Silflay Hraka

The Top 50

I’ve read 37 of the 50. Glad to see that To Your Scattered Bodies Go made the list. It’s the type of book that convinces you to pick up anything the author has ever put his name to, and that’s a crap load of books when it comes to Philip Jose Farmer. And it’s a cool title, right up there in my mind with Pohl’s Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. I’d seen the list yesterday but was reminded about it when I ran across it again at the VikingPundit’s place.

If you count the books I own, rather than the ones I’ve just read, I’d probably be up to around 45 out of 50. I’ve got several of the Bester and Delany books in paperback, or will for a little while longer. For the last 16 years, I’ve schlepped my books around with me from apartment to apartment to house with me. There were thousands of them, scattered across 7 or 8 bookcases and piled up in corners at the high point of the collection. It’s declined over the past couple of years as library space inevitably loses when it battles the needs of family space.

As far as my book collection is concerned, when the baby finally arrives we ought to name him Waterloo. My room–I won’t call it an office, as that is not only a pretentious but inaccurate description of a room where very little actual work gets done, was originally meant to be a bonus room or quest bedroom, the latter of which it is in the process of becoming. It was where I kept my stuff, where I was inevitably to be found when when the rest of the family was abed.

The computers have made the cut, but the gigantic and extremely heavy Barnes & Noble bookcases are being banished to the attic, along with their contents. The 12 foot makeshift stack of 1×12 and 4x4s that I stored my paperbacks did not, nor did the rickety bookshelf my father made out of scrap wood when he got his first teaching job.

And then there’s the books that were on those shelves. Books that made it through three previous major cuts, when having the names of Poul Anderson or Keith Laumer on the spine meant an automatic pass, when being genre fiction meant that you were loved and valued rather than sneered at and overlooked and out of print. Poul and Keith are in the cull pile now, as are Pournelle and Bova and Benford and Clarke and Asimov and and Ellison and Bear and Norton and Moorcock and Zelazny.

When I started putting those guys in the pile, I could feel my Robert Aspirin books start to cry. They knew they had no chance, that they and Craig Shaw Gardener and John DeChancie were so much rotting pulp, because a thousand just like them already clutter the shelves at the used book store.

Tonight I told friends of 25 years goodbye. Tonight I killed Fafrhd and the Grey Mouser, and Conan, and Logan and Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. They lie among piles of kin, hundreds of characters from the last 5 decades of fantasy and science fiction.

Thank you, my friends. Thank you for all the years.

Goodbye.

Beer of the Night

I was so impressed with the Allagash White, that I bought the Allagash Speciale Reserve when I saw it at the Peace Street Market Saturday. It also comes in a gigantic freaking corked bottle, so I suspect I’ll be asleep here pretty soon. I like it. Good color, excellent head, very smooth and the hops don’t bitchslap you like they do in so many ales.

That’s my review. Here’s a real one.

The Silflay Hraka Amish Tech Support 2003 Dead Pool Death Pool

The Amish Tech Support 2003 Dead Pool has 100 participants, including myself, all of who picked 11 people to die in 2003. Here it is, March 5th, 2003, and not one of picks has died yet. So, while I wait for the Grim Reaper to make his inevitable appearance, I thought I’d pass the time by running a pool of my own.

Here’s the rules. Pick the date that a choice from the Amish Tech Support 2003 Dead Pool finally dies.

Prize: Everlasting fame as the Official Psychic of Bloggerdom in the Silflay Hraka blogroll, or a bumper sticker, if any are left over after the war starts. Leave your choice in the comments.

I wonder what Bucky wants for International Eat An Animal For PETA Day

La Plainte Du Chameau

Merde! Je suis le plus stupide celui de tout!

Has the War Already Started?

Perhaps the first strike in the war against Iraq has already taken place. It isn’t the build up of troops, or the permission to use bases in that region. We haven’t dropped the first bomb, but we have started dropping leaflets. Could it be that this is the best sign yet that war is inevitable? We did a similar tactic in the early 90′s, trying to get troops to surrender rather than engaging us in battle, and we are doing it again. The leaflets suggest that troops think about how to survive, assuming that fighting against the U.S. is NOT the way to go about that. Why ask troops to avoid battle if one is not approaching?

UPDATE: Thanks to Bigwig for this link which tells of some soldiers already waving the white flag.

Introducing Turkey To Pork

Now that the Turkish military has come out in favor of stationing American troops in Turkey for use in opening a northern front, a 2nd, positive vote for that deployment appears likely. After all the times the Turkish military has interfered with or outright taken over the government, one would think that a certain number of legislators are going to jump at their command. I suspect the military won’t do so this time, even if the face of a 2nd “no” vote. Nothing would undermine the American campaign for a democratic Iraq like losing a democratic Turkey in pursuit of that goal.

Besides, it looks like we’ve started to deploy our best negotiating tool at a more, shall we say, granular level.

There were indications that American diplomats have already been pressing their case to have the troop resolution reconsidered. Turkish and American officials confirmed that American diplomats have begun meeting privately with members of the majority party, including legislators who voted against the measure.
……..
Emin Sirin, a Turkish legislator in the governing party who opposed the American plan, said he was visited by American diplomats on Tuesday to talk about the vote. Mr. Sirin said the American diplomats asked him what they could do to improve relations between the two countries, but he said he had not been asked to change his vote.
……….
Mr. Sirin said he had not decided to change his vote, but might if the United States government offered a more generous economic package.

Apparently there are certain types of pork even a Muslim can love.

Doubles Match

The fact that the U.N. has secret plans for a post war administration of Iraq is not all that surprising. Kofi Annan & company would have to be, well, even bigger idiots that most people think they are to not have given some thought to the United Nations role in a postwar Iraq.

Not that they’ll do any good there. This is the same organization whose troops not only failed to keep the peace, but stood idly by while the people they were supposedly protecting were massacred in Srebrenica , Rwanda, and most recently, the Congo. This is the same organization whose personnel engaged in human trafficking and prostitution in Bosnia. For all the protests of the United States, in the 60 years since it was founded, the United Nations has far more blood on its hands.

If you’re questioning the commitment of the Bush administration to a peaceful, stable and democratic Iraq, this can hardly come as good news.

However, the above assumes that the leaked plans are actually real plans, which may not be so. They’re rather short on detail, not to mention more or less a contradiction of what the Bush administration has said in the past couple of weeks about its post-Saddam plans, and make the rather startling statement the the United Nations has recognized it’s inability to affect the course of events in Iraq.

It’s not the plans that are the story here, it’s the leak, and it’s not only going to put extra pressure on the undecided members of the Security Council to vote for the American/British/Spanish resolution on Iraq, it’s going to give them cover for that vote. There’s the stick of “Don’t let the United Nations become irrelevant” and the carrot “After all, what’s the harm in voting for the means when the multilateral end is already all planned?”

The leak was an American and British volley, and today’s vociferously reiterated promise to veto any such resolution is the French and Russian return. Probably the next volley and return is the announcement on both sides of new support for their respective positions. It will continue, back and forth like clockwork until time runs out, at which point France and Russia will discover that George was only playing because Tony needed him to.

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is at Gut Rumbles today. This is good, as I woke up thinking today was Thursday, and I had screwed poor overworked Acidman by making him the first Carnival host to be ignored by the founder.

Thanks, Acidman.

Upcoming Carnival stops include;

March 12th The Daily Rant
March 19th Wylie Blog
March 26th Dancing with Dogs
April 2nd Go Fish
April 9th Solonor’s Ink Well
April 16th Billegible
April 23th The Kitchen Cabinet
April 30th Clubbeaux
May 7th Common Sense and Wonder
May 14th The Inscrutable American
May 21st Cut On The Bias
May 28th Dean’s World

If you’d like to host the Carnival, drop us a line. Information on how to join the Carnival can be found here.

What With All The Bile I Nearly Forgot

Beer of the Night – St. Peter’s Best Bitter.