The Annual Gift O'Cow

Every year, for Christmas, we make a donation to Heifer International.  I give to various charities over the year, of course, but Heifer gets the big Christmas donation in part because it feels like an actual gift: you don’t just donate money, but you buy a llama for a small village, or a flock of geese, or you send a girl to school.
(I’m reasonably sure the money’s just wadded up and doled out as Heifer sees fit, but it’s a clever way of making your donation seem more tangible.  And Heifer’s efficiency rating in terms of how much money it actually passes on to the people in question is reasonably high.)
This year’s gift, in honor of my new heart-healthier living, was a full gardener’s gift basket.  (Appropriately enough, this included a hive of bees.)  But if you’re lucky enough to have some spare dosh hanging about this year and feel like giving to those in need, I’d recommend you take a look at their gift catalog, which has donations for all price ranges.
And if it’s not to them, give to someone.  In the welter of expensive gifts, it’s easy to forget just how much a little gift means to those who are truly bereft.  It doesn’t take much for you, but it means so much to them.

Would You Like To Help Me Make Money From Professional Masturbation?

…well, if that’s not a zinger of a headline, I don’t know what is.
In any case, I wrote a humor tale for Alex Shvartsman’s “Unidentified Funny Objects” science fiction humor anthology, which is now available on Amazon in e-book and paper format.  I’ve read some of the tales there, and they’re funny – he’s got some damn good authors, from Mike Resnick to Ken Liu to Jake Kerr to Lavie Tidhar… and yet somehow, among all this talent, he made a mistake and included me!
Fortunately, my tale is suitably bizarre.  If you’ve enjoyed some of my crazy sex stories in the past, this one’s the looniest.  It’s called “One-Hand Tantra”  – and like all porn, first I have to give you a sample:

“The path of most wizards is solitary,” Loefwyn’s father had told him when his power had first manifested itself.  “Your path, my dearest and only child, is more solitary still.”
To this day, Loefwyn wished he had never become a masturbatician.
As his father had promised, Loefwyn’s singular sex magic had given him a decent living.  He’d just scraped up enough cash to build the obligatory wizard’s tower, a ribbed rock column jutting up to advertise his unique talents.  Masturbaticians were rare, effective ones even more so… and both Loefwyn and his spells were potent indeed.  Intrigued merchants dropped by to witness the town’s newest oddity — even as they hesitated to shake his hand.
Now, royalty — minor, vicious royalty, but royalty still — had hired him.  Enspell Griselda the One-Eyed, and Loefwyn’s success was all but guaranteed….

If you’d like a fair amount of funny for your holiday season, I’d recommend this book even if I wasn’t in it.  As I said, it’s available at Amazon for a mere $5.99, or you can cut the middleman and buy it directly from their site.  Either way, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
 

Who Should Play Picard?

So it’s inevitable: in the next ten to fifteen years, there will be another reboot of Star Trek, and there will be someone’s take on Picard.
Our question: who should play Picard?
The criteria are that:
a)  This will be roughly ten years from now, yet somehow they’ll pick a current actor.  Just go with that.
b)  Said actor will have to be in his mid-forties, older, about the same age Picard was when he started.  (They could reboot with a young brash Picard learning his stuff at Starfleet Academy, but that’s too close to the recent reboot and too samey-same.  They’re gonna want to distinguish.)
So.  Which actor should we go with?
I personally would prefer Viggo Mortensen, dragged screaming out of actor’s retirement, because he’s got that reluctant gravitas you need to pull off the Picard.  Yet Gini – a huge Viggo fan, it must be said – says that Viggo’s voice is too nasal to pull off the resonance of a Picard.  Erin says she’d like Daniel Day-Lewis to do it, as would I, if only to see what kind of crazed preparations he’d make to live as a starship captain.
Daniel Craig was suggested, but there’s no way I could buy this guy as a man who negotiates first.
The one really interesting idea was race-swapping it to get Idris Elba to play the role, which I think is pretty good; he’s got the deep voice, he’s got that gravitas, and he’d be about the right age when the time comes.  But I also worry it’d be seen more as a riff on Captain Sisko, who’s also got a rumbly voice and a quasi-Shakespearean delivery (though no patch on Patrick Stewart), so there’d have to be a lot of careful character writing.
But who do you think?  All nerd battles are heartily encouraged.

Ten Days Gone By, And How Fruity Am I?

Last week, I got the news that my cholesterol levels were off the charts.  And so, in an effort to change my eating habits, I have been choking down a healthy helping of fruit every morning.
Let me reiterate: I fucking hate fruit.
…Or at least I did.  My goal is to get me used to eating fruit so that I no longer perceive it as vile.  Because I have a Very Clever Brain that operates better on unconscious levels.  As long as I really hate fruit, my brain will short-circuit any attempts to disguise fruit.  Is my fruit in a smoothie?  Well, says my brain, it’s far too late in the day for a smoothie!  You’ll be full all evening!  Better have some nachos instead.  And, you may note, my slacker brain told me that it was too much trouble to make a smoothie early in the morning, thus cleverly pushing me off until I had a better excuse.
No, this is like exercise.  People kept telling me, “When you find the right exercise, things will be a joy!”  And it never was, so I kept bombing out of exercise.  The solution that worked for me was to acknowledge that exercise would never be fun, and yet I had to do it anyway.  And that worked.
So after ten days of chowing down berries, how’s this working?
The answer is, “Better.”  I can now eat berries while I am doing other things, like programming.  I do not enjoy them, but at least putting a fruit in my mouth doesn’t cause the full-stop panic usually associated with feeling a cockroach crunch between your teeth.  So I managed a little better.
I also tried oranges, Clementines, which were actually not bad.  The pulp still makes me gag, but when I was sick yesterday I ate four of them.  I also tried pomegranates, which made me gag, but that could be because of the strong taste and the seeds combined.
I am not yet in favor of fruits, but at least for some of my long-time nemeses, I am not as diametrically opposed.  This is greater progress than I anticipated in ten days.  We’ll see how it goes.
As for fish, well, we won’t talk about fish.  I’ve had salmon twice, and it was a meal.  The tuna steak is slightly better, but all this fish is fucking expensive.  God forbid you have heart problems and you’re poor, man.

On Politicizing Dead Children

In the wake of America’s latest mass murder, I heard a lot of complaints: “These children are dead! How dare you use this tragedy as an excuse to push your latest political agenda!  Give it a rest and be respectful.”
Now, I can understand if you’re personally unable to deal with political discussions at the moment.  Hearing the raw details about an entire classroom full of kids gunned down was an emotional moment for anyone with a heart.  It’s understandable if you need to step away from the debate to grieve.  I think needing some space to process this is a very human and honest thing, and people should respect your need for silence when they’re in your presence.*
Yet some of those complaints went farther, as if anyone who tried to pass a law or push an agenda based on the latest set of fresh graves was a disrespectful oaf.  To which I say, shut the fuck up.
The reason we politicize this tragedy is because we don’t want any more people killed by maniacs toting weapons.  And like it or not, the only real way we can affect that change is by passing laws to change the shape of society.  Certainly there’s been enough uproar and grief over the repeated spate of killings that if social pressure were enough to change such things, it would have fucking been changed. So something clearly has to be done, whether it’s getting politicians to pass more funding for the mentally ill, or giving cops more leeway in dealing with potential killers, or restricting access to guns, or discovering an effective way of stopping the media from turning killers into celebrities, or even arming teachers.
As it is, your cries of “Don’t make this political!” are the ultimate form of disrespect.  It’s a way of saying: do nothing.  Let’s bury our heads in the sand and hope this doesn’t happen again.
Here’s the thing: I think the folks who want to arm teachers are idiots, but at least they’re trying to push a solution that they think will stop tragedies like this in the future.  They’re utterly, bone-headedly wrong… but I’ll at least give them the credit that they’ve acknowledged how horrible this is and are taking proactive measures to try to head this off at the pass.
Because a tragedy on this scale should create a big, messy argument.  This is a big, messy problem.  Anyone who thinks that one solution will solve all of this is hopelessly simplistic.  It’s not just about banning guns, or better mental health care, or the media, or a lack of morality; it’s a convergence of all these factors, and many hidden ones we have yet to uncover, that is causing this.  We need to have a discussion, an honest discussion, about all the things that led to this grotesquerie… and then, while we still have the motivation, to enact a solution that will help ensure that jackasses like this will never do this again.
That’s what politicizing does: it creates solutions.  And it’s uncomfortable.  It involves listening to things you do not want to hear.  It involves dissatisfying compromises.  It means that yes, any of us might bear some responsibility in this killing, whether it’s in the way we fought gun legislation or the way we eagerly turn the television on to hear juicy facts about the killer.  It’s not fun, and it’s not clean and easy, and it’s like wearing a hair suit because fuck, if it was an easy answer we would have fixed that.
But the debate needs to happen.  And it won’t happen if you’re going, “Don’t politicize this!”, which is usually another way of saying, “I’m made uncomfortable by the fact that I might have some culpability in this issue, so please stay silent in order to enable my lack of soul-searching.”
It’s not pleasant, having these debates.  Yet it was far less pleasant for those shot in this latest butchering, and I think the least you can do is endure a bit of discomfort in an attempt to ensure no one else will be murdered. Which is the true respect.

What Percentage Of Scalzi's Tweets are IN ALL CAPS?: A Scientific Report

Anyone who follows sci-fi author John Scalzi on Twitter knows that HE LIKES TO TWEET IN ALL-CAPS.  A lot.
And I wondered, as all good people do: “Exactly what percentage of John Scalzi’s Tweets are in all-caps, anyway?”  Fortunately, I’m a programmer, and I was bored, so I did what programmers do when they’re bored: investigate ridiculous premises.
The first step was to use Twitter’s API to snarf up as many of Scalzi’s latest Tweets as it would let me.  There’s actually a limit on the number of Tweets I can pull up from his history, so alas, I couldn’t get his entire timeline, just Tweets back to late October.
Then, I applied the following logic for each Tweet:

• If it was an @-reply to someone, I didn’t count the Tweet, on the (perhaps erroneous) assumption that Scalzi is less thundrous when talking to a private audience.  (However, you’ll be pleased to note that 64.6% of Scalzi’s recent Twitterstream consists of replies.  He is gregarious.)
• If someone was mentioned by their Twitter handle (like, say, @ferretthimself), I didn’t count those characters, since not even Scalzi consistently bothers to capitalize usernames.
• If it was a hashtag or a URL?  Also not counted.  Though I’d love to see Scalzi start capitalizing his URLs, as in, “My latest essay is at HTTP://WHATEVER.SCALZI.COM/2012/12/15/AND-NOW-A-THOUGHT-FROM-JUSTICE-SCALIA/”
• All spaces and punctuation marks were omitted, since Scalzi cannot possibly capitalize the space key.  ALTHOUGH I BET HE WANTS TO.
• Finally, the first run of the program showed that Scalzi was being unfairly caps-credited for a simple RT.  So those were stripped.

When this was finalized, I was left with a very long string of characters that looked like Scalzi if you replaced his Coke Zero with Red Bull:

FunfactJohnWilkesBoothismygreatgreatgreatetcun
cleItstrueAlsoHehasthesamebirthdayasmeManifIse
eanotherjokeaboutLincolnandtheatersImightjusthav
etoshootsomeoneJustfinishedcheckingthecopyedito
fTheHumanDivision

In the end, I counted all sequences of two or more letters in ALL CAPS.  The final tally?
Total tweets counted: 886 (out of 2,506 total)
Total characters: 63,690
Total ALL-CAPS characters: 5,689
Scalzi’s ALL-CAPS percentage: 8.93232846601%
So there you have it: Scalzi’s online yelling to six significant digits.  When you talk with Scalzi on Twitter, you can rest assured that a minimum of 8% of his public Tweeting will in be ALL CAPITALS.  Those of you kept awake by any ambiguity in just how yelly Scalzi is can now, doubtlessly, rest.  Or could, if he wasn’t screaming in your ear.