Knife Laws

Recently, the guys at Customs decided they wanted to make about 80% of the folding knives in the U.S. illegal, and they got a stooge in the Senate to cobble together a bill to do just that.

Fortunately, some of the Senators in office aren't entirely stupid, and an amendment was added to narrow that down to switchblades, which are already illegal in most states, leaving the thumb-studs and wrist-snappers alone. Two R's and a D sponsored the adjustment.

Here is the gist of it.

Oh, and check out the mini-karambit:

I can't find a link to a sales site offhand, it's obviously a foreign maker, but I'm betting if one pops up, there will be a market for this nasty little claw ...

Current Set

Bell Bottom Blues

Can’t Get Used to Losin’ You

One Toke Over the Line

Daydream Believer

Political Science

Layla

Hotel California

Lola

Walk Away Renee

We Just Disagree

Year of the Cat

Hallelujah

Angel from Montgomery

Sail Away

Way Down in the Hole

The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down

Dixie (Instrumental)

The Weight

Blackbird

In My Life

Yesterday (Inst.)

Here Comes the Sun (Inst.)

Stand By Me

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

Brand New Key

Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)

I Can't Help Falling in Love With You

The Water is Wide (Inst.)

Ashokan Farewell (Inst.)

Born to Run

For What It’s Worth

Telstar (Inst.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Inst.)

Vader’s Theme (Inst.)

(The last five are all new -- I can play them, but they need more practice to memorize.)

For Your Entertainment ...

When the Rain Comes ...

Check this out:

Big Uncle Wants to Know

So, I got this form in the mail yesterday from the Census Bureau. It's already overdue, apparently, so I figured I had better fill it out PDQ.

It's aimed at my business, and almost none of it applies to what I do as a writer, but I went through the pages and dutifully X'ed in all the boxes yea or nay. Includes several questions about the internet, which is probably not something they were asking about a census or two back.

And to make yesterday's mail even more fun, I got a note from the IRS telling me I owed them money, when, in fact, I don't. I'll have to go see my accountant and see if he can explain it to them. (My agent takes her cut off the top and sends me a check for the balance, but the 1099 form shows the gross, and I apparently didn't put her commission in the right box.

Harry Potter couldn't whip up enough magic to deal with the IRS when it comes to arcane ... )

Oh, yeah, and one of the book houses looking at my urban fantasy bounced it.

Fun day. Never a dull moment ...

Ch-Ch-Changes ...

Science fiction conventions, at least once upon a time, were places where pretty much anybody who was a fan was welcome. Odd ducks? Hey, no problem, come on down! I used to use the California analogy when talking about fandom ("They stood the country up on its end, and all the loose nuts and bolts rolled down into California ...") Same with fandom. We are all a tad weird, but some of us more than a tad ...

Most SF fans I've met aren't particularly conservative, though there are some; nor particularly religious, at least not in the mainstream sense; though there are some; and in general, they are more open-minded when it comes to alternative life-choices -- or the lack of ability to make such choices. (There are still people out there who believe that being gay is a choice and not a biological imperative, but I suspect few are SF fans. Doesn't go with the literature. If I had to bet money, I wouldn't put much on the idea that somebody trying to exorcise a teenage boy of his homosexuality as if it was a demon is a science fiction fan.)

I have, from time to time, written about characters who aren't whitebread heterosexuals, because I like to posit that in a better future, the adults will be able to do what they want without being clapped into gaol for it, as long as nobody gets hurt. I leave the kids and animals out of it.

SF fandom has elements of all manner of sexuality woven through it, and transgender folks have been around for a long time. At least a few people I've met along the way started out one sex and later switched to a different one. I can't pretend to understand what that must feel like, to believe you are the opposite of what body you wear, but I can understand that there are people who do feel that to their very souls. If they have the wherewithal to fix that? More power to them.

When I knew Hank Stine, he always kind of reminded me of Phineas Freak, of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Skinny, hairy, and a wise-ass. After we fell out of touch, Hank eventually became Jean Marie, and she still writes and edits, though I've never had a chance to meet her.

And when it gets right down to it, I'd say she's a better looking woman than Hank was a man, and she's older than I am.

If you see this, Jean Marie, drop me a note. I'd love to hear what you've been doing since the good old days in Baton Rouge ...

Amusing Coincidence?

I never noticed this before -- Emile Antoon Khadaji, from the cover of The Man Who Never Missed, '85, and Steve Perry the rock singer, from the cover of his '84 album ...

Past Master

Charlie Brown's recent passing somehow dredged up a memory I hadn't visited for years.

1977, Miami Beach, Florida, the 35th World Science Fiction Convention, "Suncon," held in the somewhat decadent Fountainebleu Hotel, over Labor Day Weekend. It was my first SF con, and I was a two-story pro -- neither of which had been published yet.

Once I arrived, I was taken under Hank Stine's wing -- Hank being a somewhat infamous writer in the field who had done an X-rated book called Season of the Witch, about a man sentenced to live in a woman's body. If you can find a copy of the original paperback, from the late sixties, it'll set you back a couple hundred bucks, minimum. Available as a e-book from Amazon.com.

Hank had moved to Baton Rouge with his wife, who had family there. He and I met after he gave a talk at the local library. I was an SF wannabe writer who showed up at the talk, and shortly thereafter, when I sold my first story, Hank was the third guy I called to gush about it.

(Hank, now "Jean Marie," later went on to demonstrate that the man-trapped-in-a-woman's-body notion was very much a personal story. He became she, after some hormones and -- one assumes -- knifery. Hank had also been a Scientologist. At the next Worldcon, in Phoenix, Hank hired me to write a novella for Galaxy, at which he had become the editor. He was a character. I went to visit him on a hot summer's day once and he opened the door stark naked, and stayed that way through the visit. I didn't bat an eyelash. Ted Sturgeon used to practice nudity at home, but before I met him ...)

Um. Anyway, Hank took me around to the pro parties, since I was one, albeit new and shiny, and I got to meet some literary heroes, none of whom looked like I thought they would. (Later, I met Avram Davidson, and he's the only SF&F writer that I could have picked out of a crowded room unmet, because he looked exactly as I pictured him.)

Miami Beach in those days was a little shabby and needing a makeover, and there was enough marijuana in various room parties to stone Jakarata, with some left over for New York City.

One morning I awoke early and, before it got too hot and muggy, went on a wander. I walked for an hour, this way and that, no direction, nor goal in mind. Eventually, I came to a hole-in-the-wall diner and decided it was time for breakfast. I was probably three or four miles away from the con hotel, and since I wasn't on any panels or autographings or anything, in no hurry to get back.

Place was a greasy spoon, and I went to the counter and sat next to a funny-looking guy who had a head that looked like it belonged on a body three sizes smaller. He wore glasses, was balding, and in his early to mid-sixties, I figured.

He looked over and saw my convention badge pinned to my T-shirt. Since I'd never been to one of these things before, I didn't know that you should take it off before going out into civilization. Anyway, the old guy introduced himself: R.A. Lafferty.

Holy shit! What were the chances of that? A random wander in Miami Beach and wind up sitting next to one of the best writers in the field in which I wanted to make my mark?

We chatted over breakfast, and I confess I can recall almost none of the conversation. A couple of years later, he had a stroke, and pretty much retired from public life, suffering another, worse stroke in the mid-90's, passing away in 2002 in a nursing home in Oklahoma. Hell of a writer, and doing stuff nobody else was doing.

I had more amazing adventures at the con, culminating in the flight home, which took place in the beginnings of a hurricane that caused our jet to make three passes at the runway before we were able to land, in a driving rain and wind that was, well, the beginnings of a hurricane.

Lafferty. If you haven't read any of his stuff and you are fan of weird SF&F, give him a try.

Blonde Joke

Okay, I don't know if you've heard this, but:

So, the blonde goes to get her hair cut. She is wearing iPod ear buds and she tells the stylist, whatever you do, don't pull the buds out.

Okay, he says.

So he's cutting her hair and she falls asleep, and he has to snip a bit just over her ears and he figures, she's sleeping she won't notice, so he pulls the phones out of her ears and all of sudden, boom! she dies -- just like that.

Oh, my god! So he calls 911 and the paramedics are on the way and he's all panicked and he hears something coming from the ear buds, so he puts one up to his ear and he hears:

"Breathe in ... breathe out. Breathe in ... breathe out ..."

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm going to hell. I won't be lonely, though, 'cause if you laughed, you'll be holding the gate open for me when I get there ...

Blackhearted Soul

Came across the words and music for a song I wrote a few years back. Dusted it off, and ...

Who Do You Love?

Jude Augustus Holly, left, and his great-uncle, Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Many years ago, when the Earth was young, Reaves and I wrote our first collaborative novel, Hellstar. Since it is out-of-print and hard to find, I'll give you a short recap: A huge generation-ship, pretty much a city in space, is on its way from our solar system to a nearby star. Given the sub-light speeds, it is going to take a while. I seem to recall that it was eighty-odd years one-way, but that's from memory, so it could be off.

Along the way, the ship runs into a naked singularity, i.e. a black hole that has evaporated, sort of, and everything goes to hell. Gravity fails, time runs sideways, major disasters happen all over and everybody is in Deep Shit.

The book was pitched at 150K words, and after we sold it, the first ones out of our editor's mouth were, "A hundred and thirty thousand words, max." Thus we had some pacing problems to fix, we each did a draft, and pretty much, we were happy how it turned out.

We sent the manuscript in.

Now, at the climax of the tale, reality has broken down, there is a good possibility that the ship is going to be crippled in a major way, if not destroyed completely. Holes are opening and closing in walls, water is floating hither and yon, time is wonky, people are going mad and being killed, it's all very dramatic and harum-scarum.

Our editor -- let's call her "Beth," because, well, that's her name -- Beth sent us a note and what she said up front was:

"What happened to the dog?"

Thousands of terrified people are floating around, going bugfuck, dying, the ship is in dire peril, but none of that mattered.

We had a pregnant dog -- the correct term is "bitch" -- who had her litter in the greensward park, one of whom's pups wound up with the son of one of our viewpoint characters. A brief appearance, how can you not smile at a boy with a puppy?

Our response, if I recall it correctly, was "Who gives a fuck what happened to the dog?"

To which she, as an editor of greater experience than we, retorted, "More readers than you can imagine." And she was adamant about it.

So we went back and put in a line or two showing that the dog made it through okay.

Later, I was to discover from other writers and editors that putting a dog in peril demands resolution. A lot of folks like dogs more than they like people -- a thing I have come to understand myself. ("The more I learn about people, the better I like my dog ...")

I met a well-known Northwest mystery writer once at an autographing, and we chatted about this and that, since we sat next to each other. He had a couple of series going, and in one, the main character owned a dog. After a time, he got tired of fooling with the critter, so he wanted to get rid of it.

No way in hell, his editor told him. If you kill off the dog, your readers will hunt us down and cut out our livers. The dog stays until he dies of old age.

All of which is to say that if you are going to put a dog in your story, you need to know this.

There's another writer my wife and I like, and he killed a dog in one of his novels. I wouldn't let my wife read it when I was done with the book. If I had known he was going to do it, I wouldn't have read it. And that's why I still haven't seen Will Smith's version of I Am Legend all the way to the end. Wipe out humanity, turn them all into monsters? No problem, I can deal with that.

Don't, however, kill that German Shepherd Dog. I liked him better than I did Will ...

Competition - The American Way

Despite my self-professed status as a Luddite, I am, like most middle-class Americans in or around big cities, awash in the warm ionic Sea of Electronica: We have a landline, cell phones, an alarm system; we have TV sets, two of which are hooked into a digital cable service, as are our computers. We have iPods, albeit they are small ones. Haven't gotten a Kindle yet, nor the iPhone, but I foresee some variant of both of those in my future. An e-reader for me is a matter of when they get a few more kinks worked out, one or two more generations; a smart phone when I feel like I can afford to waste more time on the internet ...

Back in the day when Ma Bell was the only phone company -- even with the Bell babies spun off, your choice regarding the telephone was simple: Pay whatever they asked, or do without. My mother still hesitates to stay on a long-distance call because she remembers when half an hour across country was worth dinner for two at a good restaurant.

This must be costing you a lot, she'll say.

No, Mama, it costs me about three bucks an hour, and if I wait and call this evening, nothing at all.

Regulation, de-regulation, upstarts hither and yon, and now the options for connections to the rest of the world are, if not unlimited, considerably more than ever before, and for relatively much less. Comcast now has wireless high-speed coverage over most of the Portland and outlying area, as does Clear™.

Western Union stopped sending telegrams because there was no longer a need. The US Post Office is losing its ass -- and ours, since we are paying for it -- because email is ever so much easier and cheaper than a first class envelope. I once wrote a dozen letters a week and sent them forth via USPO auspices. Now? I might write one paper letter to be sent via snailmail a month, and that only because my mother refuses to get a computer so I can email her.

For a long time, I kept paper printouts of all my email. Now, I dump them onto a CD every so often and when they get filled up, stick them in a box somewhere. It will be easier for Spotlight to search an entire CD than to dig out one box of paper with one-tenth the info from the garage and go looking for something in it.

If you live in an urban or suburban area of any size, you have choices as to the kinds of connectivity you want, from landlines to wifi to all kinds of wireless networking via your cell phone or computer. (I have a friend who lives far enough out in the sticks that his computer can only connect to the internet via dial-up modem, which is glacially slow -- and even so, that is fifty times as fast as my first modem would allow, and he is able to connect. He's found a way around it -- he takes a USB stick to the library, downloads or uploads stuff from it, takes it home. Slow, but -- we're talking gigabytes of memory on a device the size of a pencil stub.)

All of which is to say that if you look around, sometimes you can find a deal that will save you some money.

The only reason I need to keep a landline at all is for my general paranoia, and my alarm system's monitoring service, and I expect in the not-too-distant future, that alarm can be made wireless, too. That landline and the odd long-distance call we make using it are spendy, since it is still part of AT&T, and they have always held themselves up as the premium service. However, Comcast Cable offers a bundle -- TV, computer link, and landline phone service that, if we elect to get it and bag AT&T -- will essentially cut our total connectivity bill in half. In fact, the new bundle, even at standard prices and not the barker's low-ball one year rate, isn't much more than the cable TV bill alone. So we essentially get the computer and phone for nine dollars a month.

We get to keep the same phone number, and since our cable has gone out infrequently in the ten years we've had it, everything being underground, it certainly seems hard to beat.

Great living here in the future, ain't it?

Building a Werewolf

Some years back, Reaves and I were going to do a book featuring a scientifically-made werewolf. I went up Pill Hill in Portland, hit the medical library, interviewed a bunch of doctors, from dentists to endocrinologists, and came up with a way of doing it using known science, and one not-so-huge suspension of disbelief.

With one thing or another, we didn't get around to writing the book. In a recent discussion online, the subject came up, in a conversation about vampires, and I thought I'd offer my how-to-make-a-werewolf as an exercise in research ...

First, the caveat: The creature had to be created without magic, even though we could use some of those tropes if we could figure out a way.

So, armed with this, I set out, and was able to come up with a scenario that was fairly simple, once I had the notion. It involved combining some things that, while not likely, could be stretched enough to seem possible.

Pretty much, you could do it with hormones and drugs.

Hormones are potent chemicals, and under the right tweaking, could be made to accomplish almost all of the classical werewolf features. Add in a few known drugs ...

Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy and Lionel the Lion Faced Man, were certainly hairy enough, examples hypertrichosis. Genetic in these cases, but the medical literature has examples of people who suddenly sprouted hair, and a combination of hormones and drugs could do the trick.

Third-set dentition -- extra/super-numerary teeth -- are rare, but do happen, and there might be a way to encourage this.

Drugs and hormone storms can make somebody fantastically-strong, fairly impervious to pain or less than crippling injuries, and full of rage. Angel dust, Roid rage, amphetamines, narcotics, easy stuff here -- make them time-release via some kind of implant.

An allergy to silver? Not impossible ...

Now technically-speaking, Larry would be no more related to a wolf than you or I -- he'd just be a hairy, toothy, bad-tempered, strong human, but he would look the part and be able to act it.

The limits: First, it would take a while to change Larry into Wolfie. Months -- and even if you fudged this a little, you couldn't do so by much -- hair and teeth take time to grow. Call it six months, you can get away with it, but much less than three or four months, probably not.

Second, once changed, Larry isn't going back on his own. You could shave or depilate the hair, pull the teeth, get the implant out and he might eventually come to look something like he did before, but the hair and teeth are the easy part; balancing the hormones would take weeks or months. That's not counting the repairs his body would have to make to injuries because it didn't throttle down while leaping about -- torn this, cracked that.

Be a lot harder to make a vampire. You could come up with sunlight allergies, somebody who drank blood -- though the nutritional aspect of human blood simply isn't enough to keep somebody alive and healthy. Chemicals for strength would work, but the blur of super-speed and the ability to spider up and down walls or fly would be a tad beyond current science ...

Charlie Brown

Charles Brown

1937-2009

Charles Brown, founder of the SF fan, and later professional, magazine Locus has died, at the age of 72.

When I seriously started writing, thirty-odd years ago, I immediately subscribed to Locus, which was the "semi-prozine" that followed the F&SF field. Reviews, interviews, pictures, stats -- back in the pre-home computer days, Locus was the only way to know at a remove what some of the writers I admired actually looked like.

What books were selling when they were coming out, which markets were open or closed, Locus ran them, and it was an invaluable resource to a young writer, not to mention a great source of gossip.

Charlie won a boatload of Hugo awards, and eventually, the "semi" became "pro" as the magazine went to slick covers and color photos.

Until a major fill-the-dumpster housecleaning a couple years back, I had all those back-issues boxed in my garage. I finally realized they were occupying space for naught but nostalgia, so I tossed 'em out.

Early on, my books got reviewed in Locus -- favorably, even -- and I appeared there in pictures now and again. That mostly stopped, for a couple of reasons: First, Charlie didn't think any kind of tie-in was legitimate writing, so those seldom got more than a passing line in the publications-received section. This rubbed off on reviewers, several of whom I considered snobs. (It took Alan Dean Foster fifty novels before he got a review, and then it was an undeserved pan.)

Second, my sometime-collaborator got more or less blackballed, and by association, so did I. Without telling tales out of school, this involved an ex-girlfriend and their unhappy break-up, and Charlie's sympathies not lying with my friend ...

I wrote one commentary for Locus for which I was actually paid, an opinion piece a decade or so ago. I was surprised Charlie bought it, since I took him to task for his snobby attitude regarding tie-ins. Give him a point for that. While I let my subscription lapse five or six years back, I didn't bear Charlie any ill will, and he was undeniably an influence on the field of speculative fiction for a long time.

Adios, Charlie.

Lag Time

Back in our hippie days -- I always feel as if maybe I should spell that latter word "daze" -- one of our touchstone books was Be Here Now, by Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert.) After chugging lots of acid with Timothy Leary, Alpert trundled off to India and found a spiritual teacher, gave up drugs, and Be Here Now was a kind of fat graphic-novel presentation of what he learned.

The upshot was, that being in the moment was the way to go -- the past was history, the future always just out of reach and all you had was the present, and that you should live in it.

It resonated with a lot of folks, still does. Can't see the future/ can't change the past/ all you have is just the moment/ and it never, ever lasts ...

I had occasion to revisit Tor Norretranders outstanding book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size this past weekend, and, strictly speaking, we don't consciously live in the moment -- we are about a half-second behind ...

This is great stuff, and in this instance, the section called "The Half Second Delay," he addresses this concept in detail. The gist of it is, the unconscious brain is aware of our intent to do things about a half second before it becomes action. There is a Readiness Potential, followed by a Conscious Wish, the initiation of Control, and finally, the Act itself. This has been determined experimentally, using assorted tools, including EKGs, and the wonderfully-named Wundt's Complexity (or Complication) Clock. (Consciousness kicks in a mere 0.20/second before the Act, not much more than a blink, but the subconscious mind knows you are going to wiggle your finger 0.35/second before you are consciously aware that you are. Which is -- not to muddy the waters or anything with the term, but -- mind-boggling ...)

It brings out all kinds of philosophical questions. The author has a wonderful line about our consciousness, that it is " ... but a little tin god pretending to be in charge of things beyond its control ..."

Norretanders is quick to answer those who hold up reaction time -- it doesn't take half a second to pull our hand off a hot stove -- as a demur. Reaction time lives in the unconscious brain -- you jerk your hand off the stove and then say "Ow!" not the other way around.

He then tosses up assorted reasoned objections to this notion, and promptly shoots them down. It's a great lesson in science, and I urge you to have a look at the book. It will make you wonder about all kinds of notions you normally take for granted.

What I find really interesting as a writer (and a martial artist) is, if there was a way to access this Readiness Potential directly, how that might be used in a fight? If I were to be a third of a second ahead of an opponent, and I had position and skills to make us of this beat, how much of an advantage would that be?

You can't outdraw the drawn gun, but if you could, boy, wouldn't that be a neat trick?

Tape

Over the years of a fairly active life, I have been fortunate in that I've had relatively few injuries that sidelined me. Some -- and while that's part of the risk, I know plenty of folks who don't exercise at all who have had worse -- and are in terrible shape, to boot -- so I'm happy with the trade-off. Live slow, die old, and leave an ugly corpse ...

One of the worst things for me has been jammed fingers, especially the proximal joint in my left thumb. If you've never suffered this particular affliction, consider yourself fortunate. I have managed to bang my thumb enough so that if I am not careful, I can -- literally -- sprain it while taking my sock off. (The reason for this is that every time you seriously strain or sprain a joint, you create some scar tissue. Scar tissue is less elastic than normal, undamaged stuff, and past a certain point, much less likely to stretch when put under tension -- instead, it tears. Once you have damaged a joint, it never will be 100% thereafter. Sorry, I didn't make the rules, but that's how it is.)

My affliction is known by various terms -- "Gamekeeper's Thumb," or "Skier's Thumb," "Nightstick Thumb," or "Boxer's Thumb ... " you get the idea.

I've had this for thirty years, and since I need my hands for activities other than martial arts, I have tried half a dozen orthopedic devices to stabilize that proximal thumb joint when it is apt to get jammed, including a couple I custom-made using Sculpey.

Most of these work really well when you are sitting in a chair watching TV, but not so well if you are moving. Those that allow thumb-motion generally aren't supportive enough; and those that are supportive enough, don't allow the range-of-motion I want. I need to be able to make a tight fist.

The appliances range from thick Spandex, to heavy-duty leather and Velcro, some with metal inserts, and they can get pretty spendy.

After some trial and error, I came across NexCare's Absolute Waterproof Tape™, a stretchy material that comes in a couple of widths. The one-inch works best for me. I've fooled around with wrapping patterns, and settled on one that seems to work pretty well. It gives my thumb support, but still allows me to open and close my hand.

The tape costs about four and a half bucks a roll, if you buy it in bulk, and I use about half a roll each session -- I do both hands, and most of my fingers' middle joints, so it adds two dollars and little to the cost of my workout. Cheap insurance any way you figure it. The tape is waterproof, doesn't slip off with sweat, and if you use the palm-wrap, stays in place. (I have managed to get sand under the palm-strip when we work out in the sand pit, but even so, it tends to stay on.)

It's not perfect, but it's the best I've been able to devise after a lot of looking. An ounce of prevention and all.

The short movie attached is how I apply the wrapping before each silat class. There is one caveat up front: DO NOT STRETCH THE TAPE AS YOU APPLY IT. Just like an Ace Bandage, you don't want to cut off circulation by stretching it, you want it to be able to give.

If you tension the wrap too much and your thumb rots off, it's your own damn fault, I just told you not to do it.