It has to be said

I love Jane Smiley in ways that cannot be textually rendered, even above and beyond her horse-world pieces (although if you haven't read Horse Heaven, you've got a treat in store). I mean, damn. "Bush and Cheney were hungry for war. Nothing they said could hide their eagerness. The story they put out, they had found out things, and they had explored all options, and now the invasion was a last resort, was evident bullshit. They never for one second had the demeanor of men who were thinking things over and weighing least bad options. They were hot to attack and impatient with anyone who stood in their way (the name Hans Blix springs to mind)."

The other bit of culture-conflict awesomeness, to which party I am fashionably late, is the flap about blogger/professor PZ Myers being banned from a free screening of a movie for which he had been interviewed and for which he was thanked in the credits. The topic of the movie? How intellectual dissent favoring intelligent design is—oh cruel!—being stifled on college campuses and how this is bad because it's important that everyone remember that belief in evolution leads to atheism and thence to the fall of civilization. And yes, the best way to demonstrate your commitment to free thought and open discussion of an issue is certainly to eject someone you know will disagree with you and whose interview you quotemined after getting it by misrepresenting your movie. But. BUT! While the movie's poobahs and their hired security did identify and bar Myers from the screening (for which he had registered under his own name, the foolish honest cephalopoidian creature), they let in Richard Dawkins. A grateful nation stands awestruck at this example of the difference between the fail simple and the fail EPIC.

Results from Iowa, the red side

It's the coverage you don't hear.

First farewell of 2008

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE, the author of the Flashman series, the pitch-perfect novel The Pyrates, and a host of other works, is dead at 82. Coincidentally, I started rereading a couple of Flashman novels over the weekend, and I finished Flashman in the Great Game this morning. I had forgotten how much fun they were. Although the Flash books, like the Bond movies, tend to follow a certain pattern—encounter with prominent British politico, meeting with a beautiful powerful and/or famous woman with whom our antihero gits it on, scene of diabolical torture, historical battle, Flashy exhibits cadfulness but triumphs (or appears to) by sneakery or luck—they're tremendously entertaining. They're educational, too, but not pedantic; like Patrick O'Brian, Fraser had a gift for bringing history to life, weaving the story through events rather than making the fictional bits a frame for a lecture on names and dates.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Fraser. Thanks for everything.

(ETA: And Neil Gaiman, writing from a month in the future,[he fix] has his own take.)

No snark

Just a link to Wonkette's gallery of images surrounding the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Wonkette asks whether the uncensored photos of the immediate aftermath make it more real for viewers or whether it just desensitizes us to the violence. I tend to think the former and that we are too used to images of fireballs but not the human aftermath. I also notice that there are almost no women in the crowds at the rally or, later, at the funeral. Is that life as usual, that absence of 50% of the population? Bhutto was a polarizing figure partly because she was a woman in power, and I wish there were some discussion of why her countrywomen are not mourning her in public.

Grief

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's.

He mentioned the phantom stroke at the LOC bookfair this summer, and I hoped that it was something that his remaining neurons could work around. I want my favorite authors to live long lives, ideally to outlive me no matter how chronologically improbable that is, and to be writing straight up to the moment when they painlessly step out. I am greedy for them to produce more books and have good lives. This seems like a cruel trick.

Not enough free time in the week

Lessons from the weekend:

• Live reggae in a coffeehouse offends the gods, who will soak the surrounding areas in icy rain. Which we need, but possibly could not so much of it have gone sideways?
• If you want to see the face of desperate addiction, the counter of the only coffee bar in the Ren Fest at 10:01, where the victims customers glare at staff who seem unable to keep track of orders, is a good place to look. Or a very very bad one.
• The Mediaeval Baebes' live show is oddly similar to that of the Pipettes: moderately decent singing, excellent backup musicians, and heavy emphasis on the "pretty women doing dance routines" aspect. Without the heavy engineering, they sounded a little thin, which might also have been due to the outdoor acoustics.
  
• There are still people who do not realize that you should know your drink order BEFORE you reach the bar and that thoughts of murder percolate in the heads of those behind you in line if you wait until you are facing the bartender to say, "Wait, what do all you guys want?"
  
• Michael Rosman does a phenomenal juggling routine with cigar boxes, a thing I haven't seen since the Moscow Circus came to town. (Speaking of which, hurray! The feds are keeping us safe from the dangers of international performers! Jesus Christ.)
• If you want to make a new mother very happy, sign her up for a massage appointment and don't let her say no.
  
• My aggro levels go up when I have to listen to an acupuncturist tell a roomful of people that proper chi maintenance prevents cancer, heart disease, and immune disorders. No wonder we are overrun with 900-year-old kung fu masters. Oh wait.
  
• Wong People's lion dance kicks ass. Not only do the young drummers have a "Do not fear, WONG PEOPLE ARE HERE" banner, their lion does cartwheels. Cartwheels! And also, at one point, he appears to lick his harbls, which I have never seen a dancing lion do and find greatly amusant.
• Dumbledore was, unbeknownst to all save the slashers, teh ghey. Hilariously, actor Michael Gambon, who plays the headmaster in the movies and is apparently known for taking the piss out of interviewers, once told a reporter that he has no problem playing gay characters because he himself used to be homosexual but was forced to give it up "because it made my eyes water." Dear Lord how I do love the British.

Follow-up on yesterday's snarling

Another subscription is the last thing Casa 3pennyjane needs right now. Popular Horseman is expiring, but I'll probably replace it with Western Horseman or Horse and Rider; The New Yorker has been a must-read ever since Tina Brown took her incoherent mess on the road; and while Wired is inconsistent, the outlier articles on the upper end are too good to miss. Outside is the only one that won't make it through without a genre-sibling replacement. And now I'm starting to think that I may need to start getting The Atlantic, which has, over the years, run some of my favorite articles.

This one, about gay life in Saudi Arabia, is timely in light of Ahmedinejad's comments yesterday, since it discusses how regulating social contact between the sexes can encourage homosexual activity even in countries that legislate heavily against same-sex behavior. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence described a certain acceptance of gay sex between the Arabs with whom he traveled, so this isn't a new phenomenon, but the "look the other way" attitude taken by all parties seems to have kept it from drawing much media attention. Read for yourself; fascinating stuff.

Synchronicity

In our adolescence, in the brief five minutes between our death-or-glory sibling battles for Lebensraum, Seesterperson and I agreed on the genius of Margaret Cho. To this day, we quote her quoting her mother on heteronormativity Back Home versus in the Castro: "So many gay! Every country have the gay." Long pause. "But not in Korea!"

Or in Iran either. Hm, so the Axis of Evil (or at least their near neighbors) has achieved the stated goal of the GOP's xenophobic bottom-feeding base? For anyone in the reality-based community, that's 100% unsurprising. But hearing that news on the same day that a straight-faced "senior administration official" (gotta be Cheney, yeah? what with the rest scuttling for the hawsers) accuses Obama of insufficient intellectual rigor to be Prez, and I start to wonder who the hell is taking the piss here. (To all of you who reflexively said, "Larry Craig," shame on you; clearly "David Vitter" is the correct answer.)

But I didn't have to overload the weary indignation circuits, because Doc time is an automatic mood recharger, excellent for the mental health. At this time of year, every drive over to the barn is a race with sunset, and after this week I think the dark will win. We got out for a little trail time under a glowing gibbous moon, then came back in the hazy deer-infested twilight for ring work. According to barn scuttlebutt, a masseuse came in to work with some of the ponies this weekend, and Doc enjoyed some extra attention in his hamstrings. That might account for the fact that he was way, WAY up once we started working on trot and canter stuff in the ring. No bucking or other egregious misbehavior, but he was emphatic enough about fast go fast that I wished I had put a saddle on him after all. To quote the cartoon character, "C'mon, horsie, whoaaaa!" The webbing loop on the front of a bareback pad is pathetically insufficient for fine work. I forgive him for oh me achin' hip, but next time will definitely involve stirrups, because there are only so many times a body wants to go sliding sideways at speed. I think I will go lie down.

Not a good year for my childhood authors

Aw, Madeleine L'Engle has died. She was 88, loved by millions of children and the adults they grew to be, and apparently happy in her life. Such a death is enviable but still a loss to the selfish rest of us.

I haven't read anything of L'Engle's in years. Her Wrinkle in Time series introduced me, at quite a young age, to the sort of micro- and macro-worlds many of us have to be stoned to imagine, and none of my teachers even thought to test my bookbag for banned substances. (Later that kind of oversight would mean my losing large chunks of physics class to helpless giggling over Bored of the Rings jokes with my lab partner. Dear Mr. X, sorry about the hairy toes jokes when you were explaining spectrometry.) I might not have like Gene Wolfe so much if I hadn't learned from L'Engle that religion and fantasy could be blended effectively; so many authors do it badly, but I was comfortable with the cherubim and other angels in L'Engle's work and with the idea that joy is not irreligious.

Eala Earendel engla beorthast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended.
Hail, Earendel, brightest angel,
Over middle earth sent to men.

Dear Australia, all is forgiven

Sure, we've had our differences. There was the whole thing about not exporting your Tim Tams, which, right, some strong words were exchanged and we ultimately compromised that they would be called something boring like Arnott's Originals (nobody wants to do an Arnott's Original Slam), and we've moved past that not that I'm bitter about the delay and all those years of having to tell visiting Australian friends to leave their clothes at home the better to fill their luggage with crinkling boxes of joy. Then there's the part about your fauna being bizarrely aggressive, what with the hissing spiders and adorable blue-ringed octopodidae and unnecessarily large crocodiles and even venomous platypuses (what, were you out of shrieking eels?), and I think that with counseling we'll be able to agree to disagree on whether that makes for a habitable continent or not. Then there's the whole aspect where your people are aggressively cheerful even before alcohol gets applied ("Let's hike 30 kilometers before brekkie! It'll be bonza!"), doubtless because you're so happy to survive all the lurking animal menaces. I won't even get into the part about your being so far away that we almost never see you.

But I still love you.

Then these guys from the ABC comedy show, The Chasers War on Everything, are able to put together a fake Canadian diplomatic motorcade of a limo with 2 escort SUVs with little Canadian flags flapping, and that was good enough to get past $A165 million dollars worth of security planning and three security checkpoints and pull up to the front of the Intercontinental Hotel where President Bush was staying on the 29th floor.

The comedian actor Chas Licciardello, who was dressed and disguised as Osama Bin Laden, popped out of the limo at the hotel and reportedly shouted "Where is my friend Bush? It has all been a misunderstanding!!!"

Ringing down the curtain

This morning I could hear Pavarotti's voice rising from the speakers of a car stuck in traffic outside my apartment. He had had pancreatic cancer, never a good diagnosis, but it was still sad to hear that he had died. Casa 3pennyjane was and is not big on opera, but I remember loving a recording of him singing the "Vesti la giubba" aria from "Pagliacci," and somehow his "Una furtiva lagrima" became part of the family repertoire of jokes and references. You could criticize his populism, his willingness to sing duets with Bono, but you couldn't deny his talent.

"Vanish, o night! Descend, o stars! At dawn, I shall conquer."

Because Ibiza is so so done

The Pacific Ocean turns to foam and eats part of the Australian coastline; locals treat it as a giant house party with no thumping beat. "Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed." More disgusting than club foam? Discuss. I do love that the Ozzies just kind of shrugged and went about their business, rather than losing their shit and screaming about how this is all the fault of the immoral [fill-in-the-blank]s and oh Lord take me now it's a sign of the end times.

In completely unrelated news, there are free podcasts of British celebrities telling fairy tales. These are not the classic versions of the stories, exactly, so they're probably good for kids who've passed the age of demanding that the tale be told precisely the same way every single time until Mummy and Daddy, driven out of their heads by the calls for textual accuracy, start to wonder whether they could make it to the treeline. I mean, does any other version of Sinbad the Sailor include the term "anorak"? And how can we go about introducing that word into broader American use, because there's clearly a gaping need.

And it would seem to me paramount to...focus on your core incompetencies

Wow. Making Light has the saga of an Australian retailer's hamfisted attempt to shake down small publishers, followed by one such publisher's response. It's a little bit like standing behind a flamethrower that's not aimed in your direction; you still have to stand back and marvel, slightly aghast, at the firepower unleashed.

A&R Commercial Manager Charlie Rimmer proves himself less "Smoke me a kipper, skipper" Ace and more the classic original model. Tower Books Director Michael Rakusin is herewith awarded both ears and the tail.

The novelist's lament

Somewhere amid the swampy mangroves, Carl Hiaasen is shaking a copy of the newspaper and screaming, "See? SEE? I don't just make these things up!" John Scalzi has a lovely write-up of Florida legislator Bob Allen's latest out-of-left-field excuse for soliciting an undercover cop in a park restroom. I've heard of facing your fears, but walking into their bathroom stall to offer them a twenty and a real good time is new.

In news that won't cause a shudder of amused revulsion, however, "Stardust" comes out this weekend. If it doesn't make a huge splash, it certainly won't be for lack of Neil Gaiman's efforts, as he's been writing it up ceaselessly on his journal, doing the press junket slogging, and being smooched by Jonathan Ross promoting it at Comic Con. I like the Russian posters better than the American ones; mine Slavic brethren got genuine jokes, rather than a generic tagline. Witness Michelle Pfeiffer smirking beneath the words "Absolute Hag"; Tristan [sic--oh noes, they shot off his r!], Yvaine, and Captain Shakespeare, respectively, get "Star Warrior," "Superstar," and, for reasons made clear in the film, "Genuine Manly Man." I may come to like De Niro yet.