Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 81

onward and upward

On the last page of the B section of this morning's newspaper is a story slugged "Millionaire's rocket has successful first flight." There are five column inches describing how the test rocket for SpaceX corporation successfully reached orbit.

The payload is a test version of Dragon, the company's proposed commercial spacecraft.

A spacecraft built by private enterprise reached permanent orbit. Shouldn't that be on the front page? BP's troubles are huge, but they're the death throes of an ind...

A Moveable Feast

I found a little gem in the "new" (i.e. untouched by Mary Hemingway) edition of A MOVEABLE FEAST. Hemingway's talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and THE GREAT GATSBY --

" . . . Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste, and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a bad book of science fiction . . . . I took it off to read the book."

What's fun about this to the insider is that Fitzgerald had _loved_ that pa...

Florida Folk Festival

Over the holiday weekend we went out to the Florida Folk Festival with Doris Nabors. When her husband Bill was alive we used to make a long weekend of it, sit on a blanket and drink beer and strum guitar and banjo, listen to a few of the performers, but mainly just veg out and enjoy the ambience.

We only went for the one day this time, but did take blanket and cooler (and folding chairs for our slightly older backs). I brought along my travel guitar, the Taylor Backpacker, and played and san...

Memorial Day

Thank you, Blues, for the charitable thought. But of course the men and women who are serving now are fundamentally different from me and my comrades. They chose to go. I chose not to go to jail.

The dimensions of "choice" are worth pondering today, and I did think about it hard as I bicycled down 8th Avenue this morning. As in every year, the Veterans for Peace have erected a monument in the form of a small plastic gravestone for each service member who has died in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

DO NOT LET DEATH HAPPEN TO YOU!

I just got a letter from the VA ordering me to report for an examination with respect to my combat-related disability. This is what it says:


"It is very important that you appear for this examination. 38 CFR.655 states that when a claimant, WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE (bad health, death, or bad weather), fails to report for such examinations, the exam and request shall be returned to the regional office. Please do not let this happen to you."


That's the best damned medical advice I've had in a lo...

the years of our lives

(in sff.net, Lawrence Watt-Evans mentioned the original Robin Hood script bought by the producers...)

I read about that, Lawrence. Evidently the first version was a killer script that everybody liked, and then proceeded to submerge under rewrites. Typical Hollywood success story.

One blogger suggested that the original story might resurface in the sequel -- that is, switch to the POV of the Sheriff and run it like a 12th-century police procedural, as the Sheriff tries to pin down this sylvan ...

Robin Hood Re-vision

We went off to see Ridley Scott's _Robin Hood_ last night. A strange movie, sort of a prequel to the Robin Hood story as it's usually told (and it ends with a card saying "The Legend Begins," which might as well be "Sequel Follows.")

The gritty period detailing is good, and the huge spectacular scenes are spectacular (including a landing of the French army on British beaches that looks like "Saving Private Ryan" in period drag, including LST's made of logs). Lots of neat-if-impossible archer...

Give me a Z

Down in sffnet, we're rewriting the classics . . .


. . . and behind Pooh the Scarecrow was singing --

"I would not be just a nothin',

My head all full of stuffin',

My heart all full of pain --

I could be a gnarly hombre

I could turn into a zombie

If I only had some BRRRAAAIIINNZZZ!"


-- L. Frank Joe

the Lost round-up

The Lost finale was complicated and compelling, and necessarily incomplete. There are so many unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, plot threads that it would take days of screen time to tie everything up.

A couple of years ago I ventured to guess that the presence of THE THIRD POLICEMAN on the island was a clue -- all of that long and complex novel takes place in a fraction of a second, while the viewpoint character dies. That seems to be related to whatever logic unifies the various stories o...

nice pair

Have been remiss at blogging lately. Social life and writing. Tim Blackmore is visiting from Canada for a few days; we have fun jawing and drawing together.

Interesting surprise at the figure studio Saturday -- instead of one model, it was two, a pretty woman about seven months pregnant, and her husband. Drawing the couple was a lot of fun. Two people seems easier for a quick drawing than one -- there's just time to get the basic form down, so I don't screw it up by elaborating.

Then we ha...