Sometimes he plays backgammon with other gods, and sometimes they lose. He must have won big, because when it snowed last night I figured it was him working on my behalf again…but then this morning I woke up, turned my head, and saw this out my window:
See that on the left? My window. I had to pull the rose to face me and stand in a most precarious position, because the only really good view of this rose was through my window, from my bed. Unfortunately you just can’t take a picture of the vivid yellow/bright white, and I didn’t get any good pictures of it against the blue blue sky that I saw it against, but you get the idea :). This snowy rose is the Spatula god’s message to me: “Look, this snow is my gift to you!” (As if I didn’t already know, because snow is so rare in Seattle, let alone this early in the winter. The Spatula God is such a sweetie.)
Now, for the snow: Three pictures from my front porch.
Left View
Center View: Gee, it's a shame that the mountains that are so large, crisp, and beautiful to the naked eye on a clear day like this just don't show up in a photo. (At least, not in one taken by Meghan the not-even-an-amateur-photographer with her roommate's camera.) Anyone who wants to see them will just have to visit!
Right View
Now, for this comment that showed up on my last post:
“I stumbled across this post because of a Google alert for Reposession [sic] Mambo, and I have the alert because a friend of mine is the co-author of the story. It’s not a rip-off, believe it or not. This project has been kicking around forever. Once you get past the bizarre premise there are very few similarities.
One of those truths that’s stranger than fiction.” –Jake Frievald, who directed clicks on his name to Flash Fiction Online. After poking around a bit, I found internet evidence that indeed, a Jake Frievald seems to have created Flash Fiction Online. This impresses me a lot more than it might impress most people, because I and many of my friends are speculative fiction writers, and this is a sfwa market!
I am further impressed that this comment showed up on my never-viewed-by-anyone-except-me-my-friends-and-my-family-members blog within hours of my posting a comment about said film, for which I’ve ticked all the ticks to not come up as much as possible in search engines and sideways-blog-surfing links. I have narrowed down the possible origins of this comment to two possibilities:
1. The actual person, Jake Frievald, whom I’m convinced exists and who seems reliable to me in a very real way about story credits etc., has a friend who co-authored the story behind Repossession Mambo, and trusts that friend not to have ripped off the story, and not to have fallen victim to a co-author who ripped off part of the story. Further, Jake has a google alert to comments about it, and when he saw my rather incredulous blog post, he responded in a very civil way to defend his friend’s project and even sympathized about my ice cream in the microwave, proving himself to be all around a good, kind, and moral person.
2. Some vast conspiracy machine associated with the marketing of Repossession Mambo is trying to prevent viral anti-marketing against their movie, which is in fact a rip-off. This vast conspiracy machine not only wanted to quash my comments about their movie being a rip-off, but wanted to do so incredibly thoroughly, and in a way that would make me, personally, feel terrible about having ever doubted their movie. Either through browsing my blog or other research, the machine discovered that I respect sfwa and spec fic people in general, and then either stole Jake Friedvald’s identity in order to make a comment on my blog post and hoped their vile identity theft wouldn’t be noticed, or somehow invented the entire zine Flash Fiction Online within hours of my blog post and put a ridiculous amount of effort into creating it, even unto going back into time to plant evidence that it had lasted so long.
As appealing as #2 sounds (particularly because in that scenario, I could track down the evil, put an end to it, and then take their time travel technology and use it forever in the name of truth, justice, and very occasionally personal gain), I’m forced to admit that as unlikely as #1 seems, it’s the more likely of the two.
So, until further evidence comes along, I officially retract any comments (nasty and otherwise) that I’ve made regarding Repossession Mambo. Maybe I’ll even go see it, when it comes out! (Well, maybe not. I do so loathe Jude Law. No, not his personality: I don’t know the guy, and even if I read tabloids or listened to gossip about actors I would not assume that what I heard was true. Not even his acting, actually; I just have this weird dislike of watching him in movies, similar in character to my dislike of Adam Sandler, for example. It’s like I don’t want to look at his face. Oh, I know I’m weird. Let me be.)
