Not quite the perfect vacuum

Just flotsam and jetsam today: the vacuum goes on! The wait continues for any action on any front whatever, save that involving air conditioning. The split system is INSTALLED. And what's more, it WORKS. In fact, it's so bloody cold, I keep turning it off because otherwise I'll have to go put on a sweater. In summer. Woah.

Allow me to pause for one moment, pop a photo and paste it in here:

...just what you needed, right? A closeup look at the two square meters from which all of the Mel Keegan extravaganzas are launched. You were expecting a suave, sophisticated office? You were expecting, maybe, neat and tidy?! Where there's Keegan, there's usually kaos, as any reader of this blog over the last seven months or so will attest!

The ongoing vacuum makes me look beyond the norm and seek other items of interest to inject a spark into the day. This one's good -- in fact, it's utterly priceless. Apparently it's been doing the rounds in the last week or so, and I caught up with it on an Alaskan blog (I'll give you the link in a moment):

Dear World,

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4th.

Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by January 20th. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improving it in the years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,
*The USA*

And here's the blog where I caught up with it: Attention: Service Has Been Restored, on the Esther Republic. That is so cool.

Another item of exceeding great coolness is this interview with Ewan MacGregor and Jim Carrey at Sundance:



Some idiot, somewhere, in a ridiculous comment on one of the news stories (LA Times??) said something about "Jim Carrey looks too old." Excuse me? Where is it written that you have to look juvenile to be attractive? You track down the place where that snippet of "wisdom" is inscribed, and I shall personally go around there with a bucket of industrial grade ammonia and erase it.

Incidentally, I Love You, Phillip Morris is being downloaded by the torrent already. No, I don't have a copy, but I've no doubt some of you do! You can see the trailer on YouTube, and a clip. Looks like a great time was had by all while they were making it, and I expect to enjoy the movie muchly.

What is massively refreshing is that neither McGregor nor Carrey is carping and whining about how hard it was to smooch another guy for the movie -- unlike both numerous other actors who couldn't wait to do just that. Far from it: both Ewan and Jim have (!) only good things to say about doing the romantic scenes. Like I said, refreshing.

Digital Kosmos continues to grow, with over 50 photos online now, of which I think about 15 or so are mine. My latest contributions have been goodies like...

Colors blaze on Stampede Trail
Storm light
Noon on the dunes
Tribute to the pioneers in Fairbanks, Alaska
Still life, with wine casks
Windows onto pure color

...I have to admit, it's a lot of fun. We could have been doing this for months.

Still waiting for a response from Google; still waiting for the proof of The Lords of Harbendane ... getting very tired of waiting for both. Working on LEGENDS -- getting the new blog in place and stockpiling posts/chapters so that real life can shove its nose in, as it always does, everything can go haywire, and the book will continue to appear on time ... there's nothing worse than a serial that keeps putting itself on hiatus.

Cheers,
MK

YouTube vidoes not loading?!

Just a service message here (with a little help from Torchwood):

If your YouTube videos are not loading ... you're seeing a white area where the movie should be -- it's a very safe bet you need to update your Flash player. It's as simple as that.

In fact, if you have your system configured to update automatically, all you're probably need to do is reboot your computer.

To figure out if you need to do this ... if you're seeing this video, you're fine, if you're seeing a white space, give the computer a restart:


[John Barrowman singing Anything Goes on the Torchwood set]

Hope this fixes problems! (And a liberal dose of John fixes most...!)

For more John Barrownman videos and so forth onsite here:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/mel-keegan-show-and-heeeeeers-mel.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/07/racehorses-gravions-and-gremlins.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/captain-jack-webpages-and-hunks-in.html

Scary movies: scammers or screamers?

And lest you think brain-rot is something quarantined in North America, have a look at this one:



This epic masterwork, recorded in ENGLAND, is potentially even scarier, because they've made the questions even easier: how many colors do you find on the Union Jack? How many colors do you find on a four-colored card? What's your own currency? Who's your own prime minister? Name a British car manufacturer.

Now, I would LOVE to see one of these movies made in Australia, and maybe also in New Zealand -- and Canada. Woah. These would be the stuff of which nightmares are made. Anyone game to go out and make one?!

It could be argued that these movies (which I call "Nightmare on Doom Street Part I, Part II" and so on ... scroll down to the previous post to see the American one) are all a complete set-up.

But, I put it to you: what kind of Americans or Brits would deliberately participate in something that will get their own people, brothers and sisters of their nation, viewed as complete morons?! I don't buy that solution to the problem. It would be traitorously un-American and un-British to do this; you couldn't get people to do it. Could you?! Or --

It could also be argued that there were loads of right answers to those simple quiz questions, and the right answers were edited out: that's much more proabable --

But here's your problem: those questions are so fundamental, ALL answers should be right; you should be weeding out the .05% wrong ones to make US'ns and their Brit cousins look faultlessly smart, not editing out the right ones to make 'em look, er, well, not quite so smart.

The questions fired at the American masterminds were incredibly simple, too: Name a country beginning with U. Find Korea on a map. What's the religion of Israel? What's the currency in the United Kingdom? Who's Tony Blair? How many kidneys does a person have? (Do you know what planet you're living on?)

(Don't get me wrong: most ordinary Americans (and English) in the street are the nicest people in the world -- some of them are in these movies. They're beautiful, beautiful people. I lived and worked in Alaska for 15 months and think of it as my second home; I have family in Texas, and in Alaska, and I was born in the UK ... in other words, I have a foot in both camps, as well as my third foot being planted in Australia (I'm a citizen). So I'm utterly impartial here. I'd be howling with laughter and in just as chill a sweat if the Aussie and Kiwi versions of these videos were to appear)

The problematical facet is this:

These beautiful people who identify Australia as North Korea (or Iran; change the printing on the map, and they zero in with unerring accuracy on what they can read), and believe Israelis are Islamic, and Kofi Annan is a hot beverage ... and there are five colors on the Union Jack, and George Bush is the English Prime Minister ... are the very same people who VOTE.

They're the folks who elect our jingoistic politicians, carefully install them at the pinnacle of the most powerful free-world governments, put them in charge of foreign policy, show them where the buttons are -- the nice, big red ones that launch the intercontinental ballistic missiles, place them officially in control of these buttons, and then ... go away and leave them to it.

They're also the self-same people who enlist in the armed forces, and follow orders to the letter.

"Yes sir, the Israelis are all Muslims, sir!" And what do we do with Muslims, these days? Omigods.

"Yes, sir, this bloody great island continent in the South Pacific [you know, the one with the koalas and the kangaroos skipping about, and the weird looking bridge on the harbor that looks like a coat hanger] is North Korea, sir!" And they're trouble, with their nuclear bombs and their missiles that can reach Anchorage, so we oughtta blast 'em. Well ... darn.

Now, if these movie are a scam (and ordinary, street-legal Americans and English folk were paid to act dumb for the cameras for five minutes), which I'm sure a lot of US'ns and UK'ns reading this will be praying -- the doodoo only gets deeper. From the American and English perspective, it reveals a traitorous element in the public that'll knife their own country in the back for a lousy few bucks or quid ... and look deeper. Take another look, from the cosmopolitan perspective.

Slap this on YouTube, and it will be seen in every corner of the world. It's being seen everywhere, right now. It's funny at first; then, when the questions put to these street-legal voters turn to who should be nuked, one stops laughing.Here's the stinger: the American one has been seen sixteen and a half MILLION times already. The English one has "only" been seen about a million times.

Don't ask yourself what regular Americans and English folks think about the videos. Rather, wonder what people in Korea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan ... the target nations, most likely to be nuked, are thinking? Feeling.

I'll tell you what they're feeling: dread. Fear. Anxiety.

Now, Americans and British are certainly going to take umbrage at being depicted as chronic morons (in fact, if you go to YouTube to view these movies, the comments are mostly from irate nationalistic viewers who are claiming the whole thing was set up. Certainly, I wish I could believe they were set up ... but I have this sneaking, crawling squirming feeling, the videos are absolutely genuine.

And it's not the fundamental stupidity of people that bothers me; it's the fact that these folks are not only allowed to vote, they're actually encouraged to.

I think people should be made to take a test before they qualify for voting privileges. I think it should be a 10-point quiz, that goes like this:

1) Who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?
2) Luke Skywalker's father is: a) Princess Leia b) Ben Kenobi c) a Jawa?
3) What color is the Red Baron?
4) How many college grads does it take to strike a match?
5) Doctor Who was recently elected president of which small African nation?
6) How many sharp points does a carving knife have?
7) If you use scissors to cut a sheet of paper in two, have many pieces do you have?
8) What is the Pope's religion?
9) What is the capital of Los Angeles?
10) Butter is made from a) cocoa b) Vaseline c) olive oil?

Award yourself one point for each correct answer.

What's more, I'd make a rule that if anyone scored less that 3 points in the above quiz, they're not allowed to bloody vote!

AND I'd make wannabe politicians take the damn' test, and if they scored less than 5 points, they not allowed to run for bloody office!

AND I'd use the test results (computer collated, analyzed to death by Zogby International, with a resulting 800pp document detailing why this planet is more than likely doomed to a lingering demise, death by sheer stupidity) to dismantle every bomb and warhead, nuclear, biological, chemical or explosive, on the planet. Because nobody, nowhere, no how, is qualified to be in charge of the buttons!

There. I feel much better now. The ocean is calm and blue ... calm and blue ... caaaaaalm and blooooooooo ...

Racehorses, gravitons and gremlins

Thursday finds me still trying to work out how to get a YouTube video to play without vertically squishing itself. It's really weird, and difficult to describe, so rather than try to describe it, I'm just going to paste the thing in here, and let you see for yourself.

This is the clip I was talking about a few days ago, where John Barrowman is getting eaten alive by a racehorse. It's a great clip, and about six months ago (when I discovered it) it used to play perfectly. Then something happened either on this end of YouTube's end, and now ... it's squished. Someone, somewhere must have a clue about what's going on here! A little help, please??




...like I said, great clip. You gotta love the man. And the horse. The only wrinkle is the way it plays back -- and it's playing back this way from YouTube direct and from this link, on three different computers that I know of, including two XPs and a Vista machine. I could have understood it, if it was just Vista was stuffing around. I've been an observer at the high-jinx of trying to get Vista to play nice, and ... I think I'll stick with the ol' XP.

Speaking of which, Microsoft must know they've got a turkey of epic proportions on their hands, because they said a short while ago, they're going to support XP till 2014. By which time, one hopes, they'll have come out with a whole new operating system. Like, maybe, one that works.

The latest episode of Tales from the Mel-o-sphere is about the frustration of not being able to get on with what I want to do (WRITING) for the avalanche of fiddling little details in other projects which have to be attended to first. I know, I know: you get patches like this, when the gremlins get into the machinery. What one needs is a tiny little baseball bat, with which one can reach into the aforementioned machinery and bash their tiny little gremlin brains out. Or a cricket bat, for that matter. I've never been fussy. Put it this way: just wait till I get my hands on the little buggers.



And now, welcome back to the world of HELLGATE, as I try to answer a very, very good question from a reader in the Chicago area, without rambling on and boring everyone else to death.

In the HELLGATE books (and particularly in PROBE), I talk about gravitons, and the existence of this particle is pivotal to the development of the technolgy that's going to drive the rest of the series ... and I do mean drive! Moreover, I talk about J-type gravitons, known in the world of HELLGATE as Jung particles. The question is this: are Jung particles real science? Come to that, are gravitons real science?! (Like I said, it's a very, very good question.)

Gravitons: yep. They're almost certainly as real as photons, though at this moment they're stll theoretical. String theory predicts that they most certainly do exist --as 'closed strings' with the tiniest possible 'packet' of energy ... the gravity equivalent of a photon. As for Jung particles (being J-type gravitons), sorry, those are a product of my feverish imagination. The J-type graviton is one of many kinds of gravitons knowin 600 years in the future; this one exists on the very line where this dimension of ours nudges up against e-space, or hyperspace. Does hyperspace exist? String theorists are developing math to describe many more dimensions than our own, so ... oh, yeah. More than likely hyperspace is very real. Now, as to WHAT a graviton actually is --

Want to drive yourself nuts? Chase links around on this site: World of Physics. There's a couple of books you need to read, too. HYPERSPACE by Michio Kako, and THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS by Brian Green. Here's my thinking, in a nutshell (and this is what's driving the technology in the later HELLGATE books). Mass and energy are interchangeable, if you remember your basic Einstein (E=mc|2 ... I have no idea how to make this thing superscript to get the 'squared' symbol, so you'll have to interpolate there). The graviton is predicted to have micrcoscopic amounts of energy, which have to be derived from mass (ain't nowhere else energy is going to come from), so if gravitons carry/transmit gravity, and they're made of converted mass, and they pump out of black holes at the rate of how many gazillion tons per nanosecond? Well ... you chase this snippet of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and you might get a glimpse of where HELLGATE is going. Then again, maybe not!

To answer an oft-asked question (actually, two quesions), YES, I know exactly where HELLGATE is going, at a detail level which would probably surprise you. And YES, the next book is on my agenda. In fact, this is one of the reasons for the frustration I was talking about above. How sweet it would be, to be able to tell the world to go away, and have time to WRITE. I imagine it's every writer's dream.

'Work' is the other four-letter word ending in 'K.' Somebody needs to put that on a bumper sticker. Or a teeshirt.

Tales from the Mel-o-sphere

We managed to get the code working for the eBay connection ... well, I saw 'we' but I basically stood back and watched while DreamCraft's tech-head and fixer did something to it which made it, uh, work.

All of which means, if you've been hunting around for the old GMP versions of my early works, and if you were predisposed to shop via eBay, and didn't mind giving me a click from the blog here (or the website), when the sale goes through, a percentage comes this-a-way like a royaly. Which would be very nice indeed.



It's been a long time indeed since GMP passed into history, and like many people (writers and readers alike) I still mourne their passing. Something very like GMP desperately needs to be launched right now ... a publishing house that caters to both new and sesoned writers, delivering books with gay themes or issues, characters or content. If I had the time or the investment capital, it's a project I'd be in without hesitation.

(Fair enough, I'm doing nicely as a writer, but -- you have to be realistic. I have 20 books at Lulu, and about 25 at Payloads, and a half dozen more in the works, plus giftware galore at Zazzle, and a marketing campaign working for me. Now, what writer just coming along with his (or her) first book, or first couple of titles, is going to be able to do that? There's a vacuum left behind with the extinction of GMP, and I'd be delighted to see it filled by a new publishing house with eclectic tastes and the ability, and the compassion, to give new writers a try.)

Work continues in jigsaw-like bits and pieces; there's an odd sense of dislocation right now, where various projects are complete, others not quite begun, loads of loose ends to tie and fiddling details to be resolved -- like the eBay code, which wouldn't work till it was given a swift kick. (It worked on the webpage, I admit; just not on the blog. Turns out, Blogger runs on a software platform which can be persnickity when it comes to add-on code. Ain't computers wonderful?! Mind you, can you imagine trying to live without them? [asthmatic whining sound]

Little of interest is happening in the Mel-o-sphere ... it's bucketing down, which is good, because we need the rain; the high winds in the last couple of days tore the TV aerial loose, so it was pointless even trying to watch the new Doctor Who, with two words out of three being snipped by a digital feed gone bonkers. David Tennant turned into a lot of little colored squares and danced off the side of the screen, and that was that ... and I spent the afternoon writing an article for the 'write your novel' website, which is due up in August or September.

When it goes up, I'll give you the link and invite you to the launch. It's actually a hell of a good idea for a website, and is turning into a very attractive website to boot. (Jade strikes again: some of the best looking sites on the web start right there. Apparently, the knack comes from spending 12 years reading code, and 15 years before that designing for the print media. Makes you cringe, doesn't it?) Put it like this: the new webpage is already the kind of website I'd have been damned glad to find when I was a late-teen trying to figure out what the hell I as writing!

And if the quality of a lot of the writing on the web is anything to judge by, there are several million people out there, all trying to answer the same fundalemental questions. Like, "How many b's are there in 'rubbish?'," and "do you put a a 'K' in pathetic?'") I've been surfing around a bit on fiction sites, right across the spectrum, to get a feel for what's out there. Damnit, some people need help.

With nothing interesting happening ... at least, nothing I care to blog about ... I'm not going to talk about politics; I swear to gods, I'm not going to talk about politics! ... I'll cut this one short.

Oh -- before I go:

I wanted to put in a link on the blog here to a really great video on YouTube, where John Barrowman gets halfway eaten alive by a racehorse, but the vide (which used to play just fine six months ago), is playing vertically-squeezed. Does anyone know how to configure a YouTube feed to get the damned video to playu right? If anyone knows the answer to this one, great. Because the video will be enjoyed by all and sundry. Advice would b appreciated muchly, guys. I don't have much more than a nodding acquaintance with YouTube.

Ciao for now,
MK