Dawn at the bottom of the year.

Two daughters! With the scary Santa robot.

Imagine writing or reading a blog on Christmas day. Electronic sharing. What if your TV could see you, and show your images to random viewers? In my novel Wetware (Avon, 1997), I describe a future Christmas morning like this Louisville, Kentucky, featuring a daughter named Della just returned from the colony on the Moon.

***

When Della woke up it was midmorning. Christmas! So what. Without her two sisters Ruby and Sude here, it didn’t mean a thing. Closing her eyes, Della could almost hear their excited yelling — and she realized she was hearing the vizzy. Her parents were downstairs watching the vizzy on Christmas morning. God. She went ot he bathroom and vomited, and then she put on her flexiskeleton and got dressed.

“Della?” cried her mother when Della appeared. “Now you see what we do on Christmas with no babies.” There was an empty glass by her chair. The vizzy screen showed an unfamiliar family opening presents around their tree. Mom touched the screen and a different family appeared, then another and another.

“We’ve gotten in the habit,” explained Dad with a little shrug. “Every year lots of people leave their sets on, and whoever wants to can share in. So no one’s lonely. We’re so glad to have a real child here.” He took her by the shoulders and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Little Della. Flesh of our flesh.”

“Come, dear,” said Mom. “Open your presents. We only had time to get two, but they’re right here in front of the vizzy in case anyone’s sharing in with us.”

It felt silly but nice sitting down in front of the vizzy — there were some excited children on the screen just then, and it was almost like having noisy little Ruby and Sude at her side.

***

[If you want to read the rest of my novel, don’t accidentally get the wrong Wetware — some guy ripped off my title for a completely different book in 2002, meaning that there is a bogus Wetware in the marketplace. My Wetware is out of print just now, although used Wetware copies can be found.]

***

Merry Christmas!

Brian Silverman sends a link to Mark Owen's amazing pages on the Wireworld cellular automaton .

Christmas gaining momentum here. I went skating in San Ho again with one of the kids. The PA system was playing “Octopus's Garden” from Abbey Road and I was happy.

The other day some of us hiked up onto Saint Joseph's Hill behind the Jesuit residence. We call the hill in this picture Donkey Hill, as usually there's a pair of donkeys living there. I'm always happily amazed at finding such a rural-looking corner within walking distance of my home, here on the banks of Route 17.

This is part of a really big eucalyptus tree. I love when trees have wrinkles as if they were soft flesh.

I had a line about this in my novel White Light :

“I stood under a big twisting tree, a beech with smooth gray hide made smoother by the rain running down it, tucks and puckers in the flesh, doughy on its own time-scale.”

There's a nice article about my artist friend Dick Termes in Science News

As I understand it, Termes's painting method consists of getting a spherical canvas, standing in front of it, and painting onto the canvas what you see on the other side of the sphere, in front of you. Termes does not work by painting what is behind him onto the sphere, all the while looking over his shoulder. He paints what is in front of him. Once he has finished a patch corresponding to what is in front of him, how does he add what is, say, to the left of the patch in front of him? He moves around the sphere to the right a little so that he is now looking directly at the area that was formerly to the left. And he rotates the sphere to the right so as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to central projection of the world onto the inner surface of the sphere, followed by eversion. By eversion I mean this: turn the sphere inside out. This way the correctly projected image which was visible from the inside is now visible from the outside.

I went to visit Dick when I was working on Saucer Wisdom in 1997. The painting of mine shown above depicts Frank Shook, Rudy, and an alien. Recalling this, I just posted my Saucer Wisdom notes, a cool 50,000 words of PDF for your reading pleasure.

Here's a picture of my friend Greg Gibson “being” my Saucer Wisdom hero Frank Shook.

Down into Los Gatos for a spot of Xmas shopping. Lots of lines, as in the P. O., but it’s somehow soothing to be part of the hive mind, to be sharing common activity.

When I first moved to California and walked around Los Gatos in December, I was amazed. I still am, kind of. The first year I was here my father-in-law bought me a surfboard!

The ultra-commercial artist Thomas Kinkade lives near here and has painted a couple of Los Gatos scenes, one near this spot. Kind of a nice picture, actually. Available in spime form, in small and large sizes, signed and unsigned, with a variety of frames.

One store had a kind of terrifying Santa Claus robot who sings and dances if you get close to him. “Ho ho ho, spare change?” Is this the 21st Century, or what? Like Bender from Futurama.

My head is warped by the shop windows.