Month: February 2010

Random 10 2/5

Last week was a pretty good showing. Am I disappointed that no one got #8, which was on my “best of ’09” mix? Nah. These lyric quizzes can be surprisingly hard, even when you know the songs. Anyway, here’s this week’s version:

  1. “Girls Room” by Liz Phair
    And we hear Terry say that Tricia’s okay
  2. “Over the Rhine” by Born
    Whatever you got I don’t mind
  3. “Daniel” by Elton John, guessed by Clayton
    They say Spain is pretty though I’ve never been
  4. “Gloria” by Van Morrison w/ Them, guessed by Clayton
    Just about five feet four from her head to the ground
  5. “Unchain My Heart” by Ray Charles
    Some fella tells me that you’re not at home
  6. “Pressure” by Billy Joel, guessed by Clayton
    I’m sure you’ll have some cosmic rationale
  7. “Mickey Mouse” by Sparks
    Basically, everything is easy
  8. “My Dark Life” by Elvis Costello
    They’re dining on rice paper scenery
  9. “Nothing but Time” by Jackson Browne
    Rolling down 295 out of Portland, Maine
  10. “Wild Mountain Berries” by Kelly Hogan & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (orig. Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty)
    We didn’t go skinny dippin’ in a cement pond

Good luck!

A cold but happy Thursday

This evening, my parents and I attended a live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, piped in from St. Paul, Minnesota, to our local multiplex. It was a lot of fun and a great show — the news from Lake Wobegone, Elvis Costello — but now I’m a little tired.

I went into work a little early this morning, in the hope of getting home a little early, but that plan was dashed by a meeting that ran until a quarter to five. It was an informative meeting that touched directly on some of the work that I do, developing supplemental online materials for our books, but I’m not sorry to be done with meetings for the week. Not least of all because I kind of wanted to spend the day doing a lot of that work.

And I still have editing for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue to do, plus an ever-growing slush pile. I don’t mind that so much (even if the slush is mostly rejections), but I think I’m going to have to spend a good part of the weekend re-reading and marking up stories if I expect to have them done for the April issue. On the plus side, I think they’re some really good stories.

Now, if you excuse me, there seems to be a dog barking right outside my bedroom door for some reason. I’m going to go investigate why, and then eventually find my way to bed.

Thursday various

  • Roger Ebert shares some good advice to filmmakers in his review of From Paris With Love:

    …the last thing you should do is remind the audience of a movie they’d rather be home watching.

  • Jeanne Cavelos shares some useful writing advice about looking/eye words — namely, that they’re over-used. Don’t write your short story like it’s a Steven Spielberg movie.

  • Jonathan Carroll shares this interesting metaphor:

    The mind is like a detective– it wants facts and figures. But the heart, its perennial sidekick, keeps shaking its head and smiling: There was no way in the world they were going to find the facts and crack this case.

  • Genevieve Valentine shares what very well may be the best commercial ever. Personally, I love all these dreadful pre-Empire cash-ins and knock-offs, made with no eye towards continuity or quality and before Star Wars seemed like anything more than the biggest fad of 1977.

  • And finally, Kurt Busiek shares some really interesting thoughts about storytelling and “not messing with Batman’s cake“:

    The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all.

    [snip]

    This isn’t unique to superhero comics. Just like readers who don’t let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or whether you want it to be fun.

    I’m tempted to joke that the cake is a lie, but he raises a lot of really good points.

What I did with Wednesday

Today was just your average, garden variety Wednesday. We had a meeting at work this afternoon to discuss e-books and, more accurately, e-inspection/examination copies. (That’s when a professor asks to see a book before potentially adopting it for a class. There are restrictions built in, and sometimes it’s a physical copy and sometimes it’s electronic. But if it’s a legitimate course, and we think there’s potential for course adoption, the book is free.) An informative, if not exactly exciting meeting, though I did find myself joining in when the discussion turned to this whole Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle and e-readers.

I keep meaning to post something more in-depth about the whole thing, about e-books in general, and Amazon and the new Apple iPad more specifically. But, for now, the short version is this: I’m still honestly thinking about buying an iPad, despite some misgivings about what is (and isn’t) available in the initial version, and I’m learning to like Amazon a little less every day.

But, honestly, nobody has any clue about the future of e-books. We’re all just trying to muddle through and guess where things are headed.

We also got a surprising e-mail at work today from human resources, informing us that the company will be offering summer hours from July to September. What that means is, we work the same number of hours, but a little more on Monday through Thursday. Then we get to leave at one o’clock on Friday. I don’t have to let them know until May, but I’m definitely thinking about it. I’d most likely work 8:30 to 5:15 four days a week, which wouldn’t change my schedule too much, and it would mean my weekend would start three hours earlier.

And who doesn’t like a few extra hours in their weekend?