meril

I realized I didn't do anything card-related for the winter holidays this year. I also noticed that I have a bunch of hockey cards (in good, but not perfect, condition) from 1990-92. If anyone would like hockey cards sent to them, PM me with your address and your preferred players and teams. If people request the same players and/or teams, I'll split them. (if you also are a baseball fan, you may also find baseball card surprise. or not. it depends on how far I get on the decluttering.) I'll try to have everything out by 1 January at the least and 14 February at the latest--new year, you know, in both cases.

The Brewers are not going to tender a contract to Seth McClung.

I am totally on board the Fire Doug Melvin bandwagon, yes indeed, because all signs point to David Bush getting the same treatment. Hope all those old fart veterans with declining skills are worth it! (because if they're not, it's yet another year of watching the Brewers lose. I've been a fan since 1988, I should know better by now, really)

but, once again, nooooooooooooo
I hope he signs with an AL Central team so I can, like, hang out at Target Field all summer and irritate the visiting pitching.

yeah, this is what I break silence for, sorry. if you really want to hear about my car accident, well, the car is OK but my head hurts (but that may be due to falling down the steps beforehand, not the accident)

The Brewers have signed LaTroy Hawkins, and I already know enough about him, thanks (good at setup as long as they don't run him out there for 80 games, yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Coffey, don't ever let them do that again) because he was with Minnesota so long as an absolutely woeful starter. Also, someone pls tell Doug Melvin about "regression to the mean."

oh, and they're still talking to Craig Counsell. If they sign Little CC all is forgiven, indeed, perhaps even letting McClung go as all indications are indicating.

Now, Randy Wolf. I need to know about Randy Wolf. I know about the Wolf Pack and the Star Wars and his brother the umpire and apparently something about this Lieberthal guy who used to catch him, but is there anything else I need to know before he pitches worse than Chris Narveson in 2010?

Yami no Matsuei v.12: apparently not a myth. It's not like everyone interested hasn't read these in scans already, though :(

Also late, here, have some pictures of Oakland Athletics. The one of Jerry Blevins should be obvious if you know who he is. I have some pictures of Justin Masterson attempting to pitch too but I haven't got around to uploading those yet.

George Kottaras is a Brewer.

Heck yeah, it's time for a Kottaras/Lucroy platoon at C!

...the next time the Brewers are going to make the playoffs is in 2034, right? >>

Was attempting to read really old novel by Nora Roberts (reprinted in 2009 in Forever) where the hero was a third baseman for some LA-based team with the same name as the LA hockey team. In any case, he was described as being 6'1", 160...and hitting 37 HR per season. Um, no. I know ballplayers were smaller in 1983, but still umno. Also his other attributes, physical and otherwise, called to mind Eric Byrnes, and I wasn't going to read an entire novel about a skinny Byrnes getting it on in 1983.

charmian and I were discussing Bill Walton, and why I was looking him up on Wikipedia:
"I mean, you can't think that one could just casually drop mentions of giant redheaded athletes into books and not have me look them up, really?"

Incidentally, the Spurs game was on NBA Gametime while I was doing that. The Spurs have a giant redhead, Matt Bonner. He's not quite as useful as Bill Walton was, though.

(response to this blog on cultural appropriation in romance</a>--please read over it first)

I didn't post it to the comments because it would have been a derail (which is, imo, a cruddy word to use for tangential outgrowths, esp. in threaded comments,) but there are some valid points in the comments that I wish could have been made more effective or in a different context.

There's this reason a lot of romance readers use "Romancelandia" as a concept of the alternate world many romance novels exist in. It's the world where everything has to be happy, leading to the HEA, and any uncomfortable details that make the world less shiny are glossed over. It's not just in "exotic" (read: anywhere where white people aren't the majority) settings. There are common complaints about exoticizing/othering Scotland and Ireland. I don't think Romancelandia is created exclusively by white authors. The Chinese historical romance mentioned in the comments was, for some readers, set in some alternate China where bad things never happened to the women involved in that situation (and see comment 184...that was my thought too.)Most of my readers here read Japanese, Korean, and Chinese comics and I know we've all run into various iterations of "fairyland"-type China, etc.

Also, a lot of American romances are populated by Generic White People. The derails about class in the comments do have a point. Most of the contemporary romances I pick up on my own and not on the basis of reading a blog review are by black authors and have black characters. I can find people who act like the people I know there. I relate to those characters a lot more than I relate to the Generic White People who have generic middle-class backgrounds and live in generic cities and have generic jobs. There's no characterization in Whiteland. There's usually no acknowledgement of social class, of varying ethnicities and national backgrounds, or of varying family structures.

It's a multi-headed issue. The publishers aren't buying non-generic romances because the readers won't buy them, but those of us who do buy non-generic romances either have to buy the generic or nothing at all because there aren't any books that we want.

(And I should take responsibility myself for actually reviewing black romances when I read them. Problem is I haven't been reviewing much of anything and my flist is romance-genre adverse in general...I don't like null set posting.)

And not the broadcasting company, although they're failing out here in the Twin Cities; they were putting the NLCS on AM 690 in this market as opposed to its normal ESPN Radio affiliate on 1130.

Unfortunately this is also the same frequency as CINF out of Montreal, so for the entirety of last week I was getting 50,000 watts of French-language news instead of the Phillies and Dodgers.

...and ETA, KFXN is a freakin' Class D station primarily because of not interfering with CINF, I assume. An exciting 4 watts at night, yay.

On Writing Romance by Leigh Michaels. Just in case I do end up doing the War of 1812 Regency romance for NaNoWriMo (2010, that is.)

I went to Borders looking for writing books and I need a book that doesn't assume you need an idea, or a plot, or characters, because I've already got all of those. What I need is something that will give me tips on how to organize this vast amount of research crap I have for each of my projects. Help plz

in response to a comment on this post...

Where is the sff in translation? It, like other literature in translation, can be hard to find but there's more of it coming all the time. Admittedly, a lot more of it is coming from Asia rather than the rest of the world, but I don't consider having lots of Asian fiction available to be a problem. I read about one translated book of sff per month, and I'm not getting all of it. (The issue in Europe of the domestically produced genre fiction being swamped over with fiction translated from English is not my issue to discuss, and the native German reader in my family doesn't read sff. I'm sure my European flist can give their 2 or 3 cents on it.)

Where can you find it?

First off, there is some fandom activity for translated sf; a good starting point would be the World SF News Blog.

Publishers/imprints largely dedicated to sff and other genre fiction in translation, or with lines for translated fiction:
Dark Horse Comics, largely Japanese author Hideyuki Kikuchi's works
Del Rey
Seven Seas Entertainment
Vertical
Viz and its Haikasoru imprint
Wesleyan University Press, Early Classics of Science Fiction series
Yen Press

Tokyopop used to publish novels translated from the Japanese and German, but their light novel/YA lines were dropped over the past few years.

Translated sff/sfnal literary fiction I've read this year, published from 2008-09, not released by specialist publishers:
The Other City, Michal Ajvaz (Dalkey Archive, 2009)
The Dwarves, Markus Heitz (Orbit, 2009)
Last Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko (Hyperion, 2009)
Death in Spring, Merce Rodoreda (Open Letter, 2009)
Moribito, Nahoko Uehashi (Scholastic, 2008)

I sadly wasn't able to attend this year's Worldcon in Montreal, but other members of my APA did and one brought back some fantasy stories translated from the French, from a French publisher. There's a note in there about British releases of translated French fantasy. A lot of the Scandinavian crime fiction that's become so popular in English lately was published in the UK first.

Yes, that deserves all caps.

I have had a teensynetwork of one laptop (running XP,) a desktop (running ME) and a cable modem/VoIP device hooked to a Linksys WRT54G for about 6 years. I haven't had a problem with it and its connectivity and range until this year. The laptop works throughout the house, on all floors, but nothing else I've acquired will. My aunt moved in this month and I've been trying to put her PC (XP again) on the network. Nothing gives. I thought it may have been the wireless USB adapter, but I have a feeling it's not as it can't lock on to the network--it can see it, but it's not there. It's not a problem with WPA or WEP authentication, as I turned off all security just to test something out and it cannot connect at all.

Also, my iPod touch can't connect to it when it's in the basement either, and I can't get the Nintendo DS or the Eee (running factory-shipped Linux install) to connect to it when it needs to authenticate.

I have seen it suggested, at Ask MeFi and other places, that flashing my firmware with dd-wrt may resolve the problem, but I do not know. It looks like a router range issue at its heart, but I know nothing.

I also bought a new Linksys router, model WRT160N, but I have seen indications that it will not work as directed with the 802.11b and g hardware I have (in other words, solving the range issue.) I have not opened this router box yet.

HELP MEEEEEE PLEASE

Is anyone else reading this manga? There are only 5 volumes out in English so far, which sucks because I'm hooked on it. It's best described as secondary-world military sf of a sort. I really like the theme, that being "peace is hard but rebuilding is necessary and the best work one can do." Also, the character dynamic between Malvin and Oland is another rare example of my bulletproof fictional preference.

I just finished the new Iain Banks novel, Transition, and if I hadn't enjoyed every Banks novel I had read beforehand I would be giving him up for the same reason I gave up on Ken MacLeod; this book was so anvilicious that the dude owes Acme royalties. (I looked up the Anvilicious trope on TVTropes and I was surprised that someone else read it and agreed.) It doesn't even matter that I agreed with the heavy morals flying all over the place. It got in the way of the plot, what plot there was, and there were too many unforgivable inconsistencies in the worldbuilding. (The worldbuilding would have got in the way of the anvils.)

That's also the reason I don't avidly read YA, for that matter. It's not so much a matter of overly didactic literature as it is of massive amounts of hidden agendas that make the storytelling fail out.

reading-related injury! surprisingly, this has never happened to me. yet.

I never particularly thought of Mountain Dew as a gendered drink. I've always associated it with occupations and hobbies where one needs a load of cold-delivery caffeine to keep awake.

I've been reading perfume blogs for the heck of it, mainly trying to find a scent with lychee notes other than that new PS I Love You from Bath and Body Works as I don't really trust them to keep selling it beyond this season. Any assistance?

I also notice, via the same perfume blogs, that dark lipstick colors just may be back for this season. If that is the case I need to stock up. The colors I mainly use are MAC's Cyber and Benefit's Ms Behavin and neither were really the deep shiny purple I was looking for.

Ernest Hemingway explains every exploding writer kerfuffle you've seen on LJ!

"He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment." (from A Moveable Feast, discussing Ezra Pound)

and from earlier in the book:
"In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career ... ."

I'm not going to determine whether or not that view of Stein was inaccurate or a slur but I think we all know or know of writers who are exactly that way.

You know, at least the Republican Party is a bit more honest about being for thin white rich heterosexual Christian males.

(brought to you by reading pieces on food policy and health care reform. Every day, I'm reminded that my votes last November were votes against, not votes for.)