Ketchup

The morning after my tour at JGI, Diana and I split for the Sierras for a four-day backpacking trip. We didn't get above 10,000 feet, so would have perished in the nano plague, but it was still pretty damn amazing. We parked alongside the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, seen here below Diana, then made a brutal ascent out of the valley with nearly 2000 feet of vertical gain in three miles. In total, we hiked 11.5 miles into the back country, nearly all of it uphill.

Highlights include this baby black bear (we took four pictures and then skedaddled cautiously for fear of meeting his mommy), a pair of brilliant yellow-orange orioles, endless wildflowers and butterflys, lizards, a big gopher snake, two red salamanders we saw swimming on the shore of one lake, a lot of fat ferious trout, two bald eagles, and four separate deer sightings.

Oh, we also skinnydipped every day and slept in, neither of which are things we get to do at home.

As seen here, the fishing was pretty damned good with two 18" rainbow trout and, I swear it, Diana caught that was 20", which is virtually unheard of. We caught 17 total in two days of easy fishing, releasing all but three for a tasty trout dinner on our second night. It definitely pays to hike that far. Most people don't, and the fishies grow fat and happy for this neglect. There were also 80,005,017,243 mosquitoes because of unseasonally hot weather, which was nasty, but the rest of the

wildlife count was the best we've ever seen.

Twice before we've heard packs of coyotes howling at twilight, and one year we must have camped under an owl's home and he kept us up all night with his spooky deep-voiced hooting. We also saw a beaver once. But this trip was like walking through a great big open zoo!

Impressive.

Labels: Backpacking, Sierra Nevada, Summer

Here is your intrepid reporter Ned Ryerson preparing DNA for sequencing with Bridget Swift at the Joint Genome Institute in northern California.

Hmmm. Whatever could Ned be doing with this information?

Labels: genetics, JGI, Research

No, this isn't a post about Cormac McCarthy! It's a post about idiots-on-wheels. In fact, I may make this a regular affair. Who else has a scary or fun story? Why are so many people so numb and dumb behind the wheel?

Two days ago I was driving through a calm residential area behind a Subaru wagon with two more cars behind me. We were doing 30. The road was essentially four lanes wide -- one lane of parking on each side, mostly empty, plus one lane in each direction in the middle. We were passing through a big park with tennis and basketball courts on my left and a community pool on the right.

In front of me, the Subaru had had its left turn signal on for most of a block after we drove through an intersection. I wasn't sure what the driver was thinking. Then the Subaru went right toward the curb and slowed way down as if to park on that side. "Oh," I thought. "He doesn't know right from left. He's parking."

I began to pull by. Suddenly the Subaru's driver, a woman in a pink ball cap, threw her steering wheel all the way around and brought her vehicle broadside across my lane as she made a giant road-eating U-turn across all four lanes.

The parking on the righthand of the street was in the sun, you see. She had apparently intended all along to park on the far side of the street, in the shade, but didn't feel that she had the turn radius to make a U-turn from the lane in which we were all driving -- across a double yellow line, I might add. It's a park. Lots of pedestrians. The double yellow line is there because the city doesn't want drivers dodging pellmell in all directions. In fact, there was a big two-entry parking lot into which she could have driven in order to come back out going the other direction if she wanted. But that would be inconvenient, right? That was why she pulled over the right and braked. She was merely preparing for her massive U-turn across all lanes.

When she came sideways, I was less than twenty feet from the broadside of her Subaru. I stood on my brakes, squealing -- never a pleasant sound -- and came to a stop within ten feet of plowing into the kids she had in back. That's ten feet from where I was sitting inside my car; ten feet including the four feet of hood of our semi-large MDX.

I would've freaking mushed those kids.

Then the guy behind me skidded to a stop with his hood angling into the open righthand parking lane to avoid ramming me.

The lady in the Subaru never looked up. We were ten feet apart, nothing but her side window and my windshield between us, with the screech of my tires still echoing -- and she never glanced up. I think she was so focused on finding parking in the shade that she forgot there was anyone else on the road, and I wouldn't killed or crippled her kids except for some fancy footwork.

In her defense, yes, the left turn signal was on. But she went right to the curb and then braked. Is it just me, or would it have been the smart decision on her part to wait until the freaking roadway was clear before throwing her U-turn across traffic?

I have at least three other Boners On Wheels stories I'll share next. Tell me your own best!

Labels: Learn How To Drive, Moron

Check this out. Bottom of the page. Yes, he's serious. Bradley at Book Lovers is a mad, mad dreamer... but it is one hell of a book! Autographed, too!

Labels: PLAGUE YEAR

I'm pleased to report that my WOTF-winning novelette "The Frozen Sky" has just been reprinted in Apex Magazine along with new stories from Glen Lewis Gillette and Jennifer Pelland.

Apex #1 Vol. 3 is available online or as a sharp-looking pdf or as a print magazine. You can order it here and, hey, this is a collector's item, folks!

If you didn't catch "The Frozen Sky" in Writers of the Future 23, here's your chance.

Amazing.

Labels: Apex Magazine, The Frozen Sky, Writers of the Future 23

For anyone (like me!) who hasn't read Douglas Preston yet, jeez, people, get out there and get into his stuff.

I picked up a copy of Blasphemy at the behest of an online friend. Naturally it sat in my to-read stack for months. You all know how much leisure reading I'm doing these days... nearly zilch... but I had the chance to bring a book with me on a short vacation last week.

Whammo! Talk about your high-octane big idea tech thriller! He's got God. He's got science. Romance. Politics. Explosions. Dark caves and burning deserts. Just as important, he's got readability. The eye moves easily through every page & there's no surprise why this guy's on the top of the NYT bestseller lists.

I guess I'm done gushing now. But I'm going out to read more asap.

Labels: Blasphemy, Douglas Preston, Recommended Reading, wow

Apparently I've got old movies on the brain. Who can name me the classic horror flick in which someone gets their reward? Someone most hungry for it... :)

In the meantime, we've had two winners in my torturously scattered trivia challenge, Kimberly Arnold, known previously to me only as Cat Whisperer on MySpace, and Lewis Bornmann, an awesome fan who disqualified himself months ago by acing the Name Game Contest, for which he'll be appearing in Plague Zone as USAF Captain Bornmann, no doubt to experience a horrific death. Wait for November! Asimov's is already into page proofs for "A Lovely Little Christmas Fire" and they'd scream if I tried to swap in a new name at this point, so Ms. Arnold will find herself suddenly in... whoops! I almost said the title! Ms. Arnold will find herself suddenly in the Big New Secret Thriller, again no doubt to experience a cinematic and awful death. What is my problem!?

This goofy contest originated at Norwescon, post PKDs, where I was talking with some strangers when I abruptly went sideways with the conversation and declared, "And then... the oral sex!"

The woman looked at me oddly but the guy laughed, recognizing the line from Monty Python's The Holy Grail. He told us a funny story about an office gag in which his co-workers needed ask, on TV, "When is a duck not a duck?" "WHEN IT'S A WITCH!" he screamed. But his co-workers only looked at him as blankly as our current partymate looked at me when I said it was time for you know what. Well. The next day, talking with the astounding SunnyJim Morgan, one of the organizers of the con, she mentioned that she could read and write fluently in Elvish. Don't ask me how this came up in conversation. I was wasted on caffeine and sleep deprivation. I said, "Oh yeah?" She said, "Oh yeah." So I said, "I bet you can't write 'When Is A Duck Not A Duck?' in Elvish." But sure enough, when I was home, GirlJim emailed me that phrase exactly.

What was I to do with it? Certainly I wasn't going to hide it forever in my computer! So I put it on my blog.

How were you to know all of this? Beats the heck out me. ;)

Even worse, the line "When is a duck not a duck" doesn't even appear in the movie. But close. Oh, so very close.


Monty Python and the Holy Grail - Burn the Witch!!!!! - More amazing video clips are a click away

Labels: Monty Python, Norwescon 32, trivia contest winners