There’s a strong forest fire ash scent in the air — when we flew in last night and encountered that suspicious burning paper smell passengers started looking around to see if something had gone wrong aboard the plane.
This morning I emerged from the elevator and there was Dennis Miller with his bicycle, setting a good example for the rest of us. I also met Amy Thomson who filled me in about the Ranquet location.
Dennis and I headed for registration. En route we got to say hi to Larry Niven, and Michelle Pincus gave us some gag ribbons for our badges. Mine says “48% Sith, so don’t push it.” I’ll let you know when somebody gives me the ribbon that answers what the other 52% is….
Although the reg line was advancing at a shuffling pace, which is good for the first morning of a Worldcon,I decided that would be too long standing on a hard surface. So wandered back til I found a spot to crash on a bench, which happened to be next to Colin Harris, a past Worldcon chair and Journey Planet coeditor.
While working on this post I’ve said hello to Jo Walton, Dave McCarty, Morris keesan and James Bacon.
And somebody just walked by wearing an “Occupy Mars” t-shirt, which kind of symbolizes why I come to these things.
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Jethro Tull: I have a liking for Ian Anderson’s instrumental album Divinities: Twelve Dances With God. (Not everyone shares that like.)
The puppies don’t post here often because they can only thrive in an atmosphere that is 80% white victimhood man-baby gas
What tribe is Mr. Beale a member of? Or if not a member, what tribe is his ancestry?
*sigh* Well, here goes the descent into flame until Mike gets back.
For those hoping to pick a thread of not-suck through the comments, I just identified my 500th species in the garden! It’s the Black-Bordered Lemon Moth, a small moth with caterpillars that feed primarily on crabgrass and morning glories.
#499 was the Great Black Digger Wasp, which is pretty badass.
I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, but 500 species is still a pretty big milestone for me. Half of them are moths ID’d by the people at BAMONA or bugguide.org, the rest a mix of bugs, birds, mammals, and a few plants and fungus.
And Bob, the Lawn Crayfish. Who is special.
Wow, after several months and thousands of posts, that’s what gets VD to poke his head back over the parapet?
I thought we always lied, not just this one time.
Seriously, Aaron? I’m kind of busy laughing my ass off at the comically villainous Beale, but you should probably at some point elaborate a bit on exactly what you mean when you say that his claims about his ancestry are “bullshit.” One has to get up pretty early in the morning to give that clown something to be right about, but it sort of smells like you may have managed it.
@Ed:
You owe me a keyboard.
@RedWombat
Oh, you have to tell us about Bob now.
VD –
Not that it really has any bearing on the discussion, but you might want to go with ‘accused of lying about being bi-racial’ otherwise you’re doing the same thing, trying to accuse someone of lying about their heritage without knowing their background or family tree. Aside from the fact that there might be more to who the genetic father was than what was listed on the birth certificate maybe his Great-Grandfather was black, making his claims about being black just as strong as yours are for being Native American, don’t it?
As a 15% Cherokee Princess my brother I salute your pride in your heritage and how you’ve managed to deal with all the terrible scorn and racism you by the paleskins.
Eh, guys, why don’t you all post both places ?
Argument is fun. Maybe argue about SFF too.
Maybe people come to tease you. You can deal.
Relax ka lang. Huwag kang magdadrama (Good Taglish that – you can figure it out)
@Laertes: He claims to be more than “one sixteenth Cherokee” (he doesn’t claim to be Cherokee but that’s the language he used). To be so, he would need to identify a close ancestor as a full blooded Native American. Which one is it?
He’s identified a great grandparent as having rode with Pancho Villa but that only maybe helps his case to have Mexican heritage. Mitt Romney also has ancestors from Mexico, but that doesn’t make him Hispanic.
Further, the claim also encompassed Correia, who isn’t Hispanic. His family is Portuguese, which isn’t Hispanic.
Mark –
I gotta admit after File770 comments when I read The Mechanical every time I read Clockmakers Lie but the Dutch certainly didn’t seem like Social Justice Warriors.
@RedWombat:
Oh, that is so cool! I never thought to keep track of the critters in my postage stamp of an urban front garden. We get goldfinches sometimes, and a lot of butterflies (We have asclepias and blackeyed susans and purple coneflower and New england asters and beebalm — I have to rip a lot of the last two out every year so they don’t take over.) and we have several resident rabbits.
Nigel : Should Mike call these reports Sasquaxels?
“The Sasquazade”
Oh lord, Bob!
So I am Not From The South originally and I was poking around in the flowerbed and there’s this hole there.
I have observed this hole for some time and assumed a snake lived in it. This does not bother me, I like snakes.
But I look over and there is…a claw.
Like a crab claw. A not-a-thing-you-find-in-flowerbeds-claw.
I tear indoors to the internet going “WHAT IS THIS THING!?” and it turns out that the world is divided into those who know that lawn crayfish are a thing that exist and those who don’t. They are common in many states and make little burrows in the ground with a little muddy front porch.
I went out with a piece of salami on a string and tried to coax him out of the burrow. He came partway out, I yelped–he was big!–and he took the salami away from me. I retired from the field of battle.
(Personally, I believe if you have lawn crayfish, you should be required to put that fact on signs when you enter and leave the state–Welcome To North Carolina: We Have Lawn Crayfish.)
I spent the next few weeks interrogating random individuals “Do you know this is a thing?!” Half of them were like “…yeah? Of course?” and the other half were like “You are on crack.” I went in with a suspicious lump and told my doctor about lawn crayfish and she stormed out to interrogate the staff about it because she was afraid that hallucinatory crayfish was a symptom of something.
Anyway, I named him Bob. He lived there for awhile. I think the hard freeze last year may have ended him, but the burrow is still there and I hope it someday gets another Bob.
@RedWombat,
I just identified my 500th species in the garden!
500? where i come from we don’t call them gardens, we call them zoos.
“His family is Portuguese, which isn’t Hispanic.”
Hispania was the whole penninsula.
When the armies of Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal charged all together at Las Navas de Tolosa, the decisive battle of the reconquista, the warcry was for the first time “Santiago y cierra Espana” – Saint James and charge, Spain. Spain, Hispania, was a thing, for the first time, and that time included Portugal.
Didn’t VD brag about his English and German (or was it English and Irish) forebears creating civilisation while he was trying to belittle N. K. Jemisin, and then turn round and invoke Mexican/Native American heritage to defend himself against suggestions that he was a white supremacist? Seems like pure-bred weasel to me.
I knew crayfish live on land if it’s damp enough. I still remember the giant-size museum exhibit of life in the soil under our feet. Among the earthworms and the earwig and a jillion tiny pseudoscorpions was one memorable fiberglass crayfish.
I’ve never encountered one in the wild, mind.
*sniffs haughtily* I b’lieve the origin of the term was “zoological garden” thank you very much.
(And it’d be an awfully dull zoo, honestly, since some of the exhibits have only appeared in the garden once three years ago. Although an Imperial Moth coming at your head would liven up anyone’s evening!)
Unamuno considered the Portuguese “Hispanic”, and an essential part of the culture of the Penninsula.
@RedWombat —
Good Lord, I thought you were making this up. Or that Bob was a temporary resident washed in during a rainstorm. But unless you have hacked multiple search engines, there really is such a thing. We must go deeper…
@Jamoche
Like this one at the Royal Albert Hall
@buwaya — Given that the original claim was “Latino”, I think you’re pushing your scholarship up the wrong tree. 🙂 Someone else made an error, but you’re not correcting the error, merely charging down the wrong path.
@Peter J — precisely.
Gallegos (people of Galicia) speak a language that is essentially Portuguese – but are Spanish. Fidel Castro’s dad was a Gallego. Difficult to argue he isn’t Hispanic. A hill or two over and he would have been Portuguese.
Conversely, there are peoples in Spain whose native tongue isn’t Spanish – Basques – like many of my ancestors, and Catalans, and arguably a bunch of others. But they are “Hispanic”.
So this is all a fuzzy concept, so Larry Correia can be Hispanic, legitimately.
I am stuck somewhere between fascinated and horrified about the idea of lawn crayfish . . . particularly since they can build castles. Castles!
I’m recovering with cute pictures of sheep slugs.
@JJ
You got to kaffeeklatch with P.C. Hodgell? Oh I am so jealous! I met her once but it was years ago. I understand she’s working on a new book; did she mention much about it? I hope whoever Self Absorbed was they didn’t get in the way too much.
@Red Wombat
Congratulations on the 500th species in your garden! And the Lawn Crayfish is very cool. I was walking along one of the Knoxville bike paths (I don’t remember which but there aren’t many of them; I could probably find it again) and we found these weird mud towers along the stream bank. I remember them as being two feet tall or so.
Knoxville is rather rich in things that sting, so we didn’t investigate too closely but my friend took pictures with her phone and e-mailed me later that they were some kind of crayfish towers.
Crayfish have never struck me as being much in the climbing department so I am still unclear on how they make the towers that tall. But there are crabs that climb trees so why not, I guess.
May another Bob move in soon.
@ Matt Y
I think those Dutch might surprise you. Just sayin’
buwaya:
If you think it is legitimate to create your own definition of the word, that is.
I bow to Matt as my comic overlord 🙂
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9912822/DNA-ancestry-tests-branded-meaningless.html
It figures that someone who uses lousy Latin as a pen name and promotes eugenics, would fall for junk science and make claims based on it.
Hey Poxy, I’m pretty sure I could prove one of my ancestors shovelled shit from a cow that once ate grass owned by the kings of Ireland. That makes me kin to Brian Boru, right?
“If you think it is legitimate to create your own definition of the word, that is.”
Why not ? Of course it is legitimate. The concept does not permit precision.
@Cpaca – Sasquabury Tales.
@RedWombat
The top Google result for lawn crayfish is your own blog!
(And I’ve just watched video of some crazy guy catching them out of their tunnels. Seems like a lot of effort for not much crayfish)
“I knew crayfish live on land if it’s damp enough.”
These ones do, for sure
http://www.steadyhands.net/photogallery/albums/temp/image28682.jpg
Jim Henson’s Mad Max Fury Road?
‘“If you think it is legitimate to create your own definition of the word, that is.”
Why not ? Of course it is legitimate. The concept does not permit precision.’
I’m nominating Buwaya for best translator next year.
Personally I find the whole argument about who is what ethnicity to be unseemly.
It is not kind to question people’s ancestry (outside of matters of inheritance (I would count things like scholarships among these and freely confess that the matter can get messy) ).
I can’t think of any society that keeps track of or defines people’s ancestry for them for any reason other than inheritance / scholarships that is not douchey about it.
(Of course, just because I can’t think of them doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I’m not a genius or expert or anything.)
(But I’m willing to let people self-define, whatever else I may think of them.)
“I’m nominating Buwaya for best translator next year.”
Sadly, a good translator needs to be a fine writer, and I haven’t the skill, no matter my imagination.
“I can’t think of any society that keeps track of or defines people’s ancestry for them for any reason other than inheritance / scholarships that is not douchey about it.”
As in US university admissions.
“It is not meet to question people’s ancestry”
These questions are pretty important to races which have been suppressed and almost eradicated by white colonialisation, and tribal enrolment is a big deal for American Indians/First Nations. I can’t imagine they’d be very amused by someone running around claiming Native ancestry based on someone *else’s* postal DNA test, while simultaneously bruiting their superiority as a white man to degenerate non-whites.
Someone who is mixed race can totally claim whatever they like as their identity. Poxy? Not so much.
Like sandkings? Run. Run very far away.
I agree. I understand why VD’s claims are questioned, because his motives for making them seem obvious (to shield himself in the eyes of current and potential “minions” from allegations of racism) and unrelated to his heritage, but it’s a trap. He’s gathering “hypocritical” “SJW” quotes to fan the flames.
If I remember VD’s claims correctly, his native american ancestry comes from a DNA test his brother did or something?
So he has no tribe affiliation.
His claims at being native american are more laughable than Elizabeth Warrens.
“He’s gathering “hypocritical” “SJW” quotes to fan the flames.”
Another similarity then, to his kin under the skin, Requires Hate.
Nope. Those rely on people’s self-identifications.
I’m talking about telling other people what they are and holding them to it. More like the US’ old “one drop of blood” custom, meaning that anyone with any black ancestor, no matter how remote, was considered fully black, and many people did remarkable things to try to hide that / ferret it out.
I have run across the sly insult “a touch of the old tar brush” in UK writings, meaning roughly the same thing.
If one or both of your parents attended a ritzy private college you generally don’t need nearly as good a GPA to get in. This is called “legacy preference.”
It’s not called affirmative action, oddly enough.
I suspect that there’s a language confusion thing going on here. Hispanic means something quite specific to Americans, but the Hispania/Iberian thing doesn’t seem completely mad from a European perspective, and quite how Filipinos interpret the word throws another spanner in the works.
Still, it’s nice to see you again Teddy, have you come up with a coherent explanation about what you’re hoping to gain from breaking other people’s toys yet? Or are you now back to not caring?
@Jamoche:
You know, if you treat them well they shouldn’t be a problem.
Seems like it to me. He’s a high-level, skilled troll. Honestly, it seems like he’s done a lot less damage than RH, though. He has the feel more of an old school troll to me, seeking out attention and hurting people’s feelings, whereas RH apparently actually wants to destroy people.
“So this is all a fuzzy concept, so Larry Correia can be Hispanic, legitimately.”
Whether you’re talking about Spanish ancestry or Portuguese ancestry, most of either descent would consider themselves of white European descent, and some might possibly be somewhat offended that a rank opportunist decided they weren’t for the purpose of his argument that his Portuguese-descended buddy DOESN’T count as white European (“Latino”) when it suits him to portray his ridiculous group as more diverse than it actually is.
“Honestly, it seems like he’s done a lot less damage than RH, though.”
Since he’s a big fan of doxxing critics, I think he’s done more damage than we realise. Like RH, the full extent may not yet be known.
It’s definitely either fuzzy or it’s not.