- I’ve always thought that competitive eating contests were, at best, disgusting and dumb, and, at worst, encouragers of some really awful and unhealthy behavior. Turns out, it’s much worse than I ever imagined. [via]
- Who could have guessed that an H.G. Wells story contest that banned science fiction and required manuscripts be handwritten would get no entries?
- The Searcher has been on something of a zombie kick recently: Zombie Journal: Of Conscience and Appetites and The Tragedy of Zombie Clown.
- Inside the digital preservation process at the Library of Congress. [via]
- And finally, the Real People Behind Famous Fictional Characters. [via]
libraries
July Third
I spent today doing mostly what I expected, although I was surprised to discover the local library was closed all weekend, not just tomorrow and Monday. I have a couple of books on reserve, and I guess I won’t get a chance to pick them up until later in the week, if not next weekend.
So I spent the day reading some Kaleidotrope submissions, and just hanging around the house. I also mowed the front lawn, did a little bit of writing, and watched a cute movie called TiMER, starring Emma Caulfield of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. She and the movie were both quite good; I’m not sure I loved the ending, but it’s sweet and funny and intelligent, which can be rare qualities in a romantic comedy.
Otherwise, just enjoying the long weekend.
Thursday various
- Yesterday, when I was posting links to stories about babies, I neglected to mention Ardi Rizal a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. I think, mostly, because I wanted to pretend he doesn’t. [via]
- Meanwhile, this is just heartbreaking [via]:
A German biologist says that efforts to clean oil-drenched birds in the Gulf of Mexico are in vain. For the birds’ sake, it would be faster and less painful if animal-rescue workers put them under, she says. Studies and other experts back her up.
- Whereas this is just…fingerprinting to take out a library book? Seriously? The huge privacy issues aside, how does this improve the system for the library or the patron? [via]
- A couple of periodic tables:
- The Periodic Table of Superpowers — I shall henceforth refer to Superman always as OAFSISpVxVhSn. [via]
- And Periodic Table of Women in SF — There is, of course, a meme going around for this, where you bold the names you’ve read and star the ones you’ve never heard of, but if I were to do it, I think it would just reflect how unread I am. If nothing else, this is a good place to start a reading list. [via]
- But finally, speaking of women I don’t want to spend any more time with, A.O. Scott’s review of Sex and the City 2:
Yes, it’s supposed to be fun. And over the years audiences have had the kind of fun that comes from easy immersion in someone else’s career, someone else’s sex life, someone else’s clothes. But “Sex and the City 2†is about someone else’s boredom, someone else’s vacation and ultimately someone else’s desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn’t much fun at all.
Thursday various
- It’s neither especially “great” nor in any way “new,” but this great new Rolling Stones song is definitely interesting. It’s one from the vault.
- George Washington owes $300,000 in overdue library fines. Good luck collecting that. [via]
- These are protests I can get behind:
- Student uses Westboro Baptist Church visit as fundraiser
- Green Apple Books donated 100% of the profits of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. [via]
…a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression.
As McWhorter says, “this is someone watching thoughts go by at a certain distance and gluing them together willy-nilly — for the first time.” [via]
Wednesday various
- The very real problem of digital decay:
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?
There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]
- The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
- Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
- I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
- And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]: