Month: August 2007

Oh, and speaking of Kaleidotrope…This post by John Klima of Electric Velocipede — third in a really informative series on starting your own zine — has got me thinking that maybe I need to invest in layout software more versatile than MS Word to put together my own. But there are pretty hefty price tags attached to packages like Quark and InDesign, even with the educational discount (which I can’t get). And as much as I enjoy putting together the zine and publishing these great stories, Kaleidotrope is still pretty much a money-losing operation.

And it’s a wonderful thing being an honoured foreign guest somewhere like that — you get shown all the cool stuff, get to see Pandas, red ones and giant ones, and then find yourself put in a blue disposable smock and gloves (to protect the pandas from you, asnd not the other way around) and you get a year-old Panda placed on your lap. Utter, utter happiness. Better than any number of awards. Makes being a writer completely worthwhile. I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months. Honest.

Now the Written Nerd offers a helpful rebuttal:

I’m going to repeat that, in case you missed it. The NEA declared that half of Americans had NOT read a book in 2002. AP/Ipsos declared that one in four Americans had NOT read a book in 2006. All the while, half of Americans DID read a book in 2002, and three quarters of Americans DID read a book in 2006.

Three-quarters is more than half.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of a 44-year-old man’s brain show a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle taking up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue, in this handout image released by French researchers July 19, 2007. The man with the unusually tiny brain has managed to live an entirely normal life as a married civil servant with two children despite his condition, according to the researchers. [link]