I Don't Know About Where You Come From

But in Topeka,

the green chile sauce is red.

Finding Myself

I don't know if I'll ever do ClearCase again, but here's a fairly simple problem that drove me nuts for over an hour tonight.

I'm trying to set up my laptop with ClearCase as a standalone server for a demo tomorrow. Of course, I'm off in a hotel instead of connecting to my company network, so I installed the server to recognize the local Administrator's group as the ClearCase elevated users group. There's a local user for the ALBD service to run under and I put it in that group. All hunky-dory, right?

Wrong, of course. Every time I try to create a view, I get this message:

cleartool: Error: unknown style protections on C:\store\ks_demo2\cc\views\MYDOMAIN\abbot\test_view.vws\.view: The data is invalid.
If the object is in the VOB's source or derived object pool, please fix it with "cleartool checkvob -protections -pool".
For other VOB objects, please fix it with "cleartool protectvob".
Otherwise, please fix the storage directory with
"%CLEARCASEHOME%\etc\utils\fix_prot".
cleartool: Error: Unable to change permissions of "C:\store\ks_demo2\cc\views\MYDOMAIN\abbot\test_view.vws\.view": Input/output error.
cleartool: Error: Unable to create view "C:\store\ks_demo2\cc\views\MYDOMAIN\abbot\test_view.vws".

I'm still using my network ID as a user with CC admin permissions (I'm in the local admin group and I can still log into the laptop while disconnected). I tried futzing with fix_prot in this case, but the problem is not really with the directory permissions directly. The problem is with ClearCase understanding who I am.

I have to teach it a lesson.

When I run creds, I get a lot of garbage with ugly looking SIDs. I wondered if this is confusing the tool, so I set my CLEARCASE_PRIMARY_GROUP environment variable to be equal to BUILTIN\Administrators. And wah-lah! I was able to create a view.

It's still a little shaky.

All Over the World

This week's meme for book geeks is to figure out where in the world I've been in terms of the places in books I've read. I'm going to leave out imaginary and extra-terrestrial places and also limit to fiction. LibraryThing really helps out here. They have a page for your library showing places identified in your books. The data is only as complete as whatever's entered so far, but it's a nice start.

create your own visited country map or check our Venice travel guide

Funny, this mapping page considers Puerto Rico its own country, but not Scotland. I'm going to list Scotland separately.

It is obvious from the map that I'm very skewed toward reading stories set in the West, but the map makes it look as if I'm even more broad than I really am. The number of books in my library that were available to represent Canada, the US and the UK is overwhelmingly larger than all of the rest of the places combined. You'll also see below that many of the exotic places are represented in my reading by non-natives. Granted, there's going to be some slant because I read in English and we are not a large translation market here in the US.

Also, I found that many of my books are set enough in the past that national nomenclature has changed. So even though Croatia did not exist in Tesla's time, I credited it for The Theory of Everything Else.

We have a lot of South American novels sitting around the house, so to catch up I'll start with Allende.

Here are details. The links are to book tales I've written after reading these books. If I had this coverage at the beginning of a game of Risk, I guess I wouldn't be unhappy.

North America

Missing: Greenland

• Canada - The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields). I like anything by Carol Shields. She writes quiet stories.
• Mexico - Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel). This one is famous enough that I don't feel the need to elaborate.
• US - Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler). So many books from the US to pick from, I'm glad this one popped up first. It's the SFnal story of a girl with extra empathy powers who is living through the collapse of the US.

Central America and the Caribbean

Missing: Anguilla, Barbados, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Monserrat, Panama, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Cuba, El Salvador, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Virgin Islands, Aruba, Belize, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Turks and Caicos Islands

• Bermuda - Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut). I love the way this story is told; it's all shattered and brought together slowly, with humor. To be honest, I don't remember Bermuda, but LibraryThing says it's so.
• Puerto Rico - The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell). This is an SF story with heavy spiritual overtones. This is a great example of someone losing faith.

South America

Missing: Argentina, Chile, Falkland Islands, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, French Guiana, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname

• Brazil - A Samba for Sherlock (Jose Eugenio Soares). This was an interesting story imagining that Sherlock Holmes visited Brazil.

Africa

Missing: Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo Brazzaville, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Guinee Conalkry, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• Algeria - Loving Graham Greene (Gloria Emerson). This is the strange tale of a woman obsessed with Graham Greene and is an excellent example of westerners walking around completely clueless.
• Botswana - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith). This is a very short book about a detective who also tries to pick up her van mechanic.
• Congo (Kinshasa) - The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver). Another example of westerners wandering around clueless in Africa. This one I don't actually recommend.
• Rhodesia/Zimbabwe - The Grass is Singing (Doris Lessing). A direct examination of racism from a white Rhodesian woman.
• South Africa - Disgrace (JM Coetzee). I don't remember this book.

Europe

Missing: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, Georgia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxlibourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Vatican City

• The Channel Islands - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer). This is a funny book set (in flashback) during World War II.
• Netherlands - Amsterdam (Ian McEwan). This should have been a grim book, but was entertaining.
• UK - Whose Body? (Dorothy L. Sayers). Another country with a lot of stories. I definitely recommend Sayers' series of detective novels. They're very light but with a little undercurrent of concern about mental health, at least early on before you get caught up in the awkward romance.
• Greece - Soldier of Arete (Gene Wolfe). This one is set in ancient Greece. The protagonist cannot remember the day before, so he has to wake up every morning and re-read his journals to know what's going on.
• Italy - I, Claudius (Robert Graves). An interesting fake memoir of the Roman emperor.
• Belgium - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (Gregory Maguire). One Gregory Maguire book is as good as another. Might as well try this one.
• Austria - The Wall (Marlen Haushofer). This is a weird SF story about a woman who finds herself alone in a valley that has been separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. Good thing, too, because it looksl ike everybody else outside the wall is dead.
• France - Possession (AS Byatt). I liked this, but I don't know why.
• Denmark - The Quiet Girl (Peter Hoeg). This is the most recent book. It reads just like you'd imagine a Danish movie to read.
• Germany - The Book Thief (Markus Zusak). This is a must-read.
• Ireland - I Sing the Body Electric (Ray Bradbury). This is here because of one story: "The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place". This is a less-obvious example of a non-native writing about a place.
• Switzerland - Frankenstein (Mary Shelley). You've heard of this book, right?
• Scotland - Poor Things (Alasdair Gray). This is a weird and wonderful book that takes place in Glasgow, which is a weird and wonderful place.
• Wales - A Morbid Taste for Bones (Ellis Peters). I know this is light reading, but I like the cadence of the narrator.
• Portugal - The History of the Siege of Lisbon (Jose Saramago). All of Jose Saramago's books are great. I think this is my favorite.
• Spain - The Club Dumas (Arturo Pérez-Reverte). Much better than the movie.
• Ukraine - Everything Is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer). I don't know if I recommend this or not. It was a little self-important.
• Czech Republic - (Prague, anyway) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon). Another strong recommendation. The story of comic book writers in the golden age.
• Russia - Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol). A story about selling dead people.
• Croatia - The Invention of Everything Else (Samantha Hunt). This was a sweet but open-ended story.
• Lithuania - The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen). I thought this got to be a little too much by the end.
• Bosnia - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Sasa Stanisic). Interesting from the standpoint of reading about another culture.

The Middle East

Missing: Bahrain, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, Ylien

• Turkey - Baudolino (Umberto Eco). This is my favorite Eco.

Asia

Missing: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

• Afghanistan - The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini). This might have been a great book, but I don't recommend it. It is much too horrible to take.
• China - The Crazed (Ha Jin). A story about a man helping his decaying professor.
• India - River of Gods (Ian McDonald) / Death of Vishnu (Manil Suri)
• Japan - Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
• Malaysia - My Life as a Fake (Peter Carey). Not my favorite Peter Carey, but an interesting investigation into "reality".
• Myanmar - The Piano Tuner (Daniel Mason)
• Sri Lanka - Free at Last in Paradise: A Historical Novel on Sri Lanka (Ananda W. P. Guruge). This one, at least, is written by a native. It's a very long book written by an ambassador and concerns the evolution of a religious man as his country also evolves in the early 20th century.

Australia and Pacific

Missing: American Samoa, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, kribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Rarotonga and the Cook Islands, tonga, Tuvalu, Vanautu, Western Samoa, New Zealand

• Australia - Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)
• Solomon Islands - The Island of the Day Before (Umberto Eco). My least-favorite Eco.

Antarctica

• Antarctica (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Waiting for a Plane Like You

Well, it's been two years, but it feels the same already. I'm doing a four week stint where I'll be spending weekdays in Topeka, KS, and weekends at home. Back in 2007, I did this for three months or so.

It's hard to say for certain, but my memory seems to think that about a third of the Sunday flights out to Kansas City were delayed last time around. And sure enough here I am waiting for a flight that's been delayed at least an hour.

One nice difference this time around is that Southwest now does numbered boarding passes so we don't have to sit on the floor hoping that the gates don't change so that our place in line isn't lost.

Last Paintings Before The Show

Well, the Brunette will be hanging our paintings for the show next Monday. I'll be out in Kansas with a customer on weekdays for the next four weeks, so I can't help her put them up. Today was our last spurt of activity in getting ready for the show. I put a couple of posters into Kinko's. Speaking of Kansas, I finished the Ferris wheel from Topeka's annual Fiesta. (Did you know that Ferris was an RPI grad?)

I like the sky better than the Ferris wheel. I also finished one entire painting in a single sitting. This is a bigger one than the garden hose.

Not exactly high-quality blending on the background there, but that's the problem with acrylics in high temperature environments. They dry out so quickly.

So, I'll post when the reception at the Café is (it'll be free and open to the public and you're all invited). I think that all of my paintings will have been seen on this blog, but I'll also have three posters up. Also, the Brunette's space scapes will be new to you and are awesome, so you should stop by.

Quotable

Here are some quotes that caught my attention in books I've read recently.

From The Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves (how's that for a long title?):

It is a fact easily discernible that governments are instituted to commit the crimes that their citizens require for gain, but cannot countenance committing privately.

From Vanity Fair:

The major plays a good knife and fork at tiffin and resumes those weapons with great success at dinner.

From Snow Falling on Cedars:

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it...He loved humanity dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings.

Movie Grumping

So we watched a rented movie the other night. I'm not going to review the movie or anything, but something about the movie made me cringe. Tell me if you've seen this movie: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl discovers evidence the boy betrayed her, girl tells boy in no uncertain terms to leave her alone (don't talk to her again, don't come to her workplace, etc.), boy realizes girl just needs more facts and ignores her direction in order to show his true feelings (by argument or charitable work or playing a boombox at her window or whatever), girl melts and they live happily ever after. You've seen that movie?

It's a common story arc for romantic comedies, and I am worried about it. This sort of story line is the result of and a reinforcement of the American cultural belief that a) women don't always act with an understanding of the facts and b) women don't always mean what they say. I'm just an old curmudgeon, I realize, but I don't think it's good for our society that boys and men are being taught this sort of behavior through film. I am particularly disturbed by the second meme there: surely there is no need to reinforce a commonly held belief among men that 'no' doesn't always mean 'no.'

Or am I stretching it too far?

New House?

Looks like we found a house that looks perfect up in the hills near Nevada City. The other side of the house is all window.

It overlooks this beautiful lake.

If nothing else, I found the place awfully relaxing.

Oh, only a little over a million. Can anybody spare a dime or two?

Nevada City

Almost done with this leg of traveling. Nevada City, California, is a lovely little place. The people are friendly and the whole environment is pretty. Here is a terrible picture of the hilltops along the South Yuba River.

This is the view down the main street in Nevada City, though it's not called "Main Street".

This skinny old firehouse would make a great Buffalo wings joint.

Really enjoyed this trip so far. You can tell, because there are 168 unread items in my feed reader.

Memories

Goodness, Sacramento is flat. I flew into Sacramento on Thursday night and found a hotel at the airport before the Brunettes came to pick me up on Friday and take me off to the mountain. The land around Sacramento is so much flatter than I expected. The one thing that always makes me think of California is this:

It was much too early in the morning to get an In-n-Out Burger, but the sign itself was enough to remind me of trips to LA and Santa Barbara way back at my first post-collegiate job. I had to fly out to California to do physical configuration audits of electronic systems being delivered to the Government. I always had a great time: in the labs for most of the day and then write the reports out on the beach.

The other thing about Sacramento is that it gives me a feeling of being in the Land that Time Forgot. There are so many businesses with names that I remember from my childhood (or even more recently): Sizzler, Jack in the Box, ARCO (Atlantic Richfield), Hollywood Video.

There's even a Crown Books, but I don't think that one's related. The others at some time in the past had a presence in the Baltimore-Washington area, but I no longer see them. I think it's ironic that Atlantic Richfield continues life on the Pacific.

Maybe we'll be very lucky and find a Pappy's.

decisions decisions

So, one of the things you miss by not following me on Twitter is my public working out of the decision making process. Tonight's question was: "Crepes or whisky (spelled properly and everything!)?" I can imagine you asking, "Why the heck not both?" And the quick answer is that I try to keep my cheating ways down to one thing at a time. Self-managing requires an either/or decision there.

And it looks like the crepes won, though I know that the Scottish pub has a nice list of properly spelled whiskies and is in walking distance of the hotel.

I did some walking around to prepare the old stomach for some food and I have to give Boulder some kudoes. Not only are there beautiful mountains in the background, the support for biking here is awesome. They even do a great job with directional signage.

Ok, here's a mountain.

What Ever Happened To Tobermory?

I finished the replacement to the Tobermory painting last night. I really really want to finish the Kansas painting before the show, but the hanging is the 14th of July and I'm leaving for Boulder today, followed by the weekend in California. All this traveling is making the show a little sparse.

I keep dropping things. I dropped my camera three times yesterday. The third drop popped the front lens and frame right off the camera and across the floor. Darn concrete floors everywhere. I pushed them back in and it seems to work, but I'm not holding my breath.

Sandy Hill Creative Disposal Project

While tootling along on my bike ride yesterday, I passed this place:

The Sandy Hill Creative Disposal Project is on Old Laurel Bowie Road (still marked 197 on the sign near Hilltop Lane). The best part is the sign on the fence that reads, "No Dumping." The gate was closed and locked, so I couldn't go in and find out what the deal was. A little googling only provided me with concerns about the groundwater on-site. I found nothing about the history of the landfill or why it is "creative."

So I am left picturing big, hulking garbage men sitting at picnic tables adding a little cheer to the trash with glitter and glue sticks. I imagine they'll find plenty of milk cartons and popsicle sticks.

Best Video of the Day

A Million Monkeys Typing found it and I'm sharing it with you.

Blow Me Away

This was at William's, the new restaurant in Greenbelt.

What's Not to Hate About this Movie?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: Sequel CGI-fest about intergalactic robots who fight each other and can turn into motor vehicles. Oh, and there are humans wandering around.
Theater Location: Somewhere in North Carolina
Noise Level: Loud
The Skinny: American arrogance -- drop the military into any country you want without bothering to ask permission, blow up a few civilians, insist on holding onto something we can't protect when the robots could do a better job, and of course the standard aliens would want to deal with the US and nobody else... Oh, and this supposedly international military force (NEST) seems to have only American and British forces (these are the only flags shown) and when the US president tells the group to shut down there isn't a peep from the Brits or even a scene showing them being told the same by their leader -- why would they care about the directive of another country's commander-in-chief? Also, all of the women are either stupid (doped-up mother), aggressively conniving (not just the girl coming on to the hero, but also the girls in class faking attraction to the professor for grades), or an object. You know, if the hero's girlfriend used her supposed background in mechanics at some point, it might justify the human involvement in the whole thing. As it is, I don't see what the humans are adding to the fight between the robot aliens.

Guess that was kind of fat for a skinny.

Little People on the Street

After the art show, I'm giving up painting and I'm going to try this kind of art:

Click on the image to go to see the awesome work at Little People.

I, Robot

I haven't done this in a while. Looks like my full moniker is too long.

Get Your Cyborg Name

Painting At the Beach

I got a chance to work a little on the painting that used to be Tobermory and is now from the Greenbelt Community Center. Can you tell what it is, yet?

The last time the in-law family vacation was in the Outer Banks, I painted, too.

Down the Ocean

There's a reason why the Wright brothers came to the Outer Banks. The wind was pretty strong in my face as I rode up to the end of the island. Magically, it turned around and blew in my face again on the way back!

Williamsburg by Bike

Along the road from West Virginia to Corolla (North Carolina), I ran out of steam around 9:30. I pulled off at the next Hampton Inn happened to be at Williamsburg. My bike was strapped to the back of the car, so in the morning I took a quick ride.

You might notice a little stick out to the left. I made a wrong turn there. But I did get to see the James River.

I'm a Travelin' Man

So, today starts a long stretch of traveling for your good friend the Abbot. The fun finishes with 4 weeks back and forth to Topeka, starting in mid-July. In between, I'll be flying off to beautiful Nevada City, California, and driving down to the Outer Banks.

But today I'm starting by driving out to West Virginia. It's a Father's Day thing. While the Brunette has already accompanied her parents down to North Carolina for the exciting week-long family festival of fun, I'm going to visit with my father (and sister, brother-in-law, and nephew) in Charles Town, WV. None of them live in West Virginia. So why go all the way over there? Well, maybe in your family you celebrate holidays by hanging out by the fire and watching home movies; I don't know what normal people do.

We go to the track.

I suppose gambling is in our blood. Our Easter eggs contain lottery tickets (you think I'm going to get five adults out looking for eggs in the back yard with just candy?) Christmas Eve is poker night. And, this year, Father's Day is a trip to the casino/track in Charles Town.

They have a nice buffet. And you can bet on the horses right at the table. The best part: if there's ever an awkward pause in the conversation, you can always look over at the monitor on the table and say, "50-1? I'm getting me some of that action."

Happy Father's Day all you Dads out there.

Disappointment

I don't know, I thought somehow that Electric Avenue would be more impressive. In the event, it had neither the reggae vibe of Eddy Grant nor the luminescence of Disney's Electric Parade. It was just a tiny spur off of Elm Street.

It could be that this washed out feeling for Electric Avenue was due to the rain. The cool, steady rain was a nice start to this trip; however, just after I snapped this picture, the clouds got grumpy. I don't mind a little water, but lightning is a whole 'nother matter. Thunder and lightning chased me up the WB&A trail to the culvert under Rte 193. There was another biker already there, taking shelter at the other end of the culvert. He was so far away, we never spoke.

You can see that the electricity was not furnishing power to the lights in the culvert. Still-and-all, it was a nice place to stop.

The 15 minute or so stop for lightning gave me a false sense of the distance I traveled. I was disappointed when I came home and mapped the route on Google maps, finding my journey to just miss 19 miles. I guess I was moving pretty slowly. Can't blame it all on the sun, today, that's for sure, eh, Eddy?

Transportation

At first, the return to Metro-riding helped with the pumping out of book tales and other writing, but then we switched to nights/weekends and it's eating my brain. One of the many kinds of things I do for work -- there are so many kinds of things I do, I was going to write a nice post about how configuration managers fit into the agile world, but the role of a CMer is so broad and such a weird mix of technical and non-technical that first I'm going to have to write a post defining what a CMer is to me before I can get into the new world order, but there's that problem of my brain being eaten and here I am rambling in the middle of this completely unrelated post, so let's get back to that sentence that I hope you remember started way back when -- is help companies maintain/administer/upgrade ClearCase. This week we've been upgrading ClearCase from 2002.05 to 7.1, which involves a stop at 2003.06 on the way. When you're upgrading a source code control repository, the creators of source code (aka developers) don't like you doing it in the middle of the day. Hence the night and weekend work to upgrade over 150 repositories.

However, even if I haven't been able to think straight, I have been able to take some bike rides in the middle of the day, which is a nice thing. Yesterday, I braved the rain -- more of a Glasgow dreich and sloppy day than today's thunderboomers -- down to Hyattsville and back. From the Café, I took this picture of three different modes of transportation:

There's a big push to get some greenness out there and to start recognizing bicycling as a viable transportation option. However, it's obvious that the powers-that-be do not take the bicycle seriously. What other mode of transportation would they allow to have something like this blocking one of the major through-routes, and even if they did, there'd be signage for detours or earlier warning before you got there:

(There's a huge metal coupling the width of that sign.) The roads remain the only reliable option for commuting bicyclists.

Brightness Falls from the Air (James Tiptree, Jr)

I happened upon an imaginary protester as I was riding along Greenbelt Road the other day. He was wandering about in the wide shoulder/bike lane across from the Kmart. He smiled and waved at the passing cars, remembering every so often to hold up his sign. His smile seemed a bit manic, if you ask me, if not downright scary.

The sign read, "Put a STOP to homo-hegemonic, humano-expansionist, xeno-repressive, Terran-cultural-imperialist policies of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency." The "ist" of imperialist curled a bit up the side at the end of its line.

He also had a smaller sign that read only, "Thanks." But I never saw him use it.

"That's quite a mouth-full there," I said as I stopped to check my tires. Lately I've been stopping every block or so to make sure I am still adequately inflated. So far, so good. "I mean, I'm not sure that the cars are going slowly enough to read the whole thing."

He disagreed, of course. He wouldn't be worth his salt as a protester if he agreed with every Tom, Dick and Harry that stopped by at his protest zone. He pointed out that the light at NASA's entrance tended to slow drivers down. I countered that he was standing too far upstream to get the benefit of that. In the end, we took turns reading the sign out loud as cars approached and passed. He read with an unrealistic speed that made his disgruntlement with NASA sound like the whining of Alvin and the Chipmunks. I suppose I read slowly enough to make one wonder about my level of literacy, eyesight, or both.

In any case, his best effort got him to "xeno" and mine never got beyond "hegemonic." He threw down his sign and shook his fist at the shaking trees of the Goddard Space Flight Center. From the shoulder of Greenbelt Road, the space flight center is not impressive. There are no visible space-age superstructures. For the most part, the chain link fence seems to be guarding a deciduous preserve. During most of our conversation, in fact, a small rabbit observed our debate from the safety of the grounds.

I wonder if it had an opinion.

"What has got you so riled up anyway?" I asked the disheartened protester. He told me he had read this book that had convinced him that humanity had nothing good to bring to the cosmos and should keep its little feelers down here on Earth so the rest of the universe could go about its life in peace.

"That's some major hatin'," I said and asked him which book. He showed me a copy of Tiptree's novel, Brightness Falls from the Air. "The My Little Pony book!" I exclaimed. He looked at me like I was the crazy guy on the side of the road. "A major confrontation in that book hinges on the love of a girl for her horsie, don't you see? And there were all those butterflies and rainbows -- well, aurorae anyway."

My imaginary protester protested. He told me that the book was a grim reminder of the evil at the hearts of men. The book demonstrated the ongoing practice of humans to silence the other. Two separate races were subjugated by the human race -- one suffered complete xenocide because of human fear and the other was tortured because of human greed. He really seemed to think Tiptree was suggesting we don't belong out there.

"Well, I never 'othered' somebody," I told him. "Besides, the blurb says that the book is about hope. And, and, and those bugs got to be happy in the end, don't you know, getting to sell stuff and buy junk from catalogs."

My protester seemed to feel it was somewhat unlikely that a race tortured for profit would be thrilled to join our economic system just because they're wowed by some shiny Kmart circulars. He used the word "consumerism" as if it were a bad thing.

I shook my head. "I think you are overlooking the inherent goodness in the majority of humanity. Why, given half a chance, most people would open their arms and hug aliens tight to their ever-loving chests. People are basically nice." And so I wished him a good day and mounted my bike to ride off home. I felt like a shining example because I hadn't crushed him by explaining that GSFWC didn't seem to have a lot to do with manned missions.

And that's when a water bottle bounced off of my helmet. A passing driver shouted out, "Get a job!" and I rode into the grass at the side of the shoulder.

So that's why I'm here in the Kmart now, looking for a black marker and some poster board.