My work here is done...

Like a lot of people, I'm fascinated by the weird and wonderful wildlife found around our planet. So I was really interested when I heard/read a story about a recent survey of deep-sea creatures and the new species they had found. I love reading about new species—it's a reminder that there's always something left to discover, even if you think you know it all—and besides, new species are usually some of the freakiest-looking creatures you've ever laid eyes on.

I was really impressed by this recently discovered hydromedusa jellyfish, Bathykorus bouilloni, that they had nicknamed the "Darth Vader Jellyfish." (I'd reproduce the photo here but it's copyrighted, so here's a link to the National Geographic pic.) This critter was a jellyfish that looked like Darth Vader's helmet, round on the top with that crazy flared brim at the bottom. I shared this fact with Boy, since I thought he might find it amusing (and yes, I'll admit I'm desperate to have a conversation with him that elicits more than a grunt).

ME: "Oh, did you hear about that new jellyfish they're calling the Darth Vader jellyfish? It kinda looks like his helmet."
BOY: "Is it black?"
ME: "No, it's white, but it really has the same shape."
BOY: "If it's white they should call it a Stormtrooper jellyfish."
ME: "Stormtrooper helmets aren't the same shape. They don't have that flared thingy at the bottom."
BOY: "But the Vader helmet is based on Stormtrooper helmets."
ME: "????"

Every parent hopes that some day their children will grow up to share their interests and values. Yesterday I had a pointless, nerd-tastic argument with my son involving science fiction trivia. I think I've done my job!

The Quilt Files, Episode 18

I've been quilting for almost ten years now, and for most of that time I've been receiving the Keepsake Quilting catalog. I've bought quite a few patterns from them, and a few fabrics, although many of those patterns remain on my "to-do" shelf. I'd always eyed their KQ Challenges with interest, and a few years ago decided to try one for myself. The idea of the KQ Challenge is that you get six fat quarters, and you have to create a 30" x 30" quilt using at least four of them, with the addition of no more than two extra fabrics. I'd been hesitant before because you don't get to see the fabrics ahead of time, but finally I saw a challenge that sounded promising. I can't remember the exact title, but two things stood out: it was to contain no applique, just piecing, and the fabrics were described with something along the lines of "bright." Since I love bright colors, I thought I could stand working with that. Imagine my disappointment when my package of fabrics arrived and contained the following:

Now, the pink, turquoise, and purple fabrics were fine. The stripe, however, didn't really match the same cool palette, and the barf-green plaid was just plain hideous. I don't have a scrap of the sixth fabric, as I used it all on the back, but it was a bali-type that was mainly brownish-black, with spots of turquoise, peach, and a pink that was plummy-brown—a much warmer tone than the pink confetti fabric. I really wasn't sure what to do. Then I looked a little more closely at the pink fabric (which was actually a slightly different pattern than the sample above from the same manufacturer's line). I saw lots of what looked like ones and zeros. My little nerd mind immediately thought digitally, I bought some golden-orange fabric to pick up on the gold in the purple and pink patterns, ... and this is what I ended up with:

It was tricky, as I couldn't use applique to make the ones and zeros (and besides, I hadn't really done any applique to that point). Instead, I used the little trick with triangles: if you use them in the right proportion, you can approximate the look of curves. Take a closer look:

So you can see I managed to get four fabrics in there: the turquoise for the ones, the purple for the zeroes, the stripe for a small inside border (judiciously cut to avoid the ugly colors), and the digital pink print for the large border. If you look closely at the above photo, you'll also see that I quilted all in "1s" and "0s," using a metallic ombre thread by machine. To complete my
Digital Delight," as I called it, I translated "Keepsake Quilting Challenge," my name, and the date into binary numbers (A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, except in this case A=1, B=10, C=11, D=100. Yes, I know I'm a total nerd.*) and quilted it into the big border. The challenge judges didn't award it any prizes, but I liked the result, especially considering the sad prospects of what I started with. I'm not sure what to do with it, so it sits in my closet until I find some place or some person (maybe a computer programmer?) who can appreciate my weird mix of fabric and math.

*It reminds me of the old joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Photo of the Week--12/21/09

You know what? There aren't any pigeons in Tunisia, either. At least not out near the Sahara Desert. What you can sometimes find, or what we found in 2000, was an abandoned set from Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. Tunisia has stood in for Tatooine since the original Star Wars (no numeral or subtitle, remember those days?) back in 1977. George Lucas left this set here after filming TPM; it wasn't because he planned on reusing it (at least I don't think so, from the state it was in), but because he knew it would provide extra tourist revenue for the locals. We were certainly excited to visit Anakin's neighborhood, climb inside the buildings and see their hollow, undecorated interiors, and take pictures. Here Boy is with a fellow Star Wars fanatic outside Watto's shop, walking around and trying to identify the buildings.

Yes, we know we're nerds.

More science, please.

Something rare happened the other night: Boy and I looked at our TIVO list, saw the second part of a miniseries, and looked at each other and said, "delete this, right?" It's a rare thing, because I almost always will stick with a story to find out the ending, even if it's poorly written/acted/filmed. Sometimes it's even fun to watch something trashy, in that so-bad-it's-good way. Boy and I call these kinds of programs "Cheesy goodness," and apply that label most often to disaster movies.

Ah, disaster movies. We can't get enough of them. My excuse is that I'm a child of the '70s, and grew up in a time when disaster movies were enjoying unprecedented popularity. The Towering Inferno? Loved it. The Poseidon Adventure? Ate it up. Earthquake with Sensurround*? I still remember feeling the seats in the old Michigan Theater shake. Boy, of course, is a boy. When he was little, he was fascinated by disasters; destruction was even better than construction. We watched a lot of Discovery Channel; if there was a volcano/tornado/hurricane/earthquake/meteor strike, he was fascinated. There was a renaissance of sorts of the disaster movie in the late '90s, so we watched them all: Deep Impact, Armageddon, Volcano, Dante's Peak ... so cheesy, but such fun to watch all the destruction!

Television networks believe that summer is the best time to dump their cheesy disaster flicks, which often look like an episode of the Love Boat, with all the network's various series stars showing up to take parts. In 2004 NBC aired 10.5, about a super-duper killer earthquake, and followed that up two years later with a sequel, 10.5: Apocalypse. We wallowed in the cheesy goodness. It was stupid and totally predictable, but that was part of the fun.

So we were excited this summer when not one but two (because of course no television network comes up with anything original, or if they do they soon kill it) miniseries were scheduled to air about big space objects hitting the earth. The first one aired on ABC; called Impact, it featured a celestial object striking the moon, sending big chunks our way. It got a little out there when it turned out the object that hit the moon was a brown dwarf that made our gravity go crazy, but overall it was just as advertised: cheesy goodness. I'm willing to suspend disbelief quite a long way as long as I get lots of destruction, with scientists predictably saving the day.

Our first sign that NBC's earth-meets-space-object miniseries, Meteor, might not be up to even our low standards came in the very first shot: a large, rocky object sailing through the darkness of space, trailing gas and making whooshing noises. "Hey," Boy said, "that's dumb. There's no air to carry sound in space!" I snorted and kept watching the first pieces of meteor hit in California overnight. Things went boom! Yay! I kept watching, between increasingly ridiculous predicaments facing a various characters—a couple of which had nothing to do with the meteor—as over the next ten hours of story as all the meteor pieces kept hitting in the same town in California.

Okay, I'm willing to suspend disbelief to a certain point, but you're telling me the scriptwriters couldn't be bothered to incorporate what Copernicus discovered in the 16th century, that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis? (Thus meaning that any meteor fragments would be land at different points the earth, "traveling" like the sunrise.) By the time the ingenue scientist had survived running out of gas, having her mentor splatted by a van, encountering thugs who had taken over a police station and tried to rape her, and being imprisoned by border patrol, only to have the car taking her and her vital data to safety be struck by a meteor-ignited gas hauler, I'd had enough. If there isn't any science in your science fiction**/disaster flick, if you're going to treat me like I'm really that stupid, I can't be bothered.

Good thing Wipeout is on tonight; Boy and I will watch something mindless that doesn't insult us.

*Sensurround, aka souped-up subwoofers, was pioneered in Earthquake, actually winning the film an Oscar for best sound.
**Don't get me started on the atrocity that is Total Recall. I could rant for days on the errors in that film.

More fun with numbers

I wasn't paying attention, so it escaped my notice that yesterday was my 200th blog post! I guess time flies when you're blathering about nothing much at all. I thought I'd crunch some numbers anyway, math nerd that I am, and take stock of the last 100 posts. So this is what I've covered since the last time I considered the blog:

163 days (7 days fewer than the first 100 posts)
21 photos of the week
13 posts on Jane Austen
7 rants (2 more than the last 100, it must be the crappy weather)
7 posts on words
6 posts on writing
4 posts on quilting
3 posts proving I'm a nerd
4 submissions to editors or agents
2 rejections (one champagne from an editor I really admire)
1 request for a full mss
1 agent taking his sweet time to get back to me
23,449 words written for pay (more than twice last time!)
many, many, many fewer written for fun
3 followers (I've tripled since last time! who knew insanity is contagious!)
untold* occasional visitors

I guess I'll keep on blogging; there's no particular reason to keep blathering, but there's no reason to stop, either. See you in another 200.

*And I treasure all half dozen of you, especially you people who haven't met me but manage to leave a comment anyway! Thanks!

Bird Nerd Alert!

I think I've admitted before that I'm a total nerd in many ways. I get lost in the dictionary; I'm making sure Boy sees every episode of Monty Python and Star Trek (original and Next Gen); and I spend way too much time looking up into trees and saying, "Hey, what kind of bird is that?"

Now, I'm not a true bird nerd. I don't buy books listing birds of every area I visit and check them off when I see them, like the gentleman I met during our Antarctica trip. (Although to be fair, I think he was a retired professor of natural resources, if not an actual ornithologist.) But I can tell a house finch from a house sparrow, a grackle from a cowbird, and a mourning dove from a rock dove (aka skyrat er, pigeon). I have a well-thumbed copy of Birds of Michigan Field Guide, which is helpfully organized by color and size for ease of looking things up. I think I've mentioned before that although we live in the middle of suburbia, we see all sorts of wildlife around us. Egrets and blue herons make use of local retaining ponds and wetland projects, and I often see raptors on the road between here and Ann Arbor. (And occasionally in my yard, thanks to my birdfeeders.)

So when I hear a strange tapping sound nearby, my ears prick up. This weekend was not the first time we've had a visitor to our corkscrew willow tree; besides strewing branches over our lawn at the slightest wind, it has a really nice hollow branch that woodpeckers really love. I've learned to look there when I hear drumming, so it doesn't take me five minutes to catch a glimpse any more. This time I found the little guy within a few seconds, and with my binoculars and field guide handy, I tried to figure out what kind of bird he was.

White front, black-and-white back, red tonsure: it had to be a male woodpecker of the Picoides genus. But a downy woodpecker (Picoides pubecens) or a hairy woodpecker (Picoides villosus)? Luckily, my field guide has a "compare" section that suggests how to tell them apart. The downy woodpecker is 3 inches smaller than his hairy counterpart, and has a shorter bill and black spots on his tail. I took a picture so I could zoom in and look more closely. Unfortunately, I can't see this guy's bill or tail very well, but from a distance I thought he was more likely the larger size woodpecker.

I tried checking pictures online, but except for the tail and beak, the two species are almost identical. I tried listening to bird calls for the two, but all I discovered was that playing bird calls on your computer is an awesome way to confuse and torture a cat that's walking across your desk. So I'm going to trust in my ability to judge size from a distance and tentatively say this picture is of a hairy woodpecker. But I could be wrong.

Finally a champ!

Most of you probably know I'm a huge football fan. I bleed Maize 'n' Blue (and there was a LOT of bleeding this year), and I've already written about how being a Lions fan has prepared me for the publication search. Sunday afternoon means my workroom TV is turned to NFL football. When we were living in London, I listened to Michigan games live on the internet, and taped Monday Night Football so I could get my fix. I subscribed to the premium sports channel in January just so I could watch the playoffs and Super Bowl. I even turned a trip to Scotland into an opportunity for football, taking the boys to an NFL Europe game. (Watching football in a soccer stadium half-full of Scottish fans is a mind-trip deserving of its own post someday, but not now.)

The final sign I've gone completely cuckoo for football was joining a fantasy football league a few years back. You may have heard something about fantasy football—it's gone from a weird hobby to a real money-making business over the past few years—but if not, I'll just explain the basics. Essentially, you pick your own "team" made of the basic positions: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, kicker, and defense. Your players can come from a dozen different teams if you like. When they play, you score points for each yard gained, touchdown scored, or fumble recovered (or lost). So every week, you see whether your players earned more points than your opponents'. Based on your performance head-to-head, you get wins and losses; you even have playoffs during the last two or three games of the year.

It sounds crazy, but the NFL loves it—it gives fans who might ignore the sport once their team is out of it* a reason to keep watching. I now pay more attention to all games, hoping to see how my players are doing. And I seemed to do okay with my picks. In my first year, 2005, I finished third in the regular season (thanks to Pats QB Tom Brady and the Indianapolis defense), but I tanked in the playoffs and finished last in the league. In 2006, I again finished third in the regular season (Brady again), and third in the playoffs. Last year, I finished first in the regular season (Indy QB Peyton Manning), but tanked in the playoffs, again finishing third.

But finally, in a year when I got no pleasure from local teams, my fantasy team came through. I got the jackpot #1 draft pick, so I not only got Vikings RB Adrian Peterson, but also Peyton Manning and Bears RB Matt Forte. (Consistent RBs are the key to fantasy success, I've decided.) With some luck in the draft, and some smart pickups, I finished first in the regular season. I squeaked by in my first playoff matchup, and only needed 8 points from the Monday night game to win the championship. I spent last night glued to the Chicago-Green Bay game, muttering "rush Forte!" through three quarters as Chicago's offense went nowhere. Finally, they listened, Forte broke through for some yardage, and eventually scored a TD. And I am now a fantasy football champion.

So I'm happy, even if the whole idea is a bit sad. (Even sadder: I'm trying not to think about how there's only one more month before football is done and I must endure the gloom of winter with nothing but hockey and basketball.)

*Not me, I was still listening to the Lions on the radio Sunday, hoping they might get that first win. They lost. So who's more pathetic, them or me?

Fun with numbers!

I looked at my statistics yesterday, and realized that this would be my 100th post in The Blathering. That's a pretty impressive number—at least, if you're a math nerd who loves playing with numbers, like me. (Example of math nerdery: while at Nationals this summer, I told my teammates that it was easy to remember my room number: it was a perfect power of 2, on the 5th floor, so of course it was 512. I saw quite a few head shakes in response to reciting this fun fact.) Anyway, I thought the way to celebrate my 100th post was to look at all the fun numbers related to this blog, which I started at the beginning of June:

170 days to write 100 posts
23 travel photos posted
13 posts about writing
9 haiku composed
9 posts about sewing/quilting
8 posts about cats (it only feels like more; sorry!)
8 posts about words
6 posts complaining about how boring Moby Dick was
5 ranting posts (although I feel another coming on, about the ancient piece-of-crap Jeep perpetually parked across from my driveway)
5 posts that prove I'm a total nerd (some might argue the number is 100)
6 manuscripts sent to publishers/agents
4 rejection letters
2 agents/publishers who need to speed it up!
11,068 words written for pay
untold* words written for fun
1 blog follower (Thanks, Mom!)
untold** regular readers

I'm kind of amazed that I've managed 100 posts, writing about nothing much at all. (Although I suppose if Seinfeld managed nine television seasons of a show "about nothing," this little blog isn't that much of an achievement.) Still, it's been fun to write, and even better when people stop by and comment. I plan on sticking around for at least another 100 posts, just to see what happens.

*Actually, I fear I would be depressed if I calculated how many words I've written for fun. Not as many as I'd like, that's for sure.
**And I appreciate all six of you.

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. It's one of my favorite holidays. I mean, who couldn't love a day when you're supposed to dress up in crazy costumes and then devour tons of sugar? Even as a so-called grown-up, I've taken any chance I get to dress up for Halloween. At my first job, before the company became corporate and boring, we actually had a Halloween party and employees were encouraged to dress up. I came up with some weird costumes for those parties. One was "prom date from hell": I took an old bridesmaid dress (and matching shoes!), ratted my hair, and wore socks and a jean jacket with the outfit. In 1992 I went political: I borrowed a suit from the TSU, wore it backwards with a George H.W. Bush mask on the back of my head; put a duck bill on my nose, and used a squeaky red-white-and-blue cane. (Lame duck, get it? Okay, it looked better than it sounds.) In 1994, when I was six months pregnant with Boy, I made a snake costume that had a mouse's tail sticking out of the mouth. (Recently fed snake, get it? You had to see it, I guess.) More recently, I've been able to dress up for the Dexter Community Band's annual Halloween concert. I've made Cat in the Hat, Moon Goddess, Renaissance Princess, and Egyptian Queen costumes for those events. Tragically, this year we couldn't get the auditorium for Halloween and so I have no excuse to dress up.

Still, there's always the decorating. I don't go crazy with lights and sculptures and fake webs and ghosts, like some of my neighbors. No, I'm all about the pumpkin carving. I make my pumpkins do weird things. Last year I re-enacted the alien-busting-out-of-the-stomach scene from Alien using a pumpkin and a squash. This year, though, I'm going with an old favorite: the barfing pumpkin. Instead of the usual CSI: Pumpkin patch scene (one pumpkin with a knife in its head, the other a barfing witness), I went for something a little more topical:

You can't read the sign, but it says: "I told you not to eat all your Halloween candy at once." Here's a closeup of the barfing pumpkin:


Halloween is the best!

Watchmen: The Official Haiku Review

I've still been too harried to spare two hours to sit down and watch a classic movie, but I did get through a work that Time magazine hailed as one of the 100 greatest English-language novels from 1923 to the present. (Nice thing about books: you can digest them a chapter at a time.) Entertainment Weekly recently ranked it as #13 on their list of the greatest novels of the past 25 years. Oh, and it helped legitimize a genre: before it was published in 1986-87, you called them "comics" and you found them at newsstands and specialty shops, not in the book store's "graphic novel" section. So here, without further ado, is my review of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1987 classic Watchmen.

What is a hero?
Outlaw, steward, idol, god?
No, merely human.

I suppose today, after a decade of popular movies eager to explore their heroes' darker sides (the new Star Wars films, The Dark Knight), that Watchmen might not seem unusual. But it was groundbreaking at the time, and even now it seems to go further into exploring real flaws than anything else I've ever read or seen. The mostly-retired masked heroes in Watchmen include a violent psychopath, an attempted rapist, an impotent has-been, a self-serving businessman, and a woman with severe mommy issues. The only one with true superpowers (he is able to see and affect all quantum states of matter) has becoming emotionally divorced from humanity. The plot revolves around the murder of one of these heroes, which leads the rest to explore if (and why) there is a plot against them all. The conclusion (which I won't give away) is bleak—there's no justice in the usual sense—and yet it feels totally real and satisfying.

So, the subject matter and characterization aren't what you typically think of when you think "comics"; in addition, the structure is very complex. There are numerous flashbacks that reveal the characters' histories; there are "documents" appended to each chapter (some written by the characters themselves) which give more details; and throughout is a comic-within-a-comic that further explores the themes of heroism and villainy. As for the graphics, they contain all sorts of details that reinforce the story; I'm sure I would catch many more of them on a second reading.

Now, I have to admit I was a comic book nerd when I was a kid; I have very fond memories of my dad taking me down to the old Blue Front in Ann Arbor and letting me browse the comics (and candy) shelves. I grew out of them—I couldn't read them regularly, so I couldn't benefit from the longer story arcs—but I still love comic book movies and hit most of the big ones. (My favorite this year: Iron Man.) Still, I don't think I'm being a fangirl when I say that Watchmen has the depth and complexity of the best classic fiction. I hear rumors that the upcoming movie adaptation will remain fairly faithful to the original novel, if the current studio wrangling over its release doesn't end up getting it butchered or canceled. If so, I'll be in line opening weekend.

Oh, and having enjoyed one classic graphic novel, I decided to check out another. Coming soon: a review of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning Maus.

Like, the best, most excellent (you tell 'em!) post EVER!!!!!

Okay, so this post was inspired by my friend Jacqui, who last week dared her fellow writers for children to post a picture of themselves at the age of their target audience. That sounds like fun, I thought, and I dug into my box of old school stuff to find a picture. And besides a bunch of old yearbook photos, this was all I found: a shot of me on my aunt's pony. I was about three at the time, and terribly cute (whatever happened!). I have no other childhood photos in my house, except for a bunch I took on a trip West when I was twelve. (Unfortunately, since I took them, the only time I appear is when I accidentally stuck my finger into the frame.) Either my mother is hoarding photos, or I'm trying to avoid producing evidence of my awkward teenage years. Because my target audience isn't three; my inner child is really a 13-year-old boy, still reading comic books and laughing at fart jokes.

To my protests that I only have old black-and-white yearbook photos, Jacqui responded: the scanner still works even if you don't have a color photo. Fine. Here, so all of you can point and laugh, is my 8th-grade school portrait. I prefer to think of my expression as "introspective and dreamy," not "dazed and confused." The glasses? Not my fault; I had to pick from what the '70s offered me. My hair? I have no excuse besides ignorance of all that girl stuff. At least I stand out (yeah, um, that's it!) among the feathered-bang gang that roamed the middle school in the late 1970s. And at least I wore earrings, so you could tell I was a girl. If the photo was in color, you'd see my T-shirt, so artfully layered underneath my blouse, was dark purple, another giveaway that I wasn't a boy (because my figure sure wasn't telling!).

Still, it's not that hideous or embarrassing. But I found something else that was: my high school diary. Despite my protestations in its pages that I wasn't writing a diary (ick! I commented), I really was. A lot of cryptic comments about boys and friends (or so-called friends) who had pissed me off; many laments about how tragic my life was (punctuated with many parenthetical! asides! and! many! exclamation! points!!!!). Many, many, nonsensical remarks about everyday stuff, like what was playing on the radio. Occasional introspective comments that are marred by being oh so melodramatic. This particular page is from my freshman year, which I remember as being a challenging time, with an adjustment to a new school and a shifting group of friends. This is probably one of least obnoxiously self-pitying pages; I was evidently in a good mood because I was about to ditch the glasses. (And after seeing those glasses, can you blame me?)

Anyway, reading through this reminder that the teenaged me wasn't quite as deep or articulate as I remember made me think about why writing for this age appeals to me so much. Back then, everything seemed life or death; everything was up or down, with no in-between. Any setback was a tragedy; any triumph meant you could conquer the world. Often I've thought that if I had a time machine, I would go back to that age and tell myself to chill, to take things less seriously and believe they would get better. (The teenaged me would probably look at present-day me and wonder why that old lady thinks she knows anything about anything.) Of course, there's no such thing as time machines. But books are just as good as a time machine for taking you into another time or another world. Many times when I was a teenager a book could lift my mood, or at least help me forget my all-consuming problems. To think about someone else, empathize, and take me out of that self-absorption that defines most adolescents. Can you think of an audience more primed to be affected by a book? I can't, which is why I keep writing for them.

Maybe I'm a dingbat, but this is funny:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Or maybe I've just done one too many typesetting jobs....

I can't deny it, I'm a nerd....

Finally, the film experience I know you've all been waiting for! Last spring, as many of you may know, Boy and I were working towards earning our 2nd degree black belts in taekwondo. Part of our requirements was to choreograph and stage a skit to demonstrate some of our skills. (And actually, some of you may remember seeing Boy and I working on possible choreography as far back as August 2007.) Having really enjoyed learning escrima sticks from Master Ron, one of our instructors, we decided to put them in our skit. From there, it took only a little imagination and a bit of fabric to come up with the following, our "Star Wars" themed black belt skit. Enjoy!