I follow John Tyner’s blog, <Insert title here>, and he had a recent post on guns and churches and permissions. Tracking back to John’s source, The Volokh Conspiracy (which is another excellent blog that I intermittently follow), this is the gist of a recent law case.

• There is a church in Georgia state.
• The minister wants to wear a gun in church.
• The church and, presumably, his parishioners, have no objections.
• BUT, the law generally forbids possession of weapons at churches or church functions.
• A case is filed.

The court hears the case but decides that the priest cannot carry a gun because:

Prohibiting the carrying of firearms in a place of worship bears a substantial relationship to that important goal by protecting attendees from the fear or threat of intimidation or armed attack.

John Tyner goes on to say:

A private entity wants to allow guns on their own property, but the government says, “no”. The people’s right to keep and bear arms can be infringed because of the possibility of “private bias or coercion”; that is, the government can take action because a crime might be committed, in the absence of any evidence of said crime.

And I completely agree with him. HOWEVER….

This does not stop the rational (i.e. non-US) readers of this piece to ask: why the hell would someone want to wear a gun in a church anyway? Now, I may be an old-fashioned atheist, but I thought that a church was a place of worship and sanctuary, a place of peace and reflection. The comments at Volokh suggest that the carrying of weapons may be valid when certain religions find they are the victims of violence from other religions but, if that’s the case, surely you have a bigger problem that needs addressing, one that involves law-makers and policies outside church grounds before infringing upon it?

The idea that one group may commit violence on another group on the basis of religion is not new. Only last year, a gang of three youths was charged with arson and attempted arson of some Christian churches in the Klang Valley area of Malaysia and there are numerous flare-ups of the same in Indonesia. Please note that the response in both countries has NOT been for the priests and ministers to carry guns to mass. Good gods, every interested party has understood that this was a problem of wider compassion, education and understanding, not shooting the first nut-case that wanders into a nave with a Zippo™ lighter in his/her hand. Apparently not so in Georgia, which prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. (And I mean, Georgia??? There’s a hot-bed of inter-religious hatred, with the potential for terrorism and counter-strikes necessitating bearing lethal weapons in a house of worship, in Georgia*??? The country south of Russia, I could almost understand; the state in the southern United States less so. Maybe the guys there are wearing underwear a couple of sizes too small.)

To my mind, there’s really only one bona fide excuse to carry weapons into a church and that’s when the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse occurs. It’s a tried and true piece of fact that, whenever great horrors beset humankind, the place everyone runs to is the local (stone-built) church. I’ve seen enough cinema to know this to be true. But, again, may I humbly suggest that should you be caught in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse, whether or not you violate the First Amendment by reloading your sawn-off shotgun in the vestry is, by then, academic?

* Yes, I have visited Atlanta, Georgia, on several occasions, and thoroughly enjoyed each trip. Thanks for asking.

While on a recent discussion thread I found, to my surprise, that several authors use Open Office as their word processor of choice. That made my geeky little heart all warm and fuzzy, until I realised that OO was a Sun initiative and that Sun was recently bought by Oracle.

As an Open Source geek, I don’t like Oracle. They’ve already proven that they will take open source initiatives and shut them down. OpenSolaris is one example. I don’t care whether you’ve used Solaris or not, innovation thrives in competition and Oracle is all about getting rid of it. I was working at Oracle when the Sun acquisition went through and it was not seen as a positive move by many Sun engineers involved in any open source initiatives. It was this, as it turned out, justified fear that led members of Open Office to “fork” the product by forming The Document Foundation and creating the LibreOffice suite.

According to Wikipedia, and for all the Australians among you, LibreOffice was only supposed to be the interim name, to be changed when Oracle joined the party. In true Oracle fashion, not only did Oracle not buy into the foundation, but they demanded that all OpenOffice.org board members involved in LibreOffice resign. Ah Larry, your management style is truly exceptional!

I’ll be honest. Even when part of Sun, Open Office was limping along, forever approaching the software guillotine then retreating from it. Now that it is part of Oracle, I really fear that the next trip to the downsizing blade won’t be as merciful.

My advice to authors who use Open Office? Switch to LibreOffice and do it as quick as you can. Get involved with the development team. Try out some Release Candidates and log bugs. If we want LibreOffice to be a viable alternative to Microsoft Word (and which FOSS advocate doesn’t?), then involvement with the product is the best way to do it. And, because it’s Open Source, that means that your comments and contributions count! You can’t get more democratic than that.

To find out more about The Document Foundation, go here.

To download LibreOffice, go here.

The Linux community has embraced LibreOffice and it is moving to replace Open Office in several distributions. I have removed Open Office from my machine and installed LibreOffice. Hope you do the same.

UPDATE: LibreOffice 3.3 was officially released yesterday. And, as the article from Developer.com says:

“I think that there is a very real and sincere offer for [Oracle] to join the community, the only blocker is Oracle,” [Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell] said. “They could become a leading light in the LibreOffice community. We’d love that. We’d love to have Oracle. This is not attempt to attack them, this an attempt to do something better.”

What’s the bet Oracle just ignores them?

Well I had a nice time at Coffee Time Romance and now I’m back. Hope you had a good weekend too.

I was thinking about my writing plan for this year (2011) and compared it to last year’s and the year before, and it struck me that it takes time to develop a rhythm of writing. For me, at least. I’m not talking about writing a novel or novella or short story; I’m taking the longer view here.

I began writing sf romance in 2006. In 2007, I had five releases (The Commander’s Slave, On Bliss, The Dragon of Ankoll Keep, Prime Suspect, and Combat!). In 2008, I had none. In 2009, I had two (A Pirate’s Passion, Guarding His Body). In 2010, I had two (Singapore Sizzle, In Enemy Hands).

2007 was a bumper year because, in addition to the stuff I wrote in 2006, there were also stories I wrote in the first half of 2007 itself. Only a new writer gets that kind of bump. After that, you get on the treadmill and, with luck, stories are released a predictable amount of time after submission.

2008 was as dry as a bone for me, mostly because I was trying to figure out exactly how to manage my writing career. I tried to tempt agents with a couple of manuscripts and, although some responses were promising, ultimately I failed to tempt them enough. As a result, 2008 was a depressing year for me. I realised, later on, that I was letting all those rejections get to me and, as a result, my writing suffered.

Moving into 2009, I decided to see if I could write a contemporary romance and, thanks to a suggestion from Maria Zannini, Guarding His Body came into being. But I was still enamoured with my Republic universe (it’s such a vile place, it’s wonderful!), so A Pirate’s Passion novella was published as well.

I turned a novella, originally called The Turk, into a novel and submitted it to Quartet Press, then Carina, and it got contracted as part of Carina’s launch line in 2010, around the same time that Singapore Sizzle got accepted for a cougar anthology with Total-E-Bound.

And then I sat down and had a long hard think again and, before I knew it, the rest of 2010 just whizzed by.

The maxim of academics is “publish or perish” and it’s the same with e-authors as well. Because the time to market is shorter than with print books, you’ve got to keep on producing in order to keep your name in front of the readers. This is something I readily admit I have not been good at. Instead of keeping the momentum of 2007 going, I completely sank in the water in 2008 and have been playing catch-up ever since.

Of course, there is the other side of the coin too. That is, there is a danger of producing so much in such a short time that the quality of work suffers. Balancing that act is a skill that the successful digital-press author needs to cultivate and that’s my goal from this year onwards. (Yeah, I have a thick skull and it oft takes time for common sense to penetrate.)

I’ll let you know when/if I reach that balance myself.

Again, I should have been promoting this like hell, but I am a part of Coffee Time Romance’s month-long book promotion. I shall be at the Coffee Time forum on Saturday, 22 January to solicit comments from interested readers and give away a copy of IN ENEMY HANDS. Please hop along and join in the fun!

I would also like to take this time to mention Maria Zannini’s incredible competition. First prize is a t-shirt or a full manuscript critique. Yes, that’s what I said! I can hardly bear to read my own stuff over and over again but Maria has insanely graciously stepped up to the plate to offer you, stalwart reader, a chance for a full manuscript critique. To find out how to win said full manuscript critique, please direct your browsers here. Oh, and did I mention there is a full manuscript critique involved?

Have a good weekend!

Here in south-east Asia, the food for pets is kibble. I had thought it had something to do with the fact that kibble doesn’t spoil in this equatorial heat and people just don’t have time for the previous tried-and-true pet food, home-cooked stew in rice.

But I think I also just stumbled across another reason.

It was bad enough when J mentioned at work that we have bull terriers and was told in horrified tones that they “kill children”. I’ll cover that topic in another post. J’s co-workers started to get really agitated when they asked what we feed our pets and he replied, “raw meat”.

“Raw meat?” they repeated. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll…attack you as a result?”

Now, isn’t that interesting? There was an implicit assumption here (for both dogs and cats) that if we feed our domestic animals a raw food diet (as we have done for the past 6+ years), the animals will start to look at us as potential food.

It got me wondering if this kind of thinking melds very well with the choice of kibble as a food. Kibble doesn’t resemble raw meat in any shape or form. It looks and smells processed. Or, to use another term, it appears more “civilised” than a plate of raw meat with bones.

It occurs to me that we constantly try to distance ourselves from our biological heritage. Say to someone, “you and I are both animals”, and there’s a frozen moment of disbelief and outrage. I know this because I’ve done it. And while people have had to agree in the end that, yes, they are animals, there is always a “BUT” floating around at the end of the admission.

So therefore, if we deem ourselves to be “civilised”, then the animals who inhabit our personal space (with the exception of those who yearn for “exotic” pets for ego or vanity reasons) must be “civilised” as well. Which means we don’t feed them anything raw. We feed them the kind of cooked, civilised meals that we eat ourselves. Roast Lamb with Vegetables. Seafood Platter. Beef With Gravy. Calamari in Prawn Jelly.

Admit it. You’ve seen those labels too, haven’t you? Who do you think those words are meant to appeal to? Illiterate domesticated animals? Or human sensibilities?

I’m thinking this out as I write this post so I’m not sure if I’m hitting everything clearly, but it could be that one reason people choose to feed their pets kibble to show they’re “civilised” pets and therefore promoted above the rest of the animal pantheon into a rarefied human circle. Which might also make sense of the horror when one of these so-called domesticated animals dares to attack us. We’re just not expecting it.

Recently, I read that either Singapore or South Korea had topped the Maths rankings for students worldwide. Whichever way it was, Singapore is either #1 or #2 in the world. I was interested in this statistic because I teach the kids from a Singapore maths workbook and today I’m going to talk about something that drives me utterly batshit when teaching the kids.

Below, you have an example of a geometry exercise from our workbook:

Once The Wast stops panicking the moment he claps eyes on it, he’ll find it’s actually trivial to solve. That is:

1) Let the top triangle be Triangle(1) and the bottom triangle Triangle(2).
2) We know that all angles in a triangle add up to 180° (degrees). Therefore, x + y + z in Triangle(1) = 180°.
3) In Triangle(2), one of the angles is a right angle (90°). Therefore c + d = 180° (the sum of all angles) – 90° (the right angle we know about) = 90°.
4) Therefore, x + y + z + c + d = 180° (from Triangle(1)) + 90° (from Triangle(2)) = 270°.

But note what the question is asking for. How many RIGHT ANGLES is this?

???????????????WHY??????????

Are we going to do anything with those right angles? No.
Is this question the first part in a progression that’s going to use right angles? No.
Is there any frickin’ logical reason for asking for the answer to be couched in terms of frickin’ right frickin’ angles????? Yes. To trip students up.

That is the ONLY reason I can think of to throw such dick-ish type questions into a workbook and hence onto an exam. And did you also note the exemplary English used in the question?

The missing in the box is _____________________ .

Oy, the lack of obvious English skills in a country that boasts about their impeccable English skills at the drop of a hat ::eyeroll:: You don’t know jack about the English language, okay Singapore? (I shall elucidate in future blog posts. Stand by for some real howlers.)

My issue with this question, and the whole array that are just like this, is that it’s not teaching kids an appreciation of Maths. It’s just teaching them to look out for the “code” in the question. The answer is not the answer. There is no satisfaction to be derived from correctly deducing the correct number. No, you have to take it one step further.

This wouldn’t be so bad if only a couple are thrown in, to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. But no, over 50% of the questions from Ratios to Mass to Volume to Geometry have this, “oh no you don’t; the answer isn’t good enough; you’ve now got to manipulate it in an entirely meaningless way so I know you’ve suffered enough” attitude that drives me, as a lover of Maths, Up. The. Wall.

That’s the other problem I have with education in this region: the inherent “code” in the questions and the fact that you have to interpret the “code” correctly in order to get the questions right. Take Science (Singapore again) as an example:

Well, what’s the difference? I showed my zealous mushroom hunter of a husband (Polish, natch!). He looked puzzled and said: “They’re both mushrooms.”

“No, they’re not,” I replied. “Wow, it’s a wonder you’re still alive! The answers in the book tell me that Organism(A) is a toadstool, whereas Organism(B) is a mushroom. Don’t you know anything?”

“But that’s not true,” he spluttered, rushing off to get mushroom classification books so he could show me his proof.

“Doesn’t matter,” I replied, deliberately not looking at the photos in his books. “The children have to memorise the fact that something that looks like A is supposed to be a toadstool and something that looks like B is supposed to be a mushroom and the publishers who put out these workbooks make sure that they copy the same illustrations as used in Ministry of Education exams so that students can (wink) pass the exam.”

Note what I said. Pass the exam. Not correctly learn about the family of fungi. Pass. The. Exam.

We seem to get a lot of Science questions wrong, now that I think about it. What is the function of a plant’s stem? The answer was “to keep the plant upright”. That’s not right, I told the kids. What about terrestrial creepers? What about seaweed? How can a Ministry of Education that is supposedly ranked so highly in the world be so blasé about frickin’ science???? (And don’t get me started on how out-of-date they are on States of Matter!)

And the answer is, it’s not about science or maths or actually understanding concepts. It’s about unlocking the “code” of the questions and answers and then memorising the hell out of it so that a country’s exam results look good.

You tell me if that makes for smarter kids, goddamned world rankings or no. As a Maths evangelist and an author who writes about science and scientists, I weep.

I haven’t spoken much about the bull terriers recently and thought I’d rectify that today. Including the problems we’re having.

Before we got Sausage, our first mini bull terrier, I did a LOT of reading. We got “Dogs for Dummies”, “The Essential Dog”, “Veterinary Care for Dogs, Cats and Farm Animals” and “Bull Terriers” by Carolyn Alexander, to name a few. And this was all after having already been exposed to bull terriers via my uncle-the-breeder.

About eight months after we got Sausage, we decided to get another mini bull terrier. I know that you shouldn’t get two female dogs. Now. I didn’t when we got Cookie. We had no problems until last month when Cookie suddenly started challenging Sausage for dominance.

Who me, try to hump Sausage? I wouldn’t do such a thing!

When we got to four bloody fights in four days, after unsuccessfully trying a variety of techniques, we separated the dogs. It was then that I started researching fighting between dogs. And it was only then that I read what a problem it was.

I don’t consider myself the sort of person who does something without researching it. But, believe me, nothing I’d read prepared me for the blood and violence of two (spayed) females going at each other hammer and tongs. There are lots of articles on how to arrange the newspaper on the floor to facilitate toilet-training, but very little to the impending owner on the problems of getting a second dog. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have got Cookie.

From what I’ve now read on fighting dogs, the spur is Cookie’s adolescence. Being adored by the kids and thinking she’s all cock o’ the hoop, she decided to provoke normally staid Sausage. Sausage has whipped her arse four out of four times Cookie tried it on but, in true bully form, Cookie has absolutely refused to yield.

I know about a firm hand with bullies. I regularly clicker train them. I’ve started a bit of agility work to get their minds off things. I am consistent about time-outs and commands between the two of them. They are already trained, for example, to wait until the cats have finished their meals before being allowed to have theirs. When it comes to bullies, I consider this a MAJOR achievement.

The chow-time line-up

Cookie, as the youngest animal in the family, has consistently been fed last and shown that Sausage has seniority when it comes to training, walking and treats. Until last month, I thought that was enough. I was wrong.

I read somewhere that the time between 12 and 18 months of age is the toughest for dogs and their owners. I’ve read that more dogs are given up by their owners during this difficult adolescent stage than at any other time. That gives me some hope that we may survive this and get back to the kind of happy home life that we had before December last year.

In the meantime, the dogs remain separated. When one is in the house, the other is either in the courtyard out back or in the front fenced yard. They eat separately but Cookie is always fed last. Next month, I’ll start re-acclimatising both dogs by giving them go-to places on the ground floor, and training them so that when one of them is on their mat, it becomes a no-go area for the other. I might keep them on trailing leads while I do this, in case we run into any trouble. In the meantime, I’m also hunting for a child security gate so both dogs can still be in the house but stay separated.

I really hope we can solve the problem with these two. They are both wonderful, affectionate, loyal, protective and more entertaining than an MST3K marathon.

I love snuggling up

If you ask me if I would get another bull terrier after these troubles, I would say YES in a heartbeat. It’s not the dog, it’s more the dynamic, which is a topic I think more dog-owners should be educated about. I’m not too proud to say I sure as hell needed it, and I’m sure others need it too.

According to Wikipedia, Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester. I did not know this two months ago.

Professor Geras is also ostensibly, like myself, a Marxist. I did not know this two months ago.

And, just to pull one little wiki fact from a hat, he backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not only did I not know this two months ago but, just fyi, I am vehemently of the opposite opinion.

In any case, colour me flapping like a fish on the deck of a fishing trawler when Professor Geras contacts me via Twitter to ask if I’ll be part of his Writer’s choice series. It’s been going for six years and contains reviews of other writers’ favourite books. If you visit the page I’ve linked to and scroll down the list, you’ll see some pretty (gulp) impressive writers.

As much as I loved the invite, it was also disconcerting to receive. Did the professor realise I wrote … shudder … science-fiction erotic romance, any one of those terms enough to banish me to the depths of hackdom? He didn’t care. If I had something to say, he’d gladly have a look at it.

So HERE it is. A review of that old classic, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Don’t know if it’s as horrorshow as the book, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. And thanks Professor Geras for the opportunity.

Kommissar Rex chases Indiana Jones

German-language The Charlemagne Code (TCC) follows in the footsteps of such movies as the Indiana Jones franchise, National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code.

The Nibelungen treasure is a wondrous hoard consisting of carriages of gold, a chain mail hood that gives invisibility to its wearer, the sword of Siegfried, and so on. The problem was, the very existence of the hoard was enough to start bitter wrangling between nobles during the reign of Charlemagne. Realising that peace would not exist while people coveted the treasure, Charlemagne instructed some of his most trusted subjects to hide the treasure but also provide four clues to its whereabouts, so that “a wiser man in a wiser time may find it.”

Fast forward to eight years ago. Maria and Eik Meiers are a husband-and-wife treasure hunting team but, after Maria (and colleague, André) die in a cliffside collapse on Rügen Island, Eik gives it all up to concentrate (ha!) on raising their daughter, Krimi.

Eight years after the Rügen Island accident, Eik gets drawn back into hunting for the Nibelungen treasure after his house is ransacked and Krimi discovers her mother didn’t really die in a car accident like she’d been told. Meanwhile, elderly and ailing magnate Heinrich Brenner (the authority behind the unsuccessful burglary) tells university museum curator Katharina Berthold that he’s after the treasure and the race is on between Eik (and Katharina) and Brenner and his crew.

This movie starts off well. You can actually believe the stuff about the hoard, the symbols, the history of it, particularly as it’s backed by that very atmospheric Germanic scenery. But then it starts to descend into the enjoyable silliness of a Kommissar Rex episode and we spend the rest of the movie yelling unheeded advice to the characters on the screen.

Benjamin Sadler plays the hero, Eik Meiers. He is reluctant to get involved in the treasure hunt but fully commits once he’s in it. He’s inoffensive enough to watch, although I do wonder at the emotional range of German actors. You see, Sadler was nominated for Best Actor for this role at the 2008 German TV Awards. All I can say is, Germany must have no budding DiCaprios around.

Bettina Zimmermann plays Katharina Berthold, an independent, take-charge, no-nonsense scientist (with a killer body, natch!) who quickly descends into a helpless little fräulein who screams at every cobweb that brushes her face. By the end of the film, I wanted Brenner’s robotic henchman, Richter (Detlef Bothe), to execute her.

Much like Japanese movies, it appears that Germanic movies must also have a male comedy sidekick character. In TCC, this character is called Justus and is played by Fabian Busch. There are a few common traits to every such sidekick-to-the-hero character:

• He must be shorter than the hero
• He must be uglier than the hero
• He must say things at inappropriate moments
• He must have, at the very least, a sarcastic quip ready for every situation
• He must have a few strange episodes in his past that become fortuitously helpful at the right moment

The dying Brenner is played with appropriate panache by veteran German actor, Hark Bohm. The younger, dashing but mentally unstable villain is played by Stephan Kampwirth. The older daughter of Eik, Krimi, who seems to be palmed off into the background whenever she’s inconvenient, is played by Liv Lisa Fries.

While the movie starts off with the right degree of intrigue, it fast descends into improbable coincidence after improbable coincidence. The reasoning is along the lines of: “Look, I just found a small marble. It’s made of pure white quartz. OMG! I just realised that the lunar eclipse will occur tomorrow! That must be what this marble means! OMG! Let’s put the marble in that handy little depression in the middle of a stream that has obviously not seen any kind of erosion for 1,200 years, push this lever over here, climb up and yell up that shaft over there and Something. May. Happen.”

In addition to all the actors, who are certainly easy on the eye, we go haring off from Cologne to Rügen Island to the Teutoburg Forest and even (improbable for a 1,200-year old mystery) to Neuschwanstein Castle, all without knowing where the hell all these places are. An Indiana-style map, animating each step of the journey, would have certainly have helped orient foreign audiences, especially as parent company, Telepool, slated the movie for worldwide release.

In a way, it’s unfair. Spielberg and Lucas built a lot of their sets from scratch using sweat and plywood, but TCC just needed the right permits from the German Tourist or Antiquities Board to go hopping from one ancient pile of stonework to another with nary a care in the world. You just don’t feel that a justified sense of industry has gone into the filming of Cologne Cathedral because, hey, it’s already centuries old and was just hanging around, waiting for a film crew to exploit it. Because of this, TCC (particularly in its second half) resembles more kids playing around Famous Tourist Sites of Germany than a serious mystery. And this is not helped by J’s comment that, “That Charlemagne must have been better than Nostradamus. Have you noticed how every place that contains a vital clue has a conveniently modern car-park right next to it?”

Once I stopped laughing, I realised he was right. A fair slice of action seems to take place in, or within sight, of a car-park which dulls the suspense somewhat. But, speaking of car-parks, Eik’s car was a wonder. It was a dinky little Mercedes SUV. An SUV-let, if you like. And, boy, this car was better than KITT. It didn’t matter that the baddies shot and rammed the poor thing. It was pristine in the next scene. It didn’t matter that the gang of heroes was swept kilometres away by freezing waters. That little white SUVlet was right there where they finally turned up, parked scenically by the edge of a serene lake, serving out towels and hypothermia-busting warmth with barely a burp from its engine. Ah, German technology. Vorsprung durch technik* indeed, if Mercedes will forgive the quote from a rival car-maker.

The of-course budding romance between Eik and Katharina was no more and no less than I was expecting. Same for the climax. I just wished that Telepool had tried to do something a bit original rather than aping North American conventions. Be original and you have the whole field to yourself; copy someone else and the comparisons are unavoidable…and not always favourable, as this review attests.

Having said all that, the family enjoyed TCC in a “Nooooooo, don’t go there!” kinda way and would watch another such German outing again. But a little less self-consciousness next time around would help.

RATING: Silly and mostly enjoyable. 7/10. (The Wast gives it 8/10; Little Dinosaur gives it 9/10.)

(*) Advancement through technology

Hmmmm, it appears that “the look” for heroes in movies has changed. From the square-jawed, alpha type, we now seem to be moving to an age of droopy, long-faced emo-men. See if you agree. Here’s Adrien Brody from the latest Predator movie:

Shia LaBeouf in…oh god, every damn thing:

We watched German-language The Charlemagne Code last week. The hero, Eik Meiers, is played by Benjamin Sadler:

I think I’m onto something here. Anyway, this is a bit of a distraction because I’m currently writing a review about The Charlemagne Code. It’ll probably be ready on Monday, but in the meantime, how do feel about long-faced heroes? I could take ‘em or leave ‘em, frankly. I prefer my men smart, stocky and bald. What about you?