I stepped on my reading glasses today. Stupid me. Probably no further posting until I get them replaced.
Archives for 2015
Pain in the neck II: The MRI Strikes Back
5 September 2015 by 2 Comments
Last night, as promised, I had my neck MRI’d. The machine is not built for persons who are fat and bulgy like myself; my elbows rubbed against the sides of the chamber when the technician shoved me in. Then, of course, there were the customary deafening noises, curiously reminiscent of very bad 1990s techno music, and made slightly worse because my right earplug came loose. On my way out, I gibed, a little sourly:
‘The floor show wasn’t bad, but the music was terrible. If you had a better band, you could probably afford to hire a bigger hall.’
I then went home and slept for a time. Upon waking, I decided I had better work on one or another of the promised blog posts. I ended up choosing the lafferty, and wrote several hundred words (interrupted by boning up on the Standard Model), culminating in the following bit of oddness:
This particle, which Dr. Boudreaux dubbed a hemion, was duly detected among the emissions of the F–V device, and the decision was taken to produce hemions in quantity and observe their interactions with normal matter.
I thereupon relayed a warning to the Psychological Correction Bureau, and prepared to observe Dr. Boudreaux’s interactions with normal humans.
Wendy sez I ought not to post the finished story for free, but see if somebody like McSweeney’s will buy it. Me, I dunno. I just write them, see?
Pain in the neck
4 September 2015 by 4 Comments
This is a blatant cheat. I am posting today to let the Loyal 3.6 know that there will be no post today. Normally I wouldn’t do that, but I’m trying to keep the string of daily updates going.
In a little over two hours, I am to report to the local hospital for the long-awaited MRI on my busted neck. We shall see if any genuine treatment is indicated, as opposed to taking ibuprofen and toughing it out.
Possible upcoming posts, if I continue to be able to work regularly:
- Another lafferty, this one about the psychological fallout from finding the elusive left quark.
- ‘Goodbye, Radar’, #11 in the M*A*S*H essay series.
- ‘The Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council’, in which H. Smiggy McStudge explains how to destroy science fiction.
- ‘Quality vs. Quality’: a teaser for a new essai to be included in Style is the Rocket.
Once I work up to that point, expect the new collection to be released at any moment.
Suggestions? Requests? Bouquets or brickbats?
‘Hot Lips is Back in Town’
3 September 2015 by 7 Comments
M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #10 in the series.
Let us go back a bit, to the spring of 1977. The finale of the fifth season of M*A*S*H was ‘Margaret’s Wedding’, which was also the swan song for Gene Reynolds (who directed the episode) and Larry Linville. It also marked the first on-screen appearance of Col. Donald Penobscot, whose off-screen engagement to Margaret Houlihan had already caused such far-reaching changes to the tone of the show and the balance of the cast.
On this occasion only, Penobscot was played by Beeson Carroll: clean-cut, likable, well-spoken apart from a tendency to mix up words when drunk (he finished ‘396th out of 227’ at West Point, where he went in for ‘Greco-wrestle Romaning’). It was a hilarious rather than a happy ending to the engagement. The Swampmen, in one of their most heartless practical jokes, encase the hapless Penobscot in a body cast the night before the wedding. By the time they relent and try to tell Margaret that he has not broken half the bones in his body, it is too late: the newlyweds are already departing by helicopter, and can’t hear over the noise of the chopper blades. The only blue note in the composition is played by Frank Burns, standing alone and forlorn on the helicopter pad, saying to the empty sky: ‘Goodbye, Margaret.’
And goodbye it is: for while Loretta Swit returned in the new season and remained with M*A*S*H to the end, Hot Lips was gone for good. (It is significant that her nickname is used only a handful of times in the last six seasons.) Nor was it simply a case of replacing ‘Miss Houlihan’ with ‘Mrs. Penobscot’. The new production team, dominated by Alan Alda, decreed that Margaret’s marriage should be doomed from the start.
In ‘Fade Out, Fade In’, besides writing out Frank Burns and writing in Charles Emerson Winchester III, Fritzell and Greenbaum were assigned the task of wrecking the marriage during the honeymoon. Margaret actually leaves Donald in Tokyo and returns to the 4077th before her leave is over. The Swampmen, consumed with curiosity, pester her with kindness until she confesses:
[Read more…]
Fan art by James Asher
2 September 2015 by 4 Comments
A milestone, if not a headstone, in the career of Tom Simon, Small-Time Fantasy Writer:
Yesterday, via email, I received my first ever piece of fan art, with permission to share. James Asher has illustrated a scene from Lord Talon’s Revenge, reproduced (at low resolution) herewith:
Kundenschmerz
1 September 2015 by 13 Comments
For the Director of Music. A lafferty. Selah.
[Sender’s address redacted]
14 November 20xx
Customer Service Dept.
Leibniz Ideenfabrik AG
Herrenhäuser Straße 4
30419 Hannover
Germany
Gentlemen:
This morning I received shipment of order No. Z-25289150 from your firm’s Hannover warehouse. I wish to inform you that I am not altogether satisfied with your product as delivered.
I opened the parcel with some misgivings; from the description in your catalogue, I had been expecting something larger than a matchbox. The label on the inner package, however, assured me that this was indeed the Self-Organizing Monad (Cat. No. M-4202) that I had ordered.
Following the enclosed instructions, I removed the gel capsule from the box and placed it on a sterile Petri dish, to which I added the required drop of my own blood. For some time nothing appeared to happen, and I felt sure that I had fallen victim to a garden-variety mail-order fraud. But just as I was about to sweep the capsule into the waste paper basket, it began to swell with alarming speed, taking on colour and form, until I found myself face to face with a Prussian blue homunculus about a foot high. I am not sure whether it looked at me with an expression of haughty disgust, or whether that was the natural shape of its ugly little face. Either way, it did not seem pleased with its new surroundings, for it gave an angry snort and said:
‘Humph! Well, this isn’t much of a place. Where’s the welcoming committee?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘The manual didn’t mention any such thing.’
‘Come now,’ said the Monad. ‘I am, beyond any possible doubt, the most important thing that has ever appeared in this wretched little backwater. There should be a brass band, and a cheering crowd, and a mayor presenting me with the key to the city. And what do I see? Nothing! Not one whit of acknowledgement. Not a trace of gratitude that you’ve been permitted the glory of meeting Me.’
I could hear the capital M in the pronoun; the little creature seemed to grow a little taller when it said the word. I decided to be tactful, for the moment. ‘Well, I do apologize. I was never briefed on the correct protocol for greeting a Monad. Perhaps you would be so kind as to bring me up to speed.’
[Read more…]
Speaking up
31 August 2015 by 1 Comment
September is upon us.
We have been through a rough patch here in the Frozen North. After the repeated hailstorms and other foul weather a few weeks ago, we were subjected to Beijing-quality air, owing to the immense clouds of smoke rolling in from the holocaust in Washington State (and portions of British Columbia). There is no rumour to the truth that up to 30% of the smoke was contributed by the face-to-face flame war at Sasquan.
Through all this, when my allergies were not acting up from bad air, my neck was acting up from general cussedness. I am finally due to get an MRI late Thursday night, about six months after my physician ordered it: our Wonderful Single-Payer Health System refuses to buy more MRI machines, and has to run the few existing ones 24 hours a day just to stay half a year behind. The results should help us figure out an appropriate treatment for my pains; at least I hope so.
If that treatment does not involve surgery or heavy medication, I should like to speed up my posting schedule substantially. I have found a routine that seems to be working, at least for the moment, to allow me to write with some regularity. What I should like to do is put up a post every day for as long as I can manage it. I do not guarantee that all (or any) of these posts will be long, interesting, or insightful. I do have some hopes of augmenting my 3.6 Loyal Readers, perhaps putting the unfortunate fraction in touch with his stray 0.4. Whole numbers are restful to the eye and soothing to the spirit.
At present I have the next instalment of ‘M*A*S*H: A writer’s view’ in drydock, and a silly bit of flash fiction at the blueprint stage. After that we shall see where the surly Muse is willing to go.
Kulturbolschewismus
29 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward (‘A Marxist Interpretation of Literature,’ in The Mind in Chains):
‘Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must… proclaim that no book written at the present time can be “good” unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.’
Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr Upward italicizes ‘at the present time’ because, he realizes that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet it is ‘good’ literature, if survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and therefore stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther, because it assumes that in any age there will be one body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of the time will be more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left-right antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time were puritans.
—George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’
‘Fallen Idol’
22 August 2015 by 12 Comments
M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #9 in the series.
Before we can continue with the story of Margaret Houlihan, we need to take note of an irrevocable change that happened on M*A*S*H at this time. In 1977, after five years on the show, Gene Reynolds stepped down as executive producer. He continued to be listed on the credits as ‘Creative Consultant’, but what this meant, in effect, was that the new production team had a chat with him once a week or thereabouts. It was no longer his show. Larry Gelbart, as we have seen, left a year earlier and was not even involved as an occasional consultant. At the same time, Allan Katz and Don Reo stepped down as producers after a single year at the helm.
So whose show was M*A*S*H now? Burt Metcalfe, who had been with the show from the beginning, and had shared production credit with Katz and Reo in the fifth season, was now credited as sole producer. But this is misleading. Metcalfe was a superb technician, who could always be relied upon to keep a show running smoothly, to work around any production glitches and keep the Hollywood-sized egos around him suitably groomed and massaged. He was a perfect right-hand man. That was the job he had done for Gene Reynolds for five years, and he would continue to do it for six more. But for whom? In theory, Reynolds was still his superior. But his actual boss was the other man listed in the new position of Creative Consultant: Alan Alda.
[Read more…]
‘The Abduction of Margaret Houlihan’
16 August 2015 by 5 Comments
M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #8 in the series.
As you might expect from an eleven-year TV series about a three-year war, the continuity on M*A*S*H was frequently dire. Television in those days was often lax about continuity – the ‘series bible’ was an innovation that had really only come in with Star Trek a few years before, and had not yet fully caught on – but M*A*S*H was an egregious offender.
When the series began, Hawkeye was from Vermont, where he had a mother and a sister living; later he was an only child from Maine, and his mother was dead. Colonel Blake’s wife was originally named Mildred; then she became Lorraine, and Mildred was reused for the name of Colonel Potter’s wife. Potter had a son, and a major plot in one episode concerned the baby pool betting on the sex, weight, and birthdate of his first grandchild. A few years later, that extended family had vanished down the memory hole, and Potter’s only child was a daughter, who had children born before the war.
Chronology got equally short shrift. About five Christmases were crammed into the three-year duration of the Korean War. The date of Potter’s arrival at the 4077th is given as 19 September 1952, but in a late episode (‘A War For All Seasons’) Potter is playing Father Time on New Year’s Eve of 1950 (and again in 1951). A fourth-season episode refers to Vice-President Nixon, who took office in 1953 as Eisenhower’s running mate, but a tenth-season episode has Hawkeye writing a letter to President Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor. Writers for M*A*S*H soon learnt to avoid tying episodes down to specific dates; but the continual turnover of the staff meant that there was always a new bug ready to make the same mistake.
Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan, played by Loretta Swit, was only one of two series regulars to last the show’s entire run. It would be unreasonable to expect that the writers would make an exception in her favour to their cavalier attitude; and in fact Margaret is not spared from the general incoherence. Her father, explicitly declared to be dead in an early episode, actually makes a personal appearance in the late episode ‘Father’s Day’. Indeed, Margaret’s development as a character is only made possible by the show’s Silly Putty calendar. Consider: [Read more…]
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