Month: March 2009

Birthday

I want to thank everyone for the birthday wishes. I had a rainy, but overall very nice, day. I also got a couple of really neat gifts — including, unexpectedly, a brand new camera.

I’m still trying to figure out half of its buttons and settings, but I’m so far really impressed by it.

Thursday various

  • Today is my thirty-second birthday. Among others, I have outlived “Grigori Nelyubov by more than a month. He was an a skilled pilot and Soviet cosmonaut who was expelled for drunkenness. He died of suicide by stepping in front of a train on February 18, 1966…” Good to know. [via]

  • Of course, if you went by today’s Writer’s Almanac, you might assume nobody but Joseph Campbell had been born today. I don’t know why, but I’m always intrigued when Keillor devotes the entire daily program to one single person. Campbell’s influence is arguably still deep enough to warrant it — though I’ve never read anything by him or seen the Bill Moyers PBS specials. Does anyone recommend them?

  • Speaking of growing up/not growing up: every time I watch this trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, all I want to do is watch it again. I have no particular attachment to Maurice Sendak’s original book — I’m not even sure I’ve ever read it — but the movie looks incredible. (Lucius T. Sheppard doesn’t think so, but that’s possibly a good sign. Seriously, his curmudgeonly scorn for all things pop cultural is getting rather tired.) [via]

  • My favorite story of the day? Easily a toss-up between this story of an Australian coach who uses a live crocodile to encourage speedy swimmers — or at least did back in 1998. I couldn’t find anything more recent than this 2001 Telegraph article, which suggests it was no fun for the crocodile either — and this story about the Egyptian government being forced to dispel rumors that a text message can kill anybody who receives it. At least, they say they’re only rumors… [via and via]

  • My least favorite? Easily this story about a massive “space storm” that could any day now wipe out civilization as we know it. I think I’m going to go back to thinking happy birthday thoughts. [via]

Wednesday various

  • Bookslut reports that both candy and writing groups are weathering the recession well. One is almost tempted to find parallels between those two…
  • People continue to try to make Garfield funny. It doesn’t work, but this is amusing. I’ve always been a sucker for a bad translation. [via]
  • The Peekaboo Paradox: a surprisingly very interesting story about a $100,000-a-year clown. [via]
  • And at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a truly horrific yet powerful article on infant deaths in hot cars, looking at how it happens and why, even to good parents. A brutal read — I imagine even more so for anyone with kids. [via]
  • And just so I don’t leave you on a down note, here’s 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes.

Tuesday various

  • I think there are a lot of advantages to the print-on-demand publishing model, but it’s still weird to see it applied to other products like DVDs. Still, I think this is the way to go. Studios like Warner Brothers can avoid the high cost of mass producing a disc with limited sales appeal, while at the same time making DVD-quality copies available to the collectors and film buffs who really want them.

  • Then again, if you listen to Clay Shirky, maybe there’s no publishing model that really makes sense in our new Internet age:

    • It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

    What I think what a lot of Shirky’s critics (like Charlie Gibson) are missing, however, is that his analysis is very well considered — seriously, read his whole article — and ultimately quite hopeful. Shirky is pro-journalism, even while he acknowledges that newspapers (and by extension publishing) is in a state of transition and flux, and some old ways of doing business are likely to fall by the wayside. [via]

  • Until that point, however, the publishing industry still exists. And personally, I’m with Jay Lake in thinking the terms of the new Google Books/Authors’ Guild settlement are pretty dire for the writers who create that industry’s content. Whatever you think of Google Books — Lake himself is a stockholder and supporter — it sets a dangerous precedent for copyright. [via]

  • Abigail Nussbaum on tired fantasy criticisms:

    • Most fantasy readers go through a phase where they realize that The Lord of the Rings is conservative, reactionary and, by certain very real yardsticks such as, to take Morgan’s example, realistic characterization, not very good. It’s like figuring out that Narnia is a Christian allegory. You take a deep breath, pick your jaw up from the floor, and decide if you can go on liking the book in spite of these flaws–because it has other qualities that you value, and because a genuinely good work of fiction is one that you can enjoy even if you disagree with the attitudes it expresses.

    She makes a lot of good points. Still, as some of the commenters there note, it’s sometimes worth repeating things for those who have not heard them before.

  • And finally, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to survive one atomic blast may be regarded as a misfortune; to survive both looks like carelessness.

Monday various

  • Six new plays by William Shakespeare? That seems like an awful lot, a bit of overkill actually. And, of couse, as everybody knows, Mr. Norman Voles of Gravesend wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays. His wife wrote the sonnets. [via]

  • Still, it’s not impossible that these plays have been missing until now. The British Library reports they’ve misplaced some 9,000 books. And this follows in the wake of earlier reports of mis-shelved or missing books at the Library of Congress — none of which gives libraries a good name. (And they already have critics like Kevin Myers to contend with.) Still, when all is said and done, what I really want to know is: what’s a “luxury edition” of Mein Kampf? [via]

  • Speaking of books, how’d you like a book of all your Twitter posts? While it might be nice to have that kind of permanent record — Waxy.org suggests that “someone should make this a service, also incorporating your Flickr photos and blog posts” — I’m not convinced it’s a permanent record I’d ever want to read.

  • It will take a lot more than color e-paper to impress me with this boring design and hefty price tag, but still, it’s a pretty neat feature. My own e-reader doesn’t do color covers very well. [via]

  • Tasha Robinson on Repo: The Genetic Opera:

    • Sometimes “cult film” refers to a movie that failed in theaters, but was eventually embraced by a vast, dedicated underground support network; sometimes the term is just slapped on anything that’s so offensive, weird, or narrowly focused that only a small, determinedly perverse collective could love it.

    It does get thrown around way too often nowadays.