even, but I chose to donate the fee back to the Nature Conservancy, who do all kinds of good things to protect and preserve nature.

As Hanna was blowing through town, I was standing in the middle of Hargett Street getting blown away by the Dexter Romweber Duo. I've seen Dexter play several times recently, but this was the first time in ages that I'd seen Sara drum. And what a joy it was to listen and to watch. They've just been signed to Bloodshot, and later this month will be in the Midwest playing some dates. Chicagoans! Madisonites! I heartily recommend the Romwebers as worthy of your valuable American dollars and your attendance.

The next day barbmg  and I went back downtown to the International Festival, to get our fill of Iranian bean/noodle soup, Polish potato pancakes, pickled herring, mango lassi, Nepalese dumplings, and probably one or two other tasty treats.