My camp popcorn story

Somehow, in the car, driving Chloe somewhere, we got to talking about popcorn. I asked her if she wanted to hear my popcorn story.

Back when I was a junior in college, I took a summer job teaching juggling to kids in a camp up in Pennsylvania. The camp didn't have many beanbags for the kids to use, so I spent some time sewing some up. I found some ratty cloth and started cutting diamond shapes and sewing them together. The cloth was some kind of synthetic monstrostity with a sort of mesh supporting some fluff.

Now I needed something to stuff these beanbags with, and I thought it'd be a great idea to use popcorn kernels, because the camp had plenty of those...they served us popcorn in the evenings. But I didn't reckon with the sharp points of the kernels. I laboriously hand-sewed many beanbags, only to find that within a couple of weeks, the kernels wore holes in the cheap fabric. Not a one of those beanbags lasted the summer.

That was just one of the lessons I took home from that summer. The other big one was that camps are aimed at pleasing the kids, not the counselors they hire for a pittance. But that's another story.

_Collapse_ by Jared Diamond

Image clipped from the cover art on Amazon, and linked to the same.

I liked this book a lot. I didn't quite finish it because I had to return it before the Christmas vacation. For a 600+-page tome, it read fast. The basic premise is that we can learn something from looking at the factors that led to the failures of various societies. Diamond develops a multi-factor model that accounts for environmental causes but doesn't lay all the blame there. He talks about deforestation extensively, with some very interesting examples...the image of the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island is striking. The chapter about China's environmental woes is painful, and the realization that all the Chinese want is the same standard of living we have here...and that the world probably can't support that for everyone...was scary.

Jared Diamond you may better know as the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He's worth treasuring for this quote alone:

"Just think what the course of world history might have been like if Africa's rhinos and hippos had lent themselves to domestication! If that had been possible, African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldn't happen."

For the explanation of that, see Guns, Germs, and Steel. :)

Corey Doctorow gets by on 500 words a day

It was nice to hear that one of my favorite writers uses 500 words as his daily standard for the novels he's working on. I rather enjoyed this article.

Of course, he's also writing 500 other things. But I'll take my encouragement where I can get it.

Today will be day 53 of writing 500 words a day for me, so I'll soon reach my 60 day goal. Maybe I'll keep this one for a while, I do like it.

Speaking of Doctorow, I am enjoying his book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town right now. It is freaky weird. It lays down a pattern of normalcy and then sends it all to heck. So far, it's alternately hilarious and scary and I love it.

I'm reading it on my phone, though, so I'm really only reading it when I'm caught at loose ends. I'm not trying to barrel through it. I have four or five books on my phone right now and I want to keep 'em around for Christmas travel. This'll be the first test of how useful such books are when I really need a lotta reading material.

Halloween 2009: Doctor StrangeGlove

Here we see the Doctor brandishing the Mark II StrangeGlove, which features a Polymer Projector, Hydroxide Sprayer, and Scarlet Ray (silly string, squirt gun, and light). Goggles are of course required for any self-respecting mad scientist, but Dr. StrangeGlove is debonair in foregoing a lab coat for a snazzy vest.

Halloween 2009...whole family shots

Lily = Cinderella; Chloe = Saquaro; Ethan = Dangerous German in Black; Aaron = Doctor Strangeglove.

Halloween 2009...Chloe's Saguaro Costume

I finally dug up the camera and found some pictures to upload. Enjoy.

Make me mighty

Ha! This page allows you to enter your name, and then creates a mighty alter ego for you, proclaimed in heraldic splendor. Here's one I did. Do your own!

_New Avengers_ vol 2 by Brian Michael Bendis

The short form: the Avengers start to track down the criminals who escaped in Breakout. The Avengers try to make a hero out of the mystery character The Sentry, described by Reed Richards as the most powerful hero on earth.

*SPOILERS*

There's lots of good stuff in this volume. I liked the scenes of a teenage girl confronted by a supercriminal who has shown up to collect his supercriminal widget, which her father bought for his collection. She's trying not to get casually killed by this guy with the power to level her house, but keeps offending him by not ever having heard of him. He finds her sunning herself by the pool, and starts demanding his widget, and hinting that he's going to kidnap her.

The text gets suggestive, but Marvel doesn't want to go too far: "Please let me put some clothes on."

"I just did hard time, so that's a no."

Then the Avengers show up before the artist can do more shots of the girl in a skimpy bikini. It's okay, though, Spider-Woman is on the team, there will be plenty of cheesecake.

In general, this book cemented my opinion that this series will deliver Avengers-style-fun with Bendis' delightful dialogue.

Second generation punster

Ethan came out with this horrible wonderful pun last month:


"Leper-cons don't have money to give you...they're too busy conning money from you to pay their medical bills."

That's my boy.