Banner ads that automatically play video are bad enough, but this one continued playing (audio only) even after I’d closed all my web browsers.
I guess that’s another reason to avoid the Sci-Fi Channel website…
Day: October 11, 2004
Having been unemployed for about three months now, I read stories like these with a kind of keen nostalgia. (Even if it is about the German workforce:
[Theologian and psychologist Thomas Holtbernd] added: “Humour relieves the pressure in all forms of life and especially so in the workplace. It doesn’t have to be clowns and a Monty Python sketch every five minutes, however.”
Although wouldn’t that be an interesting place to work?
Speaking of Monty Python — which I guess, really, I need no excuse to do — the Penn State Monty Python Society is apparently in the process of updating its constitution. (All my intel comes secondhand these days.) Anyway, in preparation for that revision, one of the Society’s members sent out the earlier version, last revised (coincidentally, if I recall) on September 11, 2001. My favorite part of that particular constitution (written, I believe, by then Minister of War Victor Colonna) has always been Article I, Clause E, which reads:
The Hindu Clause: Everyone is a member of the Monty Python Society, even if they don’t believe that they are a member of the Monty Python Society.
But really, how can you not like a constitution threatens to use Robert’s Rules of Order “as a weapon in gladiatorial combat”?
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I haven’t actually read — nor do I feel any real compulsion to read — Anne Rice’s latest book, but I was struck by the following comments she made to The New York Times today:
“People who find fault and problems with my books tend to say, ‘She needs an editor,'” Ms. Rice said. “When a person writes with such care and goes over and over a manuscript and wants every word to be perfect, it’s very frustrating.”
She added: “When you take home a CD of Pavarotti or Marilyn Horne, you don’t want to hear another voice blended in. I feel the same way about Hemingway. If I read it, I don’t want to read a new edited version.”
What struck me was not the fact that I’d never in my life before heard of Marilyn Horne. (Ms. Rice and I must not share the same musical tastes.) It was the fact that, unless I’m very much mistaken, recording artists like Horne and Pavarotti have record producers and other collaborators who work on their albums. And Ernest Hemingway had an editor.
After all, it isn’t always enough to want every word to be perfect. As Aldous Huxley once said, “A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
In his recent review of James Gunn’s The Immortals, Gerald Jonas writes:
Magazine science fiction of the 1950’s placed a premium on clever premises. Only rarely were those premises worked out in plausible stories about believable people in authentic-seeming futures. Gunn’s characters in “The Immortals” were clearly created to serve the needs of the plot. The projected future — an America whose social fabric has all but disintegrated — feels thin and arbitrary; it is hard to imagine anything going on in this world outside the narrow spotlight of the narrative. Readers with fond memories of yesterday’s science fiction will enjoy the deja vu quality of “The Immortals.” Others might use as a yardstick to see how far the genre has come in wedding mind-opening premises to the time-honored virtues of literate fiction.
Just found that interesting, is all.