Sarah Monette's Blog, page 29

Eve tempted Adam with an apple, you know I ain't going for that

1. We have a new car. The elderly psychotic Swedish car had devolved into panic attacks (the car started setting the car alarm off randomly--and silently, so it was like panic attacks IN MIME) and we finally just said fuck it, and bought a new (used) 2009 Subaru Forester. With all-wheel drive, which I am going to be loving come next winter, I tell you what.

2. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a hawk cam, which as I type this is showing three fluffy baby hawks. (Ooh, and a parent just showed up with a small dead thing. Rock on.)

3. And speaking of fluffy!cams: Kitten Cam! (via heresluck )

4. Not a cam, but to complete the fluffy trifecta: Clouded Leopard cub getting some really primo chin skritches.

5. Neil Gaiman likes my Sandman essay!1 This is the first time in my life I've written an analytical essay about a work by someone who's still alive to have an opinion. And he likes it! I have some cognitive dissonance, but it is the most awesome dissonance in the history of things that jar your brain when you put them together.

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1 @neilhimself For the record CHICKS DIG COMICS contains the best SANDMAN essay I've read & I've read too many. http://bit.ly/GT3TLe Well done @pennyvixen2

2Oh, come on. How could I not footnote at a time like this?

5 things

1. You know the faces people make when they're about to sneeze? Horses do that, too.

2. Sold "Coyote Gets His Own Back" to Apex Magazine & reprint rights for "The Watcher in the Corners" to Ghosts: Recent Hauntings , edited by Paula Guran.

3. Also, because I failed abysmally to blog on the actual launch day, Chicks Dig Comics is out! I contributed an essay on revenge tragedy and Sandman.

4. If arthropods give you a wiggins, DO NOT CLICK THROUGH to the story about the Cincinnati Zoo's Emperor Scorpion and her twenty-five babies. Seriously. Don't. Instead, may I suggest Point Defiance Zoo's unbelievably charming clouded leopard cubs?

5. Speaking of things I failed abysmally to mention, congratulations to all the 2012 Hugo nominees!

UBC: 3 books about crime in London, 1790-1888

Bondeson, Jan. The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. 2001. N.p.: Da Capo Press, 2002.

James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. The Maul and the Pear Tree. 1971. N.p.: Warner Books, 2002.

Jakubowski, Maxim, and Nathan Braund. The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. 1999. 2nd ed. London: Robinson-Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2008.


These books made an inadvertent trio, which actually was interesting for the chance it gave to watch the evolution of London's police force, from The London Monster, where all detection & apprehension was down to private citizens, through the muddle of overlapping jurisdictions in The Maul and the Pear Tree, to the clear understanding of roles in 1888. Private citizens might try to help the police, but they weren't doing their job. There were also several very instructive comparisons to be made about the historiography of crime.

The London Monster, more than the other two, was written to be popular and sensationalist (there's no need to be sensationalist about the Ripper, after all), but despite that, it is a well-written and well-researched book about an odd series of crimes in London in 1790 (I just noticed, in double-checking the date, that Bondeson refers to both the Ratcliffe Highway murders and to Jack the Ripper in his introduction. So, although the trio was inadvertent on my part, it was clearly very much on Mr. Bondeson's mind.)

The London Monster was a man (or men) who attacked respectable women on the streets of London, cutting their buttocks and thighs, or their arms, or stabbing them in the face with a knife concealed in a nosegay. It is inevitable, apparently, in reading about crimes committed before 1900, that there will be doubts expressed about the workings of justice. I'm not entirely sure whether that's a legitimate comment on the justice system of preceding centuries or whether it's simply the fashion in criminological historiography. Certainly, Bondeson follows the pattern, and I can't deny that I agree with his assessment: if we accept the eye-witness statements (which are all we have to go on), there must have been at least three London Monsters working at the same time (one man was extremely tall by the standards of the time, and one seemed to like inventing Wolverine-esque contraptions to cut his victims with), and only one of them was brought to trial. Bondeson even seems to doubt that Rhynwick Williams was one of the Monsters at all, suggesting that he was simply a creepy little stalker who made a good scapegoat. I'm not sure I want to go that far, but The London Monster is a good cautionary tale about the malleability of eye-witness testimony.

The Maul and the Pear Tree is about two horrific crimes in 1811: two houses invaded, the inhabitants beaten to death with a maul or a ripping chisel, and then their throats cut, and all for no apparent reason (one of the victims was a three-month-old baby). In comparison, the London Monster looks merely quaint; for all that he, or they, caused tremendous anxiety to the populace, and severe injury to the victims, no one actually died and there is no sign that the Monster's goal was murder. The Ratcliffe Highway murderer, on the other hand, like Saucy Jack, was interested in nothing else.

James and Critchley (on the book's original publication in 1971, it was Critchley and James, but that was another country, and besides the wench is dead) doubt the guilt of the man arrested for the crimes, John Williams, and edge toward conspiracy theory in their suggestion that his suicide in his cell, before he could be brought to trial, was actually murder. They don't go to the elaborate lengths of the crazier Ripperologists or Arnold Brown, since their suggestion is that the true murderer bribed a turnkey to get into Williams' cell, and then the investigation was dropped because the magistrates (a.) pounced on a dead scapegoat and then (b.) couldn't afford any retrograde motion. They needed to be seen to have solved the case.

I remain somewhat unconvinced. I'm not convinced of Williams' guilt, mind you, but James and Critchley just don't persuade me that their alternate theory is the truth. I'm not sure if it's due to the fact that, having been written for a popular audience in 1971, the book has no endnotes and the rigor of the inquiry has been carefully muffled, or if it's that I found the writing curiously flat (I had that trouble with James in her mysteries, and it's why I stopped reading her--she never made me care about anyone, and she never seemed to want to). So I agree that the investigation should not have stopped after Williams' death, but beyond that I'm not willing to go.

On the other hand, the book was worth the price for the description of the procession of Williams' corpse through the streets of Wapping and its burial, with a stake through its heart, at the crossroads of New Cannon Street and Cable Street.

And finally, The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper, which is an excellent addition to my library because its centerpiece is a collection of essays written by prominent Ripperologists discussing their favorite candidates for the mantle of Ripper. The prize must be awarded to M. J. Trow for his deadpan satire, undectable until the reveal, putting forward the reformer Frederick Charrington. The sad thing is that his satire is better argued and more persuasive than some of the sincere efforts in the collection. Possible Rippers include William Henry Bury, Francis Tumblety, James Maybrick, James Kelly, David Cohen, Thomas Barnardo, an unamed Irish nationalist, a series of copycat murderers (apparently, the only thing that had been keeping the slaughtermen of Whitechapel on the straight and narrow was their failure to realize that their professsion allowed them to walk the streets soaked in blood and not rouse suspicion), Walter Sickert, and Carl Feigenbaum. Plus one essay that doesn't attempt to name a specific murderer, but merely to deduce the characteristics which we can be certain the murderer had from the nature of his murders. Sadly, despite the seeming restraint of the project, even this essay bounds wildly into unsubstantiatable Biblical speculation. This collection of essays is fascinating, not so much for what it tells us about Jack the Ripper as for what it tells us about his historiography and historiographers. (I need to find the earlier edition, because Jakubowski & Braund weeded out the Ripper candidates who are now unfashionable, like M. J. Druitt, and I would love to read the essays stumping for them.) It is also extremely instructive, given that the first section of the Mammoth Book is devoted to laying out the facts as we know them, to observe how many of the essayists get basic facts about the murders wrong. I said to mirrorthaw , if I were ever to teach a course in argumentation and/or historiography, I would assign The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper, because it offers such a compact smorgasbord of rhetorical tricks and logical flaws and the way we bend history when we try to write about it.

Inadvertent trio, yes, but they worked well together.

UBC: The Old Lie

Parker, Peter. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos. 1987. London: Hambledon Continuum, n.d.
Home sick with a nasty hacking cough (and good LORD the prescription cough syrup is nasty--it's like drinking a teaspoon's worth of cough-syrup flavored honey), and finished reading Peter Parker's The Old Lie.

The Old Lie is about World War I and British public schools, more specifically about the way in which the public schools created an officer caste that believed the greatest achievement possible for them was to die young in battle. (Apply the words "glory" and "heroism" and "chivalry" to taste.) Parker goes into great detail, with seemingly endless primary sources, to show that not only were the young men of Britain being told that that was what they should want, but for many of them, it was true. They internalized this ethos, interpolated themselves into its systm, and participated enthusiastically in the indoctrination of their younger brothers (both literal and metaphorical).

And they died. Horribly. Unheroically. Unromantically. For reasons that had nothing at all to do with the reasons they were willing to die. "Poppies for young men," as Sting says, "death's bitter trade."

This is a fascinating book, and an appalling one. The alien lunacy of the primary sources belies the fact of their historical proximity. Although it trivializes Parker's project to reduce it to merely a useful secondary source, it is true that The Old Lie helped me understand the undercurrents of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

Parker is so steeped in his subject, that I suspect some of his argument was actually lost to me because I'm not familiar enough with either the British public school system or the poetry of WWI. Or World War I itself. (I could seriously have used an apparatus of annotations.) But despite that, this was an illuminating read on a subject I find difficult to get my head around.

5 things I've learned about horses that fantasy writers should keep in mind

Diana Wynne Jones famously deduced that the horses of Fantasyland are vegetative bicycles. Here are some ways that real horses are anything but:

1. Horses are very large animals. This is something that you can know in the abstract, as we all do, and still be taken aback by when interacting with an actual horse. Horses take up space. Their heads are massive chunks of bone. Even when they're being affectionate, they're still a good eight to ten times larger than a human being, and they are proportionately stronger.

My perspective on large dogs has completely changed after two years of dressage lessons.

1a. Corrollary: horses have very large, hard, heavy, inflexible feet. Obviously, if one steps on you, it's going to hurt. But even a glancing accidental blow is likely to leave bruises. As I was bringing Milo in the other night, my foot happened to get in the way of his. (See above re: horses take up a lot of space.) Entirely accidental on both sides. And I ended up with a welt on my heel where the edge of his hoof hit me.

2. Horses are, on average, thousand pound herbivores. This means their digestive systems have to keep on trucking pretty much constantly. Which is to say, they are poop machines. And you want them to be. A horse who isn't pooping regularly (by
which I mean several times a day) is a horse who is in trouble.

Also, and I'm sorry to burst the bubble of everyone who grew up with My Little Ponies*, horses fart. Noxiously. A lot.

3. Horses are also thousand pound prey animals. They do not think like human beings. They also do not think like cats or dogs. Even a very calm, sensible horse is going to spook, and he's going to spook at things that make no sense. Milo is in general unflappable, but he has spooked, for no apparent reason, at tree stumps, a wood pile, and an elderly VW. (He's also spooked at the barn cat, but I can kind of see his point there. She did emerge from under the bench quite suddenly, so we'll ignore the fact that she's at best 1/100th of his size.) He's also spooked at himself.

4. Horses are creatures with opinions. The are, for instance, herd animals. A solitary horse is an unhappy horse. They will try to follow each other pretty much automatically, which can be awkward for their riders. Take away their pasture mate(s), and they're going to be distressed. They're likely to call for their absent friends. (One of the horses at the barn screams.) And in general, if they don't like something, they will find a way to let you know.

5. A horse's primary means of interacting with the world is her mouth. (Hard, heavy, inflexible feet, remember?) Anything that isn't a threat is likely to be something that needs to be tasted. Also, horses are opportunistc and greedy (see above re: the needs of their digestive systems). Anything that can be tasted, will be tasted. And eaten if possible.

To sum up: horses have presence. They take up space in the world. They are intensely biological. They have opinions (often very inconvenient ones). And they have needs, both physical and emotional. They get bored. They get scared. They get lonely. They are the farthest thing from vegetative bicycles you can imagine.


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*Completely OT, but can I just say how utterly creeped out I am by how thin My Little Ponies have gotten? (Compare the first link, which is current MLP, to the second two, which are '80s MLP.) I mean, seriously, Hasbro, WTF? They're PONIES, not heroin-chic fashion models. FEED THEM.

UBC: HItler: Hubris/Hitler: Nemesis

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
I need to start with a tiny nit-picking piece of bitchery: nobody involved in the process of publishing this book caught the vice/vise mistake, and it happened more than once. Germany may have been caught in a vise of its own vices, if you want to be smartassed about it, but it was not caught in a vice. Thank you. Never mind. Two countries separated by a single language as per usual.

This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.

Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.

(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)

Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.

As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.

Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Due South: "Dr. Longball"

"Dr. Longball" (DS 4.1)
Original air date:
Favorite quote:
RAY: Hey, y'know what they call third base?
FRASER: The hot plate?
RAY: No, the hot corner. You know why they call it that?
FRASER: I've no idea.
RAY: Well neither do I, but it does not sound good.
[Ray turns to go]
FRASER: Ray!
[Ray turns and Fraser throws him his glove. He drops it.]
FRASER: Oh dear.

It's taken me almost two years to get from the end of Season 3 to the beginning of Season 4. I apologize. Partly, this long hiatus has been due to excessively exciting health problems; partly it's been due to the fact that Season 4 is my favorite season, and it's a lot harder to analyze something you love than it is to analyze something you like a lot. And, you know, once I finish writing up the thirteen episodes of Season 4, we're done. There is no more Due South.

So fair warning: my love for Season 4 is unreasonable. I don't love every episode equally, but two of my three favorite Due South episodes are Season 4 ("The Ladies' Man" and "Say Amen"--the third of my favorite episodes, for anyone who's curious, is "A Hawk and a Handsaw"), and in general, really, I love Season 4 more than is good for me.

And a reminder: this is an Equal Love For Rays zone. If you want to talk about how much you hate Ray Kowalski, please do it somewhere else.

Okay. On with the show!

ObDisclaimer: (1) Spoilers.
(2) I'm using this transcript site, to which I am very grateful

And, good grief, two more caveats. (1) I am a baseball fan; (2) I am a nut for the doppelganger/doubling trope (the only thing that could make me happier in this episode is if Beau Starr played both Welsh brothers).

And the episode really uses the idea of doppelgangers, of mirrors and foils and negatives, from the doubled cast members, to the way in which the evil mayor carefully sets up a patsy for every crime he commits, to the aggressive way in which both Welsh brothers emphasize the difference between Chicago and Willison. That binary between Chicago and the rest of America is something the episode examines rather skeptically. At the beginning, Huey and Dewey react to the idea of leaving Chicago much the same way Ray does in "Burning Down the House":

RAY: Fraser! Buddy! You have a good time up there in the Northwest Areas?
FRASER: Territories, you mean?
RAY: Wilderness, huh? Exactly. Me personally, I leave the city, I come down with this skin condition.
***
WELSH: How about you, you look like you could use some fresh air.
DEWEY: I hate fresh air.
***
WELSH: What's going on here? I'm talking about a day off with pay.
HUEY: Yeah, but it's the country, lieutenant.

Welsh, selling hard to Fraser, describes it as "the heartbeat of America" (which, of course, was Chevrolet's advertising slogan in the late '80s, and yes, that can be taken as a sign, because as soon as Welsh has his driver, he reverts to the same contempt Huey and Dewey show) and invokes apple pie--at which Fraser neatly explodes the binary--and reminds us that there are more places in the world than Chicago on one hand and small-town America on the other: "Hm, sounds like home. Of course, we tended more towards brown lichen tarts." The doubling isn't stable or trustworthy--the more Wilson Welsh tries to emphasize that Willison is nothing like Chicago (the word "community" gets bandied about endlessly), the more it becomes apparent that the people of Willison are just as unprincipled and nasty as the people of Chicago. Fraser, again, provides the pin to pop the balloon:

OLIVIA: The Mayor and I were just discussing a business transaction.
FRASER: So I heard.
OLIVIA: Oh. Well, y'know [nervous laugh] small towns. We know everybody. We can speak frankly.
FRASER: This is true. Although you know, I have heard young ladies on the streets of Chicago discussing business deals in very similar terms.

The binary between Chicago and "the heartbeat of America" is a false one, but the two can still be played off against each other.

The episode also uses the idea of "bringing in the pros"--the bank robbers from Chicago, the detectives from Chicago, Ace Leary (who is also from Chicago even though his cover story, in a twisty bit of meta, makes him Canadian)--to make parallels between the baseball plotline and the mystery plotline. And the idea of doubling as rivalry is ALL OVER the relationship between the Welsh brothers--both named for presidents, both officers of the law, country mouse and city mouse, both sons of an alcoholic and emotionally abusive father:

WILSON WELSH: You just haven't outgrown it have you?
HARDING WELSH: What's that?
W. WELSH: Competing with me.
H. WELSH: Competing for what?
W. WELSH: Everything. For... for Susie Delessen. For who's gonna be quarterback on the football team. For who can sit on the railroad tracks the longest.
H. WELSH: Oh I always could stay the longest.
W. WELSH: For Dad's approval.
H. WELSH: I never needed his approval.
W. WELSH: Oh no?
H. WELSH: No. Let me tell you something. [with a maginficently sarcastic gesture] How could I possibly compete with all of this?

The way in which Wilson and Harding mirror each other is made even more explicit in a later part of the same argument (which they pick up and put down all episode long):

W. WELSH: Look, I know he was a lousy father, and he treated us hard.
H. WELSH: Hard on you? There was nothing I could do to please that guy. Every other day he was telling me how you were his only real son.
W. WELSH: And every other day he told me how you were his only real son.

Given that this is Due South, it's no surprise that Harding Welsh has daddy issues--like Fraser and Ray Vecchio and Ray Kowalski--and one of the themes of "Dr. Longball" is Welsh's relationships with his family, both the brother he can't stop competing with and the father he can't forgive:

WELSH: Constable. Can I ask your advice?
FRASER: My advice sir?
WELSH: Yeah, your advice.
FRASER: If I can help...
WELSH: If you had somebody you were trying to forgive, no matter how hard you tried to forgive 'em, you just couldn't forgive 'em. What would you do?
FRASER: Keep trying, sir.

And, by the end:

FRASER: Sir, if I may. Y'know, he is your father, he's your only father. There are probably sides to him that you don't know about. I only say this because I had a father, my only father, and well, my advice to you is not to wait until he's dead to discover those sides. It tends to be somewhat disorienting.
WELSH: Constable.
FRASER: Yes, sir?
WELSH: Giving advice to your elders is....
FRASER: Unbecoming?
WELSH: Unbecoming.
FRASER: Understood.

Welsh goes, in a completely typical Welshian way, from asking for Fraser's advice to telling him off, albeit mildly, for offering it. Fraser's advice, on the other hand, remains consistent--and is one of the very few windows the episode offers us into Fraser's interiority. Fraser Sr. does not appear in this episode, and although Dief is very present, Fraser only has one conversation with him--and it seems utterly, beautifully appropriate that they're arguing the call on Fraser's terrifying cut fastball:

DIEF: [barks]
Fraser: What are you talking about? It was a strike on the corner.
DIEF: [barks]
FRASER: Oh great, blind and deaf.

But other than that, Fraser is very distant in this episode, very Mountie, very correct. "Did you grow up in a public service announcement?" Huck Bogart asks him, and, yeah, this is the Fraser that did. Dief, on the other hand, is emoting all over the place: objecting to Woody the mascot ("a wolverine with a goiter"), to Wilson's pink flamingoes, to the mayor discussing trading cheese for beaver meat ("Diefenbaker feels a particular kinship with the beaver. It's as if we were discussing, well, eating a member of the family.")--there very possibly acting as a cover for Fraser's dislike of the repellent mayor--shamelessly wooing the fangirls. And there's a lovely, tiny parallel between Superego-Fraser and Id/Ego-Dief in relationship to Rusty-who-won't-stop-crying: Fraser produces a handkerchief out of nowhere for him in his initial interrogation; later in the episode Dief fetches him a box of Kleenex. (I'm with Ray: you gotta love this wolf.) Fraser's clearly even more alien in Willison than in Chicago, and he clearly feels it. There is no Fraser parallel in Willison, no brother, no Ace Leary for him to step into.

And speaking of Ace Leary brings us to the baseball plot, wherein what we're seeing is a happy mishmash of baseball story tropes, mostly Bull Durham. Huck and Woody echo Skip and Larry; Fraser tells Ray, "Above all you must try not to think," just as Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh, "You just got lesson number one: don't think; it can only hurt the ball club"; and Ray's interview with Toni Lake is just about word for word the string of clichés that Crash tells Nuke to memorize (and which, at the end of the movie, we see Nuke reeling off like a champ). There are other clichés thrown in there, too: Ray gets both to make the final out (defense) and to hit the winning grand slam (offense)--and the way Ray's face lights up as he starts rounding the bases is seriously what baseball is all about. The baseball plot isn't entirely coherent (the thing with Kelly Olsen has no follow through because Ray's arc steals the clutch homer), but it doesn't need to be--the baseball storyline is mostly there to infuse the episode with eau de baseball: we only touch on it at pivotal moments. For non-baseball fans, that's probably about as much as they can tolerate; baseball fans can fill in the rest of it on their own, because we all know how the story goes.

(Also, I love Tony Craig and Tom Melissis' riff on Who's On First? :

COSTELLO: Look, you gotta first baseman?
ABBOTT: Certainly.
COSTELLO: Who's playing first?
ABBOTT: That's right.
***
HAYSEED #1 (Melissis): Have they got a first baseman?
HAYSEED #2 (Craig): Certainly.
HAYSEED #1: All right. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Who?
HAYSEED #1: The first baseman. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Certainly.

I'm not sure which I love more: that they're quoting Who's On First? or that they're taking the same joke in a different--but equally logical--direction.)

And finally, the piece that didn't quite fit in anywhere else, but which has relevance to all of it: Ray's initial absence. At the start of the episode, Ray has vamoosed to Mexico:

WELSH: Vecchio's on holiday.
DEWEY: Oh yeah, where?
HUEY: At a Club Couples place, in Mexico.
DEWEY: Vecchio, Club Couples? Who with?
HUEY: Remember that chick he busted last month for passing bad checks?
DEWEY: Oh man, that's low. I mean, I grovel once in a while, but to bust a chick for a date? The man has no standards.

Ray's initial absence is actually necessary, plot-wise, for a couple of reasons:
(1) like Welsh's broken foot, it gets Fraser and Welsh off on this adventure together
(2) it lets Ray to be introduced as a ringer, Fraser and Welsh's "ace in the hole," to make a bad pun

It also permits a Clint Eastwood homage (clearly there as a throwaway gag), and it offers a reminder, again, that romantic comedy tropes do not work in Due South:

FRASER: So you didn't get the girl, then?
RAY: Nah. Got this poncho.
FRASER: It's very fetching.

There's no romance in this episode--Olivia has been having affairs with everthing in Willison with a dick--but Fraser and Ray's partnership is still working like a charm: Fraser talks Ray into trouble (because of his touchingly naïve faith that Ray is as honest as he is about everything), but he also coaches him into winning the game.

RIGHT NOW

You should all go look at the ABSOLUTELY FREAKING AMAZING series of pendants elisem has made based on my story "Katabasis: Seraphic Trains" (in Somewhere Beneath Those Waves), which in turn was based on Elise's necklace "Why Do You Linger?"

Seriously. Go look. Right now.

5 things, me me me me and also me edition

1. The new Shadow Unit episode, "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," is up. I wrote it.

If you've been wondering about whether you might like Shadow Unit, this episode is pretty self-contained, so it might be a good one to try. (The first taste is freeee-eeeee ... Of course, so are the second, third, and fourth tastes, in this case.)

2. Cons I will be attending in 2012:
Odyssey Con
WisCon
Fourth Street
WorldCon
Dunno how much I'll be doing at any of 'em--per day job: I don't rate paid vacaction yet, and have found that I may or may not have much brain left on the weekends--but I'll be there.

3. My editor says not to worry about those extra 20,000 words, so I'm suddenly quite close to being able to turn the damn book in. Not quite there yet, but close.

4. I wrote an essay for Chicks Dig Comics , along with a bunch of amazing women.

5. Acupuncture brings Teh Awesome. That is all.

seeking data from people with uteruses (uteri?)

Dear Internets,

Please tell me about your experiences with endometrial ablation.
Because I'm on a lot of different drugs currently, and it looks like that's going to be a long term thing, I'm reluctant to go back on the Pill (also, there's the endless uterine drama of trying to find the one that works, but doesn't give me horrific side effects, and then there's the long-term effects of the Pill itself, and, and, and ...), but I'm a little skeeved by the whole idea of ablation, and there's also the fact that as a woman who started menstruating before the age of twelve, who has never been and never intends to be pregnant, and thus also has never lactated, I hit several of the risk factors for endometrial cancer--which ablation makes much more difficult to detect.
Basically, I don't like any of the options I can see, and I think I need more data. All comments, from the anecdotal to the clinical, will be gratefully welcomed.

And, as an apology for a very self-centered and overly share-y post, let me point out that "Blue Lace Agate" is available as a podcast at Lightspeed, as are many other fine stories, including one by mrissa . (I would link, but Lightspeed's site is currently down.)