Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Okay, people who know stuff: if a friend of mine was looking to donate a large-ish collection of good-condition vintage SF, what libraries have the sorts of collections that might want such a thing?

I have seen the Republican candidates discussed from hell to breakfast. What I haven't seen is this:

If you were the Democrats, would you keep Joe Biden for VP nominee in 2012? If not, who would you nominate instead?

Note that you do not actually have to be a Democrat in this question. Just answer as though your aims were what you think their aims are. (If you think their aims are the spread of international Communism, I reserve the right to mock, though.)

What's the most pointless mnemonic you've ever had to learn?

I think mine is HOMES, because seriously, what upper Midwestern kid can't remember the Great Lakes without a five-letter word? But then there's also PAY HERB Czechs, and that's pretty useless, because who needs to remember the Warsaw Pact countries these days? I also never liked that East Germany just got E and they couldn't come up with anything for C and so went with Czechs.

People want to answer questions, but no one seems to want to ask them. Except timprov! Here are his questions and their answers.

(I will give you one of my secret methods for questions. yhlee said she wanted random distractions, so I hit "random entry" on Wikipedia pages to see if they reminded me of anything that might be a coherent question for Yoon but would not feel too directed/non-random for her taste. "How do you feel about Carver County?": not a coherent question for Yoon. "What's the furthest north you've ever been?": coherent question for Yoon.)

1. Does Angela get to blow something up? Pretty please?

Heh. timprov is showing off. He has read the recently-finished manuscript of The True Tale of Carter Hall. Angela is Janet's best friend from college. And no, I'm pretty sure she does not get to blow anything up. She's a social worker from Minneapolis! Where is she going to get the stuff to blow stuff up? I mean, if she was a social worker from Thief River who was living in Minneapolis...and anyway, mostly what she's got to go on is Janet's uneasy feelings; I don't even know what she could usefully blow up. That's the problem with dealing with Faerie: it's not where you can blow it up.

Dammit, that's the first line of a Carter story, isn't it: The problem with dealing with Faerie is that it's not where you can blow it up, and all the other solutions are less satisfying. That one is totally on you, Prov.

Also I am not changing Angela's profession so that she is a demolitions expert from Minneapolis instead. Or the kind of landscaper who gets to take out stumps and stuff. I might do a story wherein Carter and Angela have to take out stumps and also fight crime Faerie forces and stuff. If you're nice to me.

2. Am I actually impossible to encourage, or does it just feel like that from in here?

You're, uh. Pretty difficult. I might say impossible if I was good with impossibilities, but you know how I am on that front.

Because I'm uncreative: 3. If money was not a consideration, what would you do/where would you go if you kidnapped Rob for a week? How about Lily? (You're allowed to bring helper-grownups in this scenario.)

I think Rob could have a field day in Washington DC with the Smithsonian and like that, and we could take day trips out into the Virginia countryside to look at plantations and stop at the roadside and things if he got overstimulated in the city. Also it is not so distant from visiting a jonsinger, which Rob would also like. I'd want to take Lily somewhere with a lot of flower gardens and good chocolate, so...well, Montreal actually. There are lots of good kids' parks in Montreal even aside from the Jardin Botanique, and she could practice her French and discover where she could usefully know more French, and she could ask papersky questions about everything under the sun and zorinth would probably argue with some of his mother's answers and Lily would like that. And so would I.

4. I found that The Weepies were pretty much the ideal music for Pt. Reyes. Can you come up with other unexpected music/location combinations?

My most recent music/location combination was entirely predictable: "The End of the World As We Know It" came on the music at the Berkeley Whole Foods, and alecaustin and I rocked out and joked that everyone in their 30s in the entire store had just said, "Leonard Bernstein!" in unison. That is not the least bit unpredictable. That is demographic.

I think Josh Ritter on the plains south of here is entirely predictable also.

Now I want to listen to Meg Hutchinson in the fog in California hills, though. I don't know that that counts as unexpected. But I think it would be nice.

5. What's a cool, unboring thing for me to do with a race of semi-intelligent commensals?

Architectural structures from the weird things their partner race does? Or quasi-architectural at least? I don't just say that because I know you like architecturalnessitude.

So I'm going to tell you a thing I want, and you will either tell me where I can find more of it or why I can't find more of it.

What I want is a fairly classic mode of science fiction that I call "planets and aliens." It's mostly about the people on one planet, although there may be more, and they're learning to deal with the aliens on that planet, although again there may be more. It isn't about wars in FTL spaceships, although there may be FTL spaceships (or there may not, there may just be FTL communications, or not even that). And I can come up with all sorts of classic examples and very few new recent things. (C.J. Cherryh's atevi books, for example, fit the bill, but she started writing them so long ago. There's a lot of LeGuin in this mode.)

So why the fewer recent things? Did people become stymied for things to say after they realized that using aliens as code for particular racial/ethnic groups here was a bad idea? Someone I was talking to suggested that it was because modern physics made long-distance space travel look less plausible than once it did, but there are so very many implausible things that are written about in great detail that this seems like not the explanation to me. Did everything just get pulled over into the Military SF realm and have the aliens mostly sucked out? What's the deal here?

I have been thinking about protagonist deaths in fiction, when they work for people and when they don't. I would particularly like to hear more about what works for you in the comment section, with specific and potentially spoilery examples, so read the other comments with care if you are spoiler-sensitive.

[Poll #1727111]

PS No, I am not thinking of killing off Carter. As far as I know, Carter does not die. Bullets can't...wait, that's something else.

I was thinking about titles, because I am two discs into watching Last Exile from out of the alecaustin-box, and I still don't know why it's called that, and I was wondering how much that would bother people. Discussion of differences in how much it bothers you for TV series vs. book series vs. etc. welcome in comments.

[Poll #1638546]

It's autumn here in Baja Canada, which you can tell because I'm wearing socks again, the tomatillos are going berserk, and my tisane consumption has gone from appallingly high to truly unbalanced. That latter, of course, may be due to the fact that the first chest cold of the season has arrived right on schedule, so I am occasionally alternating in what Midori's Floating World labels a honey-ginger latte, despite the fact that it contains no coffee whatever, which I thought was a requirement for a latte. It's just hot milk with honey and ginger. Really intense, but good on the throat. timprov figured out how to make them at home. He, too, is trying to rid himself of bits of lung. (markgritter too, but he is doing it in California at the moment, and also he refuses the goodness that is honey-ginger latte. timprov refuses the goodness that is tea. Only I know what's good, apparently.)

Yesterday's city, the capital of Britain's dearest ally in 1955? Oslo, Norway. Surprising Brits and Norsk alike, I expect. Well done, mastadge, although guessing all across Scandinavia at once does seem a bit...anyway, well done.

We have candidates for the dress for my godfather's wedding. We also have yet another reject. You know what I hate about those shows where they make people over, other than everything so I don't watch them? They are apparently constantly telling people to try things on in styles they don't usually wear. I do this. You know what happens? They don't fit. You know why I don't wear those styles? They don't fit! (Or else they look terrible on me.) Who are these people, who have styles that fit them perfectly well and are perfectly flattering, and they go around not-wearing them on a whim? Oh, tra la, I think I shall just not-wear perfectly good clothes that will look lovely on me, because there are just far too many perfectly good clothes looking lovely on me in this world, tra la! Also, they are far too readily available at reasonable prices, manufactured by people who are treated humanely and with reasonable environmental practices, tra la! Shut up, those people!

(Tried on a sheath dress in a perfectly beautiful shade of blue, which my mom purchased and brought over and will now have to return to the store with sad and dragging feet. It had a wide belt that would have accentuated my not-wide waist. Guess what? Did not fit. Surprise! Yet another Neal Stephenson dress. What, ask the newcomers, is a Neal Stephenson dress? It is a garment in which I could fit the complete works of Neal Stephenson in the waist of the thing with me. Gigantic cul-de-sacs of fabric, people. Why do I not wear sheath dresses in non-stretchy fabric? Because I am not shaped like a sword aaaaaaaagh the end.)

Last in the series for now. I may do another of these later. It was fun. But I feel the need to draw the line somewhere.

Have you ever watched "Strange Brew"? It's got hockey, right?

I have, but mrissa hasn't. Let's not make her, okay? She's still on about Darby O'Gill and the Little People, even though that was totally not my fault.

What's your comfort food/drink, and why?

I have to confess to being a lasagna man. There's a place here in Bemidji called Tutto Bene, and I've been eating their lasagna for years, but I'll also take Aunt Nancy's, or Janet's gran's, or Janet's, or whoever's, really. Beef, sausage, I'll even eat the broccoli or spinach stuff, although if someone invites you over for lasagna and then there's no meat in it, you wonder whether the phone rang while they were cooking it or something and they forgot. It's a pretty key step if you ask me. That thing Janet did that had carrots in, that was okay but where was the rest of our dinner? That's what I wanted to know. (So I asked her. Maybe not my wisest move.)

As for drinks, I like a cold beer, but on a winter morning there's nothing like hot coffee with cream and sugar, or hot chocolate, and yes, Tam says it's like living with a little kid to have the bag of marshmallows in the house, but whatever, I like 'em.

And finally, aedifica asks: So, Carter. If you'd been born on some tropical island or some other place with no hockey rinks, what do you think you'd have done instead of hockey?

I don't know, people are always asking who you'd be if you were someone else completely, and I'm like, but who else is this other guy? What do they do on this tropical island? Because it matters a lot, really. If this hypothetical me is still me and not some tropical island guy with a tropical island family--I mean, are my folks still gone? Do I still have an aunt and uncle? Am I on my own there in the tropics as a little kid? I don't get it. I don't know.

Like, a lot of the places they don't have hockey, if I was still me, I don't know what. I'm big enough for football, but you can't play football all the time like you can play hockey. Just look at the game schedules. One a week, give me a break. It's all start and stop and standing around. That's no way for a kid to do. And basketball, I'm not built for basketball. Maybe in high school up here, sure, I'm tall enough, but seriously? No way. But basketball's one of those games you can play all the time if you're just some kid without much money.

Oh, you know what? Some of those tropical islands they have baseball. And baseball is like hockey where they have guys built like anything, they have the little fast skinny guys and the big guys like me and the guys with legs a million miles long and all that. I bet if I'd been born Dominican, I'd totally play baseball. I don't know what Janet would do, though.

Here's the thing about tropical islands: a lot of guys act like they're moving there when they're done playing, or at least Florida. Not me. I know the fishing is supposed to be great, but I've been helping Uncle Larry with the landscaping business since I was a little kid, and down there in the tropics I can't tell you what's a flower and what's a weed, and that'd really bug me. I know some people just want to go and relax with an umbrella drink and go, "Oooh, pretty flowers," but I like to know what I'm looking at. I like to know whether it'll be helpful to yank that green thing out and leave it set by the planter. I mean, I'm not always helpful. Tam can tell you that. But with plants I kind of am. A lot of people don't know that about me. And down there in the tropics, I'd be just some guy, I wouldn't know any hockey and I wouldn't know any trees and stuff. I'd just blunder around on big feet and step on their little lizards and be useless. Not if I'd been born there, obviously. But it's hard for me to imagine now.

I had a question meme post, still active, where you can ask Carter Hall anything you like. So now we continue with the quizzing of the fictional hockey player.

What do you do with the hats after a hat-trick?

Me? I'm on defense. If I ever got a hat-trick, I would keep all the damn hats, because that is just not in the cards for me. Hell, if my plus-minus for the game hit 3, I would call it awesome. But I think mostly we give them to charity. I guess. I don't know. Hjalmar the janitor cleans them up, I think. He comes out with a broom, and unless one of the guys wants something special of it, I never think of it again. He and Cindy in the office handle it.

Oh, Tommy Heikkanen says you grab one and wear it inside out on your way out of the game and then the other team can't hex you on the way to your car? Because it's really bulky to turn your parka inside out? Hell if I know. Heikkanen is always on about crap like that, and I used to think he was nuts. Now I think it's even less useful to have somebody who is not nuts and could not get any more cryptic. I mean, it's not like I want him to talk about his feelings. It's not like I want anybody talking about their feelings. But just a little bit more information might not kill us, you know, Heik? Maybe? Sheesh, dude.

Will the Cubs will the World Series (or even the pennant) in this century?

Like, if I got out a turban and went into my Gypsy fortune-teller woowoo routine, Janet would whack me for being ethnically insensitive. So here's what I can tell you: one, I only really care about baseball when the Twins are in a pennant race. I mean, not that I won't catch a game from time to time with my buddies over some wings and some beer. But it's not my sport. I know, I hate the guys who don't know shit about hockey until playoffs and then are all like, "Woooo, Nicholas Backstrom!", and you are like, learn his damn name or shut your damn mouth. But that's how I am with baseball, I guess, except I'm not all, "Woooo, Joseph Mauer!"

But anyway: Cubbies. Here's the other thing I know. Some teams are cursed. Some teams are hexed, some teams made bad deals with magic powers, some teams just can't fight off the crap that's going on in the places where they have to play. Or in order to fight off the crap that's going on, the game gets sacrificed. But nobody knows anything like that about the Cubs. The Cubs are where the universe reasserts itself and says, "Dude, somebody's gotta win and somebody's gotta lose, hexes and magic powers and guiding spells aside. At the end of the day statistics will bite somebody's ass." So far it's been the Cubs'. Half the spare magic in Chicago has gone to trying to fix curses that just aren't there on the Cubbies. It's, like, quantum mechanical or some shit. You know how the lady says it's a long season and you gotta trust it? (I know, I said I'm not a baseball guy. That movie is about sex. I never said I wasn't a sex guy. I mean, damn.) The Cubs gotta listen to that, only, bigger than the season. I hope that helps.

Also, you know what, Cubs fan? There's this thing you know when you play minor league long enough, when you realize that hope is not this bird poem Janet tried to tutor me through in high school. Hope is this thing that shows up with a hammer about two months into the season and beats your heart and then shows up with paddles in the post-season. Because anything can happen then. That's what you know playing in the minor leagues of any sport. And I guess it happens to Cubs fans, too. Your cheerful message of the day, straight from Carter Hall.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if wood were what a queen would want?

Dude. First of all, it is a Gopher, not a woodchuck, and second, if she could get through this by chucking wood at the damn queen's head, don't you think she'd have tried that? This is Bemidji. We are not short on timber here. She still has to go through the hold-fast-fear-not-baby's-father crap, and Janet is going to be one Gopher who is in a bad, bad mood after grabbing that snake-fire-whatever thing. And it's not going to get better if you call her a freakin' woodchuck.