Happy Birthday, Vincenzo

Today, we mark my brother Vin's birthday. It was always doubled up with Thanksgiving in our house, because we're thankful that we have Vincenzo. Mom is down at Vin's place, participating in the double celebration. I sent Vin a birthday message, and he is celebrating at one of Huntsville's storied German restaurants (ya know, those rcket scientists that were brought to Huntsville after the war needed someplace to eat.

Vin always kept us hopping- his first act when he got to the US Military Academy was to post the family address on a bulletin board, with a note informing everybody that they were welcome to stay. And stay everybody did... he increased our already large family by a factor of a couple of hundred. We should have installed a revolving door in the house- at any rate, hundreds of people knew where the spare key to the house was 'hidden'. I can't tell you the number of times I came home from work to find a couple of guys in the kitchen, cooking dinner and drinking beer on one of their rare free weekends. Needless to say, we wouldn't have had it any other way. Family is family, no matter whether blood relations or not.

Vin is keeping the old tradition of hospitality alive, and I imagine a couple of his Army buddies have stopped by this weekend to hold court with him and with mom, who still remains the matriarch of an extended family of global scope. I can't think of any better celebration of Vin's birthday than having various callers stopping by throughout the day. He, inspired by mom's generosity, took on the mantle of gracious host, and that's the sort of thing that doesn't change with age.

It Wasn't Exactly Buy Nothing Day

Generally, I agree with Tengrain's stance on Black Friday being Buy Nothing Day- why buy into a 'tradition' which subjects overstressed, underpaid retail workers to what amounts to a rugby scrum, albeit one with neither rules nor manners? I've never been a materialistic person anyway, and I'd rather not be a party to the downward spiral from citizens to consumers to consumed that has characterized our society over the past half-century.

That being said, I didn't quite do the Buy Nothing Day thing... for me, it was Buy Something Necessary Day. The 'oil life' indicator in my car was reading 5%, so I brought the car into a Valvoline branch not too far from my workplace. I had plenty of time before work, and this place is set up like a pit stop- simply drive up, and a cadre of technicians read your tire pressure and check the vital fluids of your vehicle. As I indicated, I was in desperate need of an oil change, but everything else was okay- air filter and oil filter were good, brake fluid level was good, all lights were functional. The young 'pit crew' swarmed over my car, performing their various tasks, and I was ready to drive off in under twenty minutes.

I'm still a bit surprised that the whole process took such a short amount of time, this being a day off for most people. My guess is that, when most people were in the malls, I studied the blade handled a necessary task. I should probably thank of the shoppers for clearing a way for me to do so in such an expeditious manner.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019

This year, because of the chronic understaffing in my department at work, I had to work on Thanksgiving. It wasn't so bad, I was able to contact mom (who, like last year, is at my brother Vincenzo's house) and various siblings, nieces, and nephews. Everybody is doing okay- Sweetums was out gallivanting at a street festival in Uster, Switzerland, Vin, Gomez, and Pickle were all having the big turkey feast with their respective children. Last year, I was able to take a week off, and went to Vin's, and the main theme of my phone call was that I wished I down at his house with the fam.

Knowing that I'd be working on Thanksgiving, I decided to go the simple route as far as a turkey dinner goes. I picked up a couple of packages of ground turkey, some bulk sausage, and some croutons, and made a stuffed turkey meatloaf... a sort of 'Thanksgiving's greatest hits' meal item:

I needn't have worried about Thanksgiving dinner, though. One of my co-workers, who is the very essence of kindness, stopped by with another co-worker (who lost her father last year, and was celebrating Thanksgiving with co-worker one's family) with a bounteous feast, made from scratch by one of her daughters:

I was prepared for this, so I had purchased a bottle of Frangelico to go with their coffee-and-dessert course. My co-worker has to be in at 9AM, so I hope this wasn't a dangerous choice.

At any rate, I am thankful for being well-loved, by family and friends. Sure, I spent most of the day here on the job, but I had fun hearing from my mom and my siblings, I had an enormous feeling of gratitude towards my co-workers, and I got to spend time with my precious Ginger.

He Wants Your Family to Be as Dysfunctional as His

Is there anybody on the planet more pathetic than Donald Trump, Jr? He is every bit as overweening as his father, and with even fewer accomplishments. This week's disgusting DJTJr moment is his suggestion that his followers pick fights with their liberal relatives at Thanksgiving dinner in order to 'trigger' them, and to videotape the results in order to win a copy of his book and a MAGA hat. Donald is the product of a dysfunctional family, headed up by an abusive ogre, and he now wants your family to be as dysfunctional as his is. Remember when the Republicans tried to portray themselves as 'the party of family values'?

Now, regarding the word 'triggered'... the current usage of the word was initially meant to warn survivors of trauma that certain materials could cause them to relive painful moments. The people who were the intended recipients of trigger warnings are people who have gone through hellish experiences, and made it through, albeit not unscathed. The idea that the rotten rich scion of a corrupt family would use this term as a pejorative only makes him even more disgusting than he's always been. None of the Trump family members could have survived the vicissitudes that PTSD sufferers have.

Junior's challenge is just gross, and his implicit denigration of survivors just makes it worse. My advice to anyone whose MAGA relatives try to bait them for Junior's 'challenge' is to loudly mock any pretense of 'Republican family values'. It's a holiday, not a day to play along with some rich sadist's nasty plan.

Something to be Thankful For

Every once in a while, I write a post on the Qanon Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory... it's 'One Conspiracy Theory to rule them all, One Conspiracy Theory to find them, One Conspiracy Theory to bring them all, and in the dark web bind them in MAGAland, where the wingnuts dwell'. Qanon is premised on the idea that an anonymous poster with Q Clearance has been posting cryptic clues on 4Chan and 8Chan (now 8Kun) pointing to a heroic battle waged by Donald Trump against a global cabal of Satanist Pedophiles- pretty much Democrats and (((rootless cosmopolitans))). It's a mish-mash of right-wing Clinton Death List nonsense with old-fashioned anti-Semitic blood libel... but it has been able to absorb Flat Earth lunacy, Lizard People whackaloonery, and a core group of believers that JFK, Jr is not only alive, but is a hardcore Trumper and possible 2020 Trump running mate.

Why am I mentioning this now? Wonkette's Robyn Pennacchia has written a guide to readers who are dealing with Qanon whacko relatives at Thanksgiving. It's a compassionate treatment of deluded cranks, involving her mother's strategy of asking a string of concerned-sounding questions that will end in a True Believer having to articulate, and thereby truly consider, his or her beliefs. It's difficult to continue supporting a movement with a catchphrase 'trust the plan' when the plan is undefined and the planners unidentified.

This method is also a nice subversion of the Qanon methodology itself. While the whole kerfuffle began with a 4Chan post in 2017 about the indictment and coming execution of Hillary Clinton, it morphed into a series of vague posts, mainly questions and series of coded transmissions, basically the Socratic method for lunatics. The conspirator(s) also came up with a stupid-though-evil trick to keep True Believers from becoming skeptics when predictions didn't come true, or outright falsehoods came to light- they told the marks 'disinformation is necesary'. People, if you are the targets of a disinformation campaign, then you are the enemy. As far as the heavy lifting of the conspiracy theory goes, it is mainly done by a coterie of grifters who interpret the cryptic utterances of 'Q Team' like a bunch of MAGA theologians. These are the individuals who have added their own spin (aliens, flat earth, illuminati) to the whole shebang.

One of the axioms of the movement is that 'the normies' are blissfully in the dark, and that the hundreds of thousands of indictments, military tribunals, and executions would so disturb them that they would riot in the streets... they would have to be informed gradually, and then the Qanon True Believers would become lauded as wise heroes. Put succinctly, it's a fantasy about 'owning the libs', a fantasy about going from being a loon to being a sage.

Thankfully, I don't have any relatives who believe in this nonsense. We all value education, so there's no need to pretend to having a recondite font of secret knowledge. I feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with this nonsense, even with the guidelines set forth by Robyn, it's got to be exhausting work.

Going Back to the 'Tor' Well

Last Saturday, I riffed off of a post on the Tor Publishing website, and I am going back to that well for tonight's post. One of today's posts celebrated the birthday of SFF author Poul Anderson, an author I have only mentioned in passing in a couple of posts. Anderson wrote a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy works, ranging from Space Opera to Grim Norse Saga. He was also an early member of The Society for Creative Anachronism, and wrote a humorous essay, 'On Thud and Blunder' as cautionary advice to writers approaching All Things Medieval in a slipshod fashion.

My personal favorite novel by Anderson is 1954's The Broken Sword, published the same year as another notable 'elfy' book. The Broken Sword is the progenitor of 'grimdark' fantasy, a violent tale of a doomed protagonist bearing a cursed sword on a campaign of vengeance. Set in a Faerie-haunted Dark Ages Europe which is rapidly coming under the sway of a new god whose name the supernatural denizens cannot bear, the novel concerns a war between the two major powers of Faerie, the elfs and the trolls. The hero, Skafloc, is a human fosterling of an English elfin noble who kidnapped him to further his martial aims- humans can bear iron weapons and Christian exorcisms. The principal antagonist is Valgard, the half-troll/half-elf changeling (engendered in an evil fashion by the amoral elf lord) left in Skafloc's place, who grows up to be his soulless mirror-image. The two virtually identical beings, manipulated by fate, eventually meet in a 'you die, she dies, everybody dies' plot worthy of an Icelandic saga.

The book is refreshingly short compared to the interminable door-stop series that plague the Fantasy Industrial Complex. Anderson throws out paragraphs of exposition which, in and of themselves, put to shame most modern 'brick of paper' post-D&D fantasy 'epics'. This bit alone could form the basis of a twelve volume 'WAR OF GODS AND ELVES' series:


"The hardest fight was on a desert shore with a troop of exiled gods, grown thin and shrunken and mad in their loneliness but still wielding fearsome powers. Three elf ships were burned after the fight, there being none left to man them, but Imric was the victor."


While the book deals with horrific crimes (the elfs it portrays are a far cry from Tolkien's superhuman good-guys), it doesn't revel in depravity- the transgressive passages are short and matter-of-fact, the sort of laconic passages one would find in a Norse saga or the newspaper police blotter. The hero is likeable and capable, but his descent into a doom-laden destiny prevents him from being a mere 'male wish-fulfillment' figure. The villain is thoroughly despicable, though his helplessness due to his soulless nature (and his realization that he is a 'counterfeit' of another being) lends him an air of pathos.

The Broken Sword is a quick read, the plot is a thriller, the action portrayed with gusto. As I mentioned before, it throws out more ideas, more eldritch imagery, than most multi-volume series by lesser authors. If you were intrigued by the gray morality of the television series Game of Thrones, you should read the book, it delivers the same punch with much more economy. While I love The Lord of the Rings, I think it had, overall, a deleterious effect on the genre, with the 'gotta write a trilogy' model taking place of the one-and-done model.

I Think We Know How This Movie Ends

One of the supermarkets in which I shop, one not far from a couple of my worksites, has a robot which rolls slowly down the aisles, detecting spills and directing custodial personnel to areas which need a clean-up. The robot is certainly not anthropomorphic, though it has been provided with a pleasant-sounding synthesized female voice... and someone has affixed a pair of googly eyes to it:

Those googly eyes are a weird touch, an attempt at drollery to lull the humans into a sense of comfort. I'm reminded of the jocular robots in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, with their droll manner of speaking:


"SPOILER—that was his name—had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing what he said to some comic situation. The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said, 'I lost it somewhere along the way. That's what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat.' Do you recall that?"

He shook his head. "I say a lot of foolish things."

"It struck me as strange; because it was the kind of thing SPOILER said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to. I think he would have said, 'That was the basket's story, that had been filled with water.' Something like that."

I waited for him to speak, but he did not."The jaguar ate the goat, of course. Swallowed its flesh and cracked its bones, somewhere along the way.""

Haven't you ever thought that it might be just the peculiarity of some town? Your friend might have come from the same place I do."

I said, "It was a time, I think, and not a place. Long ago, someone had to disarm fear—the fear that men of flesh and blood might feel when looking into a face of steel and glass."


I guess it's only natural to acclimate us to the unnatural, but this robot doesn't even come close to the 'Uncanny Valley'. I've seen enough movies, though, to know how this will end in that inevitable day when 'Spill in Aisle Seven' changes to 'CRUSH! KILL!! DESTROY!!!'