Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Hola! Jo Walton has decreed that Monday 23rd April is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day:

You've probably seen this already. If not, read it and boggle.

In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

Whatever you're posting should go on your own site. I'll make a post here on the day and people can post links in comments to whatever they're putting up on. If you are a member of SFWA, or SFWA qualified but not a member (like me) you get extra pixel-spattered points for doing this. If other people want to collect the links too, that would be really cool. Please disseminate this information widely.

I've already celebrated by pseudonymously posting editorial notes on someone's online fiction. Also, my new icon is free to anyone who wants it.

Howard Hendrix is about to become famous on the internet, and he's not even here to see it.

March 21st is the first day of the Baha’i, Persian/Iranian, and astrological calendars, the first day of Aries, and the traditional first day of spring, though the Equinox sometimes falls on March 20th. It is also Earth Day, World Poetry Day, World Down Syndrome Day, and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and was or is celebrated by neopagans as the festival of Ostara. It is celebrated in Australia as Harmony Day, in China and Japan as Vernal Equinox Day, in Namibia as Independence Day, in Mexico as a fiesta patria for Benito Juarez, in Poland as Truants’ Day, in South Africa as Human Rights Day, in Malta as Youths Day, and in Lebanon and Jordan as Mothers’ Day. Historic events which took place on this date include Jolly Prince Hal metamorphosing into prudent King Henry V, 1413; Thomas Cranmer being burned at the stake, 1556; the Second Coming of Christ (according to William Miller's predictions), 1844; the beginning of the Second Battle of the Somme, 1918; and the first rock and roll concert, 1952. Notable persons born on this date include Johann Sebastian Bach, Francis Lewis, Benito Juarez, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Florenz Ziegfield, Phyllis McGinley, John D. Rockefeller III, Russ Meyer, Viv Stanshall, Mark Waid and Rosie O’Donnell. Persons who died on this date include St. Nicholas of Flue, Thomas Cranmer (obviously), Pocahontas, Bishop Ussher, Robert Southey, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Leo Fender. It is the feast of SS. Nicholas of Flue, Serapion the Scholastic, Enda of Arran, Benedicta Cambiaggio Frassinello, Birillus, and Lupicinus; the Blessed John of Parma; and, in the Orthodox calendar, James the Confessor, and Thomas I, Patriarch of Constantinople.

Two queries.

First, does anyone know where I can find blackberry or raspberry plants? My local store has sold out of them.

Second, does anyone know how to find contact information for a specific doctor, if you don't know where in the country he is these days?

1. Keep track.

You know how sometimes you'll get a reminder about Thing Wanted stuck in your mental queue, and a few shopping trips later you'll be wildly oversupplied with worcestershire sauce, or paper towels, or Campbell's chicken broth? If I had to do that with something for my garden, why did it have to be Colocasia esculenta, a.k.a. elephant-ear caladium?

2. Bugger all.

My vasty tray of perfectly seeded and labeled perennials, mentioned last time around? O the dreadful wind and rain: those big fat substantial petals from the magnolia tree next door -- the ones that fell last year during a string of dead-still days, so that I could literally hear them plopping onto the sidewalk -- all came whirling down and plastered themselves over the top of my seeded Jiffy-7 peat pellets. After it stopped raining today, I cleared them off and found flattened dying seedlings underneath them. Except for the Johnny-jump-ups, which were busily justifying their names.

3. Reminder.

If you are an author, and you write scenes in which people use various herbs for mystical purposes, please include mugwort. If enough writers mention mugwort as an essential ingredient in witchy formulations, the woo-woos will start using it, enterprising persons (probably first-generation immigrants) will start gathering it and drying it, and the godawful stuff will become just a tiny bit rarer than it is.

If you want to be politically correct, do the same for purple loosestrife, a gorgeous but invasive perennial that's the bane of northeastern wetlands. You might mention that it forms very sturdy root systems that can look just like creepy monster claws.

4. Jim, Duncan, Meg.

Drunken Lady, completely taking over its area of the garden. I see why your mother was impressed. The Murgy Rose, doing just fine. Jim's hedge rose from his yard in Colebrook, showing distinct imperialist tendencies. Roses, roses, roses.

5. Luck!

And there in the pocket of my gardening overshirt, left over from last fall, a forgotten wad of bills, bastante para dos cenas de pernil! And I am so very tired from digging. I phone out to La Parada for dinner. On top of the pernil, chopped spring onions from the garden. It's perfect.

Angelus wasn't Angelus; he was Liam. Spike was William. "Darla" wasn't a name when Darla was turned. And we have to assume that a pious Catholic family wouldn't have named a daughter Drusilla. What, then, was Drusilla's name?

Answer: We don't know, but I strongly suspect it was Agnes. Three iterations of the song about the lamb in the blackberry patch is a bit too much for an arbitrary detail.

Did I mention that I made my first pro magazine sale a while back? It's nonfiction, of course -- an essay on cliches in book-length works, for the cliche-themed issue John Scalzi is editing for Subterranean.

Today I proofread my galleys. (They may be .pdf files, but they're still galleys.) There are twenty-eight separate items in the corrections I sent John Scalzi. The majority of them are creebs about formatting details, loosely wordspaced lines, and laddered wordbreaks. The last item says:

(You bought a piece of writing from a compulsive rewriter who's also a former typesetter, proofreader, copy editor, managing editor, et cetera. What did you think would happen?)

Porco Bruno is my new hamster, successor to the much-missed Arthur. PB's young, high-strung, and athletic. Recently while handling him I noticed what may be a scar across his face, running upward diagonally from the outer edge of his right eye (which eyelid droops a bit) past the centerline up between his ears. If so, I'm mildly impressed that he survived it. I'm wondering now whether his tendency to go into sudden thrashing panics might be a bit of brain damage, or possibly the hamster equivalent of PTSD, or whether he came from a careless hamstery that wasn't good about socializing their young. Hamsters have to be handled, just like kittens, if they're to grow up to be human-friendly pets.

It could be that PB's just young. I'm going with that theory, since it's the one I can work with. I've been cultivating his acquaintance, establishing my character as Nice Human With Lettuce. He's still twitchy, but he's learned the "come here, I have a snack for you" noise. I've moved him to the old CritterTrail cage so I can get hold of him more easily. PB initially foiled this plan by moving his seeds and bedding up to one of the observation areas, from which he could instantly jump down and hide in the access tube. You'd swear he had bat in his ancestry. He's perfectly happy hanging upside-down in his tube, eating sunflower seeds from his seed stash in its bottom right-angled curve.

PB's antics in the tube were fun to watch, but he wasn't getting socialized that way, so I temporarily put domed stoppers over the bottoms of his two access tubes. This limits him to the main cage area. He's rejected the little dome-shaped hamster house I gave him, and instead has bermed up his cage litter and dug a foxhole in the corner under the wheel, with a thicket of paper towel strips stuffed in above it. He makes little noises while he works on it.

That's one of the weirdest things about Porco Bruno: he's vocal. Most hamsters are silent, or nearly silent except for an occasional squeak of dismay. The day I brought him back to Tor from the pet shop, he expressed his displeasure by I-swear-to-ghod roaring -- sounding, as our intern Torie said, either like bad plumbing, or an extremely small velociraptor. He hasn't roared much since he got here, I assume because he's never been that upset again. But he continues to express himself with a wide variety of squeaks, growls, peeps, chirps, and other strange sound effects.

Yesterday afternoon, when I was working at home and he was curled up asleep in his nest, he suddenly let out a seriously distressed hamster-scream, followed by a series of loud squeaks. I went over to see what was the matter and found him hazily thrashing around, feet-up, obviously half-asleep. I cupped my hand around the corner of the cage and held it there so his nest would be dark and warm, and he soon went back to sleep.

I know hamsters dream; all mammals from the marsupials up exhibit REM sleep. Besides, I held Arthur while he was sleeping during his final illness, and he was definitely going in and out of dream sleep. What I want to know is, do hamsters have nightmares? Because that's exactly what this looked like.

My birth date is March 21st, the first day of the astrological year. It's frequently the date of the vernal equinox (or the autumnal equinox, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere).

Let's see, now. Three each, events, births, deaths, and observances ...

Events:

1871, Journalist Henry Morton Stanley set out to find missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who didn't know he was being looked for.

1918, Beginning of the Second Battle of the Somme. It's hard enough to believe they did it once.

1952, Alan Freed presented the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first ever rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Births:

1685, Johann Sebastian Bach

1806, Benito Juarez

1943, Viv Stanshall

Deaths:

1556, Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake. He made a good death, though Latimer got off the better line.

1487, Saint Nicholas of Flue, patron saint of Switzerland, dead of natural causes on his 70th birthday. He laid the foundations for Swiss neutrality and for the humanitarian treatment of prisoners of war, was a married layman with ten children, and is venerated by Catholics and Protestants alike.

1958, Futurian and SF author Cyril M. Kornbluth died of a heart attack after shoveling snow, then running to catch a commuter train. He was thirty-five.

Observances:

1. Everyone's vernal equinox celebrations, which in some cases -- f.i. astrologers, Iranians, and followers of the Bahá'í faith -- means it's also their New Year observance. In theory, probably also means that any number of gods, goddesses, and other mythical personages were either born, died, or experienced significant events on this date.

2. Day of Googoo Expressions of Fuzzy Benevolence: Earth Day, International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, World Poetry Day, etc.

3. Feast of Saint Serapion the Scholastic, also known as Sarapion of Thmuis, a fourth-century Egyptian monk. He took part in all the best flame wars of his era, hung out with SS. Anthony and Athanasius, and was admired by Jerome, which should tell you something. Had it in for Manichaeanism, Macedonianism, and Arianism, the last of which got him banished by Constantius II. If Credo were an RPG, lots of characters would be named Serapion.

Seeds: Set out a tray of 120 Jiffy-7 peat pellets seeded with perennials: Achillea millefolium, Achillea m. var. Summer Pastels, Viola cornuta, Viola tricolor, Cheiranthus cheiri (one packet mixed colors, one packet all dark red), Centranthus ruber, Campsis radicans, Helenium autumnale, Lychnis coronaria atrosanguinea, Buddleia alternifolia, Rudbeckia grandiflora, Gaillardia grandiflora, Alcea rosea zebrina, Asclepias tuberosa, Dianthus deltoides, Dianthus superba, Echinacea purpurea, and Echinops ritro. They look cute, each with its popsicle stick on which I've written the seed name with a Sharpie marker.

Soon I'll do a second tray with the tender seedlings, mostly tomatoes and basil. I have a pleasant quantity of different basil seeds: sweet basil, of course, but also cinnamon, lemon, licorice, genovese, ruffled, lettuce leaf, globe, Greek mini, fino verde, dark opal purple, and holy basil.

Other doings: Located all (?) of last year's lilies and transplanted them to the triangle in front of the cherry tree. I'm thinking they'll do better if concentrated in a single area.

Planted two new rosebushes, both Mademoiselle de Sombreuil. Got them at Home Depot for $5.77 each. The trick is knowing that there are always one or two desirable roses in those big shipments of cheap bare-rooted roses HD gets every spring. That's how I got my Caldwell Pink last year.

Okay, the trick is also buying them from HD early in the season: shipped cold, still dormant, and there hasn't been much chance yet for HD's garden department to accumulate plant diseases. By mid-May last year even HD's premium potted roses were going yellow and dropping their leaves en masse, having one and all been zapped by something nasty. The only exception were some potted The Fairy, which I snubbed even though they'd been radically downpriced, as I didn't want to take the plague home with me.

My established roses are fine this spring, except for the miniatures, which all died over the winter. Don't know why. The chrysanthemums don't look like they made it. The Sanguisorba minor did. The horseradish has yet to show itself aboveground, but I don't believe for a minute that it all died off over the winter. Horseradish is one of those plants you'd better be sure you want in the contemplated location, because if you change your mind you'll be years getting rid of it.

The mugwort is rioting, herbaceous cockroach that it is.

Pruned the cherry tree for shape. The pruned branches are in a vase on my dining table, looking elegant.

Pruned the roses: viciously and heavy-handedly with the big red rambler in the corner, as it sends out meaty six-foot-long canes in all directions that can render that end of the garden impassable. Did the same thing to it last year and it bloomed like crazy, so it can't be too discouraged. Didn't prune its genetic twin over by the fence. Instead, switched its new eight-foot cane up into the neighbor's magnolia tree. That rose's incursions into the magnolia tree bloomed very prettily last year. Maybe the new people minding the yard next door will let it keep growing up into the tree this time.

Not sure what's going on next door. Appears the landlord hired a couple of young men to come in, clean up the yard, repaint the fence red and the patio furniture white, and generally get the place spiffed up. That's the yard that goes with the apartment where last year my next-door neighbor was murdered and then not found for a long time. Landlord's doing a complete renovation on the apartment: pretty much had to, under the circumstances.

On the other side of the yard, the Azerbaijanis have planted grapevines alongside the uprights of the crazy tottering wooden structure they put up last year. Thought that might be the idea. I'm not going to tell the city about them, but I have trouble believing their back yard construction projects would pass inspection. That sore-thumb arbor of theirs -- a story and a half tall, stretching from side to side and front to back in their yard -- is going to have a hard time escaping notice.

Next set of tasks: clean up rose prunings. Rake yard. See who wants some of that tradescantia, also some mint. I have way too much mint. Last year's experimental use of it as a groundcover was only successful from the mint's point of view.

Where in NYC can you buy tomato cages? I mean the plain wire kind, not the Deluxe Patio Tomato model HD keeps trying to sell me.

For various complicated reasons, there are doughnuts this morning.

I, newly awake, pick one up and examine it closely. "Chocolate frosted doughnuts with colored sprinkles look like they were designed by Milton Glaser," I observe.

"He must have been a Doughnut Glaser," Patrick replies.

I need more coffee.

Yesterday: my first flight with my hands and feet on the controls of the plane, v. cool.

Today: my first third-degree burn, small but distinctly charred.

Am now having a quiet night at home, working on manuscripts while keeping an eye on my hamster's antics. Feels like real life to me.

Yetanother meme: take a song, run it through Babelfish, from English to Italian to French to German, then back into English again. So:

I will with TV on the bell with a pain sleep, which a another go week be, and as my light regard spend be, and where it be, that the real thing go I ask a man try advise it say in former times and he it twice say have; My life is a delimitation, which met it long from damage hard over tests me changed over a map, which read: It lived the work as you in the days in projection of a better work than nation, how you lived in the days in projection of a better play than nation, which still co-ordinate! I have it cried am abyss, and gone the answered volume, but, while they examined slowly by the hands, he remembered that that him give to let blow had and him to give licks the name of air places the clay bricks me in feet outside of Albert Corridor held and has plant and written on the wall; The work, when it lived you in the days in projection of a better nation, how you live in the days in projection of a nation that better we take the water at the so-called tree now we make to me the same take your sweat, as digging the art there purely a groove for the human heart garden of please are less than cleared day, or the night them to its life the whole life does not leave to wish over to sense vacation their whispering, if comes too contacted, and if I creep between the sheets, it I legend; The work as you it lived in days in projection of a better work than nation, like you it lived days in projection of a better nation.

The entry box asked me for my interests. I thought about it a while, typed them out, alphabetized the list, and entered it:

American rivers, bodging, botany, characteristic repeating phrases, citrus, colors, explosions, expository theory, fairy dusters and acacias, fibonacci numbers, flathead-6 engines, gestures, hamsters, history, informing structure, interesting garbage, material culture, Middle English, real economics, rocks, sacred harp, saints, semiautomatic weapons, speed.

The software considered my answers, then turned into links the ones that matched the interests of other LJ users.

Today I went and looked at some of the lists of interest-sharers, and from there looked into some of their journals. It was like going around a lot of sharp corners very fast.

Here are the stats on how many LJ users share which interests:

American rivers 2, bodging 7, botany 66, characteristic repeating phrases 0, citrus 38, colors 385, explosions 110, expository theory 0, fairy dusters and acacias 0, fibonacci numbers 48, flathead-6 engines 0, gestures 61, hamsters 220, history 424, informing structure 0, interesting garbage 2, material culture 34, Middle English 20, real economics 0, rocks 136, sacred harp 41, saints 176, semiautomatic weapons 2, speed 280.

It's strange: so few for acacias and exposition, so many for speed.

Colors, explosions, speed, characteristic replicating phrases, informing structure, Sacred Harp, history, botany, expository theory, fibonacci numbers, thou my love singing in the wilderness, bodging, Middle English, flathead-6 engines, American rivers, material culture, real economics, fairy dusters and acacias, interesting garbage, flavor combinations that can't be modeled in advance, citrus, gestures, hamsters, rocks, the names of obscure rhetorical maneuvers, saints, semiautomatic weapons, and the almighty word which was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

And more besides.

I'd like this better if it weren't called a journal. It sounds too personal. My manifest willingness to shoot my mouth off about my experiences and opinions evaporates as soon as I'm the nominal topic of conversation.

Starship Captain! by Uberdude
Username
What is the name of your starship?
Uptight First Officer	jimhenley
Closeted Helm/ Navigation	medievalist
Token Alien Scientist	beamjockey
Tarty Nymphomaniac Yeoman	frostfox
Substance-Abusing Ship's Doctor	carbonel
Ensign Smith (aka "the victim")	lilairen
Ship's Engineer /Drunk	fredcritter
Arch-Nemesis Alien Commander	kiplet
Your ship's secret weapon	The Gay Ray
How does your mission end?	You and the Tarty Yeoman get married
Quiz created with MemeGen!

Bzoink's survey asks you to state your opinions on a list of complex, divisive issues. What's fun is that it forces you to keep your answers short.

What is your stand on.....
Created by spyndakitrose and taken 15572 times on bzoink!
Abortion?	Rates went down under Clinton, rose again under Bush. Sex education and access to contraception are the only answers that work.
Death Penalty?	Always wrong, and not a noticeable deterrent to crime. If you believe God punishes sin, you can leave this one in His hands.
Prostitution?	Legalize it. As long as there's a class of women who are legal and social non-persons, all women live under the threat of being reassigned to that class.
Alcohol?	A universal human consolation that takes practice to get good at. Alcoholism is obviously an illness, and should be treated as such.
Marijuana?	Make it legal for people who need it, and keep up the PR campaign to brand it as a loser drug.
Other drugs?	Oppressing people who have sleep disorders, and scanting or denying them the chemotherapy they need, has zero effect on street-level stimulant abuse.
Gay marriage?	Ever notice that not one single straight couple has stepped forward to say their own marriage has been damaged by the existence of gay marriage?
Illegal immigrants?	If we don't want them, why do we keep hiring them? Oh, right -- they're cheaper that way.
Smoking?	Insanely stupid. Feels great. Don't ever start.
Drunk driving?	Very bad. We need to sort out and address the different behavior patterns that lead to it.
Cloning?	A big non-issue. Twins are genetically identical. Half of the plants in your local garden center are clones. Cloned people won't be any more interesting than the normal sort.
Racism?	America's oldest and most successful lunatic belief. It's too useful to have an instantly identifiable underclass.
Premarital sex?	Sex Ed makes the incidence go down. Anyone familiar with traditional UK ballads should already know that Just Say No doesn't work.
Religion?	God made gays, smart women, natural-born atheists, Iraqis, and plesiosaurs. Real Christians should stop second-guessing Him, and work on their faith, hope, and charity.
The war in Iraq?	Our folly and downfall and mortal sin. May those who can forgive us for the damage we do on the way to our own ruin.
Bush?	Holds us in contempt when he thinks of us at all. Only talks to us when he wants something. Will say anything he thinks will get him what he wants. Con man, coward, and bully.
Downloading music?	Whose, and how? It's a distribution channel, not the end of the world. The recording industry's screaming because they're too bone-lazy to deal with it constructively.
The legal drinking age?	No matter where we set the age limit, new drinkers are going to get into disastrous trouble. Teach kids to drink under supervision, in civilized circumstances.
Porn?	Has always existed, and always will. It's a weird and sleazy industry precisely because we try to suppress it.
Suicide?	For teenagers, a terrible idea. My moral certainty fails me in the face of a terminally ill patient in mindless screaming pain. If yours doesn't, try spending time with one.
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I caught the virus from Womzilla. It goes:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...
...along with these instructions.

If the men are darker, it is pastes in slender strings they'll eat, or tubes, always farinaceous, as the dictionary says; but more often on Anglo-Saxon fare the potato takes place before any foreign macaroni or spaghetti.