“JCB Song” by Nizlopi
Month: January 2011
Wednesday various
- The real real Ghostbusters?
- You know what you need to do with the endearingly low-key, sleeper-hit of a musical? Turn it into a big-budget Broadway spectacle.
- “Kazran, trust me, it’s this or go to your room and design a new kind of screwdriver.” The sonic screwdriver for the Nintendo Wii. That seals it, I’m buying one.
- Remember that Udo Kier interview I linked to last week? Here’s audio of his absolute best line.
- And finally, octopuses or octopi? [via]
The eleventh hour
Second verse, same as the first.
Today was all but indistinguishable from yesterday, beyond the panicked snow predictions for tomorrow. It’s snowing now, and they’re predicting anywhere from a foot to twenty inches, but I’m going to play it by ear and see how it looks in the morning. You know, before deciding this is the next blizzard to end all blizzards.
I suspect the weather will be just bad enough to make getting to work a hassle, but not bad enough to shut our office down entirely. Though, given that I was on vacation when our last snow day happened, I’m still sort of keeping my fingers crossed.
Song of the day
“Please Read the Letter” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Please read the letter, I wrote it in my sleep
With help and consultation from the angels of the deep
Writers on writing, teaching
Anyway, writers are all frenetic bundles of experiences and influences. Might I have eventually realized how to improve my prose on my own? Probably. But would the stories I write be the same if I didn’t have Michael Swanwick in my head saying that all stories are a balance between dinosaurs and sodomy? Almost certainly not. [via]
At the beginning of the semester, I tell my students that writing is a system of black squiggles that we use to conveying meaning. In other words, writing is itself, ab initio, an insane enterprise. And we go on from there.