the best of adamcadre.ac/calendar/ When I started my Calendar page back in 2000 I didn't realize that it would wind up containing a huge proportion of my subsequent writing. So I thought I should use this space to feature some of the better articles — things that started as movie reviews and the like but wound up addressing larger topics. Boogie Nights (2010.03) 11,000 words about porn. A lecture (2010.02) Fine-tuning George Lakoff to deal with Sarah Palin. Scott Brown and the Case of the 41% Majority (2010.01) Three observations about Democratic Party dysfunction. Bad Machinery (2009.11) A story shifts its focus to children, and the audience freaks out. Election (2009.07) Tracy Flick and the origins of the Protestant work ethic. My first political donation (2008.09) Five essays about the 2008 presidential campaign. The Road to Wigan Pier (2007.12) Orange juice and the quest to be "ordinary." The Girl Who Owned a City (2007.06) Why libertarianism only works in terrible children's books. Collapse (2006.01) Debating those who don't believe that suffering is bad. The Rivals (2005.12) Why do people do what other people tell them to? New Orleans (2005.09) Hurricane Katrina touches down in the Third World. Election shrapnel (2004.11) Jesusland chooses a president in 2004. Letter to a young artist (2004.07) The joys and advantages of being an obscure writer.

Wikipedia Brown, Boy Detective (2006.11) Mr. and Mrs. Brown had one child. They called him Leroy, and so did his teachers. Everyone else in Idaville called him Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a web site giving information on all branches of knowledge. It allows visitors to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change its content. It is therefore possible for large numbers of people to create articles and update them quickly as new information becomes available. Leroy Brown's head was like Wikipedia. It was filled with facts he had learned there. He was like the entire Wikipedia web site walking around on sneakers. Simon Baron-Cohen had written a paper about him. Wikipedia Brown matches wits with Bugs Meany in The Case of the Captured Koala!

Juvenilia

They say that before you can write material of publishable quality, you have to write a million words of crap. I certainly did. But between the time I got my million words of crap out of the way and the time I produced my first work deemed worthy of publication, I wrote a number of stories that weren't up to my present standards but which I'll still sign my name to. Here are a few, plus some other odds and ends. (Click the titles to read them.)

December (1994.12) "Okay," December said. "Now, let's say that you woke up tomorrow and found that a bunch of aliens had taken over the planet. And the aliens announce that they're here to suck all the resources out of the planet and kill half the people and enslave the rest. But then they offer you a deal. They say that if you let them cut you apart and study you then they'll leave everyone alone and fly away. And they do it in the most painful way possible, they have some kind of technology that lets them cut you up without killing you so you feel every single piece being sliced off, feel every nerve of your body scream as the cold steel bites into yourflesh and—" "December!" Mom said. December looked over at Mom. "Sorry." A Christmas story narrated by Ready, Okay!'s own September Young. I generally find writing to be an immensely painstaking process, but this one came to me full-blown and I got the whole thing down in two sittings.

A Winner is You (begun 1995.06; completed 2002.08) "December" took two days to write; this one, about December's sister, took a bit over seven years. I started it in '95, got halfway into it, found that it wasn't going where I wanted it to, and shelved it. But it always kind of bugged me that I'd never finished it, so the better part of a decade later, I dusted it off and wrote the ending (and rewrote most of what was already there.) It's kind of a capstone for the Ready, Okay! universe, so if you haven't read the book this might be one to skip.

It's Okay to Eat Fish (1995.02) "So what do you do? Drink their blood? Suck it out with your fangs? Or do you just sort of drain their life energy and leave them as desiccated husks?" He tells her. She can't believe her ears. Meet Karol Carpathescu. He doesn’t drink blood or sleep in a coffin or turn into a bat, but he is a vampire — of sorts. And while he'd planned on steering well clear of the backwoods redneck helltown of Glasgow, Washington, he is about to make a detour. Part of the Angels and Other Monsters suite I wrote between college and grad school.

Sweetness and Light (1994.10) "There’s been kind of a mix-up," Sister Marjorie admitted. "Brother Ephraim took off to kill the two of you before we could tell him that the order wasn't real. So Brother Orson, who's an elder, sent me to protect you. I've had the same training Brother Ephraim has and I know what he's going to try to do." "Big deal," Decker said. "He could break you over his knee if he wanted to." Maybe," Marjorie said. "But we have two advantages. First, we have God on our side." Great," he said. "And second," she said, "Brother Ephraim is really stupid." In 1993 I was pretty aggressively recruited into a cult — this girl in a few of my classes started flirting with me quite heavily over the course of a few weeks, and then she started suggesting that I come visit her ashram and meet with her guru, and then she started insisting, and then I started getting angry messages on my answering machine when I didn't show... anyway, that experience no doubt was one of the seeds of this at times dodgy but not entirely meritless story. Another segment of Angels and Other Monsters.

Warrior Needs Food, Badly (1994.03) "Hey, isn't that a house?" Eric asked. He pointed off to the southwest. On the horizon was a silhouette of something that looked very much like a cottage. "Maybe they can put us up for the night." "All right, we're stoked," Mike said. "Or are we? This is some sort of fantasy dimension — what are the villagers like?" Eric scratched his head. "Well, villagers are usually distrustful of strangers at first," he said. "But if we can convince them that our intentions are good we should be okay." "I hardly think we should be worrying about their disposition," Jamie said. "How do we know they're even human? All we've seen are grass and trees, no animals or anything. And even if they are human, who's to say they're going to speak English?" "No problem," Mike said. "Yo hablo muy español." I wrote this for a class I was taking on highbrow fantasy lit. It is not, however, highbrow fantasy lit itself — it's pretty close to slapstick. If you're looking for depth of characterization, you might want to skip this one. (If you're looking for depth of dust, however, you've come to the right place. This would be the oldest thing on the site if not for the Barney article down below.)

Dark Marrissa (1996.10) "Patterson tells me the tower will go online tomorrow morning," Marrissa said. "Aren't you excited? I'm excited. After all, it's not every day a girl becomes omnipotent." Jay didn't say anything. She sighed. "It's almost anti-climactic, don't you think?" she said. "Here I thought I was going to have to spend the next twenty years of my life conquering the universe and now it turns out that all I have to do is start up the tower tomorrow and I'll have the universe in my back pocket." Marrissa checked her watch. "Well, time's a-wasting!" This is a story set in the Ratliffverse, and as such demands the reader do a bit of background reading — at the very least, you should read the MSTing of "A Royal Wedding" linked further down the page. This was a fairly weird project — it's set in someone else's universe, populated with someone else's characters, swipes left and right from other stories, and was written at about fifteen times the speed I usually write. But it is one of the things I was known for in my pre-IF days, so for the sake of completism, here it is. (I had Dark Marrissa #2 plotted out in my head at one point, but these days its chances of getting written look more than a little slim.)

MSTings I used to have a joke here about there being a grand total of three people on the Internet who hadn't seen Mystery Science Theater 3000... but an entire generation has come of age since I wrote that joke, so this link might need a little explanation. The premise is simple: take one movie, short story, advertisement, you name it, and let the wackiness flow forth as Mike, Tom, and Crow riff on it. The link above will take you to a site with all my MSTings.

'90s essays And a Purple Dinosaur Shall Lead Them (1993.12). Uses the Howe/Strauss theory of generations (which I've since more or less disavowed) to speculate on why Barney is so universally hated among Gen X. The 75th Word: Dreiser's Language in Sister Carrie (1996.02). I'm not going to put every paper I ever wrote in grad school up on my site, but this one came up in passing in a Calendar article so I figured I might as well link it here. Trajectories of Fascism: the fiction of Nazi triumph (1996.12). This one is actually pretty interesting. Freeway (1999.03). A little piece I wrote for Here Magazine after one too many incidents of being stuck on a freeway where the cars just weren't moving. The frightening thing is, after I wrote this I moved to a metro area with even worse traffic. Eeeagh.

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