The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

–The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

SECOND ACT

SCENE

Garden at the Manor House. A flight of grey stone steps leads up to the
house. The garden, an old-fashioned one, full of roses. Time of year,
July. Basket chairs, and a table covered with books, are set under a
large yew-tree.

Miss Prism. [Shaking her head.] I do not think that even I could
produce any effect on a character that according to his own brother’s
admission is irretrievably weak and vacillating. Indeed I am not sure
that I would desire to reclaim him. I am not in favour of this modern
mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. As a
man sows so let him reap. You must put away your diary, Cecily. I
really don’t see why you should keep a diary at all.

Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my
life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about
them.

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about
with us.

Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never
happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is
responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.

Miss Prism. Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily.
I wrote one myself in earlier days.

Cecily. Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I
hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They
depress me so much.

Miss Prism. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what

Fiction means.

Cecily. I suppose so. But it seems very unfair. And was your novel
ever published?

Miss Prism. Alas! no. The manuscript unfortunately was abandoned.
[Cecily starts.] I use the word in the sense of lost or mislaid. To
your work, child, these speculations are profitless.

I woke up in the dark thinking there was an earthquake. Then, that seeming silly, I remembered that the weather guy had said that there would be a change and the wind would pick up, so that made sense in a sleep addled way–the wind is making the windows rattle. But–I was becoming interested and a bit more awake–that much wind would make the wind chime on the porch ring like a church bell. Instead, it was still. An explosion somewhere? I waited to hear sirens. There would have been sirens after any explosion big enough to leave the windows shaking half a minute after the fact.

It was an earthquake.  Around 4:30.  In Illinois. Something short of a couple hundred miles from here. They are saying on TV now that it was a 5.4. It seems to be out in farm land, some distance from most major cities. Vincennes Indiana is not too far from there.. There seems to be a little damage as far away as Louisville, the facade of a brick building.

It is part of the New Madrid system, but peripheral.

“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”

“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”

“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

“Out of this house,” said rider to reader,
“Yours never will,” said farer to fearer,
“They’re looking for you,” said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

– W. H. Auden

I took my first stab at this. The results were…interesting. Not great, but not all that bad.

Since I have an inkjet printer, I used a variation of the T shirt transfer paper method. I had a photocopy from a catalog, of a painting. Scaled it to fit the lid of a cheapie wooden box from Michael’s–about 9×7 inches. For a first effort, that was a bit large. By the time I managed to paint the entire image with the Liquid, the ink on the transfer paper was already beginning to go into solution. Learned that the hard way when I scraped a 1/2 inch long bit off the edge with the chopstick I was using to hold it in place. That was all right, since the over all effect was going to be on the rough side.

I skipped the heat gun and baked the whole thing in the oven, on a cheap cookie sheet. A little soaking, and the paper came right off.

Next time: I will make sure my Sculpy is thinner before I begin. I’ll brush it on instead of pouring it and then trying to smooth it out. And it would be better to work by sections. Leave a “handle” when cutting out the image. Maybe practice with a smaller image a couple of times before anything I want to look really nice.

	Heat Gun Method: Spread a thin, even coat of Translucent Liquid Sculpey on the surface of your toner transfer image. The uncured clay will appear milky white and shiny.
	Use your heat gun to carefully set the clay. Move the tip of the heat gun evenly over the surface of the clay so it does not burn in spots.
	The clay will become translucent and matte when it cures.
	With a clay blade or your fingernail, peel the clay away from the paper while the clay is still warm. You will now have a paper thin transfer.
	If you use the side of the clay that lifted the image off of the paper, your image will be reversed. It is a good idea to bake the transfer on a flat tray (if you are not applying it to clay that will be baked again) for 10 minutes to make sure the liquid clay is completely cured.
	Color Transfers with Fabric Transfer Paper Color images printed from your computer inkjet printer onto fabric transfer paper can be easily made into thin liquid clay transfers. Once you have printed the image onto the fabric transfer paper (used for transferring images onto t-shirts and fabric), just follow the directions for the heat gun transfer method. Once the Liquid Sculpey is cured, the clay will peel easily from the paper. This way, you can quickly turn your own digital color images into paper-thin clay transfers.

Watching the Marx Brothers Night in Casablanca.

There is a wonderful Harpo routine:

( I love the swing bit.)

I am soooooo disappointed. Comedy Central has managed to create a format in which Lewis Black is dull. Not funny.

Oh, the humanity…

I’ve been a bit off-center lately, what with the cataract surgery and all, and wasn’t really in the mood for a production. Jim had mentioned Marche as a Valentine’s evening meal site, but by the time we got around to checking them out, they were booked.

Just as well. Dedided to do dinner and a movie instead.

For the dinner part of the evening, we decided to avoid the crowds altogether by skipping anything with a white tablecloth. Just parked in the Belcourt lot and walked down the street to Savarino’s where the atmosphere may be a little spartan, but the food is fine. And the pastries… Definitely spoiled any appetite for popcorn and M&Ms.

‘D noticed the Belcourt film noir series would be in progress. There were a pile I have never seen on a real screen, although most of them were on The Big Show or whatever on the tube when I was growing up. Now there’s Turner Classic. Interesting to realize not all of them were in black and white. Thursday’s offering was In A Lonely Place, a Bogey, and one neither of us had even heard of, so it was a perfect choice. You can see why it’s not so popular as some of his other work, but it is good.

All in all a fine evening. Jim liked the Valentine I photoshopped for him.

It was a composite, and I turned its bits and pieces into magnets for some added fun

I have a couple of places that aren’t healing right. Just scratches and scrapes, but they are inflamed, and have been for over a week or two. The most likely diagnosis is Too Much Medicine. All that crap in me and on me, small wonder the whole system is trying to collapse a piece at a time. The miracles of mod sci. I’m halfway tempted to try a little natural healing.

When I was in college back in the sixties, we had a single overworked nurse for the school clinic. She was an amazing character, and one who might have come straight out of central casting. Imagine Ma Kettle in starched white. Brusque, graying, and rawboned. She had been a medical missionary somewhere in Africa for a long time before settling into the wilds of East Tennessee, so she was accustomed to making do with what she had. I had occasion to learn about that.

One of my rare dates my Sophomore year was for a hayride. Fall, fine weather, and a flatbed truck with piles and bales of hay. We went out to some property on a hill outside Morristown for a bonfire with hot dogs, marshmallows, and the obligatory Kum Ba Yah. Heady stuff. It was the cave that was my downfall.

To make things interesting, and to keep our Baptist hormones busy, the organizers had included a little side trip into a local cave. Now, I was accustomed to seriously tamed caves, all lit and evened out. Walk-in and walk-out jobs. The Mammoth Cave short tour. Jewel cave near my grandfolks outside Dickson. Rock City and Ruby Falls. Roadside attractions, you understand. This, however, was a wild cave. No paving, no power. No nice, neat doorways.

I never made it inside. The entrance was at the bottom of a fairly large sinkhole, maybe eight feet deep, maybe less. The sides were almost straight, and the only way down was by way of a rope tied to a tree at the rim. It was a very rough rope. I had no idea of how to manage the climb. If you’ve ever seen what a rasp does to green wood, you might be able to imagine what happened to the palms of my hands. Had to be lifted and hauled back out of that pit. Humiliated.

The school nurse’s treatment for my hamburger paws was, after the initial cleaning and dusting with sulfa powder, a light gauze bandage and a daily visit to the clinic during which time I was examined and made to sit quietly by a window for half an hour with my bare palms in the sunlight. Every afternoon for about a week.  It worked. Those deep rope burns healed cleanly, quickly, and without a scar.

If it worked for that, it ought to work for a couple of little old scratches. Solar powered healing.

We went to my brother’s house for Christmas. Glenn cooked breakfast. I brought a batch of scones from the Sweet 16th and a few goodies from the Turnip Truck. It was much fun.

The unwrapping, not documented this year, was a kick. Of course I mislabeled a couple of the presents, as usual. What I would do if there were a whole crew… Glenn seemed to get a kick out of the calendar–photoshopped pics of his dogs on odd furniture from the internet. And the Dana was a hit. My first eBay purchase turned out pretty good.

Afterwards, the dogs got to come in from the cold. Nikki, the new gal, likes to rip and chew paper, so she was in heaven.

Got home and thought we had left about half of my gifts at Glenn’s. Jim looked in the car and we went through the boxes with all Jim’s things–no such luck. Depressing. This morning, Jim found it out on the front porch in the chair by the steps where one of us had left it when we were bringing everything in. Duh.

There was a call on the answering machine from Priscilla.  Not quite the just a merry christmas we were expecting:  she had news.  Leslie went into labor for the holiday, but needed a C-section, and they were all waiting.  The expected January twins were Christmas boys.  Owen Michael and Ethan James.

Pictures of the babies have been promised.

Christmas brunch

Aftermath with pups

And the gifts that almost got lost

Calendar pages

All fiction has its expectations.  Within genre fiction those expectations are all but codified.  Creation is all about taking expectation and standing it on its ear.

 

From the Random Plot Generator:   

Advice for the Evil Overlord:

After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

Advice for the Hero:

I will not count on other rebels being as self-sacrificing as I.

Advice for the Bad Auxiliary Character (Evil Overlord’s Wicked but Beautiful Daughter):

Don’t just be an attractive stage prop. Make sure you know every detail of the running of the Evil Empire, so that if anything unpleasant happens to Daddy, the transition of power will go smoothly. Then make sure that something unpleasant happens to Daddy.

Advice for the Good Auxiliary Character (Innocent Bystander):

If you notice that your fellow reporter can type 1,024 words per minute, you should be able to tell that something’s up.

Further Evil (Advice on Ultimate Weapons/Spells):

While it may be tempting to use an Ultimate Weapon or Spell with a rare, almost impossible to exploit, Tiny Flaw to accomplish my goals, if many Penultimate Weapons or Spells with no such flaw can achieve the same effect, I will employ them instead.

Murphy’s Laws of Combat:

• B-52s are the ultimate close support weapon.
• When you drop your equipment in a firefight, your ammo and grenades always fall farthest away, and your canteen always lands at your feet.