Name Search

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of something that relates to your name. It can be your first name, or your last name, or of your middle name (we're not picky). Even nicknames work. And since this is AOL, if you want you may use your screenname as well. Basically, if a name relates to you, let's see a picture of a representation.

Oh, I had plans for this entry. I was going to do one picture for each name: my old marble name sign from Worldwide Travel for "Karen" or possibly "Blocher," a picture of a volume from Funk & Wagnall, and, well, maybe the name sign at my current job. I also thought of showing you my name in my first book publication (aside from one foreword that I wrote under a pseudonym).

But my nameplate refused to turn up, and the Dell Book of Logic Problems I found was not the one with "Five Proud Mothers" in it. I couldn't find my Relix magazines with my early bylines, I left my camera on the bed this morning and therefore couldn't take a photo at work, and we apparently don't have any reference books by Funk and Wagnalls, despite the fact that I grew up with their encyclopedia. It wasn't a very good one.

I thought of trying to find our Laugh-In LP, because they had a running gag, "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls." I thought of looking for records by George Clinton or James Brown. But there are too many boxes between me and our record collection. Ah, well.

Still, I did eventually find a couple of Starlog magazines:




Okay, okay. Maybe I can come up with something a bit less egotistical. As I so often do, these days, I turn to Wikipedia for help.



So I type in "Karen" on Wikipedia. and get a "disambiguation" page, listing numerous articles about something or someone called Karen. The most interesting one: the Karen languages, which "are spoken by the Karen people." Well, of course they are. But they're not talking about Mâvarinû, Londran or Lopartin, as spoken by Rani, Talber and Danali, respectively. No, these languages are called Sgaw, Pwo, and Pa'o, from the "Tibeto-Burman group of the Sino-Tibetan language family." The article neglects to mention exactly where these languages are spoken, but let's assume it's somewhere around Tibet.


The word "funk" takes us straight to an article on the music of James Brown, George Clinton et al. But there is a big article about Funk and Wagnalls as well. Funk is, of course, the name that gave me the most trouble as a kid. Taunts that "Funk the skunk is a pile of junk" were almost benign compared to other possibilities. Yet when I got married, I couldn't bear to give up the name that helped to shape who I am.


Typing in Blocher gives us one Christoph Blocher, "the Swiss minister of justice." The article had a substantial Controversy section, but I didn't stay to find out why. I assume he pronounces it Block'-er, as we do. So why do people always get it wrong?

Enough. Good night!

Technorati Tags: Monday Photo Shoot, Scalzi, Names

Two Photos and an Unrelated Haiku

Baptism at St. Michael's, 11/5/06

Proscovia and the baby

Sleep is vital now.
Sleep calls urgently, but first
I must wash my hair.

Technorati Tags: Episcopal, Baptism, Personal, Sleep

Picture This

This is going to be a quick entry, because I've stayed up far too late again.

Picture This

Despite last night's photo manipulation, the fact remains that it's often rather tough to come up with a picture of a literary character. Unlike Pat (DesLily), I'm pretty bad at drawing, so my own characters are either sketched by a professional (my friend Sherlock, a.k.a. Sherry Watson) or based on photos of real people (all right: me). In a few cases I've altered one of Sherlock's sketches to come up with a different image from the one originally intended. That's why Joshua Wander looks like a white version of Rani Fost. His picture is a slightly redrawn and photo-edited version of an early draft of the Rani illustration.

So tonight, as I thought about Wikipedia articles I wanted to write about a couple of Madeleine L'Engle characters, I had to face the issue of how to illustrate them. Images aren't mandatory for Wikipedia articles, but most people seem to feel that any decent-sized article is incomplete without one. But where could I get a picture of Canon Tallis or Adam Eddington? Neither one is depicted on the cover of any of the books in which they appear. Zachary Gray, is on the cover of the hardback for An Acceptable Time, and the paperback cover for A House Like a Lotus, but I had something else in mind for him as well.

Adam and Zach are both in a L'Engle book called A Ring of Endless Light, which Disney made into a tv movie several years ago. I've ranted before about what a good adaptation it's not, so we'll skip that aspect of it tonight. Nevertheless, it does have the advantage of providing pictures of these characters. Here are screen captures I made tonight of Vicky Austin's two "small screen" boyfriends:


Wholesome Adam Eddington, played by Ryan Merriman, gets up close and personal with a dolphin.


Charming, troubled Zachary Gray, played by Jared Padalecki‎, tries to pick up old girlfriend Vicky - literally.

Okay, so that's those two taken care of for photos. But what about Canon Tallis? There are no screen adaptations of any of the four novels in which he appears, and he's not on any book covers. Tallis is based on a real person, Canon Edward Nason West, but I've never seen a photo of West (and it probably would be copyrighted, anyway).

So which of the three did I write the article on tonight? You guessed it: Canon Tallis. My first draft didn't illustrate the article at all. In subsequent edits, I threw in a book cover, even though it only shows a starfish, and a picture of the real Cathedral where both the real and the fictional Canon worked. But I still don't have a picture of Tallis himself. Too bad: he'd be interesting to look at, being completely bald with no eyebrows.

Doing Our Homework

John and I are gearing up for Election Day, studying the propositions and local races. I printed a bunch of editorials about the propositions, and know how I'll vote on all but one of them. There are two pairs of competing props, 105 and 106 about pubic lands, and 201 and 206 about banning smoking in public places. A common problem seems to be that whenever a worthwhile Proposition heads for the ballot, someone else comes up with a similar one to try to confuse the voters into either going for the alternate one or turning them both down. I'm happy to say that this sedom seems to work. In the case of the smoking ones, 206 is sponsored by R.J. Reynolds, allows bar owners to keep their bar open to smoking, and provides no tax money for enforcement or education. I'll be very surprised if that's the one that passes. And on the local races, the paper endorsed a Republican I've voted for in the past as Clerk of Court. I wrote her name down to vote for her, and then crossed it out after reading that there is serious dissatisfaction among the people who actually work with her, and with good reason. So it's back to the democrat on that one. However, I think I still have two Republicans on my list of people I'll be voting for - and I'm not yet done with my research.

Not Quite Sisyphus

After Halloween and post-Halloween indiscretions with candy and "pumpkin anything, " John and I got back on track tonight, literally. We had salads for an early dinner, and later went back to the gym together for the first time in nearly a week. The treadmill didn't work me as hard this time, perhaps because the heart rate monitor cut out several times. Still, I don't seem to have lost much ground in the long climb to fitness. Speaking of which, remember my mentioning a few weeks back that I got a score of zero on the treadmill's fitness test? Well, tonight John got a 70 on the same test. Good for him, but bad for me! We'll both take the test again in a few weeks.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Wikipedia, Personal

Portrait of a Fictional Friend

Here's the result of my silly project of the evening: a photograph of Ariel Allegra. You may remember her as the interdimensional traveler who brought Black Rose Kate here for a visit on Halloween night. Ariel is the 20-year-old daughter of a wizard and a ghost - at least, that's the short version of who they are. Ariel has black hair like her father, but it's less curly. Her eyes are green, and occasionally they glow a little.

"Yes, yes," Ariel says impatiently. "They can see for themselves that I have black hair and green eyes, even if you didn't catch them glowing. What else are you going to tell them about me?"

"Well, I mentioned your parents."

"They're my parents. I asked what you have to say about me personally."

"Well...."

Ariel sees my hesitation, and pounces on it. "You don't know what to say, do you? You named my fictional counterpart nearly thirty years ago, but you still know practically nothing about me. You mostly think of me as a multidimensional taxi service for your pirate friend, and secondarily as Joshua Wander's only daughter. I think I'm insulted."

"All right, then tell me what you want me to know about you. And while you're at it, tell my readers."

Ariel chuckles. "That's one way to get out of it."

"Fine, we'll do it together, interview style. Fair enough?"

"Right," Ariel says. "Are you interviewing me, or am I interviewing you?"

"Troublemaker. First question: do you really attend something called Croatoan College, as I wrote at the end of Mall of Mâvarin? Or is that apocryphal?"

"No, it's as real as I am, in quite a few universes."

"Meaning you've been to more than one version."

"No. One version, multiple universes. "

"So you can't change which Croatoan College you attend, in case you get a bad grade or something?"

"There's only one Croatoan College. It's kind of hard to explain, but it vibrates through a whole series of similar timelines, so that it's accessible from all of them."

"What do you study there?"

"You mean, do I study potions with Professor Snape? No. There is a series of four courses in Applied Magic, but overall Croatoan has nothing in common with Hogwarts or Mâton or any other fictional school for wizards. We have comparative physics, and biology, and literature, all the normal courses other schools have, except that they take into account the variations among the worlds Croatoan touches."

"But who would go to a school like that? Wouldn't that curriculum be inappropriate for anyone other than a time traveler?"

"You mean an interdimensional traveler. Yes, it's a little weird, but it turns out there are quite a few of us. Plus Croatoan has a very good reputation. A number of heads of state graduated from there."

"Which reminds me. What about Carl and Cathy, the students who almost became Carli and Cathma? I seem to recall your mentioning them in a note to me. Do they really go to Croatoan with you?"

For the first time, Ariel looks a little embarrassed. "Ah, well, that was sort of a joke." I read about them in Mall of Mâvarin."

"So they're not real."

"To say that for sure, I'd have to visit every universe there is. But the Carl and Cathy I go to school with never traveled via shopping mall."

"I see. Is there anything else you'd like to add?"

"Yes. It's five o'clock in the morning. Stop watching the Benson marathon and go to bed."

"Will you still be here tomorrow?"

"Oh, I never know that. Good night, Karen."

"Good night, Ariel."

And good night, gentle reader.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Writing, Fiction, Reality

Birth of a Democrat

Weekend Assignment #137: Recount the first time you voted in a local, state or national election. That's to say the first time your vote counted, not a play vote like Athena's. For this, primary voting counts, too. If you want to share who you voted for and whether they won, that's cool, but if you feel like you want to keep your political affiliation unstated, that's fine too.

By the time this picture of me was taken in 1977, I had already voted in two general elections, one of them presidential. Sorry - I couldn't find any for-sure 1975 photos, let alone one of me actually voting. But I remember that first trip into the voting booth, after many years of seeing the things at the schools I attended in Manlius, NY. I'm pretty sure that Manlius Elementary and Eagle Hill Junior High (when they still existed) and Fayetteville-Manlius High School were all polling places at various times.

That 1975 election, when I was eighteen, was all local stuff, nothing interesting or memorable in and of itself. Assemblyman Hy Miller may have been up for reelection; congressman Jim Hanley would have been reelected the following year. But I duly studied the newspaper before going in, pulling the curtain closed with a big red-handled lever, and flipping down little levers next to a bunch of Democratic Party candidates, and maybe one or two Republicans. When I pulled the lever again and stepped out, my mom, who was generally proud that her little girl was voting for the first time, informed me that I'd taken more than three minutes, which she claimed was the legal time limit. I suspect she was wrong about that. Heck, some years you couldn't even read the whole ballot in three minutes.

In 1976 I was in college for the first time, and looking forward to my first presidential election. I had my reservations about Jimmy Carter, but I certainly wasn't going to vote for Gerald Ford. I remember going downtown to the Hotel Syracuse where (I think) Carter was speaking, but I didn't get in. On Election Day, my dad took me aside to make sure I was voting for Carter. He needn't have worried. My biggest worry that day, I remember, was not who to vote for, but where I'd left my keys, and how I was going to get to the polls. My dad helped me out on that, I think.

Right: Jimmy Carter

In those days, for a Syracuse University student to vote at all was a tricky proposition. The local Board of Elections (or someone) decreed that Syracuse University students could not use their college addresses as a permanent address for voting registration purposes, even if they lived at that address almost year round. Instead we were expected to register wherever our parents lived, and vote by absentee ballot. Even in the relatively apathetic 1970s, this seemed like an unfair attempt to disenfranchise young voters in the wake of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which had lowered the minimum voting age to 18 back in 1971. a number of students fought for the right to vote in Syracuse, and some of them won. I think that by the time I left, it was a lot easier to do so than when I started college in 1975. By 1979 I was probably a registered voter based on the apartment I lived in, but if I was registered from my dad's apartment nearby it didn't make much difference.

Extra Credit: Are you voting next Tuesday?

I have missed a number of primaries and bond elections over the years, but I've never missed the first Tuesday in November. Well, maybe one non-presidential one, due to being in England at the time; I'm not sure. Either way, I'm not going to start skipping elections anytime soon. I've given a small donation to the Democratic Party, and one to Gabrielle Giffords, who is running for Jim Kolbe's seat in the House of Representatives. Kolbe is one of the very few Republicans I've voted for repeatedly, but he's retiring now. Giffords' opponent, Randy Graf, is so right wing (he's allied with the Minuteman Project) that Kolbe refused to endorse him. I disagree with pretty much everything Graf stands for - basically criminalizing and disenfranchising people (not just immigrants, either) instead of treating them with fairness and compassion. See? It's easy to vote for a Democrat when the choice is this clear.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Writing, Tucson

Just My Imagination

Whenever I write about an encounter with Black Rose Kate, as I did last night, I get a little worried that the casual reader will think I've completely lost touch with reality. You do know better, don't you? Well, don't you?

The odd thing about Kate and Ariel is that they are the only fictional characters I've ever created (aside from childhood, and setting aside for a moment the multiverse view of reality) who know I exist. I've never had a conversation with Rani or Cathma or any of the Mâvarin characters, even as a writing exercise in the privacy of my own head. Despite the fact that Mages of Mâvarin (and the serial Mall of Mâvarin, which probably isn't canonical) depicts characters traveling between different versions of reality, it's important to me that they be completely real within their milieu. To have them interact with me, their creator, would be to cheapen their verisimilitude. They would become like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, talking back to the camera (or to Leon Schlesinger). "Breaking the fourth wall" is usually pretty amusing, and it works well for cartoon characters, the tv series Moonlighting and so on. But it also means that you can never quite suspend your disbelief in the world of such characters. If Bugs knows he's on a movie screen, then nothing around him can be regarded as real, even to Bugs himself. Mâvarin needs to be completely real to Cathma and Carli and Rani and the rest, so that they can behave naturally and the reader can believe in them. Any interaction between them and me would call that into question. Besides, they just don't have anything to say to me.

But Kate is different, and so is Ariel Allegra. Part of what's interesting about Kate as a character is her ability to be placed in a fish out of water situation (i.e. in another century) and thrive there. She is self-confident, observant and opinionated, which gives her the ability to comment on the modern world with an outsider's perspective. Having her interact with me, her putative creator, doesn't make her less "real" because the interaction is part of her backstory. The whole premise is that somehow an eighteenth-century pirate has managed to travel from a universe in which she's real and I'm not to one in which I'm real and she's not. Ariel, being theoretically the person who caused Kate to "visit" me in the first place, is entitled to pull the same trick. As the daughter of Joshua Wander, a character who travels between universes on a regular basis, Ariel can inhabit almost any version of reality without losing believability, as long as she behaves believably and consistently herself. She's not as effective a commentator as Kate, however, because she's seen too many versions of the modern world to consider ours all that strange.

Do I really believe in this multiverse, infinite timelines idea, the concept that makes it possible for Kate and Ariel to "really" exist in some universe somewhere? The best answer I can give you is that I do and I don't. Apparently there's a fair amount of support in the world of physics for the idea of an infinite multiverse, where every possible variation is played out. But I never took physics in school, and I've never quite been able to grasp the technical explanations. Nor do I really like the idea, taken to its logical extreme. If every single possibility is played out, then every time I do something good, some Karen somewhere is doing something bad (and another one is doing nothing, and one is doing something even better, and one is doing something even worse, and so on). At the macro level, an infinite multiverse is a zero sum game. If every possibility must be played out somewhere, then free will is problematic at best.

Also, "every possibility" does not include impossibilities. If all universes obey the same scientific principles, then none of them contain real wizards, or talking rabbits in planes that stop falling when they run out of gas, or tengremen, or time traveling sports cars. Phooey on that. I prefer a more limited and freeform multiverse, where anything we create as fiction can and does exist in another version of reality, and other possible realities don't necessarily exist. I can't justify this idea scientifically, and I'm not sure I really believe it's true. But my fiction is predicated on it.

So I hope you don't mind if I indulge in this conceit from time to time, and talk to the few fictional characters who know I exist. That is, after all, what they're here for.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Imagination, Writing, Multiverse

Round Robin: This Year's Werewolf, Questioned

Pat (DesLily) chose "The Creative Side Of You" as the theme for this week's Round Robin Challenge. I've been preoccupied with Halloween the last couple of days, but let's see if this will serve. Tonight, John and I built a haunted forest in front of our house. I proceeded to hang out there with a few entirely fictitious friends. Or are they? Black Rose Katie Specks always gets annoyed with me when I claim that I created her. But according to my research, she never existed in this version of reality. Ariel Allegra is more philosophical about it. "I don't mind your calling me fictional," she says, "as long as you understand that in most of the worlds I move through, you're no more real than I am here."



"Tell me again why you perform this Halloween ritual each year," Black Rose Kate ordered. The eighteenth century pirate scribe has taken to dropping in on me lately, wherever I happen to be, aided by her dimensional vagabond friend, Ariel Allegra, Joshua Wander's daughter. The two of them were hanging out by my front door, eating our mini-Snickers and critiquing the kids' costumes. Except that this year, we weren't getting many kids. "As I understand it, you are not attempting to ward off evil spirits," Kate continued. "If anything, you are inviting them."

"I may have invited you, but you aren't what I would call an evil spirit," I said. "Merely piratical. And hungry."

"Good one," Ariel said.

Kate frowned. "I speak of the spirits of the dead and the undead. Clearly I am neither."

"That's debatable," I said. "Most likely you've been dead for centuries, but you haven't stopped moving yet." Kate started to protest, but I held up my hand. "No, don't get mad. You know it's only a joke. Besides, you're right. This has nothing to do with warding off spirits. Modern Halloween is a celebration of the human imagination."



Ariel, who had just taken my picture for this entry, asked, "Whose imagination? Yours or the children's?"

"Both."

"So you aren't doing it for the children. At least not entirely."


"No. Mostly I'm doing it for me. And a little bit for John, and a little bit for the kids."

"Then tell me this," Kate said. "For whom did you hold your two imitation bats on strings and prepare to launch them through the air, when I told you there was not a child within a furlong of your house?"

"You could have been wrong," I said. "I thought I heard some."

"Who can hear distant children with any accuracy when your street is so noisy?" Ariel asked.

"Aye," said Kate. "Aside from present company, all I have heard this past half hour is that dreadful music about Jesus, and a man talking about a cake walk."


"Yes, that's all coming from the church on the other side of Wilmot."

"Why do they sing about Jesus, tonight of all nights?" Kate asked.

"They aren't singing. They're just playing a very bad recording," I said. "It's all part of a party that church is throwing, an alternative to Halloween. They want children to think about Jesus instead of ghosts and werewolves. And pirates," I could not resist adding.

"In truth, it is no bad thing to consider God and the state of one's soul," Kate said. This surprised me a little. She certainly didn't act as though she worried about such things.



"Is there something wrong with thinking about werewolves and pirates, ghosts and vampires?" Ariel asked. "In your time and place, nobody believes in those things, do they?"

"Some people still believe in ghosts," I said. "The rest, not so much."

"So none of these children will leave your yard believing in werewolves," Kate concluded. "Do the people in that loud church believe otherwise? Would they say it is a sin for you to don the mask of a monster?"



I shrugged. "Maybe. Some people might. It's wrongheaded, though. As I said, it's not about promoting belief in the supernatural. It's about being creative, and having fun."

"And candy," Ariel added.

"Did you have fun, scattering your toy rats and spiders and snakes?" Kate asked.

"Oh, yes. Yes, I did," I said.

Kate shook her head. "I shall never understand this century," she said.


Round Robin Linking List

DesLily - POSTED!
Here, There and Everywhere 2nd Edition
http://herethereandeverywhere2ndedition.blogspot.com

Carly - POSTED!
Ellipsis...Suddenly Carly
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com/

boliyou
Percolation
http://boliyou.blogspot.com/

Janet - POSTED!
Fond of Photography
http://fondofphotography.blogspot.com/

Karen - POSTED!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com/

Sara - POSTED!
Animated Seasons
http://animatedseasons.artshelf.us/

Linda - POSTED!
Blah Blah Blog
http://blahblahblog.wordpress.com/

Suzanne R - POSTED!
New Suzanne R's Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com/

Teena - POSTED!
It's all about me!
http://purple4mee.blogspot.com/

Steven - POSTED!
(sometimes) photoblog
http://sepintx.blogspot.com/

Marie - POSTED!
Photographs and Memories Too (AOL)
http://journals.aol.co.uk/mariebm56/PhotographsMemoriesToo
&
Photographs and Memories Too (Blogger)
http://photographsmemoriestoo.blogspot.com/

Robin - POSTED!
R's Musings
http://rs-musings.blogspot.com/

Julie - POSTED!
Julie's Web Journal
http://www.barrettmanor.com/julie/journal.aspx

Chris - POSTED!
It's all about me...I think!
http://itsallaboutmeithink.blogspot.com/

Sassy - POSTED!
Sassy's EYE
http://journals.aol.com/sassydee50/SassysEYE

John - POSTED!
Personal Effects
http://personaleffects.blogspot.com

Brad G - POSTED!
We Is
http://we-is.blogspot.com/2006/11/round-robin-photo-challenge.html

Gattina - POSTED! ***Welcome New Member***
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Creative, Round Robin Photo, Halloween, Black Rose Kate, Fiction