2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Results!

And a good year it has been! Some of the runner-ups:

LaVerne was undeniably underdressed for this frigid weather; her black, rain-soaked tank top offered no protection and seemed to cling to her torso out of sheer rage, while her tie-dyed boa scarf hung lifeless around her neck like a giant, exhausted, pipe cleaner recently discarded after near-criminal overuse by an obviously sadistic (and rather flamboyant) plumber.
Andrew Cavallari
Northfield, IL


As the hippo's jaws clamped on Henry's body he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurrence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury. Tim Lafferty
Horsell, Woking, UK


Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was Polartec 200 (thanks to gene splicing, a diet of force-fed petrochemical supplements, and regular dips in an advanced surface fusion polymer), which had the fortunate side effect of rendering it inedible, unlike that other Mary's organic lamb which misbehaved at school and wound up in a lovely Moroccan stew with dried apricots and couscous.
Julie Jensen
Lodi, CA


Out of a hole in the ground popped a bunny rabbit which had a long thick orange carrot between its teeth and a big splotch of mud on its back that had dried into a dirt clump the size of a tumor.
Veronica Perez
Palm Springs, FL


I'd been tailing this guy for over an hour while he tried every trick in the book to lose me: going down side streets, doubling back, suddenly veering into shop doorways, jumping out again, crossing the street, looking for somewhere to make the drop, and I was going to be there when he did it because his disguise as a postman didn't have me fooled for a minute.
Bob Millar
Hässelby, Sweden


Lady Guinevere heard it distinctly, a sharp slap, as if a gauntlet had been thrown, and yet it was hardly plausible that she, perched delicately on the back of her cantering steed, should be challenged to ride faster, since protocol determined that Arthur should ride in front, then she, then Lancelot, for that was the order prescribed by Merlin, ever since he invented the carousel.
Celine Shinbutsu
Hino City, Tokyo, Japan


Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word 'like' while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.
Wayne McCoy
Gainesville Fl


The highway coiled up and around the mountain like a snake ready to strike because it was being harassed by one of those annoying guys on "Animal Planet."
Brent Sheppard
Morganton, NC


His feelings for Lydia became a jumbled mess, like when the pen slips out of the hole on a Spirograph wheel, ruining the drawing you have been working on for hours, or possibly, the pen running out of ink during the process, snagging and tearing a hole in the 110# cover rated vellum of his heart.
Russell Wren
Amsterdam, The Netherlands


She had curves that just wouldn't quit, like on one of those car commercials where a stunt driver slides a sexy new sports car around hairpin turn after hairpin turn while some poor musician, down on his luck and having been forced to sell out his dream of superstardom for a lousy 30-second ad jingle, sings "Zoom, zoom, zoom" in the background.
Amber Dubois
Denver, CO


Ruthanne felt as though she was frozen in time, staring into Steve's eyes, deep turquoise pools of Tidy-Bowl blue, reflecting back the deep passionate love that Ruthanne felt in her heart because Steve certainly didn't feel anything, being in a coma as he was, so what Ruthanne had reflected back to herself was what she herself felt, bouncing off Steve's eyes, because there was absolutely zip going on behind those eyes.
Linda Morgan
Manassas, VA


Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going.
Gary Smith
Florissant, CO


I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong.
Karl Scott
Brisbane, Australia


The droppings of the migrating Canada geese just missed the outdoor revelers at the inaugural Asian math puzzle competition, marking the first time that dung flew over Sudoku Fest.
Kevin P. Craver
Lakewood, IL


A rather youthful Billy Joel was fascinated when he entered the Green Room at the Tonight Show and saw a group of matronly nuns hastily applying hair color to the noggin of the show's next guest, Neil Young, whose agent offered an explanation from the corner of the room: "Only the good dye Young."
Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, TX


The stench would have been too much for most people to take, but Karl was used to it, having served as a Mess Specialist on board the "U.S.S. Constitution," an aircraft carrier that launched planes off its deck like so many maggots off a hot skillet.
Lupe Amezquita
San Jose, CA


(This One Is For Steve)
Hector had just met Sabina minutes before, and yet there they were, knees touching, faces just inches apart in the dimly-lit room, and her gazing deep into his eyes, which should not have been a surprise to either of them given that she was an ophthalmologist and he was a boxer whose left retina may have become detached the night before when "Mad Dog" Washington clocked him with a vicious right cross.
Ray Campbell
Redwood Shores, CA


As the budgies and parrots descended upon him, Rolf began to regret his decision to wear an outfit made entirely of cuttlebones; unfortunately, this was the first of many a fashion faux-pas resulting from Beatrice's none-so-sensible advice.
Ella Meumann
Lenah Valley, Tasmania


The crater of the volcano glowed red against the black sky, looking as if God had taken a drag of His cigar - if He smoked - which of course, He didn't.
Wendy Spoelstra
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada


Dane worked the Spyrograph furiously, first red, then green, then red again, and finally blue; the pattern he sought was in there somewhere, and the correct combination would open the doors to a euphoria only known to dogs getting their stomachs scratched and parakeets viewing themselves in the mirror.
Matthew Warnock
Elgin, IL

Will She Fall Off The A-List?

Unlikely, somehow:

PARTY princess Paris Hilton is $60 million out of pocket after her billionaire grandfather - appalled by her jail term for drink-driving offences - axed her inheritance.

Wealthy Old Sod

Times change! Hard to get over the old Potato Famine stereotypes:

THE Irish are the wealthiest people in Europe and the second richest in the world, thanks to exceptional gains in property values and aggressive savings rates, the Bank of Ireland reported yesterday.

The bank's annual Wealth of the Nation report estimated that Ireland has at least 33,000 millionaires in the country of 4.2 million people, up 10 per cent from 2005.

It said the average individual net wealth of Irish people rose 19 per cent to €196,000 ($312,000) in 2006.

In terms of wealth per capita, Ireland remained ahead of the UK, the US, Italy, France, Germany and Canada but lagged behind Japan.

The report said the past 13 years of rapid economic growth had been of greatest benefit to Ireland's wealthiest people, with the top one per cent of people holding 20 per cent of the nation's wealth, and the top five per cent about 40 per cent.

Getting Old? Getting Really Old???? Librarians Want To Help!

Left: Maybe spectacles will help? Dentures anyone? Breast implants? I hear they are good for the self-esteem!


Thinking I'm a Boomer, Gabe wants me as his pet project, little noticing I'm not a Boomer, but rather belong to the evanescent Gen ZZZZ, born between August 2 and November 28, 1956. Besides, my vision isn't good enough to read this announcement:

I am pleased to announce the launch of the statewide Transforming Life After 50 initiative for 2007/08. The purpose of this LSTA funded initiative is to assist public libraries in redefining, creating and delivering new and innovative services to our state’s growing population of active, older adults – a population expected to grow more than twice as fast as California’s total population, increasing 112% from 1990 to 2020, or 8.5 million people. As early as 2010, one in five Californians will be 60 years of age or older. And yet, research has shown that the current paradigm of library services for “seniors” does not match the characteristics and/or interests of this baby boomer generation.

Therefore, in the first year of this statewide initiative, a three-day Transforming Life After 50 training institute will be convened in Pasadena from November 27-29, 2007, (application deadline is September 10). The institute will promote an understanding of older adults as resources for their communities and will offer an alternative to the predominant deficit-based model of aging. ... The institute will introduce participants to a new framework for working with active, older adults that promotes productive aging through learning and civic engagement with presentations from leaders in the fields of health, education, finance, spirituality and aging. The institute will also provide training in community assessment and in the utilization of customized assessment tools designed specifically for this project and its target population.

The institute will focus on: 1) current research and trends underlying new approaches to working with midlife and older adults; 2) promising practices; and 3) assessment and leadership skills in community librarianship. After completion of the institute, participating libraries will also be asked to undertake a local assessment of their own community, and then invited to submit targeted grant proposals that would address the needs thus identified.

That Mushy Northwest Side Of The Bermuda High

So far this hurricane season, it looks like the NW side of the Bermuda High (all along the arc formed by the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the U.S.) is a weak point where tropical storms can get started. Today, for example, Chantal, near Newfoundland, became the third named storm of the Atlantic season.

Thunderstorms are forecast to be gathering over the northern Gulf of Mexico this week and pushing northeastward. The GFS model brings most of these storms ashore not far from Tallahassee: The NOGAPS model brings them ashore farther north, near Biloxi. In any event, it’s good that these storms get brought ashore early, because if they remained over water, they would almost certainly coalesce to become a tropical storm. The NOGAPS model is forecasting the storms will move across Georgia and cause intense rains over Aiken, SC Saturday morning: the GFS model is more equivocal, keeping the storms over SE SC on Friday.

In any event, the weekend may be stormy down along the SE coasts of the US.

Last Weekend Of "Tommy"

I managed to catch a few photos before my camera died in the first Act on Saturday....

Left: "Christmas"


There were several significant changes this weekend, almost all unexpected. Steve's eye problem forced him out as drummer: Andy Sullivan took over. Tim Spangler was at a funeral, so Scott Suwabe stood in on electric guitar during 'Pinball Wizard.' Jan Isaacson was out as well on Friday night, and Erik Daniells was in Vegas on Sunday. As might be expected, the changes shook the show up a bit. Nevertheless, everyone handled things well.

Left: Uncle Ernie (Steven Ross) and Teen Tommy (Sabrina Schloss)


Sitting in the audience at intermission Friday night, I started talking to Caleb Salmon. He tells me that nearly all the Salmon boys are in a movie that will be filmed shortly in Sacramento (at a sound stage on Arden Way, plus another location). According to Caleb, imdb.com has information already regarding this movie: "Cats In The Cradle," but I could not find any information there.....

Left: Cousin Kevin (Abram Stein Freer) and Teen Tommy (Sabrina Schloss). Musicians Ben Wormeli (Electric Guitar) and Andy Sullivan (Drummer).










"Sparks"

If You Say So

A passerby, coming out of a smoke shop, and speaking to me apropos of nothing:

"Mo, mo, mo, mo, I'm gonna smoke some crack!"

Erik And Kyle's Excellent Adventure

Makes me blue, because it's been a year-and-a-half since I visited that city with a cinder for a heart.

GOP Prez Candidates Should Fret

Like Josh says:

But if they can't face Youtube how can they defeat the terrorists?

Lost YowTubby Dinosaurs

Teenage girls from Brisbane mimicking dinosaurs have difficulty blending into local society, but they always have each other.

Would they have better luck finding acceptance if they mimicked kookaburras instead?

Helicopters Collide

News choppers down in a Phoenix park (video).

Megacryometers

You know how a microwave-oven sized chunk of ice gets suspended in the atmosphere in the absence of a mighty powerful thunderstorm to give it birth and keep it aloft?

Someone puts it there.....

Megacryometers my ass. Right up there with unicorns and elves and WMD in Iraq....

Vanishing Musical

Hard to believe it could be so hard to reassemble a Lerner and Loewe musical, but if people don't make an effort to keep records together, stuff vanishes:

In February, Jim Morgan, the producing artistic director of the York Theater Company, was having a casual lunch with Floria V. Lasky, the president of the Frederick Loewe Foundation and the lawyer representing the Loewe estate. Talk turned to “Musicals in Mufti,” the York’s series in which rarely produced musicals are presented as concert performances. They pondered possible shows, and both hit upon “The Day Before Spring,” a lesser-known Lerner and Loewe musical that played on Broadway in 1945.

Mr. Morgan received permission to produce it, brought on the creative people, and all was well. Then he discovered a problem: nobody had the music.

...Moving ahead to 2007: It was not until Mr. Morgan had brought on Aaron Gandy as his musical director and David Glenn Armstrong as director that he discovered how little music there was to work with. Mr. Gross gave Mr. Morgan the score from the 1990 production, but everyone involved decided that it was so sketchy as to be essentially unusable.

“There was a point where I thought we may have to come up with something else because it was sort of dead end after dead end,” Mr. Morgan said.

Mr. Gandy called someone whom he thought might be able to help: Mark Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress. Mr. Gandy and Mr. Horowitz go back to the 1990s, having met when Mr. Gandy was doing research in the library’s Vincent Youmans collection.

Mr. Horowitz has been at the library since 1991 and specializes in its extensive music theater holdings; if anyone would know where to look, Mr. Gandy figured, Mr. Horowitz would.

And he did. As it happened, in November 1999, nine years after Mr. Bell’s production of “Spring,” the library bought a trove of Loewe documents at a Christie’s auction in Los Angeles. The material, which included additional songs for “Brigadoon,” songs written but unused for “My Fair Lady” and songs and sketches written for “Spring,” was described in the Christie’s catalog as having been a bequest from Mr. Loewe to “John Morris, artist and friend,” then a bequest from Mr. Morris to the unnamed owner who had put it up for auction.

Mr. Gandy went to Washington and combed through documents, sometimes solving puzzles that the library itself had yet to figure out: this page belongs with this song; this section goes here.

“Every song had a different set of materials that survived,” Mr. Gandy said. There were scores intended for rehearsal pianists, lead sheets and scribbled notes in pencil, songs that were missing lyrics but had stage directions. After five or six weeks of painstaking restoration work, Mr. Gandy was able to come up with what he said was nearly the entire original score.

And that is what people will hear tonight, tomorrow and Sunday at the York.

Why Was Steve Wynn So Quick To Toss Britney On The Street?

(left: picture from That Nikon Fella on B3ta)


Is she a bad influence? I mean, come on, what's a little scuffle between the paparazzi and the bodyguard?

N2O Explosion Kills Three

Private sector spacefaring appears just as dangerous as government spacefaring:

Authorities today identified three workers who were killed in an explosion on the edge of Kern County's Mojave airport during the test of a propellant system for a pioneering private spaceship.

The dead, all employees of Scaled Composites, were Eric Dean Blackwell, 38, of Randsburg; Charles Glenn May, 45, of Mojave; and Todd Ivens, 33, of Tehachapi.

...Three others also were badly injured in Thursday's blast at a private test site run by Scaled Composites, which was founded by high-profile aviation entrepreneur Burt Rutan.

In June 2004, the firm became the first business to launch a reusable manned rocket into space, a craft known as SpaceShip One.

Thursday's explosion — which sounded like a 500-pound bomb to a mechanic working several hundred yards away — is believed to have been caused by an undetermined operating flaw that ignited a tank of nitrous oxide.

Authorities said the blast occurred about 2:30 p.m. at a remote site on the northeastern fringe of Mojave airport, a small, county-run commercial facility about 95 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

Rutan, looking tired and disheveled, appeared at a 20-minute evening news conference at the desert airport. He told reporters that the blast occurred as the company was testing the propellent flow system for SpaceShip Two, the intended successor to the pioneering SpaceShip One and a project whose details had been closely guarded by Scaled Composites.

"We felt it was completely safe. We had done a lot of these [tests] with SpaceShip One," said Rutan, who added that "we just don't know" why the explosion occurred.

Rutan said the suspected culprit, nitrous oxide, normally is "not considered a hazardous material." Commonly called laughing gas, it is found in dental offices and is used by hot-rodders to boost the horsepower on their vehicles' engines.

According to Rutan, company employees were examining the rate at which the propellant flows through an opening. He emphasized that the test, conducted at room temperatures, did not involve igniting the rocket motor or sparking any fire.

...Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic, and Paul Allen, a co founder of Microsoft, were backing the SpaceShip Two project. The craft, about three times larger than SpaceShip One, is to be powered by much more powerful rocket engines and is supposed to carry six passengers and two pilots.

...Scaled Composites' engineers are considered experts in designing unmanned airplanes and aircraft made of lightweight composite materials. The company also works on secret projects for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's advanced research arm.

..."This whole program for Richard Branson's company is a program that's clumsy for us, because it's announced but not unveiled," Rutan said. "So we have for a year and a half here been not answering any questions at all about the program," he said, becoming visibly agitated as he spoke to reporters.

Rutan said he formed Scaled Composites 25 years ago. This was the first time anyone has been injured in a company test, he said. Thursday's tragedy at the Mojave airport — formally known as the Mojave Air and Space Port — was the second explosion at the site in recent weeks. A June 3 blast, which caused no serious injuries, was sparked in an explosives-storage facility.

In recent years, the airport, while remote, has been a hotbed of aviation activity and has been pushing hard to be the commercial spaceport for privately funded rocket projects.

TNR Schadenfreude

I love it when TNR reaps what it has sown. As Matthew Yglesias writes:

I feel like a bit of an idiot needing to defend a not-anti-war publication's decision to publish a not-anti-war article against an onrushing tide of idiots, but that's apparently what the world's come to.

I like what Digby writes too:

After a tremendous amount of wingnut pressure on TNR to prove they hadn't been duped by an imposter, now that they know he does in fact exist, they are working their way into a complete frenzy going after this soldier as if he were al Qaeda and acting as though the hawkish New Republic has just endorsed Cindy Sheehan for president. It's like watching a bunch of piranhas attack some kids who accidentally fell into the water.

This soldier certainly had no idea what he was dealing with, and I suspect TNR didn't either. (Up until now, the right has been sympathetic with their editorial line on the war, after all. For all the disdain for the blogofascists of the left, this is undoubtedly the first time TNR's felt the full force of the wingnutosphere, which makes our little ideological disagreements look like kisses on the cheek. )

TNR has been flaying liberals and courting wingnuts for years. I hope they are happy with the trade! Piranhas they wanted, and piranhas they got!

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Flaming Hot

Especially when the Internet is involved:

A Navy man who got mad at being mocked as a "nerd" over the Internet drove from Virginia to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

Authorities say Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares burned the other man's trailer.

Tavares this week was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading no contest to arson.

John G. Anderson of Elm Mott suffered smoke inhalation in the 2005 blaze.

The feud started when Anderson, who runs a haunted house near Waco, joined a picture-sharing Web site and posted his political views.

An attorney for Tavares says his stop in the Waco area was a last-minute decision during a trip to visit his parents in Arizona -- and he never meant to hurt Anderson.

Tavares was discharged last year from the Navy, where he worked in Dahlgren, Virginia.

Cat Ghoul

Or maybe he likes the electric blanket:

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. ....Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

...If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.

Fun Facts About Fluorescent Light Bulbs

Particularly since compact fluorescents are the rage (thanks, Jerry!):

Fluorescent lamps are relatively sensitive to ambient temperature because they are low pressure lamps. Optimum lamp operating temperature is 5-25 degrees Celsius. Above this limit the efficacy falls by approx. 1 % for every degree rise. Below this limit the efficacy fails by approx. 5% for every degree fall. Fluorescent lamps should be protected from draughts that can reduce lamp wall temperature and light output.

Overvoltage to the ballast will cause high tube current shortens lamp and ballast life. It also causes preheat lamps to start like instant start lamps - shortens lamp life.

Undervoltage to the ballast causes low tube current - makes lamps flicker, causes uncertain starting and reduces light output. Undervoltage to the ballast can cause preheat starters to recycle - shortens starter and lamp life.

Fluorescent lamps are affected by extremes in ambient temperature. They operate best in the range 5-25 (35 for High Output T5) degrees Celsius. Below this there is a rapid drop in light output and difficulty in starting.

High humidity causes electrical leakage along the lamp surface - lowers the starting voltage provided by the ballast. Lamps are pre-coated with silicone to break up the moisture film and prevent such leakage.

Fluorescent Lamp Advantages:

Fluorescent lamps are 3-7 times more efficient than incandescent lamps.

Power consumption for equal light output is much less than for an incandescent lamp.

Rated lamp life is between 5,000 and 18,000 hours, depending on style, approximately five to eighteen times longer than typical incandescent lamp life.

Lamps can be selected for desired colour rendering purpose e.g. aquaria.

Available with wattage ratings from 4 to 125W. (There are 215W High Output and Powergroove lamps but these will not operate on conventional European control gear.)

Low surface brightness provides better visual comfort and diffused lighting.

Optional dimmable ballasts are available. Lamp colour does not significantly change when dimmed. Power consumed is proportional to light output.

Fluorescent Lamp Disadvantages:

Variations in supply voltage affect lamp light output and starting.

Required external equipment (ballast) consumes energy, adds to equipment cost. For retro-fits, establishes lamp size and wattages that can be used.

Lamp frequency flicker can cause discomfort to some people.

Operation on a range of supply voltages requires different control gear components or more expensive tapped ballasts.

Ballasts may produce irritating 100HZ humming sound - only reliable solution is to replace ballast.

Lamps are large for the amount of light produced - HID and incandescent lamps are much more compact.

Radio frequency interference from lamps may disturb communications equipment at close range. Note there are new EMC (Electro Magnetic Compatibility) Regulations due to come into force for the EU.

Distracting lamp flashing can occur with a glow starter attempting to strike a failed lamp.

Stroboscopic effects can make rotating machinery appear stationary which could be a potentially dangerous situation.

Rocky Road To Retinal Recovery

Steve Isaacson went back to the UCD Medical Center for the more-radical retinal reattachment surgical procedure I mentioned in the previous post, after it seemed that Steve might be among the 15% of the patients for whom the less-radical procedure fails, but at the last minute, the surgeons changed their minds. The surgeons now diagnose the new shadow Steve was seeing last night as a liquid puddle behind the retina, a common post-surgical phenomenon that can be managed. So, Steve now has eye exercises to make the air bubble injected into his eye on Monday work more-effectively for his recovery, by diminishing the puddle.

If it helps, Steve, we can get an eye aerobics team together. Maybe call on Richard Simmons to officiate....