I Wanna Banter Like Zoe

I love banter, but I'm out of practice.

Back when I was in college the first time, before I met John, I had a sort-of boyfriend who was a world class banterer. I had to work hard to keep up with him, and although I got better with practice, I was never really up to Bob's standard. Then came John, and we were somewhat more evenly matched on the banter meter. But that became family banter. It's easy to banter with a loved one, because we know each other's personal history and cultural references. And we don't do as much of it as we once did, methinks.

When I was at First Magnus, I made an effort to make my boss laugh every day, and to write amusing emails in conducting business with the folks in HR. But that wasn't banter. That was quips. It wasn't really interactive. And it's been over a year and a half since First Magnus closed its doors. I haven't really had anyone to quip to, much less banter with, in any job since then. Nor do dog park conversations lend themselves to bantering. If I try it, people just look at me strangely.

These days I get in a little banter with John, and a little bit with my friend Kevin on Sundays. Kevin has a gift for absurdity, so we have little runs of nonsense conversation, such as Kevin's claim this morning that Pepper's recent escape into the front yard was so she could help plan the rise of our new canine overlords. And that was fun, but it wasn't world class banter.

But over the last several days I read Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. I did so admiringly and more than a little enviously, because it's full of galactic-class banter.

Zoe Boudin-Perry, the protagonist of Zoe's Tale, is a 17-year-old smart aleck, but that's just a small part of who and what she is. In fact, the book centers on who and what she is, and how she learns to use her unique identity to save a planet. A little backstory here: her stepdad, John Perry, is the protagonist of the first and third books in the Old Man's War series, a resourceful and ethical man who accomplishes amazing things because he's just that clever. He's like the Doctor or Don Diego de la Vega, the smartest and wittiest man in the room, who can out-strategize his adversaries and improvise his way out of almost anything. I love that kind of character. Zoe, whose story takes place concurrently with The Last Colony, is sort of the female, teenage equivalent of John Perry, but with teenage concerns as well as planetary ones, and an unsettling but crucial relationship with an entire race of aliens.

And all through the book, Zoe and her loved ones banter. She banters with her best friend and her boyfriend and her best friend's boyfriend, with her dad and her dad's assistant, and even with alien generals. It's awesome stuff, and I couldn't resist reading out passages of it to John. Now the book's over and I'm annoyed, because I wasn't through enjoying it.

But I tell you what I'm going to do about it. Inspired by Zoe, I'm going to brush up on my bantering skills. So watch out.

Karen

A Better Birthday

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 was the day that Osama Bin Laden and I both turned 52 years old. (Yes, we were born on the same day and year.) Despite that, and my track record for upsetting birthdays, it was a pretty good day.

My birthday started on Facebook, before midnight local time. One or two overseas friends (in the broader Facebook sense of the word) wished me a happy birthday, and I was amazed. I mean, it's not exactly a secret, and I'm sure I input the info when I joined Facebook. But I didn't exactly go around telling people, and hardly anyone send requests to put my birthday on their calendar app. But you know, it was fine. Better than fine. I got happy birthday greetings on Facebook from two classmates from high school, someone from church, several people I know from Quantum Leap and Doctor Who fandom, a few longstanding online friends, and even people who know me only from Facebook games. Offline, I got calls from my dad, my brother and two people from church, one of whom had no idea it even was my birthday. Typing the words "happy birthday" on someone's Facebook wall is such a small gesture, and not very personal if that's all you say. But combined with the individualized sentiments some of them contained, plus two ecards, the phone calls and an email, the cumulative effect is a big improvement over past birthdays. There have been years when nobody at work even mentioned my birthday until I made a minor fuss late in the day, and one year an office threw a potluck in my honor and forgot to invite me. So here in this period of my having no job, it's heartening that so many people took a moment to extend a birthday greeting, with no social obligation or office machinery in play. Thanks, folks! And no, that does not mean I want you to add to the greetings in the comments thread. I'll just assume you're all glad I had a good birthday, and leave it at that!

And all things considered, it was a pretty good birthday. Although it was broken up with phone calls, I got a decent amount of sleep, had fun online, and went to the dog park as usual. While at the dog park I managed to snap this photo of a large, low-flying plane. These cargo planes or whatever they are fly over Reid Park pretty much every afternoon, presumably on their way to or from the air force base. But I've never managed to photograph one directly overhead before.

After the dog park I went out to dinner with John. I had planned to drag him to Mama Louisa's, but then John Scalzi happened to mention coconut shrimp on his Facebook page. That reminded me of Kon Tiki, a frequent site of Blocher birthdays and anniversaries, if you can call one or two visits a year "frequent." I've written about the place before: it's a genuine 1960s tiki lounge and restuarant, most famous for strong, cheap tropical drinks. The original decor with restored and refubished a year or two ago, and it's looking pretty good these days. One minor disappointment is that the big rattan Addams Family-style chairs have recently been replaced with something smaller, studier, and slightly less exotic.

Another change since we first started going there is in the species of animals to be found at Kon Tiki. Back in the 1990s there were parrots or possibly macaws in the glassed-in room behind the bar, and koi in the pond beneath a little footbridge near the entrance. But the the parrots are long gone, and the lovely tiled koi pond was filled in with concrete a few years ago. But we always peer into the room behind the bar anyway, and tonight John spotted something there - a large exotic lizard!

John wants to wait until the tax refund arrives before spending any money on birthdays, either mine this week or his on the 22nd. Actually the tax refund should be in by his birthday, so it's no sacrifice for him. But I insist on having at least one tangible present on my birthday, something more than dinner, a check from my dad and an Amazon gift certificate from one old friend. Borders emailed me a 25% off one book coupon for my birthday, so after dinner I rushed out to use it. I ended up with Scalzi's novel Zoe's Tale, which I've wanted for many months biut couldn't justify buying under the circumstances. Thanks, Dad! Thanks, Borders!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #243: Breakfast

I have a job interview in the morning. Since I don't want to ask you about jobs (maybe some other time), let's focus on the "morning" part:

Weekend Assignment #243: The founder of the Weekend Assignment, John Scalzi, is infamously fond of bacon, not necessarily attached to a cat. Setting aside the whole cat thing, what do you like to eat for breakfast?

Extra Credit: How often do you actually eat breakfast?

When I worked at First Magnus, my typical breakfast was tuna salad and crackers because it was cheap and easy and not horrendously unhealthy. When I worked at Beaudry, my breakfast was usually a bagel or nothing, except for the office pot luck breakfast on Fridays. During my 90-day contract working in Oro Valley and commuting with John, who still works near there, we were in the habit of stopping at McDonald's nearly every day. John typically got a plain scrambled egg (or as McDonald's called it, a "folded egg"), while I usually ordered an Egg McMuffin. (At right: an actual breakfast, circa late 2005.)

Since that last job ended, I've been having things like half a peanut butter sandwich or a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, or no breakfast at all. This morning I did something extremely self-indulgent. I went and bought my first Egg McMuffin in over two months. I know: wicked, huh? It's not just a question of the carbs and calories and fat; I shouldn't have spent the money, either. But on the good side, there's good protein in the egg and cheese and Canadian bacon, which as far as I'm concerned is a traditional but misleading term for a thin, round strip of low grade ham.

If I had tons of money to throw at breakfast, and if all options were both nutritious and wonderfully slimming, I would probably vary my choices a lot: bagel sandwich with egg one day, a blueberry pancake the next, a ham, cheese and tomato omelette the day after, and maybe oatmeal or shredded wheat after that. I'd love to eat at Denny's or IHoP a couple days a week, and get a slam or its equivalent. But when time or money is tight and you're not much of a cook, it gets entirely too easy to do the same thing every day, whether it's a stop at McDonald's or all natural peanut butter on a slice of bread. I suppose that's healthier than all those Grand Slams, anyway. (At right: pumpkin pancakes with apple topping, November 2006.)

Do I actually have a favorite? If pressed, I will probably admit that a nice stack of pancakes with some kind of fruit topping, plus bacon and sausage and perhaps one egg over easy, would be best of all. But part of the appeal of something like that is the rarity of its appearance in my actual diet. Even a daily trip to Denny's or Millie's Pancake Haus would get dreary over time.

Your turn! Tell us about your favorite breakfast(s), if any, and how often you eat them. Write about this in your blog along with a link back here, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of your responses. Here are the ones from last week:

For Weekend Assignment #242: Local TV Host, I asked you to tell me about local tv shows you grew up with and their colorful hosts. Our sampling was small, but nearly nationwide:

Julie said...

How about a whole string of 'em? When I was a kid I lived in Wichita, KS. KAKE-TV had a puppet chef called Cakeman. One of the big shows at Christmas was "Santa's Workshop,", which featured Cakeman. The guy who did Santa moved to another station and took his workshop with him. Cakeman became (I kid you not) Toyboy!

Florinda said...

My sister and I did watch Wonderama on Channel 5 whenever we could on Sunday mornings. For years, I wasn't sure whether that was a local NYC show or not, since I rarely met anyone from outside the Tri-State are (NY/NJ/CT) who had ever heard of it; as it turns out, it originated from New York, but it was only broadcast there and in five other cities (one of which was LA, which explains why my SoCal native husband and brother-in-law remember it too), so I'm going to count is as local.

Mike said...

We have a local channel, WGN-TV, that is also a superstation. I don't know how long it was that way, but I remember being amazed at seeing the local news guys on the TV in Michigan when I was visiting once. I did know that the news was local by the way. There are three shows that I remember from the channel, let me know if you have seen them in other areas. We had Bozo's Circus, The Ray Rayner Show, and Garfield Goose.

That's it for now! I hope you'll take the time to participate this week. Write about it in your blog or journal, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. Please don't forget your links! I'll be back in a week to highlight the results.

Also, I'm still running low on ideas here, so I need your input. What would you like to see as a Weekend Assignment topic? Email me your suggestions (mavarin at aol.com). If I use your topic you'll get full credit and my undying thanks.

Karen

P.S. The Tucson Citizen story that mentions me is now online:

Job prospects grow dimmer as Arizona unemployment rate hits 6-year high

Let's hope this is the last day of me being part of that grim statistic.

The Entry With No Dog Pictures

I mean, I could easily have more dog pictures for you tonight. They exist: fresh dog pictures. But I wouldn't want you to get bored!

So, what else can we talk about?

Zoe's Tale. John Scalzi's latest novel comes out later this month, and Amazon chose today to email me a promo for it, offering $8.48 (34%) off on the pre-order. Amusingly, Scalzi reports on Twitter that Amazon also promoted the book to him. As of earlier this evening, the Amazon sales ranking was numerically interesting:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,434 in Books
Popular in these categories:
#41 in Books > Teens > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy
#42 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
#43 in Books > Teens > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction


Now I just have to decide whether to order it through Amazon, ganged up with something else to qualify for free shipping; or to use the classic method of book-buying for immediate, tactile gratification. I'll decide in the next few days.

Heirs of Mâvarin. As Sara work on adding words to the second draft of her novel, I'm working in reducing the word count in my first novel. I'm halfway through Chapter 9 now, 350 pages in. I think the overall page count is 6 or 7 pages below where it was at the beginning of this particular edit. Chapter 8 alone lost over 500 words. I suppose that's not terribly impressive in a book that, if I work hard at it, will get down to 150,000 words. Still, it represents many awkward, unnecessary or redundant sentences reworked, reworded, recombined or removed. When I get to the end, I'll have no more excuses to put off submitting it again.

Mike and a new award. As part of his Weekend Assignment entry, Mike has given this blog the nifty award shown at right. As with most of these things, the recipient is expected to share the wealth and honor other good blogs. Rather than rush that part of the proceedings, or simply point to the usual suspects, I'm going to incorporate my recommendations into one of tomorrow night entries. Thanks, Mike!

Karen

Covered

Perhaps this entry would benefit from a few subject headers, thus:

Tracking Robins

I've spent most of tonight on that database I've mentioned a few times already, tracking who all has participated in the Round Robin Photo Challenges and when, and which blog is the most current or most preferred one for each Robin. Tonight I basically covered all of 2007, compiling a checklist for each of the 26ish Challenges including all new participants and all updates to the blogs being used. From that I got all new Robins from 2007 added to my master list in chronological order. Unless a mistake turned up as I move into 2008, out all-time list of Robins stands at 110 people! Maybe tomorrow I'll compile amusing stats on the most common first names on the list (#1 is the name "Robin," I think), but for tonight I think I've done enough.

Scalzi skimming

The other thing I've done tonight is browse through more of John Scalzi's The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, and read a few pages of The Sagan Diary. The Rough Guide has its faults - typos and the occasional omission - but it's generally knowledgeable and entertaining, which should surprise no one. I'm especially pleased that Scalzi has put nearly all of my favorites on his list of essential canon, and praised such films as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and Lilo & Stitch.

The Sagan Diary, a novelette that goes with the OMW series, starts with a fun premise: two governmental agencies are having a minor tussle over access to information downloaded from Sagan's BrainPal. The novelette itself basically consists of Sagan's private reminiscences and musings as she prepares to leave the military for a new life (literally) with John Perry. The one government person complains that the Sagan diary download is more love story than military intel.

I'm not deep enough into the book yet to have a clear idea what the diary is and what it's supposed to be. From my perspective it's off to a bit of a slow start, with Sagan thinking largely in metaphor and poetic imagery. I hope the rest of it isn't that.

Countdown to Who

Next weekend, meanwhile, is the end of Torchwood Series 2 and the premiere of Doctor Who Series 4 in the UK. The BBC is starting to ramp up its publicity machine with trailers and teasers, clips and screenings. It all looks great, and as intrigued as I've been with set reports and sly hints from the show's producers, I want to see it now! On the other hand, the episodes I'm most curious about all take place at the end of the season. Best not rush it then!

Of Dogs and Couch Covers

The new couch cover is in our midcentury modern den

The other news du jour is that the couch cover John ordered about a week ago arrived today. Believe it or not, this leopard print was the best match for the decor of the Den of the Museum of the Weird. It's thin and rough and not at all comfortable to sit on, but it's staying on much better than the mismatched throws we had on it before. It looks better, too.

Seems comfortable enough for Pepper.

A meditative lick.

Sometimes she uses the pillow, but not always.

Meanwhile, Tuffy and Pepper struggle to establish who is top dog. They've both barked at each other in moments of stress and jealousy over food or the attention of humans, and both had a tendency to guard the food and water dishes. Whichever bowl we designate as being for Dog A, you can be sure Dog B will take it over at the first opportunity, while A eats B's food from the other dish. The good news is that a) Tuffy is less inclined to run away than before, and b) the competition over food seems to have improved her appetite.

The birds are singing, and I'm going to bed now. Good morning!

The dogs want.

Update: I get overwhelmed by the number of weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc. photo memes that are out there now, some of which people have been kind enough to personally invite me to participate in. But Steven's got one that's very simple in concept. The name of the meme, Feline Friday, tells you why I've never participated. But now he's expanded it, as Feline and Furball Friday, to include dogs. I don't think of Tuffy and Pepper as furballs, exactly, but they're certainly furry, and as it happens I posted all these shots of Pepper on Friday night. So hello, Steven, belatedly. Can Pepper play with Pickle?

Karen

Traffic

Just a quick update tonight, instead of the other post I've been vaguely planning. I pretty much aggressively blew the evening on Whatever, Twitter and Doctor Who, and there's some news of the day to catch up om.

The good news: I was finally able to photograph this blooming tree at low speed over on Golf Links this morning. The bad news: this was because I was caught in a post-accident traffic jam for 45 minutes. Distance covered in that time: 2 miles.

And for much of that time, this Bounder motorhome was just ahead of me, having cut me off in traffic.
Wilmot to Swan, stop and go with long periods of stop. The air force base is just to the left of this road to the south, so there's no good alternative route. But had I known the accident was alll the way up at Swan, I'd have gotten off somehow, and gone north to 22nd St. My job is south of the base, but least I would have been moving.


This evening I left comments on several fun and/or interesting Scalzi postings on Whatever, which is appropriate because these two books arrived today from Amazon. Thanks for the gift certificate, Howard! Also tonight I added Scalzi to the list of people I follow on Twitter. It didn't work properly until I followed a suggestion by Arachne Jericho. Now I'm following 11 Twitter feeds instead of four. That should make things more interesting!

That legal-looking paper on the upper right of the photo above came from bankruptcy court today. It's almost impossible to decipher the legalese, but I think it's saying that some company or other is getting paid out of First Magnus's remaining assets, presumably ahead of my back pay. I should research what the news is these days about whether I'm likely to get any of that last paycheck.


And Pepper got the first of her medicine doses today to deal with her itching. Oddly, one of her meds is exactly what Tuffy got months ago for a different set of symptoms: Prednisone. Tuffy has her followup with the oncologist tomorrow. Meanwhile, Pepper definitely seems friendlier and more enthusiastic about seeing me. Not more obedient, though!

Karen

Wording

A severe case of pagigration

Nearly two months after leaving AOL, John Scalzi continues to inspire the creative efforts of others. No, he's no longer doing the meme-with-links-to-your-blogs thing; he's passed the baton on that (*ahem*). But over in his blog Whatever, he frequently tosses out an idea for a fun activity to keep his large readership amused. Back in January, for example, he parlayed a typo into a writing prompt, "I Met John Scalvi," and encouraged readers to describe their encounters with this fictional person. Other times he's set up a premise for readers to turn into posters and lolcats and such. And today (okay, yesterday), he declared it to be "International Make Up a Word Day."

I came up with the following:

Awakested - simultaneously too awake to go to sleep, and too sleepy to accomplish anything.

Bookcreep - the stealthy migration of books from the shelves where they belong to untidy piles all over one’s desk. Also called pagigration or librigration.

And of course I had to mention my husband's word, inanimosity, which refers to the hostile behavior of objects. I find it a very clever and useful term, and promote it at every opportunity.

To which I now add

Calibording - stopping at a booth near the Arizona - California border, ostensibly to reassure the state that you aren't importing ferrets or insect-infested fruit, while undergoing profiling as a possible illegal alien.

That's enough for tonight. I got a nap earlier, but that doesn't mean I should stay up for another hour, making up words! I'm trying to fight my dawntending, the process of going to bed later and later until all sleeping is done by daylight. That's a word I came up with over 20 years ago, when John and I shared a single Mac SE, and my sleep schedule was even screwier than it is now.

And tomorrow I'll emipagigrate those L'Engle books, I promise!

Karen

All Input, No Outgo

There are nights on which I dither for hours, messing about on Wikipedia and blogs and message boards and watching DVDs in the hope that something I see is going to spark an idea for that night's blog entry. Here we are at 4 AM and counting, and the only idea that's occurred to me is the cliche of a writer looking for ideas. Still, I have come up with an angle, and may yet manage to build a coherent essay around it.

Have you ever seen the Short Circuit? It's a fairly lightweight Steve Gutenberg film about a little military robot who achieves sentience and becomes a fun-loving peacenik, more or less. Early in the film he's in someone's kitchen, demanding "Input."

Input is a good and sometimes important thing for a writer. Put someone in a bare room for years on end with no tv, newspapers, books, Internet or friends, and he or she isn't going to have much to talk about. Well, maybe. If the person had some experience of the world before that, it could still find its way into dreams, and be built on from there. But the point's the same. We need input, grist for our personal idea mills. That's what Internet memes are, after all. They're just another form of input.

Problem is, those mills don't grind away smoothly and consistently. Today at work I finished one stage of a project compiling 1600 lines of color-coded data, and had fun doing it. At lunch I read a couple pages of my stalled Joshua Wander mystery, and realized that the world knew about dragons but not humanoid mythical creatures. I spent tonight reading about yet another dust-up over trollish sockpuppets and disemvoweling, theories about the process and stylistic differences between two screenwriters, and two different Doctor Who location shoots, while intermittently watching Series Two of Doctor Who and, when I wasn't doing those other things, messing working my way through Chapter Five of Heirs. All that stuff got crammed into my brain, and nothing of note spilled out the other end.

Maybe it's not the right input. Or maybe the grinder needs the lubricant of sleep to work properly.


But meanwhile I took a peek at Whatever, and there was a thread of hundreds of comments, supplying fictional biographical details about the nonexistent John Scalvi, son of a typo. Most of them were intricate and brilliant, and I thought, "I can't begin to compete with these." But then I added my own anyway. The gag was simply going to be a claim that Scalvi is afraid of the letter Z, and advice not to mention Pluto to him. But I ended up writing about Scalvi celebrating Dillinger Days, rescuing me from a sinkhole near the train station, settling Doc Holliday's karmic debt, and then carving me up as punishment for mentioning Pluto. And everything in that little fantasy comes from some kind of outside input, most notably my trip downtown last weekend. The celebration of Dillinger's capture at the Hotel Congress turns out to be today, but I didn't consciously realize that when I wrote the bit.

It's still not remotely the best whimsical vignette in that particular comment thread, but 'twill do.

As will this essay.

Karen

The More "Things" the Merrier! Or Something.

Hooray! John Scalzi has a meme! It's a rerun of something he posted on both By the Way and Whatever in 2005, but what the heck. This time he asks for ten MORE things we've done that others probably have not.

My response from 2005 is here. Now, what can I come up with for tonight that I haven't already mentioned repeatedly?

1. I've asked author E.R. Braithwaite (To Sir With Love) a lame question about tropical fish. I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time.

2. I've met two wrestlers in connection with their acting gigs: my semi-namesake Terry Funk (co-star of Tequila & Bonetti) and a Quantum Leap walk-on who called himself "Jay York, the Alaskan."

3. I've written a short (unproduced) film that combines time travel with sex education. I don't remember the plot; it was over thirty years ago.

4. I've stood next to Joe Strummer and played one coin-operated video game while he played another in some Ohio hotel. Can't remember which of us was playing Pole Position, nor whether it was in Akron or Kent (as in Kent State).

5. I've been frightened, while running a fever, of the imagined image of the kind of clothespin that doesn't clamp shut. I think it was when I had the mumps.

6. I've had nightmares about trying to determine debits and credits in aspects of life that have nothing to do with financial accounting.

7. I've seen O.J. Simpson run through an airport. No cameras were present.

8. I've seen an osprey (a relative of the eagle that lives on fish) perched in a saguaro cactus in the desert.

9. I've called the BBC at 3 AM Tucson time, right after being frightened by a Talking Moose. (The latter was an early Mac program, not a Captain Kangaroo sidekick. It startled me.)

10. I've driven about fifty miles on a scooter with no working headlight, half of that after sunset; and 1100 miles roundtrip (Columbus OH to Syracuse with two stops at Niagara Falls) on a scooter with a broken speedometer.

The scooter in question, sans speedometer cable, 1985

Karen

New Monday Photo Shoot #3: Downtown

Downtown Tucson - but you can't get there from here.

New Monday Photo Shoot #3: Show us something you saw downtown. For the purposes of this week's topic, your "downtown" can be in any municipality you go into on a regular basis, from the major city two hours down the highway to your own city, town, or village, or the only gas station and traffic light in a fifty mile radius.

As some of you know from last night's entry, I spent a couple hours yesterday walking around downtown Tucson. I started at the old train depot, visited their museum, checked in at the historic Hotel Congress (but not literally), and then walked all the way to a highly unusual pedestrian bridge that will be the subject of a later entry. Once across the bridge I found myself on a long footpath with no exit for at least half a mile, and then a series of streets blocked by construction. Finally I reached a scenic old underpass, and found my way back to the railroad depot at dusk. I'll cover all that visually and in more depth at a later date, but for tonight I want to share a few images that turned up toward the beginning of my long walk. They immediately reminded me of John Scalzi, originator of the Monday Photo Shoots. Here they are:


I know I didn't get the best angle on this (didn't want to stand in the middle of a downtown street among the traffic cones!), but can you tell what's being depicted in this mural? Perhaps the one next to it will help:

Yes, you've got it. Zombies! Zombies in downtown Tucson! Somehow when I set out for downtown yesterday afternoon, I didn't expect to encounter zombies. Silly me. And what about this guy?


Still, he hasn't come to any harm yet, as far as I can tell. As for me, I escaped with my brains intact, as far as I can tell.

Your turn: go downtown and find something interesting to show us, or pull something of the sort from your archives. Post it to your blog or journal, and then come back here and leave a link to it in comments. I'm looking forward to seeing the variety of downtowns we get, and the things to be seen there!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: What We're Not Watching

Our tvs are gathering dust, unless we have DVR

For our first post-By the Way edition of the Weekend Assignment, I asked,

Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns?

Here are snippets from the bumper crop of responses. Click on the links below to see everyone's full remarks:

John Scalzi : "I got out of the habit of watching TV regularly when I was in high school, since we weren’t allowed to watch TV there as a general rule."

Tanyad (Fenris_Cranston): "The only thing thats really chafing me is the loss of the new season of 24 until the strike is over."

Hieronymus: "The one place it has hit home is in my daily DVR of "The Daily Show", which has been in reruns so their topical impact is obviously lessened."

Saqib: "First of all the company who set up my satellite receiver provides only 50 channels, no ifs ands or buts. So they like to change the channel lineup just to keep things interesting."

Mike: "For starters, I'd have to say that our TiVo is getting less of a workout. If it wasn't for all the kids shows we record, the poor machine would be very lonely."

Codefool (Garyl Hester): "It does not bother me that shows are in reruns other than it means that the strike is still on, and that means “real” folks are hurting."

Laura: "Until very recently I have not put much thought into how the writer’s strike might be affecting me because I had a back-log of dvr’d shows...."

Aelf'en: "PBS seems largely unaffected by the strike. Much of what they're showing are nature shows and educational programs that were written way long before the strike began."

Adam Rakunas: What’s funny is that we ran out of Tivoed backlog just as Life On Mars started up, and The Daily Show’s coming back next week...."

Julie Barrett: "If it's not on the PVR I'm probably not going to make time to watch it - unless it's House."

Becky: "Oh man...it would be easier to ask what DON'T I miss. I'm a network TV junkie. Even some of my morning talk shows have been affected by the strike."

syrinxkat: How is it affecting me? Not at all, other than a minor twinge of curiosity at how The Daily Show would cover the campaign trail. I've been almost entirely prime time free for years."

Jeff: "the WGA strike is hitting me pretty hard, or I should say will hit me pretty hard, once I finally catch up on the almost 30 hours of shows on my Tivo."

Unfocused Me: "It wasn't that we didn't enjoy the shows when we watched them -- we did. It was just that something had to go, and I really couldn't give up any more sleep."

Deb Geisler: "Jeopardy goes on; there's been a lot of weather(!) and news; and football doesn't rely on writers so much (but might benefit from some better scripts)."

TexasPatrick: "But the thing that drew me into any TV watching whatsoever, wasn't a show . . . it was a thing: the DVR. Well, that and Battlestar Galactica."

fdtate: "What was really killing me was not being able to watch new episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Both shows are back on now without writers."

Maria: "Of these, the only one I sorely miss is The Daily Show. Jon Stewart’s take on the news is a real wake-up call."

Florinda: "The show I probably miss the most is Scrubs, and that's partly because this is supposed to be its final season and I'm uncertain how the disruption of the strike will affect that."

Zeke: "Honestly a lot of my DVR is filled with more unscripted shows or reruns, Sunrise Earth, Star Trek Voyager, Deep Space 9, stuff like that."

Mythusmage: "Even if I had a properly functioning tv (vertical is screwed) I wouldn’t be watching fiction on tv. Documentaries and factual series are more my style."

A.B.: "Without cable, I go once around the horn, see there's nothing on, and turn it off, returning to my book, laptop, or less frequently, my crocheting."

Vixen Strangely: "I am affected a little as the season numero dos of "Heroes" was cut short and I wanted more, more more."

muneraven: "Tv was losing me already before the writer's strike, but the writer's strike has more or less accelerated the process."

Two--no, three--things strike me as significant about the general tenor of these responses:

1. Most people in this admittedly skewed sampling watch very little network tv anyway - or, at least, they say they don't, and I believe them, mostly.

2. What tv they do watch is mostly delivered on a time delay at their convenience, by DVR or, to a lesser extent, on DVD.

3. More people in this group miss(ed) The Daily Show than any single prime time series.

I'm not sure what all this means for the parties in this strike, but it looks to me as though the pie they've been squabbling over all these years is rapidly breaking down into crumbs. The WGA is probably right to think that alternative means of pie delivery, virtual pie and pie-like products are going to be increasingly important as time does on.

Thanks, everyone! Your new Weekend Assignment will be posted here in a couple of hours.

Karen

Wow! Welcome, Scalzi Fans!

Normally I don't use Internet and texting slang and abbreviations, but just this once:

OMG! W00t! *squee*

Ahem.

I had a wonderful surprise this morning (Friday), and some of you already know what it was. The first comment on last night's Weekend Assignment (which I misnumbered, incidentally) was from the originator of the Weekend Assignment meme, John Scalzi himself. He not only did the assignment, but also pointed his thousands of readers toward my humble blog, so that they could play along too. Here's why this was a great thing for him to do:

1. It's no secret that I was nervous about whether there would be more than one or two responses to my attempt to keep Scalzi's meme going (and his other one, the Monday Photo Shoot). Most of his By the Way readers probably wouldn't even know it was being attempted. Heck, even the blogplugs entry in Magic Smoke lists the entry as my response to the assignment, not as a new assignment for everyone to do. And the now-scattered community that Scalzi nurtured for four and a half years hasn't always managed a big turnout for him in recent months, let alone for someone else. In introducing his huge Whatever readership to the Weekend Assignments, he's exposing the somewhat insular remnants of the old AOL-JLanders to a whole new group of erudite and enthusiastic bloggers. This should benefit everyone in terms of new readers and new ideas, and pretty much ensure the Weekend Assignment's survival.

2. The other aspect of this a somewhat more personal one, although it also has implications for the success or failure of the meme's revival. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a relative nobody with 80 to 100 readers a day to take over, unasked, something originated by a famous, award-winning writer whose personal blog gets 24,703 unique visits a day, and whose somewhat less popular corporate blog was nevertheless the touchstone for a whole community. People might think I was usurping or self-aggrandizing. But the fact is that I love these two memes and don't want to give them up if there's a choice. Scalzi knows this, and furthermore sees that the memes' continuation is a good thing, not just for that fanatic in Tucson but for anyone who enjoys writing or reading the Weekend Assignment entries. For all that to work, it's best that people know I'm doing this with permission; but Scalzi's Whatever entry goes way beyond that, well into endorsement territory. I wasn't expecting that, and I surely appreciate it. (In case you're curious, The Outpost had 239 unique readers on Friday, more than 200% of "normal.")

And now, because I happened to take some interesting photos today, a complete change of subject:

I liked the pattern of clouds this morning as I drove to work, nearly ten minutes late because I was totally distracted by all the blog comments and lost track of the time.


A minute or so later I was presented with this even-more-interesting cloud pattern. It was that tiny cloud in the middle that fascinated me. Neither this shot nor the other cloud photo is edited at all except for resizing and a "sharpen lightly" or two.


Tonight's sunset was much better than the one a week ago, but I can't show you the best of it. The first shot I took featured the ball of the sun between two vehicles at Famous Vehicle Dealer, and I don't want to identify the business to you quite that explicitly. After that I was driving. Every moment either there were buildings or trees in the way, or both; and I proved to myself yet again that it's just about impossible to photograph a sunset at 50 mph. That's the one disadvantage of my route home: there's no good place to pause for a picture. But the color when I got to the Safeway lot was rather nice. I've boosted the saturation a bit here to show it to you.


And here's the same sunset just about two minutes later, as photographed from the actual Safeway part of the Safeway lot.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #197: Missing Words

Ok, we're going to try this. John Scalzi left off with Weekend Assignment #196, so with his permission and encouragement, let's try to keep it going. Here then is Weekend Assignment #197 (numbering corrected Saturday at 4:38 AM):

There's not a lot on tv these days.

Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns? Do you miss your weekly appointment with that ill-behaved doctor, or your visits to Wisteria Lane? Does it bother you not to laugh at fresh jokes on your favorite sitcom? Or are you just as happy watching reality shows, or new episodes of shows that have been held back until now? We want to know!

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

To be honest, I don't watch much broadcast TV myself. Most of the time I watch DVDs instead, if anything. But even I am missing the few shows I normally do watch. Three of them are--or were--on NBC's Monday night sf lineup: Chuck, followed by Heroes, followed by Journeyman. I kind of lost track of Chuck after he fought with his beautiful C.I.A. minder once too often, but I watched the other two every week.

And much as I like Hiro and Peter and Claire, I have to say the show I miss the most that night is Journeyman. I'm a sucker for time travel shows anyway, and this one does it well. Sure, it's essentially a Quantum Leap ripoff, but there are worse things to rip off--much worse. And the character dynamics are interesting, as the wife struggles to cope with her frequently time-lost husband, their young son starts to catch on to what is happening, and the traveler's brother struggles to make sense of what's happening with more mundane explanations. Good stuff!

Then there's Tuesday night. And yes, Julie, I do miss House MD, probably more than Journeyman. I think.

And what do I do on Monday and Tuesday nights? Why, I spend it at the computer, of course, with a DVD running on one laptop and ten tabs of Firefox open on the other!

Your turn: write up what you miss (or don't miss) on tv these days, and come back here and leave a link in comments. If for some reason you have trouble commenting (although it should work for everyone, one way or another), feel free to email your link to mavarin at aol.com. To give time for word to spread and everyone to play, I'll do the roundup of your links in one week, next Thursday night. Got it? Good! Thanks, folks! I know I'm no John Scalzi, but we don't have to lose his legacy, as long as some of us care enough to keep it going!

Edit: I have been taken to task for not explaining what the WGA is and why it matters. I don't want to get into the politics of it (let's just say I'm pro-WGA and leave it at that), but here's what it's about:

WGA is the Writer's Guild of America, the folks who write the TV shows. As has been widely reported over the last few months, they're on strike, so networks and production companies are running out of new episodes of comedies and dramas. Why it matters, aside from inconvenience to the viewer and economic impact on the entertainment industry and the New York and California economies, is that it's a battle over writers being compensated for their work in new media such as Internet downloads. The result will set a precedent in determining the extent to which new tech is made part of the royalty pie.

Karen

When in Doubt, Post a Photo

Post-sunrise effects on my morning commute, 1/2/08

So far, the response to my attempt to keep John Scalzi's Monday Photo Shoot going has been underwhelming. Several things give me hope, however. One: Monday was New Year's Eve, and people had better things to do than read blogs. I therefore can't expect a lot of people to drop everything and take on a meme we all thought was kaput. Two: it's only the first week, and I don't have the readership By the Way had. I should be a little patient. Three, and most encouraging of all: I have John Scalzi's blessing to do this:

No need to worry. I'm not doing them anymore. Someone should. And I think you'd be good at it.
--John Scalzi

So if you've been hanging back out of respect for the Blogfather, or if you were busy and just missed the entry, I encourage you to jump in and show your support for the Monday Photo Shoot continuing, if indeed you want it to continue at all. In deference to the fact that we're necessarily going to be off to a slow start, I'm extending the deadline for the MPS topic "What's New?" until Sunday night, so that I can post your links along with the second Monday Photo Shoot in the wee hours of next Monday morning.

And while we're at at: how do you feel about continuing the Weekend Assignments? If anyone is interested, I'll post one of those tomorrow night. And again, if someone else wants to take over either of these memes, I'll be glad to support your efforts. But I love doing these, and I'd rather post my pale imitation of them than do without entirely.

Oh, and meanwhile, I have just two things to report for today:

Another edit of the same photo

1. Something that looked very much like the rising sun was in the eastern sky as I started toward work this morning. So I photographed it for you. Here it is, and yes I've increased the saturation and played with the tone values. I'm very much a sunset person and a night owl, so I don't normally do sunrises. To me, sunrise is best approached from the other direction, as something to be glanced at as I finally head off to bed. Mind you, that's not something I can get away with on the average weekday!
2. I finished editing Chapter One tonight. And the Weasel hardly said a word.

Karen

Your Substitute Monday Photo Shoot: What's New?

As you should all know by now, today (Monday, December 31st, 2007) was John Scalzi's last day blogging for AOL on By the Way. A number of people have said they were going to miss John's Monday Photo Shoots, and a few have asked me whether anyone will be picking up the slack, and assigning them in John's stead. MPS addict that I am, I'm willing to give it a shot. How about you?

Here's how this will work: I will post an entry every Monday with that week's subject. (After this week, it will be early Monday AM, not Monday night.) If you want to join in, take your picture, post it to your blog or journal, and leave a link in the comments to the original entry here. On Thursday night, I'll do a follow-up entry just as John did, linking back to everyone who participated. Simple, no? Then let's get started!

Your Substitute Monday Photo Shoot #1: What's New? In honor of the new year, show us something new. It can be a gift you got over the holidays, something you gave yourself, or even something that symbolizes the New Year to you. If it's new, it'll do!

Here's mine:


This is the coolest Christmas present I got this year: the 25th Anniversary Illustrated Collector's Edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It's one of my favorite books of all time. It's also one of my favorite tv shows and spoken word records, several of my favorite audio tapes, my very favorite radio show and my second favorite towel. It's not remotely my favorite film, but one can't have everything.


I have the text of the first Hitchhiker's book in several editions as it is, but this one is pretty special. It's full of visual reproductions of annotated scripts, behind the scenes photos from the various productions, merchandise, flyers and fan memorabilia. Love it! (And yes, I realize the above photo isn't terribly good from a technical standpoint. The glare off glossy paper gets me every time!)

Your turn! Take a picture of something new, post it to your blog, and come back here and leave your link. You have until midnight Thursday night, when I will compile the roundup of links. Remember, your participation or lack thereof will determine whether there's still a Monday Photo Shoot in the weeks ahead. And if someone else wants to take it over, please let me know so we can coordinate. Thanks!

Karen

Last Day

It's December 31st as I write this, 3:08 AM. As usual I need to get to bed, and in any case I'm not ready to organize my year-end thoughts about what's happened and what's to come. But there is one subject that cannot be put off until tomorrow evening:

Today is John Scalzi's last day under contract to AOL.

As I mentioned previously, Steven, Carly and I have put together a Scalzi tribute journal on AOL, ScalziCelebration. Despite the fact that the old AOL-J community has long since scattered hither and yon, I was hoping for a better turnout of people saying nice things about our Blogfather. Still, some of you have added your thanks, kudos and recollections, and we'll be doing at least one new entry tomorrow with a roundup of these. Meanwhile, Carly has put together a Flat Scalzi entry, and we hope you'll join in the fun there, too. Speaking of which:


Here is Flat Scalzi hanging out in the Park Place Century Theatres lobby with a Pixar robot and a cool drink - Coke Zero of course! He said he felt at home with his science fictional compadre, and hopes to see him again at conventions and book signings.

And here he is enjoying a Safeway sunset with me. Just having him around made the evening more colorful - and a bit surreal!

Many thanks to the real John Scalzi for four-plus years of fun and inspiration. See ya around!

Karen

See You Around, John Scalzi!

Your Final Photo Shoot: Wave goodbye! Because all good things must come to an end, but I think we can leave on a high note.

At this sad moment, I am somewhat comforted by the fact that many of the variations on "goodbye" contain in their meaning the expectation of "hello." Aloha! Au revoir! See ya! Auf wiedersehen! Hasta la vista....

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu!
Adieu! Adieu! To yieu and yieu and yieu!

Happy trails to you, 'til we meet again!

I'll see you again, JS, on tour, at a con, at the very least on Whatever. Meanwhile, be well and happy and productive!

Your long-winded pal in AZ,

Karen

P.S. Don't forget, folks: ScalziCelebration is open for your tributes. Expect some updates this weekend!

Celebrate Him Home

As we know, AOL will soon be parting company with John Scalzi, creator of the AOL Journal By the Way, the Weekend Assignments, Monday Photo Shoots, and a handful of nifty Ficlets. This is one of those "by mutual agreement" situations; AOL is contemplating a change in direction, and Scalzi is contemplating how much easier it will be to meet his deadlines for writing books if he's not busy amusing us with news of phosphorescent cats and fun games and pictures out hotel windows.

I already did my main Scalzi tribute entry, so I'm not going to go on and on about him tonight.

That's where you come in.

Are you one of John Scalzi's many fans? Was it because of him that you first learned how to upload a photo or a video, or had at least one thing to write about each weekend? Has By the Way or the Ficlets blog always been a "must read" for you? As time ticks away to the end of the year, when Scalzi's AOL contract runs out, would you like to show your appreciation for his four years of fun and inspiration and community building, and share your favorite Scalzi memes or moments with other readers?

If so, we've got just the journal for you!

It's called

ScalziCelebration

and it just went live tonight. Carly (whose idea this was), Steven and I have put it together on AOL as a centralized place in which we can all thank John Scalzi for all his good work, and leave links to our own tributes, favorite Monday Photo Shoots, Weekend Assignments, Ficlets or other Scalzi-related fun. We've got three entries to get things started, and we'll be adding more over the next three weeks, featuring YOUR links and tributes, plus several surprises. So click on over and see what you think. Let's gather our scattered journaling community one more time, and give our Blogfather a big send-off!

Karen

By the Wayside

Wave bye-bye to daily doses of By the Way

The other shoe has dropped: John Scalzi has announced that his contract with AOL runs out at the end of this year and is not being renewed. No more Scalzi on the Ficlets blog, no more By the Way, except for possibly the occasional unpaid posting "as a civilian." No more Weekend Assignments or Monday Photo Shoots, unless someone else manages to take up the slack. As of January 1, 2008, the blogosphere is going to have a big hole near its heart - a Blogfather-shaped hole. Scalzi will still be online, but no longer as our friendly AOL-based guide to the Internet.

For once, this is not AOL shooting itself and others in the foot; not entirely, anyway. Scalzi reports that it was a mutual decision, and frankly it's not an unexpected one. For some time now it's been clear that the AOL gig was starting to get in the way of his burgeoning book career, and vice versa. As obsessive as I've always been about posting my Weekend Assignment entry every single Thursday night/Friday morning, and my Monday Photo Shoot entry every Monday night, even I've had to back off in the last month or two, because Scalzi himself could no longer keep to that schedule every single week. And who can blame him? In a choice between meeting a contractual deadline for turning in a book manuscript, or asking readers to post a picture of a tree, I doubt that many of us would give the meme our highest priority.

So here we go, heading into the end of an era, yet again. A lot has changed since I posted my response to Weekend Assignment #7, way back on May 30, 2004. I was just looking over some of Scalzi's own entries from 2004, and was struck by how very different they are from his later ones. For starters, they tend to be short, vanilla text with no pictures, and relatively lacking in that trademark Scalzi humor. Some of that was the limitations of the blogging platform: you couldn't do long entries, I don't think you could choose your text size, and photos weren't that easy to post. But it hardly mattered. AOL J-Land was just under a year old, and most people had barely heard of blogs, let alone memes. John showed us how to blog, right there on AOL. And for most of us in those days, AOL was the only game in town. Everyone read By the Way, and so many people did the early Weekend Assignments that it took Scalzi three entries a week just to link to the responses. That first one I did, about vacations you haven't been on, had 76 comments to his original entry. Imagine! Even allowing for the responses that were in the comment thread rather than their own blog entries, that's a huge number of comments. Offhand I only know of one contemporary AOL Journal that gets numbers like that, and it's not By the Way.

And I suppose it's inevitable that the response to the Weekend Assignments and Monday Photo Shoots has dwindled over the past couple of years. The AOL-J diaspora in the wake of the banner ads soured many people on anything to do with AOL, and John undeservedly caught a lot of the flack over that. Tempers eventually cooled, but it was never quite the same community again. Lots of us ventured out into the wider blogosphere, and discovered a world beyond AOL, with lots and lots of memes we could use to fill up our blogs. We learned HTML and CSS (well, some did, anyway), and blogging platforms competed to have the best features and the most ease of use. We no longer needed John Scalzi to explain patiently how to post a picture or create a hyperlink, or to give us something to write about on a Thursday night. And somewhere in there, AOL stopped promoting By the Way, so that its readership thereafter consisted mostly of the longtime faithful.

During this same period, the writing career Scalzi had successfully nurtured for years stopped being mostly about corporate work as his fiction writing took off, supplemented by the occasional non-fiction book. He's now had a dozen books published, if you count The Sagan Diary. I'm lucky enough to have his award-winning debut novel, Old Man's War, in hardcover, and personally autographed. (I held off reading it for a long time, assuming it was too military to appeal to me. I was wrong.) It's one of four Scalzi books I own to date, and even at that I'm a slacker. His non-fiction book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is on my Amazon wish list, along with The Sagan Diary. He's got at least three books scheduled to come out in 2008. His books have been published in multiple languages, and he's been an honored guest speaker from Google HQ to France.

And meanwhile, some of the recent Weekend Assignments and Monday Photo Shoots have had as few as four or five responses. Is it any wonder that he's decided that now would be a good time to make a change, and concentrate on the books instead of corporate blogging?

But it's sad for us, the longtime readers of By the Way, as we lose our last rallying point, and perhaps our last connection to the halcyon days of early J-Land. We can always check in with Scalzi over on Whatever (I stubbornly never add the definite article to that blog's title), but it's a safe bet he's not going to be suggesting blog topics for us, and linking to our responses. I have to say, I've seriously considered trying to take over Scalzi's two BTW memes, if he and AOL don't mind. But even if I did, it wouldn't be the same. There is only one John Scalzi, one Blogfather.

Still, let's set aside our regrets. Instead, let's look back with gratitude at all he's done for us on By the Way (and secondarily the Ficlets blog), and forward to all the books he'll have more time to write now. Surely that's worth missing out on the continuation of two weekly memes that were already getting lost in the Internet clutter.

Thanks, John, and all the best!

Karen