Ahht Cahh

This is one of the many reasons I love living in a town with an art college. You encounter random art on the way to breakfast.

My other favorite was spray painted on the asphalt inside the cross-walks downtown. It was a stylized image of a llama with the instructions “Quadruped Xing only.”

Tradition

Creepy and amazing

That's what BigDog is. It's a gasoline powered quadruped robot funded by DARPA and developed by Boston Dynamics. These robots "have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go." Check out the video here.

What creeps me out is the noise the thing makes and the look of it. It's got an eerie resemblance to a spider (it's the legs), and for a while, I thought it was two humans, participating in some kind of performance art. Armor that sucker up, put a weapon on it, and I wouldn't want to see it marching up my hill.

What amazes me is its lifelike mobility. When it slips, you feel sorry for it because it moves so much like an animal--you've slipped like that before. You can practically feel it. The control it has in recovering is mind-boggling, as is the way it can mimic different types of gait. Besides watching it move on ice, the thing that I can't stop watching is the lab test where it leaps over the obstacle and gets all four "feet" past the mark. The computational power and engineering behind this is staggering.

All references to The Terminator, the works of Isaac Asimov, or the walkers in The Empire Strikes Back are appropriate.

Blog zombie

It’s not often that a web comic can combine three of my recent favorite things, but I suppose that’s why xkcd is on my desktop. Usually I agree with the Elaine character (yay! A brunette!), but this time, I have to go with Zombie Feynman.

The BR Pile

Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

What I loved about this book is its sheer density and comprehensiveness. The logic Brooks uses to make his arguments for the effectiveness of certain weapons and strategies is so carefully considered that you can imagine years of long nights arguing in bars about zombies, zombie movies, and zombie lore. If you can’t be there, making that kind of argument with your friends, this is the next best thing. It’s the kind of humor book that gets so detailed, so serious, so engrossing, that you forget that it’s fiction: I actually found myself thinking, “okay, I’ve got a machete, but what about a range weapon?” From the historian’s point of view, it was also interesting to see his take on why the Roanoke colony was abandoned… It’s not a giggly-type humor book, it’s more of a parody and satire, much in the same vein (hur hur hur) of one of the best zombie movies ever, Shaun of the Dead.

Chris Ayres, War Reporting for Cowards

Through a series of misconceived choices, all made to avoid trouble or conflict of any sort, Chris Ayres found himself embedded with Marines in Iraq in 2003. A financial reporter for The Times (London), Ayres is uniquely unqualified to be a war reporter. He makes no bones about being a coward, he is hugely incapable of imagining life on the front lines, and he’d much rather be in Hollywood, reporting on the financial side of making movies. Ayres has a turn of phrase and a capacity for self-revelation that is at times unnerving. Sure, it’s hysterical: the man goes to Iraq with twenty pairs of Calvin Klein underpants and a bright yellow tent with a large red cross on top—practically a bull’s-eye. But there are moments of pure poignancy, when he’s talking about the fear, the madness, the boredom, and the discomfort, where you have to admit to yourself, “wow, I don’t think I’d do any better in that situation.” A really fantastic book (this one happens to be nonfiction) can make you do that.

So *that's* why I go to the gym...

I've been playing around with scenes for a new book. I haven't had that one aha moment, the one where you know what the book is about and where it needs to go, and all the blind groping is damned depressing. But, like every other writer, I keep plugging along, hoping for that moment. It will mean a bunch of hard work, but as long as I have that all-important goal, it'll be okay.

Doesn't matter: Sunday is gym day.

On the elliptical trainer: grind, grind, grind. Stare at the large televisions showing sports I don't care about and news items that aren't news items. Snarl, snarl, snarl.

On the weight machines: ick, ick, ick. The weasel who was there before me did not wipe them down after he worked out. Find a paper towel and crank up my music. La, la, la.

On the mats: crunch, crunch, cr--huh? While my brain was unplugged, a thought has taken root. It's not the big answer I was looking for, but it is a way to do a scene I've been thinking about without it being a cliche. It tells me a little more about my characters. It gives me another edge of the story to work on. It fits.

Startled looks from the other sweaty people: I've been singing along with my iPod. Audibly. For those of you who don't already know, I should never, ever sing in public (or anywhere else).

But it's worth it: now I've got another angle.

Read these essays now!

Fellow Femme Fatale Donna Andrews' March 11, 2008 post on the Sisters in Crime website deserves your attention on many levels. And so does her essay "Ask not what SinC can do for you," which is here. Go Donna!

Go to Oline Cogdill's blog, and scroll down to March 2, 2008. (You can and should read the other stuff on the way: I'll wait.) And when you're done, read a version of this talk here. Lee gave a version of this talk at the Virginia Festival of the Book a couple of years ago: he had me at "punctuated equilibrium."

BSG 2008

Okay, I just found out that the premiere of the fourth and final season of "Battlestar Galactica" is April 4 at 10:00pm on SciFi. Yes, I'm behind the times, but it's self-preservation of a sort.

I can't tell if I'll make it until then to find out what the FRAK is going on.

I can't tell if I'll make it after the end of the season, knowing there'll be no more BSG.

The only thing I know is that if the ending lives up to the first 3.5 seasons, it will be astonishing.

If you don't know the new BSG, get the DVDs, study up. I don't care if you're not into science fiction, it's not about spaceships and aliens. This is some of the best writing on TV these days. Ever.

Trust me: these aren't your parents' Cylons.

Or are they?

Project Runway--are you kidding me?

(***Contains Spoilers***)

All right, it's not so much to do with writing, reading, or what trouble I'm planning, but here's a rant for you. I like a couple of reality competition shows, primarily "Project Runway" and "Top Chef," mostly because you get to see the transformation of an idea into a physical thing, which I think is way cool. And it's someone else doing the work, so, yay, a mental margarita for me. If they could do it well for writing, I wish they would, but it's not much fun to look at the top of someone else's head when she's scribbling feverishly, and fabric is pretty, so for now, we'll stick with design and cuisine.

I just watched the finale episode of "Project Runway" and I'm totally buggin'. Christian? Are you kidding me?

No doubt, he has talent and he has a definitive look. *One* look, and very nearly all of the same color. I mean, hey, I'm no one to talk about someone going into the ultraviolet, dark and gothic, but jeez, C., be a darling and throw in a couple of jewel tones.

Rami's show was clunky with a palette that confused the hell out of me. Yes, I'm a sucker for someone who can drape, but what he showed at the "three-look" contest with Chris was incoherent and heavy, and his runway show was worse. I thought Chris's look, yes, even with the hair extensions, told more of a story, fit together well, and was really lovely. I think he should have gone to Fashion Week. I found myself looking at his designs and saying "me want."

And, for the record, why were the judges freaking about using hair extensions as a trim? Why is that more gross than wearing them on your head? What's the difference between that and yak hair or something else? What was the difference between that and the FEATHERS on Christian's last gown? Yrrrch. Yes, I think Chris could have pared back. Yes, I think he did it for shock value, and could easily have gotten the same look (or a more restrained one) using other materials. It blew up in his face and I think it distracted the judges.

Jillian, IMO, should have won. I liked her stuff a LOT. It was strong, it was feminine, it was historical and modern and there was a lot of innovation in it. The line was coherent and it was couture. The judges said they were surprised by her silhouettes, but then damned her with words like "wearable" and "accessible," which is pretty much a death knell. And, to me, utterly nonsensical as a put-down. I think the pret-a-porter interpretation would have been boffo.

::stomps off in a model-ly huff::