Entries from March 2008 ↓

Last night’s speech changed this election season for us, and I think it did for a lot of others too.

I have been most interested in a regime change, a sea change in how business is done in the White House, and I think either democratic candidate could bring that. However, I have never been given so much credit for intelligence and understanding of subtlety by a politician in my adult life.

We threw $100 down on the table and committed ourselves to a campaign.

What I was struck by most? Words matter.

Words matter, words matter, words matter. Speeches should be pretty. I want my politicians to be brilliant orators and to bring passion and depth to ideas.  I want speeches that unite, clarify, bring momentum - there’s been such a dearth of this in the last eight years.

If you haven’t read the speech - find it and do so. I fought tears a couple of times.

Other than that I’m home w/ a sore throat finishing the last of this novel, which is headed out today!

Update: The Oregonian wrote about Coen

Among Saturday’s more poignant images was a tiny 4-year-old boy who held a sign that said, “This war’s older than me.”

Link to article: Five years of duty, dissent and war

Go Coen!

—

And thus the sign we made him, This War is Older than Me! He also thought ‘Poop on the war’ would be a good one.

I shipped my family off to the protest in downtown Portland today (still editing), and was awfully proud watching them go.

It’s very depressing to think that he has never known a time where we aren’t at war. Since we listen to a fair bit of radio, he has often inquired about such-and-such market bombing, and we’ve taken care with the language and have begun to censor the radio a little. At any rate, at just over four, he’s well aware of the war going on on the other side of the world and how we feel about it - and of course he’s also quite familiar with Adel Hamad/Project Hamad and thus Guantanamo. Not that each age doesn’t have its craziness, but these are strange times to grow up in.

At any rate, just for fun we did a search on Flickr tonight to see if he turned up anywhere, as Laura said quite a few people took his photo.

What do you know, he’s here:
http://flickr.com/photos/36254855@N00/2336481760/

and here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomlechner/2336714908/

side note: I’m sort of mixed about posting photos of Coen - I probably won’t do this a lot. There are various opinions from other blogs I respect - Tim Bray’s ongoing makes a point of not naming children’s names or posting photos, and the Granades are very open about this sort of thing. I like the idea of being open about it, but I’m naturally secretive and again I think this is a strange time to be growing up. But since this seems like an exceptional case and many others took his photo, and, I admit, I’m proud to think of him carrying a protest sign, I’m going for it.

The editing of Couch is going well - thanks. Doing a little research on lost cultures and lost knowledge, I came across the term ‘Language isolate’ - (Thanks, Wikipedia).

A language isolate is a language that does not have a genetic or genealogical relationship with any other living language. The Basque language is the most common example of these, I believe.

The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbors in Europe made many scholars search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts at connecting Basque with geographically very distant language families.

Many hypotheses on the origin of Basque are considered controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally accepted by most linguists.

Cool, I love this kind of stuff. And then I saw the enormous number of languages that are considered to be language isolates. Here’s a picture of what I could fit in my screenshot window of language isolates in S. America. Click for a full view.

The proposed column is for what language they might be related to.

Did this many peoples really forge their own languages out of nothing? Have we really lost this much knowledge over the course of our history?

The black hole of our past is awesome and huge.

Click to see fullsize. Very helpful, but even more so is all these extra hours she carved out of the schedule for editing here are ones that she’ll be doing extra kid duty. Thanks Laura!

It seems to be bobbing between computers quite a bit, and so here it is encased in its flash drive. Rally!

Wouldn’t it suck if I lost the flash drive? Ha ha ha oh.

Boing Boing has a post on How alternate reality games work with links to Cory Doctorow’s notes from a talk he saw on the subject.

What is an ARG?

You’re watching a TV show, the character picks up the phone and makes a call and your phone rings

Great stuff. I think of it as hacking reality, and I’d like to make some kind of play with this for COUCH when it comes out - to leave real-world evidence of the passing of fictional characters.

The scavenger/treasure hunt/caper Operation Peachblow, run by our own Black Magic Insurance Agency has put these on since 2000.

But this blending of fiction and reality seems particularly interesting on a day in which yet another author has ‘Freyed’ her work:

In Love and Consequences memoir a fake

The 1000 words reading series at The Maiden in the Mist was a full house and awesome and the writers I read with - Daniel Thomas, Jill Stukenberg and Mel Favarra were just great.

Mel has updated the site with the work, including my strange little sci-fi piece.