Category: Uncategorized

Nostalgia Lane, in Need of Repaving

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The Fairlee Drive-In movie theatre in Fairlee, Vermont,  is holding a Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to upgrade from 35mm to digital – a vital move if they hope to continue in business, given that the movie industry is rapidly going all-digital.  (Paramount has already made the switch.)

This is a drive-in movie theatre that’s been in almost continuous operation since it opened in 1950, and is one of only two drive-ins left in the USA with its own attached motel.  Furthermore, their snack stand features hamburgers made from Black Angus cattle raised on the family farm of the theatre owners, as well as other locally-sourced items.

They’ve got some really great rewards for their backers, too: a $200 donation gets a room for two on a Friday night at the drive-in’s motel, plus 2 movie admissions and free burgers and fries and popcorn from the concession stand.  For the “go big or stay home” crowd, a $5K donation lets you own the drive in for a night, along with as many of your guests as can fit on their 400-car field, and a $10K or more donation gets the drive-in’s original carbon-arc projector and related equipment, as purchased in 1950 and used at the theatre until 2003.

I have fond memories of going with my parents to the drive-in when I was a kid in Florida, back when vast herds of them covered the plains like the buffalo, and I’d hate to see another one vanish.

More from the Department of Interesting Stuff

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Here . . . have an article from the LA Times about a pair of stolen paintings – a Gauguin and a Cezanne – that turned out to have spent the last 44 years hanging in the kitchen of a retired Sicilian auto worker “who was unaware of their value” (he apparently picked them up at an auction for the equivalent of $30.)

It’s an interesting tidbit of news, and I’m only inclined to take issue with one statement in it.  The Sicilian auto worker in question may have been unaware of the paintings’ monetary worth, but – considering that he kept them in his home while he was working in Turin, and went to the trouble of taking them with him and hanging them up in his kitchen when he retired to Sicily – he was clearly aware of their value.  They were pictures he saw, and bought, and kept where he could see them every day, and it was all about him and the paintings, and nothing to do with who might have painted them or how much a collector might say they would bring at auction.

There are some critics out there, I am sure, who would assert that Sicilian Auto Guy wasn’t loving the pictures enough, or in the right way – because there are critics out there who say the same sort of thing about works of literature.  But I say that those critics are guilty of snobbery and intellectual arrogance – and I ought to know intellectual arrogance when I see it, because it’s my own second-favorite besetting sin.

(My very favorite is Wrath.  But after several decades of hard work, I’ve managed to tamp it down it to “at least I mostly behave myself in public” levels.)

Today’s Bit of Amusement

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Found elseweb: The Cowboy Hávamál, or, Old Norse wisdom translated into Wise Old Cowpoke†.  A couple of brief samples:

You’re a goddamned fool
if you think you’ll live forever
just because you won’t fight.
Say nobody ever kills you –
old age is no peach, either.

         ***

Don’t think you’re the goddamned smartest,
or the toughest, or the best at anything,
and don’t let folks think you are, either.
Otherwise you’ll find out the hard way
that someone is always better.

†It’s one of the Three Faces of the Action Hero, which are like the Three Faces of the Triple Goddess, only different: The Kid, the Gunslinger, and the Wise Old Cowpoke. They can be seen all in one movie in the first Star Wars film, with Luke and Han and Obi-Wan (aka Old Ben) Kenobi, or serially over time in the television and film career of Clint Eastwood.

In Which I Confess to Being Puzzled

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

So apparently one of the things people whose cell phones have cameras in them do is take pictures of themselves. Which utterly fails to surprise me, because it strikes me that, given the ability to do so, it’s a very human thing to do. And they refer to these cell phone self-portraits as “selfies,” which again fails to surprise me, because a new phenomenon (or a new variation on an old phenomenon) needs a word to call it by, and word-making is another very human thing to do.

But apparently all sorts of other people have been getting all sorts of put out by the practice, or by the word for the practice, or both. And I’m perplexed as to why on earth it bothers them so much — surely it can’t be because a lot of the producers of selfies are young and a lot of them are female? Or is it because now the ability to produce a self-portrait is available to anyone with a cell phone camera, instead of being limited to the likes of Albrecht Dürer or Vincent Van Gogh?

Really, sometimes the things other people choose to view with alarm confuses me.

“Make New Friends, but Keep the Old….”

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

“One is silver, but the other’s gold.”

Anyone who’s ever been a Girl Scout knows that song.  I remember singing it once in a bar at a science fiction convention, in the company of another couple of writers and an editor†, all of us former Girl Scouts.  (Though I suspect that, much as there are no former Marines, there are no former Girl Scouts.  Or very few, anyhow.)

This year the Girl Scouts are test-marketing a gluten-free cookie.
The list of councils where the Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Shortbread cookie is being sold is available here.

The main reason for buying Girl Scout cookies is, of course, that they are delicious, and I say this as someone who could easily consume a whole box of classic trefoils at one sitting if I didn’t stop myself.  But this year, buying Girl Scout cookies is also a way of frustrating these people, who in my opinion very much deserve frustration.

The Girl Scouts have always been a feminist organization – in some eras they’ve been more overt about it than in others, but what else do you expect from a group that has from its beginning striven to inculcate in young girls the virtues of self-knowledge, self-reliance, and sisterhood?

†Obligatory writing reference!

More Thought for Food

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

After spending most of the morning hunched over my computer like a vulture, feeling out of sorts with the world, I wandered into the kitchen and asked myself, “Self, what do you want for lunch?”

And Self replied, upon consideration, “You know, what I would really like right now is some tomato soup.”

Normally, under such circumstances, I would inform myself, sternly, that we have no canned or otherwise packaged soup in the house, so that idea was right out. This time, however, Self was quick to add that we had canned diced tomatoes, an immersion blender, and a microwave right there, and the rest should follow easily from that point.

“Self,” I said, “you’ve got something.”

So I took a can of diced tomatoes, and a can of light coconut milk, and some dried minced garlic and some cumin and some Tabasco and a bit of salt and pepper, and I whirled them together with the blender until they were smooth. And then I added some tomato paste from the tube in the refrigerator, to make the end product a bit less pink and add a bit more tomato kick without having to add another whole can of tomatoes, and whirled it again.

Then I microwaved the final product until it was hot, and it was good.

Buried Treasure!

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Buried in a museum, in this case, but treasure just the same.  A lump of “organic material” from a 19th-century archeological dig in Norway had been kicking around the storerooms of the British Museum for over a century before one of the curators noticed a bit of metal sticking out and decided to have the whole thing x-rayed.

His hunch paid off.  Inside the lump of material was a Celtic brooch dating from the eighth or ninth century — six centimeters in diameter, gilded, and decorated with interlaced knotwork patterns.

The whole story, with a picture of the brooch in question, can be found here.

(Obligatory writing reference:  Sometimes it pays to look more closely at the weird lumps of old or unpromising story-stuff that are kicking around your head.  There may be something valuable hidden inside.)

Retrospective: A Year in First-of-the-Month Blog Posts

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

January
New Year’s Day
My mother always used to say, “What you do on New Year’s Day, you’ll do for the rest of the year.”

February
Son of Comma-tose
As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of comma usage is a matter of individual style and taste.

March
What’s in a Name?
It’s a sad fact that short stories and novels have to have titles.

April
Chasing the White Whale
An outside observer, surveying the existing canon of the science fiction genre, might well be forgiven for asking, “What is it about sf writers and Moby-Dick?”

May
More from the Department of Nifty Stuff
Because writers, as I’ve observed before, are intellectual packrats who gather up odd bits of information just in case they may need one of them someday: The scholarly hairdresser who figured out how to do the Vestal Virgins’ seven-braid hairdo also takes on 18th-19th century papillote curls — the “curling-papers” we read about in period fiction.

June
The Benefits of Forethought
A line of thunderstorms rumbled through northern New England late this afternoon, knocking the power out in our town(among a whole bunch of other towns) for over four hours, right about dinnertime.

July
The Return of Mindless Cookery for Distracted Writers
Another dead-simple recipe for nights when your brain isn’t up to anything more elaborate.

August
How Long is a Piece of String?
I finished a short story this evening, just barely making the deadline.

September
Sultry Weather
Hot and humid, with thunderstorms happening in random places that aren’t here.

October
Back from the Road
I’m back in town after a long weekend in Montreal (lovely city, and in fact closer to us than Boston); in lieu of anything more substantive, have a couple of amusing links:

November
Now This is Neat
A Roman-era sculpture of an eagle with a serpent in its beak has been found at a development site in the City of London.

December
Peeve of the Day
Today’s peeve, gentlebeings and fellow wordsmiths, is that pair of weasel words, “somehow” and “something.”

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Why didn’t I know before now that the Oxford English Dictionary has a blog?

(Where I learn, among other things, that my birth-year new word is “noshery.”  I suppose I could try again and get a different one, but that would be cheating.)

And then, from YouTube, there’s this:  a song about Jólakötturinn , the Icelandic Christmas Cat (who is Not a Nice Kitty):

I think we have here an explanation for the Christmas Sweater tradition….

It’s the Real Thing

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Straight out of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, it’s the world’s largest gingerbread house.

What does this have to do with writing?

Well, for one thing, it’s proof that the real world has a lot of strange stuff in it all by itself, without writers necessarily having to make strange stuff up.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with making up strange stuff for the fun of it, if that’s what you like to do.)

And for another thing, it’s a salutary reminder, for those of us who write science fiction and fantasy, that we work in genres where things that in the world of consensus reality are only imaginary concepts, can and do achieve solid three-dimensional existence.  Our gingerbread house isn’t just a daydream or a metaphor any longer — it’s right there in front of us, and the door is open.