Well, it's September 11th again.

I'm more than twice as old now as when it happened. That's... wow. Angel's a senior in high school this year, same as I was. And somehow, though we seem to have stopped talking about it, the supposed "War on Terror" continues.

Planned 9/11 military flyover prompts outrage; Mayor Bill de Blasio calls it ‘inappropriate’

It is inappropriate, especially with what looks like little to no warning. I've told you what happened that Memorial Day when there was a flyover I didn't know about, right? I ended up in the basement 15 minutes with the kids! They thought I was crazy! Whoever had this bad idea, I hope they have bad dreams for the next decade.

I'd wish them worse, but it looks like their vision of terror has been cancelled, thankfully. I don't like normal planes when they fly a little low, and I know I'm not the only one.

I'm a week late, but I just found out that Octavia Butler

is finally on the NY Times bestseller list.

In recognition of this, I googled up and found what is, hands down, one of the most infuriating Amazon reviews I've ever read. I cannot even articulate exactly what I find so mindbogglingly clueless about it, but every time this review pops into my head I want to find the man who wrote it and irritate him as much as his review has irritated me.

Well written and somewhat interesting, but it falls into what I consider a "quasi" SF genre. Both stories are essentially social commentaries and the "science" associated with them is minimal. The concept of writing socially sensitive stories within a SF framework is very common - most of Heinlein and Ellison's work is in that vein, just to name two. The problem I have is that the first story is closer to science fantasy than hard SF, and while the second deals with psionic powers, a traditional SF topic, it is so short that it was over before I really got into it. Its all a matter of taste, but I could not recommend the book.

As an aside, while the author is identified as famous within the SF circle, the circle referenced must be very small; as an avid SF reader since the late 50s and owner of over 2000 SF books I have never heard of her.

It's that little last aside that sends me over the top, the way he blithely assumes that she's not that famous rather than that he doesn't read widely enough.

In addition to the chimney and potato issue from my earlier post...

northern Europe (including the British Isles) did not have eating forks until the 17th century at the earliest. The eating fork wasn't commonplace in Italy until the 14th century, and it took a while to spread out from there.

I don't care how refined and polite your character is, if your setting predates the arrival of forks in her region she washes her hands and eats with her fingers the way God intended. You can show her good manners by demonstrating that she will "let no morsel from her lippës fall, Nor wet her fingers in her saucë deep". Probably she doesn't double dip either.

Update on the flyover that wasn't:

Apparently, this wasn't intended as some sort of memorial, it was just a routine training exercise that happened to be badly scheduled. Which would seem to explain why nobody seemed to know about it until it was about to happen.

That's actually an enormous relief.