Foodie

Had lunch yesterday at the Blossoming Lotus, in Portland, on the way home after a visit with my daughter and her husband and boys. This is a vegan place, and it features something called "live food," which isn't some critter scuttling about on your plate, but food that hasn't been cooked in the usual manner. Which is to say, it's either raw or sometimes done with low heat, like a food dryer. Not all the dishes are proscribed thus, but there are some.


Quick definitons: "Vegetarian" is generally used to describe somebody who doesn't eat meat–meat here meaning of animal origin: fish, shellfish, fowl, beef, pork, lamb, snake, alligator, rat, et al, but who can consume dairy products and ova. So, butter, cheese, milk, cream, eggs, like that. 


"Vegan" is applied to one who eschews all animal products. 


One can be a vegetarian but not a vegan. I'm not either, but I have altered my diet in those directions. Let's face it, animal fat tastes great, but it's not good for you. (We won't get into the morality question, that's your business. Nobody likes an obnoxious vegan, and it often seems, that term is redundant ipso facto ...)


Then again, my altered diet notwithstanding, Tuesday, I had lunch with an old friend and we went to an upscale diner in Portland. Along with my fried chicken and mac 'n' cheese, I had a bacon/bourbon/maple syrup vanilla milkshake. You can't believe how good that was. The bacon was actually just a postage-stamp-sized bit stuck into the top as a garnish, and the shake was thick enough so the straw wouldn't deliver it. Yeah, I'm cutting way down on milk products, but now and then, the call of the bad health is powerful ...


Um. Back to the Lotus:


On the face of it, this vegan stuff might sound, at the least, strange, and a skeptic might suppose, even, vile. Roots, twigs, bark, and nettles? Right. Rabbit food. Eat the bunny instead ...


Not necessarily so. I got the whiskey-ginger barbecue sandwich, and it was good enough so I'd get it again. 


(I was going to get the falafel wrap, but I was a little leery of the collard green "bread" itself; I'll risk it next time.)


The thing with vegan or vegetarian fare has, for me, been about consistency. You can make a tasty bean-burger patty, but if it chews like, well, mashed beans? It doesn't satisfy that meat-eater's desire to use the fangs and not just the grinders. For a long time, that's been the alpha and omega of vegetarian burgers, and big deal.


That's changing. We found a faux-chicken sandwich recently that was close enough to make you wonder if they'd sneaked real chicken onto the bun; this experience was like that.


No, they haven't made soy curls that will make you think you are eating pulled-pork; however, they have made them chewy enough–even "meaty"–that they are satisfying that way. And the use of spices has gotten ever so much better with such fare.


The biggest drawback I can see at the current state is the cost. Faux-meat is spendier than the real stuff in most instances. And you can't find it everywhere. 


Nope, it's not quite the same experience as chowing down on a great bloody steak or pork chop, but it's getting closer, and I'm guessing we aren't far removed from the days when a blind taste test will fool more people than not. When Mickey D's starts serving them as a permanent menu item throughout the chain? That's how you'll know the day has come.


Be real interesting to see how many people make the switch when that happens. 

Dogz

Doggery: Foreground, left: Layla; right, Yama. B.G., left, Jude; right, Eddie

We are dog-sitting for my daughter and son-in-law's critters while they are on an overnighter out-of-town. Got four in the house. They get along, but they are also under foot a lot, you have to be careful where you step. Plus going into the kitchen for anything gets you an instant parade: Whaddya got for us, huh? Are you going to give us a treat? Please?

Pop and Power Ballads

Been working up a pop/power ballad set. Got five so far I can play that are a little more complicated than 1-4-5, and which need a bit more vocal dexterity than a lot of the geezer rock and blues I like to play. Got some stretch singing the high end, especially in the last three. Plus "River" switches keys in the middle.


So far:


1. Love and Affection
2. Can't Get Used to Losing You
3. Year of the Cat
4. Let the River Run
5. Bridge Over Troubled Water

Residences Past

Allow me to wax nostalgic for a moment:


When I was in Louisiana recently to visit with my folks, there was an afternoon when a sitter came by for a few hours and I had a chance to get out of the house. By then, I was in the grip of a raging cabin fever, and I didn't care where I went, at long as it was anywhere else.


I took my mother's car, which nobody had been using, and headed into town. I had no destination. I'd thought about going to the state capitol grounds, a place of fond memories, but there was a big demonstration going on, teachers unhappy with the Governor, so I decided against that.


What I wound up doing instead was driving around and looking at places where my wife and I had lived before we moved away.


It was a warm spring day, high eighties, and the first place I stopped was the first house my wife and I moved into when we got married. 


It looks better now than it did then. It is a single-story shotgun house–so called because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and it would hit the back door, an oblong rectangular box. It was more than a hundred years old at the time (1966), and in bad repair. 


We rented it, and spent the month before our wedding cleaning, painting, and getting it ready. The kitchen was a horrible dark green, and wound up canary-yellow. The foundation in the back had started to crumble an there was a pronounced tilt from the front to rear. Drop a ball in the hall by the front door, it would roll all the way to the kitchen. 


It cost $65 a month. It was downtown, a few miles from LSU. We were both in college there, and I rode my ten-speed bike to school and to my evening job, at the Avis Rent a Car and hotel gift shop most days. After a couple of months, I got a little Harley motorcycle, a two-cycle Pacer, aka Hummer.


Days off, I spent working on my wife's car, a 1960 Ford Falcon that always had something wrong with it.


We were married in November, had a short honeymoon visiting friends in New Orleans, and lived there until the following summer, whereupon we moved to Los Angeles so I could undertake the study of karate. Sold or gave away all our furniture, found our young dog a home in the country, packed everything else into three large trunks, and flew away.


I have fond memories of that house. The parakeet who thought he was tougher than the dog, and turned out not to be; our first Christmas as a couple. The conception of our son. The banana tree out back. The crepe myrtle out by the street. Being locked out and worried that my bride was in trouble and kicking a hole in the front door ...


For a time, the place was a law office, owned by a guy we knew. I haven't seen the house since we moved to Portland in 1978, and you really can't go home again; however, it was a place to visit on my ramble and I was glad to see it was still there, a hundred and fifty years of hurricanes notwithstanding. 

Tomato Surprise

In the writing biz, an unexpected twist-ending to a story is sometimes called a Tomato Surprise. You are tooling along, you round a corner, and splat! you get hit in the face with a fat, ripe tomato.


Whoa! Didn't see that coming!


At their worst, usually bad puns, these are groaners. I will spare you all but one, by Asimov: "Sloane's teddy wins the race ..."


At their best, such endings are memorable and moving. They can be ironic, funny, and the most well-known in the field of science fiction comes from a Damon Knight story, "To Serve Man," that any fan old enough to have seen the original Twilight Zone TV series will happily quote for you the chilling last line:


"It's a cook book!"


One that I liked better from back in the day, (though I can recall almost nothing about the story, not who wrote it, where I read it, nor even much about the tale itself, save for the reveal) also involves a race of advanced, benevolent aliens who show up to interact with humans.


As I recall it–and my memory is naught but fog here, so if you know the story, bear with my mangling of it–the aliens fall all over themselves to help humans. They gift them with unlimited energy, almost magic technology, all manner of things to make human lives better. No catch apparent.


The protagonist–and I want to make him a religious man, though that might not be–comes to realize that the aliens are keeping something from humanity. He doesn't know what, but he is sure there is something, and he presses the alien with whom he visits for the answer. 


The alien is reluctant to tell him; the man persists.


The alien finally relents: We discovered long ago something that changed us. It is that God's highest creatures do, in fact, possess immortal souls that transcend their bodies at death.


The human is stunned. Really? But why would you keep such a thing from us? It would affect the lives of every single human being! To know that we don't die, that we have immortal souls?!


And as kindly as he can, the alien says: We do. 


You don't ...


Wham!


If anybody who drops round here knows the name of that story, please pass it along. I'd like to revisit it all these years later and see if it's anything like I remember.


EDITOR'S NOTE:

It's called "The Martyr," by the late, great Poul Anderson. 


The joy of the internet is that sometimes, somebody who knows what you want to know is listening. The story is, which I'd conflated with "To Serve Man," and which was not really anything like it, did have aliens who were sharing stuff with humans, but that was about it.


A tip of the hat to Mario for calling it.


I probably didn't see the tale in F&SF originally, because I wasn't reading that one at thirteen, but I was reading anthologies, so I probably saw it in one of the "best of" collection, or maybe one of Anderson's own.




Aside: I nodded at Poul for a number of years at various conventions, including once,  an apparition ...


Twas Fourth of July weekend, 2001, Westercon, Portland, Oregon. 

I was on a panel, had gotten there early, and the room was empty. I went up to the table in front, sat, was fiddling with some notes.

People started to arrive, and the first one was Poul Anderson, the writer. He sat out in the audience, smiled, I smiled and nodded back–we had been bumping into each other for twenty-odd years, but had only a passing acquaintance. Been on a couple of panels together, like that.

People arrived, the panel cranked up, we did our thing, and I left.

Thought no more about it. (Didn't think anything of it at the time, actually).

A few weeks later, an online note: Poul Anderson had passed away, on the 31st of July.

Crap, I should have gone over and spoken to him. He was a nice guy, and I much admired his writing. A shame.

Then there was the obit in Locus and assorted places, and apparently, Anderson had been ill for some time, and had died at home, in hospice care, after having spent the last month in the hospital.

So he couldn't have been in Portland, Oregon at the convention if he was in the hospital in Orinda, California ...

Poul Anderson was not a man I'd mistake for anybody else; I'da been willing to swear on anything anybody considers holy, had anybody asked, that I'd seen him in that room before that panel. I could pass a lie-detector test, I'm sure.

No reasonable explanation I've come up with. I had to be mistaken, it could not have been him, but ...

Burning Bright

Apparently, a young tiger has been seen wandering around loose near Puyallup, Washington. 


Story here.


Such exotic animals are illegal these days outside zoos in WA state, and the grandfather clause cuts off in 2007, so a young Bengal tiger ought not be there.


Of course, it could be a cougar going to a costume party ...


Residents are warned that if they see this critter, they should go inside and shut the windows, and if caught in the open, roll into a ball and play dead. I suppose this is good practice for when the tiger eats you and you get to be really dead ...


Back in the day, LSU's mascot, Mike the Tiger, would now and then get out of his cage and shred a few pine trees until he was collected, and there's nothing quite like listening to your radio and hearing that there's a four-hundred-pound tiger loose and best if you stay inside ...

Funny

My son went to Las Vegas for a convention recently. Took this photo in the men's restroom ...

Oldest Guy in the Room

Reading a blog by a guy I know recently, and came across a posting on growing older. He was speaking to the notion that he didn't have a lot of role models for aging–where he grew up, folks tended to arrive at old age battered and worn, if arrive they did, and that realization, all things must pass, was beginning to come home to him.


As a serious, if aging and battered jock, he was looking around and wondering how to make the transition from where he'd been to where he was going.


The saw: "If I had known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself ..."


I knew guys who lived fast and hard and expected they'd die young. Some of them did. But against the odds, some of them who assumed that, instead, somehow survived. Woke up one morning gray and wrinkled, tired and aching and pains every whichwhere, looked around, and said, "Son-of-a-bitch! Now what do I do?"


Well, start from where you are ...


It's all relative. You know the story of the ninety-year-old man who goes to see his doctor?


"Doc," he says, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I just don't have any energy these days. I mean, I do my morning three-mile walk, hit the gym, make love to my wife, and I'm exhausted. I hardly have enough energy left to get through three games of bowling after dinner at the steakhouse. What  can I do?"


"You can get the hell out of my office. Go write a damned how-to book!"


I'm not the guy to hold myself up as the example here, but I do have some thoughts about it. 


First, don't give in and assume that you are over the hill and there's no hope. You can almost always improve your situation. If you have long-standing injuries that can't be fixed, you can learn work-arounds. Nobody has invented the forever pill, and no matter what you do, gravity always wins, but you can effect changes until you get there.


You have two great, cheap tools you can use: Diet and exercise.


If you are twenty-five and still bulletproof, now is the time to start down that road. You won't believe it, but trust me here, you aren't bulletproof. What you do now is going to come back to haunt you. Ask anybody over sixty.


If you are sixty, beat-up and creaky, now is also the time to start down that road. It's not too late to make a difference. There are all kinds of studies that show you can take a sedentary eighty-year-old and start him working out and eating well and make dramatic improvements in his strength and overall health.


Being a fit eighty-year-old might be kind of like being the world's shortest giant, you won't be able to run with the fit young dogs, but you can still beat the couch potatoes to the fridge. There are eighty-year-old guys out there in better shape than I am. Better shape than you, too.


(Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can be a vegetarian, do yoga every morning and tai chi every evening, meditate, and still get cancer or fall over dead from a stroke or heart attack at thirty-five. It happens. You can smoke like Satan, drink a bar full of Irish workmen under the table, and party at the House of the Rising Sun every night until dawn and live to be a hundred, too. If you chose your parents carefully.)


You could get hit by a bus. A big meteor could fall on your house. The Mayans might have been right. No guarantees. 


Working out and eating less crap aren't going to amount to a panacea; however,  like being a card counter at the blackjack table, they can help you stay in the game. Yeah, the house wins in the long run, but you can shade the odds your way. You might not be able to change the quantity of your life, but you can certainly change the quality. Are seventy-five good years better than a hundred crappy ones? Are thirty great years better than seventy-five good ones? Decide that for yourself and see if excess or moderation is the route you want to travel. 


You do have to recognize that you won't be the man (or woman) at seventy that you were at twenty-five. That if you had peaks, you were the strongest guy in the room, the fastest out of the blocks, the unbeatable bad-ass at the bar, you are going to have to let those go. Nature of the organism. You know what happens to the boxing champion who sticks around too long, don't you? 


All things must pass:


A forty-year-old NBA pro is on his last legs. There are a couple active ones almost that old. Are there any who are forty-five? No. Oldest one ever made it that far, but the game was different sixty-five years ago when he was playing it.


You aren't going to the Olympics to win the hundred meter dash at age thirty-five, no matter how much you want it.


You can, however, start to take care of yourself at whatever age you are, and be like the ninety-year-old guy complaining to his doctor.


It's all relative.

Something Else to Worry About ...

KTLA News

FRESNO, Calif. -- Police arrested a 54-year-old man Saturday night for carrying a shotgun disguised as a Super Soaker water gun.

Officers on patrol saw a Randy Smith carrying what appeared to be a Super Soaker water gun on a rifle sling around his neck, Sgt. Rick de Jong told the Fresno Bee.

But when the officers got closer, they realized the toy had been turned into a home-made shotgun, de Jong said.

"He took the Super Soaker apart, was able to fashion a barrel to where he was able to make what's considered a zip gun, where you can fire one round through it," Sgt. Mark Hudson told KMPH News.

The weapon was loaded with a 20-gauge shotgun shell.

Smith was booked into the Fresno County Jail on charges of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition, and manufacture of an illegal weapon.

Doggery

 Last time we got our dogs their immunizations, the vet spotted a couple of cracked teeth, so we scheduled them for a dental exam and cleaning.


That happened yesterday, and it turned out, was no fun for anybody ...


When I was a kid, dogs weren't treated like family members by most people who owned 'em. There were working dogs, and a lot of pets, but my family's dogs were outside critters, and other than rabies vaccine, chances were they'd never see a vet between that and passing on. We didn't have a dog that spent any time in the house until I was a teenager. (In our neighborhood, dogs mostly ran loose, and getting run over by a car was probably the biggest cause of death amongst the local canines. I don't think we owned a leash and I never saw anybody clean up dog poop save by running over it with their lawnmowers ...)


"Dog food" by the by, has been around for a long time, but the kibble that most people use came into being after WWII. Before that, canned horse meat was the most popular commercial brand, and most folks fed their critter table scraps. The notion that such was bad for them came from ad men in the sixties, looking for increased sales of Alpo and Purina ...


Big bones, as it turns out, aren't usually a good idea, especially the leftover kind that have been cooked. It makes them brittle and hard. Raw bones, small ones, not so bad.


Um. Anyway, it turned out that both my pups had dental problems. We hadn't noticed anything wrong, they seemed fine, but there you go. 


Vet says it's probably genetic, since the bad teeth are the same ones and bad in the same ways, and what this means is they had to have some of them pulled.


I felt bad about not seeing this, but he vet told me she wouldn't have spotted it, either; their mouths look healthy, no bad breath, appetites are good, they gobble up rawhide chews, and the other teeth all seem just fine. 


You don't want to know how expensive this kind of thing is, what with the general anesthesia and all the associated meds and such. But part of the deal with dogs-as-family-members is you do what you have to do. 


If we want to avoid this in the future, we need to brush their teeth more often and give them the occasional dental chew, which help keep guck from building up. This isn't as difficult as you might think, since there are liver-flavored and peanut-butter-flavored dog toothpastes, and both of mine don't mind that at all ...


Never a dull moment ...

Song Sung Blue

Back in the good old days, there were a lot of things that we did but no longer do. Some of that is a loss: Driving all over town with your buddies in your big ole Detroit V8 iron, and tooling through Hopper's Drive In for malts and burgers, when gasoline was a quarter and you could fill up the twenty gallon tank for five bucks? 


Gone, them days. 


Then there were the Blue Laws ...


Those of you not old enough to remember, Sunday used to be the Lord's day, and if you go far enough back to the founding of the United States, the Puritans and their ethics made that mandatory. A whole bunch of stuff simply wasn't allowed on Sunday, and if you did it and got caught, you could be whipped, jailed, or made to stand pilloried in the public square. Gambling, drinking, whistling, engaging in commerce, any of these could get you in trouble.


By the time I was a lad, most of these laws had been stoppered down into a patchwork of restrictions on commerce, Gambling on Sunday was no more illegal than gambling on Saturday, but aside from drugstores, most commercial markets were closed on Sunday. You bought your groceries on Saturday because the store wasn't open on Sundays. 


You could go to the movies or sporting events, but you couldn't buy booze on Sunday. 


The drugstores got exemptions because people still got sick on the weekends and they needed places to buy medicine. Certain charities, too. 


I do believe that the reasons pharmacies branched out into all the things you can buy there these days came from the fact they were the only game in many towns on a Sunday. Go in to a big Rite Aid today, the meds are in a cubbyhole in the back, with a couple aisles of OTC drugs and bandages and stuff; the rest of the place is given over to toys, car wax, basic groceries, batteries, drinks, ice cream, gardening supplies, books, whatever.


But there were–still are in places–restrictions on what you could sell even if it was in the store. Tobacco? Yes. A stapler? No. Some states, you couldn't buy a pot or a pan or a car on Sunday, and you still cannot.


Can't buy beer at the market some towns on Sunday, though you can have a drink in a local restaurant. Apparently the Lord doesn't care if you have a beer with dinner if you eat out, but you can't buy a six-pack on Sunday to sit home watching the game on the tube ...


(And if you were a man and wanted a haircut, you couldn't get that done on Sunday or Monday, either. That was because barbers worked Saturdays and wanted two days off.)


Nobody seems to know why these regulations were called "blue laws." There's a tale of them being printed on blue paper, but no evidence to show this. The term "blue" is sometimes used to disparage: bluenose, bluestocking, and for comics who delve into sexual or scatological humor, they call it blue humor.


In 1961, the Supreme Court took up the subject of blue laws when store employees in Maryland were fined for selling prohibited items from a store allowed to be open. SCOTUS recognized that the origin of the regulations was, in fact, religious and specifically Christian, but declined to throw them out because they had morphed into more secular things. In the U.S. secular gets you around a lot of obstacles.


Mostly these laws have been allowed to fade away, or simply not enforced. Probably the biggest remaining exception is the sale of hard liquor on Sunday, though many places will sell beer and wine. 


What a strange land we inhabit ...

Wink - Update

So, I've had the knife Chuck built for a week. As usual with such new toys, I tend to keep it close and fiddle with it whenever I have a spare moment. It isn't part of me yet, but I'm getting more comfortable with its heft and balance. So, a short vid to show how it looks in the sheath and in-hand  as of now ...

Widescreen version on YouTube.

Fretboard Journal Ezine

Finally, The Fretboard Journal has come out with an iPad version, hurrah!


Best guitar/fretted instrument 'zine out there for my money, gorgeous, a labor of love, and while the iPad won't showcase the beautiful pictures as big and sharp as the paper 'zine does, it does make it awfully convenient.


In theory, if you are a paper subscriber, you get the e-version free, though they haven't gotten all the kinks out yet.


Check it out.

Sharps and Flats - Not a Bluegrass Duo

At the jam group, somebody submitted the Beatle song, "When I'm Sixty-Four," for consideration. The version they had was in the key of C, which is more often than not, the key we play stuff in. 


If you are musically inclined, you know why; if not, that's because C-major is the simplest key: The notes are "whole," i.e. without any sharps or flats necessary in the notes/chords.


Um. Anyway, so we had the song in C, which is easy to play. Thing was, it was a vocal stretch for most everybody in that key. I could sing bass at the bottom of my range, but the high end was way up there.


So, the solution was to rearrange the piece into another key, and the pianist suggested E-major, since that would be down (or up) enough steps for us to hang out comfortably.


Easy for a pianist to say. If you are playing a piano, you can go off into to sharp- or flat-land, just use the black keys, but if you are a guitarist, or strumming a ukulele, the farther away you get from C, the more likely it is you will have to use a finger-busting chord.


No sharps nor flats in C, but four-sharps in E.

If you are good guitarist and have the barre chords all the way up the neck, you can adjust keys fairly easily–move everything up or down, stay relative, no problem; however, if you are still stuck in what are call the "cowboy chords," up in first position (that's near the little tuning pegs and gears and all), then shifting from a C#minor chord to an F# to an E can get to be tricky in a hurry. Most of the guitarists and uke players where I jam still use the cowboy chords most of the time.

You can use a capo, which allows you to play different keys using simpler fingering. Play it in C, capo up four, presto! E! but the uke players don't have 'em.

So I compromised and redid it in G. I think most of us can get it there, and there only one sharp in that key.

We'll see how it goes ...

Another Good Day in the Writing Game

I went into the current book not knowing who the villain was going to be. I mean, had a pool of likely suspects, but I really had no idea which one was guilty. 


In traditional whodunnit mysteries,  you can lay false trails and red herrings every which way, but there are a couple things you must do to play fair with readers:


You have to introduce the villain early enough to lay in real clues that point to him or her–no popping the bad guy out of hiding on the last page before the reveal. This is much easier to do if you know who did it; otherwise, you have to go back and add it into the second draft.


You also have to provide logical, determinable reasons, and not just because your brilliant investigator sees something nobody else could possibly see. No deus ex machina stuff:


"Come, come, Watson, surely you knew that the temperature in Borneo seldom drops that low! And there was a solar eclipse, and a neap tide! There is no other explanation!"


I never used to do books this way. Always there would be little bits I didn't know about I'd uncover along the way, worth a grin, but the hero and villain? Never a question. I knew going in. Got the yin and yang, everything else circles around that.


If it was a whodunnit, I'd try to keep it hidden, but offer clues so a reader paying attention would have enough to figure it out. If they went back  and looked, they'd spot them, once they knew who it was. 


If it was a whydunnit and they knew who the bad guy was from the git-go, I'd try to make them understand why s/he was doing it, even if they didn't approve.


Yeah, yeah, guy is a bad-ass, but I can see how he might have started  down the wrong path ...


But of late, I've started trusting my autopilot to fly the plane in places, and so far, it has kept me on course. And allowed me to look out the window and enjoy the scenery.


Yesterday, half way through the draft and some, I realized who the villain was.


Whoa! Surprised me, it did. I didn't see it coming. Likable character, but my subconscious had given me clues, and all of a moment, there it was.


Son-of-a-bitch! Wouldja look at that! Who knew?


And maybe if it surprised me, it will surprise readers, too. 


So today, I got to write the scene in which the hero and the villain face off and talk about why. I figured there would be a big fight sequence, in which the hero barely ekes out a victory, after, well, heroic effort, and there you go.


That didn't happen, either.


In the moment, as they were talking I realized that was not the right way to finish it. I like the way it went much better. 


The scene flowed like lava, hot, unstoppable, and when I looked up, I was done. As good a fifteen-hundred-word chunk as I've ever done, at least from where I sit. And the fun part is, I didn't know it was coming, so it was an unexpected joy.


Which of late, besides the money, of course, is the reason to do this stuff. Because if you can't have fun, why bother?

Rhoddy Blooms

Usually around Mother's Day, the rhoddy out front peaks. Here the rhododendron display for 2012 ...

Eagle Style

Photo by Han Bouwmeester

(Thanks to Nataraj)

You know that a lot of martial arts use animals as their inspiration, right?


Here's why ...

Guilty TV Pleasure of the Season: Smash!

This season's GP is Smash, a series that explores the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the genesis of a Broadway show. The idea is a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and what goes into getting that idea from somebody's head onto a Broadway stage.


It is a soap opera, pure and simple. Who is doing what, with whom, and to whom, the relationships, the characters, that's what the show is about. Nobody is all cardboard, there are all kinds of good and bad about all the main players. Even the most Goody Two-Shoes among them has a bit of a dark side, and ambition flows every which way ...


It doesn't hurt that the musical numbers are good, the show-within-a-show is good, and the dancing and singing and acting are all on point. There are fantasy numbers, it's a musical about a musical, and the Bollywood number a couple weeks back was flat-out terrific. 


We see the unfolding from the heads of the writers who come up with the idea and  who do the book and music; the producer, the director, the actors, chorus, and it all has such a real feel to it that it hooked me from the get-go.


I know a woman who once toured with a Broadway roadshow and I asked her about it. Yep, that's the kind of stuff goes on, all right.


There is romance, some of it hetero, some of it gay, some of it interracial, some of it cheating on a great marriage, some of it cold and calculating, and all of it sometimes painful. 


The cast is great and gorgeous, and the central wonder of who will wind up playing Marilyn, the blonde, the brunette, or the movie star, doesn't get decided until the last episode, which airs tonight.


I'm a sucker for good soap opera. Upstairs, Downstairs, the old British series, is one of my favorite TV shows ever. I'd stay up until midnight on a work night to watch that when it was on  originally. Smash isn't as good as that, but for my money, it's better than just about anything else on network TV at the moment.


Which, since I like it so much, means it'll probably get cancelled, but at least I got the one season. (Editor's Note: This just in, the show has been renewed for at least fifteen more episodes.)


If you haven't been watching it, don't start now; pick up the DVD and watch it from the first episode. (Homophobes need not bother, because there are like, you know, guys kissing each other, but this may be one of the best portrayals of gay relationships ever.)


Smash. For me, it has been ...

The Avengers: Quick Look

I finally got around to seeing it, week after it opened. Even so, the theater was relatively crowded. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out a lot of folks are going back to see it again. My son and I watched the 2D version and didn't miss the extra EFX at all. And I'd watch it another time on the big-screen, too. 


Best summer movie since the X-Men reboot, and it was a good thing, too. They have been sticking hints and previews into every Marvel movie for the last few years. 


Did they pay it off?


Absolutely. 


Yeah, the story is thin, and the characters not really deep either, unless, of course you have seen those movies featuring Thor and Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk, which, if you are a fanboy, you have, so you come equipped to accept the characters for who you already know they are. 


Loki is back, and bad as ever, and the high-tech whiz-bang stuff goes whiz and bang in spades. 


For the first time ever, Bruce Banner and The Other Guy, as he calls the Hulk, steal a movie. The two best lines in the picture are directed at the Hulk: One, by Captain America, and every fanboy in the world screamed and laughed when they heard it. The second is when Loki has something to say to the Hulk and if you don't laugh, your humor bone is broken beyond repair.


Everybody gets a super-hero turn, and they all kick serious ass and take names, exchange witty remarks, and by all means, stay until the last credit rolls for the tag. (There are actually two tags, once showcasing a possible villain, one funny one.)


Worth the trip.

Force Decisions: How the Law Makes 'Em

September last, I did a preview of Rory Miller's new book, Force Decisions. You can click the link and read the preview, but to sum it up, this one is about how the police come to their rules-of-engagement. Who to hit or not hit; when and where and why. Shoot, don't shoot, taze, don't taze, like that.


I gave it a good review, because as in his previous books, I like Miller's writing, the information he has to impart, and how he lays it out. 


This one is designed for citizens unfamiliar with how the police come up with their rules and regulations regarding such things. Good book, you should get it. 


 My one caveat was that he didn't seem to know any bad cops, so sections dealing with LEO's who step over the line were exceedingly thin. 


If an officer is following the agency guidelines, then s/he is covered, and when citizens get pissed off because of some awful thing the po-lice did, they don't understand that such was allowed under the scope of duty. (Sometimes these policies are suspect and need to be changed, and that happens, but if the officer involved in a dust-up was following them properly at the time, both management and the union will stand up for them. In theory.)


That police step over the lines happens, and I've pointed out several egregious examples of that here over the years, ranging from bean bagging twelve-year-old girls; to using live shotgun rounds on a suspect instead of bean-bag rounds as intended; to beating the crap out of the wrong guy who just happened to be walking along at the wrong place and time. 


When somebody gets beaten to death by police officers on the street and the coroner is shocked at the damage, somebody overstepped a line. Shit happens, of course, but suspected pissing in the bushes is not generally considered a capital crime ...


Usually these result in big lawsuits and almost every time, the city or county sponsoring the agency loses and has to pay out big bucks. 


That said, Miller's book is out and it is a must for people who aren't police but who want to understand how these things are determined.


Get the book here. 

Wink

Now you knew I was gonna talk about the new knife, right? 

Let's start with  philosophy, then anatomy, and physiology …

I have always favored smooth grips on my guns and knives, and I have a fondness for wood and ivory, (or faux-ivory, so that Jumbo doesn't have to die for my sins.) Nothing wrong with textured ones, but for me, small adjustments can be made easier if the handles are smooth. Look at the revolver grips by Bill Jordan and Jerry Miculek, respectively, (below) and what you see are hand-filling, smooth woods that allow you to slide to optimum position easily.

Both of these men could drive tacks with a revolver–Jerry still can, and faster than most people can fire a semi-auto.

Of course, there is a drawback, because if something can slide, it might when you don't want it to, but it's something you can train to do until it becomes automatic. And while twirling and manipulating the knife in contact-juggling play to get used to it is great fun, and there are folks who make it look like pen-mawashi, for me, once you pull a knife for serious and necessary self-defense purpose, you don't do that. I might drop it showing off; I won't once I lock my hand onto it. Last thing you need is to drop your weapon because the adrenaline-storm has washed away your fine motor control, which it is apt to do. 

Ever see those car-cam videos of police unloading full magazines of their nines at bad guys no farther away than the length of a pick-up truck and missing every shot? You wouldn't think that was possible, but it happens.

While I have only a nodding experience with the Filipino arts–arnis/eskrima/kali–so I never got much rattan work, we did like sticks in Okinawa-te, so I learned a baton-sized single-stick form. Didn't learn the double one, opted for sai instead.

Later, I had a chance to pick up a little about the yawara, sometimes called kongou, which is a short stick slightly bigger than your closed hand. I learned it using rhythm sticks, aka claves, which look a lot like Wink's handle. So I'm okay with smooth and round. 

Chuck's design of the guard keeps my hand from sliding onto the blade, and a hard stab in icepick grip would have my thumb behind the handle's end, too. 

The indentation just behind the guard on the edge side is unmistakable under your fingers, so you can tell without looking where your edge is.

The blade is almost a quarter-inch thick at the spine, cutting edge is three inches, the handle is five inches long. 

I debated whether to use paste wax on the steel–that's how they do it in some museums when they can't get to knives under glass to oil them–but decided to use what I like for most of my steel, which is pure sandalwood oil. This is spendy stuff, more so than clove/mineral oil, which is what I once used on the katana, but it it only takes a drop to feed a blade this size, and that includes the guard, I can afford sandalwood. Works on the wood, too.

Icepick, edge up (above.)

Showing the thickness (above)

Strong-side grip (above.)

Icepick draw. 

(Interestingly, if you side the sheath back to SOB carry, the draw shifts naturally to saber. Reach back as if you are tucking your shirt-tail in, it's right there.)

So there's the general b.g. on the new toy. 

And no, I'm not pleased at all ...