Ground Game Scandal. Office View

View 776 Thursday, June 06, 2013

Anniversary of D Day, the most complex and expensive event in the history of mankind.

I have been bogged down all week. I started this two days ago. Still just checking in.

Every time we think the IRS scandal is as bad as it gets, it gets worse. Given that the IRS was used to cripple the get out the vote efforts of the Tea Party and all organizations claiming to be patriotic or civic duty directed, and all religious operations, and given that it was Obama’s ground game that won, it is hard not to conclude that this was the key to Obama’s win.

It also means that we know how to win in 2014 and 2016.

This was recommended to me some time ago. I read it and thought it worth recommending, but various distractions intervened. Rather than keep this as a Firefox tab, I recommend it to your attention without comment.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/it-can-happen-here/?singlepage=true

I find myself increasingly approaching the state of the famous absent minded professor, who one day was walking through the Yard and was approached by some students who wanted an expansion of a lecture. They were impressed. Then he asked, “Gentlemen, in which direction was I going when you stopped me?” They pointed. He said, “Thank you. Good. I’ve had my lunch.”

I find I can focus on the subject at hand and give myself a good accounting, but I often have to refer to the Internet for details such as names and dates. The other day I could remember a phrase, and I knew who had said it, but I could not remember his name, or the name of the book in which it was said. Fortunately I could remember he had written A Tale of Two Cities. As I was Googling that work I realized that he had also written A Christmas Carol and that was written by Charles Dickens so I didn’t have to complete the search. It was an odd experience. On the other hand I can sometimes remember incidents that took place forty years ago. I gather it’s not uncommon. Fortunately I now live in the Internet age…

I am doing the last intro work for the California Reader. Thanks to those who have expressed interest in it. Real Soon Now

 

I’ll try to do a bit of mail tonight.  And if you haven’t read my rather ancient essay on the Voodoo Sciences recently, this would be a good time.  It’s still extremely relevant.

 

 

I was asked in another conference to show some pictures of where I work, and having done that I was about to erase the file when I realized that it might be of interest to some of you, so I paste it on to the bottom of tonight’s View.

My office has grown over the years, and the downstairs office suite where John Carr and any temporary associate editors worked is now my wife’s.

We rebuilt the front part of the house with this upstairs office suite for me. I actually do a good bit of creative work on a laptop in what used to be the room of the oldest son resident, but now that all four of them have moved into quarters of their own it is a combination guest room and monk’s cell – a room without Internet or distractions like telephones, and most of the books are high school text books. But I spend most of my time here,

I’ve been a bit under the weather and this place has slowly settled into the muck – it’s a real mess.

View of my work chair and the three computer screens I keep open. The window faces onto a second floor veranda where I keep humming bird feeders, and two big ceramic dishes that serve as bird baths and watering stations. There’s a brick waist high wall around the veranda and I put out bird seed most days. There has been the same family of California Jays since we moved here in 1968, and they have learned that if they yell loud enough I will go out and give them peanuts. The squirrels have learned to listen for the jays and come running. The resulting contest between jays and squirrels is a more even match than you might suppose. The chair is by Henry Miller and is expensive and I recommend anyone spending many hours in a chair to get one.

View from my chair into the conference room. Alas the conference table is covered with stuff. That’s the room in which we held the meeting that resulted in the SSX presentation to the White House. It eventually became a scale model of SSX called DC/X. That mess on the left is a counter on which I keep the chemistry lab of vitamins and other supplements. I am sure that about half of them do me good and the other half make expensive urine, but I don’t know which ones are effective and which aren’t so I take them all.

View of the conference room looking east from the west end.

And the same room looking west from the reading corner in the bay window on the east end.

Sorry the place is such a mess. I really do intend to clean it up and have a nice tea party for local SFWA members. My wife says I can’t invite anyone over until I do some cleanup and throwing out. I have to agree she’s right.

There’s a bit more, a room originally intended for the printer because this was designed before Laser printers and the Diablo was so loud you didn’t want to be in the same room with it, and another room of the northeast side of the conference room (dubbed the Great Hall) which is a pure store room. The printer room now holds the network server and cable modem and lots of tools, as well as a microwave and small refrigerator. It’s larger and more complicated than I need now, but in the 80’s we had meetings of the Space Advisory Council, and I was turning out a number of anthologies as well as fiction and three monthly science/computer columns, so all those facilities made more sense than they do now. But it’s a comfortable place to work, and a nice place to have friends over for tea.