Teleidoscope

Wed, Aug 06, 2008

Monsoon

Posted at 7:12 pm MDT to Weather

After a record-breaking streak of hot dry weather, it looks like the southwestern monsoon is finally arriving.

This is the second day in a row that I've gotten a little precipitation and a storm cell has gone by that was dense enough to block my TV satellite signal. The cells are still small: Nanette got no rain yesterday and the farm is only 15 minutes away.

At least this indicates that the weather pattern is starting the change.

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Good news, Bad News

Posted at 4:59 pm MDT to Current Events

Sometimes it seems like every time there is evidence of civilization in this country, it comes along with evidence of bigoted idiots.

Acording to a link on Language log the union at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Shelbyville, Tennesee recently signed a new contract that provides 8 holidays including Eid-al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan (the eighth holiday was previously Labor Day. The other holidays are New Year's, MLK, Memorial Day, July 4, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the employee's birthday). There are only 250 Muslims among the 1200 members of the union, so I think that union includes some nice civilized people: the new contract was approved by 80% of the members.

On the other hand, the Executive Director of "English First" denounced the contract as "multiculturalism run amok".

Hmmm. I wonder if the union knows that because Muslims don't use a leap month like the Jewish and Chinese calendars, Eid-al_fitr should happen 13 times in 12 Gregorian years? I wonder if Tyson knows?

In other news, according to John Scalzi on tor.com, scientists have found a lot of lowland gorillas in a previously unexplored swamp in Africa.

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Tor Freebies

Posted at 2:46 pm MDT to Media

Tor Books has started a new website with a lot of cool bloggers on various topics (John Scalzi has the science desk) and occasional short fiction. So far that includes short stories by Scalzi and Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow and a web comic by Wesley Allsbrook.

Note that the tor.com online magazine is not the same as the Tor corporate site, which uses a clunky aspx interface. They really need a competent web admin on that one to work on getting the menus and directory defaults to work reliably.

In the run-up to the site going live, they posted (at weekly intervals) electronic versions of a dozen Tor novels. I downloaded the pdf versions.

Some of them were books I had already read, or that already existed in hardcopy in my to-be-read pile, but some were initial books of series that were new to me. In my case at least, the free books are going to result in additional sales for Tor. The books I have read so far are very good, with engaging characters and very well constructed worlds>.

In the past few days I have read two and a half of these. (I have also discovered that the KDE pdf reader remembers where you were in a file, so that when I re-open a book I left in the middle, it puts me on the correct page. This is very handy.)

The first one I finished was A Shadow in Summer, the first book of "The Long Price Quartet" by Daniel Abraham. (It looks like the next two volumes, Betrayal in Winter and An Autumn War are out or scheduled). The magic system in the story is unique and well thought out, the culture where most of the action in the first volume occurs is nicely and consistently alien, with an intricate formalised use of body language as well as speech, and the events of the plot grow organically out of the chanracters and the environment. And there is something to be said for a fantasy book where a major viewpoint character is a middle-aged female accountant.

The second was Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. He has another book out, Ragamuffin, set in the same universe, and another, Sly Mongoose that is due out in a couple of weeks, both of which I will be on the lookout for. I love the use of langauage in this book. The author is from the Caribbean and uses dialect beautifully in all of the dialogue. And his world-building is very solid. This feels like a Caribbean Poul Anderson to me: the combination of adventure and solid worldbuilding scratches that itch, and I think the non-whitebread speech rhythms are giving me echoes of Nicholas van Rijn, even though the actual accents involved are very different.

I need to find out what cultural ideas are attached to Ragamuffins and mongooses in the Caribbean. I have a definite impression that there are resonances that I am missing.

I am still in the middle of Kate Elliott's Spirit Gate. After WorldCon I will pick it up in hardcopy, along with the sequel Shadow Gate. I may also look into her series for another publisher. I like the characters and the world (refreshingly not-Central-Asia as well as not-Europe), but it is quite long, and my energy for dealing with things going wrong even in narrative is limited these days. Ironically, if I liked the characters less, my patience for dealing with the on-going tightening of the screws might be better. The cultural and religious details hold together nicely.

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