ginger kenney

You will not find Riviera Shores, Florida on any map. I know. I looked. But the place is there all the same. It must be real; there's even a sign.


One has to wonder about this sign. Did the neighbors agree to it collectively, or is it the gift of one household to its community? Was it created in a spirit of neighborly love? Or resentment against the allegedly corrupt government of the City of Riviera Beach from which it cannot escape? Or in sheer whimsy?

There are other peculiar things about the community of Riviera Shores:

Directional signs are confusing.


And residents have a noticeable proclivity toward imaginative mailboxes.

All images from Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

This is what happened to me on the way home from Florida Monday:

 Two signs in Lake Park, Florida, one above the other, are fastened to a signpost in the middle of a swale between the street and the sidewaik. "NO PARKING ANY TIME" declares the top sign. Below it, the second sign adds, "NO PARKING IN SWALE".

 

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

Were these signs posted by the town's Department of Redundancy Department?

Given the opportunity, the clever (or perverse) reader could interpret these signs any of three ways:

1. NO PARKING IN SWALE AT ANY TIME. WE JUST COULDN'T FIT THIS ALL IN ONE SIGN.
2. IN GENERAL, NO PARKING AT ANY TIME ANYWHERE IN LAKE PARK. ESPECIALLY NOT HERE IN THE SWALE.
3. NO PARKING AT ANY TIME. NOT EVEN IN THE SWALE, RIGHT HERE, WHERE THE SIGN IS POSTED! YOU BLOCKHEAD!

Personally, I'd bet on number 3. But it won't help. Right in front of the sign, a truck is parked. In the swale.

 

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

So who owns this truck, anyway? Yes, that's right: the Town of Lake Park!


Neighboring Riviera Beach has a kinder, gentler approach to the problem of parking in swales.

 

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

I wonder which is more effective.

Google News top four Sci/Tech headlines for this morning, or... "One of these things is not like the others":

Oppenheimer downgrades Apple to perform [from "outperform", a stock rating]

Microsoft plans quick fix for IE [please be sure to download and install the patch to keep your passwords and other personal data safe]

Yahoo to scrub personal data after three months [glad to know that...]

and, oh yes...

Scientists say universe is expanding

Okay, let's assume that we all guessed correctly that #4 is the one not like the others. The timescale of this item far outlasts the timescale of the other three. And let's look more in depth at this breaking news.

Haven't we in fact known that the universe is expanding for, well, years now, if not decades? But the big news here is that we now have added evidence that the expansion is accelerating. And you know what that means... Sometime in the future we will not be able to see any other galaxies but our own, even with the most powerful telescope because they will all be past the event horizon -- farther away than the speed of light can carry their image to us. And we will be isolated in a lonely universe.

The implication of this discovery is that we (well, at least some of us) now believe that so-called empty space is not really empty at all; rather, it's full of energy. And this energy also prevents the further "clumping" of stars into galaxies and galaxies into larger and larger galaxies, which our current mathematical modeling of the universe would predict but which we do not observe.

On a personal-interest sidenote, Einstein has also been vindicated. When he developed the General Theory of Relativity, people (including him) believed that the universe was static (not expanding). According to Einstein's original theory, the measured effects of gravity should have been stronger than they actually were. And so Einstein introduced a kind of fudge factor into his equations known as the "cosmological constant", set to -1. The purpose of the cosmological constant was to reconcile the mathematics of the general theory with observed phenomena. But with an expanding universe, the cosmological fudge factor--er, constant--was no longer needed. At one point, Einstein called the introduction of the cosmological constant his greatest error. But it turned out that the measured expansion of the universe did not sufficiently account for the discrepancy, and this set scientists looking for dark matter, and later for dark energy. And now, this measurement of distant galaxy-clusters reported in the news today may finally account for the discrepancy and explain the need for the cosmological constant by proving the existence of dark energy in otherwise empty space.

And where does all this leave string theory, the ten-dimensional universe, parallel universes, and other approaches not yet  considered mainstream physics? They are not disproved. Quantum field theory predicts that the energy of a vacuum should be 120 orders of magnitude (yes, ten to the 120th power) higher than those observed. So we still have a way to go.

 

I had to go to the Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon. This little bit of unfinished business from my last trip here thirty years ago was the one item firmly established on my agenda for this trip. But there is no easy way to get there; this is probably why I never made it on the last trip.

Given my planned departure time, the Portland public transit Web site recommends that I take the light rail and then walk somewhere to connect to a bus that runs only once an hour. A bit more research on this Web site reveals that I could leave later, walk a little farther south downtown, and with careful time coordination hop the bus to begin with, thereby avoiding the transfer.

The return is a bit trickier because the bus will wind all through the very large Washington Park and take half an hour longer to get back downtown than it took coming out. Also, I again have to worry about the timing. Or perhaps I could walk from the Japanese Gardens to the light rail station on the other side of the park. This doesn’t look close, but it’s hard to tell from the map on the transit Web site just how far it is and what would be involved. I decide to deal with the return trip later. I time my departure so that after only a short wait I board the bus for Washington Park.

The Japanese Gardens are truly wonderful (see my previous blog post). As I leave, I ask the admissions attendant whether it’s possible to walk from there to the light rail station. Yes, she answers, sounding a bit surprised. This is apparently not a common question. There’s a dirt hiking trail, she tells me. It starts right by their driveway and winds for two miles through the woods, ending near the station. She offers me a trail map.

Two miles! Alone in the woods! And clearly these are very rough and hilly woods at that. I’m not sure about this, but I thank her and take the map. While visiting the Rose Gardens down the hill, I mull over my options. Even at this time of year, many of the roses are in bloom. They are very pretty, but visiting this garden doesn’t take much time.

Return trip decision time is now at hand. I climb up as far as the bus stop. The next bus should come by in just ten or twelve minutes. But, having gone to all the trouble to get here, it seems a shame to leave so quickly, so… definitively.

I opt for the two-mile hike.

I climb back up to the Japanese garden and find the start of the trail. Five minutes into the walk I begin to worry. Should I be afraid of encountering strangers along the way? I have no idea whether this park is infamous for muggings and worse, or not. Or should I be afraid of *not* encountering anyone? What if I slip and fall, all alone? What if I get lost?

It takes another five minutes to dismiss these considerations. The woods are beautiful. I am competent. A few people do come by, just a few, and they are as friendly as other Oregonians have been. I relax into the rhythm of walking. The trail is well marked. Not only am I not lost but I can actually follow my progress on the trail map.

Forty minutes into my hike the territory that has come to feel familiar to me explodes into surprise: Here is a trail branching off that is not on the map! And just down the trail, a sign: I have entered an arboretum! The sign recommends visiting the “Maple Grove” in autumn, and so I do.

I sketch the maple grove onto its blank area on my trail map, and I draw in the trails through the arboretum as well.

In the maple grove, two women are coming up the trail toward me. “Excuse me,” one of them asks, “is this the way toward the Japanese Gardens?”

I am pleased to be able to tell them that it is, and exactly which trails and turns they should follow, and how long it will take. I have been transformed into an expert.

In less than ten minutes, I reach the light rail station. I am a different person than the one who set out this morning. I have become a competent old-hand solo Washington-Park hiker.

The Japanese gardens in Portland, Oregon are strikingly beautiful, even off-season in mid-November.

The size, texture, color, and location of every plant, stone, timber, waterway, bench, building, and lantern have been selected to give the visitor pleasure. Each angle of each pathway is arranged for the best view of the garden or the most harmonious sound of a quiet waterfall. Each bench is in the most restful location. Every bush has been pruned to its best shape, one that will most complement the surrounding plants and structures. Tree limbs are carefully trained to follow the most desirable lines.

Even in the so-called Natural Garden nothing, but nothing, has been left to chance.

In the autumn garden, I have begun to suspect that every morning the staff arranges even the fallen leaves on the pathways in patterns of perfect and only-apparently-random beauty.

I have always had a weakness for the beauty of blown glass, but never, until this weekend, have I seen it actually being blown. So everything going on at the Icefire Glassworks in Cannon Beach, Oregon was new to me: how many layers of glass and color; how many times the work in process goes in and out of the fire; how many different fires are used; how many different ways the color can be applied; how many times the glass is blown and blown again before it is finished.

How like a dance the process is! The molten glass is always in motion, and the creators work together in choreographed teamwork.

The process is elemental; in days of fantasy and yore, glassblowers would have been mages and sorcerers, combining in their secret rhythms the glass and powders and grains of the earth, the air of their breath, the fire of three forges. And—yes—water, essential for shaping the glass and insulating the tools. Steam so hot that it is invisible and does not burn.

While reading this article in The New Yorker, I experienced a pang of angst as sharp as a knife. How much I love words has overwhelmed me. I know what Luddites are, but this is the first time I have come to understand in an immediate and personal way that they are attacking me, that all the stuff they are against, that stuff is the air that I breathe. Words are, to use Rilke's phrase, the "rind, rondure, and leaf" of my being. The beauty of a turning phrase. How the tongue delights on the rhythm of words, and the mind on their improbably origins.

So, what shall we make of this:

"The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. 'Well,' Palin said, 'it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.' This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of 'verbage.' It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language. "

I think I want to cry.

Thank you, Becky, for the blog party! Happy 115th post! Visit all the participants at Wonders Never Cease. May I bring something to the party? How about—a universe?

This may or may not be true, but it’s a fair description of opinions that a number of respectable scientists seriously appear to hold. And it really gets me.

It’s not just that all the stars and galaxies without number in our universe all came out of what can only be described as nothing much. When you look out into the darkness of night between the stars, you are actually seeing the distant past from before the stars were born. And the universe is still expanding. Some say it will continue expanding indefinitely, so that eventually all of our far and eventually even our near neighbors will be beyond the event horizon and therefore invisible to us in an increasingly dark and lonely world.

It’s not just that we have unobservably tiny particles with adorable names like muons and charmed quarks. And best of all are the strings—one-dimensional particles tinier than can be detected even in theory, miniscule units of resonant, vibrating energy out of which all matter is made.

It’s not even that they’re now saying that the universe comprises not four dimensions (three of space plus time) as we perceive it but actually ten dimensions. Or maybe eleven, depending on which set of mathematics you buy into. And where are the other dimensions, you might ask? It’s a reasonable question. They’re all very, very tiny and curled in around themselves at every infinitesimal point of intersection of the three dimensions we perceive. There. I’m glad I could answer that question for you.

And speaking of sets of mathematics, there are now a number of alternate theories explaining what’s going on in the domains of the very tiny, the very distant, and the very long ago and far away. The mathematics behind these theories is so complex that only a computer system can reconcile them. The theory behind this reconciliation, M-theory, holds that each individual version of string theory encapsulates a part of the truth, a viewpoint about the cosmos. The truth is: Human beings invented this stuff, but we can no longer comprehend it. At least not yet.

But what really gets me are the branes. A brane (short for “membrane”) is a surface of any number of dimensions that forms an elemental unit or building block of the cosmos. At its smallest, a brane might be a string (tiny vibrating unit of matter/energy too small to be measured; see above). At its largest, well… Some scientists think that the entire universe as we know it is just one brane in a larger structure of multiple universes. Some scientists have speculated that our universe (brane) is connected by a single string (brane) to another entire universe (brane) from which it was sundered during the Big Bang. The connecting brane is stretching and stretching as the two universes drift farther and farther apart, but some day, zillions of years from now, the connecting brane will grow so taut that it will begin to pull the two universes back together again. Zillions more years later the universes will collide and all matter and energy will collapse into, well, nothing much, until the next Big Bang comes along.

Until we can find out what substance the physicists are on and get some for ourselves, how can science fiction writers possibly hope to come up with anything this good?

A thunderstorm is passing overhead. A flash of lightning, mostly obscured by the trees is closely followed by a loud crack and a persistent roll of thunder. Amber, who the moment before had been sleeping by my side, is instantly alert. His head jerks up. His eyes are wide; his pupils, dark. His ears antenna in all directions. The sound passes. Amber rests his head on his paws again.

I suddenly understand that wherever we get this fear of lightning and thunder from, it's very deep and very ancient.

Recently, I put up a Web site about Dan’s and my trip to Turkey and Greece (http://www.songless.com/greece/). That site contains a (large) number of photographs, perhaps 150 of them, distilled down from the 650 or so that we took on the trip. By “we” in the previous sentence, what I mean is almost entirely “I”.

“There aren’t any photographs of you,” noted my friend Karen.

I too noticed the lack of pictures of me when I was editing the pictures, and believe me, I went through all 650 of them. What there was, was a lot of pictures showing the back of Dan in the forward distance just as he was about to vanish around some corner. There were also a lot of pictures showing streets and places empty of people where Dan had vanished around that corner just a moment or two before.

I spent many a happy hour in Turkey and Greece trailing behind Dan. We like the same kind of places and enjoy exploring them together (well, almost together) for hours on end. I explore with camera in hand, stopping to see if there is a picture in this place and if so to frame it and take it. I view places in two dimensions delineated by a frame. I have to stop and look. I have to stop and digest what I’m seeing and compose the shot to capture the essence of the place. I have to stand still to experience a place.

And Dan has to come back and get me when he’s gotten too far ahead of me and I get lost and don’t know where he went. Because Dan doesn’t experience places the way I do. He experiences places in glorious three dimensions by moving through them. He is restless. He wants to explore everything, map in hand, never pausing. Because for him, that’s the essence of the experience.

And here I thought we had both gone on the same vacation.

 Does anyone else but me find this thumbnail forecast amusing?

Date		Forecast	Hi	Lo	POP
Tue Jun 17		Isolated T-Storms	77°F	54°F	30%
Wed Jun 18		Isolated T-Storms	70°F	53°F	30%
Thu Jun 19		Isolated T-Storms	74°F	56°F	30%
Fri Jun 20		Isolated T-Storms	75°F	57°F	30%
Sat Jun 21		Isolated T-Storms	81°F	62°F	30%
Sun Jun 22		Scattered T-Storms	82°F	61°F	40%
Mon Jun 23		Isolated T-Storms	82°F	61°F	30%

Notice the subtle difference between "Isolated T-storms" and "Scattered T-storms". You think they can really tell whether next Saturday will have  a 30% or 40% probability of precipitation? But in any case,  I guess we're in for a few thunderstorms...

 

Call me naïve, but I have managed to reach what we politely call “a certain age” without ever attending an SF Con. Until now. And I have to say, it was a blast! Balticon 42 pretty much dwarfed any conference/convention I have attended since, well, Comdex. There were eleven parallel tracks listed for each day, along with all-day all-night events in film and anime, a LARP, and other special events shown separately. And a dealer room. And parties. And autographs by famous and soon-to-be famous authors and artists. And… Connie Willis!

Of special note for me:

· Meeting Connie Willis (more than once!). She is as much a pleasure as her stories

· Meeting in person a couple of fellow St. Johnnies who are more established in the science-fiction world than I am. I am a fan of John C. Wright, and may soon also be a fan of his delightful wife Jagi Lamplighter

· Getting a lead or two to pursue for publishing some of my stories

· Becoming an on-the-spot member of the panel on “The Future of Cities”. And hats off to our moderator James Patrick Kelly for keeping his cool when the regular panelists didn’t show up. He was great!

· Learning of the simple existence of tracks in art, music, film, and podcasting, even though I attended few of them and mostly by accident

· Attending a session called “Here There Be Dragons” thinking to learn something about dragon lore over the ages but instead learning how to draw the interlace dragon from the cross of Thorlief Hnakki at Braddan, Isle of Mann. What fun, drawing again!

· Attending a podcast of “Live! Mr. Adventure”, complete with commercials, breaking news, and audience participation

· Learning to think in scientific terms about the likelihood that humankind will encounter extra-terrestrial intelligent life (not very likely, probably, but it doesn’t really matter)

· Seeing all the wonderful costumes, both in the masquerade and on the floor

· Getting my head straight about my Web site and blog (this may take a while, but it’s coming)

· Experiencing the joys of volunteering. Who would have thought? And it was my very first Con!

Congratulations to the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and the conference organizers. You put on a great event!

"Four-Month Liquid CD"

There is, of course, the obvious question about the circumstances under which an investor might withdraw his money early from this CD without paying a penalty and therefore in what way the CD might be in any way more liquid than any other CD. Let's put this aside.

In light of current economic performance and forecasts, the image of a liquid CD is just a little unsettling. I have a few investments like that myself. No matter how I try to hold on to them, the money just seems to run through my fingers. I didn't spend it, but very week, there's a bit less in the reservoir. If all my investments were liquid, the money would soon run out altogether. I'm not sure I want a liquid CD too.

Give me a good solid investment any day.

Well, you may just happen to be asking yourself, “How bad could a movie be, after all, that combines the classics with great special effects, that was written by Neil Gaiman, and whose cast includes John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, and a naked Angelina Jolie? Not to mention a villain that looks like Gollum on some very heavy-duty steroids, a villain even whose saliva is terrifying.” The answer is: Pretty darn bad.

The other thing you may be asking yourself is, “If summer daylight is so gloriously long in Scandinavia, how long are the nights there in the winter?” The answer is: Pretty darn long. At least 114 minutes too long.

So now you know. And you don’t even have to watch the movie to find out.

Amber, in case anyone reading this doesn't know, is a twenty-pound Maine coon cat who has been living with us since he was a six-ounce Maine coon kitten. Amber has fur the color of peaches and cream, and he loves to be brushed. In fact, next to eating, being brushed is Amber's (distantly) second-most favorite activity.

Amber has worked hard to give the overall impression that he's dumb. Really dumb. That he'd come off second best in an IQ test against a sack of his favorite cat kibble. And he's generally pretty successful at this.

In fact, Amber's overall success at appearing more stupid than any ambulatory organism could possibly be should have been my first clue. But I am only now beginning to suspect that he has my password memorized, and when I go off to sleep at night he sneaks into the kitchen, gets on the computer, and---he's blogging!

Amber is actually famous on the Web for his advice on how to look your tiptop best. He doesn't know much about fashion, but thousands of women all around the world follow his column for the latest word in skin- and hair-care products and techniques. They all think he's a glamorous supermodel. They have no idea he's a guy (well--of sorts), even less that he's a cat.

He seems to be telling me now that if I don't get off the computer and brush him, he's going to change his will and cut me out of it. He's going to leave his millions to... Gwenny. But I'm not worried. I know he has it all invested in cat-food futures.

I generally hate having a tune stuck in my head. There are some songs I can no longer even listen to because I know that if I listen to them, they will be stuck in my head for weeks afterwards, long after they turn from song to jingle to an advanced torture device best reserved for suspected terrorists.

But my mom has a different take on it. She has, it turns out, been humming the same song for at least the last quarter of a century. (The song, as it turns out, is "La Vie en Rose".) "I love having this song in my head," she told me. "This way, I never have to worry about what I'm going to hum."

Hmmm. Oddly, I've never worried about that either. At least--not yet.

Last night I had one of those dreams where there is a whole other world adjacent to ours and connected by a doorway that doesn’t exist when I am awake.

In the first such dream, I was in a public building, something like the Gardner Museum with a central courtyard. Off the courtyard, on the second floor, was an exhibit room that had on one side a hip roof. On the straight lower wall under the sloping roof was a small door, as into an attic crawl space. I opened the door to find a homey, bright, comfortable apartment. I remember open windows with sheer curtains blowing in the late spring breeze. My father lived there.

My father, who has been dead now for twenty years.

A few years later, I dreamed myself into a department store in Montreal. In the housewares department, along an interior wall, was a door that blended so perfectly into the wall that no one would notice it was there. You had to feel its edges with your fingers. You had to know where to touch to find the catch. The manager showed me and Dan in. Behind the door was a sophisticated urban apartment, loft-style, with exposed brick walls and a high-tech open kitchen. It was my father’s, but he wasn’t there at the moment. Some day it would be mine.

My dead father.

And now this. Off the entry hallway of our friends’ house, to the left, where, in waking life there is a window that looks out, in the dream is a doorway. In waking life, beyond the window is the outside yard. In the dream is a room that had been the master bedroom, but our friends had remodeled the house and were eager to show us that they had built an entirely new guest suite there. What had been the old bedroom was a living room; the old bathroom was still there, but they had added on a new guest master bedroom and bath. All the rooms were new and clean and bright and inviting.

Dan and I would be staying there.

We're on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. All the islanders we have met have been extraordinarily friendly: Life in the Caribbean just as we imagine it.

Dan has mastered the art of driving on the left side of the road with a right-side-drive car but the roads are a shambles. Sometimes a bit worse than that. On what should be a five-minute drive from our hotel to the restaurant, road work has reduced a fairly long stretch of road to only one lane wide. And a narrow lane at that. A construction traffic light is in operation, allowing each direction of traffic to move through the construction zone by turns. It is a long light because it is designed to ensure that all the traffic going in one direction has cleared the construction area before it gives the green light to traffic heading in the other direction.

We wait patiently through the long light on the way to the restaurant. But things have gotten worse by the time we return. The northbound lane is backed up almost as far as the restaurant itself. We get in line. A few cars come back the other way. Very few. We creep forward.

Eventually, the light is in sight. It turns green. No one moves. A few cars from behind us pull out to the right (into the lane for oncoming traffic) and speed toward the one-lane area, hoping to make it through before the light changes again. "There must be a breakdown up ahead in our lane," we think.

The light turns red. A few cars come through the other way. But wait a moment! Aren't those the cars that just went by from our side? We aren't sure.

The light turns green again. Several cars pass by from behind us, and, seeing a small break, Dan pulls out into the moving lane. Or tries to. The car coming up from behind speeds up, honks angrily, and won't let us in. Dan mutters his opinion of which part of the anatomy best describes the driver. "Idiot," I agree.

The light turns red. Dan pulls back into our lane so as not to block oncoming traffic and decides to walk up to the front of the line to see what's going on. While I wait in the car, I see cars returning down the oncoming lane. One car in particular is backing down the road very quickly, angrily, barely in control. I recognize the car. It's the same guy who cut us off earlier. "Jerk!" I say to no one in particular. I didn't consider that my car window was open to the warm island breeze. As was his.

He screeches to a halt, pulls up even with me. "What you say?" he demands. There are two men in the car, large men. The driver has a face as round as the moon, as black as the night. His features twist with anger. "What you say?"

I am a woman alone in an open car. "You shouldn't drive like that," I tell him, trying to be diplomatic. "You're angry, you make everyone around you angry, too. Try to be a little nicer."

"Don't you go calling me no jerk!" He is almost yelling. Who knows, maybe I'm the third person today that has told him he's a jerk. First his girlfriend, then his boss, and now me. I don't know about the others, but as for me, he isn't going to let me get away with it.

I have a moment of illumination. By being angry at him, I too am making things worse. I'm making myself a worse person, and I'm making him angrier. Which will make things worse for everyone he chances upon along the way. In his life. I decide I must take a stand.

"You're right," I say. "I shouldn't have said that. It was wrong of me, and I'm sorry. I should have more sympathy. But you really should try to be a little nicer. It would make things better for everybody."

We look at each other for a moment. He nods slightly and drives off. I like to think: not quite as recklessly as before. But I'm not sure.

I like to think that just possibly there might be one fewer jerk out there in the world today.

Who knows?