The Christmas Exchange Ratio and Other Tales
Well, hell, you have to blog at some point. Might as well be now.
Christmas was pretty terrific, including my sons and Cath and Cath's guy and
Ky's gal. We were missing Junie but you can't have everything. The
trade was respectable and equitable among our inner circle. Gifts from
outside our little circle tended to reduce the get-to-give ratio substantially,
however. Not to name names, but one of the siblings to whom I directed a
Balinese drum sent me a ball cap and coffee mug. Verizon was running a phone special if you re-upped for 2 years,
which I was going to do anyway. Junie and I got new phones that were the
equivalent of sensible shoes, if you ever read any English murder mysteries.
The boys got these ridiculously cool Samsung Jukes with cameras and MP3 players
and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to receive instructions from the
owner telepathically. The Jukes are slim and elegant and fold open like a
high-tech jackknife. If you own one of these, you have to grow a small
ponytail and answer "Talk to me" like some famous director. Cath got me an
immersion blender, which I badly wanted. Of course, so did Junie, but I
knew what Cath was up to from the Sons' Intelligence Network so I ungifted and
regifted the first immersion blender back to Junie and it was all good again.
I got Cath a selection of Spanish culinary things from
www.latienda.com, which actually has
absolutely everything I've ever eaten in Spain except perhaps fresh seafood.
The pièce de résistance of the Spanish collection was a quarter leg of Jamon
Serrano, which is the wondrous cured pork product that I have as the first
course any time I'm in Spain. For 50 years, the Other White Meat lobby
managed to keep it out of the country, and for that matter, prosciutto too.
Not that that kept John, the president of the US foundry, from importing it when
we had copper processing operations in Bilbao (see a former post on how he
smuggled Bordeaux in under 100 tons of slag). John would just order one of
the returning Americans to purchase an entire leg of ham from El Corte Ingles
and pack it in a suitcase surrounded by green coffee beans. I guess he
figured if you can smuggle dope in that way, why not ham? It worked,
actually, and for good measure John would tell them to put a couple of dozen
Cuban cigars in the suitcase right next to the ham. As far as I know
nobody went to jail until the EPA indicted the top 15 people at the Illinois
plant that John owned, but that was for creating a 10 mile-wide plume of heavy
metals beneath the plant illegally over the course of 15 years. John of
course got off without even an slap on the wrist, as he had bribed all the
proper Illinois judges and contributed heavily to both sides of the state reps
and senators.
But, I digress. Christmas was, as I said, pretty wonderful and a break
from the insane work that has occupied my time of late. The good part is
the work on Many Mountains Moving. Malinda is the managing editor
of Number 18 and doing a bang-up job. My support role at this point is
proofing the copy coming back from the person who pours Word docs into InDesign.
I also write the scripts that manage the email traffic to our contributors, so
that they get galley proofs and their responses (contact information, desired
correction, that kind of thing) get back to Malinda and her crew (Jeannine, if
you're listening in, you're next up for galleys). The
somewhat-less-than-good part has been all the work I've been doing on SlowDown.
This is the algorithm that stretches out audio books. I have been close
for 8 weeks now and the bad news is that I promised to do this in 2 man-weeks,
which is all I'll get paid for. I actually don't consider it a project
now, I think of it as a hobby. I know way more than I ever wanted
to know about PSOLA, WSOLA, attack, pitch detection and the like. I've
read the technical papers of everyone who's anyone, actually spending $100 in
fees to obtain back presentations and US patent filings. I'm close, but
then, I've been close for a month. This is really getting irritating.
On another front, I've almost completed the second of two poetry book reviews
for A Major Literary Journal. The first review was terrible and wonderful
and very difficult to write, mainly due to the unusually somber subject of the
work. The second review is going a lot more easily because I like the work
and I like the poet. My biggest problem is that (of course) I've read all
the blurbs and the few reviews that are extant. Every one of them shoehorn
the book into some Grand Theme and deduce what must be the narrative arc.
Hello! What if there is no narrative arc, I'm thinking. What if it's
just a great collection of poetry, like the old days when we didn't have to
write 60 poems keeping in mind that the only way they would get published was if
someone could find the Grand Unifying Theme in all those poems about came
to mind in the fertile imagination of the poet over the course of a year or two?
I'm probably sensitive about this because the lack of a narrative arc is the
usual complaint about my manuscript, which is after all, just a collection of
poems I wrote over a number of year about whatever struck my fancy. And
I'm a guy who gets bored easily and changes the topic frequently and likes to
experiment and so you can imagine the challenge in making up a manuscript from
poems published in a wide variety of litmags on a wide range of topics.
Oh, heck, it's not that important. Next Wednesday, Der and I will be
driving to Linda and Roy's ranchette for this big post-Christmas Christmas where
my siblings and my parents and the Little Brown Babies will be in attendance.
My dad called last night to say he wanted to pay for a "big SUV with
all-wheel-drive and lots of metal around you to protect my progeny" or something
so who am I to complain? I rented it today. We'll be seeing Der's
roommate Max in Las Vegas and maybe staying overnight with his parent and maybe
not. Max is a nature buff and suggested that while we are in Las Vegas
(which is the most outrageous place on the planet and should be in the top 5 on
everyone's list of places to visit before they die) we should see the desert or
go rock climbing. Omigod. You have to be kidding me. There are
frigging rocks and deserts damned near everywhere, but there is only one Las
Vegas and Der is going to see the shrunk down Paris and New York and Venice and
the Luxor and the lights and the size of the gambling area at the Hilton and all
the unbelievable wonderment of Sin City. Then, we travel to SLO by mostly
Blue Roads (if you ever read that book by William Least Heat Moon, which I
thought was the strangest combination of Native American and physicist monikers
I'd ever encountered), and land at Casa Rawlings. On the way back, Der is
going to spend a day and a night in San Francisco while I visit client in The
Valley. I've suggested the usual: Chinatown, City Lights, North
Beach, oh you know.
I hope you all had pleasant holidays and continue to do so. I'm having
dinner with Dima and Tanya tomorrow night, which is always a pleasant surprise
from a culinary standpoint.
Be good.
I
have received another wondrous volume of ZYZZYVA, whose cover art appears
to be an uncharacteristic member of the French Foreign Legion. The first
20-odd pages are, as usual, decorated with advertising from San Francisco's
finest: Pier 23 Cafe, Barrish Bail Bonds, Skylight Books among others, and
I relish this section as much as the actual literature. Howard notes that
the Editor's Notes have been replaced by entries in his
which
is either his second or third in his first year as a software engineer (counting
the one he got immediately upon being hired). Der actually played in two
of the 
all
my Christmas stuff in one day. Saturday, I got up at 4 AM and got all the
e-Presents out of the way. I found these cool Javanese drums for two of my
siblings. I ran to the 24-hour Walmart to find more wrapping paper, even
though I ended up getting most of the good stuff later at Target. I found
boxes and prepared FedEx stickers and had some breakfast. At this point,
everything was open and I hit the stores. My list included baby toys, as
my 3 nieces/nephews all have small children. I found these excellent furry
action figures that sang Christmas carols in their native tongue when you
pressed on their tummy. The duckling actually does most of Jingle Bells in
quacks. I decided not to drag out my giant tree and opted for a new 2-foot
variety that fits on the end table next to the OED. It's just the size to
put Junie's gifts, which are all really small. Mom and Dad got one of
those picture frames that rotate among images loaded from a USB stick or WiFi,
complements of Best Buy. By the by, I'm not worried about telling you this
because my family never reads my blog, no matter how many times I give them the
URL. By noon, I had a whole car full of gifts, wrapping paraphernalia and
Christmas decorations. It was time to wrap to Windham Hill's December.
Two hours and a lot of gold foil, ribbon and bows later, I was done. Mind
you, I wasn't drinking wine yet. Next came the corporate Xmas cards.
I had bought some dandy serious-but-fanciful cards that I could write something
on, stick in my biz card, and send to my best clients. I also had bought
some funny Xmas cards (picture reindeer with bumper stickers) that I sent to
friends and family. I had cards+cash to integrate and place in the two
Main Boxes that were destined for the NoCal Clan and SoCal Clan, who are having
separate but equal Christmas celebrations this year. The cards+cash were
actually Xmas cards with a note and an American Express gift card. I
figured, why would you get someone a Starbucks gift certificate when you can get
them Amex or Visa and they can get what they want? These, of course, were
for my nieces/nephews in the 18-to-25 year range, an age occupied by people who
can always use money or its surrogate. My older nieces/nephews in the
NoCal contingent, plus my sister Lin opted to have me lump all the present money
in a check to Lin, who would buy presents for the children of a family they know
and help. That's so Linda and Roy, actually, who have this ranchette in
Central CA and a half-dozen horses. But, I digress. I still had to
box everything up, slap on the FedEx Ground sticker on the two gift
megashipments, and relax with a glass of wine. It was something like 8 PM
at this point, and everything was done: Christmas ornamentation was
complete, holiday cards were out, gifts for 20+ people were done, corporate
clients were