The short story is almost finished. The ending occurred to me while I was taking a walk this morning, on a break from work. I always knew how the very end of the story would go, but the matter of getting there from the beginning of the end was presenting me with a logistical challenge. But then it came to me, as I crunched across the frozen courtyard of the Harvard Medical School, and I laughed out loud, because I knew right then and there beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to finish this goddamned story after all, my first completed piece of fiction in ten years. I think I'm going to attempt the grand finale this weekend. Wish me luck.

In other news, I discovered yesterday on Dispatches From Revland, another favorite blog of mine (I should really make a list of links), that there are people out there turning old Dungeons and Dragons adventures (a.k.a. "dungeon modules") into honest-to-goodness books. Don't believe me? The novelization of The Keep on the Borderlands, a dungeon module that came with every Basic Rules Set, is available for sale at Amazon.com right now. Go ahead. Buy it. I dare you. Revland will even get the commission, if you do.

Because I obviously have too much free time at work - witness the Binder Clip Monsters - and in the interest of fluffing my monthly statistics, I then decided to see if any libraries out there had cataloged any dungeon modules and actually shelved them in their stacks. I punched "Keep On The Borderlands" into OCLC, the massive electronic catalog that connects more than 20,000 libraries all over the world, and lo and behold, there were available lenders! Not many, mind you, but it just boggled the mind that a librarian had seen fit to acquire, catalog, and circulate a copy of something that was such an indispensable fixture of my geeky childhood (as opposed to my geeky adulthood). Delighted and disturbed, I tried the names of other classic adventures - Against The Giants, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and the immortal slaughterfest Tomb of Horrors - and found at least one library for each that wasn't ashamed to admit having a copy in their stacks. O brave new world, that has such people in it. Today's young geeks just don't know how good they have it. Comic books have gone mainstream, fantasy roleplaying is the stuff of best-selling games for Sony Playstations, and local shopping malls hold weekend-long training sessions and tournaments for the latest collectible card games. Hollywood action hero Vin Diesel is even a proud D&D player. Where were these people, when I was busy getting slammed into lockers back in the 80's. Ah, well. Better late than never, I guess.

Needless to say, I ordered some D&D modules on Interlibrary Loan, for old time's sake.

I'm looking for some names for my Binder Clip Monsters, pictured below. Right now all I have are Pretzel, Stouffer, and Bernice. Pretzel and Stouffer come from the name of a law firm that does business with our library from time to time - my coworker was reading their address out loud and I just couldn't help myself - and Bernice comes from, well, Bernice. These are fine names, all of them, but do they really do my creations justice? Send me an email if you'd like to suggest a name, and if I like it, I may send you a Clip Monster of your very own (some assembly required). No, really.

I don't know what angers me more: that our alleged President Bush used the term "Hitlerism" in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, or that "Hitlerism" is actually a word. Having not heard the speech myself, I was alerted to Shrubby's use of this seemingly made up word by the Rabbit Blog, one of my favorite places on the web since the untimely demise of Filler (which was the brainchild of Rabbit's Heather Havrilesky and artist Terry Colon). Intrigued and incensed, I immediately Googled "Hitlerism" to see if it was in fact kosher, expecting to get nothing but the transcript of Bush's address, but lo and behold, there were over four thousand hits. Pretty good for something coming out of the mouth of our Mangler-in-Chief. Here's the definition, from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

The fascistic and nationalistic theories and practices of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Okay. Straightforward enough. But why not use the term "fascism"? Or "Nazism"? Either would have been a little less obscure. Could it possibly have had anything to do with the Administration's inexorable march to oust Saddam Hussein, whom Bush the Elder labelled as "worse than Hitler" shortly before the First Gulf War back in 1991? Why else favor a term scoring 4,000 hits on Google over one that turns up 359,000? Now what seemed to me at first to be another amusing Bushism (hey, you've got one too, Mr. President!) is looking a little more clever. And a lot more sinister.

But before I veer off entirely into Gloom-and-Doom-Land - population roughly six billion - Googling "Hitlerism" did also yield a page called Hitlerism vs. Odinism. I bet Odinism could lay the smack down on Hitlerism any day of the week - Bushism, too. In fact, I think we should have a WWF (wait, it's WWE now, isn't it?) style Battle Royale between all of the isms, and see who's left standing when the dust settles. That would be fifty bucks well spent on Pay-Per-View...

Luke Be A Jedi Tonight - no, you're not in a fugue state, there really is such a thing as Star Wars: The Musical Edition, which will be making its big-stage debut at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where else?) starting January 31st and running until February 8th. Now there's a funny story behind this Friday afternoon link. In ancient times, aka 1990, I arrived at MIT as a wide-eyed freshman, and promptly began to have the intellectual snot beat out of me, in what must have been one of the worst semester performances for an incoming student in 'Tute history. During this six-month period of hell, I became fast friends with someone who found himself in exactly the same situation as I had, and I'm happy to say our friendship endured, even after we both escaped from MIT and found our own separate ways in the world. This friend of mine happens to be the set designer for the upcoming Star Wars musical. A happy coincidence and little more, this I'll admit. But that's only half of the tale. After surviving a harrowing first year at MIT, I decided to take refuge in music, something that I'd neglected during my freshman ordeal. I joined the Chorallaries, an acapella group that combined a lot of skits and song parodies in with more traditional covers of contemporary songs. The Chorallaries are now a venerable institution, having been around since the 70's, and it wasn't unusual for long since graduated alums to show up at post-concert parties and sing a couple old standbys with us in between the obligatory drinking, of which there was a lot (remind me to tell you about Windex and Liquid Kermit sometime). One of these old alums turned out to be half of the duo responsible for Star Wars: The Musical Edition. I remember him now talking about noodling around with turning Star Wars into musical theatre, but at the time we just laughed, since skit-writing is what we all did, and we knew damned well that stretching a nice gag into something substantial was usually more trouble than it was worth. Well, I guess he went to the trouble of finishing this thing. I'm afraid to see it, but given the circumstances, how can I not? Pray for me.

I've been writing. Not here, obviously, but on my commutes back and forth from teaching Greek in the evenings. I don't want to go into details right now, so as not to jinx it, but it's the first short story I've written in over ten years. Hell, it's the first anything I've written in over ten years, creatively speaking. Right now it's at about three thousand words, give or take - not a lot, but considering the dry spell I'm coming out of, three thousand words feels like three hundred thousand - and the story itself is safely beyond the halfway point. I forgot what a rush it is, when you first catch sight of the ending of the story, and what was starting to seem like hopeless meandering pulls tight, and you're suddenly rushing headlong towards the final sentence with a terrible, wonderful velocity. How I've missed this feeling! Now ideas that have been backing up in the nooks and crannies of my brain are all trying to break out at once, the characters morphing into each other, the plotlines interweaving and colliding, and dialogue spilling out of my imagination and onto my moving lips, inadvertently, when I'm waiting for the bus. The hardest part is going to be staying focused on one story at a time. But that's infinitely preferable to indefinite writer's block. Here's to hoping the words keep flowing.

Oh, and I've also been dabbling in a little bit of sculpture. With office supplies. No, really:







I'm calling them "When Dinosaurs Roamed The Cubicle".

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

C.P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley

But enough about beer...



According to the BBC World News, the latest proposal for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has come from an unlikely source, the celebrated and long-dead Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi's 95-year-old plans for a futuristic hotel roughly the same height as the Empire State Building (shown above) is currently being championed by a group of architects and urban planners who have so far been uninspired by the two rounds of designs already presented. In lieu of an outdoor park or some other such monument dedicated to the WTC victims, the Gaudi building would utilize a cathedral-like interior chamber that was originally intended to be a massive "Hall of Presidents" as the memorial space, thus integrating the new building with the monument in a way that doesn't seem chinzy or contrived. Now I have to tell you that until seeing this design, my gut feeling about the WTC site has consistently been to leave it alone. I think part of my reaction was in response to the fact that many of the proposals submitted so far have emphasized the new buildings at the expense of the memorial, as if our intention in re-building there is to bury the awful truth of what happened two Septembers ago, conveniently paving over the hows and the whys with millions of square feet of office space and "tasteful" commerical and retail development. The memorials proposed in conjunction with these buildings seemed tacked on, almost as in an afterthought. Gaudi's design, in contrast, is its own living shrine - not only to the WTC dead, but to archetypal Manhattan itself, a time when even New York's skyscrapers had their own humanity. Tasteless ideas such as building the world's tallest building or otherwise "replacing" the Twin Towers are a kind of collective denial on the part of their proponents. Short of turning the whole area into a memorial park, I think integrated designs such as Gaudi's are the only way to rebuild without cheapening the human life that was lost there, and I wish the coalition sponsoring the Gaudi revival the best of luck.

Do you believe that the universe is endless?? Scientists believe that the universe goes on forever and ever. Our teachings says that beer is everlasting to everlasting, that beer is eternal. I don't completely understand it, but if the universe is eternal how much more is the creator.

Did you know that archaeologists are trying to figure out what fish fossils are doing at the peak of some mountains? It's a big mystery to someone that doesn't believe in the great flood of Beer (12BB).

Some naive people believe that beer is simply a drink for the weak willed, but how can you explain the fruit that is old turning alcoholic or the fact that yeast is a natural substance that has been on this planet for so long. Alcohol was given to us as a means to reach our promised land and to release us from the solid state of body and mind.

After reading this I hope it will influence you to go on the most Adventurous Quest of your life. The search for the meaning of life, and obtaining the peace of alcohol, which surpasses all human understanding. And most importantly, reconciling yourself to beer and the search for the one good pint.

We feel that we need to stress one point before you read any further. We do not endorse or agree with excessive drinking. To be an Alchodite is to believe in Alcohol, it has nothing to do with how much you drink. We do not have any members who are alcoholics since we can not help them, only a trained professional can make them better.

Courtesy of Google Image Search - above is the number one hit for "Guinness". Finally, a worldview I can get behind!

I'm not ignoring you, fellow Exiles, honest I'm not! As the three "hymns to Fortune" below might suggest, I seem to have stumbled into a crucial juncture in my life. A good one, to be sure, but suddenly change is on the horizon, so damned close that I can taste it. And this is a good thing. But more about that later. Right now, why don't we take a look at three BBC news items about my favorite potent potable, beer:

A French Government drive against alcoholism has incurred the wrath of Belgium's famous Trappist monks.

The craze for a cheap beer made out of sea water and raw malt is denting Japan's brewing industry.

Raspberry and chocolate beers aimed at women are to go on sale in (London) supermarkets.

Ah, yes. Beer. What would I do without it? A funny thing - the below-mentioned Carmina Burana is one big collection of Medieval college drinking songs. Kind of funny that we've turned it (thanks to Carl Orff's brilliant musical interpretation of the text and the movie Excalibur's inspired use of Orff's score) into the very stereotype of epic movie music. I guess drinking was a little more of a contact sport back then...

Cheers (for now)!

Three hymns to Fortune:

Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,
To learn my lineage, be it ne'er so low.
It may be she with all a woman's pride
Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I
Who rank myself as Fortune's favorite child,
The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.
She is my mother and the changing moons
My brethren, and with them I wax and wane.
Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?
Nothing can make me other than I am.

- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.

- Anonymous, Carmina Burana

They call you Lady Luck.
But there is room for doubt
At times you have a very unladylike way of running out
You're this a date with me
The pickings have been lush
And yet before this evening is over you might give me the brush
You might forget your manners
You might refure to stay and So the best that I can to is pray.

- Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls