Author: Kurtis

I never thought I’d post a tennis shoe ad on my site, but this one merits posting. It’s a lovely little video celebrating soccer in Africa.

Filed under: Mamba Point, Miscellaneous

Ely, Minnesota is one of my favorite towns in the world. Like Emerson and Thoreau, I like to observe the wilderness from the calm perch of civilization. There’s no more civilized a perch than Ely, nor more wild a wilderness than the Boundary Waters that lay beyond it: nothing but lake-riddled forest everywhere. (Here’s a good source to read more about that.) They have a wolf center up in Ely, and it’s supposedly the inspiration for the setting of Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolf books. They also have a bear center, and this is the one I’ve been watching all week. This January, close to a million people watched their live den cam to see Lily, a mama bear, before, during, and after the birth of her cub. OK, maybe that’s all a bit personal, but it’s great that so many people were able to learn about bears and feel personally connected to a bear family.

This week, following a storm and some mysterious behavior by both bears, they were separated. Hope (the cub) isn’t really old enough to go it alone. It was heartbreaking to read about Lily’s futile all-night searches. I’m a jaded enough guy, but there are still occasionally stories that make me feel like the world was an even worse place than I imagined, and that there will never again by joy in Mudville. That’s how I felt when I read that the cub was lost and Lily seemed to be forgetting about her and moving on with her ursine life.

But then, last night, in a scene reminiscent of a certain chain of events in my own neighborhood, the people up at the bear center lured Hope to a box and brought her to her mother four miles away.

Here’s that rare real-world happy ending, if you can bear to watch:

Filed under: Miscellaneous

The best-known hero of early video games turns 30 today. Because the yella fella figured large in my own transition to young adulthood, so he does in the coming-of-age of Linus Tuttle, the hero of Mamba Point. In honor, here are two short scenes from the final draft — they both made it to the book, but might have changed in copy-editing.

First, a few days into his African experience, Linus gets a wonderful surprise:

After lunch we went home and unpacked our air freight, which was some of our stuff that we needed right away like clothes and dishes. The rest of our stuff was coming later in what they called sea freight. I put everything away really quickly. Mom popped in, and I was worried she was going to see that I’d crammed all my clothes into the drawer without folding them—you could see a sleeve here and there leaking out—but she didn’t.

“We need you in the family room,” she said.

Oh, no. I followed her to the second-biggest bedroom that Mom and Dad had decided would be a family room. I didn’t know what she needed me to do—the TV was already set up, along with the VCR and the Atari.

Wait. We didn’t have an Atari. I’d begged for an Atari back home and my parents said I couldn’t have one because they didn’t want me to go blind or turn into a drooling idiot. There was one now, though—a black box about the size of an encyclopedia, and two joysticks waiting to be used. We even had two games: Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Who needed anything else? I stared at it, stunned. Video games… at home. It was absolutely the greatest thing I could imagine. I looked up and saw Mom and Dad grinning at me.

Law came in, noticed the game, and grinned. “Neat! Thanks!”

“Surprise,” Mom said with a voila gesture.

“Thanks.” I hugged her and Dad, then turned everything on so Law and I could play. I guess Mom and Dad figured moving to Africa meant we needed entertainment more than we needed vision or brains.
I went first, navigating my yellow hero through the maze, chomping dots. It was easier than the arcade version. Pac-Man was faster, and the ghosts were dumber.

“When do I get to go?” Law asked.

“When I get eaten.”

“You mean like now?” he asked, taking a swipe at my joystick.

“Knock it off.” I pulled away from him, and barely managed to make my Pac-Man turn the corner instead of sailing into the mouth of the pink ghost.

“How about now?” Law waved his arm in front of the TV.

“Jerk.” I tried to read the screen in between waves of his arm, but missed the chance to nab the apple before it disappeared.

“How about now?” Law covered my eyes from behind.

“No! Argh!” I heard the familiar downward musical spiral and double-blip of a Pac-Man biting the dust.

“You’re such a jerk.” I gave him the joystick anyway, so he could have a try.

“Nah, you go again. It’s more fun to watch you.”

I didn’t argue. I grabbed the joystick and played.

Later, Linus shares the game with some younger Liberian boys he’s befriended:

We went into the family room and I showed them how to navigate the yellow hero through the maze.

“Why do those monsters eat the lemon?” Tokie asked. I started to explain that we were only on the cherry level until I realized he thought Pac-Man was a lemon. Actually, Pac-Man did look like a lemon.

“Those monsters love to eat lemons,” I told him.

“But how come the lemon eats the monsters sometimes?”

“When he eats the power pill, he can eat the monsters.”  I showed him how it worked, waiting for the ghosts to get lined up before I steered through the power pill and got all four of them. After that, Tokie was obsessed with eating the ghosts, but couldn’t seem to time it right and kept getting chomped.

“Just eat the dots,” Gambeh told him. “The goal is to eat all the dots.” He was right. It was a rookie mistake, obsessing on the ghosts. Gambeh was better at the game, even clearing the maze once or twice. He loved the teleport chamber where Pac-Man goes off one side of the screen and comes back on the other. “Where am I?” he would ask in the split second when Pac-Man was invisible, then scroll back on to the screen. “Here I am!”

“Does the lemon never get full?” Tokie asked.

“I guess not.” It was some life, wasn’t it? Always on the run and hungry. I felt sorry for the lemon.

Filed under: Mamba Point

Filed under: Miscellaneous, Music, Movies & TV, Photos & Video

I blogged last year about Jason Kubel’s grand slam that completed a cycle against the Angels, and wondered then if it was even more exciting than the the one that capped this epic game against the Red Sox in 2006. Yesterday Jace added another memorable entrant to a pretty impressive assortment of game-winning four-run shots. Kubel knocked a pretty big monkey off of the Twins’ backs, after losing a bunch straight in the Bronx.

Of course there’s no place like New York to knock a monkey off of something.

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Somebody found this blog by googling, “mud mambo mushrooms.”  I suspect somebody did it just to have fun with me. Thanks, I’m touched. Somebody also found this blog by googling, “Scaletta waste hauling.” They must have heard about my exclusive litter box duties since my wife is pregnant. Let me tell you, it’s no picnic… even if both are sometimes invaded by ants. And somebody found the blog by googling “Mamba Point Book,” and now we are cooking with oil. Click through to the Mamba page to find out more about that. It now features its first blurb quote, from a bestselling author.

Now, on the flip side, I get google alerts for “Kurtis Scaletta” that are Italian bloggers and entertainment sources talking about Glee, a show I confess to watching. There’s a young man named Kurt on the show and since “scaletta” seems to be Italian for “playlist” (which just makes me wish Kurtis was Italian for “infinite” — rather, it is Indian for “shirts”), one supposes that those Italian Glee fans might stumble across these muddy mambas trying to figure out what songs Kurt will sing on Glee tonight. So I googled back at the problem to find out what the moppet would be singing tonight, and have learned via Vanity Fair that it’s “kind of a political song from thr 1980s.” All right, folks, you have approximately 8 hours to speculate about what that song will be. 99 Luftbalons? Relax, Don’t Do It? Nineteen? Land of Confusion? First We Take Manhattan? World Leader Pretend? Ooh, how about Everybody Wants to Rule the World?

You tell me.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: GLEE

Most links out there in the blogosphere to entries on my old blog will now redirect to their proper pages here. It’s funny how a guy can waste hours trying to do something in htaccess, finally relying on a smarter guy for help, and then a guy does something trickier in .php and does it on the first ok, second try.

:blows on fingers:

Filed under: About this Site

As I comb through old entries to fix broken internal links (mostly to images), they seem to appear as new/unread entries in the RSS feed. I don’t know how to prevent that, so I’m just going to bulldoze forth and do what I need to do. I look forward to sunnier days where I can stop self-referencing my website issues, and I do believe those days are just up around the next bend.

….and I’m done! There are probably still a few missing images and broken links, but I think I got most of them. We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussions of mud, mambas, mushrooms, books, boys, and beasts.

Filed under: About this Site

Like all political decisions, the majority is overpowered by the interested. While I seriously doubt that the serial commaists represent 13/17th of the population, they rallied and got out the ground troops. I also suspect that ACORN was involved, or (even more likely) the squirrels themselves.

But enough about that. Mud, Mambas, and Mushrooms it is. Now let’s talk about subtitles. The last blog was creatively titled, “Kurtis Scaletta,” and subtitled, “Author of Mudville,” later changing to “Author of Mudville and Mamba Point,” and could have gone on to be “Author of Mudville; Mamba Point; and Wake, ME” (correct punctuation courtesy of Bettye Smith via Facebook). Once an Oxford Semi-Colon has entered the picture, you know it’s time for a change, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s an unhealthy word to punctuation mark ratio. So let’s go back to the drafting board. What should be the subtitle of this blog?

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Steve Breeze popped into my last post and muttered something about the serial or “Oxford” comma which was, until shortly after I read that comment, missing from the blog title. It’s a bone of contention, this penultimate comma in a list of things.

For example, is it “The grocer had carrots, rutabagas, and celery,” or “The grocer had carrots, rutabagas and celery”? Which is right? Not even copyeditors agree. For me, even though I can get emotional about some punctuational issues (if the grocer has carrot’s and rutabaga’s, I will take my business elsewhere), this one is like gun control: an issue about which I am able to take sides to the satisfaction of the divided majority. I can see both sides, and am OK either way. Take the comma or leave it.

But it seems like this is a critical question that will affect the success of this blog and the fates of us all, so please weigh in. I will play the winner. Make your arguments below.

Filed under: About this Site

Welcome to Mud, Mambas and Mushrooms. This is where the bloggy part of my new fractured web presence will live, while the sort-of static pages are over at http://new.kurtisscaletta.com.

I’ve given up on my web host, and moved this blog to wordpress dot com. While this means all of the content is here, it also means that some links are broken, and maybe some images won’t show up, but the text is here, and I’m all about the text.

And though an experienced and, I think, worthy, webmaster, I am now relying on a miscellany of free or practically free web services and abandoning the idea of a central repository of stuff over which I have much control, since that control proves to be illusory.

But you know, we’ve come to accept that the Internet is a volatile and rapidly changing place, rife with expiring links and disappearing websites, plagued by hordes of unsolicited ads for Viagra (which my spell check acknowledges) and nests of rapidly-breeding malware (which my spell check does not acknowledge). Thank you for sticking with me in these churning waters and mixed metaphors.

Your humbled author and blogger,

– Kurtis

Filed under: About this Site

I have been told that .999… = 1. I don’t mean .999, but .999…, the ellipsis denoting a limitless series of nines following the decimal point. I remember somebody trying to explain this to me once. My feeling was that somewhere way at the back of the number there was a mote of a missing number, that no matter how many 9s you added to the end it still slightly defective. He said — I remember this well — he said he would explain it to me “as if I were a child.” I wasn’t a child at the time. He did some formula showing it to be so (10x – x = 9x; 9x/9 = x; do where x=.999…), but I felt like it was trickery. I’d seen a similar stunt to prove that 1=2 (never mind that one; it depends on a divide by zero error).

Nevertheless, I have come to accept that .999… = 1, because the mathematicians say so. It’s an article of faith. I recently saw mention of the fact that while many adults do know that .999… = 1, and may be able to do the mathematical computations to “prove” it, that the proofs themselves are not explanatory, they show “that” .999… = 1 in our notation, but not “why” .999…=1, which is locked up in the true meaning of infinitely repeating decimal points. The article quoted some math professor expressing frustration — that people have basically just memorized the factness of the formula, but don’t really grasp it. I imagine he loses sleep over this, that grown ups don’t get the absolute value of decimals. They insist that an infinite series is a process, their intuition is that “you keep adding nines,” but for him they are already there, all the way to the end of the universe and back. It must be a tough life, seeing all those nines when other people can’t. Even when they say “if you say so,” and accept the factology of the fact, he grimly considers that they don’t know it. Not the way he knows it.

Well, I’m part of the problem. I’ve seen and accepted the proof, but to me those nines will always be trailing along after the decimal point, trying to catch up to the numeral 1… who I’ve come to think of as glib and self-assured. Maybe it’s because I’m aware of my own perpetually dwindling non-quite-thereness. Or maybe I’m just not smart enough.

My third novel is now written and off to my editor. There is still a lot of work to be done, but also some waiting to be done, so this is where I start thinking about my next book — which will, if all goes well, be my fourth.

These books are like cats. You get the first one on a lark, the second one to be a companion to the first, the third one because they’re so cute when they’re small. The fourth one shows up unbidden on your doorstep.

Well, maybe it happens in a different order than that, but the point is, you set out thinking one or two will suffice, but soon they are milling about, underfoot and in the way, but you can’t imagine life without them… and, worse of all, the moment one emerges from wriggly kittenhood, you immediately go get a new one. The more the meowier, you think. And that’s where I’m at now.

I was going to use petfinder, but then I saw this one streaking across a rainy street. I felt a little sorry for the creature and took it in. Now it has made itself at home, and I have given it a name. It is a different sort of cat, but will probably get along with the others. I guess it is going to stay.

But I’m keeping my eye on it. The last time this happened, the cat turned out to have a tiny, mewling sequel.

There have been a couple of horrifying news stories lately about bullying, and author Carrie Jones created a Facebook page for authors against bullying, encouraging us to write our own true stories about the topic… here’s mine.

I was the new kid seven times between first and twelfth grade. In every year but one, I was the smallest boy in my class. Not only was I smart, I was a smartass. I made fun of other kids when they used words wrong or got their facts mixed up. Heck, I made fun of the teacher when she used words wrong or got her facts mixed up.

I read from big, thick books. They were nothing especially difficult, but they looked show-offy to other kids. They’d say I was faking and make me read passages from them to prove I could. Then they would say I was making it up, anyway. In fourth grade, I read The Shining. It was pretty accessible, and had a child hero I could identify with. Some other boys made me read a page out loud, and there was a bad word on it. They ran to the teacher and told her I’d said a swear word. She took the book away from me.

Kids would say my name in a mean way as they rode by me on their bikes. “Scaletta!” they would say, like it was a bad word. They’d take things from me and hold them out of reach. They’d ask me if I was going to cry, and sometimes I did.

I was almost always the last one picked for sports teams, but I understood — I was small and ineffective. Once the kid who passed on me apologized later. It was a sign of real respect, and of slowly realized social acceptance. When I got glasses, some kids tossed them back and forth over my head. When someone finally threw them back to me and I dropped them, and they broke, he was genuinely sorry.

Over time, those kids would become at least casual friends. It turned out I was fast for a short distance, and other kids would want to race me. I knew a lot of jokes. Most importantly, I was a red-blooded, straight, white, Christian, able-bodied and able-minded male. While I was different, I was still “one of them.” I occupied a space of marginal acceptability, like a small wolf from a different pack, but eventually I made my way into the hierarchy. There were lesser wolves than me, and there was prey.

Only one kid did have an especially intense hatred for me. That came in middle school. He put mean notes in my coat, calling me a racist name. I wasn’t black, but I had curly hair, and that was all he needed. I expect he rather would have had a real minority to harass, but our class didn’t have any that year. He challenged me to fights after school. He finally forced me to, and I won, thanks to guile and a patch of ice. I got him backed helplessly against the ledge of a window well, scooped up his legs and threatened to let go. He cried and begged other kids to help. None of them did. I helped him back to safety, supposing my mercy would give way to a robust new friendship. It didn’t, and no wonder. I’d humiliated him, not just because he lost, but because not one kid would team up against a weakling to help him. Now he’s the sort of guy who goes to political rallies with misspelled signs.

I’m not ashamed of having been bullied. I understand that I was spared the intense, murderous, bullying that other kids experience. A few hardships made me, and didn’t break me. I’m more liberal minded because of them, and more inclined to side with the underdog.

My shame is having ever joined in the abuse. I realized once there was a kid who, though taller than me, could be rabbit punched and tweaked without fighting back. Another time I made a racist joke in the locker room, and during the same spell, told an anti-Semitic joke on the bus, loud enough for the sole Jewish kid to hear. There was the time I joined in a round of teasing of a friend when we discovered he suffered from a weird, mostly harmless, but embarrassing medical problem, and the time I abandoned a new friend because nobody else liked her. There were a dozen time I faked a smile while my not-quite-friends savaged an overweight girl, and hundred times I tuned out their derision for the kid everyone suspected was gay. I felt powerless to make a difference, anyway, and would rather be on the side that was winning. I think about all of those incidents all the time. They’re the ones that bother me to look back on — those times that I showed my meanness and cowardice. They also made me who I am today.

If I hadn’t been small, or smart, or the new kid–or even if I’d been only two of those three–I might have a thousand of such moments, and they’d have made me into a different man. I’d be less thoughtful, less inclined to side with the victims in things. I would not be an ardent reader and writer. I’d be the one taking misspelled signs to political rallies.

Everything you do as a kid adds up to who you are as an adult. Your experiences and decisions are a column of red and black numbers. If you want to be the grown-up that you can be proud of, take the hard times in good humor. Make the hard times of others softer. Pull the bully back from the ledge.

Sometimes poetry (or any kind of writing) is just fun.

The Duck
by Ogden Nash

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.

People keep telling me it’s poetry month, mostly through their blogs. I’m looking at you, Laura. So today when I was walking to my car and saw a rather sudden — I mean, they weren’t there Friday — a sudden copse of daffodils, I couldn’t help but think of this poem.

Daffodils
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

There may be no more famous line in literature for that writerly detachment and observation than the haunting “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” but the later scene, with the poet lying on his couch, is equally important — a blissful moment of solitary reflection as the experience is considered.

So many workshops for writers tell you about adverbs and prologues; few tell you, first, you have to be a specific type of person and live and think a certain way. I’m not sure all published writers do, but I do think all great writers do. They are lonely-cloud wanderers, and have the flashing inward eye, every one.

Despite my best efforts to straighten people out on the difference between a mambo and a mamba, I still see my book referred to as Mambo Point. Instead of fighting this any more, I’ve decided to give in. Clearly there is a demand for middle grade dance novels, and I’m not one to stand in the way, or fail to cash in.

So I called my editor and asked if we could make some changes to Mamba Point (now to be entitled Mambo Point) and she agreed, admitting that she doesn’t like snakes anyway. Here is the new synopsis:

When his dad gets a job at the U.S. embassy in Liberia Cuba, twelve-year-old Linus Tuttle knows it’s his chance for a fresh start. Instead of being his typical anxious self, from now on he’ll be cooler and bolder: the new Linus.

But as soon as his family gets off the plane, they see a black mambao—one of the deadliest snakes in Africa dances in the Carribean. Linus’s parents insist mambaos are rare, but the neighborhood is called Mambao Point, and Linus is sure the venomous serpents high energy musicians are drawn to him—he can barely go outside without tripping over one. Then he hears about kasengs—and the belief that some people have a deep, mysterious connection to certain animals dance moves.

Unless Linus wants to hide in his apartment forever (drawing or playing games with the strange kid downstairs while his older brother meets girls and hangs out at the pool), he has to get over his fear of his kaseng animal dance. Soon he’s not only keeping a black mamba set of timbales in his laundry hamper; he’s also feeling braver than ever before. Is it his resolution to become the new Linus, or does his sudden confidence have something to do with his scaly new friend raucous new hobby?

From Kurtis Scaletta comes a humorous and compelling story of a boy learning about himself through unexpected friends, a fascinating place, and an extraordinary animal musical sensation.

Happy April Fools Day!

Doret’s terrific through-the-lineup interview is now complete! Here is the whole series. (With 12 ABs each, this must have been a loooong game!)

the beginning
questions 1-3
questions 4-6
questions 7-9
questions 10-12

Jim left a comment on my last post referring to the classic picture book William’s Doll by Charlotte Zolotow, about a boy who wants a doll. The ending to that book suggests that maybe he’s not a sissy (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but merely aspires to be a father. Which is funny because I remember once when I was three or four years old saying, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up: “a daddy.” Everybody laughed and I learned next time to say, “a fireman,” which led to a terrifying visit to a fire station. I may never be a fireman, but in August I’ll be a father. I’ve been practicing with puppets and pets for decades and should be ready. The baby will be a boy, and can have as many dolls and puppets as he wants.

Yesterday Nicholas Kristof — who blogged from Liberia last year — took on another interest of mine, boys as readers. The basic message: boys are more likely to fail in school, especially when it comes to reading and writing.

The part that struck me is this aside:

Some educators say that one remedy may be to encourage lowbrow, adventure or even gross-out books that disproportionately appeal to boys.

I acknowledge the problem, but am wary of this “solution” and the constant insertion of this pragmatism into the discussion. It basically says to me that boys are dumb and need to be tricked into reading with the dumb stuff that boys like. Mind you, I have nothing against an adventure story or even an occasional silly novel. It’s the idea that these are the only ways to get boys to read, and should be emphasized. To me this has a certain contempt for boys and their books. The flip side would be saying that girls must be given more books about ponies and being pretty. Few would stand for that kind of trivialization of girls and their books.

Inspired by the essay I shared last week, here’s a few tips on “How to Write for Boys.”

• Include “adventures” in the title, otherwise boys will assume it’s boring. It’s advisable to also include words like “extreme,” “extraordinary,” or “ridiculous.” How else will boys know what a romp your book is?
• There are basically two genres of chapter books for boys: breathless non-stop action and zany humor. Nothing else is interesting to boys.
• Don’t mix the two genres. Boys are confused and upset by any narrative that is slightly unconventional.
• There is one genre of picture book for boys: stories about machines and motor vehicles. Boys hate people. Try writing about trucks.
• Feature at least one monster or explosion per chapter, if writing action, or a half-dozen booger jokes, if you are writing humor. Boys have the attention spans of cats. They need the shiny light to be waved in front of them constantly or they’ll wander off.
• Since you can’t waste any time at all on character development, it helps to give characters defining names like Professor Badguy so boys understand.
• Secondary characters can be created with the simple formula: give one physical trait, plus one character trait. For example: he is tall and tells jokes. He is fat and good with computers. To boys, this is robust character development.
• Boys can’t understand moral ambiguity, so be sure that decisions faced by the hero have a clear moral distinction, such as: Save the world, or go and be wicked with the bad guys?
• If you have a measure of success, go to writers conferences and teach aspiring authors to avoid descriptions, feelings, elaborate plots, nuanced character development, prologues, adverbs, extensive dialogue or back story because boys won’t get it. They’ll just be bored, and go play video games.
• Also talk about what a shame it is that boys don’t find books important, despite everyone’s best efforts to create books that are trivial and simplistic enough for boys to read.