But mail for Russell Brown (always addressed to RUSSELL BROWN in block caps) kept arriving, and I realized that it was all from travel companies. Again, if you’ve gotten added to a particular spam list you’ll soon be added to related ones.

But these were from reputable companies. Holiday Inns. Princess Cruises. La Quinta. Not generally spammers. It seemed that Russell Brown (uh, I mean RUSSELL BROWN) was using my email address to subscribe to newsletters and such. Which I didn’t understand. There’s a Brown in my name, but there’s no Brown in my email address, so it’s hard to see how he could claim to have accidentally used Iain Brown’s email.

More recently I’ve started receiving booking confirmations. RUSSELL BROWN is still using my email address for travel, but it isn’t just subscribing to websites now, it’s making reservations. And the way he consistently uses my email address convinces me that it’s deliberate.

It’s not generally easy to register at a website with someone else’s email address. Unless you can log in to the mail account you can’t get confirmation numbers. Either none of these sites required confirmation, or he created the account using one address and then logged in and switched it later. Or maybe he’s selecting hotel companies based on whether he needs to provide a working email address.

Maybe he doesn’t have an address. He can figure out how to create an account and make an online reservation, but he doesn’t understand Yahoo, Hotmail or Google. That might account for the all-caps name.

Or else he doesn’t want his travel details known. Maybe Mrs. RUSSELL BROWN isn’t supposed to know about these overnighters at La Quinta.

I delayed my birthday this year to Saturday June 6th because my wife was out of town until then. When my fake birthday arrived, she presented me with a gift that was completely unexpected – a kitten. A beautiful little lynx-point Siamese.

Hiding beind my notebook

There were reasons beyond just the fact that I like cats and still miss our old storm cat that I’ll mention, but I had no idea she was going to do this.

I almost spoiled the surprise, in fact. When Vicki and the kids go to the pet store for any reason they always spend a few minutes looking at the cats and kittens up for adoption. And we were out of cat litter, so I called her to ask her to pick some up, but what I said was “you need to make an urgent stop to look at kitties.” Meaning to go to the pet store, but she thought I was referring to the kitten she already with her in the car, and I heard stunned silence for a moment. Fortunately I explained myself before she asked how I knew what she was doing.

So she and the kids brought in birthday cards and a cardboard Exquisicat box with holes in it. Which looked like a box for a kitten, but Exquisicat was the brand of catbox liners we use, which I’d asked her to get, so I figured she’d got the box with the liners and had some elaborate joke in mind. (There’s another story to that, too, but it doesn’t belong here.) So I grinned and opened the box and said “Oh, my god, it really is a kitten.”

Simon has a female Siamese, and Vicki has always intended to breed her once; this is the additional motive for getting a male Siamese, and I recognized that, but it doesn’t detract from having my own kitten. She even promised not to steal him – she has a way with cats, and they all gravitate to her, but with the kitten (as with Simon’s Lavender) she promised to try not to take over.

He was a skinny little thing. From a breeder, which isn’t how we’d usually acquire a cat, but pure Siamese don’t turn up in the rescued cages. He had piercing grey eyes and a gentle purr, and he took to me immediately. He would sit on my chest, sphinx-like rather than curled up, with all of his claws sinking into me. (Siamese claws aren’t fully retractable.) Occasionally he’d climb so high I couldn’t lower my head because he’d be wedged under my chin.

I worried about him not eating or drinking. He seemed to be doing, because he’d use his litter tray (usually), but I rarely saw him eat, and when he went to the water bowl he’d splash his face a couple of times but not start lapping.

I also worried about him interacting with Lavender. She hissed and spat at him for about two days, but then she started playing with him, and even mothered him, cleaning him up. He started following her around the house, and if I ever couldn’t find him, I’d just look for Lavender, because he would be close by. When I came home from work, Lavender would run to the door making her Siamese yowls, while the kitten would trail behind with high-pitched meeps.

I had no name for him. I didn’t want to name him until I’d found one that I really liked, so he remained “the kitten.”

Basil and Lavender

I still have text messages from that week in my phone where I was letting Vicki know how well he was doing. On Thursday morning I texted her that he had woken me up at 5:30, climbing up me (claws digging in securely) to perch on my arm. Later that day I texted her again that I’d seen him drinking from his water bowl.

Elliot suggested the name Basil, and I thought about it for a while.

Friday I had to stay home until a tech arrived for our air conditioner service. I ran a bath, but then the tech called and I didn’t have time to take it. Vicki got back into town, and I took the opportunity to get to work. During the day I decided that Elliot was right. The kitten’s name was Basil. Not Bay-zil, the English pronunciation, Bazzil, like Basil Fawlty or Basil the Rat (both from Fawlty Towers). As small as he was he was like a little rat, and Basil the Cat seemed perfect.

She had to go into the office too, so we met quite late for dinner, and then I headed home while she and Simon stopped by the drug store.

When I arrived home, it was quiet. After being greeted by both cats for several days in a row, that felt wrong. I called out, and Lavender answered from the bedroom, but there was no echoing meep. The bathroom door was open, and I knew what I was going to find before I went in.

Basil – poor, tiny little Basil – was floating on the top of the water in the bath that I’d forgotten to empty. He was cold and already stiffening. When I picked him up and held him close the last breath from his tiny lungs made him meow.

I had to call Vicki. I couldn’t stand the thought of what I’d done to that lovely little kitten. She and Simon were heartbroken, too. They hurried home, and when they saw his little bedraggled body they wailed as much as I was doing.

I buried the kitten in our yard, alongside our old Pepper cat (the first cat we ever owned) and Boober. I spent a week bonding with that precious little kitten, and he died to my stupidity. I didn’t even get to use his name while he was alive, only saying goodbye to little Basil as I laid him to rest.

The breeder was sympathetic enough to let us have Basil’s brother, although she was also upset by his loss. I wasn’t very fun company that weekend.

Parsley, the new kitten, is much like Basil – which I’d hoped would be true. Getting to know him has helped dull the heartache. Sometimes a whole ten minutes passes now without me remembering the little limp body in the bathtub. He’ll be everything that Basil could have been. He’s maybe a little more adventurous, and a little more interested in people than in following Lavender around everywhere – but I don’t like to compare them. I feel that if I do I’ll be finding fault with Basil in some way. So while I’m glad to have the new kitten, Basil’s memory is compartmented, and I think I’ll always miss him.

That’s not what this entry is about, though. Apart from family and intangibles, like the Yorkshire countryside, or the sea being within driving distance, there isn’t much that I regret not having.

What I do miss are some specific food items. Real bacon, not the thin, streaky, fatty stuff I can get in the grocery store, good as some of it is. Chocolate. Fish and chips. And most of all, milk.

I’m from Hull, former fishing port, and still home to the largest concentration of fish and chip shops (with generally good fish). I think it’s probably harder for a Hull native to be deprived of fish and chips than most other Brits. But I’ve found that when I travel to England I can eat fish and chips a few times to satisfy the craving, and then ignore it for the rest of the vacation.

I don’t know why American chocolate is so bitter and stale-tasting compared to British chocolate, but it is. It’s the added paraffin wax or lack of cocoa butter or something. Even the same candy here is formulated differently, and it’s such a disappointment that I find it easy to avoid. A regular bar of Cadbury’s beats even chocolates from expensive shops here, and Galaxy is completely out of the league of US chocolate – with the one exception I’ve found of the Newman’s Own brand, which is quite delicious and not bitter, dark or milk. The late Paul Newman makes good chocolate…

Anyway, Kroger has started carrying Galaxy. Only small bars and Minstrels (chocolate-candy covered chocolates, like oversized M&Ms with the bitterness removed), but a few small bars is still cheaper than the postage for my mother to send me a large bar. So I no longer need to gripe about chocolates.

Milk, though. That has been a problem since I first came here, 29 years ago. Some milk is better than others, but the best I can find tastes bland compared to regular cheap grocery milk on the other side of the pond. And that isn’t something my mother can send.

And then a few months back, I was visiting Whole Foods in Plano, and I found milk from “Remember When Dairy.” I bought it by accident, in fact. Organic milk was very expensive, and the price of this milk was about half (but it turned out I was looking at the wrong price; it’s about the same as certified organic). Then, when I got it home I noticed it said “shake well,” and realized it was non-homogenized milk. I’ve always prefered non-homogenized; even when you shake it up, it’s creamier. Unfortunately, even in the UK it’s hard to find now.

So I poured a glass and tried it – and it was every bit as good as the milk I grew up with. Better, even – the milk is from a Jersey herd. It’s organic, though not yet certified, so it can’t have the label, but it is. And much better than Whole Foods’s other organic products. The 2% milk is richer than any whole milk I’ve tried elsewhere.

As expensive as it was, and as awkward as it was to get to the Plano store, I made the trip several times. Life was good.

And then, a month or so after I discovered the milk, it started to vanish. I could get a couple of half-gallons occasionally, and then nothing at all.

I’ve tried to find out what has happened, and where I can still get the milk. The Lakewood Whole Foods is supposed to carry it, but when I tried to get some there was one half-gallon of 2%. A recent Morning News said that Central Market carried it, but I’ve never seen any, and the CM manager told me they’ve been trying to carry it, but their sales volume would be too low.

Now I have email from the Whole Foods store that may have more of the story. Apparently the dairy is currently out of business while they move from Texas to New Mexico, and they expect to resume shipments in 45 days. How believable that is, I don’t know. This was probably a very bad time to start a dairy, but if they’re really relocating rather than failing, and if they really plan to distribute the same products back to the DFW area, it doesn’t bother me whether or not they’re in Texas.

I’m hopeful. I’ll know in a couple of months whether to cry over spilt milk.

Now, if I could just find real bacon…

Edit: I forgot the main requirement of a Brit living in the US – a supply of decent tea. Fortunately that has never been very hard. I used to have to go to the Indian grocery for Typhoo or PG Tips. More recently, Central Market started carrying Yorkshire Tea (which is the best of all) and Kroger has PG Tips tea bags.

Central Market consolidated their tea section and eliminated Yorkshire Tea, and I was disappointed – until I discovered that Amazon.com carries it in both loose leaf and tea bag form. (Even Yorkshire Gold and Yorkshire Gold tea bags, though I don’t personally like that as much as plain old Yorkshire Tea.)

Whatever the reason, we’ve cleaned up the tank nicely, added a vastly better light with a clear glass top – that’s when I realized just how gloomy it had become – cleaned the sides, and started adding more fish.

We’ve always liked the clown loaches more than any of the other fish we’ve had, because they have such interesting behaviors. I would say that they have personalities, if ascribing a personality to a cold water creature with barely a brain wasn’t such a stretch. They school, they find the strangest places to hide, they can sleep – or at least, be inactive – in odd positions. So it was a big disappointment to lose two of the three after having them for so many years.

The final loach hid behind his rock, and we rarely saw him. After I added the light, he started following the angel fish around occasionally – not exactly schooling, but usually being in the same part of the tank.

Then, when we added plants and several other fish, he spent all of his time out in the open. He nibbled on the plants and swam around with the brightly colored neon tetras. Vicki was especially happy to see him out and about all the time, and we plan to add more clown loaches.

But… apparently our water quaility problems aren’t over, or at least we have some issue still that affects tetras. All of the red tetras we added died very quickly. The neons took a little longer, but they started to succumb. I know that tetras are sensitive to some kinds of water conditions; you can’t make the water slightly brackish, which helps keep most fish healthy, because salt is toxic to tetras. I don’t think we have any salt in the water, but Texas hard water may have other problems, and I need to look at what might be going on before I try adding more tetras.

Everything else is fine. The catfish, the gouramis, the one angel fish that we still had, and the loach, all seem healthy. The plants are doing fine. But for a couple of days I was flushing tetras when I found them (and there are several I haven’t accounted for).

Then, yesterday morning, I saw what must be the oddest thing I’ve ever encountered in years of keeping tropical fish. The clown loach was swimming around with a dead neon tetra in its mouth.

It wasn’t eating it. It was just carring it around the tank. It looked as if – and, of course, this is even more ridiculous than claiming that a fish has a personality – it looked as if the loach had found one of the fish it had been schooling with, and wasn’t willing to let it go.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous – but since yesterday morning, the loach has gone back to his old hiding place. He doesn’t come out from behind his rock.

I’m sure that there are good reasons for the events, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that I saw the end of a tiny tragedy.

AT&T couldn’t tell me anything about the charge. That seems odd; they apparently have the right to put something on my bill without giving me any justification. The operator did tell me how to find out who’d originated it (“google SJA Mobile”). So I did, and found SJA Mobile’s website. Interestingly absent is any useful information, like what they do, or what I could be paying for. Though they do offer a “no questions asked” refund.

Googling further becomes more interesting. There are dozens of blogs that claim that SJA Mobile provides a useful service, but none of them say what it is. Paid advertising? Dunno, it seems to me that without identifying the service you’re not going to sell much. Yet, for the same reason, they’re unlikely to be unsolicited testimonials.

The only site I found that gave me anything of interest was Skydeck’s blog, here and here. The text and comments make it pretty clear that SJA Mobile is or is involved in scamming. SJA initiated billing the blog writer after sending him the text message ”… “, with no action on his part. It seems that SJA Mobile is perpetrating cramming.

In my case, though, there was a reason behind the cramming. I was reluctant to follow SJA Mobile’s procedure to get my “no questions asked” refund, because I felt it would be implicitly legitimizing their charge. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to ask AT&T to remove the charge as disputed, when there was any possibility that it might be legitimate. So I did follow the SJA procedure, requested a refund, and texted STOP to the SJA number.

In response to the STOP, I got a text message from “ultimate-game-cheats.net” saying I was unsubscribed. I asked Simon, and he said yes, he’d given them his cell number to get help with a computer game. (Aside: never use a paid service for a computer game when GameFaqs.org has everything you’d ever need.) He said he’d been unable to get off the list, and didn’t know that it was costing us money.

Ultimate-game-cheats is not obfuscating the fact that signing up is $10/month. Not much, anyway. Certainly the “enter your cell # for the site password” is in much bigger and brighter text than the fine print, but the fine print is quite readable, It even mentions the subscription fee in two places.

Does that make the site and the charges legitimate? Well, that’s the reason I’m posting this. I don’t think so, and I think there’s a nasty near-scam going on here, abetted by AT&T and the other carriers who allow SJA Mobile billing rights.

I readily acknowledge that the charge was initiated by Simon’s providing the cell #, even though the site says that there will be a recurring $9.99 charge, that you must be 14 years or older, and that you must have your parents’ permission.

However, the company (ultimate-game-cheats) takes no steps to verify age. Yeah, it’s not an easy thing to do, but here it’s non-existent. Some sites (“adult” sites) require credit cards partly as an age verification mechanism. A cell # doesn’t even begin to imply adulthood or financial responsibility. Plenty of kids have cellphones. I’m fairly sure that a Texas court wouldn’t hold that an 11-year-old kid clicking on a link (even one that says don’t click unless you’re 14) would satisfy the legal requirement for establishing a contract.

I see no indication on the page that this is a real service. I see nowhere to enter the password that the company claims it will send. Perhaps the text message includes other access instructions – or perhaps it is entirely a scam.

Even if not, the site targets kids, encourages them to sign up, committing their parents to paying. If this isn’t exactly a scam, it’s at least misleading.

SJA Mobile has a duty to ensure that the charges that they bill to AT&T on behalf of Ultimate-game-cheats is legitimate. Clearly they do not do that.

AT&T apparently is willing to charge a customer based on zero justification for the charge from SJA Mobile. I’m sure that their contact with SJA Mobile requires that SJA authenticates its charges, but I’m not a party to that agreement, SJA doesn’t authenticate, and AT&T doesn’t police. So I’m left financially responsible for a specious charge.

Two aspects of this system particularly disturb me. First, that I don’t have a way to opt out. AT&T has no provision for me to say “don’t add third-party charges to my bill.” They’re free to add whatever they want, and I have to either pay or challenge it. My cell # has been turned into a payment ID, like a credit card, but unlike a credit card, I can’t cut it up and throw it away. I’m part of a new monetary system that I didn’t sign up for, and don’t want.

The second is a corollary to the first. Since a cell # has become a source of credit funding, any kid with a cell phone now has access to their parents’ funds. Subject to reading the bill’s details (how many parents know to do that? Or are likely to wade through every line? My bill was twelve pages) parents could well be funding all kinds of illicit activities. Possibly canceling text messaging would solve the problem – if the end provider was responsible enough to require receipt of a text message. (The “…” text would argue against that always being the case.) But texting is a given for kids these days.

Until the phone companies install a rational opt-in system for third-party charges, I have no option but to scrutinize and challenge every bill, and to warn others to do the same. Maybe I’m becoming increasingly a Luddite, but this is a payment system that I don’t want to be a part of.

Update:

The link to ultimate-game-cheats.net has changed today. Instead of the signup page that was present two days ago, there’s a page that says “new registrations are temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance.” There is a login page, with a password, which does imply that the game cheats service may be real.

• Always read a story aloud; to someone else if possible, but to yourself if not. You can hear clunky phrases more clearly. If you stumble over a sentence it might be awkwardly written, and if you run out of breath, it’s too long.

I discovered when I did this that it’s also good for focusing on details like inconsistent spacing and word / sound repetition, so it helped me make a few last-minute tweaks to the story.

• To succeed as a Speculative Fiction writer (according to Selina Rosen, and backed up by the rest of the panel) you need to be an extroverted self-promoter, visiting all the cons and selling yourself.

That’s a Bad Thing for me. I’ll never be able to speak in front of others, and I’ll never be an extrovert.

That isn’t going to stop me submitting the story, though. It should start on its rounds tomorrow. (Update: nope, it’s in the mail today.)

One question that came up several times was “How do I find a beta reader?” A beta reader being someone who’ll read and critique a piece before you send it out. I get great feedback from the critique group, but it strikes me it might be interesting to create a session on how to be a beta reader, and introduce con-goers to each other so that they can trade readings. I wouldn’t mind additional independent help on a story, and would like the chance to offer feedback. I’ll have to suggest that to the con folks for next year.

Pooks: no filk.

The one sour note for me was the commencement speaker. It just seems like it’s become obligatory to describe the world in terms of terrorism. My own opinion: that means the terrorists have won. They, not we, define our world now.

Well, UTD would never be likely to be considered a center of opposition to the establishment. Even so, to hear a student claim that terrorism is the result of the modern-day loss of compassion brought on by the information age and high-speed computing, and that video games desensitize us to violence is sadenning. If a young person is out of touch with reality, I’d prefer it to be in a creative, challenging way, not in media-fed adherence to fear.

Where was the computerized information age when Hitler exterminated six million individuals? Where was the compassion in the crusades, or the Inquisition, or in the buying and selling of human lives in the slave trade? People have always been capable of great evil, and blaming technology or lack of the One True Faith doesn’t help recognize and deal with the nature of that evil.

Meh. I need to stop whining about politics. But before I drop the subject completely, I came across a World of Warcraft image that I took as part of a humorous story a while back. I didn’t see the resemblance when I took the screenshot – someone pointed it out later in an IRC channel.

George and Laura, or “Chimp Gone Wild”

(“Laura” is my old character Erice, a warlock. “George” came in a gift-wrapped box from the WoW equivalent of Santa.)

I think one of the reasons his books work so well is that you have to suspend so much disbelief that it leaves you open for unexpectedly touching moments or drama that, if you’d consider it outside of the Discworld context, would be clumsy. “Reaper Man” and “Soul Music“, for instance, are surprisingly moving stoies.

The third Tiffany Aching book, Wintersmith, is probably the best I’ve ever seen him write. Even if it is in the teen section. While it might be being marketed as young adult, that seems due to its thirteen-year-old heroine rather than any attempt to write down to a junior market. There’s still plenty of boozing, innuendo (“Is this about sex?” Tiffany asks Nanny Ogg) and musings on what the Nac Mac Feegle wear under their kilts. If Nanny doesn’t add any verses to “The hedgehog can never be buggered”, well, she hasn’t done that in a while.

What do you need to make a man?

Iron enough to make a nail,
Lime enough to paint a wall,
Water enough to drown a dog,
Sulfur enough to stop the fleas,
Poison enough to kill a cow,
Potash enough to wash a shirt,
Gold enough to buy a bean,
Silver enough to coat a pin,
Lead enough to ballast a bird,
Phosphor enough to light the town,

Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart.

I guess.

I’ve been fooling around with WordPress for a while, so it’s far easier now for me to set up the blog than to think of a title for it. Maybe in a week or three.

For today’s comment: spent a long time wandering around Barnes and Noble. Mainly the SF section, as usual. I almost left without a book today, but saw Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett’s latest in the new releases – for teens. It makes sense, I guess, the Tiffany series is intended for young adults, but that’s not where I expect to look for Pratchett.

On a slightly more serious note: I didn’t learn of Roger Zelazny’s death until at least a year after it happened. Before I knew, I’d regularly check the Z section of any bookstore in case there was a new anthology including something I may have missed; or, better yet, a novel. I’ve never been especially pleased with the last Amber book, and had always hoped there might be just one more… but no. I was dismayed to learn that there would be no more.

Today I looked again. There’s a new edition of Amber – all ten novels in one huge paperback – and two other books. That’s it, for a writer who used to have half the shelf. I understand why, and there really is no point in continuing to sell books that everyone who’d read them already owns. But it saddens me to see a great name fade.

Everyone who has even the vaguest notion that Science Fiction can be more than high-tech adventure stores owes it to themselves to read Zelazny’s “24 views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.” It is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction ever created. And even now, only twenty years after it won a Hugo for best novella, the collections which include it are out of print.

Rogher Zelazny died of cancer in 1995. As he’d have written about one of his characters, “we are all diminished by his passing.”