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…They make my brains hurt, some of them.

“…For instance, after science standards were changed in Kansas, a physics teacher was not allowed to teach the big-bang theory. A chemistry teacher could not teach the periodic table. …”

The Periodic Table??

AAAAAARRRRRGH!!

How can a God so smart design people so…so… !!!!!!

Oh, Dmitriy Ivanovich, we hardly knew ye!

(sigh) I now return to my previously scheduled European idyll. With The Greatest Difficulty.

(My only consolation is that after the people with these wee, dim, parochial ideas are all gone… our good lady Scientia will still be there. Snickering.)

Or, more properly, “Brugge.” This is a Vlaamse-speaking area: while you can speak French here, it’s probably politer to default to Flemish. (English is always accepted, almost gratefully, as an alternative. A word, also, to the wise: this would probably not be an area where German is terribly popular as a linguistic alternative. Having previously spent some days in Switzerland on an earlier trip, I picked up a menu and out of habit, said, “Bitte…” Things went on in German for about a minute and a half until “mein Deutsch”, such as it is (“sehr kaum”!) failed me. I fell back into English, and the manageress of the restaurant breathed a big sigh and said, “Oh, thank you…” and continued the discussion in English which was better than that of some native English-speakers I know. …It is worth remembering, in circumstances like this, the monument at the North Gate of the city; it commemorates, most affectionately, the Canadians who liberated Brugge in 1945.

…This is another of those “timewarp” cities. In Basel, in the middle of the night, you can suspect yourself of having fallen into the 14th or 15th century: here you can do it in broad daylight.

Brugge was one of the richest cities in this part of the world, in the 1400’s and 1500’s, due to its adroit management of its end of the wool trade with England. (The city imported rough fleeces and exported them as finished cloth, or sometimes — more unusually — as spun thread.) The great families of Brugge became wealthy enough to do things like (in one family’s case) build their own “corporate box” into the great cathedral of the city — high up above and to the left of the high altar, so they could (through a bay window) attend Mass in their bathrobes — and they had enough spare florins flying around to commission that hot young Italian artist, Michaelangelo, to do a Madonna and Child for the cathedral: the first Michaelangelo north of the Alps.

The boom lasted a long while, but eventually came a bust, affected as much by their harbor at Zeebrugge silting up as by anything else. The city fell on hard times and became such a backwater that neither side bothered to bomb it during the war. The place was poor for a long while, and only began to recover during the 70’s.

But then Brugge found that History had dealt it the same kind of weird backhanded favor it did when it made Ireland too poor to put chemical fertilizers on its fields and pastures (for which reason its grass-fed beef is now famous all over Europe, and its organic produce is becoming that way). Brugge had been ignored… and hence all the great old buildings of its medieval inner city had been perfectly preserved. The city began renovating itself and (in a very smart move) putting all its utilities underground. Phone, electric, cable, fiber, everything went under the paving stones. Satellite dishes are not permitted to be visible on the outsides of buildings: everybody in town has affordable thousand-channel cable and broadband, and if you want something more exotic, as long as you can hide the hardware from the tourists, you’re fine. As a result, you can walk through the Markt and all the streets around it and see nothing that reminds you of this century…except the things inside the shop windows. A big problem, there, for this is one of the great shopping towns of northern Europe.

Fortunately I have other things to do while I’m here. My base is one of a number of beautiful “holiday apartments” rented by a smart and energetic couple whose own house, a 14th/16th century building two minutes’ walk away from the Great Market, is next door. The apartment is spacious, has a fully equipped kitchen, and everything else a working writer could need, including WiFi. It does *not* have four cats, endless mailmen, delivery guys, and constantly ringing phones. Which is why I’m here, and will be until the 30th, kicking various wizards around.

I’ll post pictures later. Right now: to work…

We’re running down the Rhine valley under a blurry grey sky that tells me it’s going to be snowing soon.

It was snowing in Köln this morning, if the weather reports are to be believed. It looked like it wanted to do it in Basel, but perhaps the city’s heat footprint prevented it.

This train is an ICE3, newest and sleekest of the German “InterCityExpress” fleet. Their noses are getting more and more pointed with every version: if they keep it up, pretty soon they’re going to look like the newest model of the Shinkansen. Everything aboard them is polished stainless steel and beautiful modern birch paneling, with seats in a neutral blue: here and there you get gray-speckled white granite (in the bistro car and the toilets, which are spotless, and merit a picture of their own — sorry, the quality of the picture won’t be great when it gets pasted in — but these facilities still cause me some wonder when I remember the pestholes that some other trains’ toilets can become: specifically, in the US and Ireland, two of the three countries on Earth which honestly believe that the public rails should function without subsidies).

A cranky moment there…never mind. This is a train on which every seat has a plug / power point, so shortly I can go back and give Ryoh-ohki a recharge (and the phone too): they’ll both be well topped-up by the time we hit Cologne.

The train which paused opposite us just now in the station at Karlsruhe went by in “kissing cousins” mode: four engine sets — one at each end and two more in the middle, nose to nose, for when the train splits. Unfortunately I’m in the “back half” of our train, which is hooked up the same way, so I don’t get the dramatic 200-kph view out over the pilot’s shoulder (they do call them “pilots”, on these trains: possibly with some slight justification, since not so long ago, anything that went at this speed would have to be flying…).

Onward to Köln…

Well, not a whole day.

P. and I went into Dublin yesterday evening to see Return of the King, then afterwards ran into an old fannish acquaintance and had a late dinner with him: then went back to the hotel and Fell Over Big Time. It’s astonishing the effect seeing such a long and (to the two of us, anyway) emotionally loaded movie can have on your energy levels. It’s going to take days to internalize this one, if not weeks.

Anyway, around noontime we went up to the airport, had lunch, and then parted company, I heading for LX 401 to Zürich, Peter heading home to feed the cats and get on with his own work. Two hours later I was in Züri: I did the sane thing and sent my luggage ahead of me to Basel (Swiss Railways makes this easy: and they’re probably the only rail system on the planet I would really trust with my luggage…) and then paused for some dinner.

This is one of the few places in the world where you can genuinely imagine yourself saying to a friend, “I’m dying for a good meal…let’s go to the train station.” Zürich Hauptbahnhof (or “main station”) has eleven restaurants of various kinds, ranging from “Au Premier” upstairs (Michelin-rosetted, I think, though I could be confusing it with the former station buffet at Eaux-Vives in Geneva) to various cafes scattered about the lower levels (there’s a terrific shopping center under the station, not to mention the gym and tanning center and the two supermarkets…).

My favorite of the main-level restaurants is Brasserie Federal. Once upon a time, a shade more than a hundred fifty years ago, when the Hauptbahnhof first opened, it was the first-class waiting room — and hence has noble classical proportions, beautiful sculpted plasterwork, and a spectacular stained-glass skylight. Nowadays it also features a hundred Swiss beers (twenty or so on draft, the rest bottled) and a great deal of what the Swiss would consider “comfort food”: a lot of rösti, the local version of meat loaf, sausages naturally (the veal and pork bratwurst are terrific), and much other stuff which can be generally classified as “stick-to-your-ribs”. So I had some calves’ liver (which I love) with onions, and rösti, and a few dezi of rosé, and then got the heck out of Dodge and headed for Basel.

The early-ish meal was a good idea, since by the time I hit the hotel (11ish) everything restaurant-like in the neighborhood had closed down. So nothing to do but go upstairs to my room, go wireless (the hotel is a Swisscom hotspot), and take care of business before falling over. There’s a morning appointment in town, and then I can head north to Köln. The final destination…

More about that later. I’ll paste a picture or two of Brasserie Federal in here in the morning…or you might look at this page, as this gent’s pictures are probably far better than mine are going to be. (These will be from a marvelous device which I’m still attempting to get to terms with — Peter’s Christmas gift to me, a Nokia 6600. I’m trying to do with it what the kids in E. Nesbit’s “Psammead” series would describe as “taming it by kindness”, but this may be impossible at the moment. More of this later as well.)

Eric Berne, founder of transactional analysis and generally interesting person (and a serious user of the Stith Thompson Motif Index and expert on fairy tales, but that’s another story entirely…) coined the term “reachback” and defined it (I paraphrase here) as the ability an upcoming trip has to upset or disarrange the conduct of your everyday life before you actually leave; and also as the period during which that upset/disarrangement lasts.

It’s an easy thing to miss, or to gloss over, until you have your attention drawn to it as a phenomenon in its own right. (I may talk a little about its companion phenomenon, “afterburn”, when I get home…if I have the energy.) But it’s worst when you try to cram too much preparation for a trip into too small a space. Fortunately this trip hasn’t been one where that happens.

This week has been about getting Ryoh-Ohki II (the Sharp Actius, successor to the Sharp Mebius “Ryoh-Ohki”) into shape to go abroad for a couple of weeks. This means duplicating all the e-mail and other “daily changed” files in Calanda, my big desk machine*: making sure all PDA and organizer entries are duplicated in both machines: making sure that the laptop can talk to the mobile phone as usual: making sure that the digital recorder is talking properly to the dictation/transcription software: making sure that everyone who needs to know where I am knows how to find me if they need me; making sure that the laptop has all the applications installed that need to be there to carry on daily maintenance on various aspects of the websites; etc, etc, etc…

Reachback: this is it. (sigh) …Work? This week? I don’t think so. …And then there’s the laundry.

Argh…

*Calanda is the name of a mountain north of Chur, in Switzerland; the peak is reputed to be haunted, and there are supposed to be caves underneath it in which local heroes lie sleeping, waiting to awaken in the time of their canton’s greatest need, as in the ever-popular archetype. (However, whatever caves there may be under Calanda are much more likely occupied by the Swiss Army.) …It’s also the name of a very nice beer brewed by a Swiss brewer in the area…though the Haldengut brewery seems to have been eaten by Heineken. (mutter)

It’s always strange when I go away to work.

One of the things I find hard to deal with (in the abstract) is the idea that the presence of another person in the house can confound your work sometimes. Even when it’s someone you love desperately. And then you discover that it’s not just The Person You Love, but also the mailman, the delivery people, the phone, the fax… Everything seems to conspire against you, and you remember (with guilty longing) how peaceful the work process was before you got married…

Yeah, well. There’s more to it than longing: sometimes you have to do something. So starting Saturday, I’m taking myself away for ten days to an apartment in Belgium to finish work on Wizards at War.

I’ll post here from various spots “on the road”, inbound and outbound, and a couple of times from the place itself (with pictures, because it’s choice).

More than this, deponent saith not. At least for the moment.

…for the Bloggie nominees. Like blogs? Go nominate something.

“President Bush next week will announce a plan to send humans back to the moon early in the next decade as part of a sweeping, new NASA agenda that could lead to a manned mission to Mars, sources said last night. ”

This is the one and only thing this presidency has done that makes me genuinely hopeful about anything. …Not that I’d care ot go live on Mars, mind you: at least not in its present state. But the Moon…that’d be another story.

…A little belatedly. Even through the holiday period, work has had to continue on some projects, and everything else has been getting a little behind, particularly blogging.

But this goes out to wish everybody who bothers to read this a most excellent New Year, full of good things.

Oh dear.

Once upon a time, long ago, when Peter and I were courting, the US bombed Libya. As a result, US air travel to Europe fell off big time. British Airways’ response to this was to give one June day’s worth of its US-departing transatlantic seats away, by way of a raffle (they called the campaign “Go For It, America!”). You cut out the coupon in the paper, filled in your personal info, sent it off to BA, and waited. And astonishingly (because I had never before won anything in my life) I won a round-trip ticket on the second draw.

Before this happened, though, I’d said to myself, “And in case I don’t win…” — and ticketed myself on another BA flight in July of the same year. (This was in the days when I would still fly BA, though. Not any more. Staff attitudes toward their passengers have changed greatly since then: you get tired of the cattle prods after a while.)

Well, the prize tickets came through, and I got on the plane, very happy to be seeing Peter a little sooner than originally planned. One of the things that happened on the flight was that the airline was running a quiz. They would pass out little cards to the passengers: the cards had multiple-choice general knowledge questions on them, and a final “tie-breaker” question. You would fill in the card and hand it back in, and the staff would tote up the results. And the winner on that flight got a prize — say, a week in a luxury condo in London. The winners’ cards, though, from all the flights for that week, would then go into a big draw — and the prize would be the condo itself.

Well, I found this pretty attractive at the time. Now, on that first flight, when I looked at the card they gave me, I knew I wasn’t going to win the quiz that day. But I looked at the questions and recognized a pattern. The questions were exactly the kind you would derive from data in an Information Please Almanac. There was some math involved, too, but all the same, I looked at that card and thought: “If you got on the plane with an IP Almanac and a calculator, you could ace this sucker.”

So I went to London, and Belfast, and saw Peter, and then came home again. And when I boarded the later flight which I had ticketed myself, I was carrying an Information Please Almanac and a calculator. And what the heck? I aced that sucker. The prize was a Stg 500 shopping spree at Harrods. (Unfortunately I did not go on to win the big prize, which was a Stg 10,000 shopping spree…but at the time I could have cared less: I was with Peter.) P. and I met in London, shopped like crazy, used the change from the shopping to have more fun still (the 500 pounds were paid to us as Harrods “scrip”, and every time you bought something with it, you got normal money back), and generally enjoyed ourselves like mad.

A happy memory. (I still have the beautiful dyed calf and suede-lined briefcase I bought myself — my first briefcase ever — now much beat up, but still dearly loved). However, it now becomes apparent that I will not be boarding an aircraft with an almanac any time soon. If indeed ever.

(sigh) Sometimes I really dislike the way the world changes…

…A long hiatus between that last post and this one. I’ve been nose-deep in Wizards at War, while also running over to Geneva to take care of some business (and catching the “Escalade” as well, an unplanned, loud, and very pleasant dividend). Now we’re in the middle of the pre-holiday craziness (or not-pre. Happy Hanukkah, guys!) and printing out cards like crazy.

While idling by the printer to make sure it’s working all right, I stopped into FandomWank as I sometimes do, and ran across this and its numerous sequelae, starting out with someone’s passionate condemnation of fanfic as a whole as morally reprehensible.

Fanfic’s been on my mind lately. I reproduce here my response to some of the responses to the original post, for those of you who don’t have time to go over there and rummage…

*****

(chuckle) Trying to define fanfic can make your eyes cross.

I’ve written a fair amount of stuff in other people’s universes, but always by invitation (i.e. “Write this book/story/screenplay and we’ll give you money.”) It’s exhilarating to play in other people’s worlds — and, peculiarly, to me it seems less like Work. Creating your own worlds is tough business: when you do it every day, cutting the occasional “class” to go play on the Enterprise or hang out with the Green Lantern Corps is really attractive.

I did write quite a lot of terrible Trek fanfic before I even knew there was such a thing — and therefore have to ask: so does it count? If a fan ships in the forest and there’s no one to hear…?? …But that was all burned long ago. I then started to write Tolkien-ish fanfic that turned into something different (the earliest drafts of The Door into Fire and its sequels.) Yet I’ve only *purposely* written fanfic (i.e. intended for consumption in a fanfic-ish venue, i.e. a fanzine) twice: one Star Wars novella for the fanzine Sentinel, and a small group of Dr. Who stories (The Doctor makes pizza, etc…) which were done initially on CompuServe for my own amusement, and then donated to anthologies for charity. So no money changed hands…but both times, it was after I started selling professionally: a book of my own per year, and sometimes more. …You’ll see, then, why for my own part the definition of fanfic becomes a clouded thing and something I shy away from defining except in terms of “I did it as a fan, not as a pro: no money changed hands.” (And once upon a time, in the ancient day, that was the generally understood definition.)

Before someone asks: how do I feel about other people writing fanfic in my worlds? Hmm.

Used to be I didn’t care for it. Some aspects of it still make me twitch, slash in particular. (And I go back far enough to remember a time when “slash” meant only one thing: K/S. Boy, have I now dated myself: were dinosaurs ever walking the earth then.) And of course it depends on which characters are involved. Writing Herewiss/Freelorn slash seems like a waste of time. We *know* they do it…though I prefer that the lights be turned off, as it were, when I venture into their bedroom. …And so on. But then…Kit and Nita? When I have my own plans for how things are going to turn out, and the characterizations of both seem to me to have made it plain that they’re not going to be “going there” just yet? Hmm.

Yet you can’t stop people thinking about it…or writing about it. Truthfully, it’s kind of like going into a Manhattan kitchen where there is as yet no gecko living under the fridge. You turn the lights on, and Things scurry away under the cupboards and into every crevice. You can try to stomp on all the ones you see. But they’re fast, and clever at hiding. Then you turn the light off and go away, and out they come again and get back to doing what they were doing before you turned on the lights. They don’t care that you pay the rent on the kitchen. They’re there to party. Only dragging in the exterminators will stop them. But (chopping the metaphor off) do I really want to do that? Is it, perhaps, something of an overreaction?…

The nature of present reality would seem to indicate that there’s some other, more affable, more enjoyable, possibly more mature way to deal with the situation. I’m considering one or two. We’ll see how it all works out. ..

“Camembert is a lot more like the McMerde burger than you might suppose. Pierre Boisard seeks to show how, over the past 150 years or so, the cheese has been ruined: industrialised, homogenised, delocalised and, finally, pasteurised – and all without the assistance of American multinational corporations. It’s almost wholly an indigenous French story…”

Dairy products in general and cheese in particular are something of a passion around here — see the Home Dairying page at Edibilia for the recipes for homemade Monterey Jack, cottage cheese, sour cream, clotted cream and other such stuff — so this article made a fascinating read. …Well, for me, anyway. And now I’m wondering if there’s any Boursin in the fridge…

(Thanks to No-Sword for the link.)