What I heard, what I saw.

I'm reluctant to write this because I don't know what happened, but here's what I saw and heard: yesterday, while Omaha and I were getting ready to drive to a restaurant, the woman of the house next door (you know the one) came riding up in her white riced Nissan, driving much faster than the 15 MPH limit our private road demands. We were busy getting Kouryou-chan to put her shoes on but the sound of a child screaming got our attention. Suddenly, we hear the woman next door screaming at the babysitter, who can't be much older than fifteen years old himself: "How you could leave them outside like this? They're not supposed to be outside like this! Get me a fucking towel! Get me a fucking towel now!" The child is still screaming. The babysitter is standing at the front door, arms out at his sides, palms up. We can't hear what he's saying, but she says, "Just shut up and get me a fucking towel!" We step outside in time to see the woman next to her car bundle the child into a big towel and hustle into the house.

A minute or two later, we pull out onto the road and drive by the neighbor's house. Her car is there, awkwardly angled in the driveway. The driver's side door is open.

Beside the driver's side rear panel, a lone child's shoe lay on the asphalt.

Why is some metaphor bad, and some good?

Quick, which of these is from something critically acclaimed, and which of these is the winner of a "bad writing" award?

• The beetle looked like a cross between an espresso machine and a 1928 Packard.
• For lunch they ate Tapir kabobs, sizzling hot, drowned in a red pepper sauce that the devil used to paint his Bentley.
• Her wet T-shirt clung to her torso like paint on the nose cone of a jumbo jet.

The last is from a "Bad writing" contest; the first two are from Mark Helprin's Memoirs from an Antproof Case, and Helprin is widely regarded as a master of metaphor and simile. I think the last line can be helped with some military imagery, but really, it does its job very well: it accurately conveys a sense of gleaming, precision form-fitting that gets the picture across quite nicely. So why is it "bad writing?"

Porn, Sleazy and Pretty

It's 4:30 in the morning and I'm still awake. Why? Because I'm having an allergy fit and my back is still screaming at me that I drank too much water before going to bed and waited too long to get up and relieve myself.

Godzilla and Lucille, my nicknames for the neighbor's dogs (a black-and-tan half Rotweiller, a black-and-tan half Chihuahua-- you make the connection), are blissfully, finally silent. We're running a fan at night, somewhat to keep the house cool but also to provide white noise to filter out Lucille's shitty little yaps. (And if you know why I've called the Godzilla and Lucille, you are a serious filk geek.)

Our budget has become extremely tight-- so much so that I've had to shut down my Usenet feed for a month or two. This would almost cause serious withdrawal if it weren't for (a) the huge backlog of unsorted movies, anime, cartoons, amateur art and posted porn, and (b) the discovery of bittorrent, which keeps the anime flowing, and fusker, which keeps the porn cache well-topped.

But there is that backlog. I've been using this middle-of-the-night time to clean it up, and as I did so something caught my eye.

( A pleasant discovery. )

Homeward bound

After a full and busy day at work, I got on the bus and wrote another 700 words. Some older gentleman kept leaning over and asking me what I was writing. I told him it was science fiction, and he left me alone. It's really hard to write hot fembot-on-vampire sex with some guy with coke-bottle glasses trying to read over your shoulder!

When I left the bus, I did so along a road lined with blackberry bushes. The blackberries are magnificent, big and ripening, with some already pluckable, and one or two truly, fully ripe. In a week, they'll be irresistable. I enjoyed a handful as I walked along the road back to my house.

I walked back up to the house and met the neighbor boys. The youngest, the two-year-old who's allowed to wander the neighborhood more or less unmonitored, has a massive fresh abrasion across his forehead but otherwise seems to be unaffected by whatever caused it. He seems to be well, so I'm just going to have to keep a close monitor on his parent's behavior and make sure she doesn't drive like a maniac along a private road. Oh, and the boys' story was that she hit their cat. Right.

And, ah well. One should never peer too deeply into fantasy. The cute porn starlet I mentioned earlier is, well, just another porn starlet-- several names, several 'careers', even a porn film or two. The classy pictures she did for Femjoy are just another way to generate cash. Can't blame her. Her real name is Renata Daninsky. Hah! More links to toss into the fusker!