Month: January 2010

Random 10 1/29

I was a little surprised that none of last week’s lyrics were guessed, but maybe you’ll all have better luck with these ones:

  1. “Private Goes Public” by Suzanne Vega
    Take your last kick now at any regime
  2. “Whistling in the Dark” by They Might Be Giants, guessed by Betty
    By hitting it with a rock, he said, though I am not unkind
  3. “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” by Edith Piaf, guessed by Generik
    Tout ça m’est bien égal
  4. “Movin’ Right Along” from The Muppet Movie, guessed by Betty
    With good friends, you can’t lose
  5. “5:15” by the Who, guessed by Clayton
    The ushers are sniffing, eau-de-cologning
  6. “Mother and Child Reunion” by Paul Simon, guessed by Occupant
    I never been laid so low
  7. “Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones, guessed by Generik
    He don’t give a hoot of warning, wrapped up in a black cat cloak
  8. “A Matter of Time” by the Leisure Society
    She lacks in desire what I lack in direction
  9. “Dead Man Walking (A Dream Like This)” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, guessed by Chris McLaren
    Broken worlds will not be fixed
  10. “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, guessed by Clayton
    Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send

Good luck!

And now for something completely the same

It snowed quite a bit here this morning, both on Long Island and in Manhattan, but you wouldn’t know it to look around now. Except for a conspicuous snowman on a neighbor’s lawn, almost all of it had melted before noon. There’s more predicted for the weekend, but we shall see.

Work continues to keep me busy, albeit not with anything new to say about it. I spent today working on the same projects I’ve been working on all week, and that I’ll probably spend all of tomorrow working on, too. It’s both more and less boring than it sounds.

Other than that, not much. Just glad that tomorrow is Friday.

Thursday various

  • I was sad to see that J.D. Salinger had passed away. I think John Hodgman said it best: “I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
  • I’m much more sad to hear the terrible news about Kage Baker, who has apparently lost her battle with cancer and has only a few weeks to live. I haven’t read a lot of Baker’s books — just the first two in her Company series — but she’s a real gifted talent taken much too soon.
  • Today in banning: first, a Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons:

    Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said. [via]

    And a California school district bans the dictionary. [via]

  • In much happier news, a story of a Haitian man rescued from beaneath the rubble 11 days after the earthquake — “and hours after the government declared search and rescue operations to be officially over.”
  • And finally, Zack Handlen watches the horror movie Orphan so the rest of us don’t have to:

    …just playing creepy music and panning over a room isn’t creating mood, it’s giving the production designer a clip reel…

Gosh dern it

The word for today in my Forgotten English calendar is dern, meaning “of actions done or proceeding in secret, or in the dark; kept concealed; hence dark, of evil of deceitful nature.”

I don’t know that it’s especially apt or anything, but it amused me.

Today was a really long day for some reason, not particularly more busy or more stressful than Monday or Tuesday, but a whole lot slower. Maybe it’s just the cold weather than crept back in after a couple of surprisingly warm days. They are predicting snow for the weekend. Whatever it was, it seemed like a long time before five o’clock rolled around and I could leave work for the day.

I spent most of the day working on that same gerontological counseling book. The way textbook adoption cycles work, it really has to go into production by next month so that it can be published before the Fall. So I’m trying to get the revised chapters I’ve already received as finalized as possible, so that, when the author has given me everything, it’s just a question of handing a ready-to-go manuscript over to an editorial assistant who can then transmit it to our production department. The good news is the author’s so far made some really terrific revisions, taking what I thought was an okay text and really strengthening it, making it even more accessible and student-friendly. In the unlikely event that I was ever to take up the counseling of older adults, I think this is a book I’d want front and center on my shelf.

So that’s an ever so exciting glimpse into my day-to-day as a developmental editor. Today it consisted mostly of re-reading chapters and copying my changes over to the electronic versions. The thrill ride never stops!

And that, for the most part, was how I spent my Wednesday.

Wednesday various

  • A whole lot of talk today has been about Apple’s new iPad. (You shouldn’t have any trouble finding plenty of links on your own.) Almost despite myself, I’m guardedly optimistic about its future and genuinely interested in its application — in a way, I should add, that I generally wasn’t interested in the iPhone. I think I’m going to wait a little before I try to justify buying one for myself, at least until a few more in-depth reviews are in. As Brad Stone notes in the New York Times, “Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”
  • Rachel Swirsky: “Genre is a tool. It’s not a prophecy.“
  • Here’s a fascinating article on confessions of a book pirate:

    TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?

    [TRC:] I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.

    I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand. [via]

  • Meanwhile, the world’s largest book — it’s five feet tall by six feet wide, and it takes six people to lift it — will be displayed with its pages open for the first time. I like how the Guardian calls it “almost absurdly huge.” How big does a book have to be before they’d drop that “almost”? [via]
  • And finally, a movie made by chimpanzees. All the obvious jokes aside, I wonder if this is really as impressive as it may at first sound — since, as the BBC notes:

    The apes are unlikely to have actively tried to film any particular subject, or understand that by carrying Chimpcam around, they were making a film.

    This seems less like a film from the chimps’ perspective than footage they accidentally shot. Still, the study as a whole does sound intriguing. [via]