- Mark Evanier on the origin of the phrase “top banana.” I’m not entirely sure if this is true, but it’s a lot more convincing than some of the other origin stories I’ve seen.
- The most environmentally friendly city in the United States? Surprisingly, it might be New York City. [via]
- I wonder if that means we’ll be able to avoid post-apocalyptic scenes like these [via]
- Maybe we can at least stop getting letters like these. Although I do particularly like the 1911 letter to Mayor Jay Gaynor about “the disgraceful acts that take place daily in Bryant Park.” Imagine if the letter writer had ever seen it during Fashion Week!
- Speaking of letters, and more particularly, Letters of Note, I particularly liked Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home after surviving being a POW and the bombing of Dresden. Makes me want to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five.
- Continuing a theme: Navy was ordered to listen for Martians in 1924.
- Sure, an “iTunes for magazines” sounds like an intriguing idea — maybe — but what does it even mean? [via]
- Often find yourself bemoaning the lack of originality in Hollywood and endless parade of remakes, sequels and prequels? It’s much worse than you think. [via]
- Speaking, sort of, of such, should Stephen King write a sequel to The Shining? Well, if it’s a good sequel, why not? [via]
- Meanwhile, King is delaying the e-book release of his new novel, Under the Dome. (I’ve heard some good things, but I am waiting for the e-book.) Allegedly, it’s “in hopes of helping independent bookstores and the national bookstore chains sell the hardcover edition.” Which actually, on King’s part I don’t really doubt, although I’m sure his publisher is eyeing its own bottom line more closely. The exercise will probably have no effect at all, given the price war being waged between Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Target (among others), except to annoy those of us who want a copy but don’t want to cart around a 1,000+-page hardcover.
It makes me wonder, though, what things would be like if one could purchase e-books from independent bookstores. Maybe it’s time to start looking into IndieBound more closely…
- For now, I guess I’ll just have to settle for reading King’s new poem in the November issue of Playboy. (That link, to The Guardian, is SFW. The link to the poem itself? Not so much. Then again, it doesn’t seem to be working anymore, so if you want to read “The Bone Church,” you may have purchase the issue or wait until it’s reprinted elsewhere. [via]
- Also potentially a little NSFW: this Graffiti Control on the Death Star cartoon. I found it amusing, though. [via]
- Of course, if I wanted to avoid the price war altogether, I could go with free books only. Like Gregory Maguire’s new novel. He and his publisher are giving away 2,500 copies of the book, provided you agree to make a small donation “to a local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street.†I don’t have any particular interest in the book itself — I liked but didn’t love Wicked, the only Maguire book I’ve ever read — but it’s an interesting idea. Although that seems like a big print run for a small publisher to just be giving away. [via]
- I’ve heard reasonably good things about the book that started this Jane Austen mashup craze, and my sister and her husband even recently bought me a copy. But now there’s a third? Mansfield Park and Mummies? I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad that Jane Austen only wrote six novels.
Though, there’s already a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sequel planned. [via]
- And finally, speaking of Jane Austen… Mitchell & Webb’s “Posh Dancing” [via]
Month: November 2009
Wednesday various
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- Your roof is leaking if you think I’m going to start using any of this 1950s hipster slang. [via]
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And then, of course, I blew away the other road with my machine gun.Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle wanted to be a poet. [via]
- And finally, M. Rickert on storytelling:
I think that to say every story has already been told is to dismiss the temperament of words, to devalue nuance and meaning. Yes, of course, if stories are summed up into one or two sentence synopsis, then I imagine they all fit into certain categories. But stories are not just a matter of summation; if they were, the summation would be enough to satisfy that need for story. In fact, every word matters. I don’t know why people are so eager to diminish stories. You don’t hear architects bemoaning that every building has already been built. Within each field of creation there is a structure that exists as the foundation of that creation. The opportunity for expansion and artistry lies within that structure and is not diminished by it.
That’s one way of putting it
The Daily Beast on the new Nabokov “novel”:
To describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral.
Tuesday various
- Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play. Well, maybe. Unless we can dig up Zombie Shakespeare, I think it’s still just conjecture. [via]
- Speaking of zombies, however, I’m not so sure I agree with The Guardian‘s contention that:
No zombie is ever going to be a pinup on some young girl’s wall. Just as Pattinson and all the Darcy-alikes will never find space on any teenage boy’s bedroom walls – every inch will be plastered with revolting posters of zombies. There are no levels of Freudian undertone to zombies. Like boys, they’re not subtle. There’s nothing sexual about them, and nothing sexy either. It’s all about splatter and gore and entrails and our own fear and fascination with just how messy and vile and extraordinary our bodies are.
Which seems to be making all sorts of gender-based assumptions on some pretty shaky and limited evidence. I’d also suggest that the so-called subtlety of broody vampires like Edward Cullen is actually a pretty thin veneer over a shallow pond. [via]
- Dr. Scott’s Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here. [via]
- Two new ways of looking at things: the US highway system as a subway map [via] and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” as a flowchart.
- And finally, speaking of the Beatles, what if the band never broke up? [via]
Monday various
- Regender.com is an interesting experiment, although obviously imperfect. In its regendering of this site, for instance, it changed Billy Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why” into “‘Donna’t Ask Me Why’ by Billie Joyce.” [via]
- This raises the troubling possibility that some of our authors are in fact cats: Cat registered as hypnotherapist [via]
I posted this earlier today to Twitter, and Nyssa23 replied, “Perhaps that explains the number of manuscripts you’ve been receiving concerning mice and cheeseburgers.” Still, as I told her, say what you will, Cheeseburger-Focused Brief Therapy works!
- “A car crash victim who was believed to have been in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.”
- Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin [via]:
And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.
- And finally, speaking of, god bless parody. [via]