Sense of Adventure

Via Cryptomundo, we learn that a DNA survey by the Chicago Field Museum reveals that “falcons are more closely related to parrots than to other hunters such as hawks and eagles.” Allegedly.

Say what?

I can accept it as a cosmic joke that the closest living relative of the great and terrible Tyrannosaurus rex is the tasty chicken on my plate (get your revenge on Rex with this delicious-looking recipe for marinated red chile chicken.) But to think that the fierce and independent (and, face it, cute) little kestrels I see around here so often, who so perfectly exemplify Gary Larson’s dictum that “Birds of prey know they’re cool,” are … parrots?

One way or another, that’s what they say here: “Field Museum’s genetic study rewrites family tree on birds.”

Read + weep.

… behold the Espresso Book Machine!

(Well, not literally: there’s no picture.)

Friends, I give you the future of publishing, dead-tree edition. Not necessarily this implementation; but here’s where it’s going.

By odd synchronicity I was discussing bind-on-demand, book-on-demand technology last night with some ASFS friends, in the hospital room where we visited one of our number who’s recovering (nicely, thank you) from knee-replacement surgery. Okay: I was ranting about it; it’s one of my hot buttons. I’m sure this comes as just a huge surprise to you.

I’m not sure why there’s still such resistance to reading on handheld devices, although one of the many great things about the Kindle is that it’s bringing a lot of readers around to e-reading.

For some reason a great many people get defensive at the notion of e-books, as if somehow they’ll snatch the dead-tree books out of their hands and off their bookshelves. How, exactly?

Look: I hugely prefer reading on my Palm TX Handheld. I love having, literally, a library of fiction and non-fiction books in my shirt pocket, especially waiting in long grocery-store lines. I love being able to search electronically, for, say, the introduction of a character who’s just been mentioned again without my retaining any idea in Hell who she is. I love, and make frequent use of the backlighting (lack of which is one of my several beefs against the Kindle.)

But look, kids: fond as I am of reading on my PDA, I’m also fond of money. So as a professional writer, I say: you only want old-school books you can hold in your hand? No problem! If you want them in Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets badly enough to pay for ‘em, I’d love to find a way to accommodate you. All I really care about is that, though my sins be scarlet, my books be read. And that I get paid for ‘em, of course.

And I think bind-on-demand technology, such as the Espresso, is how that’s going to work in the future.

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I just learned by email that Jack Speer died overnight.

Jack was a member of First Fandom - the pioneers! - a mainstay of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society, and a friend. He and his wife Ruth, who survives him, played gracious hosts to many a pleasant pre-Bubonicon party.

Sad news. Fandom in general and our Albuquerque fannish family are diminished. Jack is missed.

My condolences to Ruth and the children.

(I note that his death is already mentioned in his Wikipedia entry, linked to above.)

- if you happen to be Emma Dog. The only one worse might be early October, when in Uncle Joe’s famous words, the Great Sky Demons attack en masse.

I’m fine with it, myself. Especially since it’s still a relatively cool season this year.

But, sadly for the Em, it’s the annual July 4^th Fireworks Bombardment. Actually, it’s fairly light and late this year. Heck, the 4^th is only a week from today. Usually it sounds like a hot night in Baghdad by now.

Tonight it did start to pick up. Emma wouldn’t stay outside even to eat dinner. When I ventured out front a few minutes later we got such a loud, sustained, and variegated barrage I briefly thought there might be some kind of professional show going on.

Fortunately, Emma’s noticed that the explosions taper away to nothing later on. Last night she went out late and stayed out most of the night. So she’s not liable to get as bored as she has in years past, which is good.

And of course, it’ll all be over soon.

Has there ever been a greater sports nickname than “Death to Flying Things”?

Thought not.

It refers to this guy:

Robert Vavasour Ferguson was an American baseball player of the 1860’s and 1870’s, when men were men and umpires wore top hats and sat on tall stools to call the games.

He didn’t only luck out in the middle name sweepstakes; his defensive prowess won him the splendiferous nickname “Death to Flying Things.” As in, fly balls.

Otherwise, he was apparently kind of a dick.

But this post isn’t actually about a human, much less a surly one, but rather Earth’s Nicest Cat, TJ.

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To fit in around here, you really have to be a character. For one thing, you need to help keep the other denizens of the madhouse entertained.

Emma continues to show she belongs in the Milán Pack. Just now, with the street full of youths, not all the most reliable-looking, and with bass thumping from the speakers of a truck across the street, what roused Emma to bark fiercely?

What but her nemesis, a young mother with a pram?

To be fair to Emma, the mother was walking a somewhat stout little dog. That’s got to up the threat factor.

•••

To further support Emma’s pack-appropriate eccentricity, on our walk today we got rained on. At home Emma doesn’t like to be out in any kind of weather. By which I of course mean weather, as in, the weather doing something, not just sort of being there. Today, though, she happily ignored the fact that it was raining. As long as the rain stayed light.

To my surprise she didn’t even react to fairly loud thunder. Usually if any kind of boom is even audible when she’s outside, she’s shrieking and thumping at the back door to come in. Out on the ditch this afternoon, she didn’t even blink. Apparently she figures Daddy will protect her.

(This might be ill-advised. Daddy is tall, hence liable to attract lightning.)

I enjoyed the rain myself. Mostly. It’s a rare treat to see New Mexico on a cloudy, rainy day. And light rain falling on me actually feels pleasant. Certainly knocks down the heat.

But then as we approached the point where I intended to turn around the rain began coming down for true. Then Emma was, like, “Daddy, can we seek shelter now? Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?” Fortunately there were trees with thick enough foliage to offer some respite.

Even then I was more concerned by the lightning. If I’d expected that, or if I’d heard thunder before we set out, I would have kept us home. Naturally it waited until we were on our way up the ditch.

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It’s not a cliché if it’s literally true, right?

I’d resigned myself to not having honeysuckle blossoms - with their attendant wonderful aroma - of my own this year. I was prepared to be content with the fact that both the honeysuckles I’ve got in the ground, the store-bought one and the one I coaxed into rooting myself from a clipping, seemed established and thriving. I had originally been going to buy one that already had flowers on it, but decided it didn’t look too healthy, and instead picked a more robust-appearing, but flowerless, plant.

Then Saturday afternoon I went out to check on the honeysuckles and discovered two yellow flowers toward the top of the storebought vine. They didn’t broadcast their smell very far, but they definitely had it - that honeysuckle scent I’ve longed for for such a long time.

It’s a big thing for me. I love the smell of honeysuckle; it’s probably my favorite scent. I’ve really wanted my own for years - the whole 21 years I’ve been in my house. I’ve tried in the past to grow them but despite the legendary hardiness of the plants mine died.

Now, having researched intently and done things right, mine grow. And I was rewarded with flowers. Flowers I never expected until next year. Yay!

I would’ve mentioned this earlier but I had no landline phone service over the weekend, hence no Internet. Fortunately, the repair guy arrived within two hours of my calling today and got me back in business. Of course this enables me to upset myself and waste my life online…

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Exceedingly cute, exceedingly skinny, exceedingly young Latina clerk to another (laughing): “I never see you smile, Erin! Were you deprived as a child? Did you never go to the zoo?”

- Lowe’s grocery store, 4^th and Griegos, Albuquerque.

By and large, life here on Jupiter is pretty entertaining.

Aren’t hummingbird shadows on the ground a hoot? At first you think they come from something just floating in the air, like the cottonwood cotton that’s starting to drift like snow in the Valley now and give my allergic friends the fits. Then you realize they don’t just drift with the wind, but pause and dart.

I saw that happening as Emma and I were walking on the ditch east of the RGNC this afternoon. I never did see that particular hummingbird. Saw plenty more.

So, how did that story get started that hummingbirds never, and possibly can’t, stop and perch? Somebody mentioned that to me in the last month or so, and I thought about it right off the bat today, as we walked through the leafy tree corridor to the ditch entrance. A hummingbird lit on a branch right over the trail, although it didn’t linger long.

On the surface the belief makes sense: clearly the little bastards have to move around a lot in order to eat vast amounts to keep their furious little metabolisms blazing. And if you spend any time actually watching them, you see fairly quickly that, regardless, it ain’t true. You see them take time outs all the time: on feeders, on tree limbs, on bushes, on wires.

I guess this once again shows we tend not to see what we don’t expect to.

Also, driving the short block from Candy to Veranda to park, I saw a big white bird flying over the RGNC fields. It looked too big and not quite right to be a white pigeon - rock dove - such as you see flying around here a fair amount. I thought maybe it might be a cattle egret, which I have seen in that area, albeit it seems a bit late in the season. It went away to the north.

As we walked north along the ditch it (I’m presuming it was the same big, white bird, since we don’t get them here all that often) flew back over heading south. This time I thought fairly sure it was a gull. It was almost entirely white, with maybe a bit of black at tail and wing tips. This was surprising: we get gulls here, which most people don’t know, so that it startles hell out of ‘em when they do happen to spot the birds. Or make people think they’re crazy, as several have remarked to me.

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So I finally did something I should’ve done weeks ago: went and saw Iron Man.

Just up front: if you haven’t seen it, it’s a great movie. Also if you have.

I first started to get hopeful, I think, seeing an early trailer for it. The first review I read was by James Berardinelli of ReelViews, who’s the only critic I follow, in large part because he tends to get action movies, and not condescend to them. He basically said that director Jon Favreau had made it as an action movie that happened to be about a superhero, not as a funnybook movie. Which was the very promise the trailers seem to hold out, and what got my blood a-pumpin’.

I actually had more knowledge going in than with most comic book movies, having read the book some back in the Seventies - especially when Barry Smith, now dba Barry Windsor-Smith (the only man for Conan in the comics, since Frazetta wouldn’t do the deed) was doing the art. And I didn’t read it that much, although as a devout technophile I always did have a weakness for the battle robot/powered suit conceit. I just generally didn’t, and don’t, follow aboveground comics, not even X-Men - and I was briefly a villain in the series. (Seriously; tell you later.)

So I can’t really address how truly the movie stuck to the comic, although it seemed to do so fairly well. What I can talk about is how true it stayed to how to make a kick-ass action movie.

Which to my mind was: very.

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