Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.
Todd Zeile: Pete's been chasing breaking balls My brain: don't go chasing breaking balls, stick to the sliders and the fastballs you're used to *facepalm*
The temperature dropped outside. It's now in the 70s. As Breaking Bad put it - night and day outside today.
At work, I ran into a neighbor in the lobby of my building (it's all Crazy Org).
He saw me, first. Told me this was his last day - he was retiring. (I honestly thought he was retired. He is definitely older than me.) We pass all the time in the laundry room and elevator - he lives across the hall from me with his family. He has a dog, and a neurodivergent son, who I think has either Touretts or Ausbergers?
Apparently he was a legal investigator for one of the agencies in Crazy Org since roughly 1993. I was somewhat envious - it sounded more interesting than editing legal documents and financial analysis and negotiations. I'm admittedly bored and frustrated at the moment. It's making me cranky? Well that and struggling with sleep, lingering chest congestion, and brain fog.
Below is a photo of Crazy Org today, standing tall against a gray sky.
It was bound to happen - that I'd run into a neighbor as they are retiring, considering Crazy Org employs over 75,000 New Yorkers.
I took a walk at lunch - it was mild, pleasant even, and overcast - also the last day of school in New York, apparently, so not that many tourists wandering about mucking up the works. Or many bikes for that matter.
And I saw a wild turkey in Battery City Park. Breaking Bad and I decided that the turkey probably escaped from Staten Island via the Ferry.
Other than that the day was slow. So slow, I worked on my novel, played with spreadsheets, and played on my phone. Art History Major is off to see her family in Ohio.
***
Some good news?
The Senate Parliamentarian managed to take a hatchet to the Big Shitty Bill. Apparently you can't just add everything you like to a reconciliation bill which is meant to balance the government's budget. It's basically an accounting bill - that gets quickly passed because it's needed to balance a budget. They tried to add a bunch of stuff that had zip to do with that to the bill, which is in violation of the Senate's rules.
As one commentator aptly put it - adding the things the Republicans did to the Bill would be akin to balancing your household budget and adding a fancy new car for yourself.
For those who have raised valid concern following the Parliamentarian rulings knocking out some of the worst aspects of the GOP’s budget bill, Thune has reiterated no overruling.
***
R.I.P Bill Moyers
"Legendary journalist Bill Moyers has died at age 91. Moyers was the former White House press secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and leaves behind a distinguished legacy in American journalism. Over five decades, he became known for his in-depth interviews and thoughtful documentaries on programs such as Bill Moyers Journal and Now with Bill Moyers. A champion of public broadcasting, Moyers received more than 30 Emmy Awards, nine Peabody Awards, and the National Humanities Medal for his contributions to civic discourse. Rest in peace, Bill."
Also: Comicsrss got a cease and desist from Gocomics, so now all my gocomics feeds are borked. I should see if I can find those comics hosted somewhere else and get their RSS feeds, but ugh.
The judge's ruling totally ignores that people are using AI to write new books "in the style of" famous authors. Which is harming the authors by essentially selling copies of their style of writing.
A (female) coworker shared this really interesting article about “glue work” in technical roles. It’s about who does the important, but non-coding work that makes software projects succeed. And about how doing too much “glue work” can siderail a promising technical career, because while it’s important work, it’s not the sort of work that gets people promoted.
And not surprisingly, it’s the sort of work that women in tech end up doing a lot of the time.
I read this article about volunteering on hbr.org. It showed that, when there is non-promotable work to be done, women volunteer to do it 48% more often than men.
But they also found that men volunteered less because if they waited, they knew that a woman would volunteer. In all male groups, they had no trouble getting volunteers. If there were no women there, men volunteered just fine.
The even more interesting part was that, when managers were asked to choose someone to do thankless work, they asked women 44% more than they asked men.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
He's the patron saint of gardeners, and also taxi drivers (unofficially). See, an early and popular cab stand was at Hôtel de Saint Fiacre in Paris, and the carriages themselves began to be called fiacres, and it just spiraled from there.
What makes this even stranger is that he's an Irish saint.
I have been working on sporadically remembering the 100ships table since 2022, and today I felt like making a few more shippy icons.
Here they are:
#14 – Navy
#16 – Neon
#52 – Salt
#72 – Desert
#75 – Buff
I realize that Ody3 aren't really in the navy, but I feel like cruise ship / navy, close enough. I really wanted to have an icon of them in their navy blue uniforms, but didn't have a good cap. :/ I made some Spock icons for your_favourites today and while I was at it, made two more for the table. And the remaining two are Murderbot and the movie "Good Luck To You, Leo Grande".
When strangers meet on the road, can lives change? What if those strangers are something other than just strangers? With Smoke on the Wind, author Kelli Estes has a chance encounter for the ages… in more ways than one.
KELLI ESTES:
When I started writing my novel, Smoke on the Wind, I thought it would be just like my last two: a dual timeline where the present-day protagonist learns about history taking place in the historical storyline and it changes her life in some way. But then, wouldn’t you know it, my historical protagonist ends up seeing my present-day characters walking past her on the road and her journey alters because of it.
Wait. What? I reached for the delete key but then stopped. What if I left that in? What if she – a woman in 1801 Scotland – really does see a woman and her son from 2025? What would that mean to her? What would that mean to the story?
Now, before we go any further, let me explain that I do not write science-fiction or fantasy. I write historical fiction, dual narrative, sometimes referred to as women’s fiction. We in this genre tend to stick to historical facts and realism. Readers will light our inboxes on fire if we alter history or get too, as one reader put it, “woo-woo.” (She was referring to a harbor seal that keeps reappearing to my character in a previous novel. Something tells me she really won’t like what’s happening in Smoke on the Wind!)
But, reservations aside, the idea felt exciting. And, even more, it felt possible. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen ghosts. I’ve recalled past life memories. I’ve seen movement out of the corner of my eye when no one was there and known I was seeing the lingering energy of someone who’d been there before me.
Even more, this book is set in Scotland, a place that feels mysterious and magical, where generations of people believed that Fairy Folk helped keep their livestock safe and peering through a hole in a stone could show you the future. When I’m in Scotland walking the hills and glens, especially when I know the history of what once occurred on that land, I can feel the spirits of the people who came before me as though they are standing right beside me. In other words, the veil is thin in Scotland and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find myself touching a standing stone and traveling back in time or turning a corner and bumping into someone who’d lived three hundred years in the past.
Smoke on the Wind is set on Scotland’s most popular long-distance hiking trail, the West Highland Way. It is dual timeline meaning that there is a historical story interwoven with a present-day story and, together, they address themes such as identity, what makes a home, and the bond between mothers and sons. Because both stories occupy the same geographic space, they rub up against each other even though they are separated by over 200 years.
My present-day character, Keaka, learns about the historical character’s life which influences the trajectory of her own life. But, also, my historical character, Sorcha, sees glimpses of Keaka, which in turn, affects her life and the decisions she makes. I stuck to the facts of history – the Highland Clearances and Scotland in 1801 – but I allowed a bit of magic to come through, and I think the story works as a result. After all, we don’t really know if our own decisions are being influenced by whispers from the past, or even from the future.
As I wrote, I intended to stick with vague connections between the two women that could easily be explained away – a glimpse here and there, a whispered voice on the wind, a carving on a stone. But then I reached a scene near the midpoint of the story when, suddenly, the two women are standing face-to-face. I won’t spoil the book, so I’ll leave this vague and simply say that it’s not time-travel, but the women do see each other and communicate. I feel excited every time I think back to that scene because it feels so possible to me. Surely if I just squint hard enough, someone from another time period will appear to me, right?
It’s that sense of possibility that makes me love this story so much. Well, that and all the other things woven through the story that I equally love – the Highland Clearances, moms and sons, long-distance hiking, slow travel, visiting historic sites and feeling the weight still present, personal reinvention, the Scottish Gaelic language. Smoke on the Wind blurs time just enough that all things seem possible. History is relevant to our lives today, but maybe we’re relevant to it, too.
Oh, hey, there is an ARC giveaway of The Shattering Peace (my upcoming novel in the Old Man's War universe) happening on Goodreads, through July 7. If you want to get in on the action, go here:www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho…
As far as musical biopics go, they tend to be more of a miss than a win in many cases, with the plus side that at least you, potential watcher, get to listen to some good music even if the script fails. There are exceptions, i.e. films where both the music is good and the film doesn’t feel like a visualized wikipedia entry, for example, Love & Mercy, which escapes the formula by picking two distinctly different and important eras of Brian Wilson’s life instead of his whole life, with 1960s Brian on the verge of creating his masterpiece and having a mental breakdown played by Paul Dano and 1980s Brian, in the power of a ruthless exploitative doctor but about to freed via encountering his second wife, by John Cusack. The performances are great, the different eras are poignantly commenting on each other, and even were Brian Wilson a fictional character, the film would be worth watching. If Love & Mercy wins for originality with the template, Walk the Line (about Johnny Cash) wins for doing the formula expertly, in fact so well it became endlessly copied and parodied thereafter. James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line to a lot of commercial and critical success back in the day, waited for near two decades before going near another musical biopic again, but he did last year, resulting in A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, which courtesy of the Mouse channel I have now watched.
If the first of my reviews in the May 2025 issue of Locus was a bit of a downer, the second now comes along to offer a bit of consolation. A Letter From the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall completes the duology begun in last year's A Letter to the Luminous Deep. Set among a society of scientists and academics who live on islands and atolls on a water planet, the two novels are both an
Read Finding Hester by Erin Edwards, about the making of the musical Operation Mincemeat, the group of fans whose crowdsourced research discovered that the MI5 secretary identified as Hester Leggett in Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account of Operation Mincemeat (and subsequent adaptations, including the musical) was actually named Hester Leggatt, and her life story that they uncovered, as well as biographical details about the other real-life figures featured in the musical. (In one particularly charming note: Ewen Montagu's descendants are fans of the musical, with one of them actually participating in the fan Discord that hosted the #FindingHester research efforts.) This is a love letter to online fandom at its best - finding people to collaborate with on a passion project - and to archival research, and a delightful tribute to one of history's proverbial forgotten well-behaved women. ( Is it still a spoiler if it's real life? )
Made some progress in Caroline Fraser's Murderland, which continues to be less focused on serial killers of the 1970s Pacific Northwest than I had expected; instead, the most recent chapter I finished touched on Dune (which I've also been neglecting), the Vietnam War, and Fraser's childhood daydreams about killing her abusive father. So, yeah, still pretty grim and intense.
I was traveling again for much of last week which meant, again, it was time to work through an emergency paperback to see if it was discardable. And, indeed, it was! And you would think that reading and discarding one bad book on my travels, dayenu, would have been enough -- but then my friend brought me to books4free, where I could not resist the temptation to pick up another emergency gothic. And, lo and behold, this book turned out to be even worse, and was discarded before the trip was out!
The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. ( spoilers )
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
That means child care costs are rivaling home costs as the top line item in most family budgets. In 45 states and Washington, D.C., child care for two kids costs more than a mortgage. In 49 states and D.C., child care for two surpasses what families pay in rent.
For years, the list of states where parents are likely to pay more for an infant’s care than higher education has been growing. According to Child Care Aware, the cost of center-based infant care exceeds the cost of in-state college tuition in 41 states now. The organization uses three methodologies to arrive at its average, looking at price, supply of child care providers and the number of child care spots, pooling data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., to arrive at its annual price analysis.
I keep seeing stories about how the younger generations aren’t having children, and it totally makes sense to me. Who can afford it? Especially when someone recently posted on Facebook that half of America makes $35K or less a year (that’s $16 an hour full time), I totally get why the younger generations aren’t having kids.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helloladies in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ladybusiness - Sidetracks - June 26, 2025![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
kalinaratumblr_feed - Younger Scott, Jean and spooky phoenix
