Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 45

Key Largo

Yesterday we got to the motel in the early afternoon.  Biked a little and lounged on the beach.  Watched the pelicans dive-bombing for fish.  A little road-weary, but we had a good dinner at a  funky Keys-y place, a big board shack on the bay, the Island Grill.  The plan is for Gay to get up about eight and we trundle on down, scouting for breakfast along the way.  Looks like good weather; in fact, the forecast is good until Saturday. 

Partly cloudy nights, they predict, which will affect me less than more serious astronomers, since I'm just sight-seeing, and can move the telescope to something else if a cloud gets in the way.

I'm really excited about the prospect of using my huge (25X100) binoculars, which haven't yet been unleashed on a truly dark sky.  The main instrument, a 9.25" Cassegrain-Maksutov, has had some pretty good seeing, in campgrounds outside of town, but nothing as good as WSP (Winter Star Party) will have.  Touch wood.  The forecast is good, though, and the radar this morning is spotless throughout the Gulf and well out into the Atlantic.

Right now the sun is coming up into light morning clouds, normal for the Keys.  Gulls creaking and doves dove-ing.  Below me fishermen are staggering with cups of coffee and hangovers; no early-morning customers.  (We're overlooking a little marina with some modest deep-sea rentals.)  Yesterday they were cleaning the day's catch as we took an afternoon stroll; a pretty good haul of sea trout, amberjack, and one big bonito.

  

This is the Pelican Cove Resort & Marina in Key Largo, and I'd recommend it.   Nice big room with kitchenette for $250 a night, and others down to $169, not expensive for the Keys ("high season" started yesterday).  The name is appropriate, since the hotel is on a cove where the pelicans come to divebomb for fish all afternoon.  They're entertaining.  Cruise in elegant circles with one eye cocked, looking for careless fish, and when they see one they tuck into a streamlined headlong dropping weight.   They slam into the water and then gobble up the stunned fish.

The place has a nice white-sand beach with a bar and girls with bikinis.  Birds to go with the birds, so to speak.  If you like that sort of thing, as I say, it comes with the Joe Haldeman Eyeball of Approval.

Joe

Sebring!

Headed down to the Winter Star Party in the Keys, but we didn't want to drive most of the day and then face getting all the scopes and camping stuff set up.

It doesn't open till 10 this morning, so we spent the night in Sebring, a few hours from Gainesville. Nice sleepy town, except when it's not. It's been on the international sports-car racing circuit for 60 years, a twelve-hour endurance race. We used to come down and watch it, camping out alongside the hairpin turn. Thrilling high-speed stuff.

 Might be too loud for me now . . . actually it was too loud then, but ice-cold beer and hot dogs and racing groupies in short-shorts made it somehow worthwhile.

   We're at the big old hotel that overlooks Lake Jackson, a respectable two miles wide. Mr. Sebring built the hotel in 1916, a large graceful white pine structure.

 Small rooms with rippling floors now – but no obvious bugs, and only $86 a night. The large foyer / dining room has good coffee all night, and before dawn, a big layout of carbohydrates, including a waffle machine. I was its first customer, about five.

   Not the best environment for writing, with a teevee informing the staff and me about the sleepy part of the news cycle. There was Muzak on top of that, but it appears to have stopped.

  There's a wide veranda out front, though, looking out on the lake, with no music.

 Just a lovely cool breeze over the water. Fortunately I can write without electricity, so I'm headed there now.

Joe

to dance!

We had a wonderful musical evening last night!  First a potluck at Colleen's (a fellow artist who has the social connections to score big-buck tickets), which was delightful.  (I brought a special potato salad, which was well received.  But it took forever to prepare, bacon and all, and I might have done better just going to a deli.)  Chatted with lots of people from the arts and sciences.

Then off to the huge performance of Carmina Burana, almost three hours of dance and choral music.  Thrilling!  Sexy!  Hundreds of performers:  the University of Florida Symphonic Orchestra and Concert Choir, augmented by the Gainesville Civic Chorus.  Thirty-four dancers bounding around.

"Profound – religious – erotic – sublime," or so the poster says.  Accurate enough.  The performance was "not for children," though I think it might instill in some of them an early passion for ballet.  If I'd seen it at 16, I might have wound up being a very cultured boy.

Our seats were pretty far back, but a-ha! – I had the little binoculars that Gay gave me for Valentine's Day.  I'd asked for a quality binocular in a small format, for wildlife and things like this show.  They're eight power, 8X26, so it's easy to hold them steady.

I know that should be "it is."  "A pair of binoculars" is an agrammatical neologism, but at least in American English, you use it like "a pair of pants."  Call them "opera glasses."

It was the Dance Alive troupe, for which Colleen is a publicist and photographer.  And provider of free tickets!

Joe

The spirit of '92

Gay found this photo of Rusty and us when we took the ferry up to Alaska in 1992.  It was a hokey "antique" photo studio in Skagway, I think.

Rusty's birthday

Today would have been Rusty Hevelin’s 90th birthday.  Gay and I celebrated with root beer floats, joined via iChat with his friend Sharon Tackaberry.

In LJ I’ll add the picture of Rusty that we have in our dining room – “Life is uncertain – eat dessert first!”  A principle he always paid lip service to, and more.

Joe

night sky and absence thereof

(from sff.net -- Sean asked whether you could photograph any stars in the New York City sky) -- 

Sean, I’m afraid Dave is right, as you know; the NYC night sky moved to the suburbs when I was a lad, and then the exurbs, and then the mountains. (I recall having seen the 3rd-magnitude Orion Nebula from Manhattan around 1954.)

If you had a film camera, or a CCD one capable of longish exposure, you could put a light pollution filter over the lens and take an exposure several seconds long. That might show the brightest bluest stars. Of course in Photoshop or (Mac) Preview you can isolate a specific part of the spectrum and try to crank a coherent image out of whatever number of pixels crawl through.

Last night after dinner we watched the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair, which besides featuring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway when they were younger, was filmed all around our part of Boston -- Beacon Hill, Back Bay, North End – once within a block of our apartment. The area hasn’t changed much in 45 years. One cobblestone street is paved now; others aren’t. 
  
Incidentally, thanks to the modest gaslight along the streets in Beacon Hill, you can actually see stars down to second magnitude – third, very late at night – looking up through the branches of the trees.

Joe

matters of substance

So today, Valentine’s Day,  is our 51st anniversary of meeting.  I was a mere slip of a lad back then – forty pounds less, egad.  Blow away in a strong wind.  Much better to be substantial.  Well grounded.

(Putting that into terms of last night’s dinner,  a mere 160 potato pancakes . . . . )

According to googled calculations, actually, my weight should be 175, fifteen pounds less than it is.  I should aim to get there by my seventieth birthday.  Without taking the shortcut of getting ill.  That would be a pound a month, not impossible.  That’s 3500 calories; about 117 per day.  Which is exactly half a head of cabbage – quite easy to give up!  I feel skinny already!  And think of how much money we’ll save on cabbage!

Mathematics, they are wonderful.

Joe

the machine age

I went to the U. of Florida main library to work day before yesterday, the first time I’ve been there since its renovation last year, and it’s amazingly changed!  Escalators?  (Kids today.)  A 24-hour Starbucks?  (Yay for 24 hours, not-so-yay for the chain.)  Having the library itself open for 24 hours, Monday through Thursday, puts it above MIT.  And on the second floor there are dozens of carrels where you can close the door and,  I don’t know, work on your applied gynecology lab.

But one thing that truly croggled my mind – why have I never seen this before? – was the night-owl students’ dream vending machine:  every manner of stationery.  Pens, pencils, notebooks, 3X5’s – even a blisterpack calculator and, for $11, an 8GB flash drive!   I’ve gotta send a picture of this to the MIT library.

Joe

cell theory

Dave and others . . . a narrative problem I have here is that I don’t want my protagonist to know too much.  He’s not a spy type; he’s just a writer/teacher who crossed the wrong people and now has both the good guys and the bad guys after him.  To keep the narrative believable, he can’t have prepared beforehand for a life of crime.  But he’s not totally ignorant.   This is what I wrote in the story – “From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans.  It wouldn’t fool a government agency – or the Enemy, presumably – but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.”  (By which he only means that he and his girl have called their parents, who think they’re in New Orleans, with phony reassurances.)  My own narrative problem is the ordinary one of feeding the reader enough information to make the story believable, but not sit him down and say “you need to know this stuff to understand the plot line,” and proceed to lecture him on espionage protocols.  (Obviously, if it were a spy novel I could do it.  But this is just a novel novel.)  Joe

on the lam (ignoring the gerbil)

A question for the company assembled . . . I should know the answer to this, but I’m not computer-literate enough.

If I send an email from some random place, can the cops or the KGB or someone trace it back to a neighborhood?  To a specific location?  Or just to a specific computer?

I’m assuming that someone who’s on the lam could send an email from a public service, like a library, and then get in his Aston-Martin and zip away.

It’s getting too damned hard to be a criminal for a living.  Doesn’t stop people, though.

Joe