Sedalia Tornado
Mood:  loud
Now Playing: Queen Greatest Hits (magenta)
This is a photo taken of my hometown the night of the storms...

I've had this image for awhile now. My mom emailed it to me, though (thankfully) she didn't take the picture. Awhile back I tried to convey what it was like growing up in the shadow of storms like this, with their regularity and incomprehensible force... what I didn't really touch on was the number of people who - when we were running for cover - were running the other direction with cameras. Acts of madmen in my opinion. But there they stood on their front lawns, snapping away as fast as thier shutter would click.

When I was a manager for Borders in Omaha I remember vividly one day when it was my misfortune to be the manager on duty when the sirens began to wail. We sent the kids into the fire escape with someone to read them a story and the rest of the time was spent herding customers away from the banks of windows in the cafe. They got pissed at me too. One guy chewed me out for 'babying' him. I offered to let him leave or 'allow' him to wait in the back of the store (away from the windows) with the rest of the customers.

I never understood the mentality of it. I guess I never will. It's like having a pet Cobra and forgetting yourself and tickling it under the chin. There's getting used to something and then there's getting so blase about it that you forget it can be dangerous.

I had this image for some time before I got it together enough to post it here.
"Struck dumb" would be a good way to describe my reaction...

Looking at this, I thank God (again) that my family is okay.
Scottie

Scott Land
Mood:  not sure

A Science Fiction Rant
Mood:  spacey
First read this...

Space Elevator

And tell me why it took this long for someone to actually propose the workability of this? We've been reading about this in sci fi for fifty years, folks! Gibson and others predicted this, just as they predicted the internet, and still our 'smart guys' are behind the curve because instead of mining sci fi for ideas, the allegedly 'smart people' of the world are busy trying to pretend that the genre is a joke.

HG Wells predicted lunar exploration. Decribed rockets propelled by explosions that were alarmingly similar to what was eventually used. The Powers That Be pretended it was a fantasy until WWII! Then suddenly they were all interested in launching objects into the atmosphere with explosions, just as Wells predicted.

And we never learn. It takes a whole new generation of scientists who cut their teeth on the sci fi of their generation to rise up and gain enough personal juice to freely ignore their elders' disdain for such outlandish ideas.

Aurthur C Clark talked about this in the seventies. The first real work is only now being done to make it a viable enterprise? Sure, nanotubes didn't exist yet, but how much of that is due to the sci fi nature of nanotech? Prior to 2000 the only place you heard about nanotech was in the genre we know as Cyberpunk... the same genre that predicted (and spawned) the internet.

It's like the spaceramp we talked about awhile back. Will it work? Do we really have all of the technology needed as claimed? I don't know. I only know that if we don't try we're going to shoot ourselves in the collective foot.

And this also begs the question... what is in our current science fiction that we're ignoring? What dreams of the visionary are currently in the pulp sections of our bookstores that are going overlooked by the current establishment?

The mind boggles.

Scott

The Idiom
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: nothing
I collect idioms and quotes like some people collect stamps. My favorite sources for mining pith are Mark Twain, The British, and the Romans (everything sounds better in Latin) in that order. And my favorite idiom comes from the Brits...

Safe as houses

I'm willing to bet that safe as houses wasn't what you were expecting. And considering the other great wit and humor of the British, it might strike you as odd that this innocuous idiom should be my favorite. "Where's the Monty Python or the Winston Churchill quote?! Who are you and what have you done with Scott?!" But I stand by my assessment. Of all the homespun wisdom to leak out of the sceptered isle, that is the finest.

Should you be zodiacally minded you might attribute this to my being a Cancer, home-loving bunch that we are. Or as a "dog", by which I mean I was borne on the first day of Sirius' supposed influence on the planet's weather (hence the "Dog days of summer"). So I'm supposed to be a homebody twice over. Well, I am not predisposed toward allowing the stars to guide my decisions (barring one falling on my head) so I must dispute you there.

Like Mark Twain, I am a product of Missouri. A creature of my past as much as my present. In my writing, the Midwest and the Midwestern aesthetic crops up again and again. I've lived many places, I spent almost a decade in Denver, but Missouri is still home. I don't know how that feeling will pan out as the years pass, but I can't get past that fact. And it is to my roots in Missouri that I attribute my affection for that particular saying.

What does Missouri have to do with a British Idiom?
Because if you come from the Heartland, safety is sometimes a fleeting concept but home never is.

One of my strongest childhood memories is the wail of sirens, accompanied by the view of tile floors as I crouched in a turtled position with my fingers interlocked behind my head in the textbook 'Duck & cover' position. As a lad, I remember listening to the storms pass overhead. Hunkering in basements and hallways as storms raged around us like the finger of a wrathful God being dragged across the landscape.

The centerpieces of most of my early childhood memories are dark basements and wailing sirens. Hunkering down beneath the doctor's offices where my mom worked. The blat of the television as warnings scrolled across the screen. My sister explaining to me the difference between a "watch" and a "warning". The chirp of grandpa's police scanner as the Civil Defense storm chasers reported in with the current location of any funnel clouds in the area. The weird green light and the horrible silence that comes moments before the storm hits.

All of that sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? It would be, except for the odd bit... you become blase about them after awhile. Plenty of the memories are punctuated with looking up from the shag carpeting of a neighbor's basement and noticing hey, they have a pinball machine! The earliest tornado memory is the one in the dark basement of the Ob/Gyn where my mom was a nurse. I had no idea what a tornado was, what it looked like, or anything. Only that that the lights were out and it was something to hide from... like a monster. The darkness and fear left my over-taxed imagination free reign and for years afterward, I envisioned something akin to the Cavity Creeps whenever a tornado was mentioned.

I've read the accounts of people who grew up in London during the Blitz. For awhile I couldn't figure out how they talked about goofing around in the rubble, or decorating their gas masks. Making jokes in the dark of the bomb shelters as the stormcrows of the Luftwaffe dueled with the RAF overhead. Until I realized that for those kids, it was just like the tornado drills when I was a kid. The darkness and fear was punctuated with equivalent of hey, they have a pinball machine! Why don't we have a pinball machine?

Sirens wailed. Hail pounded the roof. Thunder punctuated the silences. And the whole time, there was the impression that home was safe. If I was in the basement of my parent's house, surrounded by my HotWheels and GI Joes, I would be fine.

My hometown was in the crosshairs of the storm that recently swept across the Midwest. A 1/2 mile wide tornado ripped through the town. Houses were lost. Lives were shattered. Someone was killed. CNN carried footage of the devastation. Grim-faced talking heads read out the toll of damage. And people around here asked me the same question they asked people from Louisiana when Katrina hit If this kind of thing happens; why would anyone live in such a place?

With Katrina I was one of the people asking the question. Now I'm expected to answer it. And the answer is actually pretty simple. Because it's home.

Like Twain, I lost little time in heading out as soon as the opportunity presented. I don't hate Missouri. I'm allergic to everything that grows there to a point where I'm practically allergic to the state, but I don't hate it. There are some who have inferred that I do from things I've said in moments of curmudgeonly pique down through the years. "It's a great place to be from." or "It's a nice place to grow up but you wouldn't want to live there." I kid you not when I was a youngster, there was like five minutes when the Missouri state tourism board actually had the motto "Missouri loves company". Like the guy at the tourism board (who probably lost his job) sometimes I say things because they're funny, not because they're necessarily true.

But for all of my cynicism, Missouri was a great place to grow up. Vast forests and meandering streams, verdant fields of winter wheat, riotous colors of maple trees in the fall and mud puddles deep enough to lose your sister in followed by snowfall deep enough to bury your mom's car (sometimes the next day). These are the things I remember besides the songs of sirens and the terror of the tempest.

I talk about growing up in Sedalia and the people around me think I grew up in Mayberry. It wasn't quite that bucolic, but I do find that my memories gel better with the people I know who are twenty or thirty years older than me than with the others who are my age. Burgers at the drive-in, playing war with wooden guns in the woods near our house, catching crawdads in the creek out back or playing baseball with plywood bases on a dusty lot.

Home. It's where the heart is, even if it can't be where the body is. My family came through the recent natural disaster just fine. A tornado isn't a hurricane, its path is relatively narrow, its impact relatively localized. This is the first time my hometown suffered appreciable damage since I was a kid, so I guess the impact of this on the national consciousness is already beginning to fade. Soon "Twister" will fade back to being just another B-movie gathering dust on the video store shelf.

My family is a little rattled, but otherwise fine. Safe as houses, you might say. And I will continue to love that phrse because people who've been in the crosshairs never forget. Because safe as houses is more than an idiom. It's my childhood in three words.

Living with a writer
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: nothing
ever wonder what it is like living with a writer?
This is what I woke up to one morning.



yup. storyline notes on post-its stuck to my bathroom mirror. I'm glad there are 3 sections to that mirror.

On Hiatus
Mood:  rushed
I regret to inform you that I'm putting this blog on hiatus for the next two weeks. I have a manuscript to finish by deadline, and simply don't have extra energy to devote to being funny and topical here.

The worst thing about writing isn't the writing... it's taking the novel you've lovingly crafted and writing no more than two pages per chapter, cutting away the loving craft and leaving a skeleton that is still somehow supposed to sell the idea to the publisher you send it to. Nuts.

Got typing to do.
See you in two weeks!

Scott the harried

ScottLand Saturday
Mood:  spacey
We haven't blown away yet. Not completely anyway. Spent the night by the firelight and lanterns and such but it was nice rather than being a drag. It's odd to draw by lanternlight. You get a real insight into why Renaissance master drawings look like they do in terms of strong light from a single source, rich vermillions and copper hues on the skin and so forth.

"Hard-Headed Woman" lyrics by Claude Demetrius
"Margaritaville" lyrics by Jimmy Buffett
Both appear under "Fair Use" provisions of US copyright Law (Title 17 US Code, Section 107) as one-time usage for purposes of satire.

The storm before the lull...
Mood:  loud
Stupid weather!
I gotta get this posted while we still have power. Sometime last night we lost it (power that is) and it didn't come back until about the time I had to leave for work. Lucky thing my clock has a battery backup.

Our back porch is taking the brunt of it (appropriate, I suppose, since the front porch is no longer there...)

There's a roof of corrugated tinted vinyl which is supposed to make it a 'sun porch' but doesn't take well to huge limbs and 40mph windgusts rattling it.

I'm trying to decide what to replace it with or if I should just shrug and replace it with the same stuff. It really seems to work fairly well as a solar ceiling, especially considering that's the shady side of the house. A very pleasant place to eat breakfast under other circumstances.

Of course the cats are a little freaked by it all, but even when there's a bad wind blowing, this is Washington and into every kitty's day a little sun must fall. So Figaro - at least - found a lull amid the storm.

Gotta go. The lights are flickering and I don't wanna have to type all this again.

Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Troy" (The movie. I don't think I know anyone named Troy...)

"Can't Buy Me Love..."
Mood:  flirty
Now Playing: The Beatles (of course)
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!