The Lord said to Noah, you're gonna build an arky arky

[bironic]

MAKE! IT! OUT! OF! Hiiiiiickory barky barky--

...Right, so it's still raining, as it has been since Saturday. It's been the kind of steadily dreary week that makes it possible to scrawl an eight-page handwritten letter to one of your expatriate friends, then spend an evening doing nothing but lie on the couch watching made-for-Sci Fi James Spader movies; that makes it necessary to bring two Joseph Arthur CDs to work and try to compensate for the office's sullen mood by staring at a new homemade House desktop (1024x760, you have been warned).

Why is it that listening to the rain lashing the windows makes you sleepy during the day and keeps you up at night?

Earth's been getting restless lately. Two hurricanes in the south, Stan in Central America, earthquake in Southeast Asia, forest fires in California, weeklong rainstorms here in the Northeast, reports of record polar ice melts. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Next on the list will be volcanic eruption, I suppose. Is this typical autumn weather, or should there be more headlines blaming global warming or cyclical ocean currents or divine retribution?

Is it wrong to hope that something dramatic really is happening? Toss in avian flu, and I'm all for quoting from Mary Shelley's The Last Man and other fun 19th-c. plague/apocalypse stories.

* * *

Wow. So mousapelli has written 21 stories in 21 fandoms after setting her playlist to random, selecting the first 21 tracks that played, and writing one story for each in whichever fandom struck her as appropriate.

Which made me wonder how many fandoms I'd feel competent to write in, and came up with this list:

• Harry Potter
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel
• Star Trek (I'll group this into one item, although it comprises TOS, TNG and DS9, and the first half of VOY)
• House
• X-Men Movieverse
• Roar
• Brimstone
• Boston Legal
• Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (barring a team of her lawyers descending with C&Ds)
• Stargate
• Firefly/Serenity
• Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Trilogy
• ~Sandman

So about 14. (Not counting stand-alone books or movies that I've pretty much integrated into my SOUL but haven't found appropriate for fic-writing.)

I was going to leave this alone with a meme (see me use the net lingo!) - "What are your fandoms, and what do you wish were your fandoms?" - and some angst about not being fannish enough for the likes of mousapelli and Victoria P. (because I don't, for whatever reason, feel competitive or defensive with Sam, and my envy of Jaida has to do with her writing skills more than her breadth of expertise), but here's a better idea:

Let's each do a series of short fics. You can use any structure you like -- shuffle your playlist like mousapelli did, or choose a theme/gimmick (coping with loss, 12 fandoms for 12 months, pairings you've never tried, etc.). Rating doesn't matter but I'd like to set limits on word count and number of fandoms.

I know we're all crazy busy, so the deadline(s) could be set for Thanksgiving or later if it's easier. I can post or link to the stories here. Just drop a line so I know who's participating.

* * *

And to think I've not only heard of this year's Nobel laureate in literature, I've read and seen some of his work (and so have you, sister! another thing to tack onto your list of Random Stuff You Didn't Want to Know but Comes in Useful Sometimes). And boy, does Harold Pinter deserve it. He can write tension like nobody's business. I remember watching a filmed performance of one of his short plays, it might have been "The New World Order," in a course with Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, which featured an interrogator and a man, then a woman, then the man again (I think) in a sparse room in a nameless country in an undefined time, discussing censorship and punishment for a book the man had published whose title or subject matter we never learn. Anyone in class who was paying attention had their hands clenched for the full 10 minutes. It was the sort of play where a whole world of information is communicated through using the word "was" instead of "is" hidden in an already jam-packed sentence in the middle of a speech. Not to mention the obscenely powerful things he can do with silence. Agonizing silence. Mind-boggling.

On another note, I am convinced that MB harbors a deep, possibly repressed passion for Pinter. michelle_nine can back me up here.

* * *

We close, in The Daily Show tradition, with your Moment of Zen:





It's so nice to see those kids getting along at last.

Comments

[synn.livejournal.com]

*whines* I can't see the picture!

Right, in other news:
I shall take the short fic challenge, though I doubt I'll make the deadline.
Can I count one I have to write for another challenge? It's Gattaca... (mmm... gattaca).

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I fixed the link, try it now.

Sure, Gattaca. What's a better deadline?

[bironic.livejournal.com]

No, I lied - now none of the photos are working. Must be a bandwidth thing.

[synn.livejournal.com]

heh. that's right house, you watch whats-his-name.
er. I mean, pretty : )

Seems to be working.

I don't object to keeping the deadline as is, esp. as I've no idea how long they'll take me to write and so can't suggest another one. I just don't expect to have everything done on time.

[musicisbelievng.livejournal.com]

that list is getting really long

[bironic.livejournal.com]

how many items are we up to now?

[musicisbelievng.livejournal.com]

i lost count after trigeminal neuralgia

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

Ooooh! Which ex-pat friend, pray? *bats eyelashes*

I'm so in on the fic challenge. Will you be setting a structure/gimmick, or is it free choice?

And yes, a lot of what you see in the weather lately IS down to global warming/impending apocalypse. Which could explain why I've been re-reading Good Omens so rabidly...

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Letter's for you, darling. Posted this morning. (And didn't keep a copy, for once, which means someone is probably going to eat it along the way.)

Figured everyone could choose the structure they felt most inspired by -- any thoughts on a number-of-fandoms or word count limit?

My father and I were actually just discussing the terrifying lack of education in America after reading the results of a poll in which the majority of people here said they believe that the recent weather is not only catastrophic (rather than the normal variations you get in any delimited chaotic system that average out over time), it is a direct intervention by God as punishment for our sins. My father prefers to believe that schools are not worsening so much as the church remains firmly in its 2,000+-year-old anti-science stance.

I've tried to continue describing our rant/conversation but it's coming out all wrong and Margaret might have had my head on a pike, so I'll stop here for tonight.

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

Well, the weather HAS been catastrophic, rather than evidence of a normal variation, but that's because of human interference in the environment. (Hurricane Katrina was a nothing of a tropical storm until it hit the artificially elevated temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico.) God doesn't need to punish our sins. The simple laws of cause and effect are doing unusually well at that.

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

Sorry, actually meant that comment to be longer, but my morning computer tutorial ended. (I think I'm going to like these tutorials - finish the task assigned, then play on the computer for twenty minutes. Yay.) Anyway, I'm not sure you could say educational standards are worsening - is public education in America really worse than it was a hundred, or even fifty, years ago? Or do we in fact expect more of it - that it should be extended to all children, that science classes should be purely science-based, and so on? And aren't those expectations in themselves a good development?

And while the Catholic Church has been, and continues to be, very anti-science, I don't think that's the tradition out of which this new wave of science-resisters comes. I think that's more southern fundamentalist. And of course, the government's policy of denial about global warming, and the media's curious and unconscionable silence on the same matter, certainly don't help.

On a much happier note - OOOOH LETTER LETTER YAY! I'm such a post whore. (As in, mail whore, not post-whore like post-modern. But don't call me a mail whore out loud, because people might get the wrong idea. I should probably explain at this point that I'm terribly hung-over and blame that for my rambling.) Did my card find its way to you yet? I worry over it.

And you normally keep copies of all your letters? Damn, woman. Your biographers are going to be able to knock off early and head down to the pub every day while mine are buried under heaps of torn and wrinkled paper, occasionally screaming, "What the HELL is THIS?"

[(Anonymous)]

You and probably half the class were sleeping... What did he expect, showing a film in the dark late on a Monday afternoon when his students were Americans who spent the weekend doing Lord knows what, probably in a foreign country?

I don't think it's weird to still get a thrill out of having taken a class with someone with a Name. (This is the part where I sheepishly admit that once or twice I looked over my final set of reviews and read his little comments.) Kind of makes you wish you'd appreciated it more while *in* the class, though. Well. We can content ourselves with knowing he retired from teaching after that semester, so WE HAD HIM LAST, KIDDIES! He'll remember us longest!

My dad's the one who heard about the poll -- I'll see if he can remember where it was so I can forward it along.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Well, the weather HAS been catastrophic, rather than evidence of a normal variation

Is there data to back that up? Because I'm fairly sure nothing really out of the ordinary has happened: three strong hurricanes during hurricane season, one of which caused massive damage because it happened to hit a city with rusted-out levees and which has been sinking below sea level ever since they dammed the river that's supposed to deposit silt for support (and everyone knew something like that was bound to happen soon). As for the non-weather events, we had one very strong earthquake in the middle of a fault that's been quiet for ages, always a sign that a slip is imminent, and whose tsunami caused so much destruction because the epicenter was in the middle of an ocean surrounded by a ring of beachy islands with fragile buildings; and one medium-strength earthquake that, at the risk of sounding callous, killed no more people than others have in the last century, let alone earlier (remember the freakishly massive one in western China?). And are the Gulf waters - normally higher than the Atlantic by virtue of it's being an insulated and shallower *gulf* - artificially elevated enough to influence a storm, or would Katrina have strengthened anyway?

Neither of us was arguing that education has slipped. I agree with all your points there. But here's part of the fundamentalist/conservative (because it's not just those crazy southerners, it's also the midwest, and the northwest, and the southwest, and the rural, and some cities, and half of Long Island, and...) horror: it makes the statement "that science classes should be purely science-based" *seemingly negotiable.* SCIENCE classes HAVE to be SCIENCE-BASED or else they AREN'T SCIENCE, people!

I'm stopping there because I have a feeling this is going to turn into a separate post.

We were talking about how a lot of the panickers lack perspective, in that they don't know history and don't have a long-term view of things. For example, weather (short term) vs. climate (long term) -- We may have had 4 inches of rain this week but we had very little over the summer, so the season's rainfall may be the same as always, or if it's slightly higher, it will even out with last year's and next year's, and this decade will balance with two decades ago, and so forth. From what I remember from earth sciences classes, the problem with the global warming debate is no one can agree on how much of a temperature increase is normal and how much is an irreversible effect of the industrial revolution, because we don't have enough data going back far enough to make a definite decision.

Yes, I actually got your card a couple of days after you realized you'd forgoten the air mail stamp. Apparently that didn't matter.

:) I keep copies of the very long or otherwise special letters, the former just in case they get lost, the latter because I like reading them later. Ah, the vices of the egoistic dork.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Here, these were in a global warming-related story today by Ker Than of livescience.com:

- Computer simulations, called general circulation models (GCMs), show that as the century progresses, frontal storm tracks will shift poleward in both the northern and southern hemispheres by hundreds of miles. Frontal storms will become more common towards the poles and less common farther away.

So the storms are affected only in the position of their tracks over a 100-year projection (which is no different from the last century's shift of hurricanes from the U.S. Northeast to the South).

- Over the past century, Earth’s average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Many scientists believe human activities are to blame and warn that temperatures may rise an additional 2-10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century if steps are not taken to curb carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. Other studies predict at least a 1 degree rise by the end of this century no matter what humans might do.

Which is what I was trying to articulate before about small rises with controversial causation.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I remembered another one at lunch today when Dukat said to Weyoun, "Have you ever been diagnosed as anhedonic?"

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Found the CBS poll results online--
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223.shtml