Beyond My Purview

     Our scene opens in the present-day, renovated, galley kitchen of a 1920s plan-built home on the outskirts of a somewhat-artsy neighborhood in a large Midwestern city.  Two spinsters live in the home.  One is cooking.  The other enters the kitchen, speaking:

     "Isn't the thing supposed to be doing its thing about now?"

    [FLUSTERED, AT THE STOVE]: "Wha'?  What thing?"  [LOOKS WILDLY AROUND AT APPLIANCES FOR EVIDENCE OF MALFUNCTION]

     "The thing?  The Moon--"

     "Oh! I don't know, um..." [SETS DOWN SPATULA, WALKS TO WINDOW AT THE FAR END OF KITCHEN AND PEERS OUT AT A HAZY GLOW IN THE WESTERN SKY] "It's pretty cloudy but the moonlight's not red, isn't the eclipse closer to eight?  Maybe there will be less clouds when it's lower." [RETURNS TO STOVE]

     "Oh."  [LEAVES]

     [TO HERSELF] "You know, I'm responsible for a lot of things but the safe and proper operation of the Earth's Moon is not among them."

"At The Sound Of The Tone, Your Mission Is..."

     These past few weeks, I get a call or text every morning around seven, to tell me if there will be any work aloft or not that day.

     Most days, not.  At nine hundred feet above ground, ice lingers, winds are stronger, and everything you do takes five to ten times longer than it does on the ground.  In the winter, when it's sunny, it's often cold: if there's no cloud cover overnight, everything cools down and it stays cool.  On warmer days there's often a front moving through, which means it's at least breezy at ground level and more so at any great height.

     And so, every morning, a text.  Or a call.

State Of The Tradition

    The newsies and Internetters seem a bit excited over the upcoming State Of The Union speech.  Me, not so much.

     Historically, I'm not alone.  The majority of SOTU reports have been handed to Congress in written form like so many schoolboy essays.  After George Washington, the next President to call both houses of Congress together and give them a talk about how things were going was Woodrow Wilson, who assured them, "The country, I am thankful to say, is at peace with all the world, and many happy manifestations multiply about us of a growing cordiality and sense of community of interest among the nations, foreshadowing an age of settled peace and good will."  Less than eight months later, World War One began.  By the Spring of 1917, Mr. Wilson and Congress joined in.  Cordiality was set aside for the duration.

     The modern State Of The Union is a talk by a guy who -- no matter his party or ambitions -- does not make laws, who must hand his treaties over to Congress to decide yea or nay and who manages -- if he is lucky! -- to stay barely even with national and world affairs.  It's a speech from someone riding a bull, trying to assure Congress and the country that everything is, if not well, at least headed that way.  It's a brave and very human effort, but the content means much less than the tone, and the tone is well-nigh predetermined.  An age of settled peace and goodwill will be foreshadowed.

     Mr. Trump will make his speech and the people who favor him will declare it remarkable.  The people who don't like him will compare it to talks by various infamous dictators.  21st-Century politics as usual. 

De-Carbing Spaghetti

or

They Do What With Zucchini?

     I've been seeing them in the produce section at our corner grocer's for a few months now: long, skinny strips of carrot, yellow squash or zucchini.  They're meant to be a low-carbohydrate replacement for pasta, but really, now -- can that be any good?

     Finally, I had to try.  Tam's doing low-carb and I didn't want to give up on the occasional treat of a spaghetti dinner.  Eggs Pomodoro is wonderful, but sometimes you'd like a change, no?

     So I bought the stuff.  Just in case, I made Bobbi's Overkill Sauce.  It starts with a half-pound each of ground sirloin and sweet Italian sausage, mostly cooked and drained, then finished with a nice onion and plenty of fresh mushrooms, to which I add a bottle of whatever spaghetti sauce looks appealing. Newman's "Sockarooni" kitchen-sink version is surprising tasty, even compared to the high-end gourmet stuff, but use whatever you like.  The end result stands on its own.

     There are several ways to cook vegetable "noodles," none of which are much like boiling pasta in salt water.  I opted to saute it for a few minutes; a non-stick skillet and a half-teaspoon of olive oil ensured it wouldn't stick or clump.  After five minutes, it was indeed al dente and with the sauce ladled over, it looked like the real deal.

     It's good!  The taste is not quite the same as traditional spaghetti.  It may be better -- zucchini can become bitter in cooking but the quickly sauteed version has none of that, just a nice, mild vegetable richness that complements the sauce.   Mouthfeel is like good spaghetti, and not at all slimy the way cheap pasta can be.

     Tam and I are not going to have to give up spaghetti.

     If you've been looking at the stuff, wondering, give it a try.

Shadow On The Moon

     I've been reading Ingathering, the complete collection Zenna Henderson's short stories about The People, a group of very human aliens who fled the destruction of their planet some time in the late 19th Century.  A few scattered groups crash-landed on Earth, mostly in the West and Southwest.  Their technology was largely psionic and only a few among them are powerfully gifted, so it's a long, slow process of rebuilding while concealing their differences, surrounded by people who look like them, but have none of their powers--

     This is a setup that in different hands could be genuinely dreadful, a swamp of pulp cliches.  Not in hers.  Zenna Henderson was a lifelong teacher, usually in rural elementary schools; she had a deep affection for the best of small-town life and it permeates these stories.  She was also a gifted writer of understated prose, with an fine eye for just how much to leave unsaid.  The People are, by and large, genuinely good and a typical Henderson story has them overcoming adversity, rediscovering their past and/or helping others -- as if The Waltons could levitate and do a little mind-reading (etc.), while being careful to not get caught at it.  They're also genuinely, if somewhat ecumenically, religious, presented in a positive way rarely encountered in science fiction.  I suppose they could be considered a bit sentimental -- but far too much SF has no heart at all, or only a tritely bloody or bleeding heart.  Hers is neither.  Henderson's tales are far back from any front lines, mostly between the wars or riots, set with the healers, home and hearth.  She finds plenty of conflict there.

     Most of Henderson's work was published in a few paperback collections, now long out of print but still available.  A few were only published in SF magazines, or not at all -- until Ingathering was published in 1995.  I started reading near the end, past the stories I had already read and enjoyed, and so arrived at Shadow On The Moon (1962). 

     The plot is not too dissimilar to Robert A. Heinlein's Requiem, and yet the story she tells is very different.  I recommend it, and won't go into details lest I spoil your enjoyment.

Books Lead To Books

     I've been reading Lawrence Block's Telling Lies For Fun And Profit, a collection of his Writer's Digest columns that Sue Grafton is said to have re-read before starting each new "Kinsey Millhone" novel.

     It's all good stuff.  He's an excellent teacher.  He uses his own work for examples -- which saves anguished conversations with authors who don't agree with your assessment of their work -- and that has led me to his "Evan Tanner" books.  Tanner is a kind of inadvertent spy, who happens to have a rare condition that keeps him from needing sleep.  He speaks dozens of languages and is fascinated by political "lost causes" of all types.  Fun reading, perhaps a bit light, but for anyone who's been around conspiracy theories, it's pure candy.

Tanzanian Peaberry

     Tamara was given a bag of Tanzanian Peaberry coffee for Christmas and we recently discovered it was ground coffee, not beans. 

     Whole beans have longer storage time than ground.  I've been working through some excellent Jamaican Blue Mountain (thanks, Dave!), grinding the beans as needed.  We shelved that for later and started in on the Tanzanian before it went stale.  That meant a rare opportunity to compare the two.

     Tanzanian Peaberry holds its own.  While it doesn't have the tastes-just-like-it-smells characteristic of the Jamaican, it is very good, with a nice flavor and a smoothness that makes it eminently drinkable.  A fresh pot vanishes with astonishing speed!

     "Peaberries" grow as single, roughly spherical seeds in the coffee cherry; most coffee beans grow as doubles, producing the familiar flat side/round side shape.  Peaberries are sorted by hand, and between the extra care in sorting and the round shape (said to aid in roasting), peaberry coffee and regular coffee from the same variety taste different, with peaberry generally ranked better.

     There are at least two different kinds of coffee grown in Tanzania -- one of them, Gesha or Geisha,* is an Ethopian c. arabica variety† currently among the most expensive coffees in the world.  I'm not sure how widely available it is.  The other, what we're drinking, is a disease-resistant c. arabica of somewhat uncertain pedigree, either a straight-up typica or French Mission.  It's also considerably less expensive than Gesha; you can find it at pretty much average good-coffee prices and you'll be glad you did.
_____________________________
* Named for a town in Ethiopia, misnamed for a Japanese professional companion.  Y'know, looking at history, Ethiopians have every right to be among the most seriously peeved people in the world.  They never seem to get a fair shake, right down to things as simple as the names of coffees.
 
† As a general rule, you can't go wrong with Ethiopian coffees.  Sidamo and Yirgacheffe are dependably good.  I don't think I have tasted Harar but it gets good reviews.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929 - 2018

     If you grew up reading science fiction, she was always there.  Her worlds were not usual sort of thing and neither were her words.

     Her voice is silent now. Ms. Le Guin passed away yesterday, leaving us a wonderful body of work. 

     You might find yourself disagreeing with her take on things, but there was never any doubt that she'd thought them through.

     I'll miss her.

In Which Outlines Are Outlined

     Some time ago, after a (non-Tamara) friend had bemoaned the impenetrable voodoo futility of being asked to submit an outline before writing, I made a terrible mistake: I remarked to another friend that such an attitude was more self-indulgent than real, because "everyone writes to an outline."

     This did not go over at all well.  It would seem that not everyone does.

     Part of the friction comes from semantics: what's an "outline?"  In the high school I attended, academic-track students were required to take "Expository Theme And Research Paper," a course that concerned itself with very rigorous, formal outlines: Unyeilding taskmasters, straightjackets, corsets, traction--  Except like the last three examples, the structure was supposed to be a support, a way of staying on track; the effort of getting this into the unruly minds of teenagers often turned "outline" into a daunting monster, the nemesis of creative expression.  And this is the dire thing people think of when you say "outline."  It's a very dry sort of writing, taught as a largely mechanical exercise in constructing readable prose no one would much want to read, and it's most likely good discipline to struggle through.

     I got a D in that class, by the way, though I think I managed to fast-talk and large-vocabulary my way to a gentlewoman's C at the very last moment.

     But an "outline" can be very rough, or very flimsy: needing to write n-many words about topic X is, in fact, an outline.  It's a darned sketchy one -- but by the time your fingers have typed the lede, that busy scribbler in the back of your mind has already got a half-dozen notions on how to proceed, at least four of which are tripe.  (A good writer knows which four ideas to throw away, and is more worried about discerning the better ones than ensuring section II.A.2, para (a) discusses early shipboard wireless use in Caribbean and para (b) covers  the curious relationship between the CIA and banana importers, exactly as planned.)

     Lester Dent wrote scads of entertaining, pulpy reading using a fairly "cookie-cutter" plot outline consisting of four 1500-word sections in each of which Hero Protagonist gets into trouble, struggles with it, gets into some kind of physical conflict, and then there's some kind of twist or surprise.  --And each section also advances an over-arching plot arc, related to the minor struggles.  Throw in some tips and tricks on generating a villain, a crime and a location, and hey, you're in the pulp business -- if you're as good at the details as Lester Dent was, which few are.  Read enough of them and you hear the gears whir, which is a problem with sticking to the same outline.  Even the "Hero's Journey" begins to pall after you've walked through too many variations on the theme. (Unless Tolkien or Pratchett is writing it --but I digress)

     Other writers begin with no more than a character and/or a situation -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley started Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus with no more than a nightmare.  And that's an outline of sorts, too.

     I struggle with plots and my work and leisure activities often interfere with long uninterrupted writing sessions; the reins slip from my grasp.  Having a better idea where I was headed helps me get things back on track.  Taking writing classes when I can, what I'm learning is there's no one good way to write; people tend to be "plotters" who get the broad brushtrokes down first, or "pantsers," who let the characters and situations develop the story -- but nobody is all one thing.

     Know your own process, and don't kid yourself; "freewriting" is fun, but it's work, too, precisely because it is so very difficult to not be steering, if only a line or two ahead.

     Outlines aren't hairy, bearded monsters, just waiting to grab, they're trails -- some very faint, nearly invisible, while others are like iron rails, strong and inflexible.  Most are somewhere in between.  Maybe you don't have one.  Maybe you do.  I don't know.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

     No sooner did we get out the colander polish than Congress decided to keep the Federal government running for another three weeks.  Just in time for a tsunami!

Your IRS: A Little More Than Fifty Percent Shut Down

     The Federal government has shut down and only the "essential functions" of the IRS will be running, which I am sure you will not be surprised includes the part that processes your tax return and accepts your payment.

     One part that's not staffed during the shutdown includes -- oh, you'd never guess, not ever -- the people who issue your tax-return check.

     Yes, the Feds really, really want your money, on time and in full -- and they'll be keeping any extra you paid, thank you very much, until the Federal Government is running again.

     Hating on the IRS is like hating sharks -- they're just doing what they're fitted for, after all.  Like the shutdown, the Internal Revenue Service is a creation of Congress.  Congressthings keep on getting paid when the fed.gov is shut down, and they do want to make sure those checks don't bounce.

*  *  *

     Various commentators on the Left and Right want me to be very alarmed about the shutdown.  They want me to blame the Other Party and they want me to be angry that "Congress isn't doing its job."  The thing is, Congress is fractious and argumentative by design.  When they hit one of these impasses, they are doing their job, no matter how much I wish they'd just go home, or at least sit down and shut up.  They do none of those things; they stay there, griping and sniping and edging towards some way to move onward, or at least around.  They're not at all efficient about it -- this is the U. S. Congress, not a V-8 engine.  Efficiency isn't the point.  (In fact, I think a genuinely efficient government would be a very unpleasant thing to have.  Certainly every government that has claimed to be achieving greater efficiency has been uniformly grim and nasty.)

     Congress will muddle through.  The military will get their back pay.  If they can be patient, so can the rest of us.

     Except, of course, for the tax-collecting portions of the IRS.  They're more like the tides.

Government Shutdown? We're Ready.

     Tamara has kept this handy through several previous Federal government shutdowns.

     Preparedness!