Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker’s career is not over. This is both interesting and nice in all sorts of way, both for me and for you, Dear Readers. But it … well, it can get in the way, you know?

The sequel to Nell Gwynne is safely with the publisher; I am awaiting the manuscript for requested revisions, but it’s out of my hands and hair at the moment. “Marswife”, though, needs daily work, as it is for an already planned and partially constructed collection. There is also a “Best of” volume in the works, and so at intervals I get requests for electronic copies of various stories – these kinds of books get put together like jigsaw puzzles, and during the decision process various stories get moved, inserted inside out, lost … recycled twice and used for fire starters, for all I know.

Just two days ago, an idea was proposed to me of hawking some of Kage’s work over in the UK again. Her very first novel was actually published first over there, under the title At the Edge of the West. It had an hysterically funny bodice-ripper cover, and was in fact marketed as a romance. They declined Sky Coyote, however, telling Kage that no one in England was interested in Indians … however, she does have quite a following Over the Pond, and all her books are in print over there; the Tor versions, mostly.

It has been suggested that a publisher might be interested in publishing some of her novellas, two at a time – like the old Ace Doubles, which were a hallmark of our childhood, she and I … books with B sides! Two for the price of one! And in those days, even an Ace Double cost only 50 cents, so they were quite a bargain. The project has some nostalgic value for me, thereby.

But it’s complicated! I am going through the novellas, checking to see which ones have been published a lot and which ones are still relatively unknown; trying various combos to see if they go well together. Does “Angel In The Darkness” go better with “Dark Earth” – both family stories – or should it be paired with “Hanuman”, in that they are both essentially tragic? Can “Maid On The Shore” carry the lesser-known “Or Else My Lady Keeps The Key?” Is “The Queen In Yellow” just too weird to repeat, or too peculiar not to?

On top of these authorial concerns (and they take considerable Kage-channeling, I tell ya), life staggers one. The dryer is dying – time to put up the clothesline, which we have left late this summer. And Harry has chewed up most of the clothespins for toys. We can’t find a spice cake mix anywhere – someone has decided they are seasonal or something.

And there are the summer movies! Broke down today and went to a matinee of Captain America. Oh, Dear Readers, this one is every bit as good as you could hope for! If you’re a comic fan, a Marvel fan or even just an antique car fan – see it. It’s grand. And I only found one egregious anachronism! Go, see it: the romantic ingenous are very pretty and can even act; Tommy Lee Jones would be a delight reading the  freaking phone book, and Hugo Weaving chews up the scenery admirably as the Red Skull.

Anyway: it’s been a busy day. It will be busy days for a little while now. Thank you for your patience, and I will endeavour to give you something better than just my To Do List tomorrow.

Kage Baker liked to be in control of her environment. That meant an exceedingly – sometimes excessively – detailed attention to home deco. Her desk, the table by her armchair, the wall art – all was designed to hold or carry things that pleased her eyes and created specific moods.

Well, isn’t that what everyone does? you might inquire. To which I reply: not like this.

Not like Kage. Most people have some art or doohickeys on the walls and shelves just because they fit there one day. Or they match the couch. Or they get trotted out to delight the see-them-once-a-year relative who sent them to you, because you personally have a low tolerance for the constant company of a life-sized porcelain marmoset.

Not so Kage. There was almost nothing that was  casually placed in her personal space, despite the fact that it  resembled the storeroom of the Smithsonian in the early 1900’s. The things in her desk area were dedicated to an atmosphere of action, research, discovery – real writer work. Even the plastic figure of Eugene Krabbs from Spongebob Squarepants; he was the penate for the need to acquire money. She kept a barometer, a thermometer and a sextant there. The Coke can riddled with a decorative pattern of holes was important: it was her echo device for Captain Morgan’s voice when she did readings (thank you, Mike Rettinhouse!) – she kept it like a ritual mask in a tree, so the Captain’s voice would never desert her.

Icons of comfort surrounded her armchair. All the remotes; a table shaped like a scallop shell; a game about ships played with dice, another played with coloured stones. A stack of books, carefully rotated through current obsessions. A model schooner.

Me, I have always been a lot more casual. You might even call me a slob – while Kage or Kimberly might have a week’s worth of clean clothes in a folded stack at the end of the bed, I have a disordered pile on the floor. As long as I can find my glasses and whatever book I am reading, I have never been too concerned about what met my eyes in the morning. I’ve depended more on the contents of my pockets (I would implode without pockets) than what’s on a shelf or table top.

My environment hasn’t mattered very much to me. Nonetheless, I have acquired … stuff. Somehow, unconsciously, without actually noticing. Looking back on my last bedroom, many of the items that made me feel happy and secure were, in fact, supplied by my sisters. Kage painted my shelves with stars and moons, hung my blue Kit Kat Klock, gave me the Mah Jong Cabinet I kept earrings in. Kimberly gave me my sun and moon throw, my feather pillows, the battery-operated candles that turn on and off like obedient fairies when I fall asleep reading …

It’s only recently that I have come far enough up for air (out of the Slough of Despond I’ve been inhabiting) to realize that I felt … unsettled. Unsettled was previously too vague a feeling for me to identify; like missing an itchy nose over the pain of a severed limb. But I’m beginning to make progress, to come back to life and pay some attention to things like: do I like that colour? Do I want bare walls? Am I really cut out to live in a pile of boxes? My family has been inhumanly patient and kind, and has slowly been introducing things into my environment to remind me that I am, in fact, alive.

It’s like re-habituating a hawk with a broken wing to the wild – only not so noble, and with more Pop Tarts than dead rabbits.

Today, Kimberly and my darling nephew Michael re-hung my Kit Kat Klock. Once again, her smiling blue face is beaming over my room, her eyes and tail ticking back and forth in comforting rhythm. They also hung a mirrored jewelry cabinet up for me, so I can comb my hair (with results that look less like a demonstration of String Theory), and get the random piles of earrings and necklaces off my desktop and into somewhere safe. It’ll look every so much less insane around here when there is not a string of tiny Jack-O’Lanterns hanging off Kage’s Nebula; or a votive light in a sugar bowl in a highball glass half full of dimes next to a hollow blue glass donkey filled with rings …

Time for the Green Man to go back up over my bed. Time for some order around me; I’m not drifting in a lifeboat anymore, I’ve made land! It’s high time I started that cunning bamboo and plaited grass rope water system, like the Swiss Family Robinson had. It’s time for clever devices and everyday joys, and being alive. It’s what Kage would demand.

Kage Baker was a funny lady. She was witty, she was a marvelous raconteuse, she could write wonderfully funny stories. Partly it was due to her skills as a writer, and because she saw the absurd comic potentialities in the world all around her. Partly it was because she had a sense of humour at all.

In persons who write genre stories like science fiction and fantasy, a sense of humour is rare indeed. There is a vocal percentage of the audience that loudly objects to humour in its space opera, first contact sagas , social science novels or fantasy stories. Consequently, the writers who continue to indulge are usually either very bad – i.e., juvenilia, bathroom humour, satires of classics – or they are very, very good. Sir Terry Pratchett is probably one of the best practitioners (and examples) now living.

Kage was pretty damned good at it, too.

She got a lot of fan letters, and her sense of humour was the single most remarked-upon attribute of her writing. Most of the folks who wrote liked it; only the sour ones, the over-grim and Puritanical – what she herself called “The Fanboys” – objected. They complained that her humour detracted from the story lines. She lampooned the type in several places, including the character of the little stupid guys, Homo umbralensis, in the Company novels. Kage felt that a variety of humans with no sense of humour could not possibly be the species to which she herself belonged …

The objections to her sense of humour were not just because she was female, either – although most of The Fanboys didn’t seem to realize her gender. They took her name Kage (pronounced “cage”) as the Japanese word “kage” (pronounced “Kah-gay”): which it wasn’t. But then, female science fiction writers are also disdained by this kind of reader; Kage washed her hands of them, and continued to write the way she wanted.

She always said, she never set out to be funny. But people are ridiculous, and life is chock-a-block with absurdity – them with eyes to see, she said, couldn’t help falling about with laughter. Like the wonderful macabre cartoonist Gahan Wilson (whom she loved), Kage averred solemnly that she wrote what she saw. She just saw lots of peculiar things.

When Kage first learned that dodos were actually giant, flightless doves, she laughed hysterically – it was absurd, that the poster child for “eaten into extinction” should be a monstrous pigeon. (She considered Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens” the funniest story about evolution ever written. It just about is, too.) When she looked into precisely why pandas were sliding inexorably into extinction, she also could not stop laughing –   – what can you expect of a species where the genders don’t live in the same area, won’t eat the same foods, have a fertile period of about 30 minutes a year and can’t understand one another’s courtship behaviour? Pandas are practically icons for DIY extinction. Kage was sad, angry, disbelieving: so how can you help but laugh? It’s a cosmic joke.

History is rich with black humour. The Romans tried hard to keep their subject people out of the Eternal City. They knew there was a limit to how many people could share all the neato fruits of civilization: like civic plumbing. Plumbing in lead pipes. Lead pipes which made the Romans sterile and left their kids mentally deficient. Luckily for the generations immediately after Rome fell to the encroaching barbarians, running water went extinct for a while and general intelligence had a chance to recover.

Academia is full of jokes. The first Neanderthal skeleton was put together wrong, and no one noticed the original owner had had bad arthritis; hence, the simian posture. That contretemps struck Kage as even funnier than Piltdown Man, who was at least conceived by some honestly larcenous villain out for fame and good English fossils.

Then there were the paleontologists Cope and Marsh, whose rivalry over American dinosaur bones was so fierce that they had their minions blow up and destroy bones they couldn’t ship home – just to keep them out of one another’s hands. They were so eager to display new specimens that Marsh, in thoughtless haste, originally attached the head of the first brontosaurus  to the wrong end of its spinal cord; it was several years before anyone noticed the error.  And then it was the wrong skull anyway.

Kage loved this sort of thing. She would also love the present story about a language on the edge of extinction – Ayapaneco, an ancient dialect in Mexico. The story is here:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/duos-mexican-standoff-bodes-ill-for-language-on-verge-of-extinction-20110414-1dfx5.html

It’s one of the rarest of dying languages, with only two native speakers left alive, both elderly men. Language experts are desperately trying to compile tapes and a dictionary from conversations with them, in order to preserve the tongue at all. This would work better if they could tape the two old gentlemen speaking Ayapaneco to one another: but the guys won’t. They don’t like one another, and refuse to exchange words. They say they have nothing in common.

This one would have had Kage in hysterics. “Good God, they’re linguistic pandas!” I can hear her cry. “There’s gotta be a story in this!”

Maybe there is. But you have to keep your sense of humour.

Kage Baker was, as is well-known, very fond of rum. And she was very fond of pirates. Her favourite pirate was Captain Sir Henry Morgan, in that he was one of the few really, really successful pirates – died knighted, a rich man, in his own bed, surrounded by his family. Her favourite rum was Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum – because the Captain Morgan on the label was such a jolly, villainous, black-bearded fellow.

Also, the rum tasted great. Kage drank it mixed with everything. One of her better creations (at least, so the audience at the time decided) was something called a Jamaican Bobsled: Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum and chocolate milk; because, Kage said, it went down easy and you crashed at the bottom. It was served over ice, if you had any, because to have warmed it would have resulted in combustion.

Our own beloved Wayne Fisher is, I think, the last survivor of the initial creation of this drink. I remember him and Kage chugging it happily after Faire hours in the Innyard, giggling and glowing faintly … and yet another dear friend, Tom Barclay, has this very morning as is sent me information on a Captain Morgan link just as splendid and strange.

Captain Morgan’s Rum has just contributed to a most amazing and wonderful discovery: cast your eyes, Dear Readers, on this!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/08/captain-morgans-pirate-ship-found-in-panama.html

One of Captain Morgan’s ships has been found off Panama (which still remembers him, though not with joy), sunk near Lajas Reef. it appears to be one of the 5 ships he lost in a bloody battle  in 1671.Back in 2008, the archeologists responsible found a full half-dozen cannons they were convinced were Morgan’s, but they ran out of money before they could get any further. And here’s where the miracle happens.

Captain Morgan USA – the company that makes the blessed stuff – stepped in. With a grant. Lots and lots of money, including enough for the magnetometer study that let the team find the actual ship herself.

So rejoice, drinkers of Captain Morgan’s Rum! The good money we’ve all laid out for that splendid potable has gone to find Morgan’s own ship. Complete with cargo, still safely sealed in coral … wonder what they’ll find in there?

Thus does vice fund virtue, excess pay for saving something precious, and indulgence in good rum contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Kage, should she be aware of this, is doubtless both gratified and unsurprised – it’s exactly the way she thought the Universe should work.

Are any of you familiar with the work of Jack Horner? Well, actually, I can state with confidence that you are, although you may not be aware of just how much. Dr. Horner is a paleontologist, one of the two most vocal proponents of the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs. He is an expert on the reproductive strategies of dinosaurs (a subject hitherto unexplored by anyone else); he established that dinosaurs flocked, built nests, cared for their young … he is the inspiration for the heroic Dr. Allen Grant in Jurassic Park.

However, before he was famous, Dr. Horner was an impoverished grad student who needed funding for a summer dig in the Badlands of Montana. His adviser told him to write and request funds from companies whose products he used a lot – they were the likeliest to give funds for projects. Upon consideration of what products he used the most, Horner sent a grant request to the Ranier Brewing Company, of whose iconic Ranier Ale (renowned for being cheap, strong, and inexplicably smelling like skunks when first opened) he felt he consumed a grant-worthy amount.

Astoundingly, Ranier Brewing said yes. And funded Horner’s digs long enough for him to establish his reputation, and become one of the best-known and most innovative paleontologists in the world. If you look closely at the beginning of Jurassic Park, the scene where Grant comes roaring into his lab trailer to confront the old nutcase who is interrupting his dig, there is a brief shot of a 16-oz Ranier Ale can on the counter … homage, Dear Readers, to one of the funnier and more successful grant collaborations in recent history.

Kage loved that story. Partly for Hunter’s chutzpah and honesty, partly because – during the blurriest parts of our misspent youth – Ranier Ale was our tipple of choice, too.

Good old Rainier – Rainy Ale, Skunk Ale, Vitamin R, Green Death; its aficianados had lots of affectionate names for it. But when you came right down to it, the stuff was a good cheap drink for poor working men, grad students and struggling artists. And it helped Jack Horner develop his model of the maiasaurs, the “good mother” dinosaurs, and proved they had all the nurturing instincts of their little feathered descendents, the birds.

Now Kage’s favourite rum has also stepped forward and lit a torch (burning dangerously  blue, no doubt) to light the dark past and bring forth its treasures. Somewhere, she is doing her triumph dance – the one she always danced around the living room at a good review, or a new book sale, or the discovery of something grand and glorious out of the past.

This calls for a drink. Rum for everyone!

Kage Baker distrusted the great organizations being born in recent years on the Internet. She said part of the problem was the speed at which things lived and aged in the aether. Hence her theory that AI’s and algorhythms were going senile at abnormal speeds.

Might be true. I do know that I have been unable to get onto WordPress all day, half my usual settings and information are missing, and it keep dumping me off. This may be as far as I get, Dear Readers, before our intangible cyber overlords shut me down …

But I’m thinking of you! I am trying to communicate! Listen for banging on the tubes, in clumsy Morse code – it’s been 50 years since the Brownies and I don’t remember half the alphabet! Keep an eye out for pigeons with notes tied to their toes, and starlings bearing memorized messages! Automatic writing in invisible ink!

We shall overcome.

Kage Baker, like all writers of fiction, lived in several worlds. Some were simultaneous, some were sequential; some were even consanguineous. Whether any of them was actually the ordinarily-agreed-upon “real” world, I have never been sure. Nor confident of it – she found the real world rather dull, and may have decided to permanently live elsewhere before I was even born.

Kage never gave a tinker’s dam for majority opinion.

Myself being her main audience, as well as an addicted reader from the age of 7, I gave up on caring what world I was in early on. Or maybe I couldn’t decide which one I was in – it’s hard to tell, when you’re a kid. The world you think you live in will become increasingly less relevant as you age, unless you are very stubborn indeed; you’ll be encouraged and required to choose one of the more popular group models on constant display all around you.

The Worker Bee World – the Executive World – the Mommy World – the Peter Pan World. Step right up and choose, there are dozens available, and every one of them is approved by thousands of other people! And you wouldn’t want one that wasn’t. Would you?

Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, I had some difficulty figuring out who was my peer group. Long before puberty, I had more or less decided that the people I wanted most to live with, to emulate, to share my life with – were the people in books. That was how life was supposed to be! Heroism, true love of all kinds, adventure, joy and despair and terror and delight. Pure colours and strong feelings, and nothing grey but the eredawn and evening that framed each day.

That was what I wanted. And, amazingly, that was what I got, for over 50 years. That was the kind of world I lived in, larger than ordinary life and much brighter. Life turned out to be much more like my books than I had any right to expect, and it was a glory. Living part of the time in Kage’s head was a big help. I found the roads that lead off the edge of the known world, out of the lands we know, round the corner and a sharp right turn from everything else. Huzzah!

Today I sat down with every virtuous intention of working hard and long. And then someone turned the telly on, and it was the middle of The Two Towers. The Battle of Helm’s Deep was about to start! I sat down for just a moment, to watch the Uruk-hai breast Helm’s Dike in the flame-lit darkness – and I was lost. TNT was showing the entire LOTR trilogy. I’ve been sitting on the couch cheering and yelling and crying ever since. That’s life, damn it!

As I type this, I am listening to the end of The Return of the King. Frodo is bidding farewell to Sam. Sam protests that Frodo cannot leave – Frodo hands him the book   filled with his writing and Bilbo’s before him. He tells Sam, “The last pages are for you.”

Was that enough for Sam, I wonder? Did it ever fill the hole left in him by the loss of Frodo, and that wild world of magic and legend? Tolkien implies that it does, and that Sam is glad of it; but he also suggests that Sam himself may one day go into the West. When he grows tired, when the world grows too dim, when the last colour leaches out of it -who knows? I can believe that Sam grows content, with Rosie and their children, because Sam is the most practical and sensible of Hobbits. But is he glad? I have never been able to decide.

Kage was glad. Not  just relieved, as one might expect after the long, hard struggle with cancer. No, she beat that and dismissed it; it was in the past, to her, by the time her last day came. Her eyes and mind were on something else: on The Next Big Thing, she said, and she was happily anticipating what it might be. She set out joyously.

I stayed on the pier, holding a book …

I’m not glad, I’m afraid. It seems that the world will never be bright or dark in the same way again. It will never be  … as much again. I miss that horribly, as much as I miss Kage. Maybe more, sometimes; I’m a selfish old lady, set in my ways, and I long to ride out again for honour and adventure. This world has grown so heavy and so dull sometimes.

If I can’t go into the West just yet, I want to find that road that turns off 90% from everywhere else. I used to know the way – hell, I knew every gas station and steakhouse and campground.

And I want to go back.

Kage Baker‘s entire Company series has been nominated to NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Titles. Now the voting has begun. If you would like to express an opinion, please go to:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles

Cast a vote! Be heard! Kage’s work is listed as “Novels of the Company”, and it’s in the lower part of the list. And along the way you might find something else you like, or have never heard and should.

Oh, and if you are feeling down, check this out:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/pia14472.html

Mars watchers (ranging from utter amateurs like me to the real scientists at NASA and JPL) have long hoped that there was relict water preserved as permafrost under the Martian soil. In the last 20 years, we have gotten increasing reason to actually expect to find the water – and we’ve already found the permafrost, and verified that is is, yes, actual water ice and not some exotic ice delivered to the ground via comet. (Though that too would be interesting.)

Now we have found what are very likely flow marks from melting ice, coursing down the side of a dune in Newton Crater. The Mars Orbital Reconaissance mission found them, and they look just the way they do on Earth – melt water, rising to the surface in a warm season and flowing down the sands. Probably salty water (and we rather hope it’s good old sodium chloride, too, and not some wicked cyanide salt inimical to life.)

What’s this mean? There’s ice under the sand. It’s close enough to the surface to melt in warm seasons and flow on the surface of Mars. It might be salty. It is the perfect place – maybe the only place in the current Martian ecosphere – to harbour life. And even if it doesn’t, or doesn’t anymore – it will nuture us when we get there.

Damned good news. And precisely what Kage Baker counted on when she envisioned her version of Mars. With luck and patience, we can be the canal builders and guide this seasonal melt water to real life.

Good stuff, Maynard.

And other than this PSA, we are temporarily down while I do housework and computer maintenance.

Thanks to Tom Westlake, the Lord of Misrule, who was the first one to send me the link to the NPR poll. Whoopee!

Kage Baker was an avid, fervent, dedicated James Bond admirer.

She first encountered the amazing Mr. Bond at the double feature of Thunderball and Help!, which seemed to play all summer long in 1965. Kage went because she loved the Beatles; in those days one could just stay in the theatre from opening to closing, if one so desired, and she did. Inevitably, she saw Thunderball over and over, and in a somewhat clearer state of mind than that in which she watched Help! … she came out of the experience with a high opinion of Sean Connery, and a determination to read the works of Ian Fleming.

Sean Connery was just the sort of dangerous father-type that made Kage feel safest. Not exactly a romantic fixation, though she thought him beautiful – what he has/had is the sort of comforting lethality of a paternal warrior god, a deadly safety offered on his lap or under the edge of his war cloak. She found him dangerous and cuddly, a combination I don’t even faintly understand. My own reaction to Sir Sean has always been considerably less filial and more visceral …

When Kage read Ian Fleming’s books, she was very struck by the difference between the suave spy characterized through so many films, and the public school thug Fleming actually wrote about. James Bond is a lot more like Robert Shaw’s character in From Russia With Love than he is like Sean Connery – who, even when his fine mean eyes go cold and predatory, cannot entirely escape a tendency to twinkle. Nonetheless, Kage accepted no replacement for Bond once Connery retired from the character.

Until Daniel Craig.

Daniel Craig is a well-nigh perfect James Bond. He looks more like Bond than any other actor who has essayed the part – consider this sketch by Fleming himself:

He plays a wonderful thug, and yet takes an exquisite polish: one of the great special effects in Casino Royale is watching his slow transformation from a government bully-boy to the iconic Bond – the tailored clothes, the perfect style, the great car. The deadly cocktail … read up on what goes into one of those things; Bond’s special recipe can induce instantaneous  liver failure.

(Personally, I also think he is utterly gorgeous. Kage thought his physique a little heavy for the part – but that bull dancer’s body, the heavy chest and shoulders, narrow waist, long legs … oh my, can you short out your keyboard by drooling on it?)

Anyway … Kage and I watched both new Bond films with great delight. We even watched The Golden Compass (a book we both abhorred) to see Craig as the Good Uncle. And he was cool, so very cool – so I was a little taken aback at the idea of Daniel Craig as a gunslinger. However, being just returned from a matinee of Cowboys & Aliens, I can report that he is just as effective in leather and denim as he is in Harris tweed.

It’s a good movie, I thought. A good western and a good science fiction film. All the acting is competent, the plot makes as much sense as these things ever do, and Harrison Ford is marvelous. He has the best opening line I have heard in a while, too. And Daniel Craig is simply overwhelming eye candy. There’s nothing subtle about anys well-made man in chaps – but a really good looking one is devastating. I may have missed some special effects scenes due to staring at costuming.

Kage would have loved this movie; I dearly wish she had seen it. But at least I did. I can recommend it, Dear Readers. Now, though,  I’m going to download Joan Vinge’s doubtless-excellent novelization on my faithful Kindle, and go for some good old B movie overload.

The cover has Daniel Craig in leather chaps. From behind. Sigh ….

Kage Baker had an attention span of roughly eternity. For things that personally interested her, anyway. She would conscientiously complete research on topics that were assignments – for instance, if she felt she had to research, say, piano key felting – but she’d eventually stop.

If such a topic were something she really needed but simply could not get her brain around, she would ask an expert. Or give the task to me. I am interested in all sorts of things she was not (another aspect of that sharing a brain syndrome), and would happily spend days reading up on what cephalopods really have on their tentacles (lots more than suckers, I assure you) and then report to Kage.

We were both famous for our book reports in grade school. Once, when Kage’s report did not agree with someone’s Cliff Notes version, it was found that the Cliff Notes were the one who was wrong.

Anyway – if Kage liked a topic, then school was never out. She would continue to collect information about it as the Universe wafted it randomly her way. She kept files, some decades old, on topics that fascinated her; I probably found enough notebooks to insulate an average home when I packed out the garage – all full of notes and newspaper clippings.

These days, I continue to hunt up references to many of the things that interested Kage; also, I just have a fondness for weirdness. (And thank you all who send them to me.) Kage kept collecting examples of the Silly Season: so do I. It’s one of the joys of summer. And I found a few more today …

Some gentleman in Florida is driving round shooting people with a bow in arrow. He says he’s one of the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse. I don’t recall which one drives a blue Ford pickup, but it’s evidently this one.

An inflatable tropical island about 40 feet across has drifted away from a concert in England. The Isle of Glass goes modern? Study of prevailing weather patterns indicate it’s probably somewhere over Czechoslovakia by now, but no one says if the coast off Cornwall has been checked.

Nearby, Bosnia has opened its first McDonald’s. That’s odd enough, but it’s being reported on Yahoo Financial News. Wow.

Not to be outdone, Time magazine reports that Earth may have once had two moons. There;s no proof and no way of getting any, but some astronomer thinks the far side of the moon looks like something fell on it, and it may have been a second, smaller satellite. The theory itself is not as silly as it’s being reported in Time …

UFOs have recently been reported over Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington DC. Oddly enough, Bigfeet have also been reported in those areas lately. (Florida too, but it always has them) . Only Siberia has chupacabras right now, though.

Guy in Louisiana has pled guilty to murder. He himself has been officially dead for 17 years, declared so on a joint petition by his parents, brother, and wife. Zombie crime? No indication of how he was implicated or caught, although one cannot resist envisioning a really, really slow motion chase …

No reports of men biting dogs. However, I did find a photo of a mariachi band serenading a beluga whale:

Ole

There. Having subjected you all to a Kage-style obsessive activity on this hot, hot day, I am off to hunt for a Fudgesickle. The screams from the kitchen  of “Bad ice cream! Bad! Get away from that, corgi!” lead me to believe my search may bear fruit …

Kage Baker loved the annual recurrance of The Silly Season. She said it was a goldmine of ideas for a writer, and a treasure trove of entertainment for anyone who cared to examine it. She watched eagerly each year for the tell-tale signs of its time coming round again.

It’s usually expected to occur in late to mid summer – August is pretty average. It’s the season when news is slow; lots of people are vacationing (or at least staying home hiding from the heat); when all the folks who – generations agone – would have been revving up for the harvest suddenly have nothing to do. So they spread rumours, report goofy stories, see weird lights in the sky and strange shadows in the neighbors’ garages. It’s time for UFOs and Bigfoot and skunk apes and lake monsters. It’s the Man Bites Dog season.

Clifford Simak, one of the Good Old Men of science fiction, set an entire novel in the Silly Season – They Walked Like Men, where a bunch of sentient smelly bowling balls almost take over the earth because the story gets reported during the Silly Season, and no one believes it. Luckily for the earth,s a clever newspaper man can sort the dross from the gold, and find out what is really happening … but he does point out that it’s the perfect time of year for aliens to invade.

In reality (or what passes for it) UFO sighting are more frequent in the summer months. Partly, of course, it’s because more people are running around in the summer dark than in the midwinter – so whatever is there to be seen, gets seen. And misinterpreted, usually. But there’s no denying that lots of folks report hovering ships, shiny strangers, weird lights on hot dark summer roads. Kage and I spent lots of summer nights avidly watching the stars for UFOs. We saw some, too. If you can’t figure out what the thing in the sky is, it’s a UFO, right? At least until you realize you are looking at a high-flying bird, its breast white as snow in the moonlight, blinking in and out of visibility with the beat of wide wings …

Other folks come to other conclusions, of course.

Explanations for the famous Lubbock Lights range from a distant highway on a mountainside, to hoards of migrating moths reflecting street lights.  (Realy? Enormous crowds of moths? Left handed ones, doubtless.) Venus apparently zips around the sky like a demented bumper car, impersonating spacecraft from pole to pole, horizon to horizon. Something flies over the mountains edging Phoenix, Arizona at intervals – while the idea that it’s flying saucers may make you laugh, Kage could take no more seriously the solemn suggestion that it’s military flares strung together on lines miles wide and set to drift over the city like a burning seine net: but it’s been suggested, and with a straight face, too.

In Texas right now, a local lake has turned blood red. Common sense indicates it’s due to lots of dead fish, low oxygen and an algae bloom gone bad. But the local mayor is reporting it to be a sign of the End Times. He means it. And he’s being taken seriously. Of course, it’s awfully good for the tourist trade …

A lady in Louisiana claims to have been attacked by a giant rat with orange teeth while shopping in her local Walmart. The Walmart says, No Way – except for the employees who say, Yeah, that’s just Norman; he gets loose now and then. WTF? Norman might be a nutria, which is a  ROUS that has grown habituated to the American South – but even if he is a perfectly ordinary nutria, what’s he doing as a pet in a Walmart? Is he a greeter? Is he a guard nutria? The lady has announced she is taking her custom to another Walmart, thank you very much. No other solution has been suggested by any of the involved parties.

China has a rising plague of STDs. A recent government study has concluded that casual sex leads to an increase in the clap … Despite advice to the young and horny to choose their paramours from among nice Party kids and to meditate on Communist philosphy, disease is spreading like wildfire. Drug-resistent too. It appears syphilis is not susceptible to ideology, but the government can’t seem to think of anything else to do about it …

Siberia is experiencing a sudden influx of chupacabras. They are attacking livestock, wild animals, and Siberians. Suggestions that they are local predators stressed by something have been met with indignation by the Siberians, who say they certainly know a chupacabra when they see one!

The Christian Science Monitor – a really very serious source for news, usually – has reported that free oxygen has been detected in outer space. Below the fold, the article’s subtitle reads: “Do astronauts really need space suits? Of course they do, don’t be an idiot.”

The Silly Season is very much upon us. I encourage you all, Dear Readers, to explore the news for these special tidbits right now. They are no end of fun, and there is nothing quite like them the rest of the year.They are born of the hot summer air and the strange miasmas rising from that sand pit just outside town. You know, the one where the green lights show at night. Where dogs and hikers disappear.

Yeah, that one.