Back from a week of skiing, knees more or less intact. We went to St. Anton in Austria, a rather high-end place that has set back our vacation budget until about 2008. Nevertheless the skiing was excellent, the friends were great, and I can only heap praise on the hotel-- great food well served and facilities that included a swimming pool, sauna/steam bath complex, and kid care from 4 to 9 PM.

I did serious "off-piste" skiing for the first time in my life, and not only lived to tell the tale but actually enjoyed it. For you connoisseurs out there, a face full of Austrian snow tastes about the same as in the Poconos so don't waste your money on a plane ticket.

Louis rang in his fifth birthday while on vacation, and his primary interest is still doing anything that permits him to go faster than he safely should. Skiing, biking, you name it. I'm thinking of buying him reinforced Kevlar underwear.

Thought for Food

I have made lasagna. Many of you more experienced chefs out there laugh at the simplicity of this statement, but it was my first time. Not only that, but it was the first time I ever made a Béchamel sauce. Go ahead; laugh again. All I can say is that it worked wonderfully. The Béchamel was what had me worried; whenever I try to do fancy things with French names (like mayonnaise or soufflé) they always seem to separate/melt/clot/burn/collapse instead of blend/solidify/smooth/brown/stiffen. In this case it went as advertised, and I can only heap additional praise on Marcella Hazan's phenomenal Italian cookbook (for the lasagna, the bolognese sauce, and the Béchamel).

My success with the lasagna got me so fired up that I went and made a tagine. These are North African dishes where meat is slow cooked with a variety of spices and garnished for the last 10-30 minutes with some sort of delicious and exotic topping (preserved lemon and green olives, dried fruits heated with honey and cinnamon, etc.). They are a staple of the numerous Maghreb restaurants in France and are great to eat.

While it turned out well, it had me nailed to the kitchen floor for an hour and a half. Next time I will choose a less labor-intensive recipe. One caveat: The flavors are a bit too exotic for young palates. Zoe and Louis pretty much concentrated on the raisins and the couscous.

In other news: This link is for undoubtedly one of the weirdest commercial spots I have ever seen. I didn't know whether to laugh or to worry for the sanity of the writers and actors. And, of all things, the product is Nutrigrain.

A number of random discoveries

Yes, you too can create medieval cartoons! The Historic Tale Construction Kit can be used to roll your own Bayeux tapestry with a very simple cut-and-paste interface.

A lot of people have gone and done this, and the results range from hilarious to scatalogically tacky.


Here is something to either make you want to visit New York again, or never visit it at all.

A copy of Stephen King's acceptance speech for the "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award" can be found here. Whether or not you like his books, you have to appreciate his humanity and his honesty.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

The article above, referenced in a very interesting thread on the topic of how and why editors reject manuscripts , made for interesting reading. Even if you don't get through all of the article, the first couple paragraphs are good food for thought.

In essence, it suggests that people who are incompetent in something (intellectual or artistic) are by their very nature unable to comprehend the thing and thus judge their own level of incompetence.

So that, for instance, a politician who was incompetent might not necessarily have the mental tools to understand what a competent politician was, and therefore be unable to realize his own lack of ability.

Not that I'm pointing fingers, of course.

Globalization, the Internet, and Food

In big culinary news, a friend of ours bought us a box of Oreos ... Oreo's ... Oreoes ... grammatically-challenging "chocolate flavored sandwich biscuits" that I had not previously seen in France. Succulent. 176 grams (0,4 pounds) of some of the finest ingredients that modern chemistry can dream up.

How much did these delicacies cost? Well, let's price an Oreo. Here in France that box sells for €2.50 ($3.14 at today's exchange rate), which works out to about $8.20 per pound. Let's see what else falls in that price range...

Gosh! According to Current Primary and Scrap Metal Prices a pound of nickel or molybdenum falls into about the same price range. Sure, they may be harder to digest, but they're almost certainly more nutritious.

Other interesting substitutes could include a pound of bilberry leaf from Gaia's Delights herbal shop, which is good for "stomach upsets, urinary infections, rheumatish, diabetes, gout," and other things that Oreo biscuits may inflict, or Poly Ac-6a, an "opaque hardener" used in creating homemade candles. For you DIY types: Use only 1 teaspoon per pound of wax in order to harden candles and make them opaque. Hmm, I wonder if they use that to whiten the cream in the middle. Me, I order mine here.

I'm sorry. I guess that all of this Oreo talk has made you hungry--what do you do about it?

Well, at CleanSweepSupply you can buy 3.5 pounds of Nabisco (R) Oreo (R) sandwich cookies (note to you cash-hungry entrepreneurs out there: 'sandwich' and 'cookie' are not yet trade-marked) for $8.36. There's a catch, though: In order to get free shipping you need to order over forty dollars worth of merchandise, which means 5 of these Oreo boxes, which means sixteen and a half pounds of Oreo units (I can feel my artery walls thicken as I type this). On a more positive note, for the true junkies out there, you can have your "biscuits" shipped UPS for an additional charge.

In related news (news about high-quality American dietary habits), the first Starbucks cafes (cafés?) have opened in Paris. How new is this news? You cannot find any mention of the stores or even locations in France on the Starbucks web site. There is a great deal of local debate over the chances of success or failure, but I am largely indifferent. No matter what kind of bizarre concoction the flavor development professionals at Starbucks can dream up, I am always happy with a small black espresso. Oreo optional.

Hopefully Paris won't go the way of Vienna, where some of the old traditional coffee houses are being driven out of business by the Seattle behemoth. The problem is that the old places were quiet, pleasant, and had interior architecture that looked like they were done with taste by Austrians, not with with haste by over-worked franchise managers in posession of an IKEA catalog and a limited budget.

Sadly, like my packet of 0.4 pounds of Oreos, a few of those coffee houses didn't last long at all.

Jeff

I forgot to do this before--I now have the right (until 31 october 2004) to post the following image on my web site:

.

The novel that I started for the NaNoWriMo contest has taken a back seat to four short stories that I am trying to edit plus two others that I am trying to write. And, by the way, I am also trying to get some more consulting work to actually pay for the house in which I do this writing stuff.

But what the hell, the vacations were great and life isn't so bad either.

The next post will actually have content. Promise.

My story "The Consultant and the Kraken" is now up at Quantum Barbarian. Click on the phrase Jeff writes great prose to see it.

This story was written quickly on impulse and I liked it so much that I sent it right in without running it through the workshop gauntlet. While that is generally a no-no of interstellar proportions, the (excellent) editor of Quantum Barbarian enjoyed it enough to accept it. Please feel free to send love mail to Tyrone Brooks, a.k.a. editor@quantumbarbarian.com.

As a side note, Tyrone's wife Jo also writes great speculative fiction, much more character-driven than my situational or idea-driven stories.

Butt has been kicked. I am a NaNoWriMo winner.

According to my word processor I hit 51,408 words this evening. I'm not sure what the official word count is, but I have been informed that I am among the winners of the contest. 50k in one month. That's epic.

Favorite quote from today's work:

I took a sip of beer. One of the advantages of working for a crook with his office in a bar is that his office is in a bar.
My phone rang.
"Jake, my name's Keen. You want me to find out anything I can on these three guys, right?"
The voice was smoother than baby diarrhea and I told him so.


What? You want to actually know about the novel? Well the beginning has been written, and the ending has been written, and lots of the stuff that goes in between has been written as well. However, the novel needs a lot more writing (not to mention some very serious editing). The work will continue, but not tonight. Tonight, I celebrate.

44 600 words. I am a machine.

Thanks to a couple of days of late nights and early mornings, I have added 13,000 words over three and a half days. I now have hope of achieving the mystical 50 000 word goal by midnight Sunday (actually midnight Sunday in San Francisco, so if REALLY desperate I actually have until 9 AM Monday morning).

Favorite quote from this morning's output:

"I took the first available flight and zombied my way to Addis Ababa by routing through Milan. Quite frankly I don't remember it--I spent the time on the plane and in the terminal either drinking or sleeping because I had a lot of catching up to do. Besides, airports all look pretty much identical from the inside anyway. All that changes is the contents of the bottles of alcohol in the duty free shops."

Hmmmm. My attempts to change the format of the blog are not working. Try, try again.

Ahhh, where was I. Right. At 28,020 words. Sadly, a week later, I am only at 31,800. This means that, in order to hit 50,000, I need to crank out on the order of 3,000 words per day.

This is possible, but deeply unlikely.

Check out the contest at National Novel Writing Month

As I left off in the last post, the novel does promise to be brilliant. Disjointed, non-sensical, clumsy, and immature, but brilliant. I hit 28,020 words today. My favorite quote from today's output is:

"So look, I'm an honest tax-paying citizen now. Actually I've always been tax-paying. The honest bit is new."

Andi and Kineke are working out some ideas for my web site, and doing a phenomenal job. The test page is here:

www.jeffspock.com

I have decided to write a novel this month. What the heck, with all those ideas buzzing around in my head, why not just sit down and do it?

So I sat down and I'm doing it. Truth be told, in order to give additional incentive to my efforts I have signed up as part of National Novel Writing Month--details can be found at www.NaNoWriMo.org.

Which novel, you ask? Ah, the one about the technophobic private eye round about the year 2015. Brilliant, I promise.

I am a writer. I have always been and will always be a writer. The fact that I have spent almost 20 years in the development, marketing, sales, and implementation of IT systems is simply a clever ruse on my part to mislead the forces of evil.
This blog means that I am published. It does not mean that anyone has actually paid to purchase a manuscript nor that others have paid to read it; but that is a minor point that would only be voiced by the terminally pedantic.
The regularity, length, and quality of the texts found here will vary. Widely.
But I don't care. I'm published.