Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved techno-toys. At the same time, she was suspicious of new technology; especially new tech designed to replace some piece of old tech with which she had a satisfying personal relationship.

Our computers were always firmly set to the “Do Not Update Automatically” settings: Kage wanted to check out anything the machine just spontaneously thought it needed. She was suspicious of the computer network suddenly demanding new programs – and after a few changes in IE and Windows, who could blame her? We went to an open source word processor as soon as one was available, and dumped IE years ago. Security updates were all Kage was comfortable letting in just on the computer’s recommendation.

Nor did she want a phone that did tricks. She didn’t really like carrying a phone anyway, and I think the number of people in her phone book maxed out at about 10. And two of those were local restaurants … she finally agreed to accept a phone that took pictures, but that was as high tech as she ever got. Even then, she kept shooting accidental movies of her own feet, with a soundtrack that always ran: “Hey, why is the screen moving?” The part of carrying a phone with which Kage was most concerned was the case. Hers was black leather, with a skull and crossbones picked out in rhinestones …

Me, now: I adore new techno-toys. I have already established a symbiotic relationship with my Kindle, and it’s been getting clear that I also needed a new, grown-up phone …

This weekend, my last in a long line of dependable little Kyoceras finally kicked the jam jar. My poor agent thought I was hanging up on her, because the phone kept dropping calls. So I did some research and all the due diligence I could summon, and now I am the happy owner of an Android Galaxy Victory 4G LTE.  It picks up calls, its battery will last for days, it has full Internet capacity, tons of memory and power, and room for more apps than I will ever, ever need. It’s a new model, and shouldn’t be out of date for at least a fortnight. I now have more computing power in my purse than any of the Gemini Moon Missions and most of the Space Shuttle shots. Plus a thousand books. I could – dare I say it? – rule the world! BWA HA Ha ha ha!

Ahem.

So now I get all the fun of loading my contacts into the new phone, designating ring tones and screen colours, selecting a modest panoply of games and apps: I know I need a spirit level. And Plants Vs. Zombies. And crossword puzzles and a mahjong game. Then I can face the world with the necessary technological and cultural prostheses about my person.

Kage would be intrigued and faintly scandalized at a phone like this. But she’d also want to examine it, slowly and carefully and (if possible) from a distance using waldoes. And ultimately, I know she would decide she wanted one, too; if for no other reason but that she could pull up maps on it, and so send us further than ever into the great enticing Unknown. New Roads!

Of course, without Kage, I am lost a lot. I do have a compass in the Cruiser (Kage insisted) and with a way now to look at maps, I shall be better equipped than ever to get un-lost. There is no power on earth that will prevent me from getting lost in the first place, but it will be easier now to find my way to a familiar intersection or pizza palace.

It doesn’t fit in Kage’s old phone case, though. I shall have to make a new one. I’ll knit it out of black silk, and include an intarsa skull and crossbones in silver thread … Kage would approve.

Kage Baker didn’t care for St. Patrick’s Day.

She didn’t like corned beef – too salty, too fatty, and the cooking method – boiling – was something she felt should never be applied to beef. This, mind you, despite her personal dedication to historical authenticity and the British Navy – eating boiled salt beef, she felt, was just taking the whole obsession too far.

And neither one of us could sanction drinking green beer. No one ever tries it on Guiness anyway. The stuff is too dark for the dye to show … we didn’t like the way Americans usually celebrate this day.

Anyway, as long as one of us was eating the traditional food, historicity was served. And I love corned beef. Kage had a deep fondness for boiled potatoes and cabbage, so I would have my salt beef and she would have a nice broiled steak, and we’d share the tatties and cabbage. Although, in her firm conviction that boiled beef was disgusting, she insisted that all the vegetables be boiled in clean, segregated, non-beef-containing water …

Traditionally, of course, they’re all thrown into a pot together and boiled to death. Ideally, the potatoes and the cabbage should have pretty much the same firmness – which is none at all. Knives should not be needed for this meal … on anything. As Kage liked it, though, the cabbage was barely cooked and the potatoes still had an enviable density. I didn’t mind; my own fondness for this meal is enormous enough to encompass any variation in the preparation of the ingredients.

So Kimberly and I do it the old-fashioned way. You could probably eat this meal without teeth, as long as you have the hand-eye coordination to cut the beef into teeny bits. The flavour is astonishing and rich and wild, not a civilized taste at all – rainwater and cold stone are in it, green grass thick on hillsides whose soil is still radiating winter cold, sea winds and peat smoke and the perfume of domestic treason in the beef that was probably liberated from some oppressive Englishman.

Nor is this a meal eaten only for ritual purposes. My family (Kage aside; and niece Annie who has gone vegetarian) loves corned beef. This time of year, it’s sold as a sacred meat: at insanely low prices, at 2-for 1; with free cabbages and bags of discount potatoes thrown in. A dedicated shopping party with three members can come away with a half-dozen hunks of salt beef a day for about a week … so we stockpile ’em. We will be happily eating corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes in July, if we’re careful how we eke them out.

But tonight – well, it is the Saint’s Day; and we do have Irish ancestors. We’ve got Welsh ones too, though, and Scots as well – and not only are salt beef and cheap veggies not restricted to Ireland, St. Patrick himself was probably originally from Wales. We watch The Quiet Man while we eat our boiled dinner, and toast everyone even remotely involved as we do so.

I hope all of you, Dear Readers, have a good time and a good dinner tonight. You might give a little thought to the fact that this meal is a traditional because the land of its origin could rarely afford beef, and then not fresh; salt beef is for poor people and good preservation. Try to remember that good beer shouldn’t be green. Try to remember that bad beer is nothing to drink to celebrate a country that’s done marvellous things with barley.

And drink to the martyrs on every side with love in your heart – don’t think you should honour the saint of the day with a fight.  Share a good meal with your friends and families and be grateful for the food on your plate. That’s a lot more Irish.

Kage Baker loved the silent movies. Talkies were well established, of course, by the time she was born; but the old films showed up late at night pretty regularly. Kage – who was often insomniac when she was little – sometimes watched telly when almost everyone else in the house was asleep – many’s the time I remember watching the station sign offs: the waving American flag and the National Anthem; fading into the ever-familiar test pattern. We both loved that; I rather miss it now.

For some reason – which I guess had a lot to do with cheapness and lapsed copyrights – old silents showed up on afternoon kiddie cartoon shows, too. Kage was a firm fan of those, and since she could read by age 4, she watched them avidly. She’d read out the caption cards for the smaller kids, but I think she rather improved them as she went along … I remember some really weird plots that I never saw again in adulthood.

Much, much later, Kage wrote her column on silent science fiction films, Ancient Rockets, for Tor.com. And it was eventually published in book form, by the inestimable Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications, of whom and which I have spoken here. Well, Cat Eldridge, editor of Green Man Review (http://greenmanreview.com/) and Sleeping Hedgehog (http://sleepinghedgehog.com/) is reviewing that book soon. Being an old friend of Kage’s and mine, he wrote to ask me how Kage came by her love of the old movies, the silent silver screen … and that got me to thinking, Dear Readers, of our long ago and weird as hell childhood.

Man, there was no way she could have avoided it! We were industry brats. When Auntie was a movie star – and Anne Jeffreys was, you bet your ass – Momma was her stand-in. Our playmates’ daddies were painters, grips, camera men, directors; half the houses in the hills were illegal compilations of bits of old sets, put up by prop men and carpenters between movies as hooches. The house next door was Momma’s rental property when we were kids; later  it became the maison d’homme where all our brothers laired. But it had begun as a bootleg movie processing lab – the porch that ran all around the second story was for lookouts, watching out for Edison’s Pinkerton men coming up the Cahuenga Pass with axes and kerosene to burn them out … Kage grew up on those stories, fascinated and silent herself, filing all those mad tales away.

Movie stars were pointed out to us in the local markets, and Momma taught us not to see them: because they needed some privacy. She showed us where they lived, too; where they really lived, not out of date addresses hawked on a street corner. And there were parties at the house sometimes, and quite famous people would be up there amid Momma’s rose bushes and irises, lounging about eating barbecue, drinking crazy cocktails – and feeding the fruit spears from their drinks to the little redhead in the sun suit, wandering around at knee level like a big-eyed bubble.

Kage never forgot anything. The things she saw, the conversations she overheard, the stories she absorbed from 3 feet over her head – she remembered them all. Some made it into her stories. They all informed her view of the cinema, and gave her a unique opinion of it all. It did that to all of us – well, I’m sure about us girls; not so sure our semi-feral brothers absorbed much. But Kage most certainly was aware that she grew up on the edges of Faerieland, and so was I.

I remember how impressed we were to be allowed on to the set of the television show Topper, where Auntie played a ghost. What most thrilled me about it was meeting Neil, the alcoholic ghost Saint Bernard: biggest dog I ever met, and very sweet. I remember playing between the paws of the Sphinx on a summer evening; a spare Sphinx sat outside Paramount’s Lemon Grove Gate for years, and we used to clamber around under its Pharaonic beard. There were old props all over the house and garden: cavalry sabres (real), flintlocks (fake), Grecian temples (real but plywood, not marble).

So it’s impossible to tell exactly where and when Kage developed her devotion to early cinema. Just as an analysis of her teeth would have shown the mineral signature of the Lake Hollywood water she drank as a child; just as her DNA  carried echoes of Welsh hill forts and Algonquin long houses – impossible to pin down when the marks were put there, except that she had carried them all her life. So you might as well say she was conceived that way. She was bred in the land of fantasy. She was born a story-teller.

It just couldn’t have been any other way.

Kage Baker loved gadgets. She loved wind up toys, clockwork, spinning light-up tops – techno-toys like thumb drives in new shapes and colours (she had a rainbow of them, and wanted one shaped like a gummy bear. Or a skull.). Cunning doohickeys that plugged into USB ports, and lit up or whistled or boiled water or made 6 tiny perfect ice cubes for her Coke.

I’ve never been as fond of weird shiny patent inventions, but … I’ve felt I was missing something by not at least checking them out. Kage adored such things, and would pore over the catalogs from Archie McFee and Hammacher Schlemmer, moaning with longing for an inflatable indoor dirigible or a working sextant. (And she got the sextant eventually.) It was one of the ways she made life so very interesting.

So, feeling I needed a tonic with explosive bubbles, as it were, I subscribed last year to a site call Quarterly. It’s … an artisanal site. For everything. Chefs, painters, programmers, tinkers: makers put their goods up there, soliciting subscriptions. And once a quarter, you get a box of goodies from whomever you chose – which is pretty much by topic. Fine arts? Electronics? Travel? Pets? Cooking? Carefully curated WTF? Sign up for a topic that looks interesting, and the maker will send you a nifty box within 3 months. And it will be full of astonishing toys. Stuff, you know – but primo stuff.

My first one came late last month. I’ve forgotten what the topic was meant to be, but I picked it because it was being done by Mark Frauenfelder, one of my favourite contributors to BoingBoing. Turned out Mr. Frauenfelder is heavily into plastic and technology, and I got a box full of wonderful toys/tools/ doohickeys – a length of EL wire that glows blue, a miniature battery-operated LED microscope (smaller than a Hot Wheels!) and a flashlight that turned out to be blacklight! Armed with these things, I can play forensic science till the cows come home.

I got this box literally as I walked out of the house on my way to Stiches. So I brought it along and opened it in the hotel room, to the delight of Kimberly and Neassa, also. In fact, Neassa twigged first to the true purpose of the blue flashlight. We decided not to check the bed with the black light … maybe next time. It’s a scary proposition.

The next box came today, from a project called Wander. Keenan Cummings and Jeremy Fisher send out travel aids and other useful objects for those who might be seriously on the go. What I got today is amazing: the US Army Survival Manual, a wonderful little folding Japanese knife, a fold-flat, inflatable, plastic LED lantern that recharges with solar panels, and a steel shepherd’s whistle.

I am that much more prepared for domestic disasters; this will all be great additions to the family earthquake kit. Not to mention just plain fun. The shepherd’s whistle is apparently intended to send signals and summon help, but it works a treat with any spare Corgis you may have lying about the place … ours appeared with panting alacrity, herded a surprised cat into the wall, and graciously accepted a treat for being such a good dog. It’s fantastic!

I know I have at least one other goodie box out there somewhere, but I don’t remember if it’s due in this quarter or next. Nor do I care; the readiness is all!

You can investigate this random treasure trove at  https://quarterly.co/contributors, and see all they have to offer. Any given maker asks between $25.00 and $100.00 for the quarterly box o’wonder – I should note, that I’ve only signed up for the low-end stuff, and look at the marvy things I’m getting. This is a great deal – Kage would be dancing with delight, and already making plans on how to use her new toys.

As for me, I feel I’m keeping faith with her inventiveness by doing this. And I’ll find things to do with my treasures, too, worthy of Kage’s burning curiosity and never-ending sense of wonder. And so I pass it on to you, as well,  Dear Readers, because this stuff is better still when you can share it with someone else.

Now I’m going to settle down with the Survival Manual and explore the wonderful world of incendiary substances: making a fire is always so vital. Kage certainly thought so, her with the fire in her head. …

Kage Baker was a dedicated and enthusiastic aunt. She loved her siblings’  and her friends’ offspring, and participated in their upbringing as much as she could. It’s a system many mammals use, as she said: if it was good for baby elephants, it was probably good for baby humans.

Besides, Kage adored babies. She liked nothing better than sitting quietly with a sleepy child in her arms, crooning sea chanties until they fell asleep. A lot of babies went peacefully to Dreamland to the sound of Blood Red Roses or The Lowland Sea in Kage’s smoky alto. Not to mention The Eddystone Light or Sir Patrick Spence or The Maid On The Shore … she was so fond of that last one, she ended up writing a story around the title: haunted pirates and Captain Sir Henry Morgan in the Panamanian jungles.

The first crop of nieces and nephews, born of brothers and sisters, is now pretty well grown: there’s a nephew who’s a chef, and another in the Coast Guard, and one working on becoming a history teacher. One niece is almost a lawyer now, another is a budding artist like her grandmother and her Aunt Kage; the youngest niece just got accepted to Annapolis! Kage was delighted when the one nephew became a sailor – she had a life-long love for maritime gentlemen. But the niece who is going to Annapolis – that would have had Kage dancing round the living room! One of our girls will be a Naval officer! And since the girl in question is the Emma of Hotel Under The Sand, Kage would be incandescent with joy.

You can see Kage’s influence in all of the nieces and nephews – these are kids who grew up learning how to use their minds,  listening to Kage and the rest of us tell tales late at night at the tail ends of family gatherings: voices by candlelight around the wooden table in the dining room, recounting family history and the the king lists of England and France. Arguing over the tragic fate of the Romanoffs, telling outrageous stories of Hollywood parties held right there in the house (or only up the hill a little).

We always seemed to end those family gatherings sitting round the hand-planed table, laughing and laughing. It’s how I remember all of us girls most clearly – sitting there with babies being passed from lap to lap, little faces peeking in fascination over the edge of the table, laughing our asses off over – everything.

As Kage grew older, she delighted in being the wild aunt. She was one of the Mad Aunties, the ones who left home and went for adventures with the Faire. (With me, her fearless driver and companion in madness.) She told the craziest and best stories, and claimed her patron saint on the road was Toad of Toad Hall. She brought weird and wonderful presents back from trips, and introduced all the nieces and nephews to peculiar candies, and old-fashioned toys, and the urgent desire to go eat in restaurants with good bars and linen napkins …

Kage made life sound so interesting.

I went over for dinner last night with sister Anne, and her two girls – another Kate and Annie. Also their two foster guinea pigs (provenance uncertain; I know she told me but I don’t recall it.) They are just a temporary pair of fuzzy little blobs in a cage, watching us with that blank robotic stare guinea varmints have … also the exquisite Pandora, a gold-eyed, jet-black lady Great Dane like a great ebony swan in her divine posings – Great Dane females are the most elegant things, canine Sarah Bernhardts. And the current star of the household, a rescued cockatoo with the temperament of a Don Juan. He too is temporary, a rescue being rehabbed, and he likes to spend his time lolling in any available female bosom and being petted.

And as usual, we ended up sitting around and laughing – a little weepily, because Anne and I are always aware of the missing flame that was Kage. When the conversation turns to her, as it always does, we both cry. But we’re laughing, too, these days, remembering her: so that’s all right. How she’d roll her eyes at the sight of Anne, cradling a drowsy parrot in her lap while the baby who used to snuggle there is showing off her latest surreal canvas to me.

Time goes on. Family traditions may melt and mutate, but they get maintained  in defiance of all storms and grief. And when we talk about Kage, life is still so very interesting …

Kage Baker felt that the edges of her mind were … permeable. She believed that the non-corporeal aspect of mind – as opposed to the corporeal one of brain – was not entirely secure in her case.

This sort of thing has usually been firmly disavowed by the philosophies of the world, which have mostly regarded the phenomenon of the “open” mind a privilege of the deliberately enlightened. Those who were able to pierce the veil were rare, special; it took specific masteries and mysteries to achieve it, whether you are subscribing to the effects of the Rosary or Zen Masterhood.

Kage paid no attention to the disclaimers. They weren’t relevant to what was happening in her head. It is worthy of note that  often those who don’t play by the local rules of Enlightenment are the ones who achieve it. Usually to the accompaniment of a chorus of disapproving denial. Kage said going for the arts was always safer than espousing religion or philosophy – a writer or a painter can be written off as nuts by the neighborhood shamans, and not risk the fate of Jesus. Or Tommy.

So she evolved her own theories about her mind, and what went in and out of it, and mostly kept them to herself. The analogy she most often used to me was that the windows were all open in the attic of her mind, and other people were constantly leaving their stuff there. Kage always maintained that half of what she wrote was not composed, but remembered; and she was always surprised at what she found up there in her mind among the trunks and bags.

She didn’t place much faith in the inviolability of the brain-blood barrier, either. That had been considered as uncrossable as the gap between the Moon and the Earth – well, (so Kage observed), we all know what happened to that. Every year or so, medical research adds something else to the list of substances that do actually flit unconcernedly across the brain-blood barrier. Some of the more interesting ones are cells from the children a woman carries, which show up especially well when she has conceived sons …

One of the other things that crosses, of course, is cancer. That’s how Kage died of a rare uterine cancer in her brain. As she herself commented, “What a joker, that God, huh?”

Before that unfortunate event, Kage and I had sort of semi-demi-hemi claimed that – due to the bicamerality of the brain – we constituted one total well-equipped brain between us. This is based on the then-standard idea that left-handed people had a dominant right brain, and right-handed people had  a dominant left brain: she and I being, respectively, left and right handed (and right and left brained) therefore could combine our native talents into ONE AMAZING 100% FUNCTIONAL BRAIN!!!! (Cue the theramin music.)

However, this now turns out to be an example of what the Guardian is calling “Folk Neurology”. These are charming little fables and urban myths, things that “everyone” knows – and that are dead wrong. The Guardian article in the link below explains this phenomenon:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/mar/03/brain-not-simple-folk-neuroscience#_

Folk neurology. Huh. I know how Kage would feel about this – about the way she felt about The Illuminated Masters, secret creeds, and the blood-brain barrier, that’s how. She would roll her eyes – and she had a killer eye roll; she had a slight strabismus, which let her roll her eyes like dear old Robert Newton. She would be scornful. She would not rant against it – she was much too ladylike to do that sort of thing – but she would quietly cast her own opinion in solid neutronium and set it up warningly on the front lawn of her life. That’s a complicated metaphor, Dear Readers, but I am sure you can figure out what it means – especially if you’ve met Kage.

I don’t quite believe it either. Medical science is always confidently positing some anatomical absurdity, like the brain being nothing but a filter and cooler for the blood. Or the heart powering only the lungs. Or (Kage’s favourite, and mine, too) that the uterus was a mobile organ, and would scurry about the body like a demented possum, wreaking havoc. Kage said it explained the tumour in her brain, except that her uterus had been evicted before the tumour was found; but maybe it left the tumour there on one of its unauthorized perambulations.

Anyway: despite the reverend wisdom of the Guardian, I have no doubt Kage and I shared a brain. Why else would I feel like a lobotomy survivor, except that half my brain is missing? Or maybe we were just both halfwits, and it never showed when we could remain in close proximity to one another. It’s awfully hard to write like this.

How does one precipitate phantom limb syndrome? I need a phantom Kage.

Kage Baker loved the return of Spring. She liked it best when it was also a return to warmth – she had salamander blood, and suffered through even a California winter.  But cold or hot, she took the change to Spring each year as a personal delight displayed for her delectation.

Today, just today, I am suddenly aware that yes, Spring is indeed on the way. It’s beautiful, but I’m not always ready every year; I like winter, I like the quiet, icy months when the world is made of crystals and reflections. But today … so many signs suddenly, it looks like a good idea is come round again, at last. Kage would tot them them up on her fingers, and gloat …

The feral parrots that live between Atwater and Pasadena were sweeping through, screaming like banshees and alighting in the camphor trees to eat the fresh new leaves. My baby Santa Rosa plum tree in the backyard is suddenly covered with pale pink blossoms – there will be plums! The roses are all showing brand new ruby-glass bumps that will unfold into leaves. The lawn is back to a verdant carpet, after the horrible summer heat and the astonishing winter frost both assaulted it: clearly, I picked a good grass for the new lawn last year.

Pigeons are courting, shameless and inconvenient, like drunken waltzers circling round and round under foot, everywhere. Skunks and raccoons are out o’nights – we can smell the skunks, and we can hear the raccoons. These days, we close the animal door after dark, and every few nights, some idiot raccoon runs full tilt into the door … the kitchen echoes with the THUMP. I admit to sniggering when it happens.

There have been tulips on my desk, and today there are hyacinths. I found Clo milk from Northern California at Whole Foods – best milk in the world! I shall have it with fresh bread, and a bowl of the first strawberries with yoghurt made from ewes’ milk.  Kate, the young wife of Prince William-who-will-be-king is with child: and she’s probably carrying a baby Queen! Her grandad pushed through a change in the rules of succession a while back, so even if it’s a maid-child in Kate’s belly – she will one day rule England. And who can ask for a better sign of Spring than a princess, for heaven’s sake?

The Pope has retired and retreated to Castle Gandolfo, clearing the way for – one hopes – a more liberal pontiff. Hugo Chavez has died – one less tyrant in the world as we spin into light. A little girl born two years ago with AIDS has been proclaimed healthy and virus-free – the first child to be cured, and may she be an incandescent bubble on a spring tide of cured children!

People of my acquaintance are having babies, and buying houses, and graduating from schools, and getting new jobs.  The Bay Bridge has been hung with light and is now fit to be a highway to faerieland. I don’t have cancer.

It’s Life, man, and it’s everywhere suddenly. Ultra whoopee cool, as Kage used to say. Ultra atomic whoopee cool.

Oh, yeah.

Kage Baker was a firm proponent of the old saw: “If you want to be a writer, write.”

When first informed of this adage, her response was outrage. “If I could freaking write, ” she fumed, “I would be freaking writing!”  She eventually parsed it, though, down to its lowest denominator meaning: sit your butt down and press keys. Sharpen your favourite #2 pencil (“sooo aptly named,” as Kage said.). Get out your magic pen – every writer has one; I certainly do – and make squiggles on paper.

Ever watch the opening of the Daily Show? John Stewart is making furious, spurious notes on old blue script pages to give an appearance of deep busy-ness. Do that, and eventually some of the nonsense you write will turn into words …

Stay away from computer games. Kage permitted herself to play Free Cell until she won a game, as she started her writing each day; but you must put that limit on it! In my own depressed and blocked state this last week, I have turned to solitaire Mah Jong. So far, I have played 367 games of a specialty layout called The Archer- not different games, I just keep calling up different deal-outs on the same layout. And I have yet to win one.

I need to change my process, my game or my Mah Jong layout. At this point, I am seeing tiny painted tiles like dancing petit fours in my dreams at night …

Friends and family members are sending me cautious inquiries. You know: Don’t set your hair on fire or anything, but, um, are you ever gonna write again?  My sister Kimberly is getting a lot less subtle about it, but she’s got worries of of her own – her husband, my brother-in-law, just had a pacemaker implanted, and Kimberly has more important things to do than slap me upside the head as she zooms past my desk and yells WRITE! at me.

Last night I dreamed of Kage, who scowled at me and told me to get back to work. In the context of the dream, she was telling me to build an Inn – evidently my unconscious’ default setting for symbolizing random creative work. So I sat down and started pounding on these keys.

To amuse you all in the meantime, here are some interesting things I’ve collected to riff on in the last few days:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-cocoa-the-brain-drug-of-the-future&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130228

Proof of the Operatives’ fondness for the stuff, and probably the seminal research that led to theobromine being used initially to boost the Operatives’ intellects. I am quite sure this is how they end up so sensitive to it, as well as why their designers couldn’t eliminate the addiction.

http://astronomyaggregator.com/solar-system/large-comet-to-buzz-mars-impact-possible/

This one is incredibly cool – we might get to watch a comet hit Mars! It may even deliver a few shiat-tons of water – comets are full of water, usually – and we can see how an air strike works to enrich the atmosphere. We might want to use the technique some day (thank you , Larry Niven!). Although I hope Fate does not drop a big rock on one of our Rovers, or split the poor planet like a cantaloupe.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-man-swallowed-sinkhole-signs-life-detected/story?id=18626485

This one is the stuff of nightmares, straight out of H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. Apparently Florida is a rocky spongecake below the surface dirt, and this poor bugger got sucked into the Netherworld.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/hundreds-manta-rays-found-gaza-beaches-article-1.1275462

And a barbecue was declared along the Gaza Strip! Fish fry for all! Apparently manta rays are edible, being neither treff nor haram, and this mass migration gone wrong is regarded by all and sundry as a gift from God. Nice to see good news about something landing unexpectedly in Gaza.

There! I’ve done something kind of productive. Less Mah Jong and more of the H=John Stewart model of writing, and things will improve. Don’t stop yelling at me, though, Dear Readers – I need it.

Kage Baker was a devoted people-watcher. She was shy and easily frightened by aggressive people, and so part of her habit was a deliberate distancing to keep herself safe.

But she was also an avid observer of human nature – something I think contributed to the humanism and insightfulness of her writing. She never really thought of herself as belonging to the species she lived among; but she watched them, understood them, and thought that people were the most fascinating show around. It was one of the things that made conventions tolerable for her. She said that John Donne was wrong, you could be an island if you worked at it: but sometimes you had to jump back into the Sea of People and get your batteries re-charged.

I am also a people-watcher; so is Kimberly, and so is Neassa, who joined us at Stitches this Saturday. And conventions are great venues for this. They are fun in their own right, but I really think they are also a healthy form of tribalism – the attendee is with her own people, it’s a group pre-selected to prove agreeable company. Kimberly and I were struck with that as soon as we walked into the lobby of our hotel Friday night: the Bar was almost 100% women; every one of them had at least one bag full of yarn, and most of them were knitting or crocheting with a cocktail glass in front of them. Beautiful and clearly hand-wrought knitted garments were on most bodies; dropped row markers glittered on the rug like confetti. It was hilarious and wonderful to see.

The crowd at Stitches tends to be mostly female. Knitting, in particular, is far from a gender-specific art – a half-dozen of my male friends knit. It’s true I have unusual friends, but most guys don’t seem to take to it in these modern times. This quirk of population makes a pronounced difference in the sound level at a Stitches event: the crowd is just as noisy as any other, and can get as rowdy as a football game – but the lower registers of sound are missing. It’s all mezzo, contralto, soprano; laughter leaps up out of the sound of voices like lightning, scaling up and going supersonic.

Acoustic science has shown that female voices are easier to hear in a crowd. In a crowd where there are only female voices, what happens is that the words get more distinct. You hear more detail of what you hear at all. So stay polite and don’t make rude comments about the goods at any vendor’s booth: a sotto voce derogatory remark like “My child could do better” (Why do they always say that?) or “That’s not worth $15.00!”  (500 yards of hand-spun Merino wool? Oh, yes, it is!)  will cause heads to swivel toward you for 8 feet around. Women can hear everything.

Of course, most of the remarks boil down to: Oh my God, I must have that! Accompanied with gasps and kissy noises …  A convention like Stitches shows you really dedicated people turned loose in the palace of their dreams. Yarn! Yarn hangs from every surface, long glowing braids of it spun and dyed in colours like jewels. Spinning straw into mere gold – and I saw yarn spun from both – pales in comparison to the enormous spectrum of colour displayed. Yarn spun from the downy undercoats of buffalo and yaks. Novelty yarns made from milk, bamboo, thistles, wood pulp. Silk yarns specify whether or not the silk worm died to contribute its cocoon toward textile production – and yarns made from naturally harvetsed silk tend to cost a little more, because no worms were sacrificed. I think that maybe matters more in California, but it’s clearly an important selling point.

Kimberly and I both bought some gorgeous alpaca yarn – not just because it was a well-made and priced alpaca (though it was), but because every skein was packed with a picture of the alpaca from which it was shorn. Name, age, gender, and whether it was their first shearing or fifth … it certainly won us over, knowing the face of the animal that produced our wonderful lace-weight yarn. It’ll work up like knitting moonlight, and we’ll know which totem alpaca to thank as the cobweb fabric takes shapes in our hands.

I tell you, textiles crafts are very close to religion. They are order out of chaos; they are individual art; they are rhythm and pattern turned into cloth. The image in the mind takes a body to itself as you watch.

Kage liked that about my knitting. It was like telling the beads of the rosary, she observed once, except that the result was a pair of socks or a shawl. She loved wandering through Stitches, watching all those happily obsessed women turn their OCD into a pattern of skill and love. And the colours delighted her. And the toys!

More about people-watching and yarn and obsession and toys tomorrow. Now, I must set up my Swift and go wind a skein of alpaca yarn as light as thistledown into a ball, so I can convert it into a spider web …

Kage Baker loved road trips. She made lots with me that really had no bearing on her likes, interests, or current work load – but from time to time I would need to drive out somewhere for my own stuff, and she was always happy to ride along. Good thing, too, as she was my GPS system – also, tall enough to clean heat-dried perma-bugs off the entire front windshield; which is a vital talent.

An event I always like to make is the Stitches West convention. It is a textiles temple. Not fabric, per se, but dedicated in particular to knitting; although anything involving string and sticks is fair game there. It’s a needlework mecca, Disneyland for those of us who cannot sit still with empty hands. If you habitually carry a knitting or crocheting project in your purse – if you have special knitting patterns for working in darkened movie theatres – if no one in your family is safe from scarves and socks – Stitches is the place for you.

Kage wasn’t that into textiles. Fabric, yes – she loved fabric stores. But she also loved colour, and design, and patterns cunningly devised. She also liked hand-made socks, since she had narrow feet that were nonetheless a size 12 – elegant hosiery is hard to get off the rack for feet like Kage’s.  And she enjoyed the proximity of obsession, just on general principles; obsession, for Kage, being one of the founts of creativity.

So she came to Stitches happily when I went. The last three years I have missed out – first Kage’s illness, then my own – and I have missed it dreadfully. The dozens of catalogs in the daily mail, the hundreds of email ads that come in are just not enough to feed my lust for yarn. And needles. And knitting toys … besides, you can’t touch touch the stuff in catalogs.

So tomorrow I am driving up to Santa Clara for the convention. I’ve kidnapped Kimberly – who would very much like to become obsessed with knitting, if she can just find the time. I figure exposing her to the delicious excess of the entire Santa Clara Convention Center full of wool, silk, cotton, linen, milk protein, banana fibre, thistle, Lycra, acrylic and fine gauge metal wire – plus all the goodies to play with them – ought to do the trick.

We’re leaving her husband and son home with the menagerie. Hopefully, no one will starve in the next two days, or be forced to eat one of their fellow inmates. We’ll be back Sunday afternoon in time to see the Oscars – Kage and I sped south after several Stitches events to make the Academy awards, which for inexplicable reasons always occur at the same time.

Then we can sit and wind yarn while we howl over the fashions on the red carpet. Combine your obsessions! That’s a sure-fire way for fun.