jenk

I am a panelist this year. Also, once again solarbird the music supervillain will have her own tech crew for the music track helmed by skydancer and tanuki_green and occasionally me. So, fun!

But, of course, Norwescon is big! Where will I be? Subject to change, of course, but here's the basic list:

Invisible Disabilities Thursday 4:00pm-5:00pm Cascade 8
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5:30pm: Move sound gear from my room in the tower to Evergreen rooms. If you want to help, let me know ahead of time and I will text you the room number when I know it.

Thursday night concerts!
But I won't be there the whole time due to my 9pm panel! tanuki_green will be there!
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Size Acceptance Is For Everybody Thursday 9:00pm-10:00pm Cascade 8
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Polyamory 101 Friday Noon-1:00pm Evergreen 1&2
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Music tech crew Concerts Friday 2pm-midnight
I am blocking off 2pm-midnight due to setup/teardown etc. Concerts start at 3pm in Grand 3 and move to Evergreen rooms for the evening.
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The Continuing Impact of Robert Heinlein Saturday 2:00pm-3:00pm Cascade 8
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Music tech crew Concerts Saturday 5pm-1am
I am blocking off 5pm-1am due to setup/teardown etc. Concerts start at 7pm.
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Intro to Health At Every Size Sunday 1:00pm-2:00pm Cascade 2
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Women's Work Sunday 3:00pm-4:00pm Cascade 3&4
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...and sometime Sunday sound gear will get moved from the Evergreen level to skydancer's van. Again, let me know if you want to help. Have I mentioned I'm taking Monday off work? I'm taking Monday off work. :D

"It's easy once you know that sauces are made in only a few different ways. One way is to reduce a liquid till it's syrupy and then add the cream. What you get is essentially pineapple-flavored cream, or wine-flavored cream, or beer-flavored cream, or whatever. Hell, you could do it with Coke, but who'd want to." - Spenser on sauces, from Early Autumn

My parents taught me some basic recipes, but I think I learned to actually cook from Robert B Parker's Spenser novels. The pages shortly before the above quote includes a lot of what I learned. Spenser creates dinner out of what's in his client's fridge. (Lesson: Sometimes you make up a dish to match what you have, not matching ingredients to recipes.) He cut the eyes out of the pork chops and throws the rest away. (Lesson: It's okay to trim meat and only use what you want.) He browns meat and adds garlic and pineapple juice, lets that cook down, then adds cream, and some pineapple and orange segments. (Lesson: One way to make a sauce; also, this was a flavor combination I'd never considered before.) He cooks rice in chicken broth with thyme, parsley and a bay leaf. (Lesson: You don't have to cook rice and then mix it with things, you can use broth or what-have-you to flavor the rice while cooking.) Finally he makes a salad out of half a head of lettuce and a dressing of oil, vinegar, mustard, and garlic. (Lesson: You can make salad dressing! Without a mix!)

I was reminded of this tonight as I went to make dinner. My initial "food" thought was spaghetti with clam sauce and mizithra at the Old Spaghetti Factory, but the drive time was prohibitive for me. I do have a couple types of clam spaghetti in my repertoire, but usually if I want a specific dish then a close dish is just going to be more frustrating. I considered mac & cheese. I remembered we have some fresh green beans I should do something with, and considered stir-frying them with garlic and maybe some bacon. Or doing a cheese sauce with bacon. Eventually I made bowtie pasta with a cream sauce that had green beans, some chicken, some bacon, and some mushrooms that were almost gone. And the cream sauce was made by sauteing the mushrooms and garlic, adding a can if chunk chicken (with its broth) and a handful of bacon bits and spices and the green beans, letting that cook down until it was a bit syrupy, and then adding cream ;)

This video is of Alison's DTWOF slideshow presentation and Q&A at the Booksmith in San Francisco during the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For tour, on November 10, 2008. Note the several references to the recent election :)

(You don't have to know the comic to enjoy the presentation. I think. :)

• 09:45 Today I have rust-colored sweater, black pants, and "moon" pendant.
• 09:46 Thanks to Jen W we have a bowl full of candy in the "Jen Team" seating area.
• 09:51 (I went for "seasonal" not "costume")
• 13:40 So far two little pink care bears, a pumpkin, and a caterpillar have dropped by my desk....
• 14:31 iGoogle's weather forecast shows nothing but rain.
• 17:07 Lord Peter group starts new read-through of all books/stories tomorrow :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LordPeter/
• 17:08 First book is online - http://tinyurl.com/5nh5hq

Automatically copied from http://www.twitter.com/jenk3 via LoudTwitter cause it's easy :)

I'm reading the comments on the Dykes To Watch Out For site about the recent re-boot of For Better or For Worse, and some are too good not to share....

"God, I wouldn’t go back to being thirty again for all the syndication income in the world.
Not, of course, that anyone’s asking me to." - Alison Bechdel, cartoonist

"At Thirty, I was making ever so slightly more money than I needed to live on, had a regular gig playing guitar in a bar, and several smart and beautiful women were vying for my affections. I think I’d go back." - Dr. Empirical

"i thought she was required, by canadian bilingual laws, to re-do the entire run in french…" - rmd

"I felt Yoda should have appeared to tell her, “Go On, or Stop. There Is No Redraw.”" - Bookbird

"Damn. I’d just be happy to get to 30. The 20s suck." - Artsyamy

"I wish Lynn Johnston would do a graphic memoir about her relationship with Charles Schulz." - Douglas (Alison Bechdel is the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home.)

"I think Alison and Lynn should trade strips for a week. No one will come out of it unscathed." - Alex the Bold

...is an article by Luc Sante, writing in the WSJ. A few things I especially liked:

Primarily ... books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind -- my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.
[...]
If you allow yourself to really feel and absorb the style of a good writer, you will take in his or her vocabulary, frame of reference, sense of humor, and at least temporarily make it your own. It is a bit like the stories of cannibals eating their adversaries' brains in order to acquire their strengths and skills, only with books no one gets hurt.
[...]
Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs, which make books seem as cozy and unthreatening as teacups, instead of the often disputatious and sometimes frightening things they are. I recognize that we now have many ways to convey, store, and reproduce the sorts of matter that formerly were monopolized by books. I like to think that I'm no bookworm, egghead, four-eyed paleface library rat. I often engage in activities that have no reference to the printed words. I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem to contain it. But I need the stupid things.

Paul Constant, the book critic for The Stranger (possibly NSFW*), is reading Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil on a bet. He is titling this Book Club of the Damned* on The Stranger's blog.

His summary of the first 122 pages, including spoilers & study questions, are here*. He writes:

I’ve read Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers, so Heinlein’s not a new experience for me, but this reads like atrophied Heinlein, as though he’s trying to write like a young man and failing miserably. This almost works with the ideas that the novel is trying to encompass, but I have a feeling it’s not going to seem appropriate for that much longer.

For anyone who cares, I have read I Will Fear No Evil. (And Starship Troopers and The Door into Summer and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Friday and Double Star and The Rolling Stones and Job and The Number of the Beast and Glory Road and more besides.) I don't think No Evil is Heinlein's best but I don't think it's his worst, either.

*The Stranger is an "edgy" weekly. In particular some of the personal ads on the right-hand side of the page would be problematic at many workplaces.

The Stranger's book column talks Norwescon this week. (For non-locals, The Stranger is the free weekly that originated Savage Love.)

Seattle has had a prominent book festival for over three decades, and for the last quarter century it's also hosted a world-famous, prestigious awards ceremony. If you consider yourself a reader and you didn't know about this festival already, it's probably due to your narrow tastes: it's devoted to science fiction and fantasy.

I like his description of the Philip K. Dick awards:

[A]n annual ceremony dedicated to celebrating a "distinguished original science-fiction paperback published for the first time during the award year in the USA." Unlike most book awards, the PKD Awards almost always single out an excellent book.

I'm not sure how having Norwescon on Easter Weekend is "sacrilegious" (or what's all that odd about a Joss Whedon sing-a-long or Hobbit Country Dancing) but hey, there *IS* a full moon tonight... ;)

( From con to mundane )

Yes, I went to my first filk con this weekend, largely to be support person for skydancer. Determined I need to learn more sound tech to be really helpful - I was fine for general setup and teardown, but didn't know, say, which mikes are better for which voice or instrument or how to position them, or how to run the board. Which meant Friday was a very long day for skydancer as editing and mixing for brunch bonus CD followed dinner followed concerts followed recording for brunch bonus CD. I was able to convince him to let me take over duplicating the CDs on Saturday during & right after brunch. He'd found a nifty solution for labels - CD blanks that are coated with an ink-absorbing substance so that we could print the labels right onto the CDs. The printing was pretty fast too - 80-some CDs in less than 3 hours of 1 printer printing, two laptops burning, and me shoveling CDs into cases.

I also danced, laughed, sang along, crocheted, and managed to bring home 10 CDs, despite somehow not grabbing a brunch CD ... shaddup ....

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Monday I didn't do much; I avoided snow silliness & caught up on laundry by working from home. Yay VPN. Also have been reading con reports in conflikt.

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jw1776 is not feeling well and will likely be working OT later this week...poor darlin'.

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Unlike her namesake, Rosie the roomba can slip right under the bed. Not just any bed, mind you, but the very heavy king-size cabinet-headboard bed of God custom-designed by sar_anon. Previously I had to move the mattress and box springs to vacuum under the thing. Hail Rosie, long may she putter along picking up particles.

I also figured out how to clean Rosie's innards, which is useful.

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I am waaay behind in the LordPeter mailing list discussion of Gaudy Night. Pooh.

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Several people I met at Conflikt added me recently. Hope you enjoy what I post - if not, no worries :)

Science eventually yields impressive answers because it compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas generated by other smart people.

The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long and hard barrage of evidence-based argument. That lesson must be experienced anew by the members of each generation, irrespective of their careers.

Mastery of scientific concepts and theories is a necessary starting point, but it serves only as a prerequisite to joining the never-ending dialogue. Students must learn firsthand how to both imaginatively create new hypotheses and dispassionately critique them.

Many commentators have rightly implored us to make certain that young people encounter the "thrill" of discovery. While this is undeniably desirable, it is arguably even more crucial that they experience the agony (if only on a modest scale) of having a pet hypothesis demolished by facts. [...]

Students must be convinced that changing one's mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one's mind is the essence of intellectual growth.
- From Your Beliefs vs The Facts

I got this from the Lord Peter mailing list, as our current book turns on a question of intellectual and academic dishonesty. In the book (Gaudy Night) the dishonesty is primarily for personal gain - but also the dishonest scholar can't bear to give up one's precious pet theory for something as paltry and boring as facts.