Temp Check 6/13: Rulez

So, the tally sheet still bleeds quite a bit... but man, it was heckuva week.

I wonder how I ever get anything done when I am working, since I am now more-or-less on vacation/working part-time and I still seem to run out of day before I run out of ideas or things to do. See, besides WARMER, I also have this spur to action:

This Wall of Do-Me! is supposed to remind me (and Coco) of projects we wanted to get done this summer. Well, we're approaching the halfway mark and I think we may have removed two cards from the door. So, in addition to the red boxes on the tally sheet, these cards mock our lack of industry and enterprise on a daily basis.

Meh, it's summer. I can mea that culpa.

The latest WARMER book was all the rage last year: all the cool kids were reading Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I borrowed an autographed copy from Sissy (that shows you how much she trusts me!) and read it over a day. I get why it was such a hit in Seattle: all the shout-outs to our locales (hotels and restaurants and streets and neighborhoods) along with all the gentle and well-informed skewering of local conventions and fascinations (Microsoft culture and TED Talks and soccer moms and REI wardrobes) make it an in-joke for self-aware Seattleites to enjoy (much the same way I imagine Portlanders must watch Portlandia.)

The epistolary style of the book was quite well-crafted, and Semple does a good job of giving consistent voices to a wide variety of narrators; the characters are for the most part engaging and built beyond stereotype. The narrative arc of the book does break a couple of fundamental rules, however, and for that reason Bernadette fails to make it onto my personal hit parade.

First of all, it violates one of Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats's Twenty-Two Rules of Storytelling. (If you haven't seen this compilation of aphorisms, you should check it out.) Rule 19 says Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. This rule is not just Coats's; Lester Dent gave the same advice in his classic Pulp Fiction Master Plot Formula, albeit in a more muscular idiom: Element #3 of the Fourth Act is The hero extricates himself using HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn. I am afraid Semple does not live up to this standard, and for me, it makes the conclusion a bit hollow - it does feel like cheating.

If animators and pulp writers aren't enough of an authority, Semple also ignores the admonition of Chekhov's Gun: Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. Semple introduces at least two plot elements that are the equivalent of loaded guns, and nether one amounts to anything, leading to a bad let-down, a little confusion, and a loss of engagement. I would be will to wager a small amount of American money that when this story gets to the movie screen (where it appears to be headed) both these elements will disappear.

Nonetheless, it was an amusing read, and whiled away a few hours if a WARMER afternoon.

When I could have been doing something else.

Temp Check 5/13

So, the WARMER tally sheet grows and grows, and looks pretty good, except for that bloody red streak down the A column. Occasional misses in any column can be blamed on the weather, or distractions, or lack of tool, or whatever, but that consistency can only mean one thing: a Gap problem.

In the beginning of the summer, it seemed I was able to overcome the Gap with some regularity. But then something happened; probably, I once again started looking at my work critically instead of enthusiastically, and what had been joy at having produced something became dissatisfaction with what I had made. As Coco would say, my inner critic has been getting the upper hand. I'll listen to her a bit more and try to get back into the swing.

By and large, however, WARMER is a go. The biggest joy has been to just read books for pleasure. The latest in the series has been Nate Silver's The Signal and The Noise, all about predictions and forecasting and probabilistic thinking from that guy who gets elections right. It was a great read: just enough math to make me feel smarter and lots of examples to help understand the concepts. For a statistician-wannabe (no kidding, right?) it was as much of a romp as an action novel, at least partly because Silver seems to get as much of a kick from it as I do. The Big Idea: Bayesian Thinking leads to better decision-making.

A added bonus to all this reading: I have been giving the bookmark that buddy Karmin gave me a real legitimate workout!

This week has also held additional duties work, some angel shifts, a dentist appointment, finding a lost dog, and a significant amount of socializing of the extemporaneous, impromptu, and pre-planned varieties. Sounds good to me!

Temp Check 4/13

So, just remember that for Seattle and Seattleites, the "heat" of summer works a lot like the "snows" of winter: even though our extremes may not be as intense as other parts of the country, we are woefully underprepared for any excesses at all, so the effects are magnified.

Just as a dusting of snow can immobilize the city because our weather response resources comprise three bags of salt and one John Deere riding mower with a snowplow, mildly hot weather makes us cranky and lethargic because very few spaces are air conditioned. If it's 105º in Phoenix, residents won't notice unless they leave their air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned homes, or air-conditioned restaurants and actually go outside. Here, we're hot everywhere except the frozen food aisle of Whole Foods.

All of that goes to explain the numerous red squares on the chart: it's been too warm to be WARMER, especially on Saturday, when it hit 90º. Those four catch-up-with-old-pals lunches, the two RPG sessions, the one night at the theatre, and some angel duty might have contributed to it as well...

Times of the Times

So, over on He is a Thark, I posted about a story in an old Seattle newspaper announcing the start of the Superman comic-strip in their pages. Since I paid for the archive of the page, I thought I would get my money's worth and share it with y'all. So here we go: the Tuesday, March, 5, 1940 edition of the Seattle Daily Times. Click it open and follow along!

¶ I am always flabbergasted by the sheer volume of text crammed into old newspaper pages. This page has no editorial graphics or photos, just headlines and body text. A far cry from the chart-junk and images in today's papers.

¶ We're looking at page two, and the first news story is about perjury charges being dropped in a year-and-a-half old property case. I don't know if the principal was a local celebrity or what, but that doesn't seem like a lead story to me.

¶ The Proceedings of the Northwest Conference on Distribution (that was indeed held on March 6, 1940) run to 104 pages and are available in the National Agricultural Library (a division of the US Dept. of Agriculture).

¶ In the article on "Tommy the Cork," it is telling that the writer did not feel the need to explain that the R.F.C. was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a New Deal agency. I guess we don't always explain CIA today, do we?

¶ The contested parking zone is a mile or so south on the main street in my neighborhood. It's all metered now, from here to there.

¶ Three stories related to the census - big news! And in one, President Franklin Roosevelt is referred to as F.R. instead of FDR. I wonder when the styling changed.

¶ I counted four fillers. Can you find them all?

¶ Only fifteen shopping days till easter - good thing the men's style guide comes out in two days! We want those pre-war metrosexuals to look their best!

¶ When I worked on a newspaper in the seventies, we still called legislators solons - does anyone still do that?

¶ And my favorite item (after the Superman story):

Oh, to have a pen so well-made and fine that it was worth not just refilling, but repairing.

Temp check 3/13: Flotsam and jetsam

So, a discerning look at the tally sheet will reveal three colors: Green (Mission accomplished!), Red (You lazy dog!), and Light Green. That last marks those days that I kinda sorta made progress in the category, but not really, if I want to be totally, technically, officially, accurate. So: things like writing, but not writing fiction; playing with the art stuff but not making progress on page;  noodling on the uke but not practicing chord progressions or a song; like that.

It's been going pretty well, considering (a) it's the nicest summer in a long time, with some really hot days, leading us to indolence; (b) I have had some exigencies, such as driving a pal all the way to Tacoma after we couldn't make it through Seattle traffic to the train station; and (c) I am working more than I expected to this summer, not just on my classes, but other school stuff. Not to mention the terrible corrupting influence of Amanda F. Palmer.

The long red streak this week in A is for Art reflects the challenge of panel borders and dialog balloons. In addition to a distinct lack of talent influencing my growth as a draughtsman, a distinct lack of skill also obtains, and the pedestrian tasks of laying out panels on a page and placing balloons surely vex me. I keep waffling between by-hand and by-computer approaches. The saying is that a poor workman blames his tools, but I'm a pretty poor workman, so I am indeed looking for some new tools to aid with those details.

Overall? No complaints from me. Summer is moving along just as it should. Coco even has the pool up!

Don't read this book

So, there's this book I may have read called Agent Garbo by Stephen Talty. It is the story of Juan Pujol, a Spanish national who was the grandest double-agent of World War 2 - rising in the ranks of field agents for the Abwehr, the German intelligence network, all while feeding them a detailed narrative crafted in the back rooms of MI5, the British espionage agency. A gifted con artist and fabulist, Pujol created a vast and imaginary organization of informers that convinced the Nazis he was their most valuable asset and that he was providing solid intelligence. His greatest triumph was obfuscating the details of the D-Day invasion, a task tantamount to distracting a big game hunter so they wouldn't notice the elephant in their tent.

I haven't read a military history like this - both in content and quality of writing - since The Catcher was a Spy, the story of More Berg. Talty combines a historian's eye for detailed information with the pacing of natural storyteller. Even though we know the ending (at least in broad stokes), the book keeps the suspense high until the very last.

I want you to think it's a great book and read it. If I was as good a manipulator as Pujol, what I would do is talk about other books until you brought this one up, and then casually dismiss but in a way that kept your interest, and then you would tell me that you wanted to read it, and I would agree that yes, you are right, you probably should, what a great idea.

But I'm not that good, so just read it, if you have any interest in WW2, spies, deception, psychology, or human nature.

Correlation is not causation.... but still

So, today was a hot and sunny day in Seattle (it broke 90 on July 1st for the first time ever). To put that in perspective, here are the historical monthly averages of Seattle's high and low temperatures:

And for good measure, here is the same for precipitation:

I though of these because I recently looked at this chart from my mileage tracker app thingie:

Seems to me there is a direct correlation with temperature and an inverse correlation to precipitation happening there, eh? To be fair, I did break a toe in fall, burn my toes in a December kitchen incident, and get the flu twice in January. But still.