diary – Page 14 – LayMusic.org

Hugo Awards are announced

This
year’s awards were announced last night.

Because the voting took place last June, when I had flu and the
Boston Early Music Festival and my mother got sick and died, I
didn’t blog about them the way I usually do.

There were two things LoneStarCon did differently this year
that cut into my ability to blog:

They didn’t really announce when the packet for voters was
available, so it had probably been up for a few weeks before I
downloaded it and started reading. So I only read the major
categories (novel, novella, novellette, short story), and not
things like related works, and I didn’t get around to watching
any of the nominated films.
They also didn’t send me a copy of how I voted, and so now
almost three months later, I can’t really tell you except for
novel. I remember the quality being uniformly pretty good, so I
had trouble making up my mind on almost everything.

I am disappointed with the result of the novel voting.
Redshirts won, and that was the only one I seriously considered
voting against. (You rank your choices rather than
voting for just one, and one of the choices is “no award”, so I
call it voting against if I rank something behind “no award”.) I
didn’t end up doing that to Redshirts, but I did
think the basic premise was puerile.

Other than that, I thought they were all pretty good. I hadn’t
read any Kim Stanley Robinson before, and I thought
2312 was brilliant, but that the writing was a bit
long-winded. Throne of the Crescent Moon was a
good example of a fantasy set in a non-european (Arab in this
case) environment. Blackout wrapped up the trilogy
with fewer loose ends than I would have expected.

In the end, though, I voted for Captain Vorpatril’s
Alliance. I know I’ve declined to vote for previous books
because they were part of a long series, but this one is more
self-contained than most of the Vorkosigan books. It’s true
that you wouldn’t care about the characters as much if you
hadn’t seen them before. But the basic reason I voted for it is
that I just liked it better. It was the only one I’d read
before the packet came out, so I left it to the end, but then I
really decided I had to reread it. I’m not sure I’ll ever want
to reread any of the others.

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Column explaining Obama’s decision on Syria

Ross Douthat wrote a good column
in today’s paper explaining why Obama wants to do what he’s doing
in Syria. I don’t agree with the reasoning, but I think it’s a
better explanation of it than I’ve heard from anyone else,
including Obama himself.

You should read the whole column, but here are some excerpts:

…Of course there’s something arbitrary about telling a dictator he
can kill his subjects with bullets but not gas. But there’s
something arbitrary about any constraint we impose on lesser
powers. The point is to sustain an environment of constraint,
period — in which troublemakers are constantly aware they can only push so far before American military power pushes back.

…
Look: I know Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t endorse a war for American
credibility, and I know the Barack Obama of 2007 probably
wouldn’t either. But most of my post-cold-war predecessors
would, and did. And they’ve bequeathed me a world that — no matter what the headlines suggest — is more at peace than at any point in human history.

When I was trying to decide who to vote for in the
Massachusetts democratic primary in 2008, I ignored the argument a
lot of my friends were making that Hilary Clinton had voted for
the war in Iraq and Barack Obama hadn’t. I said that Obama had said he
wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t in the senate then, and wasn’t
subject to the pressures that the actual senators were, so we
didn’t really know whether he would have voted for the war.

I think this decision, and several others Obama has made since
becoming president, justify my reasoning. Having a job like
President changes you, so you have to decide who should get that
job based on how well you think the person will deal with those
pressures, and not on what the person says about what he’ll
do.

For the record, I did actually vote for Obama over Clinton. I
felt sorry not to vote for Clinton, who has more in common with me
than any other candidate in my lifetime, but the endorsements by
senators who had presumably worked with both of them swayed me.
Also the position papers on some of the tech-related issues I care
about suggested that Obama had more people in his circle who also
cared about such things. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in his
record on those issues, though, so I was probably doing what my
friends in the peace movement did on peace.

Going Postal

We had a movie night last week to watch the film of Going
Postal. The
book is one of the better of Terry
Pratchett’s more recent books. (I like Making
Money even better, but you should read Going
Postal first.)

There were three of us — I’ve been reading everything by
Pratchett that I could get my hands on since about 1998, a friend
who is a big Pratchett fan but also a very busy man, so he’s
probably read about half of the Discworld books, and was only
halfway through Going Postal when we saw the movie, and
another friend who has only vaguely heard of Pratchett. (Also two
dogs — Sammy was sick
and Monte was feeling abandoned by both his mommies (my mother
died and my sister went to Europe), and not yet settling in well
at all.) The food was Taiwanese from the excellent restaurant across
the street. The big hit was the octopus with mustard greens.
The beer was a selection from the Pratchett fan’s refrigerator,
heavily weighted to the barley wines.

We all (except for Monte) enjoyed the show — it’s quite faithful to
the book, so I wasn’t in any suspense. I also wasn’t so riveted I
insisted on pausing it when Monte demanded to go out and look for
his Mommy. I did leave it in my Netflix streaming queue so that I
could go back and catch up, but haven’t yet felt obligated to do
that.

When you finish a streaming movie on Netflix, you get a chance
to rate it from one to 5 stars. I usually give things that turned
out about as well as I would have expected before I watched them
three stars, but I was feeling good enough about the evening as a
whole to suggest four. The Pratchett fan suggested five, but he
hardly ever sees movies at all, so he deferred to my judgement.
The non-fan said she’d enjoyed it but prefers movies to
not have people hanging by their fingernails off of tall
structures. Having clacks towers that people get pushed off of is
pretty integral to the plot of this book, so the rest of us
declined to downgrade the move on this ground.

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Daniel Abraham’s Dagger and Coin Series

Daniel Abraham’s website has A
good synopsis of this series.

It’s projected to be 5 books, of which three have been
published. I finished the third, The Tyrant’s Law last
night.

Each chapter is from the point of view of one of four
characters. I remember finding the first volume, The Dragon’s Path, a
little slow to get into. And then I was muttering that some of
these point-of-view characters are more interesting than others.
In the second book (The
King’s Blood), one of the point-of-view characters (Dawson
Kalliam) has died and been replaced by his wife, Clara. This is
an improvement, in that Clara is more interesting than Dawson.
Also, it removes the security you often feel in a long-running
series that of course they won’t kill off a major character. (At
least without the actor being interview in the newspaper.) George
R. R. Martin did the same thing by killing off Ned Stark, a main
character in The Song of Ice and Fire, at the end of
the first volume.

I (and apparently the Hugo award nominators) have been finding
multi-volume works really interesting these days. I always said I
liked novels better than short stories because you got a lot more
reading for the same work of figuring out who the characters are
and what their problems and relationships are. A multi-volume
series has the same advantage over a novel. Of course, some of
them can become repetitive, but with a good writer like Daniel
Abraham, it hasn’t happened yet in this series. Partly it’s because his gift
for describing places has different places to work on in each
volume. I’m also impressed that he manages to provide both more
character and more plot per page than a lot of writers do.

This series considers a lot of important questions like, “Why
do bankers have power?” and “How do wars get started?” Maybe the
last couple of books will explain how wars get ended, too. I’m
looking forward to the last two volumes.

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Sammy and antibiotics

One of the many difficulties I’ve been dealing with this summer
is that my dog got sick.

He’d been drinking and urinating a lot more than usual for a
couple of weeks, and then he started being very restless and
having occasional accidents in the house, which he never does.

So when we were both uncomfortable with the situation, I took
him to the vet, and explained why I thought something was wrong
(beyond him being almost 13 and arthritic), and said I hoped it
was something the vet could fix.

So first there were $450 of tests which were all negative. It
was nice to know that his kidneys were still functioning and he
wasn’t diabetic. The next step was $250 for more tests, one of
which was “not negative”. This was the antibody titre for
leptospirosis.

The next set of tests sounded really expensive, so I
decided we should act on the non-negative result we had, and I
spent $72 on two weeks worth of antibiotic. He started that last
Wednesday, and it does seem to be working. He hasn’t had an
accident since Saturday, and he had been having them almost
daily. He’s also recovered a bit of his energy.

So now the problem is convincing him that he needs to go on
taking the pills, which are capsules (three a day) containing a very bitter
powder. You or I would just swallow the capsule, and never taste
the bitter powder, but Sammy doesn’t do that. The first day, I
tried saying, “Here is a nice pill that will make you feel
better,” and he clamped his jaws shut very tight and said,
“No.”

So I put the capsules in some yogurt, and he ate it right up.
So I thought it wasn’t going to be a problem, but the second day,
he said, “That yogurt is going to be bitter. No.”

So I’ve been putting them in a stew, and that mostly works,
expecially if I surround them with a small piece of meat each.
When I finish the stew, I may try the peanut butter trick, but
I’m not sure that’s going to work better than the yogurt.

I keep thinking about my friends who call up their doctors and
get antibiotics whenever they get sick. I don’t approve of this
— I think you should have to have some kind of indication that an
antibiotic will do some good before you unleash it on your
microflora, but I would have expected to be able to get one for a
dog in less time and money than this took.

New York Times writes about Mozart’s instruments

In this article, the New York Times provides more information about the heavily advertised appearance of Mozart’s violin and viola at the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival. There will be a concert on both the violin and viola (joined by fortepiano and clarinet), and the instruments will be on view at the exhibition on Wednesday morning.

Apparently Mozart never performed publicly on the violin, and this instrument was left behind in Salzburg when he moved to Vienna. He did like playing viola, and this instrument was owned by his widow after his death.

Serpents at BEMF 13

Pierre Ribo, from Brussels, Belgium, will be bringing 4 serpents to the Boston Early Music Festival in June, 2013.

I got an email this morning from Pierre Ribo:

Let me introduce myself. My name is Pierre Ribo and I am a serpent
maker in Brussels, Belgium.

I will be present at the Boston Early Music Festival from June 12th
until the 15th to present four of my serpents (with four keys and 6
holes church serpent).

My purpose is to propose my instruments in the USA and also to meet
musicians, since their reactions are very important to me.

I would be pleased to meet you during my stay in Boston, if possible
for you.

In case you would know other musicians interested in the serpent, may
I ask you to forward this mail or spread the word around you?

The official concert schedule is as much of an early brass wasteland
as ever, but it looks like there will at least be a few serpents at
the exhibition.

Books I read in December (and a bit of November)

2012-11-25 Sun Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy. From the
library. Well-written best-seller about two families in a small Irish
town.

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2012-11-26 Mon Norah Ephron Imaginary Friends, play about Mary
McCarthy and Lillian Hellman. Probably better in the theater. From
the library – just after Ephron died they got a whole bunch of stuff
by her.

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2012-12-08 Sat Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, the latest in the
Barrayaran series by Lois McMaster Bujold. (bought from Baen) Brilliant – the last
Miles plot seemed to be mining a very exhausted vein, but this one
builds on the best of the earlier ones, and has both coming of age and
dealing with middle-age aspects.

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2012-12-10 Mon Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy. From the library.
More warm-hearted middle-aged to elderly females fixing the world’s
problems for the well-meaning young.

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2012-12-13 Thu The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters. Got on sale
from Amazon after recommendation by Cory Doctorow (I think). Police
procedural set against the impending crash into earth of an asteroid.
Good but not gripping.

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I took most of an afternoon to revive my procedure for stripping DRM
from Kindle books. Most of it was because of how decrepit my
Thinkpad is. The answer turned out to be that you need current
versions of Kindle for PC, Calibre, the drm removing tools, and the
python library the tools depend on. Then you have to realize that for
that format of Kindle, Calibre can read it, and convert it, but the
ebook viewer can’t display it. So you should convert it to epub and
read that. Or ignore big sales on Kindle books.

2012-12-24 Mon Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, from the
library. Some of the methodology reminds me of the story about how
much senility increased in the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s
resignation as Prime Minister. One of their methods of determining
whether someone was senile was to ask them who the Prime Minister
was. Obviously, more people knew when it had been the same person for
15 years than when it had only been a few months. There are a couple of
hallucination stories that seem to be similar to that. There’s a man
whose cat had to go to the vets for a few days. While the cat was
gone, the man would hallucinate that he saw it walking across the
living room. Sacks says that the hallucination stopped when the cat
got home, but how does he know? Some of the cats walking across the
living room might have been hallucinations, but you wouldn’t
investigate that if your cat was at home and might perfectly well have
been going to the litter box.

A common form of auditory hallucination is to hear something that
sounds like a radio left on in another room. If you live in a
single-family home on a quiet street, you get up and go to all the
rooms with radios to see which one was left on and to turn it off.
But if you live in an apartment building on a noisy street, you hear
other people’s radios all the time. Some of them might be
hallucinations, but how would you tell?

My methodology quibble aside, I think it’s a good book. One
stated purpose is to make people more comfortable thinking about
(and maybe talking about) their neurological idiosyncrasies, and I
think it achieves that. I discussed it at dinner with two friends,
and it turned out that two of us have the visual hallucinations
before going to sleep and the third had no idea what we were
talking about.

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2012-12-25 Tue Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. I think it was his
first novel. I read it in high school, or possibly college, and
haven’t looked at it since, so I was surprised how vividly I
remembered some of the better bits. There are good reasons why I
haven’t reread it – the stuff between the good bits is very talky,
and mostly about issues that don’t concern me much, although certainly
it’s of historic interest how casually people in a Huxley novel
published in 1922 advocated ideas that we would label fascist.

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2012-12-25 Tue Finished Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson. I’ve
been reading this off and on between a lot of the above – it works
best a chapter at a time. It’s fascinating but a little bit
disappointing. We really don’t think about how much of late 20th
century technological change was fueled by World War II. He leaves
out the antibiotics, but everything easily related to computers is
mentioned. (bombs, weather prediction, stellar evolution, biological
evolution…)

But with a better editor or co-author, it could have been a better
book. Dyson doesn’t really explain anything they way the great
popular science books of the mid-twentieth century did. If you don’t
already know a lot about any of these subjects, you will come away
from the book with a vague idea about how general-purpose computers
helped develop them, and some interesting facts about the biographies
of the people who did the developing, but you still won’t know much
about the subject.

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2012-12-28 Fri Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier. I think I got
this from Gutenberg because someone wrote an essay about it in the NY
Times Book Review. You can see why someone who studies how people
write novels would find it interesting, that someone would have done
something that much like stream of consciousness in 1915. But it’s
really quite unpleasant. I thought about dropping it several times,
but somehow kept on to see how the throat-cutting came about.

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First post of the New Year

It’s not exactly a New Year’s Resolution, but I have been thinking
about how to revive the diary aspect of this blog.

I’ve been doing a little bit of that on my G+ account, and it has
advantages and disadvantages over the blog. The bit advantage is that
people do actually respond to what I write over there, much more than
they do here. The major disadvantage is that formatting is primitive
to non-existant on G+, and I can’t write without at least being able
to do headers and bullet lists.

One of my ideas is to keep a diary of books I’ve read and movies I’ve
seen. If there’s a brief comment about one that doesn’t seem to
warrant a full post, I’ll comment at G+, but monthly or so I’ll post
the list, with links to Amazon so that if you want to buy them I get a
little money, and links to any blog or G+ posts I’ve been inspired to
write.

So I’m not promising any specific number of posts, but you will be
seeing some more about life in general here this year than you did
last year.

Mushrooms

We had a very hot and dry April in this part of the world, so we were all wondering whether there would be flowers in May at all.

Fortunately, we’ve had a cool, wet May, so there are not only flowers (a lot of the May ones bloomed in April, but we’re getting some of the June roses now) but these mushrooms sprung up on the sidewalk across the street from me.