Aliens in This World

Of course, the series isn’t finished, so it might not be a retcon.

I have a ton of R.M. Meluch books from the olden days on my shelves, so it makes me nothing but happy to see her making big sales for her Tour of the Merrimack series. It’s space opera making war on the conventions, while using all the fun ones. It retains her trademark gritty sf military drama and angst, while adding a lot more fun banter and a delight in messing with standard plotlines and the reader’s mind. What’s more, all three books so far (The Myriad, Wolf Star, and The Sagittarius Command) have resisted becoming formula books. So yeah, good stuff.

The major problem for me is that I just don’t believe the backstory of one of the major cultures of the series. Namely, I don’t believe in a secret society of Romans determined to retain paganism and Roman traditions that manages to last for over two thousand years. See, there’s a reason the actual Roman Empire didn’t last two thousand years, and likewise, your basic secret society. Thus, my retcon.

Once upon a time there was a secret society of Romans, sure. They probably weren’t pagans. Maybe neopagans, but most likely just Romans disgruntled about the whole nouveau Gothic nobility taking over everything. So sure, they tried to swear everybody to remember their Roman-ness, and harked back to the glories of the past instead of the Byzantine Imperial present that seemed to be subjugating them to these Gothy thugs. Later, they became a sort of genealogical society, taking pride in having older blood than all the other supposed nobles, but also adopting a lot because they kept not having enough kids. And sure, maybe their pride drove them to support learning and think of the Church as a Roman thing. But whatever. They were just doing a medieval thing really.

Comes the nineteenth century or maybe earlier, when people become willing to do much crazier stuff. The Old Roman Club gets taken over by a faction of younger folks we’ll call the Romicrucians. These guys really believe that they’re better and smarter than anybody else, and they want to take over and change stuff like the Masons and Illuminati and Rosicrucians swear they do. So they gradually tell their kids, and recruit other crazy people who will also tell their kids, that they really are the Roman Empire and worship the old gods, yada yada. Eventually, all the real Old Romans are dead or cut out of the club, and only the crazy faction survives. Despite several changes in interpretation of Romanitas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the group survives and spreads and thrives. You can always find power-hungry or mystery-haunted dupes willing to join a secret society.

Comes the twenty-first century, and the brainwashing that used to be a psychological tool used on recruits morphs into a more sf type way of doing things. The Romicrucians make their members virtuous, hardworking, militant, eager to emigrate, and believing their ideology unquestioningly, while at the same time genetically engineering them to be smart, strong, good-looking, and so forth. All the previous incarnations of the group are further covered up and forgotten.

But somewhere in the back of the smart Romans’ minds is a suspicion — that all they believe about themselves and their history is a big ol’ load of space poo. This makes them desperate to prove, to themselves and to the universe, that it is all true.

One thing I realized anew while writing out the harmony arrangement below: Celtic music needs some kind of bottom part. With bagpipes, it’s the drone. With harp, it’s the bass line being played by the other hand. With your typical Celtic band of the seventies and eighties, it was the bouzouki or the bodhran or the accordion. Even if your band is playing a tune in unison (as it usually is with Celtic music), some of the instruments should ideally have a lower and earthier tone than the others.

Nowadays, we have a lot of bands who apparently grew up listening to Celtic bands making money on New Age labels, or light jazz. Or to Solas, but without paying proper attention to the other stuff they did. So you get bands that use the hot “new” style of guitar accompaniment, but have the guitar playing a high part instead of a low part. “Plinky plinky plinky” may be pretty, but it’s not particularly useful to the song. But even “rumbly rum rum” isn’t useful, if everybody else is playing with that same tone. (Like, say, a party bar band, or a band at the Renfair pretending to be pirates.) If your band is all low tones, you need some high bits. If your band is all high, pretty and ethereal sounds, you need contrasting low sounds. (Or even higher, more ethereal sounds, I suppose.) Otherwise, you’ll sound nice for a short while, but will ultimately leave the listener feeling that something is missing, and that your music is boring.

“But what about solo a capella songs, Banshee?” you ask. “And what about solo instruments?”

In that case, your bass part is silence. (Or your high part, if you’re a bass.) Silence is the drone, the organum. Silence is your unifying accompaniment, and gives gravitas to your song.

I wrote this as an entrance song. (I think it’s better than “All Are Welcome”, but that may not be saying much. The verses are still not cohering.) The tune is a traditional Irish air, “Buachaill o’n Eirne”. I’ve tried harmonizing it for our choir, with assistance from some articles at the Wire Branch of the Clarsach Society on the music theory of old harp tunes (which have both treble and bass parts, one for each hand). All mistakes are my own, of course.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Come to the House of the Lord
Lyrics: Maureen S. O’Brien, 7/26/07-2/18/08
Insp. by: Psalm 122/121 et al
Music: “Buachaill o’n Eirne”, Irish Trad.

“Come to the house of the Lord.”
When we heard, we rejoiced.
We’ll go to the house of the Lord,
And praise You with one voice.
And now here we stand, with our feet
Through Jerusalem’s doors,
Inside her walls, Where we call
On Your Name, O Lord.

Lord, You have led us here, drawn
By Your light and Your truth.
We will go to the altar of God –
You, the joy of our youth.
We will sing praise to You, God,
Our God, saving and just.
Why should our souls be sad,
When in God we trust?

Here Justice has His high seat;
David’s House has its thrones,
And here we give thanks to Your Name,
As is law for Your own.
You are the sacrificed lamb,
And You are the High Priest,
You are the flesh and the blood
That we eat at Your feast.

We pray for the peace of this town,
for Jerusalem’s peace.
May those who love her prosper well,
On her towers be peace.
And may there be peace, now we pray,
For our fam’ly and friends;
And may blessings be on the Lord’s house,
All the grace You can send.

Phyllis D. Whitney, mystery and Gothic writer with a gift for titles that sounded like they were going to be fantasy novels (and occasionally were). Phyllis D. Whitney. You could not escape her in a library with books from the seventies. Man, I’d occasionally think with respect, she sure churns ‘em out! She wasn’t one of my favorites, but she was a dependably decent read, and apparently sold very well. I hadn’t really thought of her for years.

Phyllis D. Whitney, author of 75 books in all sorts of genres, Grand Master according to the Mystery Writers of America,  died on the Friday before Valentine’s Day. At the age of 104. No frail flower, she.

If you listen carefully to a current baby powder commercial, you will hear a chiming lullaby-like melody as the baby is invited to sleep. Problem is, it sounds like the melody isn’t a lullaby. It sounds to me like “Bonnie Dundee”!

Yes, sleep, little baby. Sleep to the sound of a cavalry march at the canter. (I’m pretty sure I suffered from a bit of auditory illusion there…. It was kinda early in the morning. Pre-coffee.)

Actually,  Johnson and Johnson has a cute little campaign going, in which they encourage people to have a nice relaxing bedtime routine with their babies. They have videos to show people how to do stuff like bathe babies and put them to bed. Heck, striking a blow for folk music, they actually have downloadable lullabyes, lyric sheets, and lullabye accompaniments  available on their website!  Not the worst idea in the world.

Seriously, I think this is a good thing.

Those Agatha Christie adaptations… ew. Honestly, what else can you say? What a waste of good actors.

This one actually stuck fairly close to the plotline. For once. However, they managed to salvage their perfect record of ickiness. Yes, they transformed a secular boarding school into a hospital run by nuns, and thus made a creepy subplot about a woman who liked a girl too much into a creepy lesbian nun subplot.

Honestly, people. Have you no shame? You take a plot by Christie about restoring justice to the world (by means of an elderly Anglican church lady virgin, no less!) and turn it into a stick to beat the Catholic Church?

Yeahhhhhh, you go on. Torque off that Latin Mass-loving Agatha Christie in the hereafter. Smooth move. Prepare to be prayed for.

Oddly enough, you will have much better luck watching the Agatha Christie anime. Despite the gratuitous appearance of Raymond’s daughter Mabel as a crossover bridge, and of her duck as comedy relief, they pretty much stick to the story.

If you Google for my parents’ home address, the little arrow points not to their house, not to the house next door, but to a house halfway down the street.

Of course, this is a vast increase on the horrors of MapQuest back in the day, which showed nonexistent streets running into our dead end street.

Seeing as they live near the Base, I suppose it could all be some kind of national defense tactic….

For those awkward moments when your intestines peek out, there is a solution.