Author Archives: Jerry

Stackers know stackers

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Tonight I was in the crossfire of a discussion between a new parent and expectant parents. The subject of appropriate toys came up (a subject I was not shy about participating in), and blocks were mentioned. You know what I did with blocks? I stacked them. The yellow pillars were good for altitude, but the red wedges were where the elegance happened. Until tonight, I had forgotten those stacks.

As I sat reminiscing, thousands of miles away another friend was writing me an email. You see, during my wanderings I have enjoyed the hospitality of a Piker family in Central California. More gracious hosts you will never find, but it is Lillian who makes the visit special. Within minutes of our first meeting (seconds, actually) she was attached to my leg, and I never really could figure out why.

Until now.

Now that’s an elegant stack. The kid’s a natural.

Thanks!

Wait Five Minutes

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When I sat down to eat lunch, it was snowing hard outside. Big fluffy snowflakes filled the air, swirling in the wind. I was happy to see it; I kind of feel like we got gypped as far as winter is concerned. By the time I was finished with my soup, the sky was blue and empty, the sun shining down with a hard-edged clarity.

That’s been the way of things here lately. Man, I’m glad I’m not trying to shoot a movie outdoors in this weather, like some people I know. Getting consistent light would be nigh-on impossible.

Thanks!

To Tread Where No Man Has Trod Before

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I’m working on a story that includes the sentence “One meter from his feet was a place no man had ever tread.” I realized tonight, after I’d read that sentence a few times, that it was incorrect. The past of ‘tread’ is ‘trod’. Worse yet, the past participle is ‘trodden’.

I’m okay with ‘downtrodden’, but while I can barely stomach ‘trod’ I just can’t imagine writing a sentence with ‘trodden’. It’s ugly. Even substituting ‘trod’ in my sentence is painful; I considered changing the verb rather than use that form. The only problem was, ‘to tread’ is easily the most parsimonious word for the job. Parsimonious, yes, but ‘trod’ carries an archaic air with it that I don’t want in the story. People just don’t say ‘trod’ anymore.

But ‘stepped’ is a junky substitute, lacking gravity. ‘set foot’ is probably the closest modern substitute for ‘trod’, but it’s almost a cliché. I could go long-winded and say something like “… was a place that had never felt the foot of man.” In this context, that’s a bit much. So I have ‘trod’. Honestly, though, I can’t use it. It’s like a big archaic raspberry at the end of the second sentence in the story, when I’m going all-out to set the tone. The more pleasant, albeit incorrect, use of the present tense bothers me less.

In the end, I will have to go with some alternative that, while lacking parsimony, does not go plop on the page. Alternatively, we could launch a campaign to make ‘to tread’ less irregular by allowing ‘tread’ to be the past tense.

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A Small Step on a Long Journey

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The rules are changing here, as far as the acceptance of foreigners is concerned. The Czechs aren’t particularly gung-ho about enforcing the new rules, but their neighbors in the European Union are. Now the Czech’s data systems have been integrated, reducing their ability to let things slide.

Currently I am completely legal here, but in the past I’ve let that slide a time or two. Getting the paperwork done to exist here legally will greatly improve my peace of mind, and get me reasonably affordable health insurance to boot. Overall, it’s the sensible thing to do. (It was the sensible thing to do long ago, but the recent changes have lit a fire under my butt.)

I don’t do well with bureaucracy in general, and although the communists were overthrown twenty years ago, some artifacts of that culture remain. There are plenty of government agencies here that exist for the sole purpose of existing, and to justify their existence they must create problems so that there are problems for them to solve. The Czechs certainly don’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing, but they’re awfully good at it.

Anyway, wading through all the requirements, getting all the documents together, and all that stuff is not the sort of thing I enjoy doing, and something that I tend to make even more complicated than necessary. Enter the professional bureaucracy-waders. You give them the power to represent you, and some money, and they take care of most of the crap. I have retained once such person, a nice guy named Robert. (Don’t tell him, but I expected to pay a lot more.)

The first step is to sign a series of nearly-identical forms granting him the power to represent me. He sent me the forms in an email, and today’s step was going to a friend’s house to print them out. They were Microsoft Word documents, but Word didn’t reproduce the wacky czech characters correctly, so I printed out a second batch using Apple’s butt-simple text editor, which did just fine. Armed with the documents, I set out in search of a notary. Soup Boy had told me where one was near my house, so that seemed like a slam-dunk.

The address Soup Boy gave me turned out to be a house. That was #7; across the street was #6, an office supply/copies/laminating shop that seemed like a natural place for a notary to be. (When Soup Boy had told me the address, I had originally assumed this was the place anyway.) I entered the shop, and in pre-rehearsed czech I asked for a notary. Confusion ensued.

It was not that I did a bad job asking for a notary; in fact I think I did a pretty good job. The difficulty was that no one present had any idea why the hell I would be asking for a notary there. What followed was a guessing game in which the shop owner and other shop patrons tried to figure out what I really wanted. One patron spoke pretty decent English. “What is it you want?” “Notař,” I replied. “Notary.” “You want something to write notes in?” I was actually pretty proud of my czech as I explained that I had documents I needed to sign and for someone official to stamp. Eventually everyone concerned decided that I did, indeed know what I wanted, and all agreed that they had no idea where I might find one in the area.

Tomorrow I’m heading to the embassy, and somewhere out there is a notary. Big steps tomorrow.

Thanks!

My New Favorite Store

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I’m a guy. Most of you probably knew that already, and find that statement obvious, if not gratuitous. But this episode is about two corollaries of the guy postulate – I eat like a guy, and I shop like a guy. The Czech Republic is perfect for the guy diet. There are two food groups: meat and potatoes. As far as shopping goes, for a guy it’s a simple matter of going to the store that sells what you want, and buying it.

Yesterday, however, I broke both those rules. I was at the grocery store picking up meat, cheese, and bread, when I was hit by a hankerin’ for some apples. This store, being almost as big as a single aisle in a major US supermarket, generally carries some produce, but yesterday, no apples. Undaunted, I carried my quest to fulfill a spontaneous dietary urge to another store. Just up the street a few doors is a fruit and vegetable store I had never tried. Surely they would have apples.

And yes they did. Lovely Fujis, delectable Granny Smiths, and a couple other varieties were on display in that cramped little store. A rainbow of beautiful bell peppers. What makes this store interesting, however, is the wide variety of items that are neither fruit nor vegetable. In defiance of all czech tradition, this store carries items not within the advertised narrow category.

The first thing I noticed was the chocolate. The owner of this store must be a hard-core chocolate lover, because these weren’t just your ordinary huge chocolate bars, they were the ones that advertise an enormous chocolate content. I generally consider 70% coco to be pretty hard core, but there were several 85% slabs of pure chocolaty goodness to choose from.

There was also an impressive selection of tea – all green. It was when I was surveying the teas that I realized that behind this store is someone who has decided to sell what they like, dammit. In the back somewhere is someone who believes that green tea is better for you than black, and therefore in this store you get green. Chocolate is good, and the more pure the better. Whoever’s running this show isn’t above making money (the apples were pretty pricey), but there’s a passion that shows in the inventory. Then there was the wine and a remarkable selection of booze.

I resisted all those temptations — I was a guy on a guy shopping mission — but I fell prey to the hand-packed baggies of nuts by the register. As I type this, I’m munching pistachios. I’ve had some disappointing bags of nuts before, but these babies rock. They’re going to be seeing more of me at that store.

Thanks!

Congratulations, Cead Mile Office Holder

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Amid much anticipation and hullabaloo, Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas had it’s 100,003rd visitor. And who, you ask, is the dedicated and enterprising individual who secured this honor?

It was not That Girl, despite her best efforts. When the count was at 100,001 she had a friend visit, then she came to visit immediately after that. It should have worked, but in the few seconds between her friend loading the page and her own arrival, someone else dropped by and stole the honor right out from under her.

This fortunate individual was not an Egg Friar; indeed, the person in question did not arrive as the result of a search at all. I think I know who the individual was, but in cases of this importance it’s best to make sure. So, here’s what we know of visitor 100,003:

  • The person was connected through cybermesa, a Northern New Mexico outfit.
  • The person was running Firefox on Windows 98 (that will slim things down a lot)
  • The visitor in question arrived via bookmark or typing Muddled Ramblings into the browser, not through a link
  • The person came by to visit around 6pm their time, only looked at the front page, and left without saying “I won! I won!”

As I said, I think I know who the mystery visitor is, but I don’t want to announce it without confirmation first. Things like this should not be taken lightly.

Thanks!

Welcome to the World, Mr. Seeger

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I’m a bit late in announcing this, but on March 5th fuego and MaK became parents, and the name Seeger found a Y-chromosome to hang itself on, to survive another generation. The little guy was impatient to get out and get going in the world, perhaps a bit too impatient for his own good. Everything’s going fine, however; the lad’s still in the hospital but they tend to keep the kids longer here even when they’re healthy. MaK has passed her training and is thus allowed to leave.

So, welcome to planet Earth, Zoe Lee Seeger. MaK insists that Zoe is a perfectly fine boy’s name, and, well, with she insists on something, that’s about the end of the discussion. fuego is standing behind her, as is right and proper, but there has been discussion of potential nicknames. (In the hospital, the nurses decided to label him with his middle name.)

fuego speaks highly of the hospital and staff, and I hope he got a picture of z-Dawg in the shopping cart he was being kept in.

Please join me in throwing best wishes in the direction of the new arrival and his family.

Thanks!

Time to give up?

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‘Login’ is a noun (or sometimes and adjective). ‘Log in’ is the verb. Thus, ‘Click here to login’ is incorrect. (Backup is a similar story.)

I have, in the past, pointed this out to folks, but I think I’m going to give up. More and more major corporations with the resources to hire people who know what they’re doing are using ‘to login’. The one that hurts the most is not a major corporation, however, it’s Writing.com.

I tell myself that this is just the natural process of the evolution of the language, but in this particular case it bugs me beyond any rational explanation. I guess we all have our language peeves, and it’s time to let go of mine. Instead I’ll climb on my motor-cycle, go down to the base ball game and heckle the numpire.

Thanks!

Happy Ground Squirrel Day!

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Ah, Ground Squirrel Day, one of my favorite days of the year. How do you celebrate? Do you get your ground squirrel from the butcher’s shop or do you go old school and catch them yourself at the local park? Ground Squirrel Day isn’t celebrated as widely in the Czech Republic; the first squirrels or spring have yet to emerge from their winter dens.

I miss those times when I was a kid, sitting around the ol’ squirrel grinder. These days, it doesn’t seem like the holiday has the same innocent charm.

Thanks!

Muddled Calendar Notes

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I’d been planning to commemorate leap day with this episode, but I forgot. Over on the right-hand side of the page you can find the holiday ticker, which counts down upcoming holidays. It gives the date in two systems, the old-fashioned Gregorian way (April 2th) and the Muddled Age date (4:0).

The muddled calendar is based on the date I first started my nomadic life. I got the Fed-Ex from the escrow company declaring me formally homeless, loaded up my car, and drove away. A couple of interesting notes:

  • The Muddled Calendar is zero-based. Once adopted, we will be done with those annoying people who said that the year 2000 wasn’t really the millenium.
  • The Muddled Calendar is more accurate than the Gregorian. That old calendar is based on a solar year of 365.2425 days, while the Muddled calendar has a year of 365.2422 days. If the world doesn’t adopt the Muddled Age Calendar by the year 4909, there’s going to be trouble. The MuddleCal is off by 0.000001 days, and I figure by the time that matters, tidal drag will have lengthened the day anyway.

Still, there are a couple of things that might slow the adoption of the Muddled Calendar. Once we clear these things up, Global adoption should be a piece of cake.

  • It has no months, or other structures that give one a sense of the season. Without losing the pure numbering system, it would be nice to have segments of the year (probably based on equinoxes and whatnot)
  • The calendar needs a catchy name. That’s critical in this day and age. The seasonal segments should have catchy names as well.
  • Finally, in the muddled calendar, the special “2th” holidays lose their poetic anchor.

So, while a couple of challenges remain, I think the obvious advantages of the MuddleCal will one day make it the way we all track time.

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Bleah…

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sick as a dog

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Frickin’ Rabbits

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There is a legend that if the first words you utter each month are “Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits,” then good fortune will follow you. I’m a skeptic about a lot of that supernormal stuff, but this particular story I believe completely. It’s so obvious on the face of it that I don’t know why it’s considered a myth.

Tonight my faithful computer made a noise. It does that now and again, and different noises mean different things. I did not correctly recognize the noise. “Freakin’ piece of hell,” I said (I’m not so good at cussing), as I brought the screen to life. Oops. New month. I think it’s safe to assume that the next thirty-one days will not be filled with good fortune. Just wait for me on the other end of March.

Thanks!

Project Gutenberg!

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Few things have transformed society as much as the moveable-type printing press. By dramatically reducing the cost of reproducing the written word, the press sent shock waves through our civilization. Not long after there was Cervantes, and the novel was born.

Now we have the Internet, enabling new literary forms (and, even more illiterary forms). And, thanks to the folks at Project Gutenberg, not only can we waste our lives searching for the rare gems in the raucous jungles of the blogosphere, we can peruse the classics that got us here. Their goal is pretty straightforward — archive all books that are in public domain and make them available to anyyone with the technology to access them.

I had read about this project, but hadn’t taken the time to drop by until I was doing a search for Ring Lardner, a humorist who is mentioned in The Catcher in the Rye. I downloaded and read The Real Dope, which was, indeed, quite funny.

Then I looked at the “Most popular downloads” page and the biggest movers were textbooks. The most popular authors, with more than a thousand downloads per day, were Mark Twain and Jane Austen. My guess is that this would correspond to writers popular in literature curriculums. Also near the top was Sun Tsu’s Art of War, someone’s Illustrated History of Furniture, and Beowolf. “Beowolf,” thought I, “cool. I should read that.”

So I downloaded the book in a few seconds and after going through the translator’s notes from the 1880’s and a few newer notes about the current digital encoding and choice for what characters to use, I got to the poem. In Old English. Completely unreadable unless you happen to know Old English. I assume the thing’s a top download simply because it’s a top download. It’s hard to imagine that hundreds of people who know Old English and don’t happen to already have at least one copy of Beowolf in Old English are going to be happening by gutenberg.org each day.

Anyway, you can bet your boots I’ll be dropping by from time to time to brush up on the great classics of literature. For instance, right now I’m reading Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Borroughs.

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Half a Million Words

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I ran my little “just how much of his life has Jerry wasted” script this morning and got back the result: this blog has passed the half-million words line. 503,909, to be precisely inexact. The total includes a few words written by other people (as in the Bacon Haiku episode), but does not include episode titles or the little blurb at the beginning of most episodes.

For a very rough comparison, at 250 words per page in a typical paperback, printing the contents of this blog would cover roughly 2000 pages. (It might be less because there is relatively little dialog here, but you get the idea.) That’s a lot of muddled ramblings. I’m sitting here sipping my congratulatory tea, trying to imagine someone reading this thing from start to finish. Ouch. Maybe it would be like Las Vegas – success just often enough to keep a reader going. Somehow I doubt that.

Still, I suspect that out there are folks who have read just about all of those half-million words. This milestone is for you guys, the stalwarts, the ones who have stuck around through the lean times. It’s also dedicated to the newcomers, those who have become regulars recently, the ones stepping up to carry Muddled Ramblings into the future! (Both of you.)

So, where should we celebrate MuddleCon 1,000,006 in 2012?

Thanks!

The Catcher in the Rye

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The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger is one of those American classics that everyone is supposed to read. Somehow I never did. As an American who proposes to make a living butting words up next to each other, I’ve been working on closing up some of the gaping holes in my mental library.

The results of these efforts are almost always rewarding. There’s a reason these books have gained the stature they have. This one is no exception and I will not attempt to add to the already-too-large body of criticism surrounding it. People, it seems, can make a big deal out of a good story.

The main guy, the narrator, Holden, is a high-school kid who is full of contradictions. He knows what he is supposed to be, he knows what he wants to be, and he’s acutely aware that he is neither. What he is, we start to realize, is better (by conventional standards) than what he thinks he should be. He aspires to be a modern, devil-may-care man, but he simply isn’t. He cares about a lot of things. He cares so much it’s a little scary.

That’s my take, anyway.

After reading the first few paragraphs I knew this book would be a special sort of challenge for me. A personal one, a gauntlet thrown. There is a voice driving this narrative, a guy speaking in a very natural manner that exposes his character, and old JD isn’t going to let the English language get in the way. There are times Salinger simply repeats the same sentence twice. The same goddam sentence. Twice. That old JD knocked me out sometimes the way he’d just repeat things like that.

Sometimes I write stuff like that. I just let fly, type like I think, words are punctuation, punctuation are words. Fragments. Asides, nonlinear thought expressed in a linear form. Then I delete it, or clean it up, to make it easier to digest. What I get from Salinger is not just a very good read but also an example that done well there’s nothing wrong with setting aside rules, as long as the result is a distinctive voice. My first drafts tend to be much more courageous than my final results. Maybe that’s not a bad thing most of the time, but I think I miss opportunities too often.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!