Hey fella, I bet you're still living in your parents' cellar
Downloading pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And posting "me 2" like some braindead AOLer
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller....

Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll CTRL-ALT-DELete you

I used to think that dogs with their heads wrapped in plastic cones were the most comically ridiculous sight imaginable. That was until last night, when I came home from work to see Ella in her cone in the wake of her spaying.

There is only one sight more pathetic and heartwrenching than a dog with her head wrapped in a plastic cone. That's a dog with her head wrapped in a plastic cone, stoned on painkillers and barely able to move.

When I say barely able to move, I don't mean that she couldn't stand up if she wanted to. It just didn't occur to her. When we stood her up to see if she wanted water, she just stood there for several minutes until we sat her down again.

We piled pillows around her for comfort last night, and to support her head, while she variously sat, stood or lay on the living room floor. We watched the Chris Rock HBO special on DVR, but it felt like a betrayal to laugh at anything while Ella was so miserable. Laura fed Ella water from a little glass mixing bowl that was small enough to fit inside the cone.

The only sight more pathetic and heartwrenching than a dog with her head wrapped in a plastic cone, stoned on painkillers and barely able to move, is that same dog in silhouette, sitting back on her haunches, with only the drooping plastic cone visible where her head should be. It's like an inversion of the old RCA Victor logo. ("Her Master's Scalpel.")

Hey, we're newbies at this.

As of today, with this review of Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle, Salon.com begins a regular biweekly SF review schedule:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2004/04/30/sterling/

Cool.

Okay, here's another one that really puts me in a fit of pique. I keep reading how something has "peaked" somebody's interest or curiosity or hunger. I guess it's all downhill from there.

But I'm one to talk. I just placed an order for a black-and-tan shake. D'oh! Freudian slip?

I knew I'd be nervous, but I really didn't anticipate how badly my hands would shake when I stepped up to the podium. I have plenty of experience speaking in public; when you grow up Mormon, you give at least half a dozen talks in church by the time you're in high school. Besides that, I've done a decent number of readings and I've appeared on local radio. Always before, the nervousness has subsided and my hands have stopped shaking in fairly short order.

But I hadn't addressed an auditorium full of teenaged writers before last night, at the awards ceremony for the New York City Region of the Scholastic Writing Awards of 2004. It was a humbling and terrifying experience. Laura reports that she couldn't hear any quaver in my voice, but I sure could. The shaking of my hands lasted all the way through my remarks and didn't end until well after I had sat down.

Before my address (the text of which is here), approximately seventy young writers had mounted the stage to be recognized for their receipt of Gold and Silver Key awards in the regional competition. If memory serves, there were three winners from the SF/fantasy category in attendance, two of them girls. My heart swelled seeing these kids announce boldly that they were science fiction writers. I couldn't help thinking back to my first clumsy submissions to Asimov's and Omni was I was fifteen, how hopeful I was when I sent out the stories—and how devastated when the inevitable form rejections from Shawna and Ellen (or their slush-pile minions) came back. What a scary and exciting road those kids have ahead of them.

After the ceremony, Laura and I led much of the staff of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers back to our apartment (a short walk from Long Island City High School, oddly enough) for delivery diner food, Girl Scout cookies, lots of beer, and Scotch tasting. (The 37-year cask-strength Auchentoshan, served with just a splash of water, was a brilliant highlight.) I probably shouldn't mention that part of the evening, but it was terrific fun and great company. That's why I'm still moving slowly this morning.

My sister-in-law reports that my brother Tim is now being debriefed—in Maine! If not yet home, at least he's on American soil.

Genuine non-colonial American soil, that is.

Separated at birth?

Lest I acquire a reputation for beating up exclusively on innocent correspondents, how about this horrifying sentence from Salon?

Diana, queen of the English-gossiping world in the last two decades of the 20th century, the celebrity princess, was anything but discrete herself (CBS was responding to rival NBC's recent airing of tapes recorded by the princess talking about her marriage and confrontation with Camilla Parker Bowles in the early '90s).  [full story]

Finally, one more bit of news. My short story "Why I Think I'll Be Staying Home Tonight" is out in the new issue of Electric Velocipede. Grab a copy now—and/or subscribe!

My brother may in fact, after another reversal, be coming home soon after all! We got the word yesterday from his wife; stmachiavelli forwards me this story from the Deseret News with more info:

Utah's 1457th coming home Telephone calls giving the welcome news began arriving from the Middle East shortly after midnight early Wednesday: The Utah National Guard's 1457th Engineer Battalion is returning home from Iraq after all....

Once the extensions became public, some family members of the Guard unit organized a group called Rights for American Citizen Soldiers aimed at finding answers about the deployment extension.

"I'm thrilled," said Alyssa Wright, whose husband, 1457th's Spec. Jared Wright, called home about 12:45 a.m. Wednesday. "I don't know if us getting the word out did anything, but it couldn't have hurt. I'm just relieved."  [full story]