Fermi/Channel Markers (2): Levittown

Another thing to check is whether the prices for the cars make any sense using these back of the envelope calculations.

So let's go to Levittown (Billy Joel fans nod along).

The price of the Levittown houses started at 6990 dollars in the late forties, still with the staturory price of gold at 35 dollars per ounce. In the same calculation, then, in today's money a Levittown suburb house was priced at about 250000 dollars.

Which in my neck of the woods is a reasonable price for a new build house in a suburb. We can argue about whether the amenities are more valuable, compared to how much more lot houses built in the 50's had, but the basic scale of the thing is consistent at least.

Minimum wage then was 0.75 dollars per hour, i.e. 75 cents an hour. Using our crude rule, that works out to about 28 dollars per hour. From my retail hell days, that's like getting hired as a manager from day one.

Or, think about a mechanic or plumber's wages today, say 50 dollars an hour. In that sense, a 28 dollar per hour wage is like starting as an apprentice. And at 2000 hours per year, that minimum wage works out to about 56000 dollars per year total income in current equivalent.

So, in fiction terms, your slimy manager is going to offer our beat down hero a salary job as soon as possible, to get her off the hourly books.

Or, maybe "Hey kid, give you a nickle if you'll run this package over to Old Man Smith..." tells you one thing, "give you a dollar" tells you another.

Oh, and gas was about a quarter a gallon, which is just a shade less than 10 dollars a gallon today in this calculation. Now there's a bit of a different look at things...

Incidentally, the Chevy Bel-Air was about 1700 dollars new, or about 63000 dollars in this method of calculation. Maybe that explains why it was so popular later, the guy on the block driving it was driving the equivalent of a high-end Cadillac, and teenagers have a tendency to imprint on the things they can only dream about...

Fermi/Channel Markers (1): Shiny New Cars...

I'm out of observations tonight.

No. That's not right. I have a couple, let's see if I can put them together coherently.

All right, so we're fans of the show Wheeler Dealers (on Velocity in the U.S., but it was originally a U.K. show, but I'm afraid I don't know offhand which of the UK channels was their original home). This past year, they had a change in the mechanic hosts, with Ant Anstead taking the slot over from the departing Edd Chyna.

We've seen a few of Ant's episodes, but what we had not yet caught was his prior show, For the Love of Cars. We happened on an episode last night by accident, it happened to be their VW Microbus episode. It's fun, if you have any love in your heart for air cooled engines it's worth catching.

So we're watching the discussion of when the Microbus was first introduced, and Ant's partner on the show mentioned that the original sticker price for the Microbus back in the mid 1950's was a hair over 2000 dollars.

And I started thinking about what I call Fermi/Channel Markers.

Or, those little tricks that engineers and scientists pick up for estimating. The most famous examples in the outer world of these sorts of things are known as Fermi problems, after Enrico Fermi, who was well known for having a knack for this sort of thing.

Things like, a cubic meter is 1000 liters is just over 260 gallons. An Olympic class swimming pool is just less than 3000000 (3 million) liters (2500000 precisely), just over 600000 gallons (the factor here is 3.8 liters per (U.S.) gallon). Big mixing tanks in industrial plants are often of the order of 750000-800000 gallons or just a hair more than an Olympic swimming pool's worth of liquid, or about 3000 cubic meters (1 pool +).

But what does that have to with the VW Microbus?

Well, the statutory price of an ounce of gold (post-Roosevelt/WWII) in the 1950's was 35 dollars per ounce. And the spot price of gold in yesterday's market is about 1300 dollars per ounce. Consequently, in today's dollars, the sticker price of a first generation VW Microbus when it rolled off the line in New York harbor was about 2000 times 1300 divided by 35 (i.e. 2000 times approximately 37) equals about 74000 dollars.

In other words, for a writer, whether fiction or non-fiction, this is a significant thing: the VW Microbus in the United States was a high-end luxury purchase if bought new.

Can we verify this? Well yes, actually. Here's how. The original Corvette, introduced in 1953, was contemporary to the 'bus, and it's sticker price was approximately 3500 dollars. And the 'vette was considered a playboy's toy.

And what's that in new money? 3500 times 1300 divided by 35 is about 130000 dollars. Which is a pretty good price for a new 'vette these days. Google tells me the base model starts at 56000 dollars. Which means that, even after inflation, etc. this year's Corvette is priced, in equivalent terms, almost exactly half of the price of its progenitor. (The next year, it was reduced to about 2700 dollars, which is a lot closer to the 'bus)

Now, look again at that original price in today's money for the Microbus, 74000. That's Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar money. But the VW Tiguan starts at 25000. Makes me wonder where the next gen 'bus, the all-electric coming in 2022, is going to be priced at. 40000, say? Maybe 35000? Certainly not that 74000 level.

Writers, this is why I call it a Fermi/Channel Marker: it helps me, and I hope you, see what sorts of things to look for in different eras. For sci-fi, it might even help for thinking about what might happen going forward. If your villain jumps into his split-window Stingray, chrome shining, pops the clutch and roars down the street... well, maybe he's slumming it in the warehouse district?

What about the surfer girl in her father's brand new Microbus going down to the Beach Blanket Bingo? Maybe she's not going to have to worry too much about how here parents are going to pay for Vassar in the fall. Or maybe she really is terrified, if dad extended himself just a little too far to get the exotic new German toy...

covers (1): Respect

Musicians can, depending on circumstances, have an advantage over just about all other artists: they can cover songs.

Sometimes, this can be a curse more than a blessing. Basically, any public performance for money has to pay the songwriter for the privilege. Just about every musician I know who's ever played in a cover band has at least a story or two about bar owners, cover licenses, and where these things meet.

It's bad enough that in any town with any kind of music scene at all, there are bars and other venues that will say "originals only" or something similar. Contrariwise, there are some bars that won't play originals at all, cover bands only.

At least a few of that latter sort are the kind of places that have reputations among musicians. That's often where you'll hear about the band thinking there's a twenty buck cover, but the fans see a thirty buck cover...

More broadly, there are musicians who've never performed their own music in public, or at least for the gigs they're most well known for. Opera singers, choir singers generally, classical musicians. Except in rare cases, for the paying gigs they're always playing someone else's music.

It's an odd little business, when you think about it. In some ways, the most celebrated (in one sense) musicians are songwriters: Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Lennon/McCartney...

In other ways, not so much: Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, names to conjure with, for the music. Not for their songwriting.

So, that's out of the way. Now let's get down to why I'm here.

Let's talk about the song Respect. You've got it in your head, and there's pretty much one reason why. Aretha.

Here's Aretha in the original.

And, it's not her song. Or, at least, she didn't write it.

Otis Redding did. Which shouldn't surprise you, if you know Otis. Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay is his most well known hit, but it's not his only one, and depending on what mood I'm in, I'd argue it's not even his own best song. Just the one most well known.

Point being, Otis is one of the great songwriters of his era, which was cut tragically short. In my book, he's the missing piece in a trail that leads from Sam Cooke to Stevie Wonder. If you ever wonder how we got from Twistin' the Night Away to Songs in the Key of Life, I'd suggest taking a stop in Memphis and giving Otis' work a listen.

So, on that note, here's Otis's original version of Respect.

First, a note. Far be it for me to argue with the almighty wikipedia authorities, but the difference between the musical arrangements isn't as large as they're making out. That's really just the difference in style between the two different R&B traditions involved, Stax and King Curtis's Kingpins at Atlantic records, pretty much the two best house bands of that particular era (from Stax, you may know Steve Cropper better from the Blues Brothers along with Duck Dunn; King Curtis gave us Yakety Yak with the Coasters, as well as being session man with a huge variety of different musicians across the spectrum).

The real difference between the versions of the songs is Aretha's voice. Sure, there's an element of timing here, at least in terms of how one of the most powerful female voices ever recorded is going to pop into the public consciousness in that time and place singing a song with those lyrics.

But that doesn't have much to do with the power of the thing when she gets ahold of it. I don't know for sure when it happened, but somewhere between the time Jerry Wexler first played Otis's version of it for her, and when she stepped up to the mic for her version of it, but...

According to legend, possibly apocryphal: When Otis heard Aretha's version, his only response was "B!tch stole my song". Now, that's not exactly the most butch of responses, but give him credit.

He was right, and he knew it as soon as he heard it. She walked up to that mic and stole Respect right out from under him. The lady's the champ...

So, off-color humor lines, as provided by my family (1) (language alert)

I mean lines similar to "nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs" (obligatory cat pic (this is woodrow the ginger nitwit telling me to buzz off)).

If you haven't heard the long-tailed cat line, the joy of it is the way the image works. It sums up exactly what you mean with no effort, at least for those who've seen cat and rocking chair and can imagine the catastrophe awaiting.

Except... I don't know about you, but my family (I mean a particular branch of the family, not all of them) didn't have many barriers around the kids. There were certain words that were off limits, but otherwise if you heard d*mn, sh!t, p!ss, son of a b!tch, g*dd*mn little bastards (my great-grandfather's description of us on the, ah, rare occasions when we deserved it =>), as a kid you were expected to ignore it.

And I don't just mean the men, either. My grandmother and great-grandmother are/were just as non-inclined to "watch their mouth" as the men were. Basically, their attitude was that, they were adults, we were kids, and they weren't about to not speak as adults. It was our job to learn the difference.

By the way, on that side we're farmers, hunters, fishermen, plumbers, carpenters, etc. So no inclination to pretend to society manners.

Let me give you an example. The first time I heard "she got her tit caught in a wringer" it wasn't from one of my uncles, grandfathers, etc. It was from my grandmother. I giggled for a week. You should have seen my mother's face.

If I recall correctly, I was about three. I knew better, but every time my mother and I were alone, I made sure to repeat it for her, just to watch her try and keep a straight face.

Another one I heard from my great-grandmother first? Nervous as a hooker in church. I was a little older before I heard that one, but it was still one of those wonderful lines that I cackle with glee because of who I heard it from.

Oh, by the way. Kids who hang out in the kitchen and can learn to help cook and keep their mouths shut get to hear all kinds of things. Beware the sneaky little buggers...

My great-grandfather was absolutely not being an old bastard himself when he called us little bastards, g*dd*amned little bastards, or other variations. He loved us all dearly, beyond words. He'd never say a true angry word to any of us, and it would have killed him if we ever saw him angry.

But he was also never going to let us get away with anything, either. And since taming us bunch of, well, g*dd*mned little bastards would have required an iron boot and a whip, dirty language that made you laugh when you heard him say it, and oh by the way take a moment to gauge whether you were really in trouble...

Let's say there are worse ways to be.

My grandfather, one in particular, contributed to my education here as well. Stink strong enough to knock a buzzard off a sh!t waggon at fifty yards. Busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Crazier than a sh!t-house rat.

That particular grandfather was a professional musican, professional gambler, race driver (cars, motorcycles, and boats that I'm sure of), trucker, plumber, HVAC tech... basically he could and did do just about anything in a long full life.

Which meant he always had a story and more than a few such phrases to go along with them.

Ah, HOA meetings... I'm not gonna say they're the bane of my existence, because I don't want to get stuck on the board. No time, no inclination, and no one in their right mind puts me in charge of anything.

Ours isn't too bad, I just operate under the principle that if I don't show up, they'll wander off into trouble. Or, at least, like anyone in a position of responsibility, they need the people they're responsible to to show up and put in a look see on occasion.

Eh, at least there's only a few of these things a year. It could be a lot worse.

In story news, I'm up to about 21400 words on A Wolf in Taos Valley, and the story's still motoring along. I can see something like the resolution from here, though only in the general sense. A challenge and a fun one.

(a bit of doggerel to send off the day)

It being a work day, I set off through the garage this morning, where I tripped over an allegory someone had left out.

I tried to stuff it under an old polemic, but there wasn't room. While I was looking for a place to hide the silly thing, I slipped on a tangent, slid through the detritus of various digressions, smack into an old soapbox.

When a cabinet full of lost similes and metaphors collapsed on me. Desparate to find someplace a little less crowded, someplace I could recover my focus and train of thought, I crawled out through the mouth of madness into the winds of change.

Exhausted, I collapsed into my driver's seat and set out for someplace nice, safe, and quiet: the Courts of Chaos.

As you can see below, I've put up a links page for my next published book, Through the Foggy Dew! It's available through all your favorite e-tailers, or at least should be. I have all my distributors listed, for paperback as well as e-book, Apple, Overdrive, and others should be handled through the distribution agreements, so if you don't see your particular favorite check under M.K. Dreysen or Through the Foggy Dew and see if they've snuck it in.

I had posted the back copy and some notes as I went through the publication polishing stages, but I forgot that I never put together and actual links page. I also forgot to send it on to Kobo, as well, but that's my foible. Hmm, guess that means it's time to put together a pre-flight checklist.

The other thing I learned this time through was that the paperback route I'm using isn't quite the distribution method (I'm using the paperback route through KDP, which for producing books and making them available everywhere Amazon sells is absolutely greaty; it's the distribution beyond Amazon that I hadn't quite clued into wasn't fully available) I had thought it was. So I'll likely begin playing with Createspace in my future path (or Ingram, not entirely sure yet, I have to evaluate both for my needs).

On the work in progress, A Wolf in... is up to just over twenty-thousand words, so I'm staring down that transition between novella and novel if it keeps going the way I expect. It's still fun, and I'm still enjoying the surprises my path is going over, so it'll most likely end up going through that transition to the other side.

Well, I say that. But I'm not judging that. Ultimately, it's up to what fits the story, and my heroine. She's surprised me a few times so far, and so has the antagonist. There's a dance here, and neither one of them are quite ready for the bloody end. And I know for damned sure neither one of them is ready yet to tell me just where and when it's gonna take place...

Far removed from the now of the Open Wounds era... there was a time before.

A time of legend. When the Fae still ruled amongst the mists and barrows...

When dragons yet concealed themselves in mound and vale...

When the Brotherhood was not yet a whisper...

This was the time of the Old Empire. Founded on the magic of family, the Empire rules through the glamour of fear.

But the Old Empire's time on this earth is drawing to a close. Unknowing, they yet wield the power and might that calls the legions.

There are those who would see that power fall...

Their efforts begin with Through the Foggy Dew, Book 1 of the Old Empire.

In which we discover...

That being the guest at your own execution is probably not a good idea...

Being chased by an entire Roman legion does not make for the most entertaining hiking trip...

Stopping for philosophical discussions in the midst of that chase has a tendency to sidetrack things...

Dragons and their caves can also be a little bit distracting. Unfortunately, not all dragons consider Roman legions appetizing enough to fool with...

Sea crossings, while very useful for providing some breathing room, can bring in reinforcements for the pursuers; there are in fact competent members of the Imperial command staff, and in this case they're part of the Navy...

That being the guest at your second execution in a matter of weeks tends to get one talked about in certain circles...

And, finally, that one should probably be just a little suspicious of traveling philosophers...

Through the Foggy Dew is available in ebook and paperback.

The ebook is available from your favorite retailers: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Lulu, and Kobo. If your favorite retailer isn't listed for ebooks, check, because Smashwords, Lulu, and Draft2Digital distribute to Apple.

Through the Foggy Dew is also available in trade paperback through Amazon.

I put in a few words today, but really it was a day to basically sit on the couch watching the Vet Life. We've been watching the three docs and their adventures since they started up, though this year's episodes have been waiting on the streaming for us to catch up to them.

I feel for anybody, animal or human medical field, it's fun and rewarding, but there's always that lurking knowledge. The ones you can't save. From this side of the camera, all I can do is sympathize, but you can see around the edges when they're running it through their minds.

Mostly though the Vet Life docs and the t.v. show side of it do a good job of showing their camaraderie and good humor. I'd imagine that their clinic is a pretty good place to work.

On the other side of life? Nothing in particular, with A Wolf... I'm still being surprised by the story. Enjoyable surprises, too, not the kind that make me want to throw my own story out and start over again.

Here, it was a moment where I thought the interstitial moment was serving one purpose, when it fact it turned out to be there for a different reason entirely. One I didn't quite recognize 'til I was at the end and my fingers refused to put in the words that my conscious mind said should go there. Instead, I wrapped it up in a different way.

And recognized what I had put in.

I'm being deliberately vague here, and I know that's probably a little maddening. In essence, what happened is that I subsconsciously inserted a brief type of moment from another genre, in particular from a particular type of thriller. It's especially from a certain type of movie thriller and the novels and scripts associated with them. I have a couple of other such moments in the story so far, but this one surprised me because I wasn't expecting it here.

I'm thinking now that I know why... the question being how to take advantage of it. Hmm. I suspect that my protagonists are going to have a busy time ahead of them.

A day where I find I have to try and keep my mouth tightly zipped.

Not against anything that the larger public would be aware of, just against my own family drama. You have your own, whether blood or chosen family, we all end up in the ditch on occasion. Oh, and this isn't immediate family, in this case it's far distant cousins.

I explain my family like this. It's not that we're a particularly large family, we're actually fairly small as these things go. The difference is that each of the generations all live close and grew up together, so even six generations along we can all tell far too much about each other's business.

This can be difficult when someone goes through the sh*t. Which one of my cousins is doing at the moment. What they're suffering shouldn't happen to anybody, but it's just one of those things.

What makes it worse is the fact that there's a built in audience in the family observational circle. Having a sh*tty time of things is bad enough; having half your extended family breathing down your neck while it happens just makes it ten times worse.

My own part in this has been limited to going "Oh, man that sucks..." and "I just can't believe it..." on the occasions where we've been back home. I keep my nose out of that stuff, a habit I learned long ago.

And I'm not about to throw it away, even if there are more currents to this story than I was otherwise aware of to date (keep my nose out of it, remember?). But sometimes things come to a head, and there's no avoiding it. Mostly because certain precipitating events involve events available for all to see.

I'm still doing things like "oh that sucks" and "I can't believe it" though. Just now with even more of a sense of "stay the hell out of this kind of stuff".

And yeah, I once had my best friend describe my family life by saying "if mickie isn't in the loony bin, none of the rest of us have any excuses". I'm still occasionally surprised by the times when that offhand observation are proven true.

It's been an odd week for me. Mostly, it's been a couple weeks where my daily schedule got out of whack, what with the spring trip chaperoning thing last week, and then the recovery at the day job.

The usual thing there, for every day you take off it seems like it takes two to catch up. If not in actual time, then certainly in perceived time.

At least on writing fiction terms I've been progressing on A Wolf in Taos, albeit at a still slightly reduced rate. At least until today. Overall, the story's hit about 18500 words, and it's still trucking along. And, I'm still having fun getting wrapped up in the story and where it's going every day.

Friday Friday Friday! Time to go get some ice cream, I think, to go along with pizza night...

Story Song Structure (Coda)

I'm done for now with the main story song structure discussion. All of these songs were a list I put together just listening one long night. Not every song grabbed me, just these, and I made notes as I went along. So mostly what you got was exactly what I put down, I just cleaned my thoughts up and added links.

Having done that, at least a couple ideas about framing in novels came to me. Mostly, about the hidden frame, or, at least, when the frame becomes the story.

Shirley Jackson, Hill House is one. In both literal and figurative sense, Shirley embeds us in it. Even, especially, where the house itself isn't (or is it?) doing anything in particular?

More active is the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Certainly in the novel, where Stephen burns the damned thing down at the end. Kubrick's movie has a different approach, as it usually does, but I take the movie as its own thing. In that case, I think Kubrick wanted his ambiguity complete; blowing up the Overlook would have let Kubrick's Jack off the hook just a little too easily.

Stephen King returns to the frame several times. Derry, Castle Rock, The Dark Tower, all are dynamic (active, passive, both) frames, only one of which survives the experience. (Remember, Stephen makes it explicit in It that Derry may not have asked for It to come, but the town at the minimum turned a blind eye to It's machinations for centuries; in some cases, Derry collectively did more than that(e.g. The Black Spot fire).)

Just about any comic book series has its framing device, certainly the major labels use their universes even if only to tell us when we're standing outside them.

I could go on for days. So could you. I think I'll just stop here for now, it's enough to say that I got my thoughts down from where I stand at the moment.

Story Song Structure (6): If I Had A Boat

I told you about star-crossed lovers, tragic and regretted. I told you about hellbound losers and ex-pats with plans easy to let go of. This one's for the dreamers.

There are (almost) no tricks to Lyle Lovett's If I Had A Boat (link here). There's no need for them.
Oh, but he's got a smile for us. Tonto telling Kemosabe to take a hike...

The frame here is by now a standard one. Here, Lyle gives us a static frame with the chorus, and the story's verses are whole, but vignettes, three little stories all connected to the frame, leading back to the dreamer's sea.

I said there were almost no tricks. That's not quite true. At the end of the original recording, Lyle repeats the last line.

I wonder about that. Note, I don't say this detracts from the song or anything. However, what I question is whether this was the way Lyle first wrote it. Now, this is a standard way to exit a song, it's a classic way to let the listener know "I'm done now" in shorthand.

Here, what I'd love to know is whether Lyle, or a producer or somebody else, listened to a first pass and said "it just sort of finishes, maybe we should add something, end it a little more definitively?" It has that feel, given how precisely the whole thing works together, in terms of symmetry of the chorus. Hmm.

Story Song Structure (5): Layla

Let's see, we've had bar songs, romance, down and out artists, and train songs. How 'bout a little old fashioned tragedy, as in Greek Tragedy straight out of our school books?

That's where Eric Clapton sets us up to go with Layla (link here) lyrically. (There are plenty of other versions, live or acoustic, but I think the original works best for what I'm describing here, and I know that Eric has said he almost hates his voice at that stage of his career, but again, for what I'm talking about...)

Like with Al Green, the lyric has its movement, dynamic story, a tragedy of the old style if we take it explicitly... ending in ambiguity, driving us to believe there's no hope for this, he's told us he's going insane...

But then.

Here's where music can save us, can resolve the ambiguity that the wailing guitars drive us to.

Because the piano outro moves from melancholy, the other side, the recovery...

to hope.

It even ends in birdsong.

Story Song Structure (4): Night Train

So I mentioned a couple posts back that the framing device, the chorus typically, can be inverted. That is, instead of the frame lying somehow outside of the throughline of the story, the frame now becomes the center of the song and the storyline now outside of how things are going.

Lyrically, that doesn't make much sense just reading the lyrics. This is where the songwriter, or the poet, use audio cues to invert the meaning and direction of the song.

Sometimes it's because of meaning, or just because.

Here, with Night Train (link here), Axl inverts the frame with the story for a subtle reason: it's a train song, which has its own rules and traditions.

He starts off similarly to what I've pointed out before: let the chorus frame the story, then we're off and running... and that's where the train song tradition kicks in, because now it's the music and the rhythm...

and we're hellbound and rolling.

Story Song Structure (3): Loser

Yes, Beck and Loser (link here).

Might seem a jump from Hoyt Axton and Al Green, but I'm still thinking in terms of story structure, and the framing device in story songs in particular.

How does that work with Loser? Well, about that. If you took the verses by themselves, I'd say "stream of consciousness without context". Hanging there, like that, there's no reason, other than Beck playing with images.

The chorus though... I'm not going to claim the chorus will make the verses make sense to you. But I will say that they help for me. They bring the images, the stream, into focus. Mostly because of how I spent time with friends in the early 90s, with the crowd of musicians and artists and writers, some of whom still play or write or make their art, most who don't. For that group, I won't say that Beck describes things in Loser that are universal.

But I will say that he paints a picture some of us can recognize ourselves at a certain time of life in, when sleeping on spare couches, four to a two bedroom apartment in a seedy part of town because it was the only way anybody could afford the rent, gig to gig and cross your fingers and hope... yeah, the story's there, it's not in code, it's just that Beck doesn't feel the need to explain anything.

Got her from the other side this morning, she obliged me by choosing the mirror orientation for her
web:

And most likely an orb spider of some sort, though a specific name I couldn't tell you (and not a brown recluse, in spite of the image, her orb's way too big and the fiddle for that "fiddle back" is in a different spot)

Story Song Structure (2): Tired of Being Alone

Ah, Al Green. The Reverend Al Green. For me, an album artist first, Let's Stay Together was a big part of my mom's album collection, and always ready to be put on, pretty much whenever. I'm Still In Love With You, as well, and many others.

But his songs... almost completely separated from the albums, Al Green was, is, so much a part of R&B radio as to have defined it, certainly in the 70s.

Tired of Being Alone (song link here) as a story, though?

Well, in terms of what I've been thinking, certainly with the framing device.

I'm so tired of being alone

I'm so tired of on my own

these two lines introduce almost every verse of the song, the frame is inseparable here from the story. The two move together, with the frame almost static.

Almost. The third verse moves the intro lines dynamically, he changes the intro to this verse, modulates to a quieter place.

To ambiguity.

This is story, I think, romance, the lover's lament, a path less traveled in book and story form, if my impressions of the romance genre are correct, but an essential path in the mid-20th century song form. Here, I read it as Al writing a letter. Not an explicit, plotted, step by step story, rather a dynamic tone poem of loss and questioning. Not beseeching. Just, well, wondering if maybe?

The story line lies in how he tells us little by little through each of the verses what's happened. How they started, where they went.

Where he is, now, wondering.

And he doesn't resolve the ambiguity, does he? I can say what my opinion is, that he knows this is a lament for himself, he knows she's not coming back, but that's ok.

He has his dream, and that's good just by itself. He's said his piece now it's time to go.

Let's see how these look. I've posted flower picks so far this spring, as our displayers come out to show their works and wares. But here's my first picture from this spring of our more mobile garden residents. Pardon the focus if you will, and my paw. Both are a consequence of using a phone camera; between the slight morning breeze making her web dance, and the lack of direct control over the point of screen resolution, I had to back her with my hand to force the contrast, and I didn't quite get her into full relief on both pics.

Just for reference, these are two out of about fifteen or so, the rest were too indeterminate to make good with.

For another reference, she was set up for her morning fishing expedition in the yellow rose who made our first flower of the spring...

Story Song Structure (1): Della and the Dealer (instead of Viva Pancho Villa)

Well, this one didn't get off to the start I was expecting.

First, let me back up. I was listening to "Viva Pancho Villa" by Hoyt Axton, andn something struck me about the structure of story songs, and popular song form more generally, once I started really looking for it.

Sorry about not posting a link to the particular song, but there's no readily available online performance of it.

So I'll instead talk about another song of Hoyt's, "Della and the Dealer". Which is cool, because Della is actually my favorite of his. Plus, that means I can point to another contrast with Pancho's structure, which you can see in the lyrics, or if you're interested enough to go out and track down a for-pay version of it. They're both on Hoyt's album "A Rusty Old Halo", which is well worth it.

Ok, first, you know Hoyt Axton. As a songwriter? Greenback Dollar, The Pusher, Never Been to Spain, and most famously Joy to the World (i.e. Jeremiah was a bullfrog). Hell, if you're into hair metal from the 80's, Hanoi Rocks covered Hoyt's Lightning Bar Blues! So, songwriter. (Hoyt's mother co-wrote Heartbreak Hotel, so we're talking songwriter royalty here...)

And, you know his face. Actor: Alec's father in the original The Black Stallion movies, and the father in Gremlins, the one who brings our little beasties home as the world's best (and worst) Christmas present from a road dog father...

Right, that Hoyt Axton. Like I said, my favorite of his songs is Della and the Dealer, which has one of my absolute favorite lines in song:

If that cat could talk

what tales he'd tell

'bout Della and the Dealer and the dog as well

But the cat was cool

and he never said a mumblin' word

But let's talk about frames. In art, the frame's obvious, right? It's there in story, as well, the so-called framing device.

It's there in song as well. Most often? The chorus, the part I mumble along to and try not to offend too too many people by singing along in off-key accompaniment.

(if you're a musician, I'm eliding the technical descriptions here on purpose, sorry if I put it in a way that seems obvious or accidentally misleading..)

Basically, I'm thinking of the chorus as the way Hoyt sets the verses, the main through-line of story, frames them.

(here's a link for Della at youtube)

What's really cool in Della? Hoyt uses two different choruses, frames if you will, a static frame, and a dynamic frame.

The static one is the "...but the cat was cool..." chorus.

The dynamic one is how he opens and closes the main throughline:

Della and the Dealer and a dog named Jake

and a cat named Kalamazoo

Left the city in a pick-up truck

gonna make some dreams come true

The dynamic change is in the last statement of this frame:

Della and her lover and a dog named Jake

and a cat named Kalamazoo

Left Tucson in a pick-up truck

gonna make some dreams come true

A change of three words, but it tells us all we need to know about Della, who she's riding with now, and what dreams they're looking to make come true now. Three words that tell us who lost the fight in the main storyline; simple ain't it?

Try it and see.

Now, contrast that with Viva Pancho Villa, if you're interested enough to go looking for it: Hoyt uses a single static frame there, and it's almost a chorus that seems like it's only trivially connected to the song story he's after.

Well, one, if you're interested in ex-pat stories, Pancho is one, and their scheme never quite gets off the ground. The chorus is connected by one of the characters, and I suspect that Hoyt had the original song Viva Villa in mind, with the ex-pat's storyline now inverting the frame. I.e., which is the frame, and which the story?

That may be a step too far, I don't think it's quite there in this one because the implication is that the character's in this story sing "Viva Villa" as part of their bar-night celebration. But, there are other songs that do directly invert the frame and the story in a much more explicit way. I'll explore that later, but next time I'll talk about Al Green, a master of lover's lament story songs...

So blogging today in a state of vapor lock. The short answer might be that I'm still exhausted from the trip and recovering.

Which is true. Though I got my fiction words in today, now up to about 12500 on Wolf in Taos... . Or true enough.

Full day at the day gig, some fiction writing, and then I realized when I was considering what might tilt my, er, fancy for blogging material, and a hundred things occured to me.

None of which I'd have been able to do justice to. I knew if I tried to dig into something more detailed, I'd get a couple hundred words in and stare at the screen while the inner blogger went off for a cup of tea and found a place to nap instead.

Such is life sometimes. I do have a few things I want to discuss, something about story structure in songs, something else about the great null thing, another ....

You might now see my dilemma. I know there's a block of things coming and I have no energy to finish them today. So I won't. Not tonight at least.

Besides, that just gives me other things to write about tomorrow and the next day and the day after that...

We had another loss in the scifi community, while I was gone so I didn't know about it until I got back and had a chance to catch up with things a bit.

Kate Wilhelm for me was one of the joys of short fiction. Basically, since I've been alive, and definitely since I started reading the short fiction magazines, Kate was a regular joy for me. Her name was magic; if she was in the table of contents, I knew I had at least one story in the issue that was going to make it worth it and more than worth it.

I didn't follow her mystery work as much, but for scifi and fantasy, she is a name to conjure with in the short story.

I dug around for her bibliography to refresh myself on which stories I'd read, and there was one that jumped out more than any other, immediately. That it won the Nebula that year doesn't surprise me: if you haven't read it, if you can get your hands on a copy of "The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky" (careful, there are few other titles out there that match up with similar titles, so Kate's name is important here), then I promise that meeting Lorna will make it worth it for you.

I also didn't put two and two together until I dug for it; I didn't realize Pulphouse had published "The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky". I think I'll run over and ask Dean W. Smith if he still has copies floating around...

I almost missed our second rose coming into spring bloom; this is our showoff, he's out in the front bed, and he's perfectly happy to display for all to see

So A wolf in Taos Valley is up to about 11500 words. Not as much as I'd been getting per day, but the past week has been spring break, our daughter's high school band put together a trip for the kids, and we've been chaperoning the shindig. So, I brought the laptop along without much if any hope that I'd get anything put down on the story at all.

But joy of joys, I did. I'm not in Dean W. Smith's league by any means, but I'll take a few hundred words a day under the circumstances. I think we averaged about four or five hours a sleep per night over the trip. No one leaves a bunch of teenagers with time on their hands on a trip like that. For some reason they have a tendency to get in trouble if you do...

If you've got a few to spare, have some good thoughts for the family and friends of the Channelview High School and their bus drivers. They lost a tour bus in Alabama on their spring trip, one of the drivers died at the scene, and as I write this one of their band directors is in pretty bad shape. As it turns out, I think they were about an hour behind us coming back this way, so we found out about it on the road. Our bus driver knew both of the drivers involved in the accident, the bus industry is a pretty small family all together, and this sort of thing hits them hard.

Same thing with the Channelview kids. At that age, we put our kids out there on the roads for a lot of things, games, bands, heck I saw an AP Chemistry class at one of the parks we went to, enjoying their spring break. The feeling involved when all you see is a headline about kids and a bus crash... Our phones lit up like rockets, and I can promise, every single parent in the band was there waiting for us when we got home.

There were a few kids asking the question "Why on earth are they all out there like that?" Typically, it can take a bit for everybody to get organized and get the kids home, no delay today. So I had to explain to them a bit about what their parents must have felt yesterday morning watching the news, waking up and the first thing they hear on the news is "tour bus crash in Alabama, one dead at the scene" while their children were on the road through that area.

We got everyone home safe and sound from our little group, everyone had fun amidst the chaos of wrangling that many kids without losing anybody, they made some memories that will last a lifetime. Small blessings, the Channelview families got their kids back, as well. I just wish the driver's family could say the same, and that their band director's family weren't sitting in a hospital watching the clock tick.

A (tiny) spell for writers:

     If you're worried and you know it
write your story.
     If you're scared and you know it
write your story.

     If a terror comes to call,
       or the creepy-crawly falls
        from the ceiling
down your shirt

write your story.

Anatomy of joke: Sight Gags

This is probably the last one of these, at least until my funny bone hits me again. Mostly, I'm stumbling across thoughts that occur to me as I get a chance to reflect.

Sight gags can work in a deconstructive way, as well. One of my favorites is a story Gene Wilder told about how he wanted to introduce Willy Wonka to the audience in the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie in 1971.

Basically, Gene comes out, limping on a cane, then rolls over and stands up to continue walking without a limp. What Gene wanted to do was establish that Willy lies. It's a neat, clean little gag that shows how suspicious we should be of the candy man...

Other sight gags? How 'bout Blazing Saddles, specifically the toll booth in the middle of the desert? You could have that as a still drawing, and it would work just fine, I think. The absurdity of it just sits there, no explanation needed. Same thing with the food fight in the commissary at the end, pure Busby Berkeley madness and ridiculousness, no explanation required.

But a current master of this sort of thing is Teller of Penn and Teller. Together, Penn and Teller have their very own special sort of madness.

Teller by himself, though, has his own lunatic magic. He's worth seeking out for the bits where he just does a quiet (not sorry) bit of magic, no frills, no games, just you and him and the gag. It's pure storytelling at the highest level.

Anatomy of a joke: Lesson from Who's on First

I realized something about a part of the Who's on First gag after I'd had a chance to think about it. Specifically, about how the whole thing is actually a continuous joke, setup-punchline setup-punchline, beat after beat once I settle in and listen to it.

My realization was that Donald Westlake is a master of this. I'm re-reading one of his Dortmunder books, in this case "Don't Ask".

And I noticed that the whole thing is built in that setup-punchline continuous manner. Sure, there's the big gag, but Westlake doesn't get there by trying to run a single joke.

He gets there one gag at a time, one piece after another, so that by the time you're through, you realize there was no one joke.

There's way way way more than a joke. The whole thing just runs and runs and runs.

Anatomy of a joke: Michigan J. Frog
Specifically, One Froggy Evening, MJ's original appearance.
How on earth is this a deconstructed joke? Well, about that.
It works on two levels. First, if you read wikipedia, they'll tell you that Chuck Jones was riffing on a set of reasonably well-known vaudeville routines. At the top level, I think that's right.
Guy finds a dancing frog, sees dollar signs, runs into the talent agent, the frog doesn't perform for anybody else, no dollar signs, guy goes broke and ditches the frog, roll credits.
Back at the time, then, running to the talent agent to go Hollywood was something you could do, if you lived in New York or L.A. at least. The rest of us would just have to dream.
So, in that reading, it's just Chuck Jones riffing, here's funny character and I've got a few minutes of short to fill, typical gag, right?
On the other hand... (before we go on, know that I'm going to be talking about the joke that pro comedians consider to be the most deliberately over the top, disgusting joke that can be told, link goes to wikipedia rather than a video, you can search for the live versions yourself, I just recommend you do it from a place where no one is going to jump on you for playing really nasty, raunchy videos)
On the other hand... Chuck Jones figured out how to tell The Aristocrats to kids.
Remember the setup for The Aristocrats? Guy walks into a talent agent | Fill with the most ridiculous, disturbing, over the top nastiness you can imagine | agent asks "what do you call that act", guy stands up proudly and says "The Aristocrats!"
Guy finds a frog, the frog dances and performs, guy brings frog into agent's office | crickets | agent kicks guy out of his office.
In other words, Chuck Jones answers the question "Can you tell the world's dirtiest joke to a kid without parents or censors realizing it?" in the affirmative.
If that's not the ultimate deconstructed humor...

Anatomy of a joke: Who's on First?
So, Who's on First? The classic Abbott and Costello routine (the link is here, there are other versions of it depending on your tolerance for hunting it down).
Why would I call this "Deconstructed" humor?
Because it's not a joke, first. Read a transcript, and there's no one thing that you can point to and call a joke.
But at the same time, if you watch or listen to the bit, it's a continuous joke: the rhythm of setup-punchline is continuous from beginning to end, and it's all in the delivery.
Which says there's a second reason it's a deconstructed joke: it's all wordplay. There's no object, no butt of the joke. All there is, is two guys playing with words. Setting 'em up and knocking 'em down.
In other words, it's jazz, with words alone. Pure poetry and the rhythm, the feel of conversation.
Which is why it works as sign language.
The idea contains multitudes. An obvious one is George Carlin and the Seven Words you can't say on television (not linking for the obvious not-safe-for-work factor). The analogy breaks down a little for me in the setup, because it's George playing a little with general hypocrisy, but when he gets rolling, really all he's doing is riffing on the words, what they sound like, how to play with words.
Again, there's no object of the joke (assuming the FCA doesn't count), it's just Carlin playing with words, to great effect.
But back to something about the Who's on First bit. I wonder if you could take a pair of kids who'd never heard of it, give one Bud's part and one Lou's part, and turn them loose to memorize it and come back and play it on stage. How far do you think they could get through it trying to play it straight?
In other words, the other think I think about this is that it's so well constructed that it doesn't matter how they start out, eventually the rhythm of the thing takes over, and all of a sudden you're Lou Costello trying like hell to understand what in the world is going on with this crazy baseball team...

Anatomy of a joke: The Four Yorkshiremen
Ok, deconstructed jokes. What do I mean by that? I'm working on it, I'm working on it...
Here, I mean a joke that says "I'm not working with stereotypes, I'm working with universals". The things we all share.
So, if you haven't seen it, the Four Yorkshiremen (link here) is Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Tim Brooke-Taylor in the pre-Monty Python days, playing "who can top who". It's an absolute hoot.
There are two universals that make it work. The first one, the surface one, is gone now: it's the shared experience of approximately 30 million Britons from the Great Depression through the post-World War II rationing and scarcity (and before that WW I and the first round of it). Everyone watching this skit in the first viewing had extra-intimate views on what hardship meant.
That's the easy universal, and it's the one that almost doesn't exist anymore. The generations involved are almost gone. And their kids just don't have the same background. How many kids these days even know what a ration book is? And that yes, everyone had one.
On the other hand, the true universal is still here: most of us have had at least some experience of watching some old blowhard sit there puffing their cigar/cigarette/drinking their whiskey and telling us about how easy we've got it. There are entire industries devoted to telling us how easy we have it.
So, the real universality (look up the four respective ages for the actors involved in the bit) peeks through. I suspect all four of them were at a point in their careers where they were more than a little tired of the generation before them telling them what made a good joke.
And it slides in like a stiletto.
What doesn't quite fit here? The stereotypes. Classism has its downsides, whether you're standing on the floor looking up or up on the roof pissing down. It seeps into the jokes, and while the Python gang and Feldman are more than capable of playing on it, and they know damned well how obnoxious the twits are, the fact is that the joke relies on it, to only a small degree but it's there.
It doesn't spoil the joke, but it does at least make my analogy go only so far. Eh, I'll take it. I love the bit, I think it still holds up, and the universals still sing. I'll take it.
But what I really learned thinking about this was something else. What other universals can I think of? Or, least, bits that required that sort of universal experience to work?
MASH the t.v. series. The movie to a much lesser degree, mostly because the movie reads better to later generations as pure surrealist absurdism. You can see the humor in that way much better, MASH on t.v. works with a different set of knees because they had the space to develop away from the initial basis.
Hogan's Heroes. Not because we've all been in a Nazi prison camp, but because I think we can all identify with having to make do with whatever nitwits are available (retail lifers, you know what I mean, plus anyone that's ever had a Dilbert sketch strike a little too close to home).
Gideon's Band. Can you imagine being the poor schlub watching first Joe go home, then Murray, then Carl, until it's just you and the dog and the guy who drew boobs in his math notebook in fifth grade? And you want us to attack who again?
The Odyssey. Hear me out. Odysseus the genius who won the Trojan War? Of course not, we're just Janes and Joes here.
Odysseus the dude who had yet another wave come in and crash his boat into a rocky little island in the middle of nowhere, and how long is this trip gonna last, anyway? Him, we can all sympathize with.
And Penelope? How many of these schmucks are going to come out of the woodwork, tear up my house, where the hell is Odysseus, anyway? Her we can all sympathize with, too.
Universals.

Anatomy of a Joke, Prelude.
Probably this is a bit like disecting a butterfly. I might learn something but the chances are good the butterfly will have a different opinion of the matter.
I don't much like, at this stage of learning, to talk about what I see in the nuts and bolts of story. Discussion technique can be tedious, and I'm suspicious of whether I'm just using it as an excuse to avoid writing more stories.
In other words, I'm not quite ready to let myself off the hook on certain things. If'n I'm at the keyboard, why aren't I writing story?
Which also has its pitfalls, 'cause if it ain't any fun what's the point?
A conundrum. Happily, no one's ever going to mistake me for a performer, so I can distract myself with diving into an enough different medium to scratch an itch.
This all started when I was wondering about a certain well-known bit in a movie with some resonance (fine, it's the "these go to 11" bit in Spinal Tap).
What I realized was the bit doesn't fit the "rules" of comedy.
Specifically, it doesn't pick on anyone. There's no butt to the joke.
Think about it. Let's say you're a rationalist. So you're Rob Reiner, sitting there wondering why the guy just doesn't go out and buy a bigger amp.
So what you're saying is, you're clueless. Everyone who's ever performed as a musician knows, it doesn't matter how many amps you have, you're always going to find yourself at some stage of the performance wishing for just one... more... step... up... higher (louder, whatever). Whether you're just playing in your garage for the yorkie and the cat and the weekend's beer, or whether you're playing Wimbley Stadium.
Either way, you're gonna find the edge and walk over it.
Or, let's say you're the dreamer, the rock god wanna be, and this nitwit shows up with a microphone wondering what on earth your amps are doing with an 11. Doesn't this clueless straight know anything, why on earth did my manager sign us up for this garbage, can't they at least get somebody from Rolling Stone that knows what music is, for christ's sake I'm tired of this newbie get me some Crystal and some brown M&M's and get this jerk the hell out of my face...
See. They're both the butt of the joke. And neither, because they're both right.
This is what I mean by a deconstructed joke. It works, all by itself, no setup, no target, no stereotypes...
Ok. You're thinking the rock god stereotype, and you're absolutely right. That's sort of the whole point of Spinal Tap, after all, to poke a few holes in the ego of the stadium rockers (woo-hoo!).
I didn't say the bit was perfectly ego and target free. There are better examples than that. I just mean that, overall, I think the template works. It just works better for other jokes, that's all.
First, here's the link "These go to 11" so you can refresh yourself (if you haven't seen the movie this is unlikely to make any sense at all, unless your friends habitually quote it in which case you'll at least have a visual to what they're talking about).
(if you run off and watch the movie, catch up when you return, we'll still be here)
So, this is the first in a series of these anatomy of a joke bits for me. I've got a few jokes I want to look at, up close or at a ten thousand foot view, whichever occurs when I dive into it.
Let's see: Who's on First, the Four Yorkshiremen, what else? Oh, that's right, Michigan J. Frog. Tomorrow, I think I'll start with the Four Yorkshiremen. Like the "11" bit, it doesn't quite work, except it's a close enough archetype that I learned something interesting working through it.

As consumed by, well, time and energy and running around. Meetings and talking and basically reiterating things said before for a new audience.

Don't get me wrong. There are certain types of projects that don't go, don't go, don't go, then you turn around and they're actually finished, and done right. This one's like that, at least at this stage of development.

Nothing in particular really, day gig stuff.

Other than that, and I think I realized what my brain's been hiding from me. Something about jokes...

Head down and the beat rolls on. Days are like that sometimes. I'm about 8700 words or so into A Wolf in Taos Valley. I think I understand more or less where I'm going, at least for the next couple of days. What happens after that, who knows? But I'll be there to find out.

The weather continues our spring follies, the cold fronts are still wandering through to break out the humidity and remind us that, while June and summer are there and waiting, it's not their turn quite yet.

I feel like I'm working on something else, the brain says "shh go away" whenever I try for something interesting to add. Hmm...

Nope, don't poke it yet. It ain't cooked, says the brain, come back later. I'll listen for now. Nervously...

Monday, Monday.... and I won't sing, because everyone hates it when I sing =>

Instrumentalist, not a vocalist. I can project, though! Heroic baritone, here, I can reach the cheap seats. Of course, I get to watch them cringe and run away (hey where are you guys going) whenever I do, though.

We had a quiet weekend, in preparation for a busy couple of weeks around here. This that and the other thing, most of it rotating around our teenager and her band business for the spring.

I did get a few more words in than I expected; A Wolf in Taos Valley us up to about 7700 words today, including the work I did today. Not much of a short story, now, and I'm fairly certain I'm about at the halfway point.

It's either that, or I've got the first part of a longer work. To be honest, I'm just not sure. It's got that feel where it's not ready, the characters aren't ready for me to finish with them, and they're doing their thing. I'm just along for the ride.

In other words, the fun part of the story, where I get to hang on and see where I'm headed when I get there.

A quiet Sunday, a quiet weekend. Just ramping up through the start of spring, spreading a little grass seed, a little bug deterrent, spraying the seams of the house. We picked a tick off one of the dogs last night. Just a couple days after we gave them their monthly flea and tick medicine, so she'd have to have picked it up just a few minutes before we found it on her.

So my chore today was to broadcast the granules and get the little boogers before they can get too well established this year. It's a constant fight, given that we're on the edge, between waterways and farm fields and subdivisions, the meeting ground for all sorts of beasties.

When we first moved in, I made a habit of taking our boxer for a walk first thing in the morning. She's more than a bit excitable, if you've ever owned a boxer you know what I'm talking about, so the only time I could guarantee she'd be able to have a nice quiet walk where she didn't get overwhelmed with joy every time a new peoples walked by was to get out there at five in the morning.

That came to a halt for a variety of reasons, but one of them was that the coyotes also make most of their movements, denning back up for the day, right at the same time. One coyote, a female boxer bigger than many male boxers, not much of an issue. Two or more, problem. And while the thought of more vigorous protection measures is logical under those conditions, the true strategy there is just to change the times we make walkabout.

Then, the coyotes can carry on about their business without the two of us sticking our noses into trouble for all of us.

If you're thinking I've left my neighbors in a lurch, understand that I also went to my HOA meetings, I said my piece and told them about the coyotes, among other issues I feel responsible for warning them about. They know they're there, and so far as I know, everyone else is being responsible as well. We've got a hundred or so houses in our little neihborhood, and we haven't lost any cats or dogs or kids to our four-footed neighbors.

It sort of puts the idea of them into perspective. Coyote is dangerous, do not mistake me, but he's also happy to mind his own business, if he's got the room to do so and plenty of places to hide. We've got a construction project coming down, though, the city's running a road through the farm land a hundred yards or so outside of our neighborhood.

The odds are that Coyote will move on, shift his patterns and his denning places as needed. They're "Wile E.", after all. But he's a nervous neighbor, and I may need to start making my walks again, not to protect my neighborhood, but to keep an eye on Coyote. Gauge how he's doing as things progress. And if necessary, be in a position to call the state and local animal control way before someone accidentally puts themselves or Coyote in a position to do unnecessary harm to either or both or innocent bystanders.

A few posts back, I introduced our "blink and you missed it" lady, i.e. our yellow rose with her (and our) first real bloom of spring. She's now about two years old, had her first real pruning this winter. Her first couple of years, she picked up her nickname because her blooms go through their process about three times faster than her compadres in the garden.

Basically, we have one day to view her blooms in full glory. After that, they're gone with only the memory of wonder left.

Here's another view of her, where I've tried to capture at least some of the effect.

She's not alone anymore in spring blooms. While none of our other roses have leapt to join in the fun yet, we have a new blueberry this year, he'll be in a container until next winter I think, but he's definitely joined in the fun as you can see below.

story time!

As in, personal story time.

Here's the setup. Way back in the mists of time (gather round children while grandpa chews his gums and reminisces), I remember all of the family getting my great-grandparents a VCR, the very first one they had.

So far, so good, and many of you reading this will have a similar story. Here's what I remember best about it, and it's something that pretty well nails down my music and niche, if you recognize the setup.

Ok, so we all get Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw a VCR for Christmas, and the first thing my aunts and uncles do is ask, what movie can we rent for them to watch. Someone says, hey, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas just made a movie, the two old farts came out of semi-retirement and had an absolute blast doing it. Comedy, Hollywood legends, we're golden.

And we were right. The movie "Tough Guys", if you seek it out, is a smiler, the kind of fun ride that old pros put together, hits its marks and bows out.

Now we get to the really fun part. I had to look up the dates, but I was about fourteen or so, and I had my own radio world. Needless to say, it overlapped with precisely nobody I knew, except for the one or two other kids at school that I traded cassette tapes and bootleg concert vcr tapes with.

This was the first rumblings of what would later become a roar. REM, Metallica, a vicious little snarl from L.A. that would turn into Guns N' Roses, the Seattle sound was hinted at, Queensryche was the forerunner here, Concrete Blonde, basically there was a group of us, holding tenuous hands around the country through tape exchange and bbs postings and so on, and we were so far outside of what people considered normal that Michael Stipe and REM making the radio was a shock beyond words.

What does this have to do with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas enjoying their golden years in a Hollywood comedy about the last two train robbers?

Well, the bit is that Kirk Douglas is trying to be cool and hip and date a much younger lady, one who's into the L.A. punk scene of circa 1985.

She took him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. When, and trust me on this, absolutely no one (except for the handful of kids I'm part of, the ones who somehow connected across country and continents and were slowly morphing into something that other people would eventually accept under the odd label of Alternative, we didn't care because none of the bands and artists and writers we were part of cared if the straights *ever heard or saw anything we did*. Why care what the straights get up to?) had ever heard of this merry band of misfits.

Except for whoever had the mindflash to put them in "Tough Guys" and have Kirk Douglas try and dance to them => here's the YouTube Link.

And now we get to my part in the proceedings.

And that's the part where, a day after Christmas when we've rented "Tough Guys" for my great-grandparents to watch, and we get into this scene in the movie, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers come on the screen...

And everyone in my family turns to me at once, automatically, without thought at all, and simultaneously asks "What the hell is that?"

I'm just glad the Peppers had their clothes on. Because trust me, they're tame here...

p.s. I guess that means someday I'm going to have to tell the story of the little punk bar where I met Dave Grohl, when he was touring with his first band a couple years before he joined Nirvana...

A day consumed by passions... assuming that programming can be considered a passion. That's debatable, but only if you're not a programmer. Hacking new code has a tendency to consume all available thought, especially when it's a new project to dig your teeth into.

Such is life. I got words in today, A Wolf in Taos Valley is up to about 4400 words, so I call that a win, all things considered.

Oh, and part of what consumed me is that I dug into and figured out what the references I was dealing with were saying in their reports.

No, let me rephrase that. I realized what they actually did. Whether they understand that I don't know. I suspect it's a case where the very original algorithm developers knew what they summoned; those coming after may be dealing with forces they know not.

Obscure, necessarily, mostly because it's an odd little corner of the applied computational world, visited rarely but with intensity by those who do so. Most of the known applications I'm aware of, the distinction I'm making is of little practical consequence. In fact, the distinction is immaterial and can be well justified on both formal and practical grounds. It mostly leads to a matter of interpretation of results. Among those who know, a matter of words and emphasis, not of understanding.

A trap for the unwary, however... sort of like writing fiction, now that I think about it ;)

Oh, there are times where the gods themselves strive in vain against the efforts, not of fools...

but of those who will always leave key bits of information out of important reference documents, or who write that information in ways difficult to extract.

The obscurity of text and figures and parameters and and and...

Sorry, just going on about a project for the day gig, and the tedious business of figuring out just what it is that the long ago did, why and how, and whether what long ago did is wrong, meaningful...

or just an accident of "oh, we didn't put that in there?"

Yeesh.

Not much on other subjects tonight, though I did get my fiction words in today and yesterday, in addition to the little flash story I posted last night. A Wolf in Taos Valley is currently up to about 3500 words total. Moving along, moving along...