Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 83

Endoscopy

I may be out of touch for a bit. At midnight I have to stop taking food and water for the next 15 hours, and then go under for gastrointestinal endoscopy. Optical fiber tube down the throat, through the stomach, and into the pancreas. Look around and see whether a stent is needed; if so, put it in. (I think between the two lobes of the organ.)

If all goes well it will be an outpatient procedure, though I'll be pretty dopey after it. Doc says only 5% cause trouble, usually pancreatitis. W...

the master's voice?

So I went to the gym this morning, did my exercises on the machines, and then peddled on over to the coffee house to write. Called Gay at home, and told her that I had gotten to the coffeehouse, had my coffee and my cookie in front of me, and was about to start writing. Then I opened my blank book, and found that I didn't have a fountain pen.

I didn't have a ballpoint pen either, nor a pencil, nor anything with which to make a mark on paper. This is pretty sorry, coming from a person has about...

the forever book

Looking for news about the Forever War movie (found nada new), I came across an interesting new, to me, review of the book, by Ted Gioia.

http://www.conceptualfiction.com/forever_war.html

(Needless to say, he liked it.) There's a new military-sf movie poster-like picture that some blog thought was about the TFW movie, but as far as I know, nobody associated with Ridley Scott has said anything about it. Most of the news is about his new Robin Hood movie and the Monopoly project, and a preque...

Go, gators.

A couple of days ago, I found out just how famous I really am.

A local lawyer with whom I've played poker a couple of times called me about 11:00 in the morning. "I have a client," he said, "who has to talk to somebody famous. Can you be by the phone between noon and 12:30?"

I said sure, but started to protest that I wasn't a famous person.

"I know," he said. "This is just in case we can't get John Travolta."

He never called back, so I guess Travolta returned his call. I wonder what the clien...

man eating alligator

We have a little farmers' market a couple of blocks away that's open on Fridays and Sundays. Last Sunday there was a lady selling frozen alligator "steaks." (Cut from the tail, actually.) I order alligator a few times a year down here in restaurants, usually as appetizers, but haven't cooked it in years. So I got a pound and figured I'd take it home and make some chili.

I adapted this from a chicken recipe in Jane Butel's _Hotter Than Hell_, not a modest cookbook.

People say alligator taste...

shuttle returns

The shuttle just passed overhead on its way to landing at the Cape. Loudest sonic boom I've ever heard, a double boom like someone firing a double-barreled shotgun a few yards away. If one barrel were 12 gauge and the other 20 gauge.

The shuttle makes a double boom because it's so large. Rather, all supersonic aircraft make a double boom, one from the nose and one from the tail, but in a smaller craft we hear both almost simultaneously. With the shuttle, they're about a half-second apart.

Joe

Shuttle heads-up

Forwarded from the Alachua Astronomy Club --


SPACE SHUTTLE RE-ENTRY: On Monday morning, April 19th, space shuttle Discovery will make a rare "descending node" reentry over the continental United States. The returning spacecraft will pass over or close to many towns and cities en route to landing in Florida at 8:48 am EDT, including Fort Peck Lake, Montana; Pierre, South Dakota; Sioux City, Iowa; St. Louis, Missouri; Tupelo, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama, and Jacksonville, Florida.


Obse...

sleep aids

Right as I sent that last message, I got a pop-up ad with surprising erotic content. It was for a mattress company, offering their wares at a substantial online discount, saying that "a good night's sleep is just a click away." But in their sans-serif typeface, "click" looked like "dick" . . . .

Joe

Here's a picture of the model Saturday. One-minute pose, drawn with a rollerball because I couldn't find my drawing pen --

our friends the rocks

I just had a curious reading experience. Reading a good New York Times article about teaching philosophy to children, I came upon the line

"He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman. . . "

and I read the symbol cluster "1970s" as the word "agora." That word doesn't appear in the article, but of course I was sort of looking for in-context Greek words, in an article about philosophy. Plus the interesting observation that we invent words from charact...

space dreams

[Robin Bailey asked on sff.net what I thought of Obama's speech at Cape Canaveral . . . :]

Robin, if George W. Bush had said he was in favor of a HLLV (heavy-lift launch vehicle), increased robotic exploration of the solar system, putting astronauts on an asteroid and a Martian moon, increasing NASA's budget, and encouraging private enterprise in Low Earth Orbit and cislunar space -- then once I picked my jaw up off the floor, I'd have had to agree with him. But he didn't. Obama's a liberal, ...