Zeborah

Sure, it looks happy enough as it bobs towards you, beak open in a smile and eyes a-twinkle as if to say, "Isn't this fun?"

But then it turns — not of its own volition, but caught in the same eddies that govern the suds and drowned midges. Slowly it turns, and its beak still seems to smile, but its eyes look at you sideways now, almost pleadingly. It keeps bobbing as it turns; it keeps staring ahead with dead, dead eyes — and then you see it. A single tear: a tear you never saw fall, but there it quivers on the edge of that unmoving beak as the currents of the bathtub remorsely spin your rubber ducky away from you.

You may turn it back to face you; you may see it smile again. But you'll always remember. You'll always remember.

It may not be quite worth quitting my day job just yet, but so far so somewhat successful!

Late last year I ate a supermarket rockmelon and, on a whim, planted some of the seeds from it. (I do this from time to time with various supermarket foods. The roots from spring onions are very prolific. Mandarin and persimmon seeds both turn into small trees, but it may be some more years before I find out whether or not they'll ever fruit.)

To my delight, the seeds sprouted. I gave a couple to a sibling (who planted them in an enclosed patch which was promptly intruded upon and the seedlings nommed by an anonymous animal) and planted a couple out in my own garden. One got smothered by weeds I think. The other started putting out little yellow flowers, similar to other cucurbit flowers but smaller and a little paler.

And then I noticed a baby melon. Now I am familiar with the ways of cucurbits (particularly tricksy pumpkins) and fully expected this to almost immediately be reabsorbed by the plant. But instead it grew. And grew. And...

Well, look, it was March by now so it didn't grow a lot. It was just surprising that it grew at all. I figured I'd leave it on the wee vine for as long as I could and then see what could be salvaged.

Cyclone Cook struck (much attenuated in Christchurch, but still very wet) and when I went out to inspect the garden I discovered the melon was scratched - I suspect an animal, exacerbated by rain. There wasn't much sign of leaves left to help it grow so I called this as good as it was going to get and brought it inside.



And cut it open and - it was nearly ripe!



Obviously there wasn't nearly as much flesh was you'd expect from a rockmelon, but it proved perfectly edible. I scooped it out like I would a kiwifruit or tamarillo - there was about as much of it as one of those too. :-)



Next season I'll plant some of the seeds I reserved from the supermarket rockmelon earlier in the season and see if I can grow a full-size melon - or two. :-)

Of course I'm not a polsci expert so this may be old news or it may be bunk or it may be both. But my theory goes:

Every possible political/economic system has its strengths and its weaknesses, its virtues and vices. They're each good for some things, terrible for others. This includes capitalism, and communism, and totalitarianism. (I don't say that they each have equal proportions of bad and good.)

So a pure capitalist society can't be perfect. No more a pure communist society, no more any society that's purely one system because humans are too complicated for any one solution to cover all the problems.

If you try to solve all the problems with one system, things start to fall apart (kind of like now). At some point people look for a new system. When things fall apart enough, people actually try to implement it, and it does really well at solving the problems with the first system. So they idealise it: this is progress, this system is our future.

The problem is that part of the reason it works so well is that the old system is still solving a lot of problems too.

Capitalism is fantastic! Competition! Efficiency! Choice! Opportunity! But those things only work to any extent for as long as we retain the old-fashioned safety nets of social responsibility. When we pursue capitalism as if it can solve every problem, cracks appear and people fall through them.

Whatever the solution after capitalism, I bet it will be eventually be the same. But if it was possible to find that sweet spot in the transition period and -- not stop there. A two-solution system is hardly perfect either. But if we could, instead of racing forward past that transtion point into a new one-solution system, hover there and reach sideways to add a third, and fourth, and fifth solution into the system, getting a happy medium of systems without getting all competitive about the ideologies....

(Except maybe totalitarianism. Certainly a very little totalitarianism goes a very very long way.)

This is about to make it sound like I'm a gardener. I'm not a gardener, I just suffer from an abundance of space so I put things in the ground and water them maybe once if they're lucky, and some of them die and some of them sit there resentfully and some of them make me free food and some of them make me free food and then make more of themselves. I call this "Darwinian gardening".


Silverbeet: I hope you like silverbeet because you're going to be seeing a lot of me around.

Asparagus: Eat me!

Spring onions: o/~ You cut me down, I spring up again, you're never gonna get me down o/~

Button mushroom: Surprise, I'm a mushroom!

Poppies: We resemble that scene in the Wizard of Oz.

Strawberries: Hi I made you a strawberries.

Silverbeet: What colour do you like do you like green or yellow or red or pink or orange or pale green or more red or-- No, can't do silver, how about orange or green or dark green or--

Pumpkin: I have huge flowers.

Bok choy: Slugs enjoy me.

Lettuce: Earwigs are my friends.

Poppies: Here have more seeds than you could ever use in muffins in a year.

Strawberries: More strawberries?

Celery: I will take two years to grow and taste terrible but it's the thought that counts, right?

Silverbeet: Or yellow-green or red-orange or orange-pink or green-red or--

Pumpkin: So many flowers.

Raspberries: Ugh, here are 14 raspberries I suppose.

Plums: Are you ready for plums? WHOOMPH!

Strawberries: Hi again it's me, strawberries.

Zucchinis: Would you like a zucchini? Haha it's a marrow now. Enjoy your four marrows while I grow more marrows.

Mandarin tree: You grew me from a seed from a supermarket mandarin, what did you expect, flowers?

Lemon tree: All my flowers fell off.

Strawberries: Look here are more strawberries.

Silverbeet: I'm going to spend three months slowly going to seed now.

Pumpkin: All the flowers.

Grapes: Btw I decided to make grapes two months early this year, you probably didn't notice them hidden under the leaves. Oh look the birds ate them all, what're you gonna do.

Yellow zucchinis: Would you like a tiny yellow zucchini or shall I just shrivel up, yeah I think I'll do that.

Pumpkin: I guess I can make one pumpkin. Also more flowers!

Mystery cucurbit: Spherical cucumber, spherical pumpkin, who knows? The important thing is that I'm really big!

Peaches: Hey the peaches are ripe now, also turning mouldy, why didn't you pick them in the three seconds they were perfect?

Lettuce: I'm going to look like a dandelion as I go to seed.

Bok choy: I'm going to emit a secret call to aphids worldwide to come and swarm my seed pods.

Silverbeet: I've made a million seeds and every single one of them will be a new silverbeet, I think you'll enjoy their colours.

Strawberries: Continuing to grow strawberries.

I originally made this stool in woodwork class about 26 years ago. I got the fabric from Mum, and I remember her pointing out ruefully that I used the wrong side of it. I disagreed: whatever the manufacturer had intended, I much preferred it this way out.

26 years later the fabric has faded and worn and frayed. And then it got in the way of my cat dealing with an upset stomach and I tried cleaning it, but well. So before I went to shop for new fabric I asked Mum if, by any chance, she still had any of that fabric.

My family is a family of hoarders. I really shouldn't have doubted.

So I unscrewed the base, pried out the staples holding the old fabric on, and on my next visit to my parents used Dad's staplegun to affix the new fabric. (I even managed to ward off Dad's attempts to Help. It wasn't that hard.) Then just put the screws back in.

Not that hard, but stunning results:

Pictured is the stool with its new fabric, and on the left the faded old fabric for comparison (its corner turned over to show the "correct" side). That should do me for another quarter century, and there's still plenty of fabric left over for when that time comes.

I go through phases. There are Reading All the Things phases, and Writing Every Spare Half Minute phases, and Sewing Sewing Sewing phases and Teaching Myself Latin Yes Again I'm Using A Different Textbook This Time phases.

I recently found myself in a lull between phases but it's important for me to keep achieving things or I start feeling guilty for being useless and then I get the blahs. I find it easier to prevent the blahs than to get out of the blahs so try to pay attention when I feel the urge to sit on my couch and read fanfic for too many days on end. Fortunately they don't need to be spectacular achievements: doing the dishes often works.

This most recent lull has lasted longer than usual though so although I've read/written/coded almost nothing in my spare time for weeks, I have:

• cleaned and tidied like my entire house. Not actually my entire house, the spare room is turning into storage and there are Certain Cupboards, but definitely like my entire house. (Much of this was achieved while watching Star Trek Next Generation on the laptop or I'd have been super bored.) The floor is cleared and cleaned! Mopped even!


• done so much gardening. Spring is awesome, you put seeds in the ground and they start growing food! (I have asparagus and lettuce and celery and silver beet and spring onions, and am working on courgettes and pumpkins and tomatoes and bok choy and lemons and strawberries.) On the downside, other things propagate themselves by root and next minute you've got a forest of plum shoots and ivy. Over the last couple of weekends I've been sawing down and rooting up eight years' worth of plum-and-ivy growth. The ivy goes into the green bin to be dealt with Elsewhere, the plum growth gets cut up to as much as possible go back on the garden. The parts I've achieved look awesomely tidy!


• sewed the handle for a carrybag back on! This is an awesome grocery shopping-sized rugged zebra-pattern bag which I've had for ages and the handles broke once but Mum fixed them, and then I carried too much in it and it's been sitting around broken for possibly years and now I can use it again!


• started going to a regular "speaking Māori" date with some once-strangers! My first week I started off all "What is kupu how do I reo???" and then after an hour I was talking to them about my Master of Library Studies research project. Really badly but communication was happening! Similarly today actually (ended up talking about my current research into open access and conference papers). I need to learn more kupu. Also more grammar but especially more kupu. I might start writing a diary.


• invented a dessert. I'm working on the name but something like "Jellytip slice" / "Jellytip cupcakes". First you make a base out of biscuit crumbs and butter. Cool it. Separately make jelly but with half the water, and cool that until it's starting to set. If you don't cool it enough then when you pour the jelly on top of the base, the jelly will sink in and the biscuit will float up and it'll still be delicious but it won't be what you wanted. Then you put them back in the fridge. When completely set, you melt chocolate and spoon a thin layer on top of the jelly. This is the part I was most nervous of failing but it's really easy; don't dawdle about smoothing it out but you're not really on the clock even. Then back in the fridge until dessert time. Cut up / remove from muffin cups and serve with vanilla icecream. My friends approved of it last night. Their 4.5 year old son refused to eat anything but the icecream but that's normal for him and meant more for us.

I am now about to go to bed on time so while I'm sleeping it's your turn: in what way have you been awesome recently?

or,
Forget your goddamn hoverboard — where's my utopia?

Every now and then someone writes some screed that seems to presuppose that science-fiction began with Star Trek or Campbell and that the movement to include social themes is destroying the genre. This is a patent nonsense: firstly because the genre is flourishing; secondly because social themes were always part of those stories; and thirdly because Campbell and Star Trek were mere johnny-come-latelies to a centuries' long list of illustrious foremothers.

But the fake geek guys don't actually care about the history of the genre. All they care about is what they read and saw when they were growing up. That's why the catch cry among the current generation is "Where's my hoverboard?" They saw Back to the Future Part II, they imprinted on the hoverboard like a newborn chick on its mother and, ever since, that piece of cheap technology is all they want of the future.

What this doesn't take into account is that hoverboards don't come from nowhere. Someone, or more likely some team of people, has to create them. Back to the Future Part II has no interest in exploring this. It's not the kind of story that delves into social themes; it's the kind of story that knocks a woman unconscious and leaves her in the alley to keep her from interfering in the men's adventure. So it simply has our white male hero steal the hoverboard from a native of the time period and proceed to trash it.

Star Trek, though it was (self-)consciously interested in social themes and depicted the future as a utopia, wasn't much more forthcoming on how its technology or that utopia developed. Which came first, the replicator or the society with no need for money? Zefram's warp drive seems necessary to meet the Vulcans and enable humanity's next step of societal 'evolution'. It's never spelled out and there are a few counterpoints — the Prime Directive at least seems to recognise that technology isn't a panacea — but by and large the general impression, imbibed by the generation raised on the show(s), is that if we get the technology right, society will fall into place.

This isn't entirely unfounded: technology can greatly improve quality of life. Birth control, immunisations, water filtration, solar power and cellphones have, together and severally, incredible transformative power. But it's not the whole story. We still need to figure out how to get our hoverboard.

And this is something that the ovular works of science-fiction took an intense interest in. Whether their utopias were reached by the imagination, a polar vortex, a dream, or time travel, they didn't want to just revel in cool technology (although they did that) or the fantastic adventures it enabled (though they did that too). They wanted to know How do we in the present get some of this? And the answers were based in social justice.

Suffrage, says The Blazing World. Education, an end to early marriage, and keeping men secluded in mardana, says Sultana's Dream. Physical and mental training for women, suffrage, prostitution reform, and farming, says Men's Rights. Free and universal education, class equality, parthenogenesis, and eugenics, says Mizora: a Prophecy.

Yes, eugenics; no, these authors were not perfect. (None of us are: we can but keep striving for it.) But they were right about extending education. The more people we educate, the more people can contribute to advancement of society, knowledge, and technology. Like science-fiction, computing was literally founded by women, and we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today without the integral contributions of LGBT people, of people of colour, of people with disabilities.

But our society doesn't make it easy for any of these people. In the news recently have been the stories of women who left astrophysics because a prominent lecturer at their university harassed them and countless others for years with impunity. The same happens in science-fiction fandom. It happens in computing. And it happens in engineering. People who don't meet the cis-het white male standard get chased, sidelined, and ignored out of the field.

So where's our hoverboard? Let me tell you: it was supposed to be created by a team of engineers who met at a conference and discovered a shared passion and a mutually complementary set of skills. But in our timeline, none of these people are in the field any more. Maybe they got shot at the École Polytechnique. Maybe they got arrested for building a clock. Long story short, if we want a hoverboard we're going to have to take our DeLorean 30 years back in time and fix whatever went wrong.

No DeLorean time machine? Well, in that case maybe we'll just have to settle for fixing the things that are still going wrong in the present.

So first we need to build our social justice utopia and then we'll get our hoverboard. And a lot more besides.

Patches of high pressure get trapped over Australia for a long time. When they're finally released they zip south-east over the Tasman gathering moisture; hit the Southern Alps and rise, dropping all the moisture on the West Coast; then roar across the Canterbury Plains picking up heat, dryness, and grass pollen. This tends to make people grumpy.

Tuesday night a particularly strong one rolled in and in subsequent days I found:

1. Summer: we didn't get spring this year, just a short summer, then second autumn (we didn't really get winter this year either), and now summer again. It was as hot on Wednesday as many of the warmer days of midsummer.


2. A large green lemon: right in the middle of my lawn.


3. All the straggly birch branches: the neighbours have a birch. I hate it because every time the wind blows, its branches end up littering my lawn. These aren't like boughs, they're twig-thin but make up for it in length, perfect to hide in the grass and screw up the lawn mower. I've never seen so many on my lawn as I did on Wednesday.


4. A rubber door mat: I took it to the neighbours but they disclaimed all knowledge. Currently it's hanging over my front fence in case someone recognises it but I may have to bin it.


5. A fledgeling: at first I thought it was very dead. I turned it over with a stick and saw its chest moving rhythmically. It was, however, in fact very dead. I turned it back over with the same stick.

The other yicky thing in my garden at the moment (that was not however brought by the wind) is the warm slime that my huge pile of lawn clippings is turning into. Fantastic mulch. Such slime.

Less disgusting things include asparagus, lettuces, and all the silverbeet. I also detect tiny baby plums, and various other fruiting bodies are putting forth preparatory buds and leaves.