The problem with terrorist profiling...

...Is that EVERY ethic group, gender, and age group have been involved in terrorism.  It's not just "young Middle Eastern men"  like some idiots think.  Pick any group that people clambering for profiling think should be excluded, and you will find a significant number of terrorists.  For example:

Caucasians:  Anyone else remember the Oklahoma City anymore?  Largest terrorist attack on American soil prior to 2001? 

Women: Russia.  Algeria.  Actually, my understand is that one of the big "OMG they're teh evilz!" wielded against guerrilla fighters in Algeria's 1950s war for independence from France was "they use women to carry out their terrorist attacks!"  In other words, ladies have a long history in terrorism.

Eldery:  Algeria again, and quite likely that Al-Qaeda will continue to user elderly operatives in other areas.  There was also that nut who tried to commit a massacre at the Holocaust Museum but got stopped at the door; killed the security guard.  (We do want to stop individual mass murderers and not just those with group backing, right?)

Christians:  I bet the Irish would have something to say about this. 

Even children too young to intiate terrorist action themselves have been used to carry weapons and explosives.

I think we can all agree that we do not want to identify only "most" terrorists and call it close enough.  We want to catch all of them, and only them, before they kill people, right?  Then profiling doesn't help, because there are no "safe" groups.  If we want to go this route, then we need to go all the way to background checks for all passengers.

I don't understand why this is such a difficult concept. 

Then again, let's be honest.  Many people who say "I want profiling" really mean "I don't want to be personally bothered by this security stuff."  Majority priviledge talking loud and clear.

An Abuse Culture and "That Awful Thing Women Do"

This post is about two issues: how traditional socialization of women promotes a culture in which domestic abuse flourishes, and the double standard between men's and women's behavior.

First, though, I'd like to put down a reminder that abuse can happen to absolutely ANYone -- and I'm not just saying that.  Some people are more susceptible to it, but even the most confident, mentally healthy person can find themself on the receiving end of an abusive relationship.  The psychology is very similar to that behind Stockholm Syndrome.  To put it very briefly, the human mind is made to differentiate allies from enemies, and when someone you love (i.e. firmly planted in the "ally" category) starts behaving like an enemy on an unpredictable basis while still acting like an ally other times, that throws the brain for a serious loop.  Does not compute. 

As the abusive behavior gradually increases from "rare fluke" to "daily operation", a survival mechanism gets triggered, the one that says "I must keep this person happy, even at the cost of my own personality, in order to survive."  Now, that survival mechanism doesn't seem to make sense from a modern standpoint.  Wouldn't "run run run" make more sense?  But if you consider that until about 150 years ago, slavery was an innate part of the human existence and still exists today, and also that women and children have been considered property for most of human history and even today often do not have financial resources under their sole control, well, it starts to make sense.  For much of humanity over much of history, keeping someone happy even though you didn't like then and they didn't treat you well was necessary for survival, while escape would likely get you killed.

So in summary, abuse can happen to anyone no matter how healthy and confident, not just those somehow predisposed to it.

So, on to "that awful thing women do".  I think all of us, man and woman, have been deeply ingrained with the large number of "horrible things women do".  Let me take one example for this post: "women will get mad at you without telling you why".

I'm going to give an extreme example here to demonstrate why this "horrible thing women do" is not always unreasonable behavior.  Imagine you're at a party full of your friends, and your partner for God only knows what reason suddenly screams the most vulgar insult you can imagine at you and hits you so hard he lays you across the floor.
1) Should you have to explain to him that this is utterly unacceptable behavior that has upset you?
2) Would you have the guts to do so under the circumstances?

Isn't the fact that he doesn't understand that insulting and hitting you will make you angry a problem in itself, in addition to the fact that he insulted and hit you?

I find this is often the case.  There are some things that should not have to be explained as inappropriate and upsetting, and in some of those cases, giving the explanation can be dangerous.  This idea that "it's horrible for women to be angry without explaining why" basically forces the victim to either suppress her justified anger, put herself in danger to explain it, or suffer the stigma of being a "horrible woman".  All three options are very convenient to the abuser: either she doesn't get mad so what he did couldn't have been that bad, or he gets another opportunity to literally or figuratively beat her down, or he gets societal help convincing her she's horrible and worthless.

Of course, the stereotype is of a women going around pouting to punish the guy because he left the toilet seat up again, or some other triviality.  Personally, I've rarely seen that.  When I have seen it, the problem was not really the toilet seat, it was the disrespect shown by the problem repeating again and again despite her previously stating how much it annoyed her, and the "pouting" is not for punishment, but out of fear, or frustration, or quite often, social conditioning. 

After all, if she did say that she was angry every one of the 20 times the toilet seat was left up during the week, she'd be doing that other "horrible thing women do", nagging.  Pick your horrible, ladies, because you can't win.  It basically comes down to "women aren't supposed to be mad at men".  We're not supposed to say when we're mad, but we're also not supposed to not say when we're mad, so apparently we're just supposed to flip the switch that turns those emotions off entirely and not be mad at all.

Also, this "horrible thing women do" of going around obviously mad but not saying why?  I've seen men do it.  I personally have seen it more often and more blatantly from men, usually out of frustration and their own social conditioning.  You know, the guy is stomping around, slamming doors, kicking things, and if you ask "what's wrong" you get no response, or a grunt, or the dreaded "Nothing" or "It's not important to you."  You get exactly what women as a collective gender are accused of doing as a "horrible thing".  But when a guy does it "It's OK.  He's a guy.  They don't talk about their problems."

"It's OK.  He's a guy."
The behavior is "horrible" when women do it, but when a man does, "It's OK, because he's a man."  Definition of double standard, right there.

Health Care "Reform"?

So, the health care reform bills coming out of Congress.  Were they purposely designed to make the problem worse, or are our law makers just that incompetent?

1) By requiring consumers to buy insurance or pay penalties, they are making demand inelastic, which will drive prices up.  It's basic Econ 101 stuff, folks.

2) They've set the fines for failure to get insurance significantly below the cost of insurance even with the new subsidies.  Intentionally.  The fine maximums are tied to insurance policy costs.  The problem has never been that people could get insurance and chose not to, but rather that they can't afford it.  This does nothing to address that root problem.  What's going to happen -- I might go so far to say what is obviously going to happen -- is that we will go from a country with millions of people who are uninsured, to a country with millions of people who are uninsured and paying for the 'privilege'.

And no 'big picture' price controls that I can see.  I've found limits on how much more companies can charge their older clients compared to their younger ones (2 or 3 times, depending on the bill), and how much they can charge sick clients compared to healthy ones (no difference allowed), but nowhere is there a limit to how much they can charge a person relative to their income, or relative to some external measure like Cost of Living Index or something.

So, basically insurance companies can charge whatever they want as long as they do it across the board in the proper ratios, and we the consumers are legally required to either pay it or pay a lesser amount for absolutely nothing.

This is supposed to be helpful?  How?  I mean, the parts about no longer allowing people to be disallowed or dropped because of health issues are good, but this forced consumerism, I just don't see how it's possibly going to help.  At best I think the effect would be neutral, but honestly I think it's going to hurt a LOT of people.

(The cynical part of me also notes that neither plan goes into effect until after the next Presidential election.  Oh hell yes I believe that part is by design.)

Now, if the master plan is to screw up the insurance industry so bad that the whole racket collapses and then we can do real reform without that pesky lobbying block in the way, great!  I'm behind that goal, and their plan looks well conceived, if a little blatant, for fulfilling that aim.  The pain we'll feel in the meantime sucks, but we gotta get rid of them somehow and this allows impact to the economy to be slower than just putting them all out of business  at once.

On the other hand, if the master plan with this bill is to help people who are getting screwed currently...  Fail.  Complete Fail.  Epic Fail.  It's not even out of the gate yet and it, and the lawmakers responsible for it, are Made Of Fail.

I love these women.

The intelligent ladies at the Shapely Prose blog: You'll love them, too. Primarily fat acceptance and feminism mixed in.


Also, this Fat vs. Fiction article on Jezebel is pure awesome.

Death is a funny thing.

Funny strange, not funny ha ha, of course.
I hope I've waited long enough to not be completely insensitive with this post, too.

Isn't it amazing how people's opinion of a person can change on a dime when that person dies? I mean, may I politely suggest that if you had asked the average person on the street what they thought of Michael Jackson, you would have gotten a very different answer on June 20th than you would have gotten on June 30th? Literally overnight, Michael went from being "Whacko Jacko" to being "The King of Pop" again.

That's... odd. And frankly, kind of sad. Instead of being cruel to the living and idolizing the dead, would it really be that hard to try to see people as people?
Then again, it's easy to idolize the dead. They don't do anything to piss you off anymore.

Burning stupid: health care edition

There are some conversations I am finding more and more difficult to have, or even to tolerate, because the loudest arguments are often really flamingly stupid. Health care is one of those.

I think the US ought to determine which country has the best most-bang-for-the-buck system, and replicate it. Now, this may not come down to an easy choice, deciding how to balance our bang for our buck. But we're not even seriously looking at how other places have done it, and I've got a problem with that. I can tell you right off it is not going to be our current system, and it is going to be a single payer universal system. It's just the numbers, folks. Per capita, Americans pay more and get worse care than any other developed nation. Wanting it to be otherwise isn't going to change that. And the "not invented here" crap? A health care system is NOT the place for it.

Now, I am not at all saying that every position in opposition to mine is stupid. Not at all. There are plenty of intelligent arguments against my position. For just one example, adopting one of these established systems will almost certainly destroy the health insurance industry as it exists today. Personally, I think this is ultimately a good thing, but with the economy in the awful state it's in, now may not be a good time for it.

(Something I got to point out to the "Capitalism is God" people, though. Capitalism worshipers claim that capitalism is always the most efficient way to allocate resources. If that were true, replacing a capitalistic system with a socialistic system would not destroy jobs, it would create them. The most efficient system would be using the smallest amount of resources. If changing requires less resources, the the original system was not using the smallest amount of resources, and thus is not the most efficient.)

There are lots of blindingly stupid arguments against universal health care, though. Some of them, I wonder if the people saying them have ever read typical private insurance terms. For instance:

Stupid 1: In a socialized system, you will be told what doctors you can see and what procedures you can have.

Um... Four words. "Out of network provider." Three more: "procedure not covered." My insurance company already tells me what doctors I can see and what treatments I can get. I eagerly await the day every doctor and every hospital in the nation is "in network". If I get in a serious car accident on my way to visit my mother, I am screwed. Actually, I'm kind of screwed just in town, because I'm only allowed to use one of the three hospitals. The Catholic hospital. Women, if you want to be treated like a wrapper for a uterus, the local Catholic hospital is the place for it -- and I speak from experience here. Under nationalized healthcare, my health options will hopefully determined by my choices, not by someone else's religious beliefs.

Stupid 2: Ungodly long waiting times await you, unlike in the US.

Oh dear. I just spit my beverage all over the monitor. It didn't splash on you, did it?

I read an article a while back that said that when you equalize for population density, wait times in countries with socialized medicine are the same or shorter than in the US. Unfortunately, I've lost that link.

However, I can tell you this. It takes a minimum of 2 weeks to get an appointment with my PCP, and it's usually 3 or 4. When I needed to have a diagnostic ultrasound, I had to wait an entire month for the procedure, and then another month for the follow-up appointment so that my doctor could tell me what it said. (And I had to go to the Catholic hospital for it, where I was treated like a walking uterus. Not fun.) It took like 3 months to get an official diagnosis, when I knew what was wrong with me the day I called for the first appointment. It was the only one of the 3 most likely possibilities that matched my age group, weight, and symptoms.

When I last went to make an appointment with my gyno, mine had left the practice. If I wanted to come under the head doctor, I would have had to wait 9 months for an appointment. Because I agreed to go under the newest member, I "only" had to wait 5 weeks.

Where do people get this "short wait times in America" idea? Yes, we have prompt care clinics where you can get in same-day. They have those in other countries, too.

Also, anyone else note how the comparison is always to either Canada's system or Britain's NHS? I am not dissing either system, because they are far better than the American alternative. But neither of these is considered the best in world, either. Ironically, America's to blame for some of that. Canada's was shorted funding due to NAFTA, and from my perspective a lot of Britain's problems are coming from taking an Americanized viewpoint towards health care. But that's MHO.

Stupid 3: A universal health care system is impossible. It couldn't possibly work.

Don't tell me that something can't be done when every other developed nation in the world already does it. Just don't. Millions of people already live quite successfully under universal health care systems, and idiots are trying to tell me that those very systems are physically impossible and can't possibly exist? UGH! The stupid, it burns!

Stupid 4: Well look what socialized health care did for Massachusetts.

::head desk:: Yes, Massachusetts is a mess. And anyone who's taken two weeks of an Intro to Economics course could have told you that Massachusetts would be a mess. I predicted the day I heard about it that it would be a disaster, and my predictions have come true. In part, it's a mess specifically because most of it isn't socialized. Massachusetts' idea of "reform" was to require people to have health care. [sarcasm]Right, because the problem is that people are choosing not to have it.[/sarcasm]

First, the "reform" does absolutely nothing to help those who are uninsurable due to pre-existing medical issues. There are no good numbers for how many people this may include. I've seen estimates from 1% to 15% of the population. I actually suspect it's much higher, especially if you include people who are technically insured but will have their claims rejected for "pre-existing condition" when they submit them. I say this because, for one example, anemia is one of the conditions that will land you on the "uninsurable" list; 20% of women will have a bout of anemia at some point in their life.

Second, all the Massachusetts plan did was make insurance demand inelastic. We all know what happens to the economic supply-demand curve when demand becomes inelastic, right? Cost goes up and/or quality goes down. That is exactly what happened. A year or two into the program Massachusetts went to the insurance companies to negotiate rates for their subsidized plans, and the companies refused to give them any deals. Why should they? By law, the state had to pay no matter what. Why should the companies give them a discount if they can't say 'no' to full price? The state had no negotiating room. Yet policymakers were absolutely shocked by this frankly obvious turn of events. And because they had budgeted assuming they'd get a discount for their huge block, funding came up short and it turned into a disaster.

This is not a problem with socialized medicine. To the contrary, this is a problem inherent in capitalism, and it will be a problem in any capitalistic health care system, including the one we currently have. Health care is just about the ultimate in inelastic demand, and catastrophic care is even more inelastic then normal care. You don't have it, you die -- which is not a valid choice for most of us. And so, price goes up, quality goes down. Remember what I said in the second paragraph about Americans paying more and getting worse care per capita than any other nation? Hey, theory in action! This is capitalism. This is not some outside taint, this is not some failure due to 'impurity' or 'regulation'. This is inherent to a capitalistic system. It is one of the most basic parts of capitalistic theory. This is the kind of thing that makes economists wet themselves in joy because "look, we're right! It's just like the model said it would be!"

I cannot beat this horse enough. Demand for health care, especially catastrophic care, is so inelastic that expensive and/or (usually and) inferior care is an inherent and unavoidable part of any capitalist health care system. The only way to avoid it is for the system to not be capitalist.

OK, I think that's all I can handle for one day. That's OK. I think those are the biggest stupids, the one that most make me want to beat someone with the huge thick binder of legalese that is my insurance plan.

An observation

Have you ever heard the saying that the best measure of a person's real character is what they would do if they knew they'd never get found out?

The Internet is one big exercise in that, isn't it?

Carbon Footprint Logic Fail

No, they're not random words strung together. The following is an actual conversation (originally about saving money) that made me headdesk hard, and yet I think the lack of thought is not atypical.

Person 1: I need a camera battery charger. I can go to the local Circuit City/Compusa/Radioshack and get one for about $40. Or I can order one online–including shipping, for about $18. It is the same thing, and if I can wait 5 days for postal service, it is much cheaper.
Person 2: Of course then you run into the whole carbon footprint local vs non-local issue.
P1: I’m pretty sure that no matter how I get my battery charger , it is going to be of non-local origins.
P2: I don’t think you understand my point. BUYING locally.

Head, meet desk.

I've read that in any given purchase, the biggest contribution to the object's carbon footprint occurs in the drive from the store to your home. I don't know if that's literally true and in what cases, but the important point is to remember that economies of scale have a big factor. A single skein of alpaca yarn goes from raw fiber in Peru to scouring in China (virtually all wool and most other animal fibers are cleaned in China due to more lax environmental and worker safety laws) to spinning God Knows Where to warehouse to store. That's a lot of travel. But Peru-China-GodKnow all go by boat in quantities of several thousand tons at a time. GodKnows to warehouse goes by the semi full, which is around 10 to 20 tons. Warehouse to store goes several hundred pounds. Store to my house is 100 grams. You can see how the division works out.

In the particular case mentioned, the mail truck is coming to your house whether it carries a charger or not, while if you buy it locally, you have to go out in your personal vehicle to get it. Thus unless there are unusual mitigating circumstances, buying online actually has a lower carbon footprint.

If you are buying something produced locally, you are cutting down on some of the carbon footprint. (In my example, the Peru-China-Godknows-Warehouse portion goes away). For something produced remotely, there are many good reasons to buy local, but carbon footprint is not one of them.

Critical thought: it is your friend.

Book: Thirteenth Child by Patricia Wrede (Heck yes there's spoilers)

So, ldragoon asked that I read Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child while letting my history trivia and natural love of riffing dance on it. I’ve slogged through all 344 pages, and I am ready to riff. I am soooo ready to riff. I am beyond ready to riff.

What I’m going to do here is basically an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet riffing. Take what you like, leave what you don’t. You see, logically speaking, adding magic unravels the entire sweater of history into a big ol’ tangle of yarn, and even “just” eliminating two continents’ worth of people completely trashes pretty much everything that happened since 1492. But Wrede’s insisting she’s still got something basically sweater-shaped here. Except where it’s obvious (changing two of the first 5 presidents, for example), I am not even going to try to guess at her logic as to which changes are intentional and which were oopsies. I’m just laying all the inconsistencies out, and you can decide for yourself which to write off as magic and/or intended, and which are just messed up.

I’ll roughly go through a chapter at a time, but I’ll pull in examples from later chapters as appropriate.

So, diving in:


Chapter 1

Enjoy this chapter for all its worth, because nothing even remotely interesting will happen again until Chapter 6.

1. Family Size

It really appears that Ms. Wrede is writing her mid-19th-Century huge family from the perspective of a modern small family. First page, Eff talks about families giving up on trying for 7th sons because “there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings.” (I will do my best not to groan at the unnecessary fantasy word changes. Don’t expect me to use them myself very often, though.) Actually, from what I’ve read written by modern people with large families, once you get to six-ish it gets easier. You’ve got the older kids to help take care of the younger ones, and of course by the time you’ve popped out number 10, the first few are usually out of the house. (That many kids, they’re often pretty eager to flee. ^_~) Twelve isn’t terrible much worse than six, and 20 isn’t all that different from 12.

Later in chapter 2, Jack and Nan are declared too young for child minding. It’s already established that Eff has a sibling who’s 8, which means Jack and Nan are at least 9 and probably 10 or older. In this time period in a society where huge familes are the norm, that would be more than old enough to be watching younger siblings. Again, looks like it was viewed from a modern standpoint instead of a period one.

Furthermore, let’s talk child-mortality rates. We are nicely before germ theory here. In the real world, statistically speaking, 3 to 7 of the Rothmers' children wouldn’t make it to age 18. Yes, this world has healing magic. However, Eff’s rheumatic fever, Mama’s broken leg, and the settlement magician who died of fever all suggest that it’s fairly limited in what it can do. Instead of losing 3 to 7, maybe instead we’re talking 1 to 4. Can we at least acknowledge the issue, attribute it to Papa’s own Seventh Son luck? Personally, I think it would have been stylish if a sibling had died of disease shortly after Eff’s birth -- see, unlucky 13th-- even though that means losing the part later where Eff vaguely hopes a sibling she hardly knows will die so she’ll no longer be 13th, and then immediately feels horrible.

2. Mama’s clothes.

I actually don’t have a problem with Mama’s clothes, but half my history trivia comes from a historical costuming interest, so I use these to help date the action and for a later complaint -- and just to get down with my nerdy self.

On page 4, Mama finds Eff so upset that “she got right down on the floor beside me”. Wow. Obviously she is not wearing a crinoline; otherwise this would have been fun to watch. That puts us before 1855-ish. If it’s 1840s, I don’t know how she managed it with the period’s corset. At that time, they were to the hips and over the belly, tightly laced, and busked. A woman could not bend at the waist. So, I gotta give Mama some serious credit here. With 14 kids, the woman’s got to be in her 40s at least. She’s fully corseted with busk, wearing a bodice that’s second-skin tight, 2 to 6 full petticoats, and a day dress that weights at least 20 lbs on its own, but she’s getting down on the floor with her daughter. I bet getting back up took some work.

Later, her skirt is described as being “navy blue pleats”, which supports an 1840s date. However, I want to point out the color. Aniline dyes haven’t been invented yet, so popular colors were “dull” blues, browns, and greens. Navy was absolutely doable, but it was more expensive than the more common duller shades.

3. Sugar cookies

To make Eff feel better after the 45 minutes it takes Mama to stand back up after getting on the floor in her full-length corset, they go and make sugar cookies, and Mama doesn’t even scold Eff when she spills the milk.
Milk? Who uses milk for sugar cookies? My sugar cookie recipe doesn’t call for milk.

Snark off, there are sugar cookie recipes that do call for milk, although it’s usually only a few tablespoons, not an amount you’d let a five-year-old try to measure out of a heavy stoneware jug, glass bottle, or metal milk can. (Personally, I couldn't even lift a plastic gallon jug of milk when I was five.) I don’t know if those recipes would have been common before refrigeration. The real reason I bring this up, though, is because there was fairly extensive debate over on ldragoon’s review about whether sugar would be readily accessible without either heavy mechanization or an extensive slavery system. They debated it, so I don’t have to. ;)

4. “Witch” as a pejorative.

This is neither a snark or complaint. I just find it really interesting that there are accusations of witchcraft in a society with widespread magic use. I was really hoping that Ms. Wrede would explain her terms, but no. That never happens.


Chapter 2

1. The Rothmers are freaking rich!

I already mentioned Mama’s expensive day dress. Now we find at that the Rothmers have one son at a University other than the one Papa teaches at, another either at boarding school or also in college, and a third going to University in fall. And all this on a professor’s salary. Wow! On top of that, in chapter 4 as a part of the job benefits, the family is given a nine bedroom house. Minimum. There might be more; we just know there’s at least 9. No wonder they can afford to make sugar cookies despite a lack of heavy mechanization or extensive slavery system.

2. The Secession War

One of the dangers of writing alt history is giving in to the temptation to just plunk your story bible down on the manuscript and let it carry the book on its own while you go get a sandwich or something. That unfortunately is what happens here with the bit about the Secession War, which ended in 1838.

First, credit where credit is due. I don’t know the details, but my understanding is that the United States actually did come very very close to having a civil war in the 1830s, so this is not wholly arbitrary. (Renaming it the Secession War is, though. That almost makes it sound like the South won, doesn’t it? But they didn’t.)

However, that almost 30 years would make a huge difference in the course of the war. You see, in the 1830s, England didn’t care so much about slavery in the Americas. Hell, they didn’t abolish it themselves until 1833. So if the southern states wanted to hold slaves, England didn’t really care as long as they were getting cheap cotton out of the deal. It wasn’t until Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Britain in 1852, selling 200,000 legal copies (and probably at least that many pirated copies), that the British people really got their feathers ruffled by it. Because of this new popular opinion against slavery, in the 1860s, the British government did not enter the war on the side of the South, which meant the South had funding problems. If the civil war had happened in the 1830s, hell yes the British would have been willing to break the Northern blockade and continue trade.

However, with South America controlled by one or more African countries instead of Spain and Portugal, Spain never imports massive quantities of gold, which means they never build their Armada to invade England, which means England never builds their Navy to counter and doesn’t have pirated Spanish gold to do it with anyway, which means the British Empire never happens. So maybe it doesn’t matter that the Brits didn’t have a problem with American slavery in the 1830s, and thus the South loses anyway.

And actually, with one or more African countries being Major world powers with capital M now, how did widespread slave trade even come about? Doesn’t the Middle Passage fall on its face? I suppose that depends on which African countries we're talking about, but with the entire power dynamic of Africa completely changed, and one or more countries in it having control of the gold that in our world went to Spain and was pirated by other European nations, you gotta at least seriously consider the possibility.

See what I mean about unraveling the sweater of history? I’m going on to the next topic before I hurt myself.

3. When and Where Our Book Is Set

So, we’re heading to a brand new, still under construction land-grant college not terribly long after 1838 in a territory bordering the Mississippi River. Well, there’s a little problem here. Most of that land already had statehood by 1838. Let me go dig out a statehood map. Let’s see. Illinois was 1818, Kentucky was 1792... Wisconsin, 1848! We’re going to Wisconsin, and it’s the 1840s! W00t!

4. Invisible Indians

Obviously we’re not calling it Wisconsin, because Wisconsin is a Native American word. Wrede has done a decent job of removing the Native American minutia from her world -- the names, the crops. Of course, we’re still a democracy (evidenced by presidents), the Enlightenment still happened (evidenced by mention of Jefferson’s voracious reading), and somehow we’ve managed to settle this country nearly in the same amount of time despite it not being cleared and cultivated for us by previous civilizations and being filled with mammoths and saber cats and nasty ass magical stuff on top of that.

It’s kind of creepy, actually. It’s like if one day you woke up, and there were absolutely no men. But no one was saying anything and we were all pretending nothing had happened and that there had never been any men.

I’m only going to touch on this, because this rabbit hole has no bottom. It’s been extensively discussed all over the internet. I wouldn’t be here if not for it. Nonetheless, I’m really disgusted with Wrede’s combination of laziness and racism. She didn’t want to use the pre-1980 stereotypes, she didn’t want to use the current stereotypes, and GOD FORBID she do some research into the vast array of actual Native America cultures. There was not a hive mind over here. There were vastly different societies, from the militaristic Aztecs to the socialist Incan empire, from the successful farming societies to wandering hunters to resource-hungry city dwellers whose over-harvesting of resources eventually caused their own downfall. If the Mississipian empire hadn’t collapsed on its own, their society had at least some resemblance to European considering they developed wholly independently. The choices are not limited to “warlike savage” and “pacifist environmentalist”.

This "didn't exist" bit? Worst possible way to handle things.


Chapter 3

We move West. It’s mainly just a boring train trip followed by a boring wagon trip. Mama won’t let anyone go off to explore during stops because then something interesting might happen. :P

1. Population Density

Blocking off everything west of the Mississippi River basically cuts American land area in half during this period. The population is probably not smaller, however. In fact, with the norm of huge families and the bizarrely low child mortality rate, it’s probably bigger. So I don’t really buy the smaller, more widespread population centers that Eff alludes to, and I really don’t buy the old growth forest the train passes through. With the Louisiana purchase almost completely off limits, Columbians would be packed to the gills.

2. Miss Ochiba’s clothes

When we first meet Miss Ochiba, she’s wearing “a high-crowned hat trimmed with cherries”, a “white lace neck scarf” and a “close-fitting blue jacket”. In other words, she’s dressed at the height of fashion -- in 1878.
Mama’s clothes have already established that we are pre-crinoline. Separates didn’t even become fashionably tolerable until hoopskirts were at their largest, and jackets didn’t come in until hoops had given way to bustles. Hats were the same; before the 1860s/1870s, they were mannish or at best childish, and no woman over the age of 16 would ever wear one. Bonnets were de rigeur.

I don't care what period our clothes are from. Well, OK, I do, but I'd give a pass as long as they were consistent. However, Mama’s clothes and Miss Ochiba’s clothes would never be worn in the same time period.

3. Miss Ochiba

I’m calling it now. Miss Ochiba is a quintessential Magical Negro(TM). She has no life of her own. She’s not married, we never even see her out in the town except the first time she came out to meet the new professor arrival, she has an amazingly subdued personality, she exists in the story solely to teach and guide our main characters, and when she’s no longer needed she’s sent off to a vague Star Trek reference. Holy crap, I think I just got Bingo.

4. The Racism Paradox

There is apparently exactly one black person in town. Sometimes Washington Morris visits, and then there’s two. Yet at the same time, we also don’t see any overt racism. Oh, Dean Farley and Prof Jeffries are kinda “ih” around Miss Ochiba. Maybe it’s racism. Maybe it’s indigestion, or “you’re bringing students to my university! Ew! Stop that!”

Guys, we are less than 10 years after a slavery-triggered Civil War here. I will grant that removing that almost 30 years I talked about in 2-2 takes with it some of the worst decades of moral push-back and race-based justification rhetoric, but nonetheless, ya don’t enslave someone you think is your equal. By choosing to still have African slavery in America, Wrede has chosen to make this an especially racist period in our history. By then denying that, she is denying the real suffering from history. Not cool.


Chapter 4

1. “Long and hot and boring”

This is how Eff describes the first graduation ceremony at Northern Plains Riverbank College. It’s also almost exactly my sentiment towards the book at this point. Including this one, we’ve got 2 more chapters and some sizable change before something even considers happening.

2. Mills

Eff briefly talks about the lumber industry and how some of the logs coming down the Mississippi are milled “right in Mill City”. Hence the name, I suppose. But then she says “most of them got piled onto flatcars and shipped east to the mills there.” Is Wrede crazy? Waste all that space stacking cylinders and all that weight sending bark and unusable edges? No, I think they would at least be roughed into blocks in Mill City before being shipped for further work.


Chapter 5

We finally actually see some magic, 48 pages in, despite it being talked about constantly. The kids are absolutely shocked by it, even though we later learn that in an average day even someone who isn’t much of a magician will do 5 or 10 spells without hardly thinking about it.

1. Revolutionary War Dates

Either William is full of it (and I do give good odds), or Wrede didn’t really do her math here. Everything she says about the Revolution suggest that it happened about the same time as in our world, but William says it was “almost a hundred years ago”. Either it’s really more like 70 years, or it took 30 freakin’ years to get this university thing going, in which case why doesn’t our location have statehood yet?


Chapter 6

Lan comes in to his natural magic by almost killing William. There, something happened! Here’s a voucher for more happening later. It’s on backorder right now. We might have something in stock in Chapter 10, but don’t get your hopes up.


Chapter 7

Mammoths actually do something. Off camera, of course. Our characters, on the other hand, continue to do nothing. Eff says that she would give her “best Sunday dress and a year’s growth” to be able to see what happened when Mama goes to go rip someone a new one. I would too, because it’d be something happening.

1) “Best” Sunday dress?

It’s the 1840s. That’s her only Sunday dress. If it gets too faded or worn, it’ll then become a day dress and she’ll get a new one. If she outgrows it first, Mama’ll let out the growth pleats, and she’ll be good for another year.
Of course, the Rothmers are freaking rich...

2) And Canada Bites the Dust!

We now establish that it’s “suicide” to go north of the Mississippi’s headwaters due to all the various scary critters running around. Good-bye, British North America! So long.
I’ve seen some impressive Americentrism in my fiction reading, but when an author can’t even stand to leave Canada on the continent... So, did she leave anyone down in Mexico, or is it just us?

3) Jackals

Why jackals as scavengers over here in Columbia? Are coyotes suddenly not good enough for the job? Or is it that Wrede couldn’t think up an alternate name to replace the lost Nahuatl root, so she just called them a completely different, utterly unrelated species? The coyote evolved over here along with the Dire Wolf; it is not originally Eurasian.


Chapter 8

Our heroine has not actually done anything, but the risk that she might is too great, so she comes down with rheumatic fever. This guarantees she can’t do anything whatsoever for an entire year. Because, you know, the action so far has just been too overwhelming and we need some downtime. :P

Honestly, giving it to Lan would have been a much better call. Then Eff could be fretting and blaming herself and maybe even go do something to try to make it right. But that would be doing something, wouldn’t it? (I swear it’s like the author had 180 pages of story and a contract for 350.)

1. How Long Have You Been Living Here Again?

Eff enjoys when William visits because “it was nice to see a face that wasn’t one I’d seen every day of my whole life.” No, just every day of half her life. She’s 10 years old, they’ve lived her when she was five, and William has come around to play with her brothers basically every single day. As she says herself, he’s practically part of the family.

Also, from this point forward we must all politely pretend that it’s not Really Freaking Obvious that William is sweet on Eff.

2. Brant’s Logic

Brant is the young Rationalist working to set up a settlement on the bad side of the Great Barrier that doesn’t use magic. “It will prove to everyone that we don’t need magicians to settle the plains, and the government will have to open the territories for settlement.”

Um... Wha? That’s a bit of a non sequitor, isn’t it? I mean, they haven’t opened the territories because it’s freakin’ dangerous and we haven’t figure out a way to fix that reliably. Matching the reliability of a magician, it’s nice to know that we can, but it doesn’t fix the “freaking dangerous” bit.


Chapter 9

1. Eff’s whining
a. “I don’t get to see my friends!”
Because she was on Turbo Load mode for a while there, our heroine is now a year behind where she was in school. However, the classes are mixed together by ability level, not age. So, doesn’t she just see her friends in different classes? Instead of seeing What’s-Her-Face in reading and composition, now she sees her in history. Some friends she might actually see more often this way.

b. “Waah, I’m a thirteenth child!
I swear to God I will remember the title of the book if Eff will just shut the hell up. Yes, she got crap for it every day until she was 5. Then she moved, and hasn’t heard another single solitary thing about it since, and won’t until she’s 13. It’s not going to be in the forefront of her mind anymore; children’s minds just don’t work that way. It’s mostly-forgotten “mean aunts and uncles” stories by now. If Wrede wants to keep this up, there ought to have been a reason to keep it in mind. Maybe a town ne’er-do-well that everyone looks at, gives one of those nods, and says “Well, you know, he was a 13th child.”

Personally, it would work a lot better if Eff did put it completely out of her mind now, and then it all nearly unexpectedly comes crashing down on her later when they go back to Helvan Shores. Believe me, if you have someone who was a pariah, and then they got to live a normal life, they will absolutely react violently if someone tries to drag them back into being a pariah again. And in the meantime, it is getting really annoying.

In any event, it really should stop right now on page 98 because Miss Ochiba tells her plain as day that being the goodness and good luck of being a seventh daughter more than cancels out the badness and bad luck of being a thirteenth child. But no, Eff just keeps constantly whining about it for several more chapters. Ironically, what finally shuts Eff up is almost blowing her uncle off the map. Coming thisclose to doing something evil actually makes her shut up about being destined to become evil. I don’t get it at all.


Chapter 10

Something actually happens! Kinda. Well, we see a dragon for a couple of seconds. We don’t actually see it doing anything. Someone kills it before it makes much of a mess. We don’t get to see that, either. Our heroine is all but dragged to go see the body. They don’t get anywhere near it -- big surprise.
Nothing happens again until the very end of Chapter 14/beginning of Chapter 15.

1. Slavery, and Africa as homogenous uber-country

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring attention to the only discussion about pre-Civil War slavery in the book. I already talked about this a bit; I still don’t see how it comes about with one or more African countries taking the place of Spain and Portugal. I’d at least like to know which countries they are. I could buy slavery remaining more easily if they were already resource-rich counties known at the time as the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, than I could if it were the area known as the Slave Coast.

Also, you ever notice an annoying tendency people have of talking about “Africa” as though the entire continent is basically one big homogeneous society, rather than as a landmass containing many very different countries with very different cultures? Guess what Wrede does. They’re “Aphrikan colonies”; not, say, Nigerian colonies or Ghanan colonies. I mean, Africa’s basically the same all over, right?

2. Lack of foresight

Come spring, that dead dragon starts to smell really bad, so they start casting preservation spells on it.
...
Is Wrede really trying to tell me that it didn’t occur to them to do this any earlier, say before it started rotting?

3. Milk paint

One of Eff's brothers paints a bunch of garter snakes with grey milk paint and sells them as "baby dragons" the next spring. Milk paint is paint made with a combination of milk, lime, and pigment. The milk and lime react to form a coating of calcium caseinate, which after curing time bonds very well with wood and other porous surfaces. However, they are very sensitive to water (which means easy clean-up, but poor results on surfaces that get wet during the curing), and they’ve got a curing time. I don’t buy milk paint sticking reliably to garter snakes. On top of that, milk paint is somewhat caustic, more or less so depending on the amount of lime used. Those poor snakes.


Chapter 11

Eff’s resolute refusal to do something interesting is almost kind of a funny, in a head shaking trying not to cry sort of way. She sits here wishing that Dr. McNeil would bring back more of the strange North American animals so she could see them, never even remotely thinking it’d be cool if she could go out into the wild and see them herself some day. A little bit of an adventurous streak would be really nice in our heroine.

1. St. Louis

It’s stated that Lewis and Clark went up the “Grand Bow River” from just north of St. Louis.
Um, what state is St. Louis in?
Which side of the Mississippi is that?
If you said the side with no cities in this world, take a cookie.
(If you tried to mention East St. Louis, you have to give the cookie back. Not founded until 1820, 16 years after Lewis and Clark and many decades after St. Louis itself, and not renamed “East St. Louis” until 1861.)


Chapter 12

1. The boy’s clothing

Eff complains in here about her mending chores because the boys can’t go three 3 days without tearing a shirt and ripping out pants knees.
Yeah. After the third time, each and every one of them would get a beating and a single play outfit to keep wearing all summer long. It’s the 1840s. Cloth mills are bringing the prices down, but clothing is still too expensive to be destroying the way the boys are described as doing. It would be like if your kid had to have a laptop for school, but over the summer every three days it was so loaded with viruses and spyware from irresponsible use that it wouldn’t run anymore. Would you keep fixing it, or would you say “this is the last time, Sport. You mess it up again, you’re stuck with it until September.”

Also, Eff calls them “pants”. The word pants was first recorded in 1840, so probably would not have been in common use yet. She would say “trousers”.

2. Starter Trunk

With the announcement of Diane’s upcoming wedding, all the females in the family set to work sewing things for her “starter trunk”. I have never hear that term in my life, and I’ve not been able to find a reference to it. It would usually be called her “trousseau”, or more colloquially her “cedar chest” or even “dowry chest”.


Chapter 14

(No, I didn’t forget a chapter; there’s so little happening in Chapter 13 that there’s not even anything to point out.)

1. The Gray Wedding Dress

The gray wedding dress mocks me, because this is right around when the trend went from “best you can afford” to “must be white”, and I don’t have the documentation I need to say what side of that we’re on. My pattern books start in 1867, “Dressed for the Photographer” doesn’t have any wedding portraits in this decade, and I can’t find my big brown book of fashion plates (or indeed even remember if I actually bought it or just borrowed it from the library a zillion times). By 1868 (when I do have documentation), white was norm, especially for a first-time bride in a church wedding, although I found ivory in the 1880s. Late 1840s/early 1850s, I just don’t know for sure. Supposedly, Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1840 is what popularized white for weddings, so gray is probably accurate but unfashionable, especially for a family as the well off as the Rothmers seem to be.


Chapter 15

Eff actually does something, 161 pages in! Well, no, not actually. She starts to do something, but then stops herself, so all we get is a frightened drunk uncle and a cloud of sparklies. If she’d actually done something, we might have got some story going on, and we can’t have that!

Seriously, at the absolute least just to tide us over, couldn’t she have at least given Uncle Earn some tentacles, or donkey’s ears, or turned his skin green or something? And then she could be all “Ha ha, see, I intended to do something silly and childish all along. Oh God, Papa knows I tried to kill him.” But no, we don’t even get that much, just a cloud of sparklies.

Eff, just come to the Dark Side already. You’ll like it. We have cookies. We’ll even let you do stuff. Otherwise, nothing will happen again until Chapter 18.


Chapter 17

After another chapter so dull it’s not even worth talking about, we go beat out carpets. Yay. The story’s dragging, and then Wrede shows us housework.
But the good news is that in this chapter, Eff decides she might want to do something. Someday. She gets the idea, so painfully obvious at the end of chapter 11, of becoming a naturalist and going out to see scary critters for herself. There’s no consideration about whether a woman in this society would even be allowed to do this; I’d say the odds if favor of it are basically nonexistent. However, I’m just as glad that didn’t occur to Eff, because God knows the last thing our heroine needs is another excuse to do absolutely nothing.


Chapter 18

I’m sorry, I lied. I can’t in good conscience call the baby mammoth knocking over its fence “something happening”. Nothing happens here. Nothing actually happens ever ever again *sobs* until Chapter Twenty-Freaking-Nine.

We do see the first, and only, hint that the Rothmers don’t have an endless stream of money somewhere.

1. Magic Styles and Stereotypes

Oh gosh, now Wrede’s stepped in it. The magic style stereotypes are so incredibly offensive.

Hijero-Cathayan (i.e. Asian): “Hijero-Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells.” Asian = group. You can tell how much thought and research went into that idea, can’t you? You know, it’s not like there’s actually people over there living out lives where they might, like Westerners, need to light fires for cooking, or carry heavy water buckets, or keep bugs away, or do the other dozens of things that the main characters do every day without hardly thinking about it. Nah, they’re just all doin’ big mystic crap, none of that living stuff. “They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries -- at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero-Cathayan magicians.” Look at that! Wrede doesn’t even let them keep their cookie!

I just got to point out, that the “Aphrikan” trying seeing the world as it really as rather than as it appears to be and redirecting energy instead of manhandling, those have at least some resemblance to Buddhist and Taoist traditions. It would need more research, but it’d show a little more thought than “group work”.

Believe it or not, the stereotyping in Aphrikan magic is even worse. Aphrikan is not about calling up magic, but just guiding the magic that’s already there, and it never works the same way twice if it even works at all, and by European standards it’s unpredictable and unreliable but it’s really really good at one particular thing, and that’s dealing with “natural” magic. Hmm. Passive, little initiative, unpredictable, unreliable, but with a primitive closeness to nature. I’ve heard stuff like this before. In fact, when I was reading the description of Aphrikan magic, my mind connected to a paragraph in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Stowe starts waxing poetic about how “If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race”, how great it’ll be because black people are so gentle and docile and in tune with a higher power. I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly, but I will be the first to admit that she was very much a product of her times. Haven’t we come any further than that in 160 years?

If you’re going to write outside of your time period and/or outside of your own culture, *you’ve got to do your research*. If you know you want European, African, and Asian magic systems in your world, and you’re a pasty Mid-Western white girl, you need to start reading. See what’s already there in the culture, and use that instead of just throwing antiquated and offensive stereotypes around.

Also, “unreliable”, don’t throw that at anyone. “Unpredictable” needs to be followed by “but it isn’t at all if you know what you’re doing” and NOT by “and I guess they’re right”. And that “good with nature” thing, that is a literary hand grenade. That’s been patronizing backhanded praise lobbed at just about every minority for the past 500 years, carrying with it the unspoken “because they’re uncivilized.” Find a way around it. Even “good with the unexpected” is a big step up. (In fact, “good at handling the unexpected” could tie in well with the themes of cleverness often found in the heroes of African folklore.)

Suffice to say, the different magic systems earned a scream of disgust and a book thrown across the room. (Well, not really because it is a library book. But if it had been my own...)


Chapter 19

1. The Age of Majority

So... You can sign up for a homestead on the life-threatening, nasty-creature-ridden frontier at age 18, but you can’t marry without parental consent until you’re 21. WTF?

2. Sawbones

The slang “sawbones” for doctor came about in our world because for most of history, the only way Western medicine could deal with a severely injured or especially infected limb was to amputate it. However, the way Eff’s rheumatic fever is treated suggests that the story world has antibiotics, even if they don’t realize that’s the mechanism by which their potions work. So there should be fewer amputations. Would “sawbones” still be used?


Chapter 20

1. Triskelion

A triskelion is a symbol with three connected spirals or three bent legs joined at the crotch, which is found across many cultures with diverse meanings. However, I’m a huge geek, so the first thing that popped into my mind when Miss Ochiba left for Triskelion University was the original Star Trek episode, The Gamesters of Triskelion. Hence my reference earlier. :)


Chapter 21

1. Eff’s new look

On page 20, a nearly 18-year-old Eff remarks that she has started putting her hair up and wearing full length skirts. What she doesn’t mention is that everyone around her was thinking it was about freaking time. This was usually done at age 14 if you were going to start working, maybe a little later in a well-off family, but 16 was the latest. When she waited until she was 17 and a half, people were whispering about her behind her back.

2. William’s old look

We’ve got to be in the 1850s by now (no news on that statehood thing, though). William is described as wearing a “beaver hat”. Beaver hats were out. They fell out of favor right about 1850 in our world, replaced by silk in the upper classes and wool in the lower. But, there’s more to it that.

The America beaver population supported the popularity of beaver hats well after the European beaver had been driven almost to extinction. That was with the full beaver population of North America available, and indeed searching for the pelts spurred a lot of exploration. Of course, in this story world everything west of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes is off limits. So there goes access to at least half the beaver population. With that reduction, the American beaver east of the Mississippi surely would have been wiped out long before, forcing beaver hats out of popularity even earlier in this story world.


3. And No One Knows What Lan’s Going For

Lan has grown muttonchops. Muttonchops were not fashionable at this time, especially not for young men. Sure, a few people wore them; a few people wear them now. But a young man picking a hairstyle to go with his nice new fancy probably imported paisley waistcoat? Nah. Young men were oiling their hair in this decade, and doing this wave thing, or almost a duckbill with this sort of topknot thing. Here, here's a picture of what I mean, not the worst example by far. There were some seriously scary men’s hairstyles going on in the 1850s, but not so much with the mutton chops.

4. What’s Differerent About the Rationalist Settlement?

Hmm. Every settlement west of the river is overrun with grubs and beetles, except the Rationalists. What could possibly be different about the only settlement in entire West that doesn’t use magic?
We will spend the next 70 pages politely pretending that the difference is not really freaking obvious. Or maybe screaming every 10 pages “The bugs are attracted to magic, you flaming morons! It’s so bloody obvious!”


Chapter 22

If you’re looking for a good spot to scream “The bugs are attracted to magic!”, I suggest page 240, where we discuss in detail how much the Rationalists dislike magicians.

1. Benjamin Franklin as a double-seventh son

Oh for goodness's sake. Ben Franklin was Josiah Franklin's 10th son, not 7th. Josiah was his family's 9th child. I wasn't able to find genders, but the odds are against him being a 7th son. This is not terribly obscure as trivia goes; the Google search to find this out will take you all of three minutes.

I find this change disturbing, because it smacks heavily of classism. Jefferson was from a rich and prominent family that could afford a good education. He can stay basically as he was.
But Franklin. His family was squarely working class. He was the son of a candle and soap maker and grandson of a blacksmith. His formal book education stopped at age 10. Being freaking brilliant isn't enough; Wrede's got to make him special for him to be capable of this great amazing Great Barrier Spell. :P Screw that.

2. Why didn't they just ask him?

A big deal is made out of no one understanding how Jefferson and Franklin created the Great Barrier because Franklin didn't write everything down, and Jefferson did but with references other people couldn't figure out.
Jefferson didn't die until 1826. The Barrier had to go up before Franklin's death in 1790. That's at least 36 years in which people could have asked "Tom, what the Sam Hill were you talking about here?"


Chapter 24

Including this one, only 5 more chapters until something finally happens.

1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
A. The Flag

Eff makes a deal about Papa and Prof Jeffries remembering that the flag carried by Washington and his crew “should only have thirteen stars”.
Actually, it shouldn’t have stars at all. There would have been a union jack there (sans the red portion of the diagonals). The Stars and Bars wasn’t used until 9 month later.

B. Robert Carradine

It’s too much to ask for Wrede to research actual participants of the crossing of the Delaware, or even important military figures under Washington. Instead we apparently get an actor best known for staring in Revenge of the Nerds.

C. The Light

Said actor is known for casting the light spell that guided Washington. Because when you’re setting up a sneak attack, you definitely want a big huge bright light on your boat.


Chapter 26

1. Sisters Hugging

When Eff sees her sister Rennie again, part of her wants to hug and part wants to yell at her, “but I wasn’t thirteen anymore, and I couldn’t do either one” in front of the others.
Actually, women relatives and close friends in this time period were expected to be very touchy-feely with each other, to a degree that modern audiences can find downright lesbianic. When she doesn’t hug her sister, the others are probably thinking that Eff is really pissed off.

2. Rennie’s Clothes

There’s nothing wrong with Rennie’s clothes, but I would have loved to see her in reform garb. The Bloomer trousers and short skirt. It’s a little early, but absolutely doable; in fact, the reason the Reform clothing movement didn’t die almost as soon as it started was because of pioneer women. In Reform garb it was so much easier to move around and do hard frontier chores and cook without setting yourself on fire. There’d also be this fun mirroring thing with Eff. Eff just stopped wearing pantalettes and short skirts (children’s wear) and comes out here to find her older sister wearing something that looks very similar to what she just discarded. And the cherry on top: in later decades, Reform dress was also known as “Rational Dress”. It’d be perfect!

3. Rennie and Eff’s Conversation

... falls flat on its face. Rennie and Eff talk about Rennie running off and it looks like they’re going to have a big argument or worse but then that fizzles, because an argument might be doing something, and then later Eff decides to just accept that Rennie said sorry even though there wasn’t much explanation, and the conflict just sort of goes away.
It didn’t occur to me until I was doing the dishes the next day, but I bet when this takes place, Eff hadn’t done the math on Albert’s birth yet. (If she has done the math, she’s just being an asshole.) Which brings up that this would have been a much better place to reveal the math rather than just tossed out in prose earlier.

So imagine if when Rennie says she was young and scared and did the best she could at the time and Eff asks what she was afraid of, instead of answering “Oh, stuff”, Rennie instead says, “Eff, you know how I eloped in May? Albert was born in November.” “What does that have to do with.. Oh. Oh!”

Rennie found herself pregnant and unmarried in the late 1840s/early 1850s. Hell yes she was scared. This is a golden opportunity for some character development. A great perception shift (Rennie from bossy selfish know-it-all to scared desperate girl), a good reinforcement that Eff is now a woman who can be trusted knowing how her sister messed up rather than needing the truth hidden from her. But no, instead we get an “Oh, just stuff” answer, a fizzled-out conversation, and a potentially major reveal just tossed out in prose way back in Chapter 14.


Chapter 27

As usual, Eff is actively kept from doing anything interesting. She wishes she was out bug-hunting with the boys, and as usual I do too, because it means something might be happening. This is how desperate I am at this point. Looking for bug pupae would be a step up. *head desk* At least we finally stop pretending that it isn’t Really Flaming Obvious that the bugs are attracted to magic.

1. Spell casting

So... all respect for the Rationalists goes completely out the window and we just start casting spells willy-nilly without even trying to be subtle about it anymore. Would have served them right if a local had come up and smacked them upside the head and told them to get the hell out of town.

2. Walking Boots

When she tells Wash and William she’s a 13th child, Eff specifically mentions avoid their eyes by looking at the toes of her walking boots. In the 1850s? Possible, but not likely. Boots didn’t come in until the crinoline did, and then there was a transitory period of gaiters over slippers and soft soled, heelless boots -- all driven by modesty rather than function. What you’re thinking of when you read “walking boots” is probably not what Eff is wearing.


Chapter 29

Finally, something happens! Don’t get your hopes too far up, though. For a second there it looks like Eff has finally become a character worth watching, but we later find out it’s just that her brother has, at great effort, drug her into doing something. :P

1. Full skirts

Eff specifically makes it a point to mention while getting on horseback that she’s glad she wore a full skirt. As opposed to? It’s 1850-something. They’re ALL full skirts. Your options when you wake up in the morning are putting on the skirt made with 10 yards of fabric, or putting on the skirt made with 12 yards of fabric. Thank God she went with the 12-yarder, huh?
I’m just glad she hasn’t started wearing that new-fangled Parisian crinoline thing.


Chapter 30

1. Bugs.

So, our heroine finally goes and does stuff and heroically battles one of the great unknown creatures of the frontier and it’s... bugs. Not dragons, or pyromaniacal bird things, or even mammoths. Just bugs. They’re not even carnivorous bugs. (Well, Wrede might try to slap life-sucking on as an afterthought, but it’s just slipped into a single sentence in the denouement and never really demonstrated.) The problem is that they eat magic, which means they can eat your protection spells, and that allows other things to come eat you later. If the other critters get around to it.
Bugs. Purty much.

3. No! Big Issue, Come Back! I’ll Love You!

The bugs do bring a Big Issue, though. They’re attracted by the spells settlements use to protect themselves, and this has caused enough buggy population growth that the Great Barrier could be in danger. This is a Big Issue. The things required for our short term survival are a detriment to our long-term survival! What else are our magics contributing too? The increase in the pyromanical bird population? The steam dragon that made it across the Great Barrier? Do we enter an arms race with nature itself, knowing the price of losing is complete destruction of the entire country? Do we abandon the settlements and attempt to deal with overpopulation to the east of the Mississippi? Do we have to start recruiting a whole bunch more Rationalists and let them have the entire west half of the continent?

Or do we just put together a solution that takes “a couple of days” of tweaking and then we’re completely hunky-dory? :P Wrede chooses the “couple of days of tweaking” route and completely drops the Big Issue.

I want the Big Issue. We should have fought the bugs at page 180 and spent the second half the book tackling the Big Issue.

And the book just kind of smacks its nose on the door on the way out. We got denouement going, but it doesn’t really have a conclusion; it just sort of reaches the end of a page, and stops.



So, final conclusions on Thirteenth Child.
If you can look past the massive racism in the set-up...
You’ll find a lot of racism in the book itself. I don’t think any of it’s malicious, but is this level of laziness and thoughtlessness really that much better?

But if you can look past the additional racism, you’ll find...
A story that’s at least twice as long as it needs to be, and thus LOOOOONG stretches in which abso-fraggin’-lutely nothing happens.

But if you could trim the story down to, say, 150 to 180 pages, you’d get...
Well, I’m afraid you’d still got the story of a whiny heroine who has no sense of adventure at all and has to be drug kicking and screaming into doing anything interesting whatsoever.

It’s a bad book on multiple levels. There’s maybe a few good scenes in it, but if they total even 20 pages I’d be shocked. Mostly, it’s a lot of nothing peppered with whining. There’s 12 hours of my life I ain't never getting back.

Because apparently I just can't get to Hell fast enough.

Baby Be-Bop had to go back to its home at the library, so while I was there, guess what I picked up?

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Not yet targeted by West Bend or the oxymoronically-named Christian Civil Liberties Union, but probably only because they either haven't read it or it just induced heart attack and/or stroke immediately. Or so I've heard; obviously I haven't read it yet.

You know what the problem with people like West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries and the CCLU is?
... Wait. There's not enough blog space in the world to answer that.

You know what one of the many problems with people like that is? They think God is an asshole.

Seriously, listen to them. They believe in a god makes 3% to 10% of the population gay, then wigs the hell out that gay people exist, and sends them all hell because they have the gall to exist in the way he made them. What an asshole.

The thing is, I don't see the point of trying to score brownie points with an asshole god. I mean, let's take this Baby Be-bop thing. Up until sometime last year, the library branch I borrowed Baby Be-Bop from stamped the due date on a sticker on the back of the book. I don't know when exactly they changed, but I know it was after early Jan 2008 because that's the last date stamped here on American Gods.

When I checked out Baby Be-Bop, it still had the old sticker on it. Which told me it had been checked out once in late 1995 (probably off the New Book shelf), once in 1996, then not again until 2000, and then not again until 2004, and that was the last one. It wasn't exactly flying off the shelf, now was it?

Then these people step up and make a big furry deal about it to Protect Teh Childrenz and Do The Will Of God or some crap. So now it's in the news and there's a good chance the ALA will feature it for Banned Books Week and tons of people who never would have heard of the book have now heard of it, and a lot of them are like me and want to read it to see what the BFD is. I know several people who are specifically reading it because of this kerfluffle.

From their standpoint, this has got to be what is generally known as a Fail.

Can you imagine them in the afterlife going up to Asshole God?
Nutjobs: "But Asshole God, we were trying to keep people from reading this horrible sinful book."
AG: "That's nice, but you FAILED! Spectacularly! Three times as many people read it because of you making a big deal out of it than would have if you'd just kept your mouths shut. And I'm an Asshole, so no brownie points for intention. WHOMP! No heaven for you!"

Besides, let's be honest for a second. They're doing it for the attention. If they just wanted the book out of the library, well, there are quieter ways to do it of varying levels of legality.

I seem to remember there being something in the Bible about doing religious stuff for the purpose of getting attention. What was that? Ah, yes, I think I remember. It was DON'T FUCKING DO IT.

I've never seen the point of believing in an asshole god. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to meet the standards of an asshole god. That's why I prefer to believe in a friendlier God. Besides, the way I figure it, if I'm wrong, I'm going to hell one way or another, and I like to think it'd be a little less hellish if I knew I was there for believing that God was actually a nice, loving deity. I much rather be there for believing God is good, than for trying to burn a book like Baby Be-Bop.

Book: Baby Be-Bop

Yesterday I finished reading the book Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block. This book came to my attention thanks to the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries, and more specifically to the Christian Civil Liberties Union, who are suing for the right to burn or otherwise destroy the West Bend Community Memorial Library's copy of it. They describe it as “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian".

Generally speaking, I find if something pisses off the Christ-i-ain'ts this much, it's worth a read.

To quote this article from the ALA, "“the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” specifically because Baby Be-Bop contains the “n” word and derogatory sexual and political epithets that can incite violence and “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”"

So, as I was reading, I marked points I noticed that included the 'n' word and derogatory sexual and political epithets.

On page 16, Pup is admiring Dirk's portrait of Jimi Hendrix and says ' "My mom went out with this gross trucker guy once," Pup told him. "He saw the Jimi poster in my room and goes, 'That nigger looks like he's got a mouth full of cum.' I wanted to kill him. I told my mom I would if she didn't stop seeing him."

On page 42, a cameo character says "If you ask me all those fags are going to die out."

On page 45, Dirk calls a boy with a swastika tattooed on his neck a "fascist skinhead", and on the same page the skinhead called him a "faggot".

I think that's it. An insult in dialog may have slipped by me, but if so I feel quite certain in saying it's in the same vein as the others.

The "vulgar" complaint I can understand, knowing the very strict definition of vulgar these sorts of groups have. There is some cursing, and there are mentions of sex. Nothing very explicit, but you know, sex exists.

Racial I don't get at all. Honestly, 'racial'? What does that even mean? My dictionary says "of, relating to, or based on race; occurring between races." Is this supposed to be good? Bad? Indifferent? In any event, it doesn't apply, because everyone in the book is white. It's actually kind of funny how white the book is. Well, I guess technically Dirk's great-grandfather may have been Middle Eastern. (OMG! Miscegenation!) They mention Martin Luther King Jr's assassination as Uber Bad Thing a couple of times.
Racial. Hmm.

And of course anti-Christian only in the sense of "not blatantly fundamentalist Christian". Is it just me, or at this point does that almost go without saying? When was the last time you saw/read/experience something that was accused of being "anti-Christian" and that actually was by any reasonable definition? Or even if you squint? Somehow to these groups, if it doesn't say all Christians everywhere are perfect and wonderful and covered with rainbows and kittens, it is "anti-Christian". And they wonder why they aren't taken seriously.

Right now, the statement that "Baby Be-Bop contains the “n” word and derogatory sexual and political epithets that can incite violence and “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”" amuses me because it's so... lawyerly. Technically it's correct. In the wrong circumstances, being called a skinhead or a faggot can incite violence and/or put someone's life in danger. The book isn't inciting violence or danger, but the statement doesn't say that it is. I wonder if the actual legal document is phrased that way.

In the meantime, I'm just going to close my eyes and imagine the grand jury called together to determine if the book is obscene and if making it available should be a hate crime. I'm imagining those people reading the book, and then beating all four plaintiffs and especially their lawyer about the head and shoulders with it for wasting their time with such stupid, even ludicrous, complaints. But then thanking them for the reading recommendation.
Ahh....

Now, on to my opinions of the book itself. Now, given how I learned about it, naturally I have not read any other of the Dangerous Angels series nor was I actually aware that it was part of a series when I started. I'm coming at it completely cold, viewing it as a stand-alone.

Frankly, I think this book was wonderful. I'm tempted to buy myself a copy, and it is very rare for me to reread fiction, so I think this is saying something.

It is about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but it is also about people and their stories. How everyone has a story, and how freeing it is to share a story and how destructive it is to silence a story. If you'll allow me to quote a passage:

"Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free."

Doesn't that make the request to destroy this book all the more sad, and all the more ironic?

I was warned going in that the author had a "twee writing style". I'll admit that my reaction was "what does that even mean?" Then I started and oh, that's a twee writing style.

The start of the book is written in the way you'd expect a book for beginning, elementary-age readers to be, even though the intended audience is older. Very simple, short sentences, very concrete. But it doesn't stay that way. The storytelling subtly changes with the events of the story. At first, it's reflecting Dirk's life. It's very black and white, there's no depth to it, "There's something wrong with me; I want to be normal, and if I can't have that, I want to die." Later during dream sequences it gets more flowery and symbolic; it changes depending on the character in the focus. Then at the end the style is more down to earth, but more grown up. It isn't the choppy simple elementary-school style any more.

I thought that was very stylish.

It's a character driven story, and the characters were great. It's a very short book (just over 100 pages), so it's very pared down, but I still found them very believable. I could really feel for Dirk, really experience what he was going through. I do wish Just Silver had gotten to share her story, but I guess you can't have everything.

So, in summary, my opinion: Go read it. Now. Close the browser and go to your local library or bookstore and get a copy. Reading it is an excellent use of two hours of your life.
But, however tempting it may be, don't actually use it to beat a bigot about the head and shoulders when you're done. It's too good of a book for that.

Of Buddies and Bullies

I am in the midst of reading Baby Be-Bop on the "recommendation" of the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries, to whom I should send a thank you note. It's a quick read, but I also have very limited time, so I'm not done with it yet. I'm enjoying it very much, but it does leave me teary-eyed in places. Now, part of it is that it isn't hard for a story to leave me teary-eyed, but part of it is that it also reminds me of my friend Tom.

Tom was a friend of mine in high school. He was one of the nicest boys I'd ever met (which unfortunately, in my school was a crime in itself :P), and very bright. We were on the Scholar Bowl team together. He also wanted to be a writer. I remember being on the team watching these horrible "Art Lady" videos. I don't remember it that was actually part of the name, or just what we had spontaneously screamed in the agony of "not another Art Lady video!" But, their purpose was to briefly go over the major players in various art movements, and featured the most painfully cutesy mnemonics delivered by a woman who sounded like a kindergarten teacher who was exceptionally bad at her job. I can still remember her saccharine voice repeating "Dot. Seurat." I remember that, and I remember that Tom wanted to be a writer as well, because at that point we turned to each other and made a solemn oath never to write anything so painfully stupid. We had a lot of good laughs and a lot of good times together.

Tom was also gay.

Somehow, this came out during our Senior year. He suffered for it. A lot. His house was subjected to vandalism, and he was beaten up at least once. That's just what I knew about, and I know that there was a lot more that happened and a lot more he feared. The bullying got so bad that he left school, planning to get a GED immediately and use it to get into college.

It didn't pan out that way.

The last I heard from friends who were closer to him than I was, his parents had kicked him out of the house. He was living with a man 5 years older -- which at that age is a huge gap, and I didn't get a real warm fuzzy about that relationship from the friends relaying it. College was looking like a far-away dream. He was desperate to find a job, leaving no time for study, and the schools he was interested in would have taken a GED earned before he could have gotten a diploma (a sort of fast-track diploma, if you will) but wouldn't accept one earned after the normal graduation period.


Now, that made me think of the bully responsible for driving him from school, Aaron B. I actually remember that guy's full name, which makes him one of 3 enemies for whom that is true. (Of the other two, one almost broke my leg, and the other pulled a stunt so sad and pitiful that she pulled herself out of complete memory oblivion to cement herself firmly in my mind as The World's Most Pathetic Person. I can't think of her without laughing.)

Aaron B. If ever there was a person who actually, honestly deserved a beating, it was Aaron. Interestingly enough, the reason I remember him is because he is one of only two people in my childhood to drive me to the point of intentional violent retaliation -- this boy pushed me to the point where I beat the crap out of him.

Now, to really put this in perspective, please understand that in elementary school, I was the absolute bottom of the social totem pole. My name was an insult so firmly entrenched as meaning "social pariah" that other grades used it without ever having met me. In middle school, where I first met Aaron, I was one student above the bottom. There was not a day in the first 9 years of my public schooling when I did not suffer some form of verbal abuse from my classmates, and there were literally dozens or even hundreds of students delivering it over that time, because again, I was at the bottom of the hierarchy.

But it was not the case that that Aaron was at the wrong place at the wrong time and caught the explosive brunt of, at that time, 8 years of teasing. No, not at all. He was so far beyond those dozens or hundreds of others that he drove me to violence where no one else had before.

Now, you know what they say about bullies really being big huge wusses? Well, I don't know about generally, but Aaron got his ass kicked by a very short, slightly overweight nerd girl who couldn't lift 20 lbs. I guess I can't honestly say I beat the crap out of him, because I was pulled off before it got to that point. I did, however, draw blood. I know, because I was sent to the bathroom to go wash it off, and it wasn't mine. He didn't even land a blow. (I would just like to thank him for pushing that final button on the day we had a substitute teacher. Ms. D would have had my ass in the principle's office before Aaron figured out which way was up, but that poor sub never knew what had happened. She just sent me to the bathroom to clean up and calm down with a "gosh, Ms. D told me you two didn't like each other, but I had no idea!")

You know how you can look back at some of your classmates and go "Well, so and so was a complete dick at the time, but I can see where he might have grown into a decent human being"? I can look back at Aaron's best friend and say that. But Aaron himself, I look back on and think "well, I can see where he might have grown into a... used car salesman." I'd say there's better than average odds that at least one person in this world refers to Aaron as "my abusive ex".

That person there, he put concentrated effort into destroying my friend's life. Oh, he didn't do it alone. He was more the kingpin. Other people helped him beat Tom up, and to trash Tom's home -- but Aaron was the instigator. Aaron didn't make Tom's parents kick him out -- but he was likely responsible for them finding out about the closet, and the vandalism certainly made denial difficult. It just seems to unfair to me my sweet, kind, smart, creative friend had everything he planned to do ripped apart in front of him, his whole future stomped on by bigots, while the head asshole responsible for it got to go on and live a normal life. Worse, some of the other people involved, I bet at least some of them now regret what they did. But Aaron? Unless he is an entirely different person now, I very much doubt it. He's probably proud of it.

Tom, wherever you are, I hope things are going well for you.
And Aaron, wherever you are, if the guilt doesn't get you, I hope the Rule of Three does.

When in doubt, blame Twilight

So, this whole swine flu thing.

When it comes to news, I am the equivalent of an unvaccinated individual taking advantage of the vaccinations of the people around me. I don't put any effort into following general news myself, but so many people around me do that I find out everything I need to know about, and then some.

So, the swine flu thing comes up and I'm going "you know, I've heard that if you get it, it's more mild than the normal flu." And the people around me are all "Oh no, it's as bad as the big bad flu epidemic in 1918 and if you catch it you need to get antivirals or you die" and so on. I defer, thinking I hit a bad rumor. Then I come home and look up the real deal, and... turns out I'm right. Less severe than normal flu. It does have some similarities with the 1918 Spanish flu, but there's also key differences.

Now, there's nothing wrong with keeping in mind the lessons of the 1918. Then, there was a wave of mild flu, and then the bugger mutated into its deadly form. So by all means, we do want to contain this thing and get it to die out its natural virusy death as quickly as possible. At the same time, we should also remember that 1918 had the problems of WWI. Many of the countries hard hit with it were war-torn, low on resources, and with widely malnourished (and thus less able to fight off infection) populations.

Right now, what we actually have is a mild flu strain that transmits easily, does not yet have a vaccine available, and --like any flu-- has a potential to mutate into something nastier. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, 1918. That date has come up recently. Isn't that the deal with Edward in Twilight, that he was made a vampire to keep him from dying in that flu epidemic? No one's drawn that exact connection yet that I've seen, but I can't help but think that it's why the mass media is jumping to that particular pandemic, when early analysis suggests it's more similar to the pandemic of 1957. (Well, and the fear-mongering "massive amounts of death" part.)

Now, another thing. As I said, I came home and looked up what I need to do if I catch the flu. One of the first things that came up was a British site, and it basically said, "Look, you don't have anything to worry about unless you've been in Mexico or the US."
Is anything else embarrassed by that juxtaposition?

This situation here is why we need some form of universal healthcare. Right now we have a very dangerous combination of a large population with poor healthcare access, and a cultural expectation that you will go into work with an illness and work through it with no regard for the coworkers you are infecting. These two things together make this sort of situation more dangerous than it has to be.

The second one, Powers That Be are trying to negate by encouraging anyone who thinks they have a flu to stay the hell home. My own company has told us that if we think we have the flu, they don't want to see us at our desks for at least a week. That's good. But, this should be the case all the time. People need to be encouraged to stay home when sick all the time.

For the first, even a bass-akward system in which basic care is provided, but more expensive care requires insurance, would be a huge step up. Imagine a system where treatment for infections, minor injuries -- the stuff your PCP covers -- are free, but if you need testing or hospitalization, you pay out of pocket/with insurance; now put this flu thing on it. I think even that half-assed universal healthcare effort would do a LOT to contain the problem. And we would at least have the option of saying that we're expanding that basic care to include anything related to the flu epidemic, so no one who thinks they have the flu should avoid treatment because they're afraid it'll lead to hospital bills they can't pay.

C'mon, country. It's time to join the rest of the world in the 21st century. I know I'll like it; they have cookies.

I hereby declare Mike Gronstal to be cool.

It's not as hard as they think, because it's not about them.

On a forum I frequent, a poster asked whether her husband's reactions to students clothing in a hot climate where both men and women bared a lot of skin were appropriate. In this, a remark came up that I've heard before many times:

"It makes me feel SO sad for men in today's society. They are expected to figure out what message a woman's attire is sending, and react (or not) appropriately, and if they don't, they're sexist pigs."

I bring it here because this is not unique to this conversation at all.

In reality, the expectation for men is a lot simpler than a lot of people, including this poster, realize.
1) Is the woman in question the man's significant other?
2) Is the man in a common "pick up" location, like a bar or club or whatever is common in their area?

If one of these is yes, then the man may need to decode a message.
If the answer to both of these is no, then the answer is easy. The woman isn't sending the man a message at all! She's just wearing clothes. There is no message for any strange man to figure out. Just leave her the hell alone. What she's wearing is no one's damn business but her own.

There's no real complexity, just a societal assumption that everything women do, especially with their own bodies, is for the benefit of men. And yes, that assumption is sexist.

I can has yummy tea!

I got myself a nice toy which was delivered a few days ago: an electric kettle. My stovetop kettle takes half an hour to boil water, and doesn't whistle reliably. That makes it a bit of an ordeal to make tea or hot cocoa. The new electric is awesome. Flip down the little switch, and in five minutes I've got water at a rolling boil. Or I can turn it down if I'm making green or white tea. I can actually have tea in the morning before work now. It's a happy thing.

It also let me test a theory that certain people are stupid assholes. Y'all know the McDonald's Coffee case. As a quick reminder of my opinion on it, 3rd degree burns, skin grafts, debibement, an 8-day hospital stay, 700 previous injuries and a refusal to fix the problem due to corporate insistence that the coffee is used in a way that their own market research showed it was not: I do not call this a frivilous lawsuit. Now, the issue here is that homemade coffee is served at 140F (60C), restaurant coffee is often 150-ish F (a little over 66C), and McD's was 190F (88C).

Well, I have seen certain people insist that 140F number is BS and a normal person would consider that cold coffee, that 190F is a perfectly reasonable temperature, and tea is about that temperature when it's served because it's made with boiling water.

Now, I don't know about you, but I let my teabag sit in the water for a few minutes. You know, kind of steep? And while my cup is sitting there steeping, it does this little thing called 'cooling'. So, I decided to make an experiment. I made echinacea tea this morning, which has a 6-minute steep time. The water I poured in the cup was at a rolling boil, which means that it was 212F (100C). Now, when I took the tea bag out, it was hotter than I care to drink it, but I measured it right then, before I even put in my honey.
154.4F (68C)

I didn't measure it when it got to drinking temperature, but it was undoubtably somewhere in the 140s. So nyah. :P