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Creeping Up

2009-12-14T00:37:58Z

On the same day this week I received solicitations from the Trident Society, offering a Free Pre-Paid Cremation [this seems an oxymoron], and from SmartCremation, offering simple, earth-friendly and affordable services.

See picture, above. Those jolly Etruscans, they painted the insides of their tombs with pictures of singing and dancing and drinking. That's the way I intend to go.

I recycled the solicitations. I thought about cremating them; but this was a spare-the-air week, and outside burning was banned.

The Long, Slow Collapse of Book Publishing

2009-12-10T18:21:46Z

from PublishersLunch (a daily newsletter from Michael Cader):

* Nielsen to Close Kirkus Reviews
The publishing world's concerns about declining review space will only become more severe with this morning's news that Nielsen Business Media has "made the decision to cease operations" at Kirkus Reviews (as well as Editor & Publisher.) The news came as the company announced the sale of the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and six other media brands to Guggenheim Partners and Pluribus Capital Management. Nielsen is retaining ownership of The Bookseller in the UK.

The memo from Nielsen Business Media president Greg Farrar does not indicate what will become of the Kirkus archives, and whether there will be any effort to sell the operation. As Ron Charles at the Washington Post Book World tweeted: "Worst news in a long time: Kirkus shutting down. For me, they were the last reliable source of negative reviews."

and, in a curious, spiral-like way related, regarding ebook versions:

* Amazon has quietly pushed the discounting envelope even further, at least on a small set of delayed big releases. The new books from Sarah Palin and Steven King, both of which release in Kindle format right around Christmas, can now be pre-ordered for the lower-still price of $7.99. That's also the pre-order price for Ted Kennedy's True Compass, which Twelve has apparently decided to release in ebook form after all, also on Christmas. (Previously the imprint had postponed ebook publication "indefinitely.")

Editorial Corrections

2009-12-09T06:44:07Z

NEW ENGLAND ANCESTORS, Fall 2009 issue, page 87:

"CORRECTIONS:

Summer Issue, page 50: In the table, the DNA sequence code given for George Hodges of Salem is incorrect. The sequence for the descendants of George Hodges of Salem should have been written ... as - 13, 22, 14, 10, 13, 13, 11, 14, 11, 13, 11, 29, 15, 8, 9, 8, 11, 22, 15, 20, 26, 12, 14, 15, 15, 11, 9, 19, 21, 15, 15, 16, 18, 35, 35, 12, 10."

Be careful to get these right, or you may wind up descended from someone you don't really want to have in your family tree.

Books to go

2009-12-09T06:29:31Z

I sent a book off to someone who had bought it, and paid me ten dollars for it. I sent a box of books off to my sister, and a box of books off to my brother, and they didn't have to pay for them.

Would you like me to send you some books? If so, state what kind. You won't have to pay, either, though covering postage would be nice.

Sometimes it can be hard to give things away.

Trade Magazine Meets Small Skiffy Press at Con

2009-11-25T22:35:43Z

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY talks about small-press handselling at Philcon:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6708822.html?nid=2286&rid=##CustomerId##&source=link

Time was, skiffy conventions were below the horizon of PW. In recent years they've added genre blogs and more coverage.

Old books as they degrade

2009-11-11T18:14:38Z

Give off effluvia of age: http://www.physorg.com/news177079514.html

Giveaways and saleaways

2009-10-23T05:46:42Z

We've given away five DirecTV receivers and two microwave dishes for them; a 4' x 7' solid-core door intended for use as a worktable top; three Sierra Club engagement calendars (not used) from 1975 and 1976; videotapes; a kneeling chair; and a bunch of three-ring binders. Mostly using Freecycle, but some on Craigslist.

Giving things away can be hard work. Selling is harder.

We have lots more stuff to give away. I'm hoping Saturday to pass forward my files, from the period during the 1970's when I was a transit activist in the Santa Clara Valley, to a current activist. It's also time to take a load to one of the local resale charities.

And of course we give away books all the time. Selling books is possible, but harder.

Selling magazines seems to be the hardest thing of all.

On with the week

2009-10-07T05:18:33Z

The music festival was amazing. Apparently, 750,000 people came to it. They were all sitting where I wanted to sit, but with some luck and some dedication I found us places just to the left of the soundboard, at the "Banjo" [topname] stage.

The people in front of us had come down from Tacoma, WA. One of the men asked me in all seriousness if he had seen me somewhere, like on television. I assured him I was nobody he was expected to know, and that in all probability it was just that my appearance was so universal he was mixing me up with someone else. I didn't say Jungian archetype, because we're only talking about appearances here. There were a lot of other people there wearing broad-brimmed hats.

Back to work: I'm mucking about in the bowels of the MySQL database that powers magazineart.org. Luckily I have a couple of similar database/image sets I can try things out on first, with no fear of a major screw-up of the big one (it says here). There are now over 7000 magazine covers and advertising art pages on the website, most of which I have at least touched with Photoshop, and some of which have taken quite a bit of time in restoration.

Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of "Femme Fatale / The female criminal," published by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. (No, I don't know why the Trust did the book, either, not thinking much of the link with the criminal history of Oz that was used as justification.) It's an odd size, about 5" x 7", 128-page hardcover with pictorial boards, and with much color inside, printed in Singapore. I supplied an image of the cover of Gun Molls 1930-10, and others supplied many more pulp and paperback covers. I didn't get paid for this, except in copies for me and the owner of the pulp, but I do expect to get paid by a Danish tech magazine for supplying the image of a very striking ad for G. Washington's Instant Coffee.

Exciting as all of this is, I still haven't found a way to make a living at it. I suppose that if everything collapses I could find work as a Photoshop monkey; but if everything collapses, no one will be paying Photoshop monkeys for anything, anyway, and so there you are. It's a good thing I'm semi-retired.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

2009-10-03T05:44:53Z

The usual cohort seem all to be out of town, so I'm driving up toward the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival tomorrow by myself. Somewhere along the way I'll give up trying to get closer and park, catching a Muni bus for the rest of the trip. Most likely.

It's an amazing show, not even half of it bluegrass (though that part is also great), and it's free. See http://www.strictlybluegrass.com/ . For some reason, a lot of people go.

Intellicast says that the the weather in San Francisco tomorrow will be "nearly record low temperatures." One year we froze our butts off, but this time I'm takin' Minnesota clothes. (Or what I imagine to be Minnesota clothes, not having come from there myself.) On Sunday the weather will be even colder, but vgqn will be free of Master Gardener events, and we'll both go there and freeze together.

Out, Damned Stuff

2009-10-03T05:30:06Z

I sold a set of the Harvard Classics for $160, but no one has bought the collection of AMERICAN HERITAGE magazine (185 issues for $140) or the stack of 1950's/60's PLAYBOY issues at $75. Maybe I'm asking too much.

Anyway, the new LP record price guide came in, so I'm about to trawl through the LP collection and send the not-so-worthwhile records off to Amoeba in Berkeley for whatever I can get for them. The valuable ones, like the Roy Orbison, Trashmen, and Beatles Butcher-Cover, I'll put on eBay.

In case you're wondering, it's not for the money (though the money is nice), but for the space. I have plans.

Bees, Reducs

2009-09-28T22:53:16Z

We had bees, and arranged with a beekeeper [Mark Small at smallbees.com] to move them to an apiary at his location. The pictures show bees living in an architectural decoration; dead bees which had found their way into the house through the walls; and the man in the bee suit removing the tiles and vacuuming the bees up. There's a closeup of the very large combs, and the confused bees shown huddling together when they can't find the queen. The bees haunted the front of the house for a day and a half, and have now mostly gone away.

Here's the closeup of the combs, with angry bees, during the removal process:

As always, click for larger.

Zorpia

2009-09-21T16:31:31Z

This came in the morning electron mail:

"Arunpratapmall wants you to become a Zorpian"

[Holds up hand] Excuse me, may I go back to my own quantum universe now?

It says, "Hi, You must be special! Your friend Arunpratapmall, has invited you to be apart of Zorpia!"

Small pictures of two of Arunpratapmall's Friends are shown. One is an infant; the other has only eyes and the bridge of a nose.

Nothing in the science fiction I have been reading since I was twelve years old prepared me for the present future.

A clearing-out question

2009-09-11T04:57:26Z

I found Sierra Club Wilderness Engagement Calendars for 1975 (2 of them) and 1976, all unused. (I was using something else. Life was dull, but it wasn't that dull.) They're in nice condition and have beautiful pictures. What should I do with them?

Busy

2009-09-11T04:55:01Z

Amazingly, the set of Harvard Classics sold in a day; the buyer picked them up this evening. They were priced to sell, but I didn't think they were that underpriced; also, no one else had contacted me. I have things ready to go onto the shelves where they once sat.

Now if I can only find a buyer for the AMERICAN HERITAGE issues. I'll price them cheap to someone I know--that's a hint to those of you with empty shelves. Sometime next week I'm taking a truckload of LPs to Amoeba Music in Berkeley to see what, if anything, they'll buy.

ObNote: we're not running out of money! It's all about clearing some space for a change in the usage of the basement.

On another front, after struggling along without much publicity for the last couple of years (that was when Boing-Boing did a writeup), the magazineart.org site got laudatory reviews in metafilter and Good Morning Silicon Valley over two days. Yay! Daily visitors have tripled, and I've even got a new Photoshop volunteer.

Stuff, Out

2009-09-10T01:46:35Z

I've been spending a lot of time in the basement, picking things to send off to new homes. So I've just listed my set of the Harvard Classics, and nearly 200 issues of AMERICAN HERITAGE, for sale. At the moment they're just on the local Craigslist, but most probably they'll go on eBay in a while.

Termites

2009-09-05T22:30:56Z

Never rains but. This morning calimac came over to pick up some LP records and as I pulled an E. Power Biggs disk out from the section of music history recordings I found the sleeve was missing the bottom back corner. Ook.

At least twenty LP's damaged, some severely, but none of them precious to me. That's the good news. The bad news was, oh yes, it was termites that have done the damage. Even more unfortunately, they're still living there, all white and wet and muddy. It's a basement bookshelf that backs up against a wallboard hiding a section of the foundation, so the little beggars have tunneled through the dirt and concrete and found their way into the back of the bottom shelf.

Not very many houses in California have basements, but many houses in our area have, or had, termites. We had them in 1992, in a different location. They live underground in huge nests, and send tunnels off for tens or hundreds of feet searching for wood. Or something somewhat like it, in this case. Better LP sleeves than wooden beams; but, still, they will have to go.

I've been getting rid of unnecessary possessions, as a discipline for improving access to living space. This will accelerate the process. I had less stuff in the basement in 1992, and moving it around so the termite crew could access the concrete slab was an arduous process then. I think I've just declared yet more material possessions to be surplus.

I really am 39! says Billie Burke

2009-09-04T23:20:16Z

in this 1932 ad for Lux Toilet Soap--

http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/ads/personalitems/soap/Lux+Toilet+Soap+-1932A.jpg.html

--there's something just a little bit odd about Miss Burke. I believe the aliens were among us then, and here's photographic proof. Explains a lot about the Depression, it does.

Do you have aliens working in your brokerage house?

Oh, yeah, are you sure? Would explain a lot about the crash of 2008.

Bees Again; and More

2009-09-04T04:51:06Z

Our bee expert says that there doesn't seem to be any honeycomb inside the walls, and that he thinks they're currently using the walls just as a secondary chamber for the hive. We agreed that he will take the tiles off the architectural decoration on a Saturday within the next four weeks, and we'll see where the situation leads from there. It does seem likely that the hive is in the decoration and not in the walls; it will be much easier to deal with it there, so please forward all possible quantum probability streams to make it so.

Meanwhile, people I asked to send magazine scans have sent a great many, and I'm working hard just to keep up with them. Here's what's been added in recent times.

When my doctor moved from one clinic to another, I moved with him, and tomorrow morning I'm visiting the records center for the old clinic to get copies made of my old medical records. This seems so Twentieth Century. Partly this is necessary because in the past (say ten years ago), my previous doctors didn't pass along the entire results sheet of my lab tests, so I can't compare numbers with current. I'm hoping the medical file actually contains these results.

Bees

2009-09-02T05:23:16Z

We have bees. Unfortunately, we're not beekeepers, and we have bees in a place where we don't want them: inside the front wall of the house. They're living between the stucco and the interior plaster, with access through a small hole in an architectural decoration at the front of the house.

When we thought they were only in the decoration, we started working with a beekeeper who thought he could move them. So much for past thinking.

Thursday he's coming by again to reassess the situation, after my recent discovery of bees in the walls and bees with access to the attic.

I'd like to keep them alive and somewhere else; but, one way or another, those bees have got to go. After they're gone we'll have to open the plaster wall and/or take out one of the windows to get access to where they are presumably building honeycombs. Honey and walls are not good friends to one another.

I've made a lot of progress in getting rid of excess books and other stuff, and the weather has been good. But bees are what I have on my mind.

Dave Kyle Viewing Dave Kyle at Worldcon, Aug 8, 2009

2009-08-22T18:38:30Z

Sitting in the Fanzine Lounge one afternoon, reading LJ on my iPhone, I found a fine picture of Dave Kyle and Scott Edelman in Scott's LJ http://scottedelman.livejournal.com/138732.html .

Turning around, I saw Dave Kyle himself. So here is a picture of Dave, looking at the picture of himself and Scott in my iPhone.

Click to go to the large version.

OK. I have now published one Montreal Worldcon photo.

TAFF Visit

2009-08-22T18:20:45Z

We had a small dinner party BBQ for visiting TAFF guy Steve Green. There are pictures at http://www.mikeandkaren.org/mikespix/2009/TAFFDinner-08-20/index.html. Steve is the one sitting, in the first picture, with his head directly below the BBQ's chimney.

I'm aware that I haven't posted photos from our trips to Italy, Alaska, or the Montreal Worldcon. So I don't know how long the MySQL image database at MikeAndKaren.org has been fritzed. I hope to be able to find out what's happening there, but I face this issue with much trepidation, as a great deal of the image gallery juju there (MySQL + PHP + magic dust) is, um, difficult to work on.

A well-attended party (another one)

2009-07-27T05:43:52Z

The last of the crowd left around 1 am, but I didn't get to sleep until after 3, what with the buzzing going on in my brain from the conversations and all. At least I only had to deal with sleep deprivation this morning, having had very little alcoholic to drink over the entire course of the evening.

When you host a party like this you're pretty much on your feet from the time it begins (say 4 pm) until the last guest leaves. Almost everything got eaten, so there was little food to worry about at the end. There was plenty of mess, though. We went to Peet's for coffee and breakfast before tackling the worst of it.

All the new construction was put to use. Well, no one could sit in the adirondack chairs in the mosaic patio, as we found the Deodar had deposited little lumps of sticky sap on their surface, and I had to make up warning signs. But the recycled parkstrip chunks by the hatchcover bench next to the white Brugmansia look good.

The new front walkway steps were finished four days before the party, and served us well. Their solar lights are back on, showing the beauty of the new concrete to the passing world at night. For the solar lights in the back yard, I replaced some dead batteries, and all are working except for three of the multicolored bubble lights. These last I put together as an impromptu garden sculpture in the newest bed in the Back 40; they look like something out of a, um, science-fiction movie.

K did the garden tours, so you should ask her how those went. We didn't do any house tours this year.

K and I showed various people the artifacts from my local-archaeology dig, which I sometimes call "Time Team Martin Ave." I didn't get to the descriptive labels for them, but I think most people recognize potsherds, marbles, and lumps of rusted metal without our having to spell things out. The tie plates and spikes from the trolley line that used to run down Martin Ave. take a little more explanation. We also have an electrical power-pole insulator left behind by the PG&E crew that came in during a BBQ a few years ago; it was over a hundred degrees F when the party began, and the pole-mounted transformer in the next yard boiled over and had to be replaced with a new one, the process starting while we were all still sitting around in the back yard. I also have a white ceramic sherd with some Roman letters on it reading "microwa"; I believe this came from an offertory vessel dedicated to the domestic god Microwa (god of small bits of pottery and ceramic, probably).

I don't know if any new startups got put together at this year's party, but I certainly heard from a number of people that they are suddenly, sometimes unexpectedly, available for work in a new location.

The Moon; Cement; TV

2009-07-21T06:29:14Z

When we walked upon the moon for the first time, I watched it at a small party in the home of Felice Rolfe, in Palo Alto. Just a few of us, one being (I think I recall this) Dave van Arnam.

Earlier I had taken the front page of the San Francisco CHRONICLE and printed out some photo-reduced copies on 8.5x11" paper, using a documentation scanner/copier recently installed at my workplace. I handed these out at the party. What fun we had with optical systems in the days before there were computers to do it for you.

I haven't seen Felice (now Maxam) for decades, but heard from her yesterday. She's having a party (yes) on the same Saturday we're having our BBQ (damn). PENSFA started in her living room in 1968; we kind of forgot to mark its 40th birthday last year.

On another arm is the story of our friend the cement steps, which was done well, and will be ready for people to use this Saturday. Done well except for the clown who disposed of excess cement on top of one of Karen's plants, and the washwater in my newly laid gravel parkstrip. I've called the company up to complain.

Yet another arm: there is no news on the TV. No, wait, I mean there is no news on the situation about satellite TV. I'm off looking for an old TiVo box that someone will hand over for little or nothing; Craigslist hasn't yet supplied me with that. On -our- TV, some of the progarms record perfectly and some have too many dropouts to watch; I haven't been able to find a pattern (time, channel) in which is which.

TV; Steps

2009-07-19T06:15:38Z

We progress slowly. A neighbor gifted me with two (2) DirecTV receivers, one with digital video recording, but neither with TiVo. I set one up to monitor transponder signal strength, with the original receiver providing audio (so we would be able to tell when the original receiver had a hiccup [aka hiccough for those of you with variant orthographic values]). No hiccups were received during the test period, before we went off to make dinner, and then went to a show. More on this anon.

Valley Concrete came early Thursday morning to break up the old steps and build the forms for a new set. They did an excellent job. In the process we were able to throw out hundreds of pounds of old broken concrete. However, said company did not come back Friday morning to pour the concrete into the forms they had built. At this point I'm hoping for Monday.

As we continue to clean up the back yard for the summer BBQ I discover more stones, and more old broken concrete. I'm not sure what to do with it all. However, K did clean off and we set up a shelf unit under the deodar; on this unit we now display the artifacts, archaeological and geological, I have found in various digging projects in this yard. Plus the fishplates and spikes from the trolley line that once ran along our street, buried for seventy years but made accessible during a bit of road work some years ago. Plus a few pretty stones and mining samples we've picked up in our travels. Mostly, though, the provenance is simple: "Here". These are the efforts of our local Time Team.

Landscape construction; satellite TV

2009-07-16T06:07:30Z

I used pieces of the parkstrip concrete to make a new section of patio over by the raspberries (so people sitting on the hatchcover bench will have some place to put their feet). The parkstrip, which I broke up by hand, supplied numerous large and small piece of concrete decorated with embedded quartz-like rocks. these I pieced out mosaic-like to cover the area, about four by six feet. The city inspector, by the way, came by to look at our new graveled parkstrip and approved it.

Tomorrow a local cement contractor is scheduled to tear up our front walkway steps and cast us new ones. Wouldn't be happening if our neighbor hadn't accidentally gotten the city inspector, with his can of warning paint, onto our sidewalks,. So our neighbor is having to have the contractor remove and replace quite a number of feet of sidewalk. In the process the cement truck will deliver concrete to the steps forms expected by tomorrow evening. I just had to replace the parkstrip, but I can assure you I won't be doing anything like that again soon.

Meanwhile, our DirecTV satellite TV has been showing frequent, but erratic, signal dropout; this shows up as loss of sound followed by pixelation of the screen, until things recover. If you watch the signal level on any of the transponders you can see excellent reception, excellent... ooops, there was a second or two of nothing; then excellent again. I found a neighbor with an old dish, which I reassembled and got working again. Replacement dish, new coaxial cable, hot-swap comparison of the two signal, still same intermittency. Ergo: the problem is in the receiver. This is a difficulty, since DirecTV and TiVo are not yet shipping their kiss-and-make-up-design receiver, and we'd prefer to continue TiVo. Now I go look for a replacement receiver. It's not like we watch much TV; but the things we want, we want.