OT. When I hear 'going to the mattresses' I think strikebreaking. Company sees a strike coming a month ahead, they order a couple hundred mattresses in a semi trailer, park the trailer on their property. If the strike goes down, scabs and management sleep on the mattresses instead of crossing the picket line. The mafia stories are just stories to me. I've seen the mattresses. Maybe not OT: What does Apple see coming?
]]>I think most people rich enough for swords put some kind of classy, tacticool, religious, or magical goop on the hilts for show. When great Caesar was told his soldiers were putting gold and jewels on their weapons, Caesar said, 'Good, now they are less likely to drop them and run away.'
Gilliland's Wizenbeak is a water wizard who finds water and helps construction for a desert settlement, after a career as mountebank and magic glassworks manager. The magic is well integrated into the society's industrial base.
]]>HG Wells in Anticipations thought dirigibles would be lighter-than-air gliders which could inflate one end, rise in that direction, then stabilize. Might have worked on the Silk Road at some point.
]]>It might be easier to robotize the old Aztec floating gardens than a modern US farm, though.
]]>I'd like to think that right now some octopus is using kelp nets as complex as a bowerbird nest to funnel prey into his tentacles. An early-stage underwater society might start from nets and the lasso from kelp fronds the way we started from chimps with pointed sticks.
]]>I wonder how sure linguists are about whether PIE existed, or if it's just an artifact of hindsight, superimposed on a bunch of guys who traded and raided with each other. Is it widely trusted, or just a useful alternative chapter title for Hic Draconis?
]]>The story I heard in the Navy was that torpedoes were fueled by alcohol, drinkable if you filtered it through a piece of bread (helped to be an alky with dead taste buds and dying liver). Result- US torpedoes kept running out of fuel instead of hitting their targets. This was also a factor in JFK's torpedo boat navigation issues.
]]>Niven's wife was a figure in the Georgette Heyer Society when Niven and Pournelle wrote the Mote. According to Pattison, Heinlein pushed them to use a lot of 1920s military social manners. I'd say it was a huge help to the novel- Georgette Heyer wrote good. But then I think the Forever Amber stuff in Zelazny's first couple of Amber books was a huge boost too.
]]>sudden decline in vampires tantalizingly close to 2008-
Fred Saberhagen died in 2007. Saberhagen's The Vampire Tapes is the only really good vampire book I've ever read. Saberhagen's Vlad series stayed pretty good to the end. Talent matters. If another writer as good as Saberhagen or the first couple chapters of early Ann Rice came along, there'd be another vampire trend.
Dracula is a scary foreign gent. He can be a metaphor for anything, but he's a scary foreigner.
]]>There's a John D. MacDonald riff on this, I think in The Quick Red Fox. Travis McGee expresses his dislike for all this modern (1980) data on him. His wise old Milton Friedmanesque friend tells him to spam the system. Bury what you want private behind giant piles of meaningless crap. Aren't lots of us doing this anyway?
]]>