Just The Caffeine Talking

It's Not Christmas Without NORAD

Every year at this time I link to my favorite Christmas Web site: the Official NORAD Santa Tracker page. If you don't understand why this site is the sweetest, goofiest, and yet also the greatest embodiment of the Christmas spirit, you have the soul of a Krampus. And Krampus is not welcome in this airspace.  

Kitchen Report: Timballo

The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, is a landmark of Italian literature. There are many reasons to read it, but among others it contains some of the great dinner scenes in modern fiction. The meal in Chapter 2 begins with "monumental dishes of macaroni." But this isn't just a pile of pasta, oh no. Di Lampedusa describes the dish in some detail:

"The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede."

A few years ago, after re-reading the novel, I began to wonder about making something like that myself. I found a couple of different recipes for "Timballo alla Gattopardo" — that is, pasta pie Leopard-style. It quickly became apparent to me that the only things the recipes I found had in common with one another were the ingredients mentioned specifically in the passage above.

So I tried a couple of experiments, and have finally settled on my own version, which can be made in an afternoon and always gets a good response.

The crust: I make a sweet crust with plenty of cinnamon, as per the novel. Combine 3 1/2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup sugar, a tablespoon of cinnamon, a teaspoon of salt, and 5 ounces of butter (1 and 1/4 sticks). You can use margarine if you prefer. Combine the dry ingredients and the butter, either using a pastry-cutter or a food processor, then add water (start with 1/2 cup and add a little more at a time until the dough sticks together properly). Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate while doing everything else.

The filling: 2 boneless chicken breasts or thighs, sliced; 1 cup chicken livers, cut up into 1-inch pieces; 2 ounces thin-sliced Italian ham, 2 Italian sausages, skin removed and cut into 8 pieces each; 1 cup of peas; 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese; half a cup of good chicken stock; 2 hard-boiled eggs, and about 2/3 of a pound of small pasta (elbows or mini-penne).*

Sautee the chicken and sausage pieces, then set them aside. Cut the ham into thin strips. Sautee the chicken liver in butter, then add the peas, ham, cooked sausage and chicken, and about 1/4 cup of white wine. Simmer them together until the liquid reduces by about half, and add salt, pepper, 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric. Slice the eggs and put them aside.

Start preheating the oven to 350 F. Boil the pasta, drain it, and combine with the chicken stock and grated Parmesan.

Roll out 2/3 of the dough and use it to line a deep baking dish. I use a 9-inch springform pan about 3 inches deep, but a brave and self-confident cook could use a Pyrex or ceramic casserole.

Cover the bottom of the crust with about a quarter of the pasta-and-cheese. Reserve another quarter of the pasta for later. Mix the remaining half with the meat and peas, and pour that mixture into the crust. Top with the egg slices, then cover that with the reserved pasta. Now roll out the rest of the crust and cover the top, crimping the edge thoroughly to make a good seal. (If you wind up with some leftover crust you can make decorative shapes to put on top — a heraldic Leopard would be appropriate, or the insanely complicated flag of Bourbon Naples.)

Bake 45 minutes or until the crust has nicely browned. It should "rest" a few minutes before serving to give the interior a chance to set, although the novel suggests that was not how they did it under the Bourbons.

Slice ceremoniously and serve. You'll want to have a big spoon handy to round up stray filling. This is a good dinner for four to six people, or an impressive pasta course for a larger group. It would be suitable for a Christmas or New Year's feast, which is why I present it now.

I haven't tried any other fillings, but it seems like a dish which could support variations. Mushrooms are an obvious addition, and possibly chopped spinach if you want to pretend you care about "healthy eating." (Or use spinach pasta for an exciting green interior.) I suspect one could come up with a good seafood variant, substituting shrimp or lobster for the sausages, oysters for the livers, smoked salmon for the ham, and cod for the chicken.

*The observant reader will note the absence of truffles. If someone with a few hundred dollars to spare wants to buy me a couple of ounces of truffles, I'll happily put them in next time I make this and report on the flavor.

The Argument For Space

I've always been a fan of space exploration, which means I've often gotten into arguments with people over the value of doing it. NASA (among others) spends a lot of its public-relations budget promoting the importance of exploring space, but I think they focus on the wrong things.

On the NASA web page there's a whole section on "Benefits to You" which emphasizes the important and helpful "spinoff" technologies first developed for space exploration. It's a nice idea, but it's kind of wrong-headed, in my opinion.

After all, a critic might point out that the same technologies might easily be developed without the additional expense of doing space exploration. If NASA is studying sleep to help astronauts aboard the ISS, they could just as easily do sleep research without a space station.

The fact is that any large technology enterprise will generate spinoff devices and applications. We could be spending NASA's budget on digging a giant hole in the ground, and that would produce useful innovations in excavator and pumping technology. The fact that digging a giant hole might produce some incidental benefits doesn't justify doing it.

I think NASA and other space advocates should put more effort into justifying space exploration for its own sake. The Earth is a tiny part of the Universe. It's a tiny part of just the Solar System. If we restrict ourselves to just learning about the Earth that means we're ignoring the other 99.9997 percent of the Solar System. That's like focusing on part of one square foot of a field covering an entire acre. That square foot may be important to you, but the acre is likely to hold other things which may interest you, or be of value. You can't tell until you walk around.

Instead of holding up a can of Tang or a Teflon skillet, space advocates should be turning the tables on people who question the value of going beyond Earth: how do they know we won't find anything of importance? You can't know until you look!

Blogs I Read

Since I have twice this year had spikes in my blog traffic due to other people mentioning it on their blogs or on Twitter, I think it's time to do the same with my own mighty horde of followers. Here are the blogs I regularly read — with some important exceptions. I'm leaving off purely political blogs because people who share my outlook probably read them already, and people who don't agree with me would only scoff.

The Bleat: James Lileks's blog. It's typically a mix of hard-edged reporting about trips to Target or walking the dog, plus entertaining looks at old movie serials, small-town downtowns as seen on Google Street View, music cues from radio programs, and whatever else Mr. Lileks is on about this week.

False Machine: The amazing blog by game designer Patrick Stuart. Just his random jottings are enough to inspire whole campaigns.

Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog: The home base of Jeffro Johnson, a game blogger who has become the leader of a minor literary movement as the result of his extremely entertaining "Appendix N" series analyzing the source materials of the original Dungeons & Dragons. He also runs the blog at Castalia House. 

Overcoming Bias: This is Robin Hanson's blog, though from time to time he has guest posters. It's hard to categorize, exactly; Hanson is interested in futurism, problem-solving, how to compensate for our biases, and various other topics. He's also the father of the "Great Filter" concept.

Samuel Pepys's Blog: The greatest chronicler of the 17th Century is blogging his life, day by day, 353 years later. Keep track of what he eats, what's going on at Court, how his digestion is working, and the ongoing campaign against graft at the Navy Office.

Sippican Cottage Blog: A fun (if irregular) blog about life, furniture, music, child-rearing, and an old house in Maine. The series about sewer problems is epic.

The Suits of James Bond: An oddly fascinating blog about exactly what it says on the tin — the superbly tailored suits featured in the James Bond films. Makes one want to go down to Saville Row and get suited up.

The TOF Spot: SF writer Michael Flynn's personal blog, with random jottings, personal anecdotes, and occasionally some amazingly good historical writing.

The Unwanted Blog: A great blog about science, old aerospace projects, cats, rockets, and other random stuff, by Scott Lowther.

Inoculating Against Woo

A while back I posted a little joke about why Marty McFly's father George, in the movie Back to the Future, is the worst science fiction writer ever. One of my complaints was that George couldn't bring himself to publish his stories until a midnight encounter with a fake "spaceman" convinced him it was all real. I scoffed at that.

And I was right to scoff. One aspect of the science fiction field which always seems to surprise outsiders is how staunchly skeptical we are. Among science fiction writers and editors I doubt you'll find any who believe that UFOs are spaceships from other worlds. (I'd like to say the same about SF fans, but I know it isn't true.) There are few who believe in psychic powers, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or any of the other topics beloved of late-night AM radio.

Note that — contra McFly — one doesn't need to believe in these things to write about them. Writers can and do write stories about psychic powers, flying saucers, and even ghosts. They just know those things are fiction.

There are many reasons for this skeptical approach. First is the generally higher level of scientific literacy among SF professionals. Most of them aspire at least to the "educated layman" level, and we have a strong contingent of professional scientists in the club. This, I suspect, is the primary reason why SF writers don't go in for UFOs: we can imagine better alien spaceships than a bunch of aluminum Frisbees pestering yokels in the remote and benighted Pacific Northwest.

But there's another big reason for science fiction's innate skepticism: it got an early inoculation against quackery and woo. That inoculation came courtesy of Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, and a writer he discovered and promoted, Richard Shaver.

There's an interesting book about the two men and the "Shaver Mystery" they created — which briefly made Amazing the biggest-selling science fiction magazine in the country. It's called War Over Lemuria, by Richard Toronto, and is well worth reading.

Very briefly: Richard Shaver was a man with a vivid imagination and some serious mental problems. He was institutionalized a couple of times, and for a while lived as a vagabond. His symptoms sound a lot like classic schizophrenia: he heard voices, which he eventually identified as thoughts beamed into his mind by evil "deros" — degenerate dwarfs living in vast ancient underground cities, who amused themselves by tormenting (and occasionally abducting) surface-dwelling humans.

Shaver wrote up his discoveries about the deros, and sent them to Ray Palmer, the energetic promoter who edited Amazing Stories. Palmer rewrote them and published them. But despite the fact that Amazing was a science fiction magazine, Palmer took the unusual step of presenting Shaver's accounts of his encounters with deros and adventures under the earth as fact.

The result was a huge controversy within the SF field. This all took place in the late 1940s, just as science fiction was seeing the first light of respectability shining down on it. After all, the world suddenly had atomic bombs, radar, rockets, and computing machines. All that "Buck Rogers stuff" didn't look so silly after all, did it?

The "Shaver Mystery" series in Amazing was a threat to that respectability. It was, or at least it sure sounded like, genuine crazy-talk. SF fan clubs reacted vigorously: they denounced Palmer and Shaver, they expelled pro-Shaver members, and they organized letter-writing campaigns to Palmer's bosses at Ziff-Davis publishing.

Eventually William Ziff asked Ray Palmer to dial it back, and Palmer —either from genuine belief in Shaver's stories or because he resented the interference — decided to leave Amazing and start his own magazine. Amazing returned to its old niche as a science fiction magazine.*

I think the experience of the "Shaver Mystery" gave the whole science fiction field a huge shove toward the skeptical side where paranormal claims are concerned. In effect, Ray Palmer and his critics forced science fiction fans to choose a side: believer or skeptic, and most chose to be skeptics. That set the tone from then on.

Even when John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, became interested in psychic powers, he was careful to keep his statements within the bounds of scientific possibility (and that was the era of J.B. Rhine's experiments at Duke, when psychic phenomena were at their peak of respectability). And since the end of the Campbell era, science fiction's devotion to skepticism has grown only more solid.

Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer inoculated science fiction against woo, and so far, that early resistance has endured.

*Richard Shaver, to his great credit, was able to overcome his mental issues and managed to build a stable life for himself as a farmer and artist.

Movie Review: Arrival

Short version: it's great, go see it.

Long version: I confess I was a bit worried when I got tickets to this movie. When I heard that Ted Chiang's great story "The Story of Your Life" was being made into a film I was very pleased and excited . . . but then I saw the trailer for the movie under its new title Arrival and it seemed to have a lot more running-and-shooty-bits than I remembered from the story.

I've seen what Hollywood did to stories like Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or The Puppet Masters; or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles or "A Sound of Thunder." And "The Story of Your Life" seemed like a very difficult story to adapt. It would have been all too easy for some producer to decide to dumb it down and make just another "scary aliens invade" actioner, or the equally cliché "misunderstood aliens arrive and mean Army guys want to waterboard them" story.

So, as I say, I was a bit worried. But when the movie began with a montage showing the tragically short life of the main character's daughter, I relaxed into my seat and began to enjoy myself. It's the daughter who is the "you" in the original short story title, and her inclusion meant the movie was actually going to follow Ted's story.

Which it did, almost line-for-line. I haven't seen a more faithful adaptation since Rosemary's Baby (according to Stephen King, Rosemary's Baby precisely tracks Ira Levin's original novel because the director, Roman Polanski, didn't know he was allowed to change things).

I'm not going to give any "spoilers" because the movie's still in theaters — though there isn't any kind of lame "twist ending" which woul ruin your enjoyment if I revealed it. Instead I'm going to mention some of the things that impressed me.

First of all, there are no villains. There are people whose goals are opposed to those of the heroine, but those goals are perfectly understandable and logical. There are no mustache-twirlers in this movie. I really liked that. It's also more suspenseful: you know an obvious villain will ultimately meet her doom, but what if the entirely reasonable antagonists turn out to be right?

Second, the movie has real aliens. I've griped in the past about how wedded moviemakers are to the "guy-in-a-suit" look for alien beings, even now that computer animation means you can put literally anything someone can imagine on the screen. I'm also tired of aliens with eyes-over-mouth faces that plug into the hard-wired face-recognizing parts of our brains.

Well, Arrival doesn't have any truck with that nonsense either. The alien Heptapods are extremely non-human, but still look like something which might have evolved on another world. They don't even have faces.

Third, the movie does a wonderful job of convincing me that "this is what it would be like." That's something I look for in movies: a sense that I'm really experiencing something fantastic. The movie Unbreakable gave me that feeling, as did the first 90 minutes or so of the movie Signs, and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Arrival's depiction of how the world and the characters reacted to the aliens was utterly convincing to me. (One particularly nice note was how believably nervous everyone was before the moment of first contact.)

I hope Arrival makes a ton of money. Partly because I'm happy to see Ted Chiang get issued a Rich-and-Famous Contract, but also for what it might mean for future science fiction cinema. Arrival is not a dumb movie. It doesn't pander to any lowest common denominator. If it's a success then maybe we can finally drive a stake through the heart of the old myth that audiences are too dumb to "get" science fiction unless it's the excuse for showy effects in an action movie.

I have long suspected that blaming "dumb audiences" is a convenient crutch for dumb moviemakers. Moviegoers are smart enough to install HVAC systems, do other people's taxes, manage farms, repair vintage motorcycles, and sell real estate. It's absurd to think that the contrivances of storytellers are too hard for them.

If that's true, and if Arrival is reasonably successful. then maybe people who make movies will take note. Science fiction films don't have to be action-adventure; they can be dramas, or comedies, or mysteries, or all of the above. There's a century of excellent science fiction short stories waiting for someone to turn into screenplays.

I've got a couple. Call my agent.

Nostalgie Du Geek: Hearing the Call

In a couple of earlier posts I've described my reaction to my first two role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller. Those two were followed in the marketplace by a whole wave of other games in a variety of genres: Tunnels & Trolls, Universe from SPI, Gamma World, Chivalry & Sorcery, Metamorphosis Alpha, RuneQuest, Villains & Vigilantes, Top Secret, Boot Hill — and doubtless some others I'm forgetting.

I didn't play any of those. I got a copy of Metamorphosis Alpha because it was cheap, and I picked up Universe to get the three-dimensional map of nearby stars that came with it, but that was it. The various fantasy titles struck me as nothing more than D&D knockoffs, and the remainders just didn't interest me. I had to budget my allowance, and a roleplaying game cost as much as three or four science fiction paperbacks.

But then I heard about a new game: Call of Cthulhu. I think I first read a review of it in Dragon magazine, and was intrigued. That was right around the time I discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft — and that discovery, in turn, was sparked by the inclusion of some Lovecraftian Great Old Ones in the D&D supplement Deities & Demigods. (After Call of Cthulhu appeared, TSR pulled the Lovecraft material out of later editions of that book; I've heard varying accounts of why that was done.)

I must have bought Call of Cthulhu shortly after it came out, possibly with some Christmas gift money in late 1981, or early 1982. It wasn't long before I talked my friends into trying it out. Recall that Raiders of the Lost Ark had premiered in the summer of 1981, so all of us were very enthusiastic about playing a game set in the era of pulp adventure heroes like Indiana Jones. Call of Cthulhu's 1920s milieu seemed perfect.

In fact, the campaign I ran for the next few years owed as much to Indiana Jones and Doc Savage as it did to H.P. Lovecraft. Around that time I acquired a copy of Philip Jose Farmer's biography of Doc Savage, and I shamelessly mined it for ideas. I can retroactively justify this by saying it was a "Robert E. Howard" style campaign, except that I didn't read any of Howard's horror stories until I was 35 years old.

The heroes in my group's campaign were definitely a two-fisted lot. The unofficial leader of the group was hard-boiled private eye Mike Slammer. Mike managed to survive several years of battling Lovecraftian horrors, chiefly due to a loophole in the game's famous Sanity rules. When a character encountered a mind-blasting horror, that character had to make an Intelligence roll before the Sanity check. A failed INT roll either prevented or reduced the effect of the Sanity roll, because the character simply failed to comprehend the cosmic wrongness which could unhinge more sensitive minds. Mike's invincible cement-headedness protected him against any threats to his psyche.

The pulpy tone of the campaign also meant that my heroes alternated between investigating Lovecraftian horrors and battling more conventional pulp villains, like the insidious Inca in Gray. (The Inca, by the way, introduced me to a problem which has bedeviled just about all my roleplaying games: the difficulty of having a recurring master villain when one's players are perfectly willing to shoot him in the face before he can finish his monologue.)

I ran Call of Cthulhu games for the rest of my high-school career, and into my first few vacations in college. Over time, as I read more Lovecraft and grew more interested in the history of "real" occultism, the tone of the games I ran shifted away from pulp adventure to more straight horror. My first winter in Chicago certainly inspired me to adapt Lovecraft's Antarctic horror story At the Mountains of Madness for my old group during summer vacation.

Call of Cthulhu was the first — and, really, the last — game for which I used a lot of published adventures. I had a couple of collections of scenarios, and ran some straight out of the books, while mining others for elements I could use in my own adventures. By the time I shifted to other games, I was already starting to think semi-seriously about submitting some of my adventures for publication.

While many roleplaying games have won awards, spawned licensed products and cross-media tie-ins, I think Call of Cthulhu is the only one to have set off a literary movement. The game got a whole generation of gaming nerds reading Lovecraft, and then reading other writers of his circle. This created a ripple which is still spreading.

Lovecraftian fiction went from being a relatively obscure corner of the horror section (crowded to one side by Exorcist knockoffs, Stephen King, and Ann Rice) to being pretty much the entire horror genre over the course of the next couple of decades. Go to a bookstore nowadays and look for horror stories: you'll find Dracula, Frankenstein, and a few Gothics in the Literature section, the Twilight books in the YA department — and shelves and shelves of Lovecraftian horror in the SF/Fantasy section.

Every year brings out another two or three original anthologies: Swords Versus Cthulhu, Shotguns Versus Cthulhu, Heroes of Red Hook. We've seen steampunk Lovecraft stories, feminist Lovecraft stories, postapocalyptic Lovecraft stories, and I'm sure "Rule 34" applies here as well. HPL himself is now enshrined in the Modern Library imprint from Random House, which is about as close to an official Canon of American Literature as one can get. I don't think any of that would have happened without the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

So how did it happen? How did a game based on the works of a (relatively) obscure author who'd been dead for fifty years become an enduring classic? (The game has now had a longer career than Lovecraft himself did.)

I think the answer is that Call of Cthulhu was the first cerebral roleplaying game. The emphasis wasn't on fighting, or even negotiation and problem-solving. The focus was investigation. In fact, in all the game publications the player characters are called the "Investigators." Call of Cthulhu appealed to people who liked finding out stuff, keeping notes, and making connections. Other games let players be vicariously tough or attractive; Call of Cthulhu lets you be smart. (Of course, being smart in that game is likely to get you killed, which means Call of Cthulhu appeals to players who think that's really neat.)

The game has been a steady seller, spawning variants like the X-Files inspired Delta Green or the pulpy World War II-era Achtung! Cthulhu. Call of Cthulhu itself is now out in a spiffy new Seventh Edition. I haven't tried out the new version. Maybe I'll just go dig in my game closet, pull out my 35-year-old boxed set, and try to drive some Investigators insane.