Pay Your Way into the Pages of a Book

What's in a name? Depends on who you ask and how much you're willing to pay.

A recent trend in fiction writing, apparently, is to name characters after people who have paid for the privilege. The most recent instance of this is a set of eBay auctions, the proceeds of which go to the nonprofit the First Amendment Project.

Heard of Thomas Perry? He writes the Jane Whitefield mystery novels. He'll use your name for a character in his latest book. He's just started writing, so you can have your pick of victim, villain, or anywhere in between. And, you get your name mentioned at least four times. Surely that's worth a few hundred dollars, right? Remember, the money is going to a nonprofit.

Dave Eggers, the fabulously funny author of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is onboard as well. So is Anywhere but Here author Mona Simpson.

Fancy appearing in a graphic novel? Chris Ware's your man. The author of the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware will happily write your name above a character in one of this future projects.

It does make me wonder, though, what's to stop authors from doing this all the time. Maybe they already do? Those character names have to come from somewhere.

Some authors spend ages agonizing over names, doing research and sounding out possibilities. (J.K. Rowling comes to mind, with all of her comparative religions and cultures knowledge (not to mention astronomy and astrology) being brought to bear in names like Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, and Sirius Black.) Rowling, like Dickens before her, seems to have the knack for choosing names that fit the characters like literary gloves (like Remus Lupin, the werewolf).

But that's not what we're talking about here, at least not according to Andrew Sean Greer. The author of The Story of a Marriage, Greer is offering to include an auction winner's name in his next book but doesn't guarantee anything else. It is, after all, a roll of the dice: You could very well win the auction, get your name in the book, and then find out that you (or at least a character named you) has died in some horrible way midway into Chapter 3.

Maybe that's OK. Maybe it's worth the money. I won't be finding out, since I won't be bidding. If I'm going to see my name in a book, it's going to have to be an autobiography.

Time Now to Grieve

2:37 p.m.

Some family members of the 29 miners lost in the explosion at the Pike River mine will remember that time for the rest of their lives. At random times in the years to come, they will glance at their watches or clocks and see those numbers on the clockface and remember what happened on this day in 2010, what happened to finally seal the fate of their beloved men (one of them just 17 years old and on his first shift at the mine) — their loved ones, their friends and family members, their sources of strength.

Now, the situation has been reversed. Now, the people left behind, as their loved ones carried on into the next journey of their lives, will have to go on and live their lives without the ones they knew and loved most — fathers, sons, cousins, nephews, friends.

The entire Grey District has just short of 14,000 people. Greymouth's population numbers about 10,000. It's a coal area — has been since the British arrived, in the mid-19th Century. It's New Zealand, so every one of those 29 miners was known, friends with, and/or loved by someone in the area. Such close-knit communities forge strong bonds, bonds that are tested by trying times but not broken, even in the midst of shared tragedy.

The men had been trapped in the mine for a few days, as the result of an explosion underground. Two miners managed to make it out, but the 29 others remained. As the number of hours without word mounted, families do what families do best — come together, say a prayer, hope against hope for their darkest fears to be swept away by an ocean of relief and good news.

But this story did not have a happy ending.

This was no Chilean Miracle. This was a reminder that life is precious and that we take it for granted at our peril. At times like this, we think of what we wanted to say but didn't, said but didn't want to, or wish we could say if only because it would mean that the person is there before us, instead of buried deep underground, never to return to be spoken to, listened to, or hugged for all they're worth.

This was a story that just kept getting worse. Rescuers couldn't enter the mine because the gas levels were too high. Rescue robots broke down or found nothing useful. A mixture of gas became toxic and then created a second explosion, this one even bigger than the first.

The Prime Minister has given a speech, calling this disaster a national tragedy and saying that the miners "leave behind them a hollow space, that will not be readily filled."

This is a story that is continuing, even as the ultimate of the missing is now known. Eventually, others will be able to enter the mine and answer some of the questions that linger: when did the men die, and did they suffer horribly, and could they have been saved. Answers to all of those questions, and more, will come in time.

Time can be so cruel sometimes. Time can take our loved ones from us. Time can steal moments from our lives. Time can rob us of our hopes, dreams, and desires. Time can slow to a crawl when we're waiting for good news amid aching despair. Time can fly by when we hear the good news at last.

Sadly for the families of the Pike River miners, the time of 2:37 brought nothing but pain, grief, and sadness.

Up in the Air at Sea

Makes you wonder how the players will fare if they're prone to seasickness ..

Seems Michigan State is planning to play a basketball game — likely against North Carolina — on an aircraft carrier.

Tom Izzo's bunch will undoubtedly be looking for a new challenge on Veteran's Day 2011 — the likely day of the game. (This, according to a well-placed source whose big clue was the red-white-and-blue 11-11-11 painted on the floor at the Breslin Center.) That would be in the middle of preseason games next season. Whether the Spartans win it all at the end of this season remains to be seen.

But back to the aircraft carrier. So it's a mammoth ship, right? And it's anchored and docked and all the rest of it. It's not going anywhere. But it would still be moving, if only slightly. So the crossover dribble would have an extra hitch in its step, the three-point would have a fraction of extra oomph on it, and the long free throws wouldn't get that friendly bounce-back off the back of the rim. And those are only some of the difficulties the players would have to overcome.

Then there's the security issue. An aircraft carrier isn't exactly the same kind of venue as a basketball arena. For starters, the carrier is owned by the U.S. Military. All players, coaches, staff, girlfriends, wives, dogs and cats would have to be searched meticulously for every practice, team meeting and (of course) the game. Then there are the fans. A quick Internet search didn't turn up reliable figures for how many basketball fans could fit on an aircraft carrier, but this made-for-prime-time event probably wouldn't be played in front of only the sailors onboard. So all of the fans would have to be searched meticulously as well. That might be more time and effort than many fans want to spend on cheering on their favorite team. But the possibility of a Tar Heels-Spartans matchup might be enough to pull enough people in to make the experience worthwhile.

Also on the cards is the possible warmup game to be played by the basketball teams of two of the nation's service academies. We could be looking at an all-new variant on Army-Navy.

Emotional Rescue from Tattooed Fate

This horse owner definitely won't get any satisfaction from the court ruling that has just gone against him.

Seems a German man had shaved a good bit of hair off the right hind thigh of one of his horses, in preparation for a tattoo — of the Rolling Stones tongue logo from the earlier days. Seems also that the court didn't like it too much.

The tongue, which existed only in outline, was a good six square inches in size. Had the horse owner had more time and the proper authority, he would no doubt have succeeded in branding his animal in a way that might seem a bit head-scratching to some people.

The court, in its ruling preventing the full tattooing of the poor animal, went on about infringement of animal rights law. That may very well be the case, and such things shouldn't be foisted on animals. However, the court was also on to the horse owner's other, more to-the-point motive, which was to create a template that he could show off and then offer as a service — a tattoo-for-hire business, perhaps.

And where would that end, if it had been allowed to begin? What would be able to stop the man from branching out? Who knows but that we might have seen a horse sporting the genius of Dark Side of the Moon. More frightening might have been the cover for Sticky Fingers.

No matter, though, because the court headed the man off at the pass. No doubt his neighbors will be on the lookout for other, similar sorts of tomfoolery.

Making Another Pass for E.T.

The eyes on the skies are going back for more.

Astronomers in a host of countries are turning their telescopes once again to swathes of the sky first surveyed during the early days of the Cold War, an attempt to find the E.T. in the night sky haystack.

Efforts in Argentina, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United States to find evidence of extraterrestrial life will go back to the drawing board, looking once again for something they missed on the first pass across nearly impossibly wide sky. Among the targets will be Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, two of the most famous early stars surveyed, because of their (very) relative proximity to the Northern Hemisphere.

The needle in a haystack metaphor is quite a good one because the very possibility of detecting a noticeable communication from an alien species is complicated exponentially by myriad factors, including:

• that the alien life is transmitting information in a form and/or frequency recognizable to humans


• that the information, even if it was transmitted, lasted long enough to be picked up by our instruments


• that the alien life is transmitting anything at all.

Other factors further complicate our efforts to discover whether we are, in fact, not alone in the universe.

The new project is titled Project Dorothy, an homage to the original project, which was titled Project Ozma, after a character in the popular Oz series of books by L. Frank Baum. Dorothy, the namesake of this latest project, is Dorothy Gale, the main character of The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps a random space cyclone will put us on the yellow brick road to finding E.T. One thing is probably for sure: Any alien life we find will not probably have heard of Facebook or Twitter. Such modern electronic conveniences would certainly be alien to those who launched Project Ozma all those years ago.

15-story Building Built in 6 Days? Not Exactly

Talk about blink and you miss it!

Residents of the Chinese city of Changsha who returned home from a weeklong holiday would have had the shock of their lives, as they noticed that a new 15-story hotel had gone up while they were away.

The travelers had nothing to do with the building, of course. No, that would be the workers who completed the Ark Hotel in record time. They put together the giant pieces that make up the tall, soundproofed, thermal-insulated building in just six days.

But here's where the sound bite ends and the truth begins.

The real story of that building is not how quickly it took workers to build it, for that isn't the real question to ask. What those onsite workers did in those six days was put together a bunch of different pieces into the whole that is now standing, all from bits of prefabricated materials. Granted, that was thousands of different bits and they all were assembled within the timeframe specified.

The bottom line is that we really don't know how long it took to build the hotel, since it wasn't all built onsite. Workers could have taken months or even years to build their parts and then the "building" happened in a week. (Well, six days does not a week make, so it was a bit less than a week.)

So what does that say about truth in reporting? Have we reported the truth if we say only that "it was built in six days"? No, we have not. To be accurate, we need to include the important words construction using prefabricated materials. Any shortening of that or glossing over the key facts can result in something that's already gone viral on the Net now, namely that Chinese workers put in a superhuman effort to build a tall building in less than a week.

Well, yes, they did and no, they didn't. They certainly did the building, but the building consisted in large part of piecing together what was already done. Yes, no one was hurt in the construction of the building (and that fact needs to be communicated as well, since it was basically a day-night-day-night affair). Yes, the building looks fantastic. Yes, the countryside was changed in a very short time.

But to say that the building went from dusk to skyscraper in six days is wildly inaccurate. It misses the biggest detail of all.

The King for a Day: Pena Finishes Marathon

"There's ordinary. And there's extraordinary."

That from the race director of the New York City Marathon. That to describe the performance of Edison Pena, the Chilean miner who went from being on of 33 people trapped deep underground for 69 days to being one of 40,000 people who ran through the famous city's famous five boroughs. That to describe the amazing accomplishment of this man who, while trapped underground ran to stay sane, and who rose to the challenge of completing a marathon having only ever run 10 miles at a stretch.

He did it, with the same blend of determination and faith that inspired him to keep hope alive not only for himself but also for all of the others who were moored helpless deep in the earth until help could arrive, buoyed by one another and, in some cases, by Pena's performances of his beloved Elvis.

He was at first invited to be a spectator or even hold the finish tape as the winner crossed, but Pena wanted to do the race himself. A knee injury didn't stop him. The thousands of people around him didn't stop him. In fact, he took courage and encouragement from the athletes around him and the masses of spectators along the race course.

He made it halfway running on that injured knee (an injury sustained before the mine collapse), then needed ice packs from the medical tent. After a respectable 2:07 over 13.1 miles, he hobbled through the last several miles, cramping up in the last few (a normal occurrence in a marathon, truth be told) and finished in 5:40.51, ramping it up to a run at the end as his body soared with cheers-induced adrenalin.

His reward for finishing — along with the tremendous feeling of accomplishment and the cheers of the throngs of New York — was hearing his favorite artist over the loudspeakers at the finish line. The song of choice was "The Wonder of You."

It wasn't like he was totally unprepared. He did run while in the mine, every day, a couple of times a day. He had competed in a triathlon a couple of weeks before, running on a relay team. But 26.2 miles was a big ask.

And Pena answered.

Chilean Miner to Run NYC Marathon

The New York City marathon gets a ton of people running it every year. Celebrities are commonplace. But one of this year's media darlings was unsung until a date with subterranean destiny forced him to stay deep underground and use his running to help keep his sanity.

Edison Pena, one of the 33 miners rescued after a few months in the depths of the earth after a cave-in underneath Chile, will be toeing the line this coming weekend, determined to run the entire 26.2 miles, even if it takes him 6 hours to do so.

Pena was one of the miners who was the most active while trapped underground. He ran repeatedly, to keep fit and stay sane. He ran as much as 6 or 7 miles a day, in his electrician's boots, which he had cut down to ankle-high. He was determined to outrun a bad fate and make his fitness work for him. When his rescuers finally lifted him and his fellow miners to the surface, he felt fit and ready for anything.

Turns out he was.

The Marathon folks have rolled out the red carpet, including current world-record holder Haile Gebrselassie greeting Pena at the airport. Pena had his own press contingent for awhile, and he didn't disappoint, breaking into song by his beloved Elvis, whose music helped keep the miner focused on staying alive.

Turns out he's a regular runner, this Pena guy. Just last weekend, he ran 6.5 miles as part of a relay team at a triathlon. How he'll go in the longer distance remains to be seen. Still, his wife will be with him, cheering him on, as will 150 Chilean professional and amateur runners who had already signed up for the race. They joined in the cheers for the suddenly famous miner, even forming a parade to escort him off the plane.

You can follow him here.