Exploding Poohsticks

Salon's takecomments on Rafa Nadal's fashion (non)sense in 2009: "We even liked those riotous neon tennis togs he sported, though they made him seem less the comic superhero Nike intended than an adorably musclebound friend of Hello Kitty."

...from quoting this line from USA Today when it's time to wrassle with my next tennis plotbunny:

Rarely has the men's game had such thick cream at the top.

(I'll at least refrain from working in dubious and/or vicious jokes about Juliette the cow. Maybe. The problem is that now that the idea's occurred to me, the anti-guardian angel is already cooing potential punchlines into my ear. Have I mentioned lately that I hate my brain?)

ETA: Cows lick home, owner calls police. Ribbons contemplates writing a scene in which a herd of house-munching cows interrupt hot top-and-cream action between two prominent tennis players. ...Ribbons suspects recipient of fic would justifiably come after her with an electric prod for answering a perfectly serious prompt with udderly mooronic comedy. *dodges boots and soggy mittens, gets back to work*

Or, No Fandom Is an Island, Exhibit JT:

The unforced error is when you beat yourself. The ball comes to you and you hit it into the net. Or you hit it long. Or you hit it onto the roof of Gary Burke's car, in the parking lot, which I do, a lot.

But the worst error of all is when you don't even try.

On game day, I knew our opponents were going to be tough. During warm-up, the tall one kept hitting fast, spinning serves. I knocked a couple toward Gary’s parking space just to show her that she didn't scare me. But of course, she did.

During the match, however, I stayed tough and maintained my focus. When she hit a 400-mile-an-hour drive straight at my kidneys, I played my game: the dink. Soft returns, ridiculous loopy lobs and a serve that floated across the net like a matzo ball made with love.

But a funny thing happened. My opponents kept overhitting. Meanwhile, my partner, Cheryl, and I got most of our shots in. At one point in the second set, I even heard one of our opponents hiss to the other, "But her serves are so soft ..."

"Float like a matzo ball, sting like a bee," I thought. And wafted another of Nana's seltzer specials over the net.

- Michelle Slatalla, There is a 'Me' in 'Team'"

(1) Andrea Petkovic - interesting, personality-wise

(2) Andrew Broad at the TW boards says, "Monica Niculescu is the WTA version of Fabrice Santoro: she has two hands both sides, but unlike Marion Bartoli, she has Santoro's forehand slice, and plays lots of dropshots."

(3) Also in the TW forum, from Jenni, a disgruntled St. Louis fan: "I'm not even that upset that they got rid of Washburn. It's that this team is always trading away cows and then expecting us to be excited that they got a handful of magic beans with 'great fastballs.' Ridiculous. But then again, this is the team that traded our Hall of Fame manager for Randy Winn."

(4) "Lendl" was an answer in this morning's UPI crossword.

(5) The NYT had an article on Andrea Jaeger, who became a nun after she retired. Sadly, the article's about a property dispute between her children's charity ranch and its neighbors.

According to the dentist's assistant, the 3/16" chunk I dug out of my gum on Saturday was some of the concrete used in installing the temporary crown. In any case, I got through the morning with a combination of ibuprofen and folk remedies (some saltwater rinsing, followed by gauze plastered with a paste made from Becherovka and ground cloves), and by sacking out (having been awake since 3 a.m. was a factor in that as well). Post-dentist, I stopped at two grocery stores, the art supply store, and the library, and the rest of the evening will be spent at the easel as soon as the contractor working on my bedroom window clears out (long story). Onwards...

Again from The Rivals:

By the time she retired from full-time singles at age thirty-eight, Navratilova had played so long that Conchita Martinez, the woman who defeated her in her swan-song run to the 1994 Wimbledon final, had grown up in Spain idolizing her and hitting practice balls against a wall she nicknamed "Martina."

More from Howard's The Rivals:

( true arrogance )
* * *

( meeting only on Sundays )
* * *

Evert's loss [to Kathy Jordan in the third round of Wimbledon 1983] ended one of the most amazing streaks in sports. Starting with her sensational 1971 U.S. Open debut as a sixteen-year-old, Evert had never failed to reach the semifinals of the first thirty-four Grand Slam tournaments she had played -- a peerless run that stretched back twelve years.

The WTA locker room dynamic in 1976:

At any given moment, Rosie Casals might be in one corner planning an excursion to a museum or concert, and Navratilova might be strolling by with her latest dog. ...Francoise Durr of France could be playing one of her loud bilingual Scrabble games with Betty Stove of the Netherlands, who spoke six languages. Kristien Kemmer might be showing Evert the latest halter dress she bought. Ingrid Bentzer of Sweden might be walking around the dressing room stark naked with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, raucously holding forth on any number of topics in what Bentzer jokingly calls her "pompous Swedish way."

- Howard, The Rivals

...Tilden was playing more than a mere game. He never forgot what his friend, the famous opera singer Mary Garden, had told him long ago: "You're a tennis artist, Bill, and artists always know better than anyone else when they're right. If you believe in a certain way to play, you play that way no matter what anyone tells you. Once you lose faith in your own artistic judgment, you're lost."

- Marshall Jon Fisher, A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, A World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (Crown, 2009)

* Quoting because it's interesting, not because I agree with it (I don't, in fact).
* Interesting book. It's about von Cramm vs. Budge, 1937. Among its themes are what it was like to be a gay tennis player. Having to return it to the library before I finish it, but one I will almost certainly revisit some other year. (Tonight's looking like another 3 a.m. date with code (fourth night in a row, gah). On the plus side, I've just found out it's going to be at least three hours before the next build, so that's several hours of clear calligraphy time as soon as I'm done with supper.)

Says You is a public radio program that includes bluffing rounds, where one team is assigned an obscure word, two of its members create fake definitions for it, and the other team tries to guess the actual definition. Yesterday, the word for one of the rounds was filk.

I thought, "Oh, geez, that's a gimme!"

The guessing panel picked one of the fake definitions.

The studio audience was in favor of the other fake definition.

In tandem with my partner discovering Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog only just last week, it's a well-timed reminder that my perceptions of "popular" and "well-known" are somewhat skewed.

(This is related to why I generally discourage academic authors from using the adjective "well-known" and "famous" in their prose: if something is truly is well-known, saying so is redundant, and if it's knowledge that wasn't previously shared by the reader, it can unnecessarily distance or alienate them.)

(Tangent: the only other word I've recognized going into a bluffing round was "hardanger." That one, not so much of a double-take.)

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I haven't gotten around to reading Alma Alexander's books yet, but I peeked at her Flycon posts from this past weekend, and this one really struck a chord with me:

...whoever said that you or ANYBODY else are going to be reading the same book, ever, even when every word in it is identical between your two copies?

...It is flat impossible to write for every possible interpretation of a given set of words – you would have to have the mind and the breadth of vision of a God to be able to understand everything about everybody, to know the contents of every single person's duffle bag as they slog along the road of life. You write a story -- and after it's out of your hands it's between the story and the readers. They may have issues with the story. While "issues" are often something that you can take on board and fix in your head and do better (or try to) in your next story -- it's also true that you could not posssibly have known about every issue from every reader. You owe the reader the best story that you could write. What they discover in it… is more often than not something that you never thought that you had said. As a writer, this is something that you have to live with.

Today's subject line comes from a poem by Hafiz that begins, "Admit something: / Everyone you see, you say to them, 'Love me.'"

142 words today on Not as Dumb. With yet another OC ambling in from left field.

geri_chan's comment detailing which dog breeds correspond to various Harudaki characters -- I have no words, because I am still laughing too hard to come up with them.

Read scans of Vassalord v3 yesterday, and my print copy of Yellow v1. Also came across scans of a manga titled Welcome to the Chemistry Lab. Who knows if it's any good, but with a title like that, of course I'm going to peek at it at some point.

The Talking Library shares a parking lot with a County Clerk branch, which means the congestion's impossible the last and first business day of each month (when people queue up to renew their car tags), so it turned out to be the perfect morning for a 6.5-hour shift: the first two hours were devoted to the Tennessean (which is fading right before our eyes -- the editorial section is literally half of what it was, and at least one funeral home lists its website in lieu of actual obituary details for its clients), and the rest to wrapping up The Red Necklace, which added up to twenty episodes (roughly twenty pages per half-hour).

The to-do list is reproaching me, but I am heading to bed anyway: I don't think I've caught the latest whats-it that knocked out at least three members of the chamber choir over the weekend, but I am definitely inordinately achy and out of sorts, in spite of copious quantities of both sleep and dried squid over the past forty-eight hours (in spite of being relatively well-behaved the forty-eight hours before -- I stayed in Friday night to work on a business tax return, and haven't touched any alcohol since Wednesday). I'm hoping more sleep and orange juice and Greek yogurt will do the trick...

Chouette! ;-)

From a bit of fluff by Eric Wilson:

Let's put it this way: Barbie is to Cindy Crawford what Hello Kitty is to Naomi Campbell. One is the conscientious workhorse of her oeuvre, with a heart of gold (or plastic) and an improbably perfect body; the other is more difficult to read, with a sinister streak lurking behind that sweet, beautiful facade.

(Two observations do not a trend make, but I can't help wondering if it's the season for debatable analogies in the NYT. There was an article on an Iowan farmer in the Magazine last week that began, "If salami is the blog of cured meats, then prosciutto is the great novel.")

The odds of me finishing a drabble for halfamoon today are looking iffy (have character, have concept, lack energy), but I think I've pinned down another strand of the plot for "Not As Dumb," so go me.

Also, marginaliana pointed her readers to the prompt post for the gen battle being organized by fox1013, and just reading it is a hoot and a half. (Including fox's intro: "I am in fandoms where bears and frogs go on road trips together and real people dive into human-sized bowls of pasta..."). Too many highlights to provide a comprehensive list, and I don't know if I'll manage anything for it at all (in spite of the short wordcount max), but I want to remember prompts like these anyway:

( People will cross over the Muppets with ANYTHING. I'm not even quoting most of those... )

Reb sure gives good rant:

...where is this personal venom coming from against our inaugural poet and poem? Are people in the music industry bitching that Obama should have picked Patti Labelle or Faith Hill or that guy from Coldplay? Are they up in arms at the selection of Yo Yo Ma? I kinda doubt it. This grotesque pettiness goes back to poets fighting over that tiny crumb of a pie. Poets, forget the fucking pie already! I promise you, it's stale and flavorless. If you ever get a bite, you'll still be as empty as you are now.

I feel compelled to add, however, that as a resident of Nashville (which my favorite local t-shirt describes as a "drinking town with a music problem"), I'm dead certain that someone in my area code -- hell, in my zip code -- was bitching about the music lineup. I've encountered walking cases of sour grapes here that could make vinegar taste like Manischewitz.

Still, it's tempting to turn "forget the fucking pie already" into a button. Or icon.

*wrenches self away from lure of further catwaxing and back to mortgage-paying, laundry-drying, Harudaki-smexing soup-heating...*

At this morning's pre-inaguration service at St. John's Episcopal Church:

Bishop T.D. Jakes, a senior pastor from Houston, used Scripture to offer the incoming president four lessons for his administration. "In time of crisis, good men must stand up," Jakes said. "God always sends the best men into the worst times." He also told the worshipers, "This is not a time for politeness or correctness; this is a time for people to confront issues and bring about change. . . . You cannot enjoy the light without enduring the heat."

Looking directly at Obama, Jakes said, "The problems are mighty and the solutions are not simple, and everywhere you turn there will be a critic waiting to attack every decision that you make. But you are all fired up, sir, and you are ready to go. And this nation goes with you. God goes with you."

"I say to you as my son who is here today, my 14-year-old son -- he probably would not quote Scripture. He probably would use Star Trek instead. And so I say, 'May the force be with you.' "

[Source: The Washington Post]

Clearing away some of the clutter on the couch...

From the New Yorker: A Winnie-the-Pooh cocktail. My initial gut reaction was that this cannot possibly lead to anything good, but a second read suggests that it sounds like a tastier variety of cough syrup. Hmm...

On the radio today, I heard a recipe for pero frizzante, which sounded both intriguing and not too fussy. I may have to try making it in March or April (when I will have a kitchen again, renovation gods permitting).

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From today's New York Times Magazine, a profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman with lots of snippets I want to remember, including:

( quotes on acting, which are not unrelated to issues in writing... )

Yea, verily!

Or, "Oho, so that's what's under Dumbledore's robes!" From a 2006 profile of Jeremy Irons:

He filmed some Pinter pieces in Turin with Michael Gambon and ended up having a conversation in the back of a taxi about body piercing and tattooing. "I adore Michael. He said, 'Yeah, I've never had a piercing but I've got "Laddo" tattooed on my cock. When it's erect it spells Llandudno!'"

[Sadly, this is completely unrelated to anything I am supposed to be working on, but I needed a break from the current batch of endnotes, even though I have been cheerily answering "Syphilis!" when asked what I'm currently dealing with. (The life of a copyeditor, it is not dull.)]

So, yesterday ended up draining me a bit more than I expected - estate stuff in the morning and extended wrangling with technology in the afternoon - so I treated myself to a margarita with dinner (brisket-avocado-spinach quesadillas at the Alley Cat), which was tasty but also made me too sleepy to socialize afterwards, so I headed up to bed soon after we got home.

Since I'm currently obsessed with sussing out the springkink-fic is heading, I picked up Peter Brookesmith's Sniper: Training, Techniques and Weapons (St. Martin's, 2000) for a bit of reading, which turned out to be the perfect choice. You know that happy moment when a character comes into sharper focus at multiple levels -- that is, not just the version you're writing for a fic, but the one within the confines of canon? I went to sleep happy, because I've had several clicks of that kind during the course of drafting parts 1 and 2 of this fic (including one last week where I wrote a sentence, reread it, and only then realized, "Holy shit, so that's part of their dynamic too").

[The daft thing is that all of this excitement is extraneous to the actual story -- it's about how writing the story intensifies my pleasure in being a fan, and wholly irrelevant in terms of whether other people will find the fic sufficiently engaging or entertaining. On the down side, I feel more than a bit foolish expending this much time and mental energy on a fic that maybe seven people will read and two might actually like (the fandom is small). On the up side, it's exhilarating when a story insists on shoving me out of my ordinary groove and into a new-to-me landscape (which would be why you patient ones end up with all these teal deers about process galloping atcha).]

Anyhow, last night's unexpected revelations came when I was reading Brookesmith's discussions about how snipers are regarded by their fellow soldiers:
( the loneliness of the long-distance sharpshooter )

[continued in the next entry...]

In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses creativity - especially the kind with late-blooming results:

[David] Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on [Mark] Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Now that I've finished bleeding words through my forehead my deathmatch with the most recent albatross, I can finally deal with some photos that've been sitting on my hard drive since mid-August(click images to view larger versions). Dodgy quality (they're from my cellphone) but good memories...

( Chicago - so full of yay! )

( squids! )

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The rec:
Trubbleclef's A Simple Misunderstanding. Neville/Harry, NC-17, 3187 words, discussion of watersports, Luna being awesome, funny.

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The randomness (because I have got to stash this somewhere, because I am going to want to look this up again, but heaven knows why): there was an article in the New York Times this morning about people whose relatives' ashes are in Yankee and Shea Stadiums,... ( Read more... )