Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 44

a bridge to nowhere

(From a conversation going on in sffnet -- )

I actually did read _The Bridges of Madison County_ -- I took it on a long train ride with no other books, vowing to read the whole damned thing so that I could figure out how to write a best-seller.  It was kind of depressing.  I couldn't do it even as a pastiche.  Too fundamentally dishonest and manipulative.  My agent at the time, Robert P. Mills, summed it up.  He said I would never be a best-seller.  On the one hand, I didn't write well enough, and on the other hand, I couldn't write badly enough.  I should be happy I had a genre audience.  This is the agent who couldn't sell _The Forever War_, though he supposedly sent it to eighteen publishers.Joe

tires, and soda, pop

Yesterday we went for a little seventeen-mile bike ride, and my bike only finished eleven of them.  As if it knew it was about to be replaced.

I was riding along in front, chatting with Pat Payne, and it suddenly got difficult to pedal.  I stopped just as the last air went out of the rear tire.  The tire itself, not just the tube, had failed, a fissure an inch and a half long.

We were only a hundred yards or so from where a country road crosses the bike path.  So I found a stump to sit on and when Gay caught up, I told her to bring the car back, no rush.

It was more than an hour, but pretty interesting.  I didn't have anything to read, so I concentrated on the micro-ecology around me, being as still as possible, identifying all of the insects and plants I could see, and watching them do their thing.  A black wasp that didn't fly walked all over the grass and weeds in front of me, as if looking for something, very systematic.  A tiny red ant was carrying a bright green grub four or five times its size, off to the formic mess hall.  Mosquitoes and no-see-ums sought out my company, and a couple of sweat bees, but I managed to convey my desire to be alone.  A couple of robins checked in and left.

Only one bicyclist passed by, and three or four joggers, one very pretty.   Surprising there weren't more on such a beautiful day, but it was a weekday.  A toothless country guy pulled up his car and asked if I needed he'p.

Of course I could have spent the hour changing the tire.  But I was headed for the bicycle shop anyhow, and would just as soon pay them ten bucks to do it.  (Of course we had the bike rack on the car.)

(It wouldn't have been a simple tube change, either, of course.  With a fissure in the tire you have to repair or replace the tube and then improvise something that keeps the tube, under high pressure, from popping out of the hole in the tire.  Sometimes a dollar bill, folded once lengthwise, will do the job.  Sometimes not.)

I can imagine it being an ordeal – like if it were the middle of summer and I was running out of water.  But it was a gorgeous day, in the sixties, and after Gay pulled up and I put the bike on the back, we stopped at one of those little country stores that has a hundred weird flavors of soda pop.  I got "old fashioned cane sugar ginger ale," and it was a time trip. 

When I was a kid in Washington, D.C., we would spend the summers with cousins in Oklahoma, and we were allowed a quarter every day to spend on soft drinks (seven cents, including two-cent bottle deposit).  Weird flavors that never made it to the stores back east – grapefruit and black cherry and watermelon.  A Southrun thang, I guess.  In my mind, Oklahoma (where I was born) was part of the Wild West, but marketing demographics, then and now, put it in the South.

Joe

Addendum to Boswell's Beef

Addendum to Boswell's Beef . . . The recipe worked fine.  After a few meals I sliced about a pound of the beef for sandwiches, great on fresh rye bread.  When it got down to the end I cubed the last of the beef and added a can of bouilion and a couple of potatoes and carrots, chopped up.   Got one big dinner and a half-dozen two-person meals out of  the small roast.(to reiterate the original recipe -- )Boswell's BeefOkay, Boswell has nothing to do with it, except that I'm rereading his London journals.  He did like beef.4 lb. sirloin tip roast.12 oz. mango juice1 oz. capers with juice1 medium onion, chopped fine6 cloves garlic, chopped fine1 cup red wine1/4 cup sherryveggies (I'm using five potatoes, six carrots, two sweet potatoes, peeled and cut in approximately one-inch cubes.)Brown the roast all over in a little oil.  (I skipped this step.)  Marinate the sirloin, mango juice, capers, onion, and garlic with the red wine and sherry together for a few hours.  (I skipped this step.)  Preheat large crockpot while peeling and cutting veggies.  Throw the veggies in and put the roast on top of them.  Add the juice, capers, onion, garlic.   Let it all simmer on high for a couple of hours.  Then turn it down to low for another five or six hours.I think an hour or so before it's done, I'm going to peel and core two tart apples and cut them into large wedges and add them.Joe

joe_haldeman @ 2012-03-07T13:22:00

Last night we went to see an amusing play at the Hippodrome, Tom Dudzick's Over the Tavern.

It's a family comedy that's a veritable zoo of potential clichés – a well-meaning stern nun is on the case of the main character, who's a middle-school kid who just wants to have fun, whose mother is overworked and frazzled, and whose father is overworked and frazzled and handicapped, and whose sister is frazzled and freaking out with adolescence.  His older brother floats in and out, frazzled.  The nun comes over to talk to mom and dad about the misbehaving kid, and the holy water hits the fan when she has some sort of attack and faints.

The acting was good, especially the kid, played by eighth-grader Paxton Sanchez, who did a lot of well-felt reacting to the mysterious adult situation unfolding around him.  He also had several soliloquies in between scenes, talking to God, which could have been cutesy or cloying, but worked pretty well.

The nun, Sara Morsey, walked a careful line between the expected and the easily invented.  Her part would be the easiest one to fall into stock-character simplicity, but she brought a nice measure of empathy and uncertainty to it, and connected well with young Sanchez.

The thing all fits together like an old-fashioned wooden puzzle, but for me it stopped too soon, leaving loose ends dangling.  (Gay didn't think so.)   Google says there's a sequel.  I'd pay to see it.

Joe

ride to live/live to ride

(Not sure whether this went through earlier . . . )

Well, I just ordered a bike.  After riding maybe a dozen in the $1000-$2000 range, I settled on a Raleigh Revenio 3.0, about $1400 after discounts, with rack and light.  It comes with a Shimano 105 groupset, not too shabby. 

It will go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds.  If you drop it off a cliff.

I could have bought one off the floor.  It rode like a dream but was a bit small, with a 52" frame.  I ordered one with a 54" frame, so it'll be another week or two, depending on which warehouse it comes from.

My second choice was a Cannondale, about $2000, which also had a dreamy ride.  A classier brand, but I'm not interested in impressing other members of the bike club.  (If I were, I could have shelled out two or three times that much.  And then try to explain to myself why.)

Frankly, one reason I didn't get the Cannondale was that the store wasn't willing to give me a break on the price.  Okay.

Also, an old friend works at this store.  He wasn't in, so he didn't get the commission, but I know that if anything goes wrong I can call him.

I guess a thousand-dollar bike is a thousand-dollar bike, no matter who makes or sells it; you're not going to win any races, but it will be a tight smooth ride and a dependable piece of machinery.  (Well, if you're Lance Armstrong you could win a race with a dimestore rust-bucket.  But speaking generally.)

My daily ride in Cambridge is a commuter bike that was three or four hundred dollars new, and it's an okay compromise.  Probably never go more than thirty miles on it, and there's a high probability it'll be stolen.  The road bike I keep in Florida has to be good for a century ride, 100 miles in a day, but also be a good grocery-hauling or let's-go-camping bike.

The Raleigh replaces a Trek 2200, which I'll give a final overhaul and keep as a second or guest bike.   It's almost ten years old and is starting to really show its age.  The crank bearing has a recurring click that I don't like, and the ride has gone a little spongy and noisy.  Which of us has not?

Joe

octalpuss

(From a conversation in sff.net . . . )

You didn't make it all the way to octal, Dave, which is a pity.  I've been fascinated by base 8 ever since Professor Lindamood went to the blackboard and showed us how to decompose an octal digit into sets of three zeros and ones -- on and off switches, as it were.  It really made me catch my breath; all the world became a little bit more clear (no pun intended).  One of those learning moments you remember as a teacher, and hope to find in your own words.  Joe

Still on the Hill

Last night we went to see Still on the Hill, a very proficient folk duo, Arkansas friends of Jack Williams.  I guess you'd call them "folk fusion" or something – elements of bluegrass, old folk, new folk, whatever.  A middle-aged couple with some really remarkable guitar (male) and banjo (female) picking.  Brandy agreed that the guitar player must have a few extra fingers hidden away on his right hand.  We bought two of their CDs.

Weather here in Gainesville has been almost spookily warm, up around eighty.  We're not that part of Florida; it should be getting down into the thirties at least.  Checking the weather, I see the warm snap is going away – thunderstorms tonight and low of 48.  Ah well.  Beats snow shovels.

Joe

the diarist

I'm loving rereading Boswell in the tub.  Even when his writing is bad it's entertaining in its earnest transparency.  Here he talks about his journal to his pal Erskine, a few months after he's started, and gets some good advice –  "I had now and then mentioned my journal to him.  I read him a little of it this evening.  To be sure it is very carelessly wrote, which he freely took notice, and said it might become a habit to me to write in that manner, so that I would learn a mere slatternly style.  He advised me to take more pains upon it, and to render it useful by being a good method to practice writing:  to turn periods and render myself ready at different kinds of expression.  He is very right.  I shall be more attentive for the future, and rather give a little neatly done than a good deal slovenly."  When I first read the London Journals in 1971, I did start keeping a journal myself, as I had at other times in my life.  But the habit never really took hold until the web evolved (in my case through the list server GEnie) to where you could muse in public, and have an audience of hundreds or thousands.  Samuel Johnson famously told Boswell, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money," but we're fortunate that he never took that advice.  For my own part, GEnie made me realize that it's not money I need, but an audience.  Joe

Winter Star Party

Star Party report –

The server at the Winter Star Party site blocked my use of Live Journal.  Fie on them.  Here's a belated report:

21 Feb

Last night the sky was pretty good for several hours, but clouded up before midnight.  Did get everything set up and calibrated pretty well.  Then got a good night's sleep; up around 5:30 for a leisurely shower.

Our campsite is nice in some ways and not so nice in others – like, it's very close to the toilets, which is a plus until the wind shifts.  Our tent is under the shade of a big tree, which will keep it cool at mid-day.  But it does cut off part of the sky, which is sort of the reason we're here.

The Winter Star Party is an annual ten-day week of amateur astronomy sponsored by a Miami-based astronomy club,  the Southern Cross Astronomical Society.  It's a pretty elaborate gathering at a big campground on a semi-deserted island, West Summerland Key, about 35 miles from Key West.

It's about as organized or unorganized as you prefer.  Maybe half the people just pay at the door and set up their scopes under the pretty dark southern skies.  "Pretty dark" in both senses – the sky is beautiful, but it's not the inky black it was ten or even five years ago.  Lights from Marathon and Key West are encroaching.  As Americans retire in ever greater numbers and come down to "the land of the newly-wedders and the nearly-deaders."

Set up yesterday and went out to dinner with friends from Gainesville.  An okay Mexican restaurant that gets old pretty fast, if I recall accurately.  There are a few other places to eat, and a concession here offers burgers and such – right now, before dawn, I'm taking advantage of their delicious cinnamon rolls, baked fresh in their trailer.

Last night we visited the observing site of Peter, a wheelchair-bound amateur who has a gizmo-ed up 12-inch that he built himself – beautiful hand-rubbed wood -- and looked at a few galaxies enhanced by his light-amplification electronics. 

Fiddled with my 9-inch without getting the computer to quite cooperate; will beat it into submission tonight.  The huge 100-mm binoculars  worked their low-tech magic, though the sky was far from perfect, and around midnight olouded up completely.

I slept a few hours and got up to look at the gorgeous southern sky, and take advantage of the almost empty shower room.

Sky's getting light.  Think I'll take a little nap before the sun comes up and the swap meet starts.

Joe

22 Feb

I saw some pretty stuff last night!  My new huge eyepiece (a 31-mm. Televue Type VI hand grenade) is gorgeous on star clusters and nebulae.  I did get the mounting to cooperate enough so that it will point in the general direction of the object I'm aiming for. 

The algorithm is a combination of high tech and low wiggle.  I punch in "select and slew"/"Deep sky objects"/"Messier objects," and then the three-digit Messier number, and the telescope rolls around with an impressive whirring.  About three times out of four, it winds up with the thing I'm looking for right outside of the field of view.  There's enough play in the system so I can wiggle the eyepiece around and glimpse the object of my obsession – but I can't point the tube manually, so have to use the arrows on the control box to center it left-right, up-down.

It probably takes less than two minutes, but of course I'd rather have the telescope read my mind and point at the thing  I'm interested in.  I'll check in the dealers' tents, but maybe that's a year or two away.

(Interesting that it might not be total fantasy, given the direction they're going in paraplegic research.  Of course you'd still have to have a telescope that points exactly where you want it to go, but even now that's just a matter of money.  You can buy voice-controlled mountings if you have the moola.)

23 Feb

Beautiful clear sky as the sun comes up behind me.  And the skies were perfect last night, too, until about two.  Got my computer drive un-bugged, and it went obediently to, well, the general direction of my target.  Always close enough to find with the finderscope.

That was my big purchase yesterday, a thirty-dollar finderscope to replace the shabby one I bought at the swap meet here, years ago.  Correction, I also bought a hundred-dollar eyepiece case, a little black suitcase, but haven't yet put it into service.  Have to pluck out squares of foam to fit my eyepieces.

Didn't sleep well, though not for any obvious reason.  Excitement, I suppose.

In the twilight when I was aligning the scope last night, a random meteor flashed by just next to Venus.  Well, not next to Venus.

25 Feb

We have far too much water in some places and too little in others.  The dew here leaves gallons of the stuff dripping from everything.  But we had no water for awhile yesterday because some genius couldn't read the DO NOT FLUSH PAPER TOWELS DOWN TOILET sign, and clogged the system with paper towels.

More serious to our particular location is the fact that the five portable toilets ten meters from here are filling up.  The truck that was supposed to come pump them out yesterday couldn't make it.  Perhaps today we'll be blessed.   Or evacuated!

Yesterday I took off about 7:30 to bicycle down to Key West, where Gay would meet me for lunch.  It's 36 miles, and the first six were gorgeous.  Then it started to get rough.  A two-lane road with an unimproved 18-inch margin for bikes.  Heavy truck traffic.  Bridges every mile or so.   By 8:30 the sun was beating down pretty hard.

I had a nice break about 9:30, at Shark Key, where the bridge is wide.  I stopped to watch the water and enjoy a Heinekin non-beer and a Reese's sugarbomb.  But it really was getting warm, and the bridge shook alarmingly when the eighteen-wheelers crashed by.

I didn't doubt that I would make it, but it was no longer exactly fun.  But then a few miles down the road, Gay pulled over in the van!  Under other circumstances, I might have waved her on.  This time, I gratefully put the bike on the carrier and slid into the airconditioning.

We drove on down to "Saluté on the Beach," one of our favorite places, parked in their big lot, and pedaled off for a ride along the beach with Chuck and Judy.  Another few miles, what the heck, ouch.  The bar wouldn't open till 11:00, anyhow.

Gay and I split an order of stone crab claws, excellent, and I had a big salad with blackened fish, likewise fine.  Then we pedaled on into town and took a tour of Harry Truman's Little White House, down by the Navy yard, which was an interesting time trip.

Nobody was up for barhopping, no surprise considering our hours (and years).  We went back to the campsite and I crashed for a few hours.

The four of us went to dinner with Fred and Pam, who are involved in organizing the Star Party (but are sanely staying at a motel in Marathon).  Went to the closest restaurant, which is uneven but has pretty waitresses, with a dress code that mandates skin-tight jeans.  Had the special, monkfish with black beans and rice.  Okay fish and great beans.

The sky was pretty good, clear but loaded with humidity.  My dewcap worked pretty well.  After an hour the corrector plate (the thing on the front end of the telescope) started to dew up.  I pulled out my handy-dandy hair dryer, which worked for about twenty seconds and then started spitting sparks and smoke, almost certainly a signal that its warranty had run out.

Gay and I went for a stroll up on the berm (the preferred observing site, always sewn up way in advance) and saw some neat "fuzzies," the generic term for galaxies and nebulae.  Best was the Eskimo Nebula, in a 20" with light-amplification circuitry.

Came back and technology struck again, this time with ferocity.  I punched in directions to slew my scope to Messier 81, and it hummed for a few seconds and then groaned and made a loud ratcheting sound as the whole shebang blew out and the scope spun down with the speed of gravity.  I got under it and caught it, hurting a knee joint but saving a couple of grand.

That was it for the night, for both of us.  I'm going to take the thing apart this morning, with Chuck's help, and see whether there's an obvious fix.  The company, Ioptron, has a representative here, but I'll be surprised if they can do anything other than sell the things.  We shall see.

I could buy a new mount here – here if anywhere! – though it would cost an extra 7%, for Florida sales tax.  Well, maybe I'll adopt children, and let the taxes take advantage of our stellar school system.

This morning I did spend a very pleasant half hour before dawn, using the 25X100 binoculars on the deep-south skies, including Alpha and Omega Centauri, which is a breathtaking globular cluster, certainly the most impressive such sight in the sky.  In the states, it's only visible from the Florida Keys and southernmost Texas and California.

26 Feb –

. . .  although my telescope was hors d'combat, the mounting could still work with a light load.  So Chuck loaned me a small scope, 80 mm, and it made a nice combination with the huge new eyepiece.  Odd-looking.  Now that it's light I'll have to go take a picture; send it to you later.

It was good on star clusters and nebulae, and the star clouds in Scorpio, Saggitarius, and Centaurus.   Especially the Omega Centauri cluster.  I was able to show that to Gay when she got up for the john.

High-quality optics.  I used a 3-mm. eyepiece on Mars, and it was clear and steady at 400X . . . the rule of thumb is "no more than 50X per inch, under best conditions."  This is 133X, remarkable.

Boswell's Beef

           Boswell's BeefOkay, Boswell has nothing to do with it, except that I'm rereading his London journals.  He did like beef.4 lb. sirloin tip roast.12 oz. mango juice1 oz. capers with juice1 medium onion, chopped fine6 cloves garlic, chopped fine1 cup red wine1/4 cup sherryveggies (I'm using five potatoes, six carrots, two sweet potatoes, peeled and cut in approximately one-inch cubes.)Brown the roast all over in a little oil.  (I skipped this step.)  Marinate the sirloin, mango juice, capers, onion, and garlic with the red wine and sherry together for a few hours.  (I skipped this step, too)Preheat large crockpot while peeling and cutting veggies.  Throw the veggies in and put the roast on top of them.  Add the juice, capers, onion, garlic, wine and sherry.   Let it all simmer on high for a couple of hours.  Then turn it down to low for another five or six hours.I think an hour or so before it's done, I'm going to peel and core two tart apples and cut them into large wedges and add them.===============Looks like it would work with pork, though you'd want to change the name.  Pepys's Pork, to stay with the theme of great and somewhat overweight British essayists of the 18th century.With pork, I think I'd go with pineapple and peaches along with potatoes – a 4 P dish! – and cinnamon and sweet sherry or even Madiera.In a spirit of daring I'm going to post this recipe now, and see how it turns out.  If it doesn't work, I'll eat my words instead of the beef.  And post a correction.Joe