World Sweet World magazine suggested wrapping paper is unsustainable and we should all give each other biscotti for Xmas. They gave a sample biscotti recipe. Every ingredient is imported, except for four eggs. And the flour they forgot to include. The best idea I heard today: arrange the entire score of The Sound of Music for a costumed ukulele ensemble. Bearded uking nuns = sublime. I hope @justinethinks’s Sound of Ukulele Music plan doesn’t include dancing, because crossdressing ukulele nuns DANCING is just silly. Wouldn’t The Sound of Music be better without all those Nazis? They don’t even get any songs. Alternative staging: keep the Nazis, add chorus of Austrian jews gradually led offstage through show. “So long, farewell…” What the world needs is a mashup of The Sound of Music and its contemporary, West Side Story, pivoting on Maria. With those classic songs “I’ve Just Met a Problem Like Maria”, “Climb Evr’y Mountain Tonight”, and “Gee, Gauleiter Krupke”. It’s a shame “Ich liebe leben in Österreich” isn’t grammatical, because it scans better than the English. If you think science removes our “sense of wonder”, compare the Tuwharetoa account of Taupo’s origin (guy threw a tree) with the real one. Namely, a gigantic explosion heard round the world, and the skies turning blood red over China and Rome. “Eat Pray Love” listed as someone’s favourite book raises a red flag; “Eat Love Pray” raises a whole fluttering regiment. If you want me to open your spammy attachment, my good sir, you’ll need to choose a more trustworthy name than Mr Milosevic. @adzebill

(Appeared in a modified form in the NZ Herald Online)

“Have you signed the Pledge?”, people kept asking me in the months after February. The Pledge was a register of people who were committed to staying in Christchurch; copies were made available for signing in public places, and the whole thing was to be bound and presented to the mayor. Curiously, all the people badgering me seemed not to be in a position to leave: trapped by dependents, job, unresolved insurance, or an unsellable house. One should only pledge to stay if one is free to go; I was, and didn’t pledge, because I don’t like loyalty oaths. This was before the June 13 quakes. And the December 23. And the thousands in between. You don’t hear much about the Pledge any more.

After the first quake shock had worn off, there was an unexpected elation in the air. People were itching to reclaim the rubble and turn destruction into a fresh start. The Gap Filler project screened outdoor movies in an empty lot, and made a book exchange out of an old fridge; Greening The Rubble built parks where there used to be buildings. The urge to help – to do something – filled community meetings and swamped the City Council with suggestions for the rebuild, giving rise to that utopian document the Central City Plan, which painted a picture of tree-lined cycleways, green markets, and inner-city apartments. Not only would the quake damage be fixed, so would decades of urban sprawl and central city neglect. Ponies for everybody. Ponies with free wireless.

Afire with the spirit of the Revolution, I approached the owner of the neighbouring empty lot. It was going to be sitting unused for a year or two; could we turn it into a community garden? The Cashel St Victory Garden began with a working bee, adults and kids sowing seeds and planting a bed of lettuces edged with recycled bricks. The quake had uncapped an artesian well, so we had a pond and a trench for growing watercress; our digging unearthed fragments of Victorian crockery. There were grand plans: creating garden beds for all the neighbours, seeking sponsorship, even building a team to help create more gardens around the city.

Three days later it had been paved and turned into a Wilson Parking lot.

Apart from a fortnight when I was barred from my apartment by a police cordon, I’ve been living in the central city since the February quake, watching earthquake tourists circle the Red Zone on sunny weekends, and seeing buildings gradually disappear week by week. I’ve watched the crack in my wall get slowly wider, and energy and optimism leak away, replaced by frustration, cynicism, and a dawning realisation that bringing a heart and life back to the city will take a decade or longer. And that the only people who can speed that up are politicians and insurance companies, not citizens.

We’ve said our piece, and now we wait.

The favoured dismissal for those leaving was “doing a runner”. Cowards fled; they probably never loved Christchurch anyway, or so said people who seemed to be trying to convince themselves to stay. An All Black recently claimed we’re scared and should harden up instead of running. Nobody’s had the guts to tell me that to my face. Those praising us for our supposed “resilience”, or accusing us of cowardice, seem to be projecting their own fears and needs onto ordinary people who aren’t exemplars of anything.

The funny part is, I was planning on quitting Christchurch two years ago, and suspect I’ve only stuck around through bloody-mindedness. I’ve watched my friends and neighbours leave in ones and twos, to Wellington and Auckland, and finally decided I was going too. Who wants to live for a decade in a wasteland, where we’re told we should be excited about shopping malls? The signs on the back of the buses implore us, with a big red heart, to love Christchurch—love it or leave it, I guess. But this is a city without a heart, and I no longer have it in me to stay.

For a while now I’ve been buying more books than I read. Reading is slow, but buying books is so quick sometimes the sensible bits of your brain cannot intervene fast enough. Having all my books in LibraryThing for a while, though, makes the mathematics of the problem clear. Acquiring 50–100 books a year and reading one only every week or two means, through the application of pitiless Malthusian logic, that I’ll die with over 1000 unread books in an enormous teetering pile beside my bed. This is a good argument for investing in ample shelving, or moving to a remote island and reading for three years, or perhaps even for frittering away less time on the Internet. Something had to be done.

To exert some control over the problem, and I am admitting it’s a problem, I decided to monitor my incomings and outgoings over this year (humiliatingly like a Weight Watchers food diary) and to come up with a plan: a reading list I could consciously work my way through. Like a shopping list for someone who only hits the supermarket when they’re hungry. Compiling such a list, picked by the Listener Best Books of 2011 and suggestions from my well-read friend D, was the easy part.

• Atwood, Margaret | Cat’s Eye
• Atwood, Margaret | Oryx and Crake
• Bailey, Elisabeth | The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
• Bakewell, Sarah | How to Live: a Life of Montaigne
• Barnes, Julian | The Sense of an Ending
• Burke, James Lee | Feast Day of Fools
• Clayton, Hamish | Wulf
• DeWitt, Patrick | The Sisters Brothers
• Dickens, Charles | Great Expectations
• Druett, Joan | Tupaia
• Duncan, Glen | The Last Werewolf
• Dyer, Geoff | Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
• Egan, Jennifer | A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Eugenides, Jeffrey | Middlesex
• Eugenides, Jeffrey | The Marriage Plot
• Farrell, Fiona | The Broken Book
• Firbank, Ronald | The Flower Beneath the Foot
• Grimshaw, Charlotte | Opportunity
• Hardy, Thomas | The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Hitchens, Christopher | Arguably
• Hoban, Russell | Riddley Walker
• Hollinghurst, Alan | The Stranger’s Child
• Kelly, Kevin | What Technology Wants
• Lanier, Jaron | You Are Not a Gadget
• McCarthy, Cormac | All the Pretty Horses
• McCarthy, Cormac | The Road
• Mukherjee, Siddhartha | The Emperor of All Maladies
• O’Brien, Flann | The Third Policeman
• Phillips, Arthur | The Tragedy of Arthur
• Quigley, Sarah | The Conductor
• Redniss, Laura | Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie—a Tale of Love and Fallout
• Ross, Alex | Listen to This
• Ross, Alex | The Rest is Noise
• Shirky, Clay | Cognitive Surplus
• Smiley, Jane | A Thousand Acres
• Smith, Jennie Erin | Stolen World: a Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skullduggery
• St Aubyn, Edward | At Last
• Stephenson, Neal | Anathem
• Stewart, Rory | The Places In Between
• Tremain, Rose | Music and Silence
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh | The Last Days of Hitler
• Unsworth, Barry | Sacred Hunger
• Unsworth, Barry | The Quality of Mercy
• Vann, David | Caribou Island
• Wallace, Alfred Russell | The Malay Archipelago
• Wells, Peter | The Hungry Heart
• Wilson, Tim | The Desolation Angel

Though this looks a little like one of those Great Books One Must Read lists, it’s anything but. I’ll still be compulsively reading randomly, but this should cut down on the impulse purchases. And having a deliberate goal will surely help me set aside more reading time—something that I’ve noticed has been declining every year, with the competition from Twitter, Facebook, ukulele practice, movies, DVDs from Fatso that must be watched, and all the other demands on my free time. In part, this is an experiment to see if reading can be as important as I remember it being in my youth, or even in graduate school.

So the question then occurred to me: how long should it take to read this list? Am I being unrealistic? Once again, LibraryThing to the rescue (seriously, if you love your books I can’t recommend this site enough). The list adds up to just over 16,000 pages. That’s 307 pages a week, or 44 pages a day. I tested my reading speed with The Road, and seem to cruise along at 20 pages every 15 minutes. So if I can read half an hour a day, perhaps an hour a day on weekends, I should get through them all. He said blithely. Let’s see.

Orange: the only juice for which manufacturers can claim, “No no, we meant the COLOUR.” Bemused by people who can afford a computer and broadband but email me because they’ve run out of prepay minutes on their phone. If Beck and Palin had announced their 2012 Presidential candidacy on 9/11, then the terrorists would have won. Also, the Mayans. On the cover of Handwriting Analysis for Dummies, the title is set in Comic Sans. What is the author trying to hide? An online review of Decline and Fall describes Evelyn Waugh as “not my favorite post-modern author.” God bless user-created content. Imagined UC Library suggestion box: “Could the ‘Library is being munted by an earthquake’ announcements be in English and Māori, please.” My friend’s new kitchen has so much cupboard space it could inconspicuously house a small nocturnal child. It’s all fun and games until the pale-skinned sunbather realises the swan thinks he is a lady swan. Even if a student has an amusing name, I really shouldn’t make up nursery rhymes about them. Force de frappe. Does anyone have a wussier name for its nuclear arsenal than France? Scary as a wet slap. Why are those folks most clueless about the internet—even self-described technophobes—the ones convinced they can make money off it? Ignorance is seen as a barrier to getting rich from medicine, property investment, or racehorse breeding. But the Web’s fair game, it seems. My mum, looking for an easy-to-remember phone number, was chuffed to find that one ending in “666” was strangely not taken. Now every time I call her I shall think, “Hail Satan, Mum.” @adzebill

Natural disasters create a surge of helplessness in those not directly affected. Many people want to do something concrete, something more than a quick donation or a Like on Facebook. Nowadays this desire to help can be harnessed by social media, but it’s easy to waste the time and goodwill of volunteers if this isn’t managed well.

On October 5th, the cargo ship Rena ran aground on a reef near Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, a couple of hour’s drive from Auckland, New Zealand. It leaked 350 tonnes of fuel oil, which blanketed nearby beaches and killed or injured dozens of seabirds and seals, among them Blue Penguins (Eudyptula minor), the most common penguin species around New Zealand coasts. Thousands of volunteers went to Tauranga to help shovel oil-soaked sand, and veterinary specialists set up a facility for cleaning oil-soaked birds. The Rena spill was and is a national tragedy, and all around the country people wanted to know what they could do to help.

Back in 2000 a similar oil spill near Phillip Island, Australia, left many Blue Penguins oil-covered, and a bird rescue team through trial and error developed a little knitted sweater (or jumper, in Australian) that would keep penguins warm and stop them from preening oily feathers. The Tasmanian Conservation Trust organised a knitting drive, hoping volunteers could supply them with 100 or so. As often happens with unmanaged email requests, it was wildly over-successful: they ended up with 15,000. The Trust page now politely requests people stop sending them jumpers; they’re supposedly filling a small room somewhere waiting for a gigantic oil spill, but are actually being sold at the Phillip Island gift shop, adorning toy penguins.

© saskyumchar on Ravelry

Six days after the Rena grounded, in a discussion forum on the knitting website Ravelry, one keen knitter posted the Australian penguin sweater pattern, and said a friend’s daughter was in contact with the bird rescue crew, and there were Blue Penguins in need of sweaters. A Napier wool shop, Skeinz, volunteered to receive completed sweaters and send them on to Tauranga. Having seen what happened in Australia, I created a Ravelry project page that anyone knitting could link to, partly to make a gallery of completed sweaters, but mostly so there was a single place that allowed control over the message and would let me notify knitters when enough had been received.

My concern from the start was that we had no direct link to actual rescue workers: our only contact was the coordinator’s friend’s daughter, who was “in touch with” the veterinarians (note the similarity to that classic “friend-of-a-friend” setup we see in urban legends), and all communication was by two-stage mail, channeled through Skeinz in Napier. The coordinator at Skeinz then went on holiday, and the fun began.

First the pattern was linked to by multiple different forums in Ravelry, and knitters from all over the world got busy. Then it started being emailed to knitters not on the network. Most critically, the call to action, full pattern, and mailing address were posted in the Skeinz online newsletter, where anyone could link to it, up to October 25th. And link to it they did: knitting blogs, conservation websites, the popular craft site Etsy, the Huffington Post, and the world’s most-read blog, BoingBoing.

© beforesunrise on Ravelry

Hundreds of sweaters started flooding in, far outnumbering the rescued penguins. Skeinz was contacted by local and international media wanting pictures of cute penguins in sweaters. The organiser’s holiday coincided with a long weekend, so there was another delay in shutting down the campaign. But by now the horse had bolted, as the online newsletter content remained unchanged and was easy enough to copy and paste into emails; the penguin sweaters had gone viral.

And by now it turned out that none—not one—of the sweaters was actually used. The rescued penguins were being kept in warm water and recovering under heat lamps, much less stressful for wild birds than dressing them in a cute knitted sweater. Nobody seems to have asked the vets and rescue workers if they in fact needed penguin sweaters, and those interviewed seemed a bit surprised by the international knitting effort.

The end result is that “hundreds, possibly thousands” of unneeded sweaters will continue arriving at Skeinz. The organiser claimed, “the sweaters were a way for people to help, even if they weren’t going to be used.” Apparently the sweaters will be sent to a conservation group in Australia, though with crates of penguin jumpers already in storage it’s hard to see when they’ll ever be needed; some might be sold for unspecified fund-raising purposes. It all seems like rather a poor use of thousands of hours of volunteer effort: the knitters would have made more of a difference supplying gloves and hats for the volunteer clean-up crew, or donating a few dollars to Greenpeace, or writing to their MP with their views on maritime safety or offshore oil drilling. Knitters didn’t sign up to make sweaters for sale; they made them for penguins.

© jenromero on Ravelry

So history repeats itself in the Great Penguin Sweater Call To Arms, and the result is once again squandered effort and goodwill. This is an example of how not to use social media to rally the troops; how should a similar effort be organised in the future? Enlisting the crafting skills of volunteers really can work: see for example the knitting drives of WWII, the Knitted Periodic Table project, or the campaign to knit a cosy for the shipping containers of Christchurch. Here’s what I’d do, if we had a chance to rerun the project:

1. Set up a dedicated website: say, using a WordPress blog (these can be updated from any computer) or even a Facebook fan page. Registering a domain name would help its credibility and make for more concise links.
2. Make sure all URLs in tweets, emails, and forum postings point to that top-level domain name (e.g. www.volunteerproject.org), not an individual page with a knitting pattern (www.volunteerproject.org/whattoknit.html).
3. Get the visible support of the group being helped: say, a short message and photo from them on the home page. In this case, perhaps show a sweater actually being worn by an actual rescued Tauranga penguin. Most importantly, the group being helped should also have editing privileges for the site, so they can correct mistakes and add a news release as soon as any target is reached.
4. Date-stamp everything, especially any page that might be linked to or emailed out of context. Add day-to-day updates on targets: the number of rescued birds, how many sweaters received, and so on, so volunteers can judge whether their effort is still needed.
5. Keep any pattern or instructions from being emailed. Make the instructional text hard to copy and paste by embedding pictures and CSS styles, so it’s more convenient for a supporter to just pass on the page URL (write out the URL on the page itself and tell them to only mail this). Block search engine spiders so the pattern won’t be indexed (and cached) by Google, only the home page. The goal is to have the pattern existing in just one place, on that web page.
6. Put the mailing instructions on a different page from the pattern, preferably the main page. Make sure this has a press kit link and instructions for media, in case the whole thing goes viral.
7. And when the target is reached, put a big THANK YOU on the home page, post a gallery of the finished project (say, happy penguins in their sweaters), and… take the pattern down.

Phrase I did not expect to read in a Dashiell Hammett crime story: ‘“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled…’ (Nightmare Town, 1924) Amazingly, nostalgic about paying $14 to see a DVD projected onto a screen the size of a bath towel in a 15-seat cinema. Much like watching at home, except you can’t pause for toilet breaks, and there are three complete strangers on your couch. Great Zoological Discoveries 27: Cows sound just like people saying “moo”. Or, sometimes, trying to muffle screams of agony. Amazing new tool for de-cluttering computer desktop: put everything in a folder called “Desktop [Sort]”, never to be heard from again. I used to be disgusted by people who ate raw cookie dough, but now I find there are folks who eat raw frozen pizza. Thanks, Internet. Why should del.icio.us be the only one having fun with country codes? Quick, nicega.ms is free. Also goldarn.it, gottabe.in, iyamwhati.am, fakesteve.jobs, and (very proud of this) jorgeluisb.org.es Kazakhstan is apparently still hung up on Borat. Just let it go, Kazakhstan. Let it go. Everything made much more sense when I realized Tom Waits is a werewolf. If you see a car with Hawai’i plates in the mainland US and steal it, there’ll be a pot of gold in the trunk and you’ll get a wish. I think we’re all in agreement that the biggest letdown with Inception was the lack of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt dance sequence. Call me stuffy, but I refuse to buy my kazoos from someone who believes in Atlantis. Dear Mr Obama: why not come and be President of New Zealand? I guarantee less than 18% of us think you’re Muslim. Apparently I appeared in a friend’s dream and yelled, “You can’t stomp on Incas: they’re part of history!” I’d heard of Robert Evans’ success, downfall, comeback, book, audiobook, and movie, but a cartoon show too? That, my friends, is a career. The fastest starfish is the Sunflower Star, Pycnopodia helianthoides, which can reach 75 cm/minute, or 0.045 km/hr. Starfish racing would be like greyhound racing, but more restful. And with a terrified fleeing abalone. @adzebill

Auteurs are not like you and me. For example, the German director Werner Herzog is at first glance something of an eccentric. When you learn more about him, however, you realise he is not simply an eccentric, but an ECCENTRIC, written in foot-high capitals carved into an enormous granite boulder that has crushed our will to live.

Recently there was a fad for listing fake facts about actor Chuck Norris: “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.” These even have their own website, novelty book, and amusing t-shirt.

After reading a recent interview, I realised that one could compile a similar list of Facts About Werner Herzog.

It would be just like chucknorrisfacts.com, except everything would be true.

1. Werner Herzog was invited to guest star on The Simpsons, but asked for a DVD because he had never seen an episode.
2. Werner Herzog saw Avatar, but didn’t care what happened in it.
3. Herzog was once shot during an interview but rather than stop, tell the police, or get first aid, he kept speaking dourly.
4. Herzog hates introspection so much he won’t look in a mirror and so doesn’t know the colour of his own eyes.
5. To propose to his wife, Werner Herzog walked a thousand miles across the Alps, because that is what a manly man does.
6. Herzog (unlike Oliver Stone) read the Warren Commission Report into the JFK Assassination. He quite enjoyed it.
7. Werner Herzog only respects people who know how to milk a cow, and he can tell who knows how just by looking at them.
8. Klaus Kinski and Herzog simultaneously plotted to kill each other; Herzog was about to firebomb Kinski’s house, but was too scared of his big dog.
9. More people die in Werner Herzog’s movies than Chuck Norris’s if you count his crew.
10. Herzog thinks of himself as a little girl in a fairy tale who steps out at night and holds open her apron and stars rain into it.

If you were to put these on a t-shirt, I think Herzog himself would hunt you down, fix you with his pitiless gaze, and anatomise your sad buttonless-shirt-wearing hipsterness until you cried. This is, after all, a man who really believes the twentieth century was a mistake; the entire twentieth century. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Never wear shoes you wouldn’t walk in for an hour.

I ditched the car when I was halfway home. The Riccarton Road traffic was inching along, and walking was looking more and more sensible. I watched a stream of pedestrians straggling away from the shattered central city, where my apartment was. One I suddenly recognised. In fact, we’d broken up the day before. I pulled over and hugged her, these being, after all, exceptional circumstances. She had checked my apartment on the way out of town—it was standing and didn’t look damaged—and then she was off one way, me the other. At that point driving was becoming increasingly nonsensical, so I parked in a side street and set off home on foot. For some reason, I’d decided that morning to wear uncomfortable dress shoes, and soon regretted it. Never again will I wear shoes I can’t walk in should there be a natural disaster.

I was on the ground floor, about to get my photo taken by a university PR person, when the earthquake shook us like a dog. I wish she’d gotten that shot, just to see the expression on our faces. I’m my workplace Health & Safety warden, and through a odd coincidence just a couple of hours before had attended a training session on what to do in case of an earthquake, so was able to busily usher people out from under tables and shoo them outside, checking each office for stragglers on the way.

It wasn’t until we were all milling in the parking lot that I realised I’d left my phone in the building, along with my jacket, keys, wallet, ID, pocket knife, camera, and laptop: essentially, everything I need to exist. The next time evacuation, be it building, crashed aeroplane, or burning car, I ignore official instructions and grab jacket and bag on the way. At this point, there was no obvious damage to the university. One of the students asked me if lectures would be cancelled for the rest of the day. Probably yes, I said. We watched cars wobble back and forth in another aftershock, and I knew, with mounting anxiety, that my family and friends were probably all txting me right now. Getting on Twitter could tell us the magnitude of the quake and the amount of damage.

Some of my workmates also were without keys or phone. After an hour of fruitless standing around, we decided it was worth a crack. “Please, we need to get back into our offices. One of my colleagues needs her medication.” The Facilities Management chap in his hard hat could probably tell I was lying, but, very much against the rules, he let us venture back inside to quickly retrieve keys and bags. The Learning Skills Centre then scattered to the four winds.

An hour later, walking across Hagley Park after ditching my car, I saw the first photos of what was left of the Cathedral on my phone, and realised just how bad things were. The procession of people escaping the central city on foot had eerie echoes of 9/11, except these people weren’t covered in dust; we chatted as they passed, and I could tell some tourists the airport was closed, and also quite a hike, so they might want to stay put. Crossing the Botanic Gardens, a prodigy: the Avon River was flowing backwards from east to west. Signs and portents. I half expected a rain of blood. At that stage, I was ready to believe anything. (A week later I checked a map and realised I’d crossed the river where it looped back around, and this was the direction I’d seen it flowing all my life.) Only the ducks seemed unperturbed by the unusual day we were all having.

There is a feeling of sick anticipation as you first enter your house after an earthquake. Photographing my way from room to room, it was clear that there was hardly any damage. Pictures had fallen down, some of the cracks in the wall were a little bigger, but the place just needed a clean. And, well, electricity. I changed my shoes.

One simple method for improving the quality of student essays: don’t let them pick their own topic. The problem with goat cheese is that sometimes it tastes rather like it originated in the nether regions of a goat. That Kim Cattrall is such a classy dame: I wish she were MY mum. Olduvai, Amboseli / Turkana, Tsavo, Gombe / Olorgesailie, Tanganyika / Serengeti, Aberdares: the biologist’s African litany. The Chch Press today twice bylined food writer Paula Wolfer. Next week: guest articles by Jamie Olive and Nigel Slate. It’s exam time. The university seems as deserted as if there’d been a Zombie Apocalypse. But if the Uni were infested with zombies, how would you tell? Answer: zombies can’t ride skateboards. ‘The command “” is not currently available.’ Thanks, Adobe Bridge CS4, for that helpful message. And for sucking royally. My band is called the Broken Bear Club, but based on our last gig a better name might be The Dunning-Kruger Effect. MHRA is the style guide for the Modern Humanities Research Association, but also stands for Michigan Hot Rod Association. Their style guide: 1) More fonts. 2) Bigger fonts. 3) Fonts with flames. I am trying to popularise an alternative term for submitting a thesis: “having a wordbaby”. Almost want to get another ukulele, just so I can write “this machine annoys fascists” on it. In literary quiz, thought “Last Man in Europe” must be the working title of Mein Kampf. No actually it’s 1984. Sorry, George. The UC library bans messy, smelly, hot, or noisy food. If they banned messy, smelly, hot, or noisy students it would be deserted. Those moaning about how the Web rots our “ability to focus” should recall the innate concentration skills of monkeys and toddlers. Pre-human Long Island was the home of herds of dwarf mammoths and flocks of giant flightless cranes. After a find/replace of double spaces in InDesign, a “Search completed.9 replaced.” message using double spaces. Is Adobe taunting me? Someone who would microwave a croissant would steal sheep. G#7 is not in fact the Devil’s chord; that’s FM7. G#7 is Cordo Diabolo, Esus4 is Main Crispé, and Asus2 is The Buster. #fakeukulelelore One of my vert bio students once claimed that the gastrocnemius connects the humerus and femur, or the ulna and heel. He did not pass. @adzebill

I stumbled across the following short story in my archives and thought it was worth sharing. It’s actually an assessment task from my BIOL 139 (Biomechanics) class back in 2002, which was taught by the inspiring Steve Vogel. Steve’s assignment for us was to imagine a world in which the only structural force was tension, and nothing existed in compression—no pillars, bricks, struts, props, or even bones. These sort of thought experiments are the perfect task for science fiction. The Baton Races of Yaz setting was from a half-remembered childhood board game. Engineers are welcome to leave comments on the physics, but no harshing on my prose style please!

When I woke, it had stopped raining. On Yaz, this happens once a year, if you’re lucky. It’s not lucky if you’re a Yazian, though, because the Day Without Rain is when you go to war. Me too. And all because of that stupid Baton.

I extricated myself from the damp pile of dozing Yazians, found my waterproof pack, and crawled out of the tent. It had been built in an excavated hollow lined with groundsheets, and although a ring of bladders had been laid to act as a dike, water had pooled in the bottom in the night. Typical. The Yazians didn’t mind this, but I did. Outside, the rolling expanse of marshes and moors went as far as I could see. To get a better look, I took a running jump at the side of the tent and scrambled up it to the central peak. I still couldn’t see very far, so I climbed up the main support rope for twenty feet or so, using the knots the Yazians had thoughtfully tied the night before. Resting with my foot in a loop just below the balloon, I finally spotted the support balloon of our companions a few miles away; we’d missed them in the night.

I munched an energy bar while the Yazians made the boat. They hauled down the balloon, sat on it, and squeezed the helium into bladders. One cast a net into the stream for breakfast, and collected some floating pods of helium weed to replenish our supply. Our weapons were bundled up in the balloon skin, which was lashed with the bladders into the net. We piled on, and one Yazian swam in front to guide us into the current. We didn’t float very high, and I kept my pack on my knees.

To rendezvous with the other war party, we had to head upriver. The Yazians unrolled the largest square groundsheet, and attached their thinnest five-braided rope, tying it to loops on each corner and the center. Two of them swam it to shore, and ran with it into the freshening breeze until it caught and lifted. For some reason, the wind blows one direction here in the morning and another in the afternoon, which makes for predictable sailing. As it strengthened, we launched two more sail kites, each heavier and stiffer than the one before, until we were moving at a fair speed. When we met the others, we sailed upriver together for a couple of hours, keeping clear of the main current. The Yazians amused themselves by tightly twisting together bundles of elastic fibers and lashing them by their ends the length of the raft. I had no idea why.

Yazian fighting in the old days was throwing mud in your opponent’s face, then sitting on them. Since the Break, things have gotten more sophisticated. The enemy surprised us; suddenly water balloons were exploding all around. Some splashed in my eye and hurt like hell. Luckily, nothing touched my pack. I ducked for cover while the Yazians unslung their stomp rockets in pairs. One jumped on the bladder while the other aimed gobbets of corrosive glue at the charging enemy. Their aim was good: almost always right in the eye. The Yazian beside me was using a slingshot between two of its tentacles, firing what looked like (but can’t have been) some sort of fruit. We counter-charged, throwing sticky knotted bolas at the retreating enemy, entangling one. The Yazians pinned and immobilized their blinded opponents with whips, and strangled them. One they just sat on.

Before long we heard the yelling of a war band, and ran for the raft. The Yazian we left on board had been busy rigging something to the stern. As we piled on board, it yanked five ropes at once, pulling slipknots. The bundles of fibers untwisted convulsively, and there was threshing and flapping in the water behind us. The raft jerked forward into the channel, not for long but enough get clear of a shore filled with livid Yazians. We cowered under a mat as the mother of all stomp rockets dropped hissing blobs into the water near us, until the current caught and we were swept downstream.

I gathered that our sortie had been a diversion. As we rounded a bend into a shallow gully, the river getting stronger all the while, I saw the real target. Suspended above us, straddling the rapids, was a huge clot of tents, sheets, and rope ladders, stretched between four thick hawsers. I could see maybe fifty Yazians climbing over and through it. We beached the raft under a bank of ferns, and picked our way up the slope to the nearest hawser, me lugging my pack. One of the Yazians pointed to the suspended village and whispered to me. “Baton!” he said. In Yazian, of course, but it’s one of the few words I know.

Until forty years ago, the Day Without Rain was the occasion for the famous Baton Race of Yaz. The Baton is, or was, a stick of solid rock, or maybe dense wood, about two feet long. Nobody knows exactly: the Yazians won’t let you near it. Baton is what the first anthropologists called it, of course; its Yazian name means something like “Doesn’t Bend”. It’s the most rigid, and most venerated, thing on the whole planet. Then one day a Yazian (tribe still disputed) decided to test the Baton’s name. They’ve been fighting ever since.

Apparently the pieces were kept in the village above us.

By the time we reached the hawser, we’d been spotted. A howling mob, brandishing whips and slingshots, poured out of the village, and swarmed up a suspension bridge towards us. My companions screamed taunts at them; I caught the chant of “Break you! Break you!” (my other Yazian word). I looked at the hawser; it was as thick as me, and plunged straight into the mud. Apparently, it was connected to a huge mesh of thick rope submerged about two feet deep in the marsh and spreading over a square mile. Even so, it must have been stressed close to its limit.

The mob was getting close. The Yazians all turned to me. ‘Time to earn ten thousand cubic meters of helium,’ I thought.

I opened my pack. And pulled out my chainsaw.