Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Cool icons of the day: Entries in this year’s pixelpalooza

I’d been wondering whether the slowness of the new Green Line trains was all in my mind, but this morniing cured me of any doubts. I watched an all-new train creep through a major intersection, and then, instead of turning around and heading for the nearest bus stop, I climbed on board. I measure the first half of my commute in Metro time - if I finish the Metro while the train is still above ground, that means something is amiss, or I’m on a new train.

The conductor was feeling chatty. He admitted that the trains were slower - you get where you’re going, it just takes longer to get there - and even explained the technical difficulties. Apparently there is no “play to the wheels” of the new trains. He also mentioned something about the old trains wearing the tracks down in certain ways, but I was too far away to follow the exposition very well. In any event, it explains the derailments. I suspect they happen at curves in the track. That also explains why every new train I’ve gone inbound on has gone out of service at Park Street instead of making the last stop at Government Center. The Government Center station is one big curve, and these things wouldn’t squeak going around it, they’d derail.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

PS: I forgot to mention that the fast old trains catch up to the slow new trains, so the new ones then have to go express. The chatty conductor had to walk down the train to the “cheap seats in the back” to tell us we were going express to BU East (not to be confused with going any faster). Either there is no intercom at all beyond the annoying automated stop announcements, or the intercom was broken. The even more annoying piercing beep beep beep beep that goes off whenever the train doors close was, unfortunately, in fine working order.

Today I got a two-new-cars Green Line train again. Our leisurely pace inbound was quite regal.

The worst April Fools joke of all was, of course, the snow.

I stopped by the library on my way home last night and found Walter Jon Williams’ Star Wars novel on the new book shelves. I’d been looking around for it in bookstores, and just realized last week at Pandemonium in Cambridge that the reason I hadn’t found it before was that it’s out in hardcover. Somehow I always think of media tie-ins as going straight to paperback.

I have this problem with the Boston Public Library. I take out books, I return the books - no problem. Every few months, however, the library loses a book I’ve returned, and then blames me. There used to be a special status for such books - claimed returned. I would tell them that I’d returned the book and they would mark it claimed returned. Whether they ever found the missing books was beyond me. This time, however, a manager was trotted out to negotiate with the computer over the status of a useless little anthology in paperback that, even if I were the thieving kind, I wouldn’t have bothered to steal. Then he, the manager himself, trotted out into the stacks to look for this book which the BPL would be better off without. He must get a lot of exercise.

I don’t understand how a completely computerized system can fail so frequently. I doubt the bar code readers are at fault - in fact, I suspect that it’s human negligence, and not just human error, that causes so many books to go missing - somebody’s not in the mood to scan in the returned books.

Either that, or they’re running Windows.

This morning I discovered the MBTA’s clever scheme to keep the new Green Line trains running. They’ve split them up so that each new car is attached to an old car. This makes the new “trains” go somewhat faster, but still not as fast as two old cars together. All sorts of similes come to mind, but I’ll spare you.

Someone sent me a Chesterton quote that’s appropriate for these warblogging times. The following is from The Daily News, September 19, 1903:

The saying that good men are the same in all religions is profoundly true, if it means that the attitude of doing one’s best is the same everywhere. But if it means that they will all do the same thing it is not true; it is not common sense. A man from a distant continent or a remote century may be as good as any of us–self restrained, aspiring, magnanimous, sincere. But we must not complain if he has a slight penchant, let us say, for human sacrifice. It will altogether depend upon the nature of his philosophy. And that is how the case stands at the root of the horrors of the Near East. The Moslems are not without creditable qualities in the least–courage, sobriety, hardiness, hospitality, personal dignity, intense religious belief. These are fine qualities. The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy another quality, a total disregard of human life, whether it is their own or other people’s. Therefore our civilisation is and must be at war with them, and that war is a religious war, or, if you prefer the term, a philosophical war. We are allowed by the modern mind to call the Moslems en masse thieves, beasts, devils from hell, though it is manifest to common sense that no people can be so entirely composed. The one thing we are not allowed to say against them, the one thing that amid all our curses it would really be thought illiberal to say, is exactly the thing which is really our case against them. Our case against them, that is, is that they both think and act, that they think and therefore act against everything for which we stand.

These puppies have been piling up for a while, so to clear my desktop I’m going to do a link dump. There is neither order nor sense to the following list:

• You have reached the End of the Internet, again
• Finally, an explanation of Trackback for beginners
• Rocky recommends Laura Williams’ stories
• Browsing prophylactics for the paranoid: privoxy and authoxy
• Spam as a spectator sport
• Rumors of an Apple tablet
• It’s not too late to vote in the ASC Awards!

It’s snowing.

Despite my misgivings about Scientology, I’m really going to enter the Writers of the Future contest this time. The quarterly deadline is tomorrow, so I’m busily dusting off a novelette for the purpose. Short stories over 7,500 words are difficult to sell in the magazine market, but the WotF entry limit is 17,000 and still I’m well below that.

This story has been sitting around the hard drive too long and has gone through too many minor revisions, partly because of the size issue and partly because of the curse of perfectionism that dooms so many fine stories to the bit-bin of history. I have a new plan to replace my neglected New Year’s resolutions: I’ll submit one story a month for publication. That gives me a week to do research, a week for a rough draft, a week for a final draft, and a week to goof off. I think it’s a plan.

And yes, for anyone who’s keeping score, I’ve completely neglected NaNoEdMo and won’t be finishing in time for midnight tomorrow. Maybe next month…

I took a fanfic survey today; the usual paleo-fan questions about zines and how-has-the-net-changed-fandom were in there. One question no one asks is how print changes your perception of a fic. Since I printed out my Glory Days PDF, I’ve found myself enjoying the story more than I would on-screen. I read one of the stories on-screen before, so I do have a basis for comparison.

So I have this option for the printed page. It’s easier on the eye, less disposable, less likely to be dismissed with a command-W. Maybe it’s thirty years of reading good stories in print, compared to three years of reading questionable stories on-screen, that has given me the prejudice. Maybe it’s the ease of picking up and putting down a book, compared to the trouble of bookmarking a story and searching for where I left off. I usually think of the pro-zine crowd as exclusionary and inbred, but if it were just about the advantage of paper over photons, I’d be in their camp.

I hope someday someone invents a passive computer screen - something black and white, at 600dpi, that generates no light - something that looks just like the printed page. It could be done mechanically in black and white, or chemically in color. It might even break down the barriers between pay-per-fic and fanfic.

Sock of the day: Harry Kim

I haven’t been entering my votes in the ASC Awards for the last few days, but I have them all typed up in a file. I have only two Voyager categories left to read: J/C and Glory Days. Glory Days isn’t an official awards category; I just saved all the stories from the series (except for one Seven fic) to read together. Toward that end, I converted the whole series to PDF. My special, paper-saving version is only 82 pages, but I also looked at the double-spaced version, which was 344 pages and 100,000 words. Now I have a printed copy thanks to the wonders of LaTeX and duplexing laser printers. It had better pass the three paragraph test…

[The three paragraph test: read the first three paragraphs of the story. If it hasn’t caught your interest by the end of paragraph three, close the window and move on to the next story.]

According to boston.com, Park Street Station was closed for part of rush hour this morning because of a strong odor. That’s nothing new at Park Street, where I’ve caught a whiff of burning trains before.

The odd thing about this report is that it contradicts my experience this morning, when Park Street was open on both levels, but my Red Line train skipped Downtown Crossing entirely. At Park Street, the conductor said that Downtown Crossing was closed due to “police activity,” and that people who wanted the Orange Line should go back upstairs and take the Green Line to Copley. Apparently there had been a shuttle bus or bussing plan, but that had been changed to the Copley scheme. There is no connection to the Orange Line at Copley, by the way. Who knows what happened to those poor commuters?

Downtown Crossing and Park Street are connected by a pedestrian tunnel (as well as by the Red Line), so maybe the Downtown Crossing closure was a direct result of the Park Street incident. I was already wondering what was taking so long when my train reached Park Street, but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Who knows what I breathed in as my Red Line train was speeding past Downtown Crossing?

Sock of the day: Chakotay

My modem connection has been bad lately because changes in weather throw the phone lines for a loop, but despite the challenges I’ve been listening to Filk Radio. There are some great one-liners (You’re not retro - you’re old!), and some very odd ideas (Joey who fills his waterbed with beer). My new favorite filk is “Black Davie’s Ride” from Avalon Rising by Avalon Rising, a techno-medieval band. You have to hear it to appreciate it.

The filk standby is, of course, popular songs with new, sci-fi, lyrics. Take, for instance, The Saga Begins, Weird Al Yankovic’s filk of American Pie (from the album “Running with Scissors”). This filk covers the entire plot of The Phantom Menace, but my favorite lines are the chorus. (You have to hum along to the tune of “American Pie” to really appreciate it.)

Oh my my, this here Anakin guy
May be Vader someday later - now he’s just a small fry
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye
Sayin’ “Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi,”
“Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi…”

The video is hilarious, but my connection is decaying rapidly - I can’t tell whether that’s the Emperor or a sand dude from Tattooine playing the piano. I’ll have to watch it at work tomorrow to find out.