Obsidian Wings

Wednesday Reading including Hugo Novella nominees

by Doctor Science

Bad news makes me re-read comforting fanfic, so it's been a while. At last I have some books to report!

Company Town by Madeline Ashby has many areas of overlap with Alex Rakunas' "Windswept", which I read about a month ago. Kickass heroine, working for a union, gets involved in high-stakes violence/crime/mystery involving a powerful corporation. Punches are thrown, mayhem involves movie physics more than real physics. And there's a dubious, good-looking guy.

Unfortunately for Ashby, her novel suffers from this comparison. The plot is too complicated toward the end, when a whole extra layer of machinations gets introduced and I lost track of character's motivations. I admit, I was also dissatisfied with the ending because I've been feeling dissatisfied with a *lot* of books, because they have characters who've inherited wealth & position and are also exceptionally charismatic, intelligent, or talented. What is with this yearning for aristocracy? Any time you want to put in a "rightful king" who has inherited some kind of ability for leadership or command, I invite you to contemplate: Prince Charles.

Anyway, I then went and bought Like a Boss, the second of Rakunas' "Windswept" books, and enjoyed it just fine (the cover makes the heroine look like a teenager, but she most emphatically is *not*). It's full of the atmosphere any good noir should have -- though in this case it's tropical noir, which means the food is much better. And it's almost got me craving rum, which I don't really like the taste of and which ends in a scalp-wrenching hangover.

I'm not quite sure I bought the overall plot, really. I guess Rakunas ran into another thing that's been bugging me in general: too many plots that involve The Bad Guy being motivated by essentially personal issues. Especially Revenge. I am so *sick* of Revenge as a motivator, whether for Bad Guys or "Good Guys" (moral protip: revenge is never a Good motive).

One thing about the Windswept books that is never explained: it seems as though most of the characters, include many (most?) of the ones who beat people up professionally, are women. This bugged Mr Dr because it's never talked about. I didn't notice until he pointed it out to me, and I suspect Rakunas is doing it as a kind of meta joke: to flip the kind of SFF stories (we've all read so many of them) where almost all the characters "just happen" to be men.

Meanwhile, Mr Dr Science just finished Dark Run by Mike Brooks. It's basically Firefly fanfic, except Mr Dr reports that the captain is supposed to be nuanced and morally ambiguous, yet is actually an irredeemable asshole. Why the characters are talking in fake-Western accents is never clear, either. I'm not reading it, I've got too much Hugo reading to do.

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Hugo Best Novella nominees (in order of reading).

I started with Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, which has already won the Nebula. I knew within a few paragraphs it would be a high bar to beat, and, not surprisingly, none of the rest made it.

I'd been trying to avoid spoilers, but the few I'd seen led me to expect something *much* more downbeat than I actually got. To me, the almost hilarious meta-thing about the story is how Heinleinesque it is. Grrantr zngu travhf ehaf njnl sebz ubzr gb Fcnpr Npnqrzl! Rapbhagref nyvraf naq fbyirf vagrefgryyne pbasyvpg! [rot-13 spoilers] How old-school can you *get*?!?!! Seriously, it's one of the core SF plots, with a new-style character and a hair (lol) more complexity -- but the same basic feeling that lifted my heart when I was 12.

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds. Does this belong to one of his other series? Is it the start of a new one? It strikes me as too short for all of what happens, so crucial parts are kind of glossed over. It's also really odd, to me, to have a long story where we may have to rebuilt civilization etc., where there are male and female characters but no indication that anyone has sexual interests or motivations, nor are there any discussions about having children. Did I miss something about everyone being asexual, somehow? *scratches head*

Penric's Demon by Lois Bujold. This is another one where the treatment of sexuality confuses me. I think I can say, without major spoilers, that the basic plot is the trope known as "Sharing a Body", and in this case the body-owner is a young man, while the passenger turns out to be, essentially, n pbafbegvhz bs gjryir jbzra.

Now, I'm used to seeing this trope in fanfiction, where I would expect the story to be heavily focused on issues of sexuality, gender, and the characters' feelings about bodies. At first I thought Bujold was heading there, but then she sort of veered off to Plot-land, before the POV character had done more than guvax nobhg znfgheongvat. I was left feeling rather wrong-footed, and only sort of interested in the Plot. In sum: for me it was a good enough story, but rather bizarrely incomplete.

Perfect State, by Brandon Sanderson. Too much like a video game, though an interesting enough take on an old SF question. I just don't believe that most humans really want Awsum Powah instead of comforting relationships with other actual people.

I haven't decided yet how I'm going to rank those three stories (places 2 through 4), but I'm going to put The Builders by Daniel Polansky below No Award, and maybe off the ballot altogether. I just can't finish it, the animals are too pointless, clichéd as both animals and humans.

Tribalism and Brexit

--by Sebastian

Leaders who fan the flames of xenophobia so that their followers lash out are evil.  Leaders who structure their systems such that a large portion of the population are on the edge of lashing out are fools.  Trump and his ilk are bad people.  But we are fools for letting it come to the point where there are enough people who feel pushed to lash out that the xenophobes can take advantage of the situation. 

There is quite a bit of commentary that tries to either dismiss or attack the Leave vote on Brexit as largely deriving from xenophobia and racism.  The problem isn't that such commentary is strictly wrong, but that it is misguided.  Every country in the world has xenophobia.  Every county in the world has racism.  It is well established that older people voted for Leave much more than younger people.  But this causes an analytical problem for those who want to protect their worldview with a dismissive 'racism' analysis.  Those same people 10 and 20 years ago got along much better with the idea of the EU.  So either a huge percentage of the population mysteriously got more racist, a huge percentage of the population let their racism become more important than other concerns, or racism isn't the key factor we outght to be analyzing. 

I believe that some people are hard core racists in the sense of never wanting to give outsiders a break.  That isn't 40-50% of the UK population.  Something else is going on. 

Politics has a large tribal component.  You give people on 'your side' a lot more leeway, and are suspicious of people not on 'your side'.  This is a well known psychological component of human beings.  So much so that when studying it, you often don't have to prep people any more than randomly assigning them to a team and then telling about their assignment to the team.  So the diagnosis of "people are xenophobic" or the stronger "those people are racist" isn't useful in this context because they aren't the incorrigible racists who won't ever give an outsider a break.  Until very recently they were going along with the European project of the EU.  A bit reluctantly from time to time, but going along.  Something changed in the last few years. 

The numbers of immigrants went up significantly, but to levels that would seem like a blip to a place like California.  The problem is that a significant number of people went from thinking that the EU represented their tribe to believing that it didn't.  I would trace that to the EU reaction to the global financial crisis.  In broad terms, the EU reacted by saving the banks and abandoning the general population.  That was followed by Merckel's reaction to the later Greek crisis.  Again the banks were bailed out, and the populace forced to accept a heavily deflationary economic environment.  The general voter received the message that the rich would be watched out for, and if they were poor they would not only have to fend for themselves but might have the EU side with the rich against them.  This meant that if you felt you were at risk of being poor, you were no longer just fighting for economic success, but were at risk of losing the protective status of being in your tribe.  That mindset is ripe for xenophobia to come to the fore.

So noticing that there was a strong xenophobic component to the Leave campaign is true, but not helpful unless you analyze why all these people who were doing relatively fine with the EU before, suddenly 'became' racist.

The next type of analysis which is likely to lead us astray is getting too bogged down in policy details.  Policy details are for in-tribe discussions.  When you start to believe that a powerful group is against you, you either despair or lash out.  I would suggest that there was despair for the last few years, and lashing out now.  Lashing out isn't conducive to policy analysis.  Lashing out means attacking people who aren't of your tribe, and clinging to those you perceive to be of your tribe even if they are unsavory.  This is a situation that political opportunists love, because if they signal that they are part of the tribe they are trying to appeal to, they can get away with almost anything else.  They stoke the lashing out because they know that it means they won't ever have to be accountable.  It is a very effective political technique when a large portion of the population is open to it, which is why it a large part of the work of a civilized society to make sure that most people feel enough a part of the big tribe that they won't react in that way.

We have failed to avoid that situation.  The Donald Trumps of the world are evil for manipulating those who feel abandoned by the tribe, but our leaders need to realize their fault for abandoning too many people.  The consensus Western approach is failing too many people, and that is why we are here. 

 

 

In Other News -- Weekend Open Thread

by wj

Just in case someone has something to say that does NOT involve the Brexit vote or the US Presidential campaign.

Will you stay or will you go?

by Doctor Science

This is your Brexit watch/results thread.

I have had only a vague, distant impression about what's driving Brexit, and only within the past week or so did I realize how close the vote was going to be. For US votes, I follow Sam Wang and 538 for their data-driven, boring approach. The nearest equivalent I can find for the UK is YouGov, where I guess I'll be following results. Their polling shows a map with a vaguely familiar pattern, if you swap blue and red:

Remain is strong in the cities, Leave in the more rural areas. But why is Leave so popular in the estuaries of the Wash and Thames? Why is Scotland all pro-Remain, when the Scottish independence vote was divisive? If the rest of the UK votes Leave, will Scotland vote for Independence and join the EU?

As for the merits of the two sides, I defer to Hugh Hancock, who's done exhaustive work fact-checking them. His conclusion:

I came into this leaning cautiously to Remain. However, I really hoped to find that my initial impressions of Leave were wildly wrong, and I was hoping they had very strong arguments.

Why? Because the country might vote for Leave. And if that happens I'd much rather be saying "well, at the end of the day both sides have a good point" than "oh god, oh god, we're in real trouble now".

Unfortunately, "well, at the end of the day both sides have a good point" is not what I found.

At every single turn, I found that the Leave campaign's arguments were founded on lies. Sorry, it's as simple as that. I wish it wasn't.

Wow, a political issue where one side consistently lies. That, too, is kind of familiar.

How much of this whole business is driven by Rupert Murdoch's hatred of the EU? Why is the vote going to be so close? How can David Cameron survive politically, when he's supporting Remain while his voters Leave?

Over to you, Nigel and our other Britfriends, and best of luck.

The Last of England, by Ford Madox Brown. I never noticed before that there are cabbages hanging from the netting. Are they supposed to be on some sort of Bum-boat, carrying passengers as well as fresh provisions to the big ships at anchor? It's interesting that Brown didn't choose to show "the last glimpse of home", but portrayed middle-class people literally turning their backs on England.

If Trump has no money, will his supporters abandon him?

by Doctor Science

Ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would have enough delegates for the Republican Presidential nomination, various desperate Republicans have been talking about the possibility of a "coup" at the convention, where the cooler heads of party stalwarts might install someone more generally-acceptable as the nominee.

I've been laughing at these ideas, because A) the second-place finisher in the primaries should be the logical choice, but that's Ted Cruz, and the party stalwarts hate him as much as they hate Trump. More importantly, B) the GOP base chose Trump, and, to quote Republican strategist Anna Navarro:

A brokered convention would be the equivalent of the political "Hunger Games". And I am not exaggerating. Take a look at what's going on at Donald Trump events. Take a look at what happens to protesters. They get basically assaulted. If you think people aren't going to get clubbed like baby seals on the floor of the convention you haven't been watching what's been happening.

But now I'm starting to wonder if I should change my mind. The May FEC filings dropped Monday night, and Trump's campaign is in worse financial shape than anyone expected. Well, almost everyone: Josh Marshall has been saying for a while that Trump is probably broke, or has so little liquidity it amounts to the same thing. Remember, Trump hasn't released his tax returns, and some people have wondered all along if they'd show that Trump is really only millionaire-rich, not billionaire-rich.

So my question is: if Trump turns out to *not* be a billionaire, but to be a typically over-extended real estate developer (lawyer Thomas H. Crown, who's seen a lot of it, has a really informative set of tweets on how "Donald Trump is basically a walking cliche"), will his supporters at the convention desert him as a "loser"? Or will they double down, and just figure this means he was stabbed in the back, deprived of the billions that were rightfully his?

Donald Trump's whole campaign looks like a grift, a self-serving con. Will this turn GOP delegates away from him, or is it just business as usual?

The Disciples at Emmaus painted by Han van Meegeren as a forgery of Vermeer. I first learned about van Meegeren in the Time/Life book about Vermeer, when I was a teenager, and I was struck from the start by how much van Meegeren's paintings don't look like Vermeers. I believe they looked much more like Vermeers when they were first painted, but even by the 1960s Vermeers looked different to us, we paid attention to different things.

A rose by any other name wouldn't smell like much

by Doctor Science

I used to think I didn't like roses. The standard roses of my youth in the 60s and 70s were Hybrid Teas: gorgeous, large flowers without much scent, from plants that are magnets for bugs & diseases. Ugh, not worth it.

What really changed my mind was a particular rose. It grows in front of the Sullivan Real Estate office on Water Street, Block Island, at the south corner of their garden. It's been there for well over 10 years, but I can't find a picture of it. It's a light-to-medium pink, many-petaled "old rose" type, repeat flowering and salt tolerant, with the most wonderful, full, rose-and-lemon scent. The people there don't remember what the name is, but I figure it's a David Austin rose introduced no later than 2000 (might be "Gertrude Jekyll").

Every time I go to Block Island, I make sure to stop by this rose at least every other day and stick my nose into it, snorting the delicious scent until I feel almost drunk. "Roses might be worth growing!" I said to myself, "too bad my garden is all shade, all the time."

Now, though, I have a new garden with some sun. So last Monday a friend and I went to the van der Goot Rose Garden and sniffed pretty much everything they have that might tolerate partial shade. We discovered:

1. many roses smell strong or good to one of us, but not to the other
2. there's a "soapy" quality to a lot of rose scents that we do not care for
3. I'll probably have at least one Rugosa rose (for trellis around propane tank?), possibly Blanc Double de Coubert

   

   or Thérèse Bugnet

   

4. I really like Westerland, too:

   
   Maybe for the sunnier spot where I plan to have peonies & phlox?

5. They don't have nearly enough David Austin roses, and too many Hybrid Teas. Of course, that's partly because no others can compare to HTs for color varieties and for their long, cutable stems.

I've been thinking about roses, but what I've been putting in are some native plants plus a whole lot of Sedums:

Though the hill we're on top of is only about 150 ft. above the village, it's so dry and windy (by the standards of central NJ) that we have very few mosquitos and almost no poison ivy. We'll have to terrace the front to make a garden that can grow things like Garden Phlox, but meanwhile I'm trying all kinds of supposedly shade-tolerant Sedums to see which will grow.

I've put my pots of herbs on the front porch, because that spot actually gets the most consistent sun:

That's: basil, basil, parsley, mint, parsley, basil, basil, parsley. Next summer I'm going to really try to get some more kinds of basil, especially lemon -- it makes the *best* tuna salad.

I'll take a picture of the front garden after the annuals have had a little time to settle in. Other garden developments: there are several places around the house where leaves have apparently been piling up for years. When the top layer is removed, wonderful leaf mulch like you pay for is revealed! My garden elf is making a screen to get out the gravel so we can use even the bottom layer.

We're also collecting old pallets to use in making a compost bin. Following suggestions I found online, I discovered that the local lawnmower & power equipment store, just as they predicted, often has pallets to get rid of. My biggest problem: we don't have a station wagon like we used to, so we can only get one pallet at a time and it has to be the small size. We've got two so far, and the elf thinks he'll only need 3 (or maybe 4) to make a double compost bin.

So what's up in your gardens?

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ETA: It turns out Sprog the Younger has a picture of the Block Island rose I love:

Any idea what variety it might be? I'm pretty sure that's *not* "Gertrude Jekyll". "Abraham Darby", perhaps?

How Do We Get There From Here? -- Weekend Open Thread

by wj

A couple of weeks ago, there was a primary election here in California. Per California law, most of the races were what we call "top two". That is, everybody can vote for all of the candidates, from all parties, for each office. The top two vote winners go on to the general election.

That applies even when, as happened in the US Senate race, both of the top two are from the same party. (Actually, the state of the California Republican Party is such that, in state-wide races, that result is more common than not.) In fact, in the Senate campaign if all of the votes for the 11 Republicans in the race were combined, they would have only barely exceeded those of the second place Democrat (there were also 7 Democrats in the race; plus the other 4 regular parties' candidates and a couple of independenets). That's have far things have gone.

But there were two exceptions. The first, of course, was the Presidential primary. Three of the parties (Republicans, Greens, Peace and Freedom) only let registered members of their parties vote in their primary. The other three (Democrats, Libertarian, American Independent) allow voters who have not registered in a party to request (at the polls) one of their ballots. (Makes for great fun for poll workers. We are explicitly forbidden from telling voters that they have those options. All we are allowed to do is point them to the written statement on that point, and wait for them to ask "of their own volition." Sigh.)

The second was the contest for members of the party Central Committee for the local county. In my county, there were 9 candidates for 7 positions. But the trouble was this: there was zero information available about those 9 candidates. No mailers arrived. None of them had websites. With one exception, I could not even find anything about them with a web search. So, no information on which to make a decision. Nada.

Why does that matter? Because the County Central Committee is where political careers start. Not so much via membership, as because they are the ones who recruit candidates of local and state legislative office. Who the committee members are, and what they think the party should be, shape who they recruit. But what is that; what do they each think? How do I, as a party member, give my vote to the ones who reflect my views on that?

I don't have an answer to that. Just some frustration. And a hope that I can figure out how to make the situation better -- not this time, obviously, but perhaps for the future. Without some changes, the party which could win Govenrorships, and Presidential general elections, in the 1970s and 1908s, will remain an irrelevance here. And government really works better if there is some real competition between parties.

Political Tribalism and the Orlando Attacks

--by Sebastian   

One facet of the discussion regarding the Islamic inspired attack on the gay Pulse nightclub in Orlando is the heavy political tribalism that is already shaping the narratives, particularly regarding whether it was an Islamic terrorist attack or an anti-gay hate crime.

Team Blue takes the anti-gay hate crime side of the argument while Team Red takes the Islamic terrorist attack side.  What is so frustrating is that it clearly was both.  To fail to understand it as both is to abandon your ability to talk about it as it really was, and to fail to respond to the dangers it really represents.

Team Blue doesn't want to talk about it as a terrorist attack for a number of reasons.  First they know that Trump's reaction to it as a terrorist attack will be ridiculous and counterproductive.  Second, they know that such acts stick to the President, no matter how unfairly.  Third, they worry that fear about terrorist attacks accrues more power to Trump and/or Team Red.

Team Red doesn't want to talk about it as an anti-gay hate crime because there are too many strong anti-gay elements in their midst.  They don't want to be associated with this kind of massacre.  They don't want us to look at how the anti-gay elements of our own culture dovetails nicely with the ideology of Islamic terrorists.  They don't want to admit that the rhetoric of many of their allies supports the kind of thinking that makes killing gays in a nightclub seem righteous.

So we chose our sides and cut off half of the analysis. 

This attack cannot be properly understood without looking carefully at both. 

I won't claim to fully understand the Trump phenomenon.  But I will suggest that a large part of his appeal is in speaking aloud truths that we have been neglecting.  His stated methods for addressing these problems are foolish.  His framing of the problems is misguided.  For all his bullshit, he seems to strike a lot of people as being unafraid to talk about certain obvious things that we on the liberal consensus have been papering over for decades.  He is dangerous in a case like this not because his solutions for terrorism make sense, but because he won't hide from the fact that it was terrorism.  He knows we can't even engage him because we won't call it terrorism.  But it is.  People know it is.  So we will look like lying fools for denying it and he will gain power. 

Team Red however wants to frame it wholly as terrorism because they are connected to anti-gay elements that don't seem entirely uncomfortable with the idea of killing a bunch of faggots.  I'm afraid I'm too angry at how that all has played out, and more distant than ever from my old Republican connections to adequately address it.  But there is a virulent strain of anti-gay sentiment that is well nurtured on the Team Red side, and its kinship to Islamic terrorism ought to give pause. 

Dreams

--by Sebastian

I don't often remember my dreams.  This morning I woke up into a dream where I was waking up in my bed.  I realized that the north and west walls in my room had transformed into a plexiglass and that there were no doors anymore.  There was some crazy straight guy yelling at me for not thinking that his girlfriend was hot and how I was never going to get out.  I picked up a heavy claw hammer and was banging uselessly against the walls as he screamed.  But just as I woke up I had realized that the claw side could break through and the spiderweb cracks were spreading as I was breaking through and getting ready to attack the screamer.

Don't you hate it when your brain informs you that you aren't dealing as well as you thought? 

Tort Reform Arguments from Unexpected Places

--By Sebastian

Hulk Hogan's case against Gawker has caused quite a bit of consternation.¹  The concerns seem to cover a few major topics: forum shopping², the media being chilled from conducting their normal business, the size of the award, the immense costs of defending a lawsuit, the danger of having rich third parties fund lawsuits. 

In case you haven't heard of the case, it is fairly simple.  Hulk Hogan was filmed having sex without his knowledge.  Gawker media published the video in full on the internet.  Hogan sued Gawker for various privacy torts.  He won a gigantic verdict against them.  After the verdict, Billionaire Thiel was revealed as having helped Hogan fund the lawsuit.  Thiel had a grudge against Gawker for outing him as gay. 

My initial response as a lawyer was: nothing about this seems particularly surprising.  Forum shopping is standard for class actions and privacy torts, companies are always complaining about how lawsuits chill their ability to act the way they want to (attend any meeting with doctors and mention malpractice suits), windfall awards are scary for everyone, everyone talks about how expensive lawsuits are to defend, and having rich third parties fund lawsuits is nothing new (I'm sure you've all heard of the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and the NRA). 

All of these problems are brought up repeatedly in tort reform discussions so I couldn't understand what was so special about this case.  After reading quite a few articles on the case (some of them almost apocalyptic in tone) I realized that there was some truth in their complaints, and I had just been convinced by tort reform arguments that most of those problems were unadressable.  However, many of these arguments were being advocated by people and institutions which had previously not been very receptive to tort reform arguments, so maybe it was time to revist them.

1. Forum shopping.  This actually wasn't a problem in this case, but it is indeed a big problem.  The problem is that most states have very long-arm statutes which allow those in the stream of commerce to be sued almost anywhere.  Those statutes were a progressive reform in response to the fact that far flung corporations could do harm in a venue without ever being present in that venue.  This caused people who were harmed to have to sue them in the forum where the corporations were incorporated, which could be a huge pain to someone on the other coast.  The modern view is that you should be suable where you are, or where you caused the harm.  That seems like a sensible rule to me.  It causes problems with media cases because the harm is everywhere they broadcast, and with class actions because it allows the plaintiffs' lawyers to choose essentially anywhere. 
2. Chilling.  We want to chill bad behavior like publishing secret sex tapes and pollution.  So that isn't what people mean by a chilling effect.  What they mean is that we don't want to limit legitimate behavior that comes close to things that can be sued over.  This case isn't a good case for that worry, because Gawker's actions are among the type of thing we clearly don't want to allow.  (This point has been well covered in the feminist analysis of revenge releases of private nude pics, or in peeping tom crimes).  The complaint among media corporations seems to be that they don't want to have to have their legal department go over every release.  That is true, but I'm unsympathetic in this case, because it is exactly the type of thing that is clearly out of bounds and that therefore you shouldn't even need legal review for. 
3. Giant windfall awards can seem scary.  But they aren't just scary for media companies, they are scary for everyone.  The obvious solution would be some sort of cap on non-economic damages.  That generally hasn't been considered a good solution for reasons that I have never fully grasped.  It may have to do with incentives for lawyers to take expensive to litigate cases with medium level direct damages.
4. Lawsuits are expensive to defend for everyone.  I have no idea how to deal with that well.  Loser pays partially fixes the problem in other countries, though it stacks the deck in favor of large corporations in all but the clearest of cases unless poor people can get financial backing from someone else in the fairly good but not slam dunk cases.
5. Rich third parties funding legitimate cases.  These seems like the least problematic of the things mentioned.  Rich third parties funding illegitimate cases is a different issue, but non pertinent to the Gawker case.  Third party funding is a huge part of how all sorts of big cases get dealt with.  If you don't allow it, you get rid of almost all of what we normally think of as public interest law.  Disclosure seems the key to keeping it from corrupting the system.  There don't seem to be disclosure requirements and I'm not at all sure why.  Unless there is some sort of good argument against disclosure that I haven't heard of, I'd be all for it. 

So after thinking it through, I was wrong.  The articles do point to serious problems in our legal system, just not special problems with media companies and not just affecting freedom of the press.  I've become so used to people dismissing tort reform that my "this is nothing different" response was correct, but it only showed that I have become used to the abysmal state of modern law. 

 

¹Felix Salmon

New York Times

Crooked Timber

Lawyers Guns & Money

 

²As far as I can tell, this case doesn't actually involve forum shopping.  Filing in the home county of plaintiff's residence is pretty much the definition of routine non-forum shopping.  Hulk Hogan appears to live in the filing forum, so absent other evidence I don't see forum shopping here.