Stuck at the beginning

I've been trying to make sense of what I want to do with Moon, Sun, Dragons for weeks now and I feel no closer to an answer today than I did when I started. It's really frustrating. And I think part of the reason it's frustrating is because I've been reading Dorothy Dunnet and Jaqueline Carey.

There are two things I took away from reading Dunnet: First, most fantasy is crap. It's set on hermetically sealed stages completely isolated from reality. The reality is that people have to eat, and that just getting food onto the table of a castle involves an incredible web of economic interactivity that everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, was aware of, and it was all human-powered. Her characters don't meet in bars, they lay on the grass outside of a church amongst the butchers, dyers, sewers, merchants, and louche nobles to discuss what's happening. When they do meet in taverns, taverns are busy places where real trade, not random background noise, is the order of the day.

The other thing I took away from reading it (she was a history professor and this was her era) was that trade was truly international. The precipitating crisis is a fight between a Dutch dyer's apprentice and a minor French nobleman on a trading vessel in Bruges, Netherlands, that had just come from Florence, Italy, around the bulk of France, and was on its way to Dover. The ship had aggregated spices from Egypt, jewels from Africa, and silks from as far away as China, all brought to Florence via other ships. There was an international mercantile network and a stock market as dynamic as today's.

Reading Carey, on the other hand, made me realize just how important having secondary characters is to the story. There really isn't a character in Kushiel's Dart that, once given a name, doesn't play a serious role somehow, something that raises you the reader up and then slams you down again. My problem seems to be that I've always been primarily a short-story writer: at most, three or four characters get center stage, and the rest are extras. I try not to make them spear-carriers likely to get killed, but still it's hard to see the many dozens of people I'll need to surround my trio with, or how I'll get them all underway.

Bleah.

A cooking mistake to avoid repeating.

Last night for dinner I made risotto. The recipe for risotto is simplicity itself: take your standard savory vegetables (one medium onion or large shallot, a stalk of celery, a carrot) and saute' them for five minutes. Add 1½ cup of Aborio rice (or any short-grain) and ½ cup white wine. Let the wine evaporate, keeping the heat medium to medium-high, then start adding heated (to near boiling) broth, about ½ cup at a time, stirring every minute or so. Let the liquid boil off slowly, so that the mixture is neither a soup nor allowed to dry out. Aborio is nice because it releases a lot of starch, which gives it a nice texture. After 20-25 minutes or so it'll be thick and the rice will be chewy, neither tough nor soft. Add ½ cup of shredded parmesean.

The saute' should be done with 2tbsp. of butter, or olive oil if you choose to add meat. I did that last night, adding 3oz. of proscuitto. I also changed from my usual low-salt chicken broth to a "standard" vegetable broth. Bad mistake; the full-salt broth and the salty proscuitto made the risotto much saltier than either Omaha or I usually like.

It wasn't horrible though. Even Kouryou-chan ate a little. And it makes a nice leftover for lunch.

The Jukebox is probably nearing death...

I dropped my Archos Jukebox a couple of months ago and ever since then its behavior has been most flaky and unereliable. Once dependable, it has become a cranky beast demaning the most cautious of handling. It's barely out of warranty and it's already showing too much age for its own good.

I found out why it's as big and heavy as it is. I took it apart last night. That's no mini hard disk in there; it's a full-size notebook drive, a Toshiba 20-g and a pair of custom fitted circuit boards to hold it in place, and that represents the length and breadth of it. The thickness is to hold the batteries and the hard drive. There wasn't much I could do, but still, I gave the geeks prayer that maybe if I just take it apart and put it back together again it'll work this time. It seemed to.

This morning, though, when I tried to do lesson 75 of my Japanese, it failed. The sound came on, but stuttered badly. Annoyed, I performed Hardware Maneuver #1: I smacked it against my chair. It started working again, but I have no faith that it'll work well for much longer.

I think I'm going to be in the market for a decent MP3 player again very soon. Are there any out there that support OGG, Linux, and don't demand DRM?

How much does a senator cost?

Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum has introduced a bill into Congress that would forbid the National Weather Service and associated organizations like NOAA from making public the information it gathers. His rationale is that "The National Weather Service threatens the livelihood of private meteorologists." Un-huh.

Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'" "

To which the director at the NWS said, "You don't plug your clock in when you want to know what time it is. To know when people's lives and property might be in danger, we have to be forecast the weather all the time."

How much did Accuweather pay to have Rick Santorum take your tax money and deny you yet another service? $4,600.

Not only is he perverse, he's cheap!