(Not Responding)

Just the usual.

Oh, how I'm starting to hate those two words "Not Responding," almost as much as the slow-moving blue circle that says the computer isn't in a hurry to do much of anything. I've had intermittent trouble with this laptop almost since I got it; my favorite glitch was the night it decided that English is typed from right to left, and rendered my text accordingly. But the past week or so, I've hit a whole new level of malfunction and inanimosity.

Some symptoms:

• My AOL Mail tab in Firefox creates a popup that advises me that a script is causing the something or other to respond slowly, and asks whether I want to stop the script. Clicking Yes will occasionally fix the problem temporarily, but more often the words "(Not Responding)" appear at the top of the popup. And when I do manage to get rid of the popup, I get one or two more of them, saying the exact same thing.
• Clicking another tab in Firefox has no effect for a minute or longer. Sometimes the entire application gets whited out for a bit of "Not Responding" time.
• Scroll down? Are you mad? Here, have a rotating blue circle instead.
• An AIM Alert that Scalzi or Chuck or whoever has posted a new AOL-J entry consists of a little blank box.
• AIM and IM windows stop responding, and AIM loses the connection with the cable modem/wireless network.
• ArcSoft PhotoStudio decides in the middle of a tricky photo edit that it isn't going to work any more until I reboot.
• It takes forever (perhaps two minutes, but it seems like forever) for "Import Media Files" to get started when I plug in the camera.
• MS Word stops responding too, but that's standard practice, isn't it?

And so on. And the computer starts doing all this within an hour or so of shutting down completely and then starting up again. It gets old really fast, ya know?

So tonight when I got home and rebooted, Windows volunteered a window that listed a few dozen problems over the last several months and offered to look for solutions. In my experience, such things almost never find solutions, but it was worth a try. In a moment it said it didn't know why I was having the first batch of problems, but it traced a second batch to an Intel graphics accelerator chipset driver (or somesuch) and blamed everything else on Firefox. Well, that last part out I'd worked out already, thanks. The acute difficulties date back to the latest Firefox update. Others seem to date back to the latest AIM update.

Not much I can do about Firefox until they issue a fix, unless it's to break down and use Internet Explorer instead. Am I that desperate? It may come to that. But I went to the Intel site. It told me how to identify the driver I have now, so I duly looked that up, and the version of Vista when it asked for that. It directed me to a certain download, which I saved and then tried to install. That's when it said it was the wrong driver for my computer! Then why did you direct me to that driver, you stupid website? Needless to say, my feedback to Intel about their website was less than enthusiastic.

But I ran Windows Update, and it claimed to give me Service Pack 3, if I read that aright. Maybe that will help.

There it goes again, freezing up for thirty seconds as I try to select the label "Inanimosity."

Sheesh.


Karen

Oddities abound at the Museum of the Weird

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Give us a picture of many things alike -- and one thing not. If you're of a certain age (i.e., my age), you'll remember the song from Sesame Street that went "one of these things is not like the others..." This is a picture version of that. Could be as simple as three cups and a dish, or six cars and a bicycle, or a bunch of young kids with one elderly person. You get the idea.

The reason I like to call Casa Blocher the Museum of the Weird, aside from the fact that it's an obscure Disney reference, is that the place is full of fun, odd things. Sometimes the fun odd things are next to other fun, odd things that are fun and odd in a different way. Let's explore, shall we?


Okay, this first one is mostly fun for just Tuffy, although I kind of enjoy guessing which flavor of dog food she would be most likely to eat tonight. (Which do you prefer, Tuffy, the porterhouse or the sirloin?) These Cesar brand dog food containers are a little over half the price at Target that they are at Safeway, so tonight we stocked up. While at Target we also bought a space heater for my office at work, and did our annual Toys for Tots shopping. But I digress. The odd item here is Tuffy's prednisone pills. I hide them in sausages and between slices of pepperoni. They help make Tuffy's tongue feel better, and restore her appetite for the gourmet dog food.


Here is part of our tiki mug collection. I'm pretty sure we have more of this particular pattern of mug than is shown here. The one on the left is different in three ways: it's darker, it's taller, and it's a licensed souvenir of Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room.


I fudged this shot just a little by taking away a tiny cactus plant. But what's significant here is that only one of the four flowerpots still has a living plant in it.

You have your choice of incongruent items here. Which stands out for you more, the extra large china dog or roughly in-scale Donald Duck?

Again in this one there's a choice. Which one strikes you as "not like the others," the larger Dam doll or the troll in the wedding dress when all the other trolls are nekkid?


More of the tikis. But wait a minute - how did that surfer girl get in there?


These happened to be stacked together in the front room - the Dollar westerns and Joss Whedon's Serenity. I suppose you could argue that Serenity isn't all that different in setting or violence level or even the outlook of the protagonist. Even so, I'm pretty sure the Man With No Name has never been on a spaceship. I think what these four items have in common for John's purposes is that they've been displaced by special edition DVDs.

Karen

The Comment Manifesto

I tend to get suspicious when an older entry from the Outpost gets a new comment. Sometimes it's because someone was Googling for pages on a specific subject (I get lots of hits on my George Maharis posts, for example), but more often it's comment spam.

But this one tonight was in a class of its own. It was posted to "The Curse and Promise of Change," an entry from November 16th that has recently aged off my blog's main page.

Let's start with a copy of my posted comment in reply, slightly edited for typos, and then I'll say something new. Here we go:

I am deleting a comment that begins,

rafael said...

AUTHENTIC RECORD AND GEOLOGY SCIENTIS CAN’T CALCULATE THE AGE OF THE EARTH.
The subject of evolution among those who understand it, they must be aware that there is the danger of excessive subjectivity concerning one owns knowledge. This is not healthy, is a means of cultivating the mind with vain thoughts, and be fill with self examination. Is better, to be objective.

...and goes on for a total of 20,661 words, most of it in one paragraph. The bulk of it is an attempt to use Biblical quotes to disprove evolution. It contains misspellings, poor grammar and punctuation, logical fallacies, and pure gobbledegook. My favorite (by default because I haven't the patience to read the entire screed), is the following:

Darwinism was accepted by eugenics which was Hitler idealism or dream, never accomplished in Germany but applied in North America, where is up to now working, nevertheless the biggest lied on humanity is ending microscopic world.

Looky there! A genuine Reductio ad Hitlerum!

I would leave this misguided comment up in the interest of fairness (and so Paul et al. can laugh at it), but the fact is that it fails my comment policy. There is no indication whatsoever that the person read my entry, which was mostly about my job changes and Tuffy's cancer, and secondarily about change itself. Evolution wasn't even mentioned. I'm assuming that the person Googled the buzzword "species" and pasted in comment spam everywhere the word turned up. Sorry, rafael. Your manifesto, pasted in as a response to a posting on an entirely different subject, does not constitute intelligent discourse. Bye-bye.

Anyone who knows me, or even reads this blog on a regular basis, can probably tell that I'm not the most confrontational of people. I hate, hate, hate interpersonal conflict, and do my best to avoid it. It makes me physically ill. And I really do believe strongly in tolerance for other points of view, and not dividing the world into Us and Them, and all that other ethical stuff I sometimes rant about here.

So believe me when I say that I don't really want to belittle or make fun of this "rafael" person. That's not my idea of a good time. The deficiencies in English may be an ESL issue, and if it's not, it mostly just makes me sad to see the language mangled. Nor am I going to refute this manifesto, which when I paste it into Word comes out as 32 pages. The final paragraph is over 28 pages long, and consists entirely of interpreting Bible quotes as "proof" that Darwin was wrong. At least, that's the impression I get from glancing at a few lines here and there.

And that's kind of my point. Even if I were to leave this ridiculously long comment visible, I doubt that anyone would read it through, least of all me. It's not necessary, when it's possible to get a sense of the thing from reading bits and pieces of it. I can overlook deficiencies in punctuation (well, let's pretend I can) if the words themselves make sense. But there seems to be precious little sense to be found in this one, even beyond my gut reaction of "I disagree with you, and therefore you're wrong," which is a fallacy in itself. If I were to read it through, it would probably be to play "count the fallacies."

But let's not, and I'll tell you why. First off, this was an anonymous comment, in the sense of having no contact link for the commenter. It is unlikely that any attempt on my part to educate this person about science or critical thinking or paragraph breaks would ever reach its target. Second, even if the person were to turn up again, and I somehow overcame my aversion to confrontation, I doubt I could make a dent in the person's illogic. Third, evolution has plenty of defenders online, with far more knowledge of the subject and far better arguments than I could manage. It doesn't need me to jump in there too. Fourth, at least one of my friends has issues with the subject, and I don't want to open that can of worms. Fifth, I really do respect the right of this person to disagree with me. And sixth, it would be too darn much trouble!

What annoys me about it, though, and the reason I clicked on the trash can icon, is that this person posted 20,661 words of comment to my 1,519-word entry, not one of which related directly to what I wrote about. That's rather rude, isn't it? Here I am, going on about jobs lost and a sick dog, and trying at the end to turn it into something philosophical and uplifting. And does rafael call me by name, sympathize about Tuffy, or indicate in any way whatsoever that he's read a single word that I wrote? He does not, unless that single word is "species." And what is my grandiose claim, requiring 32 pages' worth of passionate but clumsy refutation? As far as I can tell, it was simply this:

Species die out, the Earth gets warmer, and new superviruses arise.

Y'know, I wouldn't have thought there was anything terribly controversial about that sentence. The passenger pigeons unquestionably existed, and don't anymore. Icebergs are melting, and polar bears are having a difficult time as a result. And hospitals find themselves battling highly drug-resistant viruses that weren't around a decade ago. One can debate about dinosaurs, or whether humans have an effect on global warming, or why and how viruses seem to get more virulent over time. But the facts stated in my little sentence are pretty hard to refute at this point, short of some elaborate twisting of both facts and logic. Notice that I didn't say why or how any of that stuff happens. I never used the word evolution. I was merely listing three examples of change, which was after all the subject of the essay.

Still, I doubt rafael even knows this, or cares. And that, more than anything else, is why I deleted the comment.

Karen

Reimagining

Tin Man is on in the next room, heading into the last 15 minutes of tonight's installment, in which the evil sorceress catches up with DG and everything goes wrong. I saw it on the airing that immediately preceded this one, but I watched bits of the rerun anyway. As the name suggests, it's a modern reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, with major changes to the mythos throughout. The Dorothy character, DG, is a young woman whose father(!) tells her stories of Milltown and the old brick road. Her parents later turn out to be nurturing androids, sent with her to Kansas to love, raise and protect her, and prepare her to return to a world she knows only in her dreams. In reality she's the younger daughter of the queen of "the O.Z.," or Outer Zones. Big sister is the evil sorceress who is running things now. Her new friends are members of the resistance: Glitch, the genius with half a brain removed, is clearly the Scarecrow; Raw, the semi-human seer with a tail, is the Cowardly Lion, and Wyatt Kane, the hardbitten ex-cop with a tin star, is the eponymous Tin Man.

Is it a travesty, a rip-off, or a valid exploration of new characters based on archetypes from the source text? Is it a remake, or a new story, or neither? I'm leaning toward the latter option in both of those sentences. Without Dorothy Gale there would be no DG, and yet this 21st century motorcycle-riding ex-waitress differs strongly from her literary parent. Although she's referred to as a girl or a child, she seems to be slightly older than the Judy Garland version of Dorothy, and much other than Baum's child heroine. Dorothy wants to get home to her aunt and uncle in Kansas; DG can't get away from Kansas fast enough, and wants to find her "parents," and eventually her real mother. Dorothy is an ordinary (albeit brave) girl who almost accidentally saves Oz from two witches; DG is hidden royalty, a magical princess who must work hard to save the OZ from her own sister. Similar characters, different backstory and emphasis, but one informs the other. And overall I think it's a good idea. Baum, Thompson, MGM et al. have already taken the original characters as far as they can go. Now it's time to see what can be done if you strip them down to essentials and build from there.

The genetic transfer

The current version of Doctor Who is a less extreme case, but nevertheless represents a departure from the 1963-1989 series. At the very least it colors outside the lines. I was thinking about this earlier today as I wrote a review of the Series Three DVD set on Amazon. There are fans of the original show - and I know a few of them - who dislike showrunner Russell T Davies' updating of the character and the series. Following on from two infamous kisses in the Doctor Who tv movie, the Ninth and Tenth Doctors between them have now kissed Rose Tyler twice, plus Martha Jones, the future Madame de Pompadour and even Captain Jack Harkness. In some cases the Doctor was more the kissee than the kisser. In other cases he did it for some plot purpose, removing the power of the Time Vortex from Rose, and arranging a "genetic transfer" so that Martha would test positive for traces of alien DNA. Nevertheless, they were kisses. For some fans, used to the Fifth Doctor's hands-off, brotherly relationship with Nyssa and Tegan and older Doctors as father figures, this is unacceptable.

Other bits of the mythology have changed as well: the Doctor's home planet has been destroyed in the mysterious Time War, and it's implied that the Doctor was responsible for the extinction of his own people. The only other known survivor from Gallifrey, who surfaces at the very end of Series Three, is a major nemesis of the Doctor from the old show, but greatly changed, physically and behaviorally. Now he's a cleanshaven, charismatic lunatic with drums in his head, and I know at least one fan who absolutely hated the two episodes in which he appears this way. Yet the essentials are there. You feel the centuries of history connecting him with the Doctor, the Doctor's compassion for him, and his need to show himself to be the Doctor's superior. And one of the biggest changes in the show is evident from the first scene of the first episode. The Doctor's companions, Rose, Donna, Martha, and even Jack, have lives outside the TARDIS, people they left behind who miss them and care about them. Our visits back to contemporary London and Cardiff to check in with Jackie and Mickey, Francine and Tish and the rest is a way to tether these characters to a familiar, everyday world, give them a personal history, and make them that much more real.

Reimagining. Tricky stuff, and it doesn't always work. Film critic Richard Schickel used to deride "the Disney version" of stories, which I suppose includes smoothing out the rough edges or characters and making the dangers of a story less graphic and extreme. The Julie Andrews version of Mary Poppins is considerably nicer than her P.L. Travers counterpart. I personally find the film superior to the stories, or at least equally valid; but there have probably been other characters over the years who were less well served. Meg Murry in the Disney version of A Wrinkle in Time is not an improvement over the L'Engle character, and her televised story lacks the heart of the original, dropping the religious and philosophical underpinnings and replacing them with an altered backstory, confrontations and special effects. Phooey.

So as I struggle with Heirs of Mâvarin, cutting a scene that's been in Chapter One for a good twenty years, I think about the validity of my own reimagining. Tin Man would be a considerably less rich story without The Wizard of Oz to provide context, but the only person with a full understanding of the original versions of the Mâvarin stories is me. Even my beta readers weren't there when Harry MacTavish was hanging around with Dag and Shela, and when Rani, a.k.a. Teng, became a Wraith of Thale two hundred unwritten pages later. Almost everything from that era is long gone now, except for Rani in a tree. And I find that I don't want him to start the story anywhere else, no matter what.

But I nevertheless made a number of major changes to Rani himself years ago, when writing the sequel showed me that having four legs and a horn was the least of his problems, offset by talents I didn't initially know he had. These innovations have become the hook to the whole series for me, and again, they are essential to the reimagined story.

On the other hand, much as I love the scene in which Rani talks to Clif and Suri, it's not essential, and cutting it gets Rani in trouble several pages sooner. So it goes away. And yet, I know that the scene happened. It's canonical, because it's been part of Rani's story a long time and nothing else has displaced the event or the dialogue itself. So think of it as a deleted scene, something that probably happened but we don't get to see it in the main narrative for reasons of dramatic economy and flow. But you do get to read it. I'm about to post it on the fiction blog. You won't have the context now to fully appreciate it, but someday, when the books are in the stores, that may change. I hope!

And maybe someday if I'm both persistent and lucky, I'll also have to decide whether some producer or director's vision of Rani is a valid reimagining as well.

Quick Pics and Then to Bed

Well, what do you expect? It's late! But it's not completely my fault. My computer was horribly sluggish most of last night and all of today, until finally I shut down completely instead of just restarting. I think it may have been the latest Firefox upgrade that did it. In any case, it frequently took a minute or two to scroll up or down or select a tab or close a window, if it worked at all. I couldn't get a defrag to run, Norton didn't find any viruses, and the few windows I had open frequently had the words "Not Responding" next to them. But it's better now, finally. Much better.

On to the annotated photos:



A few days ago in the bathroom I glanced down at a Doctor Who book on the floor, and was quite surprised to see a lizard on it. It took a few tries, but I managed to rescue him and put him on the outside of the window sill.

Can you see the sparkle of water on Tuffy now? This was from Saturday.


John and I went to Barnes & Noble, and despite the upcoming holiday I was highly self-indulgent. All three of these books are brand new.

A big ol' cloud at dusk.

Other things accomplished today, despite everything, included determining that Chapter One of Heirs is a thousand words and three pages shorter than, well, whenever I compiled that particular version of the word count doc. I also edited the first scene of Chapter Two, which is in good shape anyway. And I solved my HTML editing issue, sort of. I found an option to uncheck in Word, and the links on my L'Engle pages appear to have stayed intact. The bad thing is that Word introduced some of the usual Word-specific tags. But it opened okay and looked all right in Firefox, so I can live with it. So my L'Engle pages on mavarin.com finally acknowledge L'Engle's death. Tomorrow I'll update the AOL mirror pages and the St. Michaels' sermons page, with has fussy podcast links. But first I expect I'll be taking a nap after church. Good night!

Karen

Food for a Rainy Night

Because of my usual obsessiveness about scheduling issues beyond my control, I've got two entries tonight. This one is the Weekend Assignment. See below for the Round Robin Photo Challenges entry. Thanks!

Weekend Assignment #193: Share one of your favorite comfort foods. Because it's just about the time of year for them, isn't it? Getting chillier and with the cold comes the desire for warm food that makes you happy. Hello! Comfort food.

Extra credit: Well, a picture of your favorite comfort food would be nice, and might also make me hungry.

First off, my #1 comfort food isn't warm at all. I even wrote a haiku about it for a different Weekend Assignment several years ago:

Ice cream from Trevor's, a great business that has since folded.

Cold comfort food soothes
Hunger, stomach pain and stress:
Ice cream first; then guilt.

The other two "snack-ku" were

Pumpkin anything!
Strange that I should crave foods with
Jack O' Lantern eyes.

and

Dolley Madison
Would be astonished to learn
About her snack cakes.

The third one isn't especially relevant, but ice cream really is my main comfort food of choice, and the right "pumpkin anything" isn't far behind. Take today, for example. I think I mentioned in passing last night that I've had "digestive inconvenience" since Wednesday afternoon. I don't know why, but whatever it is, I've still got it. This morning there was pumpkin bread at work, but I only had one small piece. Actually I'm not quite sure that it was pumpkin bread. By this afternoon when I went to lunch, I was feeling especially bad. So I had a McFlurry, because somehow ice cream always makes me feel better, at least temporarily. I also had a hamburger (no mayo, no cheese) because I'm theoretically giving blood tomorrow, if my iron level is high enough.

Anyway, by the time I got home tonight I was feeling crummy again. I decided to get some soup. When John pointed out that the soups I like to buy at Safeway aren't especially healthy, I decided to get dinner from Peking Palace instead. So I did.

Here it is, warm comfort food for a rainy night and a queasy stomach. Note the phone book still open in the background from ordering.

Inside: house egg foo yung, won ton soup and white rice.

And it worked! I felt better, for a while. The big question is whether I'll be well enough to give blood tomorrow, since "Are you feeling healthy today?" is one of the Red Cross's questions. We'll see.

(Don't forget to scroll down for the RR entry!)

Karen

Sparkling Water

Yes, it's Round Robin time again! This week's theme, "Sparkle," comes to us from Vicki, author of "Maracas." And yes, we're gearing up for a time of year full of sparkling tinsel, ribbons, champagne, lights and, if certain advertisers get their way, diamonds. But over the last few days, the only sparkling I've seen has come from a very different source. Let me show you.


See it? On the ground there, that purply pink light? That's the reflection of a street light in a couple of puddles. Yes, folks, it's raining in the Old Pueblo!



I had to really think about the word sparkle, what I think it means. I don't want to get pedantic about it and actually look up the word, but to me it means tiny, shiny bits of twinkling light. That's what I've been seeing over the last few days, drops of water lit up by headlights, streetlights and camera flashes. Kind of pretty, really, especially if one takes a moment to capture it digitally and present it.


Yes, I know I posted a shot of taillights near the power planet as recently as Monday night. But the rain adds a whole new sparking dimension to the scene.


A streetlight near my house illuminates the rain against the moody sky.

This was a line of approaching cars near the wash behind the high school. Can't really tell, can you?

I took other pictures for this, but I'm not quite satisfied with most of them. In some cases the sparkle was just too subtle for the camera to pick up, being either too small, too far or too poorly lit. One shot I tried for twice, unsuccessfully, was rain on Tuffy's head. Ah, well. Take my word for it, she was sparklingly wet!

Now go see the other Robins sparkle. And don't forget, you're also welcome to join in yourself! See the Round Robin blog for details.

Karen

Linking List

Vicki - Posted!
Maraca
http://mymaracas.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

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

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

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

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

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