Happy New Year. In terms of prime factors,

2207 = 3 * 3 * 223. Lots of 2’s and 3’s, which I like.

On Sunday, January 7, 2007, I’ll be live on the radio, from 4 PM to 5 PM in the afternoon, on the Billy Sunshine Show out of Sand City, California (near Monterey), KRXA 540 AM; note that you can listen to the show online using a link on their site. It’s a call-in show, so if you have time on your hands Sunday afternoon, phone in a question.

I got one more story for Flurb #2, the communistic “Revolution Time,” by kibbutznik and young SF phenom, Lavie Tidhar.

On Christmas Eve, the Sunday L. A. Times ran a full-page review of my novel Mathematicians in Love and my story anthology Mad Professor. And the Barnes and Noble SF newsletter lists Mathematicians in Love as one of the top ten novels of the year.

Performing seal that I am, I wrote an answer for John Brockman's annual EDGE question, “What Are You Optimistic About?” I wasn't feeling all that optimistic that day, but I hoaxingly pushed the ideas from my novel Postsingular, and that made me optimistic after all.

I’ve been away from the blog because we were in New York City visiting daughter Georgia, son-in-law Courtney and granddaughter Althea. It was lovely to be with them. It's a little hard to believe I'm now the visiting grandparent category! Sliding down the hill…

It's so great to see the new ones coming up! Althea's favorite present was a second stuffed penguin, a “big peng” to go with her well-worn “little peng.”

When I got home, I got into crunch mode on a short story called “Hormiga Canyon” that I’ve been writing with Bruce Sterling. I think it’s gonna turn out well, and it’s pretty long. According to the official SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America!) categories, it’s not a short story, it’s a novelette:

Short Story — 7,500 words or fewer

Novelette — 7,500 – 17,500 words

Novella — 17,500 – 40,000 words

Novel — 40,000 words or more

I always laugh over that word “novelette,” reminds me of the old Rowan and Martin Laugh-In show and they’d have this foppy, drunk-seeming guy called Big Al pretending to be a newscaster, and he’d introduce some segments of his fake newscast by picking up a little bell and tinkling it and saying, “Featurette!”

Our novelette is about giant ants, something I'd always wanted to write about, ever since the movie Them and the Blondie song, “The Attack of the Giant Ants.”

Here’s a cloud seen in Los Gatos near my house. And the next picture shows a pair of donkeys up on the hill. Christmas donkeys.

I got a little more info on Ta Moko from Ray Quah: There’s a book of photos by Hans Neleman Moko-Maori Tattoo. Also there’s some modern ta moko in the movie Once Were Warriors.

Robert Anton Wilson is still alive and, if not kicking, at least blogging. Great to see he’s still at it.

The other day, as an Xmas treat, I went into SF and met up with John Shirley, my son Rudy, and hacker Marc Powell. First we went to a show of Croatian electronic art at the Tenderloin RX Gallery. It’s so funny how the totally scuzzy Tenderloin is wedged in on the same side of Market Street as the big tourist hotels and Union Square.

Marc is into “food hacking” now. Check out his site and figure it out. He said if you blog something before someone else, you got the “blog drop” on them. So maybe I have the blog drop on Marc right now.

We four went to see Rancid at the Warfield. It was so great to see Rancid. I love those guys, especially Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen (Tim in the middle, Lars on the left). I think they’re both from Campbell, California, a suburb of San Jose near where I live.

It’s always nice seeing a concert in the Warfield, with its plaster moldings and painting on the ceiling. Using the old SF analogy machine: the people who painted this mural in the early 1900s are in the same relation to Rancid’s music as the designers of the contermporary Metreon Center are to ——- (fill in blank with some type of performance in the year 2106.)

I’ve only seen Rancid live once before, and that was when they did a free lunch-time concert outside the student center at San Jose State, more than ten years ago. At the time I was so happy and surprised to see that punk was still alive and, indeed, as good as ever. John S was happily beating time to the Rancid music. He says the latest popular punk band out the gate is The Horrors.

Rancid's first song: “When I've got the music, I've got a place to go.” That says it all.

When I got home, I found three new volumes by me out! Just in time for Christmas shopping, so here’s some Amazon links.

The Hollow Earth on the left, a new edition of my historical SF novel. (The Amazon link showed the wrong graphic for the cover lately.)

A collection of my recent stories, Mad Professor.

And, on the right, my latest SF novel, Mathematicians in Love, which I wrote so much about on this blog last year.

It’s bittersweet to be back from New Zealand. I miss the friendly people and the informal vibe.

Thanks, by the way, to all the kiwis who sent in comments on my recent New Zealand blog entries. There's still so much I want to see there: Coromandel, Nelson, the Southern Alps, Dunedin and Invercargill. I hope we get back there again one of these days. Like I say, I already miss it.

The weirdness of the ferny jungle, complete with mysterioso shrines!

The uncrowded, pristine coast.

My friend Trim Pork the pig.

The giant tree-ferns.

You look forward to something for a long time, and then you do it, and then it’s over. Somehow the transition always feels a bit surprising.

We do have some nature here, of course. It’s just that, at least in the Bay Area, there’s usually a six-lane freeway somewhere within earshot. I went walking with my friend Jon Pearce in Santa Cruz soon after coming back.

Out of habit, I was seeing our plant through tourist eyes, and indeed our oaks and redwoods are pretty gnarly. Only nature picture I seem to have brought back from this particular walk, though is a hole in the ground showing a subterranean stream which possibly leads through the Hollow Earth back , sob, to New Zealand.

Downtown in Santa Cruz was some weirdness. People were waiting in a line three blocks long so that their children could spend ten minutes per group in a fenced-in enclosure of — snow. Obviously the thing to do with the snow is to make little snowballs, but in our customary US hypocritical cover-your-butt-from-liability fashion, the sponsors of the event had to have a sign saying NO SNOWBALL THROWING ALLOWED.

Back in the USSR, where everyone is a criminal, all of the time…