Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 76

numbers and pictures

I just got a letter from Susan Hockfield, the president of MIT, noting that the Toot is 150 years old this academic year. A person born in 1861 had a life expectancy of just over 38 years, so from that point of view the Institute has been in existence for four lifetimes. From today's point of view, two lifetimes.

Maybe one lifetime, when it gets to be three hundred. Does anyone want to say that's impossible, a hundred fifty years from now?

Found a cool visual display at http...

... and then the shit hit the sandal ...

I had a pretty bad experience yesterday.

The temporary expedient for dealing with my severed intestine (it's cut off at the ileum, awaiting reattachment in January) is a plastic bag that's glued to the abdomen, which has to be emptied and cleaned eight or ten times a day. The assembly removed and replaced every five to seven days. After almost a year, I should be getting used to it, but it's still a major pain in the . . . abdomen. Nasty and constant.

The open end is held closed with a plast...

Pens with balls, argh!

(In sffnet, we got to talking about ballpoint pens . . . )

I read in a blog about Moleskine notebooks that the best "ballpoint" (actually gel) pen was the Uni-ball Signo 207. This was the result of a readers' survey – "What kind of pen or pencil do you favor for your Moleskine?" I tried one at the store and bought half a dozen. Black and blue and blue-black ink.

Googling, I find that they come in eight ink colors. So of course I had to order that. Then they also had needle-fine points of ...

manu-script

(Talking in sff.net about handwriting . . . )

Yeah, that was a strange non-contest.

Ten or fifteen years ago Harper's Magazine had a kind of contest . . . for one month they asked for letters-to-the-editor that were handwritten. They printed mine, a screed about the difference between belief and faith.

I do have fairly neat handwriting. As I think I've related here, that's due to the kind influence of science fiction artist Jack Gaughan. I was in my sophomore or junior year in college and my...

Actually reading actual books

(From a sffnet discussion about reading -- )

I think there's an aspect of the encroachment of computers into our intellectual and emotional lives that is so basic and self-evident we don't bother to examine it: Communicating is too easy. There's a first-draft quality to everything, from political commentary to love letters.

I do it myself, here. When I write something of importance, though, the first stage is always away from the computer, alone with pen and paper. When you write down every...

Boob toob

Yesterday I took the car in for service, and the TV in the waiting room was so loud I couldn't work. So for 45 minutes I just wrote down everything that they covered on the "news," Fox network style:

Political commercial. Weather. More weather. Going back to school – short interview with an authority figure who said you should take a picture of your children every morning when they go out the door, in case the police will need it for identification! Walk them to the schoolbus stop or rehe...

45th Anniiversary

Gay and I were married 45 years ago today. Rare enough.

I've been trying to convince her that the 45th is the Cardboard Anniversary, but she has been skeptical -- though said she hadn't looked it up. I did, and it's sapphire.

Big solitaire sapphires are pretty pricey, but I found her a bracelet, lots of smaller ones in various shades of pink and violet, Briolette cut, that I could buy without taking out a second mortgage.

She meant to get me a Lamy fountain pen, but the company made a mistake ...

the pit

Somebody asked here (or in sff.net) why I don't work at home, where presumably I have an office with a computer and all.

In fact, I have two big rooms, one for writing and one for art and music. This one, "the" office, was meant to be a formal living room when the house was designed, fifty years ago. Now it's rather a collection of warrens, free-standing bookcases turning it into an Escher-ish kind of structure that makes perfect sense to me. One warren ends in a U shape that would have a c...

. . . but are the boys all right?

There's a meme in the air . . . I just got an announcement from Boston's Landmark Theater about the opening of a Swedish film called Patrik, Age 1.5 – which is about a male gay couple who try to adopt, and are saddled with a kid named Patrik, who definitely isn't 1.5 years old . . . there was a decimal error. He's fifteen, and homophobic. Have to check it out.

Joe

the ladies are all right, too

Last night we went to see The Kids Are All Right, which I was disposed to like from the beginning, because it didn't use the horrific "alright." Overall it was a likeable movie for almost anyone, a thoughtful family dramedy about a lesbian couple coping with teenaged children and a desperate intrusion of (heterosexual) infidelity. The kids, a boy 15 and a girl 18, want to meet their biological father, an anonymous sperm donor they track down without too much trouble.

It's sort of an updated ...