'Bred Crumbs
11.09.02
Great name in the news: National Weather Service forecaster Carolina Horne.
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It's gotten to the point that I watch CNN Headline News just to see how bad it is – not the news, though there's plenty of bad there, but its presentation.
I tuned in yesterday morning in the middle of the "International Minute," the news channel's randomly scheduled segment paying lip service, in the American way, to the world beyond these shores. But the "news" being featured was about a riot by Guns N' Roses fans when Axl didn't show for a concert – in Vancouver. Never mind the sad notion that anyone would riot about Guns N' Roses in 2002*; the "International Minute" has brought us vital information from the exotic land of Canada!
Then back to the regular Headline News package, which two minutes later told us all about ... a riot by Guns N' Roses fans in Vancouver. Apparently intra-staff communication is forbidden at CNN. Further, one of the those amateurish Headline News graphics stuffed next to the video footage read GUNS & ROSES RAUCUS [sic]. Presumably, the dictionary-deprived graphics department was shooting for raucous, though that makes little more sense.
At the top of the half-hour, the channel addressed the windstorms here in the Bay Area. We saw a reporter standing in front of the crashing surf at Fort Point, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, where she offered up this non sequitur:
"It's called a bay for good reason. There aren't usually that many waves here."
She's right; I looked it up and bay is indeed from the Latin for "body of water that usually doesn't have that many waves." (Not.) And by the way, the reporter arguably wasn't even standing by San Francisco Bay; the Golden Gate Bridge above here crosses, oddly enough, the Golden Gate, the strait that connects the bay to the ocean. She was practically on the edge of the Pacific, which despite its name has a relatively high number of waves. (Not to mention that Fort Point regularly has waves worthy enough to draw a few surfers even on non-stormy days.)
Here are my theories for this degree of globally broadcast sloppiness:
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* All part of the ancient band's engineered comeback, as tracked by Steve.
11.08.02
One week into National Novel Writing Month, I stand in worrisomely good shape. I'm a quarter of the way through with 13,450 words under my belt, only slightly off my words-a-day goal of 2,000. I set that goal for the beginning and end of the month knowing that not only would time be more likely to get scarce in the middle of the month, but also that I would hit the part of the story that is most vague in my mind. The good news is, I'm already arriving at those gray areas, yet I'm filling them and chugging along with the word count.
The NaNoWriMo hints and tips keep saying you should have no idea where you're going with your novel, but I can't and don't think I should pretend to ignore the connections that formed quickly out of my initial thought, and I think having a direction and a few touchstones along the way is keeping me going. I hope the fine NaNo folks don't think that's cheating, and if they do, I'll just kill them fictionally. I am writing the novel beginning to end, and in the NaNoWriMo spirit, I am hitting plenty of now-what places, forcing myself to face them as my word-count quota demands, and coming out the other end with a small unexpected occurance or nifty dialogue exchange that tweaks my direction or adds another layer to what I (think I) have in mind. And I'm resisting the urge to go back and revise. Mostly. I have absolutely avoided changing the plot once it is committed, and to my surprise have had little urge to.
So far, the book (working title: The Hand of Todd; I hope a better one emerges before I'm through) doesn't excerpt well. Here's the small chunk I've shared on my NaNo profile, in which my hero has become employed as a theme-park mascot:
It was hot. It was smothering. But it wasn’t depressing – it was more isolating. Trying to see the world from his sweat-stained person-shaped cave through the narrow slit of the merry parrot’s beak, he felt a million miles away from everyone, but still able to interact with them. He felt shielded from their stupidity but able to control them with antics and perkiness – for which he could not be identified and blamed. He could envelop small children in the sweep of his false wings, and the parents would swoon. He could mime a visitor behind his back, causing his friends to guffaw at his expense. He could jig or hop or cavort as long as he wanted, with music or without, and no one could stop him. Pirate’s Domain belonged to Parrot Pat. If Parrot Pat waved at you and you ignored him, you were a fool.
11.06.02
The desperate search for a post-election silver lining:
So Republicans have taken the majority in Congress to go with their ill-gotten White House. Well, even if the Democrats had won the House, Democrats have become pretty indistinguishable from Republicans lately anyway.
OK, that didn't make me feel better at all. But hey, at least the Democrats kept the governorship of California.
Oh wait, it's Gray Davis.
OK, let's concentrate on the local scene, where a city fed up with homelessness and homeless advocates without answers backed a measure to do something about it, which could work – or could make matters worse, or be blocked by supervisors or the courts before it can even be implemented.
But look, my city Fought the Power by deciding to buck the feds and look into growing its own medicinal marijuana. 'Course the feds, in their strange, pathetic, costly crusade against a negligible menace, won't for a moment let San Francisco go through with it.
At least our local water system will get repaired – driving up my water bills 300 percent because the public commission that should have been fixing the system all these years misused the funds.
Maybe I can take heart in the conduct of democracy itself. Shame the local voting management was screwed up yet again, and at my precinct the machine that accepts the ballots didn't work half the time, I wasn't listed on one of the voter rolls, I was never asked to show ID, and a procedural stupidity required me to fill in at least one vote on a page full front and back of contests such as judicial races and insurance commissioners (not to mention the "board of equalization") that I could not possibly make an informed decision about, or else my meaningful votes wouldn't be counted.
OK, here's my "take-away": Nevada continues to be a giant desolate piss-hole that deserves to have nuclear waste dumped in it.
No, not really a silver lining, but I feel better having vented.
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Metafilter had a discussion on whether people should be encouraged to vote if they're uninformed, which leaves me wondering if in places like California there might be too much democracy to do us good. My ballot last night had, besides the two pages' worth of decisions on lower-rung judicial candidates and such, 26 ballot propositions. Even if the news media did a good job supplying information on all this, which they don't, how am I supposed to absorb it?
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Here's my contribution to the electoral process: to make it easier to remember which proposition question is which, instead of just lettering them, we should name them like hurricanes. "Proposition Ethel swept to victory last night, but voters said no to Hernando."
11.03.02
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