We didn’t get a total eclipse here in northern Colorado, but it came close—about 94% covered, according to one source. I wasn’t about to point my eyes or a camera at the sun to get pictures, though.

I was thinking about doing what I’ve done before: set up a pair of binoculars, and use a mirror behind one eyepiece to project an image of  the sun onto a screen or a light-coloured wall. With 7×50 binoculars you can get a projected image three feet across pretty easily. It works for looking at sunspots, too. The hardest part is getting the binoculars pointing at the sun safely (that is, without looking through the things—I don’t need to tell anyone how stupid that would be) and keeping them pointing at the sun as it moves.

But I didn’t take the time for that. Instead, I just got some pictures of the crescent shapes on the ground under the trees, which are still pretty cool.

. . . ACTUALLY, I don’t really have any. I stopped doing New Year Resolutions years ago, because I never kept them and it became pretty obvious to me that I really never would.

The truth is, I sort of make resolutions all year round; that is, on any given day I might make some decision that there’s something I’m going to do, or stop doing. Then I try my best to stick to it. Making a point of setting goals for the following ENTIRE YEAR then trying to make those happen really doesn’t work for me.

Example: you make a New Year resolution to, say, quit smoking, and you do. And you make it to February 1 before something stresses you to the point where there are two choices: (1) light one up, or (2) tear someone’s head off. So you light up. And that’s it—you’ve broken the resolution, so you think to yourself that you’ve failed and you might as well give up trying to give up. Until the next New Year comes round and maybe you’ll set another New Resolution. Wouldn’t it be better to just make a February 2 resolution to try again?

Yeah, I know, I’m kinda waffling here. It’s one of those days.

Ok, so here’s a short list of a few things I know I’d really like to get done over the new few weeks or months. This is as close to a list of resolutions as it’s likely to get:

• Clean my desk up. It’s a damned mess.
• Get the garage sorted out. Right now there are two sofas and a stove in there that need to be sold or donated or otherwise disposed of, and I’d like to clear the space so that I can use the garage as a garage. (The reason for the sofas still being there is that, despite being years old, they’re really comfortable and I’ll be sorry to see them go. But we don’t have room for them and I have to be realistic.)
• Write at least two full length books before, say, the end of August. The Artemis sequel will be one of those, for sure. And since I’ve as good as decided to make Artemis a trilogy, the sequel to the sequel might very well be the other. We’ll see.
• Learn to play the piano. Seriously. Some time ago, Kate bought me this really nice keyboard that comes with teaching software, but I just couldn’t seem to master it and the thing’s been sitting behind my office chair gathering dust. See the picture. Nice, huh? I’d like to see about some actual lessons with a teacher, if it’s not too crazy expensive.
• I think that’s about it for now. Other things will occur to me as time goes on.

Until next time . . .

WE recorded Game of Thrones season 5 on DVR, and then watched the whole thing over two or three days. Well, to be honest, we watched up to episode 5 together then Kate watched the last five episodes back-to-back while I was asleep because she had to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, GODDAMMIT.

To get to the point, I’d already heard about the scene with Ramsey and Sansa, so I wasn’t surprised when it happened. And you know what? I don’t really see what the fuss was about. Was it graphic? I didn’t think so. Mostly what we saw was the look on Theon’s face. Was it necessary to the story? That’s a bit tougher. The story needed something that would start moving Theon back to the land of the non-zombies, and there were probably other options. He’d grown up with Sansa to the point where they were almost brother and sister. Something that hurt her would have to hurt him. Could Ramsey (or even Roose, for that matter) have done something less nasty to hurt Sansa in a way that would still be enough to give Theon the kick in the brainpan that he needed? Like I said, that’s a tough question, and I’m not sure how to answer it. As it is, though, I can’t imagine writing such a scene in any of my own work—I think I would try very hard to find an alternative. [Update: A small clarification here. What I’m saying here is that the writer of the scene—whether that was GRRM himself or the episode’s scriptwriter—could, had he wanted to, have done something different, including not having the scene there at all and relying on Sansa telling Theon, in a later scene, what Ramsey’s doing (which, actually, she does, although it’s almost in passing). It wouldn’t have had the same gut-punch but all the same the point would have been made, so the scene was almost certainly not necessary.]

But that leads to another observation, which is that we’ve seen much worse treatment of people over the course of the series. Daenerys and Drogo’s wedding night. Locke’s men attempting to rape Brienne. Joffrey and the the brothel girls, and his torture and murder of Ros. Those are just a few that stand out; there are certainly more. And they were all painful to watch. So I have to say that, while the Ramsey/Sansa scene was in the same league, I don’t quite understand why it received quite as much attention as it did when those other scenes didn’t. You want controversial? What about burning Stannis’ young daughter Shireen alive? I don’t recall seeing a lot of uproar and hand-wringing over that one, and it was horrific, guys.

So, will I stop watching the show in protest? No. My biggest concern is, now that the show has overtaken the books, that the direction the story takes will be more driven by the showrunners and less by GRRM, and that as a result we start to see some really unjustified crap. But that’s a wait-and-see.

Until next time . . .

THE other day I posted a tweet in reply to one by a friend. It expressed a thought I had about gun violence in the wake of what had happened in Sandy Hook and other places including, most recently, Charleston. Since then I’ve been thinking more about it but there’s way too much to fit into bite-sized tweets. Right now I should be working on Artemis, but I can’t do that until I get this out of my head. And so…

Tragedy After Tragedy

CHARLESTON was a tragedy. Why Did It Happen, is the question we see all over the place. The answer is simple, as far as I can see: it happened because it can. Because in America, everyone has the right to own a gun. And as a result, some kid who gets pissed off by someone at school, or a fucktard tormented by the voices in his head, etc., can get hold of a gun and let loose. Result: another tragedy.

In other words, shoot-ups in schools and cinemas and churches are (as I said in my tweeted reply) the price America pays for gun freedom. So when the next one happens—and there will be a next one, and one after that, and on and on—don’t ask why. You know why. It happens because it can happen. Because the conditions that make it possible—and probably unavoidable—are written into the constitution. They’re the law.

Is The Price Too High?

FOR a lot of people, of course, it is. For many, one victim is one too many.

At the other end of the scale are the gun rights advocates, and it seems that for many of them, no price is too high. The body count can go through the roof, and it’s still a worthwhile price to pay for second amendment freedoms. For them, there is no problem; things are just fine the way they are, and the collateral damage is acceptable.

(It occurred to me… many of those advocates say they need their guns in case of a rogue government. So let’s say the government gets out of hand, and there’s a revolution. There are, of course, the armed forces, and they have lots and lots of guns, and planes with bombs and missiles, and tanks with cannons, and drones with machine guns, etc., etc. And the armed forces are either going to be against the government just like the gun advocates—in which case they don’t need untrained vigilantes with popguns getting under their feet—or they’re going to be on the side of the government, in which case the gun advocates are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. Just a thought.)

Note that there can be no line here, no number we can say is the limit. No number we can point at and say, fewer deaths than this is okay, and more than this is too many. Because any number we posit will be too high for those at one end of the spectrum and too low for those at the other.

Gun Problem?

OF course, while gun rights advocates might not see a problem, other people do. And we keep hearing about it as a gun problem—but what’s the problem, exactly? Too many guns? Too easy access? Not enough training?

For myself, I don’t believe there’s a gun problem. What I think there is, is a constitution problem. There’s an eighteenth century amendment that might have made sense at the time, but—from where I stand—has no relevance in the twenty-first century. No, I don’t think there’s a gun problem. I think the problem is the second amendment. Get rid of that fossil, and the rest will follow. And to those people who think you can’t repeal the second amendment, think again. It’s an amendment, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t in the original constitution—it was added later. And just like other amendments, it can be repealed. The eighteenth amendment—that’s the one that gave you Prohibition—was repealed with the passing of the twenty-first, and that didn’t signal the end of the constitution, or of the United States. So don’t think there couldn’t be a twenty-eighth amendment that pushes the second amendment into the history books.

[Update: I read an interesting article that pointed out that the second amendment was intended to ensure that militias had the right to carry firearms. That didn’t extend to individuals—until 1976, when an NRA-backed initiative changed the legal interpretation of the wording of the amendment. Thanks to that, many people think the right for individuals to bear arms goes back to the eighteenth century (in many cases, it seems, the same people who have the weird idea that the constitution says that the US is a christian country). It doesn’t. So it’s clear that the NRA is to blame for much of this shitbucket of a problem.]

But what would it take to do that? It seems obvious that there’s no number of corpses, no amount of spilt blood, that would be enough for some people. In fact, I don’t think the body count would ever be a factor. Cynical git that I am, I think the only factors that are likely to have any impact are going to be economic ones. Now, I have no idea what the economic impact of, for example, Sandy Hook was. How much did it cost? Did it affect people’s taxes? Or health insurance? Or life insurance? Did it have an impact on people’s money in any way at all? I suspect it did—but not enough for anyone to notice, or really care. But as tragedy after tragedy happens and the corpses pile higher, maybe one day some pen-pushing asshole will figure that these massacres are costing too much of the folding green. Once that happens, you can guarantee someone will say there’s a problem and it needs to be fixed, pretty fucking quick.