Sense of Adventure

For about the last two years I’ve read “The War Nerd,” Gary Brecher’s column for the English-language Russian alternative website The eXile, religiously. While I don’t always agree with him (big surprise, since I don’t always agree with anybody, including myself), Brecher knows his military history, as well as the broad spectrum of wars, large and small, going on today. His facts are usually right and his analyses incisive. Incisive enough that he’s quite often proven right when all the government/media complex “experts” are dead - and deadly - wrong.

This might not seem your cup of chai. But Brecher’s writing is brisk, his wit savage. He’s the freshest writer on current events since P. J. O’Rourke sold his soul to the Dark Side. Fair warning: like O’Rourke he uses what we might call fairly strong language. Then again, sometimes the easily offended need to be.

And soon, you won’t have to spend hours clicking from column to column in the eXile archives to get your Brecher fix. As of June 1^st, 2008, you can enjoy reading some of his greatest hits between the covers of The War Nerd, the book.

If you pre-order you can get a 5% discount off Amazon’s already marked-down price of $10.85. And of course, if you pre-order or buy the book through this site, you’re helping to support me. And of course my wonderful animal family, including Emma (note the subtle yet entirely gratuitous way I worked in the site’s real draw!)

If you want some of the best insight on the current disaster - and the various whirlwinds so assiduously being sown today - all wrapped up in a damned and damnably entertaining read,you can hardly do better than the self-proclaimed fat boy from Fresno. I just ordered mine!

I was just out in the kitchen - it’s about 12:14 AM - getting some ice to top off my Giant Red Mug o’ Water for the night. It’s 64 ounces. If you’ve seen me at a con or a party lugging this great big garish thing around you no doubt think I’m the world’s biggest alcoholic. And I don’t drink alcohol at all. But I’ve always slogged down immense quantities of water. Having basically a tank-truck with a handle saves me having to keep running for refills.

Anyway … I’ve missed a lot of sleep, what with one thing and another (no, nothing that fun), the last several nights. So my perceptions are a bit altered, here. As a consequence, when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a blur of shiny black fur coming into the kitchen I decided that it must be Squeak.

Then I turned, and it’s Emma. I jumped about a foot in the air and my heart almost stopped.

See, here’s the thing: Squeak’s a cat. She weighs like twelve pounds. She’s basically a very glossy black football with legs and a tail and big yellow-green eyes. Emma Dog weighs in at nearly 100 and is the size of a miniature horse. Almost, anyway. And, in the kitchen late at night, unexpectedly seeing a great big black something that looks like Emma is startling, let me tell you.

She gave me a hurt look anyway. Dad! You thought I was a monster.

Sorry, sweetheart. But … yes. Yes, I did.

And why did WordPress just give me a message, Saved at 25:17 AM? What is up with that?

Oh. Whew. That’s twenty-five minutes and seventeen seconds (because it just now autosaved again at 0:29:30.) I thought the people in charge of Daylight Savings Time had decided to really screw us up this year.

I told you I get weird when I get short on sleep. Weirder.

Dungeons & Dragons (and before that Chainmail, a proto-RPG which I played in a campaign run by Walter Jon Williams) co-creator Gary Gygax has died.

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

Those of us who have enjoyed, and devoted far too much life, time, and creative energy to, role-playing games, owe Gygax a deep (if somewhat ambivalent) debt. So do those of us who make our living as professional fantasists - by which I include SF writers, by the way: all SF, and arguably all fiction, is a subset of fantasy. Like J. K. Rowling he brought us many, many potential customers, in the form of readers turned onto fantastic fiction through his work.

Naturally, those of us who have earned income from role-playing games or RPG-derived fiction owe him big time. Since Wild Cards started life as an RPG (you knew this, yes?), and I wrote a D&D novel, War in Tethyr, he’s got some pretty specific gratitude coming from me.

He had his enemies and critics. Anybody who leaves a mark is going to. Especially in such insular, and strongly overlapping, circles as gaming and SF&F.

I don’t know much - okay, anything, really - about Gygax as a person. But I’ll readily say of him: hail, farewell, and thanks for everything.

(Thanks to David Weigel on the Hit & Run blog for the heads-up. Lolcat added 3/7/2008, courtesy of, where else, I Can Has Cheezburger? And if you think that’s inappropriate, I only hope that when I die, I rate my own Lolcat.)

When Emma and I went on our walk today, on the bike path and trails down along the clear ditch by the RGNC, it was a lovely afternoon. The breeze was cold, but it’s mostly a sheltered walk. Only walking west down the path from Candelaria did the wind-tunnel effect make it really bitter.

As we crossed the wooden footbridge across the ditch from the Nature Center gate a young mother with two kids by the far landing stepped aside to let us pass. A wise idea, as it turned out.

Her older kid, a little boy of maybe five or six, came tottering forward as we reached that end, blithely ignoring his mom’s repeated commands to stop. And then he did stop, and his eyes got real wide.

“There’s a big dog!” he announced breathlessly.

Yeah, kid. No diddly. Listen to your mama next time, won’t you?

Actually I don’t think Emma would ever remotely hurt a child. She got along well with the kids at the home she lived at for a year. It was the other dogs she had a problem with. Still, I prefer to avoid putting such things to the test unnecessarily.

There’s no question that, at almost 100 pounds, burly and black with a shoebox head, Emma looks formidable. Okay, she is formidable. Most people just assume she’s a he. A lot of people admire her, some with visible trepidation.

They should hear me coo at her as my baby girl…

It seems the cranes have finally flown away. I didn’t see any in the field along Veranda, east of the RGNC. It’s sad, of course, in a way. But if they don’t go away, where’s the poignancy when they return?

That’s not altogether true. The Canada geese don’t all leave. A goodly population sticks around and produces broods of deceptively cute babies. (Deceptive, in that their parents are huge and scary.) But when I hear the wild geese flying back as the autumn air turns crisp, it always stirs me at a very deep level.

Saturday was the famed Sci-Fi [sic] Night at the NM Scorpions hockey game. It was a lovely late afternoon for a drive - welcome to the actual beginning of New Mexico spring.

I’d downloaded directions to the Santa Ana Star Center and they seemed clear enough. I got a bit of a shock, however, when I came upon the Santa Ana Star Casino far short of where the map told me I was going. In my simple naïvete, here I thought the Center would be attached to the Casino. Nope.

At least the map was clear enough to give me confidence. On I drove. And on.

Later fellow attendee Jane Lindskold told me she’d called to ask for directions. She asked specifically what the Center was near. There came a pause, and then the reply, “It’s not really near anything.”

No, it’s not. It is, in fact, way out in the weeds.

Still it was hard to miss, rising out of the desert pretty much by itself. I got there with my box of books right before the doors were to open and joined my fellow writers at our table on the concourse. Two tables, actually, as well as another table for Bubonicon staffed by con chair Kristen Dorland and her sister-in-law (whose name I never manage to get; sorry.) I got slotted in between Walter Jon Williams and Gerald Weinberg. Out on the ends were Jane and Robert E. Vardeman.

The Center is relatively new, and a very nice, clean facility. Things started out fairly slow. Over the course of the evening, though, we got a fair amount of interest. A lot of kids came by to check us out, always a good thing - we need that rising generation of readers to keep us from having to get actual jobs.

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