If you're looking for a way to liven up your Hanukkah games of dreidel — and, let's face it, who isn't — you'll want to check out Staccabees™, a new twist on the classic that combines skill and strategy with the traditional four-sided top. Instead of taking and putting chocolate coins, players add or remove different-sized wooden cubes from a stack, depending on the roll of the dreidel.

Staccabees was invented by an aeronautical engineer and an internet project manager from Philadelphia looking for a way to liven up the traditional game of dreidel. (For those not familiar, the Wikipedia entry explains how spins of the top determine puts and takes from a pot.)

I saw the game this week and was very impressed with the craftsmanship; sturdily made from solid wood, designed to be used for years. And the gameplay looks simple enough for a 6-year-old to learn, but interesting enough to hold a youngster's attention for the average 20-minute game.

Your kids may miss the gelt. But hey, you can always invent your own variation.

Resources
Staccabees
Read about Hanukkah on Wikipedia

Full disclosure: I know the makers of this game, but I did not receive any compensation or promotional material.

With a day to spare, and just 50 words of headroom, I crossed the finish line of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) at 12:05 this morning, certifying my scrambled manuscript for the alternate history novel "Fist of the Ape," written in the past thirty days. I won't pretend it was easy, nor that it would have been possible without the support of my family, friends, and the awesome Wrimos in Rhode Island and beyond.

I will confess that there was a very bad point this afternoon when I realized that I had counted about a thousand words twice. It very nearly kicked my ass, when I thought I was at 48K and was really only at 47. But with some encouragement, I cranked six thousand words to put this thing to bed.

Thanks to Karen, for putting up with a month of craziness (and for being polite, when reading the manuscript, and saying only "I can tell where you had the flu..."), and Jack, who didn't have as much homework time with daddy. I will make it up to you. Thanks to the gang at the Gibraltar Point science fiction workshop (you know who you are) where I plotted the outline for this book three years ago. And a special shout-out to hazwastegirl, who made writing sprints at the Warren Coffee Depot such crazy fun.

And now, because I have to share, the only marginally publishable copy. (Which is to say, uh, I actually edited this...)

Synopsis: Fist of the Ape

In an alternate WWII, a US weapons expert and his code-talking sidekick pair up with a Russian spy to track down a possible Nazi atomic bomb.

Excerpt: Fist of the Ape

Manhattan, July 28, 1945, 9:40am
People on the streets recalled hearing the airplane first; a big Army bomber from the sound of it, coming in from the East River. They might have looked up, but couldn't even see the tops of buildings in the drifting cloud deck. The plane was clearly over the city, they remembered, and far too low.

In the Empire State Building, the Saturday shift of the Catholic War Relief Board was beginning their work day. Perhaps they caught a rumble of approaching engines; there might have been time for a glance out the window.

Then the bomber emerged from the fog and struck head-on.

Twenty tons of airplane plowed through the limestone facade and exploded into the building; the B-25 came apart in a fireball, sending a hailstorm of wreckage tearing through offices. The workers, a typical wartime mix of old men, teenagers, and nuns, were killed at their desks, crushed or incinerated.

The left engine penetrated the elevator core, sheared cables, and plummeted to the basement.

One heavy chunk of wreckage passed entirely through the 79th floor, blowing an exit wound in the south wall and plunging across 33rd street to bury itself in the top floor of a warehouse.

When the Office of Strategic Service agents arrived, they had no time to listen to witnesses babbling excitedly to the cops, and they had only the briefest glance for the smoking hole in the side of the skyscraper. None of that was important. The debris across the street was all that that was of interest to them.

Click to visit NaNoWriMo

At 12:01am on November first, hundreds of thousands of fingers will start pounding keyboards in a frenzied effort to crank out a novel in just 30 days.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a gonzo word spree whose goal is to coax a 50K-word-novel out of every participant. Now in its 11th year, NaNoWriMo has been steadily growing from its origin as a 21-member "noveling binge" in the San Francisco Bay area. Last year, according to organizers, there were almost 120,000 entries, with over 20,000 "winners."

And how do you win? One simple, unassailable metric: You write 50K words. No literary standards. No judging. Nobody even reads the entries; they're just word-counted by a web site. It's the process, organizers say, that makes this kind of thing worthwhile.

"The 50,000-word challenge has a wonderful way of opening up your imagination and unleashing creative potential like nothing else," NaNoWriMo Founder and Program Director (and ten-time NaNoWriMo winner) Chris Baty said in a statement. "When you write for quantity instead of quality, you end up getting both. Also, it's a great excuse for not doing any dishes for a month."

Local groups of participants have "write-ins" to help keep everyone motivated, and there is a great web site, complete with a "Procrastination Station" (go for the exercises, stay for the dolphin cheese). Online discussion boards and e-mails help keep everyone in touch and maintain a sense of community.

But it's not all just for fun and camaraderie, say the organizers. More than 30 NaNoWriMo novelists have had their "NaNo-novels" published, including Sarah Gruen, whose New York Times #1 Best Seller, Water for Elephants began as a NaNoWriMo novel.

I've never done NaNoWriMo before, so this is going to be an interesting experience. Pushing 50,000 words out in a month seems pretty daunting. I wrote 5 short stories during the six weeks of the Clarion workshop, but that was probably about 30K in total. And I will admit that I was pretty fried by the time that was over.

Bottom line: You can expect me to yak about this a fair bit during November. And if my coverage of local meetings is just a bit thinner, I hope you'll understand.

ps: I do have an outline for the novel, a hard-sf secret history of the end of WWII.

"No flash photography..."

It is hard to believe that it was ten years ago today. As any parent will tell you, it is a blur, where every moment seems like yesterday.

I still cannot thank enough the medical team that helped us. Dr. Richard Viscarello and the staff at Maternal Fetal Care in Stamford, CT, the staff at Stamford Hospital, Dr. Steven Spandorfer and Dr. Gianpiero D. Palermo and the incomparable expertise of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Cornell-Weill. And, of course, Dr. Alice Domar and the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.

dingir.Pazuzu qatu dingir.Ištar

Click to go vote.

One of my sf writer buddies, Lis Mitchell, is also an artist, and has a design up on Threadless.com. If you like it, you can vote it up and maybe it'll end up on a t-shirt.

Makes me think of Carl Sagan's "R-Complex" from The Dragons of Eden...

Those of you who visit regularly — via the old-fashioned Web, rather than RSS — will have noticed that shortly after the Personal Democracy Forum, the X-ray image over in the left-hand column got a new cutline: "Transparency is the new objectivity." As it says over there, it's a quote from David Weinberger, which he has now expanded in a blog post over on his site.

The idea of false objectivity in news has been floating around for a long time. There are several episodes of Rebooting the News where Jay Rosen and Dave Winer talk about the "View from Nowhere," and even Chip Scanlan, in his venerable J-school textbook Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century points out that "objectivity" was created by wire services in the 1860s so they could sell copy to papers of all partisan stripes.

And there are deep philosophical reasons to suspect claims of "objectivity." Weinberger, in the blog entry linked to above, slides right up to the edge of it when he talks about "the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report." More than one hundred years ago, philosopher Edmund Husserl came up with the term "bracketing" to describe a rigorously suspicious stance toward our experience and its relationship to truth: if all we ever have is our sensory data, how can we make claims about the accuracy of their relationship to the world outside our skin? This flavor of philosophical inquiry, called phenomenology, teaches us to regard any experience as subjective and conditioned. (Think about Neo in The Matrix and you'll see what Husserl was driving at.)

As Weinberger says:

At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.
— Via JOHO The BLOG

Full disclosure: I've been a hard-core phenomenologist since my undergrad days, when I received dharma transmission in the lineage of C.I. Lewis.

I know this has been posted all over the place, and you meant to click through. It's the weekend now; take a couple of minutes and watch.

This is what folk music is about. This machine kills fascists.

We bought WALL*E, of course, and watched it together immediately, and it's just as good on repeated viewing. Then last night, as we were talking over the bonus content, Jack noticed something. The featurette, about one of the robots on the Axiom, is called BURN*E. "Shouldn't that be BURN*A?" asked Jack.

Of course, my nine-year-old is right. The "E" stands for "Earth-class" and we clearly see the trash robots on the ship are labelled WALL*A for "Axiom."

This morning, I found that even the director has admitted the name was a hand-wave.

There is no prouder moment for a hard-sf parent than this.

FYI: "Hard" science fiction tries to get everything important right and track with science as we understand it. What I think of as the paradigmatic example comes from the 1993 Clarion workshop, where one of my colleagues began a critique of a story with, "I did the math, and your planet has no atmosphere."

I've written before about digital civil libertarian Cory Doctorow's newest novel, Little Brother, and what a great handbook it is for anyone concerned with electronic freedom. Today, Cory posted a note on BoingBoing about a teacher who's using the book as a jumping-off spot for an on-line YA community. Says Cory:

Smári McCarthy, a high-school teacher in Iceland, has been teaching a course unit on civil liberties and technological literacy based around my novel Little Brother. He's launched a new Google Group for the kids in his class (and other classes around the world) to continue the discussion -- what an awesome idea!

At the end of the last class yesterday the idea came up to form a mailing list for young people who're interested in digital freedoms, computer security and so on, and one of the students suggested that we call the list "Watching Back". The list is watchingback@googlegroups.com and almost all the kids who took the course are on it.

It would be great if people running similar courses could get their students involved on the list, and that teachers and other people who know something about the subject hang around and help guide the discussion as mentors. [...]

Throughout the network young people are being empowered to change the world, they're figuring out the beauty of the hacker culture and the fight for freedom. In a world where big brother is watching with increasing scrutiny it is a big relief to know that at least the children are watching back.

— Via BoingBoing

Resources:
Watching Back
Download Little Brother for free from Craphound.com