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Arizonal & Wisconsin Real-Estate (bleg for novel).

172 Comments

First: Open thread. Talk about whatever you like.

Second: I didn’t make my ridiculously ambitious deadline to finish the first draft by Sept 6. I have definitely discovered that publishing chapter by chapter would be impossible for me. As I write more, I muse a bit, and then sometimes need to drop a “tidbit” earlier. Sometimes the tidbit is long, sometimes short. Also, to make some decisions seem credible without requiring a full chapter of long winded and otherwise unimportant back-story, or to make certain things ‘harder’ or ‘easier’ for certain characters, I need to change certain things about characters (which I intended to do anyway. It’s fiction. Semi-autobiographical, but still fiction).

That said, the book is coming along; I’m approaching the “first crisis”. The book discussing the “Snowflake Method” says a novel needs three ‘crises’ and a resolution; the author made a persuasive case for why this is so. Ideally, the first crisis is roughly 1/3rd of the way through the book. I haven’t quite gotten there yet, but I’m about to write it and I know what happens.

Of course, the story is also fictionalized by changing names and places. In that regard, I need help doing “research” on settings. I want your help.

Specifically, I need help from people who are familiar with the Phoenix, AZ area. I have a character who needs to live in a house and neighborhood that meet the following criteria (or met it in fall of 2009).

  1. Between 30-60 minutes drive of Phoenix Airport but not ‘just off the highway’. They should travel down a dusty rural road for at least a few miles before getting to the house. (Doesn’t need to be endless. Dry dusty shouldn’t be a difficult thing to find in AZ.)
  2. Semi-rural lot on well and septic. About 1/2 acre.
  3. Mix of fairly new construction and old falling dawn construction.
  4. Ideally, unincorporated.
  5. Ideally, 15 minutes drive to a grocery store.
  6. Optional: Decent view. I need something to attract some new construction built on spec during the 90-00’s real estate boom. Access to public park etc. might do, but we need a bit of a “edge of the middle of nowhere type feeling.”
  7. Optional: Many people don’t water their property — or at least they don’t water the full lot. So a passenger can get an impression of dusty and dry as they look out the window on the trip from the airport. (Having lived in the dry part of WA state, I suspect this can’t be difficult to find. The issue is whether it can be found near all the other stuff.)

Is this possible? I can work with some deviations, but others do need this. (Note: I can write and change the town later– editing for details. But if someone magically finds me a suitable town or area today, that would be terrific!)

I don’t plan to get on an airplane and drive around Phoenix to find things, but if someone suggests a place, I can Google to see if it makes sense. Note: the well and septic is crucial. So is the distance from Phoenix. Unfortunately, this defeats my “Google-foo” because searches like “Phoenix area real estate, well, septic, dusty rural road” don’t work very well.

I’m a bit better of on Wisconsin. I need another character to live in

  1. Large house in a swank suburb. The idea is to mimic house that would be just west of (not on) Sheridan road– so not right on Lake Michigan– located in a Chicago suburb somewhere between Kenilworth and Lake Forest. (For movies, I”m looking for towns like those where “Risky Business”, “Home Alone” or “Ordinary People” were filmed. I need neither the best nor the worst house in the neighborhood. Someplace an attorney who is partner in a successful law practice might live. ( e.g. something like this.
  2. If anyone from Milwaukee can suggest a nice looking Episcopal church with a formal old-fashioned “cathedral-like” appearance. Ideally it will be near an Irish Pub, that would be nice. It should have stained glass, nice pews and so on. It does need to be Episcopal, not Roman Catholic, not Unitarian etc.

I think I have a halfway decent handle on WI. Jim and I will plan a road trip which would include a visit to proposed towns, the ‘cathedral’ and the Irish Pub.

Thanks. Also: Open thread.

172 thoughts on “Arizonal & Wisconsin Real-Estate (bleg for novel).”

  1. Lucia,

    I’ve posted for years on rec.arts.sf.composition, and we gossip about writing all the time. One of the good phrases is ‘the nine and sixty ways’. I think it’s from Kipling ‘there are nine and sixty ways of — maybe composing tribal ways… and every single one of them is wrong.’ Bearing that in mind, may I offer a little advice? My only qualification for this is a few dozen short stories*, 12 published in the US and UK, and several novels which I couldn’t sell although I once had lunch with the most glamorous editor in London.

    Never show anything before the whole thing is done. It limits your options, induces a freezing of flexibility, stops the flow. Unless it doesn’t, of course, which is why we say ‘there are nine and sixty…’.

    Good luck.

    JF
    Lucifer Falling, The Geoacache Killer, Ground Zero etc come up when you Google on my name.

    *One in Analog. Analog! Me!

  3. St Paul’s Episcopal church is Milwaukee’s oldest Episcopal church
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Paul's_Episcopal_Church_(Milwaukee,_Wisconsin)
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/St_Paul's_Episcopal_Church.jpg

    The County Clare Irish Hotel & Pub is one-block away
    http://countyclare-inn.com/irish-pub/

    https://www.google.com/search?q=904+E.+Knapp+St.+milwaukee+to+1234+north+astor+street+milwaukee&oq=904+E.+Knapp+St.+milwaukee+to+1234+north+astor+street+milwaukee&aqs=chrome..69i57.19617j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

  4. Someplace an attorney who is partner in a successful law practice might live. ( e.g. something like this.

    Gah. You appear to have linked a train station or some sort of metro station there. At least, that’s what I see when I click and zoom in.

    I know, times is hard, but I’d think a partner in a successful law firm ought to be able to afford a bit better than that… 😉

  5. On the trainstation: I did google Ravinia Park, and then dragged the icon. I guess google just remembers “Ravinia”. I always forget there is a Metra stop in Ravinia! I’ll get some snaps of the neighborhood I want to find. Try this

  7. Feranando,
    I’m not sure. It’s hard to imagine my agents would be interested in doing a lot of research for someone who is not planning to move to Arizona and the parameters are so broad. Usually agents tend to show in a somewhat finite area, so I might need to have an idea what town I wanted first.

  8. Kevin,
    Thanks on the pub. That will be perfect!

    Julian

    Never show anything before the whole thing is done. It limits your options, induces a freezing of flexibility, stops the flow. Unless it doesn’t, of course, which is why we say ‘there are nine and sixty…’.

    I tend to think this is good advice for me. Although the caveat would be “Never show to people who are ‘potential readers’ “. I did join a writers critique group and I think showing portions to them is going to be fine for me because “in my mind”, I don’t consider any of that final. But I am thinking I’ll be showing judiciously.

    But someone suggested I publish serials here. I have figured out that wouldn’t work for me– and to some extent for reasons you said. I can tell that certain ‘scenes’ sometimes need to be written twice– like try one characters point of view, then may switch. There is a ‘main’ character, but about 1/3rd seems to be working out to be in ‘other’ characters points of view. It seems to solve some ‘issues’ I have in explaining relationships.

    I have no qualifications at all. So nearly anyone’s advice is useful for me. I take some with a grain of salt– I even find some writing advice books say to do so because they point out that some people “must” start with the outline first, and others “must” just sit down and start stream of conciousness writing. These are exactly opposite first steps! I seem to be somewhere in between. I do have an outline, and I’m writing. But I find that I have to go back and shove in stuff as I write. Someone might say I shouldn’t but…well… I have to. I also find I come to realizations about how certain things are “problems” and how to “fix” them when I take walks, drive and so on. (It’s a bit dangerous to think about the writing while driving though.)

    The grammar, formatting and everything are a complete hash right now. The pattern is
    (a) get up, read what I wrote yesterday, editing where it’s really truly horrible.
    (b) write new stuff just typing as it comes.

    I seem to be able to do about 1 to 3 hours of fresh writing depending on the day. Today’s is a crucial scene though. I suspect I’m going to rewrite it twice because it occurred to me I might need to try a few different POV for certain bits. (I think of ‘bits’ as comparable to ‘scenes’ in a movie– though this is not a screen play. I guess in books they’d sometimes be separated by “* * *’.

    I haven’t defined chapters at all, but usually they would be some groups of scenes. I have no idea how this is supposed to be done.

  9. Read Pratchett for a no chapters technique.

    Do not believe anyone who tells you ‘this is the way it’s done.’
    You are the expert on “this is how I do it”.

    In the end you are* reduced to sitting in front of a blank screen for hours. Do that. In the end it forces you to write out of sheer boredom

    Or not.

    Sometimes it feels right and you can’t help writing — you run to the keyboard to put it down: “The night before a drop I never sleep….”

    JF
    *I am

  10. There are farmers with wells west of Phoenix (Buckeye, Goodyear, Tonopah come to mind). Most of the run-down properties on the outskirts have community wells or truck their water. I drove through Surprise in 2008, you might find something out there.

  11. Julian Flood,
    I googled Prachett and found this
    ““There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”
    I laughed… Yeah.

    As for the writing, I find that if I’m home alone and IF say, “I’m going to write right now” and set the kitchen timer for an hour, I always end up writing for two hours. Writing stuff isn’t a problem provided I don’t let myself get distracted by doing other stuff.

    Mind you, there is a certain amount of ‘other stuff’ I do need to do– but some other stuff is “wasting time”. As I get a bit deeper into writing the book, I am doing less of that though. But oddly, some mental stuff happens while I’m doing necessary “other stuff” (e.g. mowing lawn, getting groceries.) But this useful mental stuff can only happen if I’ve already written something– which might be utter crap. But still,it’s now there. So for example, once I’d written the first bunch of “scenes”– making about 15 page, I knew that no reader in the world would understand why the two sisters and brothers decided one particular sister was the one going to go get their Dad and transport him around rather than the other two. Now, the “solution” could be they have an knock down drag out fight– which would require an earlier scene. Or I can ‘reveal’ something about their childhood, or family relationships or… . Then readers would “know”– but no matter what I do, it requires me to write an earlier scene.

  13. Julian,
    Your name is somehow familiar from my years of Analog reading.
    But I cannot recall the name of your story in that venerable mag.
    Your Amazon site is interesting. I guess I am going to have to get Kindle.

    Lucia,
    Do not be disappointed that getting a novel out based on your original schedule did not happen. You are obeying the first law of writing: To write.
    And recall the second, irt your props and scenery: never let facts get in the way of a good story.

  14. hunter,
    I’m not disappointed. I just made up a deadline arbitrarily. I never really thought I would make it. Things are coming along which is what matters.

    With respect to your second law: I think it’s a little important to not be too ridiculous with certain props and scenery. A certain level of ridiculousness tends to annoy people. I think an author should be careful not to say that a character looked out her window to see the banana tree growing in her yard in Chicago, or have 2 feet of snow fall in Key west. Well… unless one is writing about a future with climate change or strange weather events, or fantasy or something. Certain types of mistakes do annoy people.

    So with respect to AZ: an incident with water well is going to ‘matter’ to the story. So I can’t just put this character in a downtown Phoenix condo or in some location where everyone is required to be on city water for some reason. I realize I don’t need to be toooo specific and so can grace over some stuff, but if I’m going to have certain features at this persons residence, I don’t want them to be too ridiculous. I’ve found a target town. I googled and saw that it “looks” sufficiently dry and I found a document indicating that nearly everyone in that town is on a well. So…

  15. Is this the open thread?
    I want you to go back to being you.
    So.
    Cheering for the novel.
    No clues.
    A friend of mine recently wrote a 600 page novel about the Sikh’s,
    Mostly several generations in India and then coming to Australia.
    Never mentioned it until he finished it.
    Keep writing as fast as you can.

  16. angech,
    The main reason I mentioned it is that if I blog, I am too distracted to write the novel. So, it’s one or the other, and for now I chose the novel. So it was either have the blog go silent totally mysteriously or mention what I’m doing. But from time to time, I need advise– probably not often.

    It is an open thread.

  17. I grew up in Kenilworth, only then it was in Warwickshire, UK (pronounced worrick, not war-wick). I never realised it had moved to Wisconsin. How is the castle these days? 🙂

  18. Hector,
    Kenilworth is in Illinois. The houses tend to be palacial though newer than in the UK. Here’s an image search for Kenilworth homes.

    If I’m not mistaken, they town incorporated to keep liquor out. I don’t think it’s still dry. But anyway, they incorporated a very, very small area slightly North of Chicago, and all very close to Lake Michigan. What you find in the Chi-suburbs– especially too the north, is towns and homes right on Lake Michigan tend to be swanky. The ‘swank’ index drops noticeably as one travels west away from the lake. It stays pretty high from Kenilworth to Lake Forest/Lake Bluff. Then home prices and general swankiness starts to drop as you move north and away from Chicago. Mind you, the Lake is still nice. But people who earn livings or just want to go to the theater will pay more for something within 1 hours drive of the city.

    Many Great Lakes cities have similar “swanky” neighborhoods on shores or island because the Lakes are huge and fun for very large boats, swimming and so on.

  19. I’d say check out Casa Grandé, south of Phoenix along I10. It’s about 35-minutes to the airport, if you drive like I do anyway. There are definitely some dusty roads down there that meet your specs.

    There’s a community around 32.975747, -111.617656. You can best get to it heading south on a dirt road for a couple of miles, though there is a “back way in” all on pavement.

    Some nice local prominences are near there, so good view. (The desert in that region is very pleasant too.)

    A good mix of old and new construction in that aresa (with the requisite number of crystal meth labs out of old trailers).

    According to Google Earth, it’s about 20-minutes from the nearest grocery.

    We set up an array on some BLM land near there.

  20. Question for the experts (sorry Lucia I know you said this was a completely open thread though all the posts so far have been “on-topic”):

    The Wikipedia map of global net primary productivity shows a distinct pattern in the oceans, where the eastern side of continents clusters NPP near the equator and it fans out toward higher latitudes as we move east (toward the western side of a continent). It’s most pronounced in the Pacific of course, and maybe it only applies there.

    I’m wondering if anyone on here has a very quick explanation of this in terms of ocean temperatures or currents/ENSO, whatever, because the picture is sort of alarmingly simple. I’d extrapolate from the picture that on an “aqua-planet” this divergence from the equator wouldn’t exist, and if we had one big ocean and one big continent (with fairly broad latitude coverage in both hemispheres, centered on the equator) that the dark blue gradients we see in the Pacific would extend across the entire large ocean body……….?????

  21. Lucia
    If this comes out this
    is the house I grew up in. Not quite Kenilworth Illinois.

    The rather smart side extension is a replacement of the prefabicated 1 1/2 car garage my brother and I (aged 17 and 14)erected in about 1966.

  24. Bill C,

    I don’t claim to be an expert, but what I have read is that ocean NPP is mainly determined by the presence or absence of adequate mineral nutrients (eg dissolved iron). These nutrients become depleted in surface water in regions where there is strong temperature driven stratification, which is mainly open ocean in the tropics and subtropics. Where there is upwelling, deep convection (even if only in winter months), or a lot of land supplying mineral dust and/or river runoff, the NPP is higher. Look at the discharge regions for the Amazon and Mississippi for clear examples. There tends to be upwelling along continental coasts where the prevailing winds drive the surface water away from shore (eg US Eastern seaboard). The west coast of South America is the best known example, where the NPP (and fish catch!) vary with ENSO state.

  25. Carrick,

    I’d say check out Casa Grandé, south of Phoenix along I10. It’s about 35-minutes to the airport, if you drive like I do anyway. There are definitely some dusty roads down there that meet your specs. […]
    A good mix of old and new construction in that aresa (with the requisite number of crystal meth labs out of old trailers).

    Crystal meth labs on the way would make it perfect! They wouldn’t be featured prominently…. but if there actually are a few, that would be perfect!

  26. Lucia,
    That looks more urban than our Kenilworth. The part Evanston east of “chicago ave”,looks a bit more like that– but newer and possibly more trees. See
    https://www.google.com/maps/@42.0389353,-87.678812,3a,75y,90h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s45IQhFhTGVU29-r7lZmJ8A!2e0!6m1!1e1

    Obviously, it’s newer because… we’ll nothing is more than 100 years old in most US suburbs. But generally, Evanston has closer to the density of what I’m seeing in your image. In Kenilworth Il, the houses are on very large lots. So there is lots of between each.

    Evanston is between Chicago and Kenilworth. It’s a much larger town than Kenilworth. Nearly everything is a larger town than Kenilworth because Kenilworth specifically only incorporated a very small area, it’s about 8 blocks N-S and 20 blocks e-w. (I may be exaggerating the smallness, but not much. But the smallness to some extent explains why all of Kenilworth is swanky. If we pick other towns on the lake, at least the western portions approach a ‘more normal’ look. (Mind you, the don’t degrade to ‘hovel’ status, it’s just they don’t look like palaces).
    .

    Note the towns I’m showing have lots of trees. You’ll hear the term “leafy suburbs” a lot when people describe American suburbs. Around IL, “leafy” tends to be literally true if the ‘burb or development is more than 20 years old and owners of new property who have more money tend to plant trees sooner. In contrast, farms will clear out trees– and dense areas don’t have as much room for trees. So humid-climate/lots of trees contrast very strongly with — say AZ desert or even downtown Chicago which is humid-cold, but not so many trees. (But lots of flowers in planters downtown and so on.)

  27. For a north Chicago suburb, I would suggest Highland Park if the character is the type who likes flashy cars. A more subdued character (or spouse) would prefer Glencoe.

  28. OHhh… Vía Verde Casa Grande has an appropriate “look”. Jimmy Kerr hwy..

    Ohh…
    http://casagrandemlssearch.com/detailsarmlsres_191998.cfm?startrow=31&&list_id=5006848&PageID=192013

    Perfect. Has private well! So they exist!

    I think the house is the speck here:
    https://www.google.com/maps/place/1372+S+Ethington+Rd,+Casa+Grande,+AZ+85193/@32.8678038,-111.8088757,3a,75y,270h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sRl_Kjzcnzbl8GTXYMHIFnw!2e0!4m2!3m1!1s0x872a605f3d942ce5:0xc4b04087636bfd8e!6m1!1e1

    This is better than the ‘original’ because it’s in many ways “worse”. (The property right next to it is probably a perfectly respectable farm…associated with the irrigated field across from the house. But it looks very isolated and the paranoid can worry about ‘the shed’. Plus, where it’s not irrigated, it’s dusty, and one could certainly imagine meth labs in the area.

    This is THE town! Thanks Carrick.

  29. DB,
    This is fiction based on real life. You do understand the flavorI’m going for. The town I want to capture the flavor of is Highland Park. That’s where Popsie-Wopsie actually was taken after I got him from Florida.

    But I don’t want the story to ‘be’ Highland Park because then people might think it’s a ‘memoir’. This is a story that is ‘inspired’ by things that happened. Anyway,the story is moved to Wisconsin. Many details don’t have to be the same, but certain things need to be communicated by setting. So for example: the setting of Highland Park tends to communicate, stable, not particularly troubled by money, convenient commutes to high-priced things like opera, blah, blah. Nice town amenities (local beaches, good library, great schools). People in Highland Park are also pretty nice. Physician’s offices and specialists aren’t long drives. And so on.

    If you can swing it, this is a “nice” place for Dad to end up. You’ll learn more in the book, but he almost ended up somewhere else. And so the ‘other place’ needs to contrast. Carrick adding the idea that the character might worry about ‘meth labs’ around there is a bonus. But the features need to be: Not so close to amenities, not easy to get to groceries, not easy to run to neighbors… blah, blah, blah. The house also has to have stairs on the front door (but I can just do that– and the sample house is two stories), and inside has to have other features. But I can do that– but it wouldn’t make sense for me to put this thing nestled in the middle of some truly populated stuff, nor literally in a place where there is absolutely nothing that would make someone with a real job want to buy the place. So, the view is an attraction– and in fact, in dry states, the right to pump from a private well is an attraction. So it’s important that exists (otherwise the detail will bug the 8$#&! out of readers from AZ.)

    I need it near Phoenix for the airport! I need exactly 1 lay over between Madison WI and Phoenix. It’s easy to get direct flights from Phoenix to anywhere large (like Chicago). If I picked another town in AZ, I would need two layovers from Madison WI->wherever.

    Some things ‘matter’. Some things don’t. The number of layovers matters. I sort of needed the town because otherwise, I was going to have to rewrite critical scenes around this bit– and this bit matters a lot to the plot.

  31. ed–
    I need a home in the suburb of Milwaukee which will be the city in the novel. I’m familiar with the north shore of Chicago. I went to high school in Lake Forest and grew up in Libertyville. So, I don’t want towns that are actually in Illinois, I want comparable towns– in Wisconsin.

  32. Re: semi-rural house in PHX area

    Your best bet is the Apache Junction – Queen Creek area, in the far East Valley. All your desiderata are easily met there.

    “… passenger can get an impression of dusty and dry as they look out the window on the trip from the airport.” Yeah, this isn’t hard to find in the Low Desert of AZ….

    Queen Creek is more rural, and is about a 45-min drive to Sky Harbor. Apache Jct is closer, and heavier on trailers. You also get views of the Superstitions from AJ, which are more likely to be recognized by non-AZ readers (Weaver’s Needle, Lost Dutchman).

    Email me for particulars. I lived in AZ for ~35 years, a few in Globe-Miami, not too far east of AJ.

    Best wishes,
    Pete Tillman

  33. Casa Grande area would work too, but it’s heavier on new(ish) construction, large spec-house subdivisions built before the boom collapsed in 2008.

    If you want your setting to be in a post-boom collapse subdivision, try Maricopa. Still lots of standing-empty foreclosures. (I know, you didn’t ask, maybe for the sequel??)

  34. When driving back from Florida and discussing this, Jim would suggest stuff and I’d say “that’s for the sequel”. We’d both laugh– because of course, sequels aren’t written unless you write the first book first.

    But yes, I am thinking a little about stuff that could ‘matter’ if there ever is a sequel. And… well.. life continues, and we could imagine both pre-quels and sequels. I’ve written you more. I have a feeling based on the newer comment that your location will be better than Carricks because lighter on new(ish) construction is good. I’ve sent you the address of the place I want to “mimic”– and more than you want to know about the “why” for the features I ‘need’ to mimic. Obvious, one doesn’t need every feature to be the same– it’s not a memoir. Just ones that matter for plot and character development.

  35. Peter Tillman, if you go north and east from Casa Grande there is a fair mix of new and old structures.

    The area I pinpointed, on the east side of the interstate, was where we put in an array (BLM land nearby), and I can vouch that it was definitely a very mixed neighborhood. Mostly decades-old ranch houses with a mix of trailer homes.

    The exit is actually the one for the north end of town (exit 185), but you go east instead of west, SR187 to SR 387, south on Tamarack Way (which is the dirt road I was referring to). Waverly Drive is on the north end of the BLM section, but is a difficult road to travel without a four wheel drive (it is not paved through the BLM section).

    Here is an authentic “look and feel” view. There are actually a number of fairly nice houses in the area, and lots of seedy looking mobile homes.

    As you go south from that area, you do encounter more recent housing developments of the sort you were talking about.

    I’ve driven through Maricopa at least a couple of times. Not a lot to remember but it does seem like a good place for a “remote feeling” location. I would say the town proper has more of that “little Arizona town” feel to it than Casa Grande does.

  36. Lucia, it appears that it is important to your writing to get a couple of realistic town settings. If you can make those places up you can attain whatever atmosphere you want/need for the characters in your novel – unless you are making more general statements.

    My brother’s novels were set in prehistoric times and with characters who reacted to one another in much the same way as people do in more modern times. That combination allowed him great flexibility in the settings used and even allowed his characters to invent new ways of doing things – that were important to the storyline. My daughter-in-law’s father used fictional characters but based on modern settings and history. He told me after attending a writing conference with other aspiring writers that he received most of the criticisms for his novel for not getting the technical details exactly right.

  37. Speaking of not getting the technical details right, has anyone watched Manhattan on WGN? A reactor to make plutonium at Oak Ridge called X-10 and no mention at all of uranium? *sigh*. They did mention calutrons (prep scale mass spectrometers) at Oak Ridge, but you don’t need them for making plutonium. They were used for separating 235U from 238U as was the Y-12 gaseous diffusion plant. Plutonium was manufactured at Hanford, WA. And the first production reactor there was the B reactor. So far, the only real people who have had speaking roles seem to be Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr.

    I know someone who worked at Oak Ridge during the war and remember Feynman talking about a trip to Oak Ridge. In fact, in a recent episode, there was a scene very similar to Feynman’s story, but no Feynman. The sad thing is that the real story seems to have been more interesting than what they are depicting in the show.

  38. RE: Carrick @ AZ setting + Lucia’s email

    Yup, that part of CG would work. But you don’t get much in the way of views….

    I liked (and still do) “historic” CG — the old downtown, and of course the namesake National Monument. Florence, a little east of the NM, still has most of the “old Arizona” feel — but a bit too far away from the airport.
    Lucia, old CG is probably the closest you’ll get to Corrales — whether you can find a half-acre lot on septic, I dunno. and no mtn views to speak of. Artistic license?

    Privately, Lucia said she wanted a place like Corrales, NM — LL, do you want to post that? I can’t think of anyplace in the Valley like Corrales — which is now pretty much enclosed by ABQ — but Apache Jct would work. No farms, anyway. But nice to spectacular views of the Superstitions.

  39. DeWitt,
    I’m not sure which of Feynmann’s books contains the tales of his adventures at Oakridge, but one such story recounts his astonishment that the proximity and amounts of material stored interstage in a warehouse were such that excessive activity could be provoked due to mass-distance relationships. He was quite young at the time, no-one would listen to him and he had to get Groves to tell the people he was trying to coax into moving the pallets farther apart to do it.

    My dad was there during the war and had a couple of other stories about what they told employees about the processes they were running to capture their attention without revealing what was actually being done.

  40. Peter, that area is close to San Tan Mountain. Not the best of views, but it beats anything in my area.

    I’ve worked near Florence too, there’s an array location near that spot too. Eating at the McDonald’s there is a bit of a trip because of the proximity to a jail and a prison. At least you feel “really safe” while eating there.

    I managed to get *really stuck* near the Gila River east of town one time. The tow truck driver that came to pull me out would have fit in just fine in a Faulkner novel.

    As to interesting places near ABQ, I’d go south instead of north. North (and east too) is suburbia. I call the region to the south “the New Mexico Dust Bowl”, because it is.

    This it the area immediately to the north of White Sands.

    What’s not to like about a town named “Los Lunas?”

  41. Re: j ferguson (Sep 11 15:12),

    I’m not sure that the story about reviewing the blueprints for the gaseous diffusion plant is in any of the books. He told us that one after dinner at the student house, Page, where I was living when I attended Caltech in the early 1960’s. The person I know who worked there was very grateful to Feynman. Likely a lot of people, including him, would have died if not for Feynman.

    As I remember, in the original design for the storage facility for the enriched uranium, it would have been possible to start a chain reaction when a person walked between the pallets or shelves. The water in a human body would have been a sufficiently good moderator to slow the neutrons and increase the capture cross section enough to initiate and sustain fission. That also applied to the amount of 235U dissolved in water and its volume. ‘Green water’ storage tanks, i.e. uranium containing water, was mentioned on the show as being a problem and plant management wasn’t being cooperative in the last episode I watched.

    The biggest error, though, is that the Little Boy bomb design, which they refer to as Thin Man on the show, is supposed to work with plutonium. It couldn’t. That was always a 235U design and was so certain to work that they didn’t want to waste any 235U in testing. Not that they had enough at the time. Even the first few milligrams of highly enriched 235U produced went into the bomb rather than being preserved for historical purposes.

    But, as I said, 235U seems to have fallen down the memory hole for the writers of the show.

  42. A few points to consider, from someone who grew up in Phoenix.

    (0) Phoenix is in the middle of a desert – EVERYWHERE within 60 miles is normally dusty and dry, even the rivers. (And Arizona natives will all recognize that’s NOT an exaggeration.)

    (1) The Phoenix metro area has roughly quadrupled in both population and area over the past 50 years. Places like Chandler and Surprise that once were considered the distant boondocks have now been absorbed by an unending sea of suburbia. There has ALWAYS been incentive for real estate development ANYWHERE reasonably close to the effective edge of the urban area; you don’t really need to add an extra rationale.

    (2) Rather than Casa Grande (which has lost much of its rural nature), I suggest you consider the nearby town of Eloy. If you can find a copy to watch, the “Halo vs. Velociraptor” episode of the History Channel’s show “Top Gear” shows what the Eloy area looked like as of 2010 – it seems to me it meets all your (local) criteria. Actually, it would probably work to set the novel in any of the old-time near-Phoenix communities that hasn’t yet succumbed to urban sprawl.

    (Take all these pronouncements with several grains of salt; I haven’t lived in Phoenix since 1974.)

  43. I checked. It’s in “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!”. In the paperback edition I have, it starts on page 103. Or look in the index for Oak Ridge. It’s the first one. I suspect that one of the major characters in the show is loosely based on Feynman, but the character doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor and his wife is healthy.

  44. Kenneth,

    Lucia, it appears that it is important to your writing to get a couple of realistic town settings. If you can make those places up you can attain whatever atmosphere you want/need for the characters in your novel – unless you are making more general statements.

    Not entirely. Making up a town gives greater flexibility. At least when I read fiction, it annoys me if someone makes up a place that could not exist. For example, if I needed a neighborhood outside a major city full of red light districts, meth labs and trailer parks, and also later want a scene where meth is exchanged at some beach, I can’t just “make up” a town with the ‘right’ features between Kenilworth and Winnetka just because that’s got lakefront. Even if I don’t name the town, I can’t have someone leave the Loop and drive north 15 miles along the lake to get to their trailer on the lake front town. I know it’s fiction, but this is just too jarring to people who know perfectly well there is no ragged crummy crime laden north shore neighborhood within 15 miles of Chicago. It’s right up there with an adult main character being 5′ tall in one chapter and 6′ tall in another one. If I want a rough neighborhood.

    If the area is remote enough, I can rename a town and that gives me some leeway. But even then, an author still ought to be sure things aren’t utterly implausible. (Well… unless the whole things is just implausible– like you made up Harry Potter. But in that case, you need to make sure your made up world hangs together. That’s a lot of work too. It’s also not the sort of story I’m doing.)

    My brother’s novels were set in prehistoric times and with characters who reacted to one another in much the same way as people do in more modern times. That combination allowed him great flexibility in the settings used and even allowed his characters to invent new ways of doing things – that were important to the storyline.

    Yes. In prehistoric times, you get the luxury of some flexibility in settings. People can invent things. But you can’t have them invent an electric powered blow dryer. The question of plausibility remains present even though you can make stuff up.

    My daughter-in-law’s father used fictional characters but based on modern settings and history. He told me after attending a writing conference with other aspiring writers that he received most of the criticisms for his novel for not getting the technical details exactly right.

    Depending on the genre, you can goof up certain details or not. I think writers of bodice rippers are given a pass on nearly anything remotely technical. Heck, the may get a pass on historical details too. Sci-fi writers, not so much — on either. Their readers will accept something being totally made up– but if you seem to violate the first law of thermo, you better have an explanation. If your character uses their time machine to go to 1900, he better not visit a housewife using a teflon pan (unless the author supplies on darn good excuse for that teflon). Historical novels? Pearl Harbor better be in Hawaii, bombed on the right day and by Japanese. Get these things wrong, and your readers will toss the book away.

    With respect to AZ: I haven’t been around Phoenix much. I want to be sure I don’t say something utterly implausible about certain things.

  46. Lucia,

    At least when I read fiction, it annoys me if someone makes up a place that could not exist. For example, if I needed a neighborhood outside a major city full of red light districts, meth labs and trailer parks, and also later want a scene where meth is exchanged at some beach, I can’t just “make up” a town with the ‘right’ features between Kenilworth and Winnetka just because that’s got lakefront. Even if I don’t name the town, I can’t have someone leave the Loop and drive north 15 miles along the lake to get to their trailer on the lake front town. I know it’s fiction, but this is just too jarring to people who know perfectly well there is no ragged crummy crime laden north shore neighborhood within 15 miles of Chicago. It’s right up there with an adult main character being 5′ tall in one chapter and 6′ tall in another one. If I want a rough neighborhood.

    I hate to come across as a kiss ass, but I’m going to suffer it in this case and chime in and admit I got the same issues with some stories. Severely. There’s some stuff where I’m glad to suspend disbelief, but other matters are just inexcusable in my view. Don’t ask me to believe something ridiculously and obviously wrong for no particular good reason. It makes for a cheap and shoddy story.
    So anyway. whatever. Hope the writing is enjoyable!

  47. Mark Bofill,
    I think one issue is that different people mind different things. But if one is going to write a novel, they should minimize the total number of potentially jarring things. Some people won’t care that you screwed up and had a woman in the chicago suburbs look out her window and admire the mature crepe myrtle growing in the yard and “remembering” how she and grandma planted it when she was a child. But others from Northern Illinois will say… crepe myrtle? Northern Illinois granny planted a lilac, not a crepe myrtle.

    Writing is enjoyable actually. I don’t think that means the writing is any good, but it has elements of fun-ness to it.

  48. SteveF (Comment #131767)

    Thanks for the comment. It would have helped if I had read the image correctly. I had the blues backwards…darker = lower. I’m sure what you said is correct. I think it’s related to ENSO, but the image was created over 1997-2000 which spans both ENSO phases, so I’m not sure exactly how it would look during an El Nino or La Nina.

  49. Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, Mequon, and Cedarburg are all relatively affluent suburbs north of Milwaukee. Whitefish Bay and Fox Point have some of the older, stately, brick homes right on Lake Michigan. Just do a street view anywhere on US 32 along the lake to get a feel.

    West Allis, South Milwaukee, and Cudahy are working class suburbs.

    These are all close-in suburbs (difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins).

  50. Thanks Kevin,
    I’d googld and had a list of towns. Whitefish Bay is on your list and mine as a candidate. I’m going to schedule a trip up there to have a look around. (This will be as much for fun as anything else. Wisconsin in fall is nice.)

  51. Lucia, when I travel to a place that I have not previously experienced and even ones where I might only visit periodically I get a feeling or an aura about it that I suspect that if I wanted I could put into words, but not like I have read from great or even good writers. As a kid, and less so at my advanced age, I had an imagined feel for an anticipated visit to a new place. It was sometimes realized but often not, and for better or worse, primarily based on my expectations.

    If you want the reader to get that feel of a place, and do it in what I see as your technical bent to get it right, I would think you might consider traveling to the location you plan to use in your novel. The feel you describe will be personalized and legitimate – even if not a consensus one.

    A practical question and unworthy of an artistic discussion: Can you use as tax deductible expenses against future income, or even current income, say, for example, travel to a place you intend to write about? I think the tax laws in the US changed for writing off small business losses against other income back in the 1980’s. You had to show that you were operating a legitimate business and not a hobby just for tax write-offs.

    http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2010/02/11/how-to-write-about-a-real-location-if-you-havent-been-there/

  52. Kenneth,
    I’m not going to schedule a trip to AZ for this ‘scene’ in the book. If I were placing an entire book in AZ and I already had some saleable fiction, I might do so and I would look into tax writeoffs. But for now, I don’t think unfamiliarity with AZ is the difficulty in explaining the feeling. I’m not going to explain further why I think what I think here.

    You had to show that you were operating a legitimate business and not a hobby just for tax write-offs.

    Currently, I don’t think I could show I am operating a legitimate book writing business. There is no income and many never be. Of course some day there may be– and if there were and I had tickets to AZ I might in future be able to claim a write off. But for now… really… I think that unlikely. So I don’t think the monetary expenditure is warranted. Also: for now, I don’t think the several days time is warranted either.

  53. “But for now, I don’t think unfamiliarity with AZ is the difficulty in explaining the feeling. I’m not going to explain further why I think what I think here.”

    I think I understand. When you asked for suggestions you are going to get some that will make good sense and are on point and then get those that might appear to be unsolicited ones from those who cannot write a lick. Thanks for indulging me with your replies, as while I do not write, I am very interested in the process and how it varies from writer to writer.

  54. John Chisholm,
    Thanks. I know I’m writing “bring me a rock” to some extent. Let me elaborate a bit.

    I know AZ is dry. But even in dry states, there are locations that are or seem “dustier”– possibly because the roads or shoulders of roads are gravel. Possibly because due to larger lots or semi-rural settings, many people either don’t irrigate or only irrigate small portions of lots. I lived in central washington state in the 90s– the dry part. The edges of town look drier and dustier than the nice tidy built-on-spec subdivisions. West Richland, WA had a drier/dustier feel than most of Richland. So did much of Pasco. All were dry and dusty relative to Illinois.

    This is the sort of neighborhood I mean :
    DryAndDusty_snipThere has ALWAYS been incentive for real estate development ANYWHERE reasonably close to the effective edge of the urban area; you don’t really need to add an extra rationale.
    The difficulty is I’m not looking for a region developers built a community of 50 houses all similar to one another. I’m looking for a place where individuals decide to build ‘the house of their dreams’. You find a splendid manse next door to a lot where the home owner parked their doublewide. As you drive down the street, you see homes from 1920-now all interspersed willy-nilly with no sense of planning what-so-ever. The splendid manse will be designed to have a splendid view of something (mountains, river, canyon… what have you.)

  55. Kenneth,
    When I answered, I wasn’t thinking “What does Ken know, he doesn’t write fiction.” It was more, “Ken doesn’t know precisely how important or unimportant the AZ setting is.” Setting is not highly important in this story. But somethings need to be “make sense”.

    I need to:
    (a) fly a woman and her elderly father into the air port of a fairly large city in a dry state. It should be a non-stop flight from Tampa to that city. That makes Phoenix a candidate.
    (b) have that woman and her father be driven a ‘fairly long’ way to a house in a town outside the city. The drive has to give the impression of dry, dusty, and getting into more and more isolated locations. As the two approach the destination– a house– there has to be enough space around houses that you couldn’t imagine the old man walking down the street to meet the neighbors or get to the library and so on. It can’t be totally isolated- so not the only house within miles- but also it can’t be 8 houses to an acre or something like that. It has to seem like living there would cut the elderly father off from most human contact.
    (c) When for various and sundry reasons (which motivate some of the features this house needs to have) the woman and her elderly father leave. They don’t even stay the night, instead staying in a hotel by the airport. The latter decision is motivated by a number of facts– included among them the fact that there is some worry about things going wrong on the somewhat long drive to the airport. So this can’t be 10 minutes from the airport. Oh.
    (d) there has to be some feature that explains why it is not insane for other people to live in this location. (And in fact, some people built what can only be called “mansions” next door to lots where others live in trailer parks in that location. It’s a pretty spot and a perfectly good choice for an able bodied fully functional adult who is willing to drive to work but wants seclusion at home. In the case of the ‘real’ place the attraction a beautiful view of mountains.)

    added
    (e) We need it to be possible to make last minute flight changes so the two can fly from the major city to Madison Wisconsin– with only 1 lay over. That makes Phoenix a candidate.

    The rest of the book is either in Wisconsin or Florida. So I don’t need to ‘be as one’ with Arizona. But I need an appropriate spot to exist and ideally, I have the driver go in the correct direction (north, south, east, west? What road? What is the view– mountain? canyon? Etc. )

    Most of the feelings are the person’s feelings– but the spring from the combination of the situation and features of the location.

  56. I agree in large part with the point about scenes matching reality.
    But read something by Charles DeLint, who writes urban fantasy that is centered largely around Tornoto, and you will read an amazing synthesis that captures the apirit of Toronto and yet build a complete fantasy world for the story. Or at the other end of the spectrum, some Hemingway: He took the real world of the Spanish Civil War, for instance, and built a hugely credible convincing world out of it with a compelling story that is still read nearly 80 years later.
    As an author you are in as much control as you care to excercise and can convince a reader to buy into. I realize you are not going the SF/Fantasy route, but the principal remains. Your mind has huge horsepower. I have every confidence you can produce something witty, compelling and very readable.
    For a single stop to a fry state, have you considered the city of San Antonio, Texas?
    Lots of interesting cultural milieus as close or far from SA as you wish to drive. And Texans are always good for poignant comment or two……

  57. hunter

    and can convince a reader to buy into

    This part is important to remember. As I wrote before: genre does affect how much leeway your reader will allow himself to buy into and what sorts of lack of reality they will accept. Anything with the world “fantasy” in the genera both permits and forces the author to do things that are “fantastic”. One is permitted to build a ‘fantasy Toronto’ which can be “Toronto in an alternate parallel universe”, “Toronto through the looking glass” or any number of things.

    But once the author does that, the challenge for the author in that case is to keep track of the features of his “fantasy Toronto” as he would have to do for any world. That’s no mean feat either.

  58. lucia,
    Of course you are right. And since it is your literary universe, it is completely yours. In the final level, it is literally your universe to create. Enjoy.
    Your search reminds me of the smell of July-hot dry dust baking dirt road I used to walk down during my summers. Occasional hackberry trees grew on either side of the road, so dusty that the green was bleached out of the leaves. Not a breath of wind. We would meander our walks to find bits of shade to walk under. The sound of cicadas screaming in their thought drowning screaming. When a pickup truck would come down the road, it would make a rooster tail of dust seemingly visible for miles. The smell was dry, dessicated, mummified. Life not fully living in the endless dust and heat. Life stunned into a torpor as it sat helpless in the endless afternoon, hoping for a shower to come by and relieve the heat and dust.
    See where you got me to go with just a hint of your work?

  59. hunter,
    Your description is more vivid than mine. Alas, my would go more like,
    ========
    “Irene’s felt a dull pain in her stomach as she looked down the 80 foot gravel driveway. At the end she saw a black sunbaked pavement straddled by gravel shoulders, no sidewalk to welcome pedestrians. The nearest front door was a quarter mile away. She shuddered to think what might happen if Dad decided to leave the property and take a walk.

    She turned to look at the house and saw Kieran as enthusiastic as a little boy standing on the stairway encouraging Dad to come on up and see the house. His enthusiastic voice calling, “Come on Dad. You’ll love the house. Let me show you your room.” Kieran waved.

    She sighed, turned towards her father and said, “Give me your arm, I’ll help you up the stairs.” She stuck to Dad’s slow pace as the two lumbered toward, then climbed up the 8 steps to the front door. When they reached it, Irene looked into the front hall and saw a wood floor covered with dust that had blow in from under the window sills.
    =========

    Similar road. Different context. But we need the dust, the isolation– the large lots, the no sidewalks and other types of things. But yours seems to be kids on vacation, out from school or camping, wanting to meander and find shade. Likely they either have water or know where to get it.

    In mine, it’s worrying an old man with Alzheimers might go out… break his neck, get lost, have no water and so on. Same setting.

  60. lucia,
    Yours really *works*. And you are parsimonious with the words, yet paint a great picture of the internal concerns and external realities. A sort of extended haiku of midwestern daughterly concern. Mine is Falukner-lite southern gothic. Vague journey with no definite goal. And with no hesitation to put lotsa words up on the screen. You caught the youthful perspective on my vignette perfectly, by the way. But you have captured the desert of Arizona and desert thirst of worry in a beautiful way. I like the cut of your jib on this. A lot.

  61. hunter,
    But if you read the first draft, you wouldn’t like it. The first draft is mostly getting plots down, often figuring out if different Points of view work and so on. Characters get more fleshed out and so on. The prose. Meh…. I’m planning improved prose on the 2nd draft.

  62. Lucia, maybe a real estate agent would agree if write them into the story? As it turns out the character moves next to a house inhabited by weird characters. A tall guy who looks like Lincoln, a tall lady who looks like Morticia, and a red headed youngster who definitely looks adopted. As it turns out the real estate agent is very keen eyed and decides to use her google skills to investigate this family. As it turns out they are Soviet Union escapees, nuclear scientists who were put on the FBI protection list and have been found by the red headed son, a KGB agent who is now blackmailing them.

    I think most real estate agents would help you if the book includes the part where they lock the KGB agent in a basement and the guy dies after he gets stuck in the window trying to get out…

    On the other hand if you need a setting in Caracas, Havana, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Spain’s east coast beaches, or Moscow let me know. I also have spent time in the Arctic, but I don’t think you want those Soviet Scientists living in Arkhangelsk or Nadym.

  63. Fernando,
    If I were a famous author of a best sellers, I’m sure a real estate agent would jump at that chance.

    Red hair… let me think… Red hair…. Red hair gallops in my family. I need to make it black hair.

  65. DeWitt,
    I didn’t paste that from the draft. I typed it in the comment. But in the first draft, I’m not remotely worried about things like the same adjective appearing twice in the same paragraph. For me other things are more important at the first draft stage. They are getting plot and character developed.

    I know some people need paragraphs to be perfect at all times. I’m not one of those people– not by a long shot. For me, worrying about that at this point would slow down writing and not help the final product one iota.

    The quality is measured not by the first draft, but by the final product.

  66. lucia (Comment #131798)

    I do not consider your reply a put down. I was merely pointing to my own deficiencies in writing and to your willingness to take time to reply to a post that was not on point. From the bits and pieces you have posted I think I know where you are coming with this story – but not where you are headed.

    Have you thought about who you might want to do your editing if you self publish (I cannot remember if you were going that route or not). My brother felt this was an important choice for his novels. I am pretty proficient in picking up errors in articles and books and I do not recall finding any in his works.

    Finding a place to live for a parent reminds me of the trials and tribulations of my wife and me in finding one for her mother after my wife’s father died. We were not aware of the extent of the diminishment of her mental facilities. We found a place nearby but noticed that she was not driving her car. She was afraid of getting lost. While at our current ages my wife and I would be acutely aware of what an elderly person might experience when moved to a new location, I have to admit that we did not fully appreciate it then. My mother-in-law did not want to live with us and when we tried she and our kids came to me on separate occasions and told me that it was not working out with the grandkids/grandma. We moved her back to her familiar surroundings and that lasted only for while until I received a call from her minister who cussed me out for not knowing that my mother-in-law was calling him with her crises. I think the minister was more disturbed that he was not receiving the church donations from my mother-in-law that my father-in-law had provided over the years, but once again we were not on top of her deteriorating condition. The only alternative was a nursing home as she was beyond the point of obtaining a care giver. She used the common argument from the elderly with her problems that she would rather die in her home than go to a nursing home. When we finally found a facility near our home for her and she would visit us for a couple of hours she would tell us she wanted to go back to her room at the facility by giving us the room number. That was about the saddest part of the whole process as she was in effect telling us she was resigned to her fate and that it was the beginning of the end – and it was.

  67. Fernando Leanme (Comment #131805)

    Your story line had me laughing. If made into a movie long ago surely there would have been a leading role for Peter Sellers.

    Your travels remind me of a neighbor who lived across the street and was a geologist who had worked all over the world. He was English and his wife was Hungarian. He could go through a half a pack of cigarettes and quite a few Scotches and still be the best bridge player in the house. He and his wife invited us over to see some African art they had collected on their last assignment and I remember seeing this large beetle slowly emerge from a piece hanging on the wall. I finished my Scotch and we made a hurried retreat.

  68. Kenneth

    Have you thought about who you might want to do your editing if you self publish (I cannot remember if you were going that route or not). My brother felt this was an important choice for his novels. I am pretty proficient in picking up errors in articles and books and I do not recall finding any in his works.

    I agree it’s an important choice. I am no where hear the point of identifying an editor. I will not need one until at least the 3rd draft. I have thought of who should do the cover art. Josh.

    I have to admit that we did not fully appreciate it then.

    This is one of the issues. Each elderly person is an individual. That said, there are certain patterns that seem to spring up with many who get dementia. These include getting lost if they go out driving especially if the location is unfamiliar. In the meantime, they can perfectly well continue to do repetitive things and drive to the ‘same’ familiar location over and over.

    Unless someone has gone through it personally, they are unlikely to really know what sorts of things cause big problems.

    On the one hand, at some point, you know you have to move the person who has cognitive decline. But Moving them is a big problem for many reasons In early stages of cognitive decline, if you get them to agree to move, they can remember they agreed to move and they can remember that they are getting used to new digs But they can’t learn the new surroundings easily. So they will get lost if they leave the building on their own.

    Later on, even if they agree that they should move, 10 minutes later they forget they agreed. Also after they move, they forget that this is a ‘new home’ and then argue they need to “go home”. Eventually, after the setting ‘sinks in’ they don’t try to ‘go home’ so much, but initially, they forget and they constantly want to ‘go home’, call people, panic and do other things. There is no way to help them get over this any faster because… well… they can’t remember any discussion. Like your mother, if they have their ministers phone number they may call him every 10 minutes. And you know what? It’s illegal for the assisted living facility to forbid them to use the phone. Even if the minister gets furious, there is not a freakin’ thing you can do. (He could block the assisted living facilities phone number. But you can’t do anything.)

    Also, in my Dad’s case, he would not be able to remember that he’d decline physically or that he previously couldn’t really get up and downstairs. For a while, it was a surprise each time he got to stairs and needed help. So, even though he was shuffling and lumbering, the idea that he might decided to “go home” in the middle of the night, get out on the top of the stairs, walk down and start ‘hunting’ for the way “home” was not remotely unrealistic. (Of course he might just get to the top of the stairs and fall down.)

    My mother-in-law did not want to live with us

    My mother-in-law didn’t want to move out of her house. A few years ago, if we’d tried to get my mother in law to stay with us when her husband went on a trip to visit his family, she would literally have tried to crawl away in the middle of the night. How do we know? She litterly tried to crawl out of the Devonshire. (She wouldn’t use a walker because she thought it made her look old.)

    I received a call from her minister who cussed me out for not knowing that my mother-in-law was calling him with her crises

    Luckily for us, Dad would call my brother-in-law. Jim’s Mom would mostly call her own old phone number which has not been reassigned. She just concluded no one was home and then try again. She sometimes called us and asked us to pick her up from St. Ray’s in Joliet. That’s where she thought she was.

    she would rather die in her home than go to a nursing home

    My mother in law absolutely would not permit anyone to hire anyone to stop by, visit, clean the house, mow the lawn, fix drippy faucets etc. This was a mild problem generally (we would come by to do some stuff– but some house keeping was “auto-pilot” for her. So that part wasn’t as big a problem as you might think.) It was a big problem when my father in law wanted to go on vacations. He was losing his ability to reason too– and couldn’t quite see that she was not able to take care of herself. I would find excuses to spend the night.

    It’s all very, very, very difficult to deal with. On the one hand, you don’t want to force someone into even the nicest assisted living or nursing care before they need it. On the other hand….people with cognitive decline often resist long after they need it!

    The issue in writing is to explain just how hard it is to deal with people with Alzheimers– and why care giving needs to be really, really, really planned out in advance. My mom once said, “Oh, it’s as hard as a baby.” I said, “No mom. It’s worse.” She never dealt with someone with Alzheimers, so she imagines someone physically capable but whose memory is a bit fuzzy and/or has the mental ability of a baby. You can sort of think it’s like that, but .. not quite. I mean.. you could have a baby at home while doing a home remodel requiring people set up a temporary eating or sleeping areas. You can put a toddler who tends to wander in the middle of the night in a crib like bed — even at an age where others might sleep in a more ‘normal’ bed. Alzheimer’s patient? Oh my goodness, the first could be a catastrophe. The second is illegal!

  70. Re: HaroldW (Sep 13 08:28),

    IMO, the apparent abrupt change in the secular trend is an artifact of the principal component analysis. The calculated MDV after 1975 may be a little too low and/or the phase is off. You can get a fit that’s about as good with a sine wave and an exponential function. Also, the AMO Index hasn’t started to decline significantly yet.

  71. HaroldW,
    Your link is broken. Could you verify? Of give enough information to make it easy to google easily? (Enough information is generally at least all the named authors and a title. In many cases, lead author only, no title, no abstract and so on leaves readers having to guess. )

  75. Don’t know if the rest of you are interested, or whether Lucia would feel it is proper, but I feel like having a little fun with the Williams firm and Peter Fontaine who are representing M. Mann in the suit against Steyn.

    I will bet 150 quatloos that the Williams firm will take down its briefs from its own website within 90 days. My reasoning is that their work has been so bad and that as news of their obvious blunders spreads on the web, that posting their work on the web harms their reputation . Undoubtedly, the original linkage of the various briefs was made to serve mostly an advertising function and obtain business for the firm. I don’t think that will happen in this case. In any event, this is done in fun, and if permissible by Lucia, it might be a pleasant diversion.

    JD

  76. lucia (Comment #131811)

    Lucia, I think the word that can sometimes best describe the situation between adult children and their aging parents who are deteriorating either physically (my mom and dad) or mentally (my mother-in-law) is a dilemma. You even have to have patience with those who have never gone through the experience and are more than willing to provide “simple solutions”. I probably had a few of those solutions prior to the experiences.

    What you say about each case being different and the parent being an individual and thus requiring individualized care and planning for that care is very true from my experiences and firsthand knowledge of from others going through the same process. If you have to deal with institutions it is best to have advocates in the family who can deal with these institutional bureaucracies which can be as, if not more, challenging than dealing with parents. I remember my sister’s advocating for my mother when she was in the hospital with what doctor’s were predicting was the end of her life (it was not and in fact she lived for another year). They wanted to be assured that she was receiving sufficient pain medication. My older sister was a hospital administrator and my younger one is very strong willed and as the doctor, who came whining to me, told it they had pretty much taken over the nursing staff as it concerned our mother. He told me he was concerned about the hospitals Medicare credentials if my mother died from an overdose of morphine and it was revealed to Medicare. I told him that was his problem and that we paid my sister’s big bucks to do just what they were doing. He did not share my humor of the situation.

    With my father we got him to agree that in order to stay in his home he had to have a 24X7 caregiver. We were very fortunate to find a medical student from the Czech Republic who needed to study for his medical exams. My dad was not an easy guy to get along with, but his caregiver, Peter, (we called him St. Peter amongst the siblings) was an energetic, good looking (my sister’s hired him) and personable guy who had many admirers in my Dad’s small community. There were a number of factors that clicked with my father and Peter and the entire family for that matter and that relationship, as luck would have it, truly made that time much less difficult for my siblings and me.

    When my mother was physically disabled with a heart condition, my sister’s hired a couple to come every other afternoon to prepare food for my parents and do household chores. I meet that couple and thought they were rather nice people, but to hear accounts from parents you would get a very unfaltering picture of them. I am quite certain that my parents were reacting to someone they felt was invading their home that they had shared with just the two of them for 40 some years. My mother’s alternative strategy worked quite well until her death and that was to teach my “old school” father to cook (a lot of microwaving) and to wash clothes. That had a cleaning lady in once or twice a week.

    I keep thinking that the experiences of my wife and me with our parents will help us make it easier for our children, their spouses and our grandchildren in dealing with us – even though we tend to think more like our parents the older we get.

  77. Kenneth

    I am quite certain that my parents were reacting to someone they felt was invading their home that they had shared with just the two of them for 40 some years.

    That’s the way my mother-in-law would have reacted. My father liked having caregivers and cleaning ladies. So, that varies.

    You were very luck with the medical student.

    I actually find myself angered by news articles that try to promote in home care and which make it seem that it’s realistic to (a) get the elderly to live in their own home after the start losing cognitive ability and (b) that you can contact county services and so on to find just the right people.

    In fact, it is very, very, very difficult in many locations. Somoene who worked in elder care might be able to do it– but people ‘learning the ropes’ when dealing with one parent can’t do very well. For example: when I interviewed in Florida, some people were licensed to oversee medications. Others are not–they can clean, cook, vaccuum, give baths and so on, but if your parent needs someone to help him remember to take thyroid medication, you need someone is licensed to do that. Thyroid imbalances don’t cause Alzheimers– but thyroid problems are implicated in memory.

    And they are going to want to be insured against any ill consequences. Now… in my mother in laws case, she wasn’t taking medication, so if she had not been hostile to the idea of an inhome caregiver, we could have gotten someone to just do house keeping, grocery shopping and check. Also, Jim Sr. could have given her her medication– nothing illegal in that. It’s just that someone who can’t be hired to do so. (Mind you, it’s possible a student hired to do tasks might not know. But if you are hunting around or using government services, they are going to find people who are licensed, and those people are going to know.)

    With my dad: He took a variety of medications. People who are licensed to give medications cost more than people who just do things like “meals on wheels”, “laundry” and so on. So, of course you likely get two people — and possibly more if you need stuff like gardening and so on. Or, otherwise, you pay someone licensed to give medicine to do lower level tasks like fluffing and folding laundry which is expensive. This means the task of “helping” a parent with cognitive decline almost becomes “running a very small company”.

    Worse, with a parent with mild cognitive decline, if you are attempting to help them live in the state of their choice– and you live no where near– you can’t verify whether any complaint they might have vis-a-vis the caretaker is valid. And you will hear complaints, quite a few of which are likely invalid. On the other hand, some may be. But you can’t check without visiting, which you can’t do regularly.

    So, the problems with dealing with Dad in Florida included needed to learn local laws, needing to interview people, needing to monitor whether they are doing a “good” job, needing to know which things he could still do and which he couldn’t do–all from a distance.

    It’s different for someone is cognitively ok, but physically impaired. They can generally take their own medicine. They can generally make choices, do some of the hiring– and they can tell if some helper is ‘not right’. They can even fire staff, phone and get someone new. Not so for those with cognitive decline. Often, they can even make good judgements– like knowing that they can live alone if they make sure things are wheel chair accessible, and knowing whether that means move or remodel. And they can even make judgements about their finances and so on.

    Those with cognitive difficulties? Early on, they can do these things. But over the years, less so. And they can’t judge that they can’t do things anymore.

  78. Lucia, it appears you have been through the process and given the ramifications a lot of thought. Each person who goes through it has a different experience. Any successes my wife, siblings and I had in dealing with these issues was usually based on taking some initiatives without infringing the parents’ rights.

    Going strictly by the rules is not going to get the job done in my judgment. With my mother-in-law we waited until it was too late to get power of attorney and in order to take care of her bills and investments legally would have required us to go to court and declare her incompetent. My wife would sign her mother’s name to pay bills with a shaky imitation of her mother’s signature until I told her to sign in her own hand writing or I could do the same. The payee is not going object that they are getting paid with a suspect signature and never did. Investing her money was another matter, but there was only her brother who might have legal objections (other than the state) and he did not. I would think even the state might have had a problem showing that we did not have my mother-in-law’s best interest at heart when we put a lot of her money into 5 year CDs when inflation was raging in the 1980s and suddenly dropped off to low rates thereafter.

  79. HaroldW (Comment #131812)

    HaroldW, thanks for the link to that article. I’ll have to study it in detail.

    It is timely for me as I have been attempting to find the deterministic trend in the GISS mean global temperature series 1880-2014 and then use the residuals from that trend to fit an ARMA model and to look for cycles in the residuals. I found a spline smooth that appears to fit well the temperature trend due to GHGs and aerosols from the published literature.

    The ARMA model best fitting the residuals from the trend defined by the spline smooth is ARMA(1,0) with an ar1 coefficient around 0.40. The residuals also yield cycles from a power spectrum at 60 years and lesser but statistically significant ones at 3.5, 8 and 10 years. Using the residuals from a linear regression against time (for illustration purposes only as we know that is not the likely shape of the deterministic trend) for the 1880-2013 period requires an ARMA(4,0) for fitting and shows no statistically significant cycles in a power spectrum.

    My spline smooth trend has a couple of inflection points not in the secular trend published in the link, but I can fairly well duplicate the shape of the secular trend in the link by changing the spline smooth order.

  80. Lucia –
    Apologies for putting you to some trouble with the link to the paper. I was away all day so had no chance to add more info. I tested the link so I thought all was well, but you’re correct that I should have given a complete citation just in case the link didn’t work (as it didn’t for you). You managed to figure it out in #131815 correctly, though.

  81. HaroldW–
    No problem. I just clicked and it gave me a 404. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work for me.

    Then… googling was a bit difficult because all I had was “Marcias”. More info tends to help when the link breaks and so is useful to give.

  82. I would heartily recommend that anyone with parents in their later years read carefully what Kenneth and Lucia have written above. In combination it mirrors our experience with our parents. The details are a little different, and the flavor and combinations of affliction a bit different, but one lesson is vital.

    We were a bit late in obtaining all of the will modifications which seemed prudent, trustee changes, changes and additions to powers of attorney etc. Mom is still copus so no problems there, but Dad went from full comprehension of the issues to not being able to sign his name in about 6 months. Fortunately we have all of the possible situations covered but one and think we can handle that one by agreement among the family members.

    I think that if you are going to be executor, it is vital (VITAL) that you are comfortable with their attorney. I wasn’t, but was able to convince Mom to change. We found an outfit which specializes in elder law and not only readily understood the changes the family had in mind, but was able to make it all happen. And most importantly, I’m comfortable with him and know I’ll be able to count on him for good advice, including talking me out of things I want to do that unbeknownst to me are foolish.

    The earlier attorney was replaced for two reasons. First was that a phone call would typically not be answered for at least a week – absolutely a firing offense in the construction industry where I spent my life – first thing next morning at very latest, but usually same day. There was also his answering message which assured callers that he would return their calls at his “earliest convenience.” I felt that if he didn’t understand what was wrong with this, likely he didn’t have a good grasp of English which I think is fundamental to the law.

    The will changes were made to cover the possibility that an heir might predecease the last parent such that his share would then go to his children – leaving his widow high and dry. We thought that any woman who could live with one of us for 20 or more years should not be left out and according had wills rewritten to make that happen.

    We were able to encourage my parents into an assisted living apartment with (as it turns out) the idle threat that the choice was 24/7 live-in. I had devised a remodeling of the house to provide a comfortable apartment for whoever got this job, and had done some initial forays into the caregiver market. It is good if you face this option yourselves to re-read what Lucia has written above. We sought help through agencies who specialize in this sort of thing and found ourselves confronted by 20 page contracts which if signed by us meant that their caregiver couldn’t be expected to do half of what we reasonably expected. It appeared that we would need several different types of people to dispense pills, drive them as required, and so forth. Cost was not the issue in our case, but more the diffusion of responsibility. We were also on the East Coast and parents in Chicago.

    Neither of them was any longer able to manage their lives in the sense of paying bills, keeping the checkbook in some wild simulation of balance, paying taxes etc. So we hired a woman who does this and she spends an hour or two every two weeks to keep things right-side up. And by the way, if she does’t find a lot of phony billing once in a while, get someone else. You’d be astonished at how aggressive some of the businesses which “cater” to the elderly can be – most often double or triple billing for a single event. And they will cash all the checks you send them. Charitable organizations are even worse – another story for another time.

    The larger issue of managing long term finances is pretty readily handled with a financial manager if you can find one you like. Fortunately, theirs is wonderful and I took over keeping an eye on him 5 years ago while they could still do it themselves, at least in theory.

    Years ago, I was present at the revealing of an earlier ancestor’s will at which there was considerable gnashing of teeth, tearing, of hair, and rending of garments as well as screaming – Yes, screaming. Due to a last minute codicil added by my grandfather, the will didn’t work quite the way some of the heirs expected and there was a lot of unhappiness. I was astonished that people I had always thought civilized would behave this way, but then it was about money.

    This may not be universally sound advice but it’s what I did which was to make certain that anyone with a significant interest in the wills knows what will happen – no surprises at the end.

    And one last thing, work out how the house is going to be sold if it has to be sold after both parents have gone a bit around the bend. I didn’t quite get there although I thought I had. I was forced to get my Dad to sign a document months after he’d lost his ability to do it. It was awful, he was clearly frustrated because he understood the requirement but could’t make his hand do it. It is one of the very worst things I ever went through, but was necessary due to the way the initial offer of the house had been made – my fault for not recognizing the issue. I was trustee of the trust holding the house but we hadn’t had the trust offer it for sale – stupid me.

    there’s more, but again, what Kenneth and Lucia wrote above is vital information for anyone in this situation.

  83. If you have elderly parents not under your direct supervision you should be aware of “promiscuous poly-pharmacy”

    I have a series of anecdotes on this subject, but I think I’ve overdone it for today’s commenting.

  84. Stupid me. the ONE lesson is get everything thought about signed , trusts created, wills thought out, trustees created, and powers of attorneys assigned BEFORE the parents lose it especially for the responsibilities which will make it easier for you to see to their care.

  85. HaroldW (Comment #131812)

    I have linked below 3 graphs of my analysis of the GISS global mean annual temperature series 1880-2013 showing (a) a deterministic trend line estimated from a spline smooth and an attempt to qualitatively follow a published view of the temperature changes due to GHGs and aerosols, (b) the residuals from the trend line and (c) a power spectrum of the residuals. The y axis in the first 2 graphs is temperature anomaly in 100 ths of a degree C.

    http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/540/nssqPw.png

    If I had looked further into the published estimates for temperature changes from deterministic sources and used different smoothers I could have derived other shapes for the trend line. My effort here was simply a starting point. I did not bother to calculate CIs at this point as Macias did in his paper. I want to use the singular spectrum analysis in R to do with the GISS series what Macias did in his paper with HadCRUT4.

    HaroldW, with the CIs in mind I am not sure one can make very definite statements about the inflection points in the Macia graph you noted. (My reference above to differences in inflections between the linked paper and my results was incorrect – it should have been differences in the amount of inflection). If we ignored the CIs, I suppose we should note the very slight bending over at the end of the reconstructed series in Macias of the secular trend or, for that matter, attempt to explain the changes in warming rates (with CIs) of the secular trend that Macias shows in Figure 3 in the linked paper.

  86. Kenneth Fritsch –
    Macias et al. are willing to make very definite statements about the droop at the end of the curve, e.g. “the ST [secular trend] shows a pronounced decline, 0.017°C year-1 in 2001 to 0.003°C year-1, in 2013.”

    You mentioned CIs, which allows me to mention something which I found surprising in their figure 3(a). The CI of the warming rate becomes quite small at the center of the interval (~1930). The CI of anomalies shows a similar narrowing during the baseline interval, because all the curves have been forced to be near the zero line (and hence to each other). However, anomalization doesn’t force the slopes to correspond, just the offsets. Apparently the Macias et al. analysis forces the slopes to match at the middle of the interval. I’m sure there’s a good algebraic reason for this.

  87. HaroldW (Comment #131834)

    Harold, I looked again but could not find the method used in Macias to calculate the warming rate.

    My first look at the singular spectrum analysis of GISS in R (I see that Macias used the same functions in R) gave a trend line nearly identical to the one I obtained with a smoothing spline that appeared related to GHGs and aerosols effects on temperature.

    For the cyclic part, in my interpretation of the analysis results, I obtain differing amplitudes for the 60 year cycles whereas Macias shows amplitudes that are identical. Would we expect identical amplitudes in nature or did Macias simply use an average or one cycle’s amplitude?

    I should note here that in my linked graphs the max/min of the 60 year cyclic amplitudes that can be detected in the residuals are switched because of how I did the subtraction.

  88. I used the global annual HadCRU4 1850-2013 data that Macias linked in his paper and obtained the same results using the ssa function in R from the library Rssa (kind=”1d-ssa” as was used in Macias). I then used the same HadCRUT4 data for 1880-2013 to match the period used for GISS in the singular spectrum analysis. Changing the period puts the HadCRUT4 and GISS decompositions/reconstructions closer together in secular trends and cyclic features but there remain some not so subtle differences that I want to show in another post here.

    We often hear how similar these temperature data sets are when we look at monthly or annual series. These similarities in my mind do not hold up that well when modeling the series.

  91. Anybody else having display issues with Firefox? It looks normal until you scroll down a ways and then the background color goes from white to black.

  92. I switched to the latest beta version and the problem went away. Apparently they broke something in the most recent update of the official version.

  93. Below I have linked the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) for the global mean temperature series for GISS and HadCRUT4 for the period 1880-2013 and HadCRUT4 for the period 1850-2013. The decompositions and reconstructions are shown for 1880-2013 even though the SSA for the second HadCRUT4 was performed on the series 1850-2013.

    I’ll present the results in the graphs in the link for secular trends, mutidecadal variations and reconstructions minus the high frequency noise without comment on the differences.

    http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/538/IfZVup.png

  94. Very interesting, Kenneth — thanks!

    The marked visual difference in the components obtained (between the two HadCRUT4 series in particular) gives the strong impression that this method is not identifying fundamental elements, but is more a decomposition of convenience. Clearly it’s picking up on *something*, but it doesn’t seem to produce more than a band-pass filter (for MDV) and low-pass (for ST). My two cents’ worth, anyway.

  96. For completeness I linked a graph showing the portion of variance explained by the first 10 eigenvectors from the singular spectrum analysis of the GISS and HadCRUT4 1880-2013 series and the HadCRUT4 1850-2013 series. Note that it is eigenvectors #1 and #2 that are combined to give the secular trends and eigenvectors #3 and #4 combined to give the mutidecadal variations.

    http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/902/VMrqLj.png

  97. DeWitt Payne (Comment #131845)

    The HadCRUT4 1850-2013 series yields something close to your sine wave.

    “Spectral decompositions are interesting starting points, but the results are unlikely to avoid some confounding with noise.”

    I agree and attempting to model the temperature series requires assumptions about the trend line in order to model the residuals.

    I think an ARMA model can handle some of the cyclical parts of a time series. I know that I can obtain an excellent fit with an ARMA(1,0) model to the residuals from the secular trend determined by the singular spectrum analysis decomposition of the GISS series.

  98. HaroldW (Comment #131844)

    I think part of the difference between the GISS and HADCRUT4 series might have to do with the differences between CRU and GISS in handling the Arctic north of 60N. GISS was closer to Cowtan and Way (larger trends) in the recent temperature changes in the Arctic.

  99. j ferguson (Comment #131827)

    “the ONE lesson is get everything thought about signed , trusts created, wills thought out, trustees created, and powers of attorneys assigned BEFORE the parents lose it especially for the responsibilities which will make it easier for you to see to their care.”

    That is what the wife and I did as parents with the hopes of avoiding these adult children problems. I have even kept the storage areas free of “junk”.

  100. Ken/John,
    That’s good advice. Lucky for us, many documents did exist, were signed etc. before. But also, ideally, the parents think through “what happens if”.

    For example: Jim was agent for his father. Who was agent for his mother: Jim’s father. This choice likely seemed wise decades ago when we could tell that Jim’s mother was slipping into dementia while his father seemed healthy as a horse. The Jim’s Dad got cancer.

    Jim was listed as substitute agent– but exercising that while his father was still alive was difficult. Meanwhile, his father was bed ridden and not well able to go around dealing with paperwork of various sorts. So, there’s Jim bringing in a sheaf of paper work to present to the various clerical people who might be a bit leery. (Different banks, financial institutions and so on have different degrees of caution in these regards.)

    One of the features of people who don’t entirely wish to face death is it’s difficult to get them to revise documents based on the thought that they will fall ill and die. Moreover, by the time Jim’s Dad was failing, it was very difficult (though not ultimately impossible) to persuade his Mom to sign various papers. This was especially true because Jim’s Mom (correctly) knew she had power to bend her husband to her will… and that to some extent he shared her preferences. But he kids would– if necessary– eventually take over.

    Proof she could bend her husband to her will: She had callouses on her knees because she would frequently crawl around the house rather than use a walker or wheelchair. Neither wanted to move out to somewhere where they could get help. But ultimately when he fell and ended up in the hospital and was too weak to walk, cook dinner drive to groceries, we got them to move. They should have moved long before and if it had been up to us we would have made them move.

    But it was not up to us.

    Legally, we would not have gotten a ruling to permit us to take over, we wouldn’t have wanted to do it that way unless it was absolutely, positively necessary, and we could persuade either of them.

    Rosemary has finally accepted a wheel chair and is pretty good with it. She no longer has callouses on her knees. 🙂

  101. It seems that we (50-70 year olds) are first cohort to have to deal with dementia in our parents in any numbers. My parents’ parents worked out to the end, 70’s and late 80’s. They stayed in their homes and never needed any assistance until the last few months in two cases, fatal strokes in other two. Except for a great grandmother who lived to 97 half of those years in a home for the blind (amazingly, her mother we discovered had same fate), no-one else ever lived long enough.

    So I suspect my parents thought there was no reason to expect their experience to be any different. They were wrong.

    There were some interesting episodes along the way. My Dad had wanted to be a career musician in the ’30s. His dad had suggested that if he wanted to do this, he would need to be one of the top 5 guys in his instrument (tenor sax) in US. He had been practicing 8 hours day since he was 9 – mostly clarinet. He devoted a summer to playing everything he could find, but there was something Artie Shaw could do that Dad never managed. So it was off to engine school and a career in EE. He kept playing though, and was doing 2 or 3 dance jobs (swing) a week when we were growing up and continued into his retirement.

    He was still doing 3 jobs a week in his early nineties and was forced to turn down jobs even then. The first clear symptom of his decline (not counting earlier automotive navigation issues) was difficulty in assembling the saxophone. He’d show up for a gig and then not be able to get the horn together. Someone finally discovered that if the components were set out on a table in exactly the right pattern, he had no trouble and of course had no problem at all reading and jamming. People familiar with Swing genre will know that there are a couple of thousand standards which any serious swing musician will know by heart – true of my Dad.

    So two of the groups he played with photographed the correct array of saxophone parts, would get him to hit the head when he showed up and then would arrange the parts in accordance with the photos. this worked for another year, but then it didn’t any longer and he wouldn’t let anyone else put the horn together.

    the thing about all of this is that i have a pretty good feeling that he knows what’s going on but is so inhibited by his dementia that he can’t get the words out.

    And of course we’re the first cohort that it going to see this sort of thing over the extended period that modern medicine enables. The hardest part of this is that there doesn’t seen to be anything that can be done.

  102. John,
    Yes, I think we are the first to see aging parents surviving into their 80s-90s in large numbers. But also, we may be the 1st generation where both the aging parents and the children see the aging parents as living entirely on their own forever as 100% normal.

    Certainly when my mother was a child, often grandparents — or great grandparents if they existed– lived with their children. Heck, my Grandfather came and lived with use when I was in high school.

    But you know, oddly, some of this comes from the elderly having money. My Dad’s estate pretty well got tapped out. But in both his case and my inlaws, if there had been literally no monetary resources they would have had to move out of their homes more quickly because they could not have afforded utilities, transportation and so on. That wouldn’t have been any sort of dream come true, but we would be discussing different difficulties. (Note: Even the poor elderly should pick out an agent to assign Power of Attorney. But issues like “how to sell the house” go away.)

  103. Reverse Mortgages, while fraught with potential problems, will enable seniors to stay independent much longer.

  104. Buy long term care insurance in your early to mid 50’s if you have assets large enough that you won’t qualify for Medicaid. I think you can get 100% in-home care benefits now instead of the 50% that was usual when I bought it. The cost goes up a lot for every year you age and, unlike the ACA, you can’t wait to buy it until you need it.

  105. hunter,
    With respect to my inlaws and parents, reverse mortgage would have been the worst possible thing. Anything that encouraged them to stay in their house after cognitive decline was just a flat out bad thing. I know it’s what the older people want but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

  106. I think anyone with parents having the intention to live in their home until the end needs to look carefully at the costs of keeping them there if an around-the-clock care giver is required. This was one option when my mom demonstrated that she had no idea about money, was starting fires in the kitchen and proved that a car with one flat tire can be driven locally for over a week – yes it was beat up but still there.

    She’d complained that the car was a bit tricky to park. Illinois requires annual testing of drivers 90 up. She always passed with flying colors up til she was 95.

    Dad was already around the bend.

    If they were to stay in the house, we faced all of the costs of maintaining it, taxes, gas, electricity, plus transportation for shopping, plus remodeling for the live-in, plus the cost of the live-in and substitutes for weekends, plus additional insurance to cover liabilities not covered by the agency contracts, plus stuff i can’t remember.

    In my parents’ situation this all added up to more than the cost of sharing an apartment in assisted living at a nearby CCRC. (Continuing Care Retirement Community).

    Obviously you need to know what the costs of a place like that are going to be.

    If you have the authority to sell the house, the money from the sale should help finance their stay.

    If not, then they may be living out their years with you.

    I’m writing this in the living room in Jan’s 99 year old mother’s apartment in independent living in her CCRC in New Jersey. We had dinner tonight with one of her 102 year old friends. Except for hearing, these ladies are just as sharp as they likely ever were and a joy to spend time with.

    You may luck out and have parents that evade dementia. But since I didn’t, and had a real struggle to get them safely settled, I’m convinced that getting as much authority over their circumstances as you possibly can will make the whole thing happen, if it must, more smoothly and possibly comfortably for them.

    DeWitt, Jan and I have 4 years of long term care insurance. It pays a fixed figure daily for up to four years. Our thought was that if we somehow lasted the four years in this condition, we’d think up some alternative to continuing – but that discussion probably belongs at some other blog.

  107. Geez, I leave for a year and you start a book club.

    How are you Lucia and all? I do miss this blog. I’m pretty much limited to CA and Judith’s in China, due to the Great Firewall. Even when I travel in Asia, your site won’t let me comment.

    Writing a book is great–if you’re a masochist. The only time you’re not actively miserable is when you’re writing and when you’re writing it can be miserable too.

    Perhaps due to emotional immaturity, I had to be very disciplined when writing reports and the occasional book. X number of words before the morning walk, X number of words before I could have lunch, etc. Good luck with all that.

    I miss you all.

  108. RE: NM vs. AZ

    They’re very different cultures — I’ve lived in and like both states, but it’s going to be hard to make AZ be a proxy for NM.

    NM is Hispanic-governed, and has a lot of the old Spanish pioneer families still resident, politically active, some wealthy and powerful. It’s not too uncommon to bump into people who can trace their NM ancestry back to the 1600’s. NM is much poorer than AZ, and more Democratic in politics.

    AZ is Anglo-governed and dominated, and heavily dominated by Phoenix, which has well over half of the population (and probably 2/3 of the wealth & political power) of the state. There are still some of the Anglo pioneer families present and active, but few go further back than the 1890s. Before the 1890s (when the RR arrived), AZ had Anglo ranchers, a few pioneer miners, Hispanic farmers and townspeople, and not very many of any of those. There are local pockets of Hispanic political power (S. Phoenix, S. Tucson) but nothing like their NM influence and power. Most of the AZ Hispanics are relatively-recent immigrants, very few go even 100 years back. The Navajos are influential in NE AZ, the other tribes are politically and economically inconsequential.

    NM is very tradition-conscious. All 3 of the major cultures — Hispanic, Anglo & Indian — have major influence in state politics and gestalt. The Anglos have the wealth, the Hispanics have the political power, the Indians have some moral authority and good lawyers. NM is the only state in the US (sfaik) where Anglos usually pronounce Spanish words and place names close to right. And *everyone* loves green chile! (+/-red) Government on all levels is slow, VERY prone to nepotism and only intermittently competent. Population is just 2 million (vs 6.6 million in AZ), in just about the same areas.

    AZ is MUCH more businesslike, boosterish & better-governed. Phoenix is strongly Republican, as are the Mormons — the latter by far the most politically-influential religious/social group in the state, especially in northern AZ.

    AZ climate and vegetation are quite different from NM: AZ is lower hotter, & wetter in the deserts, with milder winters. NM is more continental, dryer, lots more high country, lots more *inhabitable* high country.

    So for you, Lucia, it’s going to be *really hard* to find a convincing facsimile of NM culture in AZ. You may not care, since this is a secondary issue for what you are (I think) trying to do — but you should seriously consider a NM setting for that part of the novel-memoir. Maybe the Mesilla Valley (Las Cruces to El Paso) would work — though I don’t know that area all that well.

    Incidentally, now that I live in coastal Calif. (SLO County), I’m having a really hard time adjusting to the one rainy season — and not much then. Very frustrating to see TWO hurricanes blowing out in AZ/NM, with dust and dead grass here. Sigh. Like the ocean wildlife, tho, and the year-round cool temps.

  109. Good point. I am just starting a steep climb of the learning curve on this issue. I am starting to see where that could become a bad outcome.

  110. Pete,
    I could tell they were different just from googling and looking at communities. But– I only need this one little bit– the dry drive, dustiness, etc. I don’t need the full state to match. I don’t need to know anything about the culture.

    The story is about the a few people in a family– not the town or its culture. The family member living in the Southwest did not grow up there. The amount of time in AZ/NM is very, very small. But certain details can’t have a reader saying… what? She’s saying Minnesotta is dusty and dry? Or “The guy is on a well in downtown Minneapolis? Some things just don’t make sense.

    I know a few readers seem to not worry about mis-matches too much, but it bugs me when I read a story supposedly in the Chicago area and they do something that strikes me as “whoa..” (Like high-level medical research in Lake Zurich, Il.)

    In contrast, many stories on Northern Illinois could move to Southern WI easily. Is Madison different from Rockford? Sure. But for any given town, you can find a somewhat reasonable facsimile provided the story isn’t “about” but more “about” the people, you can find a reasonable similar setting.

  111. hunter,
    The problem with planning is that — quite often– everyone’s plan seems to envision something like “The Golden Girls” where the oldest one may have grey hair, maybe she’s best off living with her daughter, but she’s pretty with it or “Aunt Bea” in the Andy Griffith show. Or maybe, someone is in a wheelchair but otherwise ok (like say “Ironsides”.)

    Generally, this is the idea people have in mind when they are considering a reverse mortgage. It’s sort of like getting to stay in your house but pulling money out of the bank.

    What they really don’t want to plan for is someone whose memory has declined to the point where they forget things and start fires when cooking (my mother-in-law did that– luckily it was very small and my father-in-law was there) or forget where they live now and start looking for their childhood home (my mother-in-laws father did that. The joliet police would find him wandering around Joliet looking for the home he lived in when he was less than 18 yo.) These people can’t live at home alone no matter how much money they have. (And — moreover– depending on personality, they may refuse to let anyone care for them in their own homes. That was the case with my inlaws.)

    Or the other thing is that people don’t notice their home is unsuitable for someone who isn’t fully mobile. Others will not admit it is unsuitable for someone who isn’t mobile and lives alone. (My mother falls in the category of those who will not admit. She thinks that because my wheel chair bound grandfather could live downstairs in the lovely half basement with a ‘mother-in-law suite’ set up (which is very nice) and enter and exit through the downstairs patio, it’s possible for a person with limited mobility to live there. Well.. yeah. They can. If they are part of a family with two other able bodied adults and 2 able bodied teens to get groceries, do laundry, mow the law, do or arrange tasks associated with maintaining the house and so on. In those circumstances, the kids could even roll him out and take him on regular outings to highschool football games, church and so on. But by himself? Not. Possible.

    If they were to stay in the house, we faced all of the costs of maintaining it, taxes, gas, electricity, plus transportation for shopping, plus remodeling for the live-in, plus the cost of the live-in and substitutes for weekends, plus additional insurance to cover liabilities not covered by the agency contracts, plus stuff i can’t remember.

    In my parents’ situation this all added up to more than the cost of sharing an apartment in assisted living at a nearby CCRC. (Continuing Care Retirement Community).

    Remodeling, cabs to get groceries– or even just go to church– are sorts of costs that people somehow don’t think of. Newspaper articles talking about what you ‘need’ to do to stay in your own home until the day you die overlook this. The aging need to envision the possible unpredictable ways they might decline, then look very critically at the house to see whether it’s realistic to stay there.

    Dementia? Unless you have staff, you aren’t going to stay in your own single family detached house living independently unless at least 1 other person lives with you. Don’t even imagine it. People with moderate to severe dementia cannot live on their own. Period. And if they have moderate dementia, it’s going to become severe.

    So, in this case, reverse mortgage may be more a burden than a blessing. One might be able to mitigate against this by also having some sort of insurance-but still. To some extent, unless you live in a house your kids own, no matter what anyone tells you about government programs letting you keep your house while still qualifying for benefits that pay for care …well.. sort of. But if the income the aging person has can’t cover insurance, taxes, any association fees, essential utilities and so on and they live with dementia for 5-10 years (which is not uncommon) while also covering those expenses the state or insurance can’t or won’t pay for (which can include things like clothing and hair cuts) , any house that is not sold is going to go into foreclosure to cover debts associated with paying things like real estate taxes.

    To some extent, people really, really, really need to recognize that “dying in the house where I raised my kids” should not be the priority that takes over all planning. As for leaving the house to the kids because of all the ‘sentimental memories’: do your kids really want that house? If they have their own houses where they raised their own kids, or live in another state, or your ‘dream’ is for multiple kids to split the old homestead, there’s a 99.99% chance they will just sell it within 5 years of your death because the ongoing taxes, maintenance and insurance costs vastly outweigh the ‘sentimental’ value of a house they don’t live in and– really– never visit.

    Besides, given uncertainty of what can happen, if you really want to give money or property to your kids, and you can afford to give it, it’s probably better to start giving large gifts, or offer house down payments when you are alive and fully competent. But that means you won’t have control of that money when you retire. Also, the kids may squander it, or be ungrateful, or become irresponsible etc. Or they might get divorced, have businesses that go bankrupt or get sued or something and lose the money in some way. People being what they are, they might be resentful that you didn’t retain money to cover your expenses– and be so even if the reason you don’t have money is you gave them money. Or they may be grateful. Who knows? Life is a risk.

  112. lucia (Comment #131866)

    “The problem with planning is that — quite often– everyone’s plan seems to envision something like “The Golden Girls” where the oldest one may have grey hair, maybe she’s best off living with her daughter, but she’s pretty with it or “Aunt Bea” in the Andy Griffith show. Or maybe, someone is in a wheelchair but otherwise ok (like say “Ironsides”.)”

    A lady told me a few years back that life was all about Plan B.

  113. Since there has been interest in the Mann defamation case, and since I suggested on 9/13 that the Williams’ firm might not keep their briefs on line out of embarrassment, I would note that Mann’s latest 9/3 brief was not posted online.

    Hopefully, it is OK for me to cross-post what I stated on Curry’s blog:

    I read the Watts Up summary of Steyn’s latest commentary on the lawsuit. Steyn mentioned something very significant, which I missed in quickly reading Mann’s latest brief. On page 21 of Mann’s brief, his lawyers drop their opposition to the jurisdiction of the Appeals Court. This is a huge change in strategy for Mann.

    Mann’s lawyers claim that they did so because the appellate court asked for briefs addressing the merits and that could possibly be their actual reason for doing so. On the other hand, Mann’s lawyers invested a substantial amount of time and money in claiming that there was no jurisdiction in the appellate court. (Undoubtedly, in substantial measure, because they believed that the trial judge bought into their claim). Something significant is going on here, and I can’t say exactly what.

    One potential explanation is that Williams has realized that the case is much more difficult than he thought and is bailing. Supporting that theory is the fact that his latest brief is not even posted on his website which is an indication that the firm is embarrassed by its work or doesn’t want to draw further attention to the case. There are other potential explanations for Williams conceding the appellate court’s jurisdiction (for instance, he could believe that the court will rule in his favor, and he merely wants to get an inevitable appeal on basic issues out of the way.)

    Also, I would note that the Appeals Court is not bound by Williams’ concession. If it decides that there is no jurisdiction, it can decline to hear the case on its own motion.

    JD

  114. JDOhio–

    On page 21 of Mann’s brief, his lawyers drop their opposition to the jurisdiction of the Appeals Court. This is a huge change in strategy for Mann.

    That is huge!

    One potential explanation is that Williams has realized that the case is much more difficult than he thought and is bailing

    Yes. I suspect the lawyers may not have been following all the discussion on the web, but they would certainly read the amici briefs. They may have previously thought the only counter arguments to the ‘exonerations’ were (a) whether or not they were exonerations and (b) whether the plaintiffs were aware of and had read them.

    But the Amici arguments are (c) Even if they are exonerations and the plaintiffs read them, it would be a horrible violation of 1A to say that people either have to believe the results of governmental, semi-governmental or even universty investigations or to say that people who don’t believe them are not allowed to air the view that these investigations are white washes.

    Legally (c) is a very strong argument. Politically, it might not be the one the defendants want to spend a lot of time airing, but that’s ok. The amici are doing it.

  115. Lucia, “But the Amici arguments are (c) Even if they are exonerations and the plaintiffs read them, it would be a horrible violation of 1A to say that people either have to believe the results of governmental, semi-governmental or even university investigations or to say that people who don’t believe them are not allowed to air the view that these investigations are white washes.”

    Personally, and it is just an educated guess by me, I believe that Williams now realizes that he doesn’t have an easy case to prove, what he hopes is the falsity, of Steyn’s statements. My best guess is that Williams was hired on a contingency basis because he hired Grimm rather other Cozen lawyers to do some of the brief writing. If there was a wealthy person underwriting the case, Cozen would be billing out of the wazoo and Grimm wouldn’t have been hired. There is a decent chance that Williams is bailing because he doesn’t currently see gold at the end of the rainbow of what is probably a contingency fee contract.
    …..

    Personally, “c” doesn’t resonate with me because the issue is the truth or falsity of Steyn’s statements and Mann’s work. Whether you prove truth through government reports or other means shouldn’t matter. I believe the realization that the factual issues are so difficult is what most probably caused the change in strategy.

    JD

  116. “Legally (c) is a very strong argument. Politically, it might not be the one the defendants want to spend a lot of time airing, but that’s ok. The amici are doing it.”

    So Mann’s argument boils down to we are required to trust the government and universities.

  117. Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps Mann’s representatives want less blogosphere/back bench peanut gallery feedback and want to focus on the case at hand?
    I certainly *hope* that Mann’s suit ends badly for the plaintiff. But I will believe it when it actually does.

  118. Also, I would note that the Appeals Court is not bound by Williams’ concession. If it decides that there is no jurisdiction, it can decline to hear the case on its own motion.

    Indeed, if a court doesn’t have jurisdiction over a case, it not only can, but must decline to hear it — at least in any court I’ve ever seen. That being so I wonder whether this “withdrawal” will have any effect at all. (Except maybe to prevent Mann’s lawyer from having to talk about it at oral argument…I haven’t been following the appeal closely enough to know when that is.)

    I used to work in a federal trial court and ran into that issue a couple of times…where the defendant apparently hadn’t noticed there was a jurisdictional issue with the case, but the judge did, and the case got dismissed. The judge always gave the lawyers the opportunity to show cause why the case shouldn’t be dismissed…but the lawyers weren’t always able to come up with anything.

  119. (btw, I don’t know why, but the comments feature is adding plus signs in names with spaces, and I think the comments are going into moderation as “first time posters”; I just happened to notice and modify mine)

  121. Joseph W. You are absolutely right about a court’s duties when it finds lack of jurisdiction. I was speaking colloquially. Also, since the jurisdictional issue is so subtle here, the Appeals Court could rule either way, and no one would raise an eyebrow.
    ……
    I would add to my comment about “c” that judges deal with government agencies all of the time and quite often deal with with both competent and incompetent agencies. They have no particularly strong feelings about the competence of government agencies in general one way or the other. However, I do think that a court’s first instinct is to give a good amount of deference to what people think are prestigious scientific organizations, such as the National Academy of Science. Also, as I said before, a court would be impressed by the fact that Steve Mc was number one in Canada on the high school math exam.

    JD

  123. Also, since the jurisdictional issue is so subtle here, the Appeals Court could rule either way, and no one would raise an eyebrow.

    Too true. I think the “go ahead and decide it” interpretation fits the real intent of the statute, but the language is vague enough it might very well go the other way.

    Unlike you, I very much favor Lucia’s (c), but that is no secret, and I am as happy as she is that the amici are arguing it so forcefully.

  124. I think the jurisdictional issue, whether interlocutory appeals can be taken from denial of the Anti-SLAPP motion, is controlled by the reasoning in the recent case of Doe v. Burke, discussed by Ken White recently at Popehat.

  125. Joseph W: I think the Amici help a lot, mostly by their numbers and political affiliation. However, as I said, I, personally, am not that impressed by the (c) argument or its importance.

    JD

  126. JD,
    I am astonished that you would suppose that Williams is working on a contingency basis. I would have thought that the likelihood of any significant recovery in a suit like this, even if ‘successful’, would be very low.

    Could he be working ‘pro bono’ without it being evident?

    I ask more as a question of being in the business of being an attorney.

  127. j+ferguson,
    This would be an awfully long involved case to work pro-bono on. Also: I’m not sure it’s a “principle” that would excite some attorney relative to other ‘principle’, and — on top of that– the plaintiff is not impoverished. While the principle that one should not be defamed is important, it isn’t exactly like Mann has lost his job or grants because of defamation. At most he can point to something like Steyn/Simberg hurt his feelings. I know hurt feelings can be tough– but it’s maybe not a huge motivation for an attorney’s firm to do lots of pro-bono work.

    I’m wracking my brain– but the only motivation I can imagine for doing this pro-bono is thinking favorable publicity would get you more clients. But that wouldn’t do a firm much good if they lose.

    (I gotta get those +’s out… but don’t want to figure out what’s putting them in! WordPress got updated… Alas, it’s also causing lots of people to be moderated. )

  128. However, as I said, I, personally, am not that impressed by the (c) argument or its importance.

    Well, as far as its importance goes, think of the effect on future litigation:

    A finding that relates strictly to the facts of this case (Mann wasn’t really exonerated) leaves the door open for future intimidation lawsuits…all the future plaintiffs have to do, even Mann himself, is to get a couple of friendly government agencies staffed with their ideological allies to really “exonerate” them. (The “exoneration” can be as fluffy as Penn State’s was….MJW linked to it here…once you decide this stuff creates an issue of fact, you beat the dismissals and get to drag your victims to the jury). Mann’s preferred intimidation tactic is left wide open for future use; it just has to be executed more carefully in the future.

    If (c) works, on the other hand…that says, don’t even bother with this line of attack. The fact that you hold the “commanding heights” in the media, the administrative state, and on campus does not give you an extra tool to shut your enemies up. Not in this country.

  129. Joseph W.

    That’s wort of what I think. I agree with JD Ohio that in this case, the attorney is going to find it difficult to prove Mann is correct on the facts. In truth, the cases claiming to exhonerate him just don’t do so. So, in some sense the question of whether exhonerations if they existed would matter shouldn’t “matter”.

    But if one goes through the “if/then” situation for the attorney, the thing is:

    Even if he could convince the jury that Mann did not commit fraud and even if he could convince the jury that Mann was exonerated, then he gets to yet another hurdle: Are journalists and pundits required to believe government or university ‘exonerations’. Can they believe these were white washes? Can they say so? Can they express beliefs about the person ‘exonerated’ based on their own belief that the ‘exoneration’ was incorrect?

    That is: Am I allowed to say that I think OJ did it?

    All these look like rhetorical questions– but they are subtly different. I’m not posing these to “make a point”, but rather as examples of the sorts of legal questions a court might need to resolve in a case where the plaintiff’s evidence he has been defamed involves saying that the defendant must believe some legal, semi-legal, or university ‘exoneration’.

    Obviously, if the exoneration exists that matters as a point of fact and will weigh heavily with a judge or jury trying to decide if a certain claim was a lie. But the second question is: Does everyone need to believe the exoneration? That’s subtly different.

  130. Re: lucia (Sep 19 08:28),

    Strictly speaking, being exonerated and being found not guilty in a criminal trial are different things. That being said, my reading of the various investigations is that they amounted to not guilty verdicts rather than exonerations.

  131. DeWitt,
    True. Exonerations are not the same as ‘not guilty’. Nevertheless, people aren’t required to believe either one.

    I also agree that the verdicts were closer to ‘not guilty’ than ‘exonerations’. But beyond that: the investigations looked into very specific things and don’t give any sort of ‘not guilty’ on things they didn’t look into.

  132. Doe v. Burke Link http://caselaw.findlaw.com/dc-court-of-appeals/1668280.html

    Quote: “Because each of the criteria of the collateral order doctrine is satisfied, we hold that an order denying a special motion to quash under the D.C. Anti–SLAPP statute will be immediately appealable to this court.”
    ….
    Quote: “If anything, the edits seem to suggest confusion or honest mistake on Zujua’s part. Again, the edited paragraph is internally contradictory and implies that Zujua probably did not understand that the private civil action in Abtan and the federal prosecution of the contractors arising out of the same incident were separate legal actions. Moreover, in contrast to the allegations Ms. Burke makes against John Doe No. 2 (CapBasics359), who apparently re-published similar information after she informed him that it was false, Ms. Burke admits that after she apprised Zujua of the problems with the paragraph, he apparently accepted the correction and did not seek to re-publish the information.”

    …….

    No time to comment in detail. Case mostly helpful to defendants. However, the fact that Steyn keeps making the fraud accusation and is now calling Mann Mr. Fraudpants gives Mann something to argue in this case.

    JD

  133. Lucia: Obviously, if the exoneration exists that matters as a point of fact and will weigh heavily with a judge or jury trying to decide if a certain claim was a lie. But the second question is: Does everyone need to believe the exoneration? That’s subtly different.

    .
    Suppose all the judges in all the pretrial legal wranglings issue the kinds of rulings which eventually result in one or more jury trials commencing.
    .
    (1) Since Steyn is currently being defended separately from NRO & CEI, and is also countersuing Mann, how many jury trials could there be?
    .
    (2) What role would issues of free speech play in these jury trials versus what role issues of fact would play?
    .
    (3) If both categories of issue — issues of free speech and issues of fact — play some role in a jury trial, what kinds of arguments might be raised for each category of issue?

    Note that I did not include in my list of issue categories one called “issues of belief.” If it is included at all in some way or other, should issues of belief be listed as a separate category of issue, or is it something which is bound up inside one or both of the other two issue categories?

    Once again, the premise in asking these questions is that all the judges in all the pretrial legal wranglings have issued the kinds of rulings which eventually result in one or more jury trials commencing.

  135. Will J. Richardson: Here is the Google Scholar link to Doe v. Burke. The advantage of Google Scholar is hyperlinking to the cases cited in the opinion.

    .
    More evidence that the emergence of the Internet guarantees employment for lawyers for the next 10,000 years.

  136. Dr. Liljegren, you stated:

    Obviously, if the exoneration exists that matters as a point of fact and will weigh heavily with a judge or jury trying to decide if a certain claim was a lie.

    The “exonerations” are facts only insofar as it can be proved that investigations occurred and conclusions were reached by the investigators. However, the conclusions reached by those investigations are not “facts”. Mann claims that the “exonerations” prove that the “Hockey Stick” was not “fraudulent”, and prove that Mann did not manipulate and “torture” the data. Mann also argues that the “exonerations” must be believed because of the scientific qualifications of the investigators.

    Therefore, Mann’s own argument the the “exonerations” are dispositive prove that the “exoneration” issue cannot be other than a matter to be determined by expert scientific opinion. It follows then that at best, the “exonerations” express the investigator’s collective scientific opinion that the evidence actually presented to and considered by the investigators does not support the allegations actually investigated.

    To prove “exoneration”, Mann must elicit the testimony of the investigators he claims “exonerated” him. On cross examination, counsel for the defendants will then be able to precisely establish what evidence the investigators considered, evidence not considered, the reasoning underlying their conclusions, and the standards or rules they applied to reach their conclusion. After such a cross examination, how many of those scientists would be willing to testify that the accuracy of Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is an objective, provable fact, and therefore not a matter of scientific opinion. If deeming the “Hockey Stick” not fraudulent is a scientific opinion, then Steyn calling the “Hockey Stick” fraudulent is also a scientific opinion, and not actionable in defamation.

  137. J Ferg:
    “JD,
    I am astonished that you would suppose that Williams is working on a contingency basis. I would have thought that the likelihood of any significant recovery in a suit like this, even if ‘successful’, would be very low.

    Could he be working ‘pro bono’ without it being evident?”

    Here are the reasons that I believe that Williams is working on a contingency basis. 1. If he were to win the case, very roughly, the publicity he would get should be worth something like $5,000,000. Essentially, everyone would know him, and he would be on the top 3 list of plaintiff’s defamation lawyers in the U.S. He appears to be a publicity hound and would like the public to think of him as a gunslinger who will represent anyone and take on anyone.

    …..
    2. Imagine that Albert Einstein was accused of scientific fraud by a journalist. First Amendment issues could be significant, but if you got by those, the actual trial on the facts would be easy. I think Williams [wrongly] thought that Mann was roughly in the place of Einstein, and he felt that if the legal issues were surmounted, the actual trial of the facts would be easy. I believe he made the calculation that he would risk his time in this situation.

    …….
    3. I don’t feel that Williams is handling the case pro bono. [look at his past list of clients — seems like he is not a pro bono type of lawyer.] On the other hand, since he is not affiliated with Cozen any more, and since only 2 Cozen lawyers are on the case, it appears to me that there is very little hourly billing involved here. If there was a substantial amount of hourly billing, we would see Cozen lawyers all over the place [large firms are essentially billing machines], and we would not have seen Bernard Grimm (a sole practitioner) helping out on the briefs.

    …..
    Obviously, I have no inside information, but for 18 years I worked on a contingency basis [workers compensation claims], and I think I understand the way that contingency fee lawyers think.

    JD

  138. Will J. Richardson: After such a cross examination, how many of those scientists would be willing to testify that the accuracy of Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is an objective, provable fact, and therefore not a matter of scientific opinion.

    .
    In the world of tort law, does there exist a precedent for distinguishing scientific fact from scientific opinion?
    .
    If a legal precedent exists for distinguishing a scientific fact from a scientific opinion, how would the criteria for something being a scientific fact versus a scientific opinion be applied to the Hockey Stick?
    .
    For example, if we use F=M*A as an example of a scientific fact, and we view the Hockey Stick as an example of a scientific opinion, what specific attributes distinguish F=M*A from the Hockey Stick?

  139. Mann is not only good at selling hockey sticks. In my opinion he has been very effective in posing for sympathetic people as a martyr for science. It is very likely that he ahs used those sympathetic people to finance his legal war against skeptics. Pro-bono and contingency are both highly unusual in civil cases where there are no deep pockets. The ACLU, for instance, regularly makes certain that those government groups who settle with them cover the ACLU legal fees as part of the settlement. NGO groups that settle in sub rosa arrangements with the EPA are said to have their fees written into the settlement deal.
    It is highly unlikely that this sort fo arrangement could hold up in going against purely private interests.

  140. Hunter: “contingency [fees] are both highly unusual in civil cases where there are no deep pockets.”

    True. However, I would consider National Review, CEI and their insurers to be deep pockets. Also, if you prove an intentional tort, or get punitive damages, typically the defendant has to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. (not sure what DC rule is though) There are plenty of benefits for Williams if he were to win the case.

    JD

  141. Beta Blocker (Comment #131895)

    You ask:

    “In the world of tort law, does there exist a precedent for distinguishing scientific fact from scientific opinion?

    I don’t believe a specific precedent is necessary. If there is a trial, Mann bears the burden of proving that Steyn’s description of Mann’s most famous work as the “fraudulent ‘Hockey stick'”, is not only false, but false as a matter of fact, not scientific opinion. Who will Mann call to the stand to prove this? He must necessarily solicit the testimony of witnesses who by virtue of their education, training, and experience, are qualified to evaluate Mann’s data, code, and methods. Those witnesses must then be willing to testify that the “Hockey Stick” is not “fraudulent” in fact, and was not produced by “fraudulent” methods.

    Mann therefore needs “expert testimony” to prove his case. Mann is not likely to concede that any layman (or mining engineer) without the equivalent of Mann’s scientific education, training, and experience, is qualified to testify about whether Mann’s “Hockey Stick” papers reached correct conclusions using correct methods. Experts usually testify in the form of an expert opinion.

    I do not believe your example, “F=MA”, is sufficiently analogous to the circumstances material to the issues in this case. I do not doubt that there are many persons qualified by their education, training, and experience who honestly hold the opinion that Mann’s “Hockey Stick” papers are supported by neither the data, nor methods, Mann used to construct the “Hockey Stick”. I doubt you could find any qualified expert who would dispute the correctness of “F=MA”.

  142. Re: Will J. Richardson (Sep 19 17:22),

    You ask:

    “In the world of tort law, does there exist a precedent for distinguishing scientific fact from scientific opinion?

    I don’t believe a specific precedent is necessary. If there is a trial, Mann bears the burden of proving that Steyn’s description of Mann’s most famous work as the “fraudulent ‘Hockey stick’”, is not only false, but false as a matter of fact, not scientific opinion.

    .
    Will, not to be snarky here, but the question I asked was not if a specific precedent was necessary, but if one exists. To your knowledge, is there such a precedent where arguments which involve the validity of scientific research draw a distinction between “scientific fact” and “scientific opinion”?
    .

    Will J. Richardson: I do not believe your example, “F=MA”, is sufficiently analogous to the circumstances material to the issues in this case. I do not doubt that there are many persons qualified by their education, training, and experience who honestly hold the opinion that Mann’s “Hockey Stick” papers are supported by neither the data, nor methods, Mann used to construct the “Hockey Stick”. I doubt you could find any qualified expert who would dispute the correctness of “F=MA”.

    .
    Will, I am acquainted with people who hold scientific credentials in the earth sciences who believe that the Hockey Stick is as much a “scientific fact” as any fact can possibly be, to the extent that although different versions of the Hockey Stick exist in which the squiggles look a little different from version to version, the basic shape is the same among all versions in that there is a long handle with a sharp upward blade at the end.
    .
    In other words, as their opinion goes, there may be differences, but the differences don’t make any real difference; i.e., in the Hockey Stick as a generalized body of scientific research, there is conclusive scientific proof that recent warming is unprecedented in the last one-thousand years.
    .
    You ask if I could find any qualified expert who would dispute the correctness of “F=MA”.
    .
    If a plaintiff’s case depended for its success on pushing the argument that F=MA is true at all times and in all places — a very audacious assertion, certainly — then I can find an expert in relativistic force mechanics who will very successfully argue that F=MA isn’t true at all times and in all places — assuming the jury’s eyes don’t glaze over during the presentation.
    .
    How would a plaintiff respond after an expert in relativistic force mechanics got done with shredding the argument that F=MA is true at all times and in all places? Probably the plaintiff would argue that F=MA is true at all times and in all places for all practical purposes in everyone’s everyday experiences; and is good enough for government work in most cases where it is being applied.

  143. I doubt you could find any qualified expert who would dispute the correctness of “F=MA”.

    I’m no expert, but I’d argue for F=dp/dt. 😉

  145. Re: MikeR (Sep 20 19:37),

    And that’s just about the IPCC WG-I report on the science. WG-II on effects (I refuse to use ‘impacts’,), costs and vulnerability and WG-III on mitigation are far less verifiable than WG-I, with lots of references to what’s called the gray literature. WG-III being significantly worse in that respect than WG-II. IMO, mitigation isn’t going to happen, so WG-III is a complete waste of time and effort.

  147. Lucia – Having read your criteria – you might look at the little towns north east of Denver. With DIA being out in the middle of nowhere, the towns of Hudson Lockbuie, Ft. Morgan (I-76) or Bennett (east on I-70) all seem to fit your criteria.

    They have a mismatch of big houses, trailers on acreage. And it is dry and dusty.

  150. Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #131846)

    On further analysis and reading of the Macias paper I now can show what I thought were CIs in the graphs in the paper were actually what the authors described – if read carefully: The lines represent the range of variation of the monthly secular trends (ST) estimated separately for each of the 12 months of the year. The more variation in the estimated monthly STs for a given year the further apart the lines.

    I modeled the residuals from the HadCRUT4 secular trend and multi decadal variation (MDV) and found a best fit of an ARMA(2,0) with ar1=0.302 and ar2=-0.201 and sd=0.0878. I did 10,000 simulations with this model with the ST and MDV added to it to determine the 95% CIs. As it turns out the CIs look somewhat like the monthly range that the Macias paper calculated. Also important to note that the CIs from synthetic data were closer together at the mid portions of the curve and further apart at the ends much like the monthly range shown in the Macias paper. I need to do more work with simulations using synthetic data, but I think the difference in separation observed is related either to the analysis method or the shape of the ST and MDV or both.

  151. Kenneth+Fritsch (Comment #131918)

    In addition I disagree with the statement in the Macias paper that the residuals from ST and MDV is white noise. The aic scores for ARMA(2,0) were considerable lower (better fit) than for ARMA(0,0).

  152. kenneth,
    My take on the paper: glorified curve fitting. Yes, the temperature history is consistent with an oscillation of about 62 years superimposed on a long term warming trend. But that is pretty obvious by inspection, so I don’t see that the paper advances understanding very much. Untethered from causation, this type of analysis is limited in what it can accomplish.

  153. SteveF (Comment #131921)

    My interest in the paper was its using a non-parametric and more objective approach to the decomposition of the instrumental temperature series and isolating a secular trend (deterministic). Calculating a linear trend line in these temperature series is curve fitting and expecting the trend to be linear is very probably going to be wrong.

    I have been interested in modeling the instrumental temperature series and perhaps even temperature reconstructions (and reconstructions that I judge are mostly or all fatally flawed from the start). In order to model the series based on stochastic residuals one has to obtain a good estimate of the secular trend and the multi-decadal variations. I think the use of the Singular Spectrum Analysis used in the Macias paper is an excellent starting point at the very least.

    If you read some of Mann’s early papers you will see he was interested in doing the same. He appeared at that time to be concentrating on natural variations in climate. You then see a paper (I do not recall the specific one) where the authors in a Mann coauthored paper note the importance of determining the anthropogenic portion of warming. That was apparently the initiative for the reconstruction papers coauthored by Mann. In the reconstructions the technique in Singular Spectrum Analysis of obtaining a smoothed time series showing the lower frequency structure, including secular trends, without the white noise appeared to be abandoned by Mann in favor of smoothers applicable to signal processing, e.g. Butterworth. I think the choice might have been based on having more knobs to turn in order to obtain the “correct” answer.

  154. SWIRL Story Writing in Remote Locations (literacy program; Australia)
    just posting random thoughts, come back to your blog, Lucia.

  155. Back to dishwashers.

    I recently had a problem with my relatively new Maytag. The start button on the front control panel wouldn’t work, as well as several other buttons. After a little research on the internet, I discovered that this was a known problem. There was even a class action suit filed. It turns out that apparently the coating on the ribbon cable at the point where it joins the control panel board was not thick enough or something. There were 12 or 14 lines on the cable and three of them were corroded. At least one of them was corroded so badly it wouldn’t conduct. The quick and dirty fix was to use copper paint from a rear window defroster repair kit.

    I doubt that will last very long, so I’ve ordered a new panel at ~$150 including shipping. I’m going to inspect and put some additional coating on the ribbon cable at the critical point before I install it. I also called the law firm that filed the suit. They gave me a phone number to call at Maytag or Whirlpool or whoever actually makes these things.

  156. DeWitt,
    What a pain! With some luck, you’ll get your cable. My problems were with Sears the entity that extended their warrantty. Maybe Maytag or Whirpool will be better.

  157. Off topic: Lewis and Curry have a new paper on climate sensitivity; posts at Climate Audit, Climate etc. and WUWT.

  159. I saw the Lewis & Curry study. He addresses one concern of mine:

    Scientists who work on or with global climate models (GCMs) tend to be suspicious of observationally-based ECS and TCR estimates that lie well below the values indicated by most GCMs. One of their arguments is that most ECS estimates based on warming during the instrumental period are actually of effective climate sensitivity, which reflects climate feedbacks during the period studied, and that many GCMs show feedbacks changing and effective climate sensitivity increasing over time, so that energy budget and other instrumental observation-based estimates of ECS will be too low.

    But I don’t see his response as resolving it:

    However, it is standard to estimate the equilibrium sensitivity of coupled GCMs from regressing radiative imbalance on GMST over a 150 year simulation involving an artificial scenario with an abrupt quadrupling of CO2 concentration. The vast majority of such regression plots show no evidence of the strength of climate feedbacks changing measurably over time, apart from (for about half the GCMs) during the first year or two when the climate system is undergoing very rapid adjustment to the quadrupling of CO2. If such behaviour in that period reflects reality, there would be an effect on the relationship of energy budget ECS estimates to the regression-based estimate of equilibrium sensitivity, but it would be extremely small and possibly negative.

    I admit that what he is doing is (as well as he can do so) “standard practice” for people trying to estimate temperature sensitivity from temperature data.

    This is a case where I think the standard practice is “not well motivated.”

    What the models say is this:

    figure

    This is a plot of the model outcomes from Winston 2010 as per a suggestion by Isaac Held in the comments of this thread.

    “TEQ” is the change in equilibrium temperature for in a doubling of CO2 (so it is the same as ECS).

    Anyway, there seems to be two discrepancies here.

    One is that Nic Lewis is finding lower climate sensitivities for TCR that the models find (this isn’t necessarily a real issue) and the other is that his ratio of TCR/TEQ is much larger— roughly 0.8 for Nic’s analysis versus 0.5 for the models.

  160. Carrick,
    I think it is pretty well agreed that if the equilibrium sensitivity is lower, then the ratio of transient to equilibrium sensitivities has to be higher. My recollection is that for the CIMP5 models, the ratio is near 0.6. So I don’t find it surprising that L&C get a higher ratio than the models. Am I missing something?

    The difference between equilibrium and effective sensitivities is an issue that needs to be better addressed, since some published papers claim a difference of 15% or more between these (as calculated by the models). I expect the paper will attract a formal comment or two on this and other subjects in the same journal over the next few months. But from a practical standpoint, the difference between equilibrium and effective sensitivities may not be so important, because according to the models where the difference is substantial it takes on the order of 150 years following a step change in forcing before the temperature response begins to migrate from the effective toward the equilibrium value.

  161. SteveF, see the figure I linked to, which shows the ratio of TCR/TEQ against TEQ for a number of different models.

    0.8 is well above the ratios allowed by the models.

    Note, I’m only saying this is a discrepancy, not that it’s necessarily wrong.

    If it is correct, it could even indicate what direction the models need to go in order to arrive at modeling the “real Earth”.

    [See Isaac Held’s comments in his post #4 for an interpretation in terms of 2-box model parameters.]

  162. “They gave me a phone number to call at Maytag or Whirlpool or whoever actually makes these things.”

    If it is Whirlpool do not expect much help. I have had a problem with a relatively new Whirlpool refrigerator defrost drain outlet freezing before the water had drained and eventually the water/ice builds in the freezer floor and can spill over unto the flow. They finally claim to have a fix but want to charge me for the service call and only with a Whirlpool recommended repair person. There was a class action pending on that problem, but I see little hope for any compensation there after the lawyers divvy up their share.

    The problem requires some intricate, for me anyway, disassembling, but after the second incident in 3 years the repair person and I worked out what I think should solve the problem. I also think if the solution fails I can thaw out the drain without disassembling.

  164. Bill_C (Comment #131941)

    I recall an American Physical Society forum that was held recently with Judy Curry, Bill Collins, Ben Santer, Isaac Held, Richard Lindzen, and John Christy having discussions on many topics. I thought I heard Held being very adamant about the linearity involved. In fact I was surprised when he invoked his many years working in this field. Held may not consider a non linear system.

    Or I might have misread or forgotten. The transcript was very lengthy.

    http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

  165. I think I was mistakenly thinking of “TEQ” = “effective” climate sensitivity (linear extrapolation).

    Kenneth – Held does seem to argue for 1) linearity in mechanisms and 2) linearity overall in terms of the GCMs (e.g. apparent nonlinearity in T-F plots can’t be explained away by postulating “new” feedbacks kicking in on longer time scales. But I think he agrees the apparent T-F nonlinearity in models could have explanations consistent with this view.

  167. DeWitt –
    The *unofficial* results (apologies for formatting):
    Name, Guess, Bet amount, Gross winnings, Net winnings
    DavidJay, 4.9, 5, 81.558, 76.558
    BobD, 4.9, 3, 39.148, 36.148
    LouisJenks, 4.89, 5, 52.197, 47.197
    Carrick, 4.94, 5, 41.758, 36.758
    HaroldW, 4.949, 3, 20.044, 17.044
    eddieo, 4.95, 5, 26.725, 21.725
    BillKelly, 4.827, 1, 4.276, 3.276
    DonB, 4.825, 5, 9.279, 4.279

  169. Lucia,

    Oral argument before the court of appeals is scheduled for 11/25 in DC. See http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/389835/update-mann-v-national-review-jack-fowler If anyone is in the vicinity, it would probably be an interesting experience to hear the questions asked by the court and the tone of the questions. I would be particularly interested in whether Mann’s attorneys have irritated the court with their deception on the exoneration issue. Also, I believe anyone attending the oral argument will get a very good take on which way the court will actually rule.

    JD

  172. JD, glad to hear it! I won’t be listening, as I’m going to be on a vacation/second honeymoon at that time….but when I get back I will very much look forward to reading your commentary on it.

Comments are closed.