kaleidotrope

Working for the weekend

Well, today the only exciting thing to happen was my lunch: a turkey burger with chipotle hominy, pancetta, and smoked mozzarella on a multigrain bun, again from that new place next door. And I got to use the last of the points I earned when I set up my order-ahead account the other day, so the burger (which was both tasty and filling) was only a couple of bucks. I still think this place is trying to do way too much to turn a profit in a busy midtown area, but if you order ahead and go in at the arranged time, it’s actually a lot better than a lot of the other nearby choices.

It has the McDonald’s across the street beat, but then again, I haven’t been inside McDonald’s in two or three years now.

And that’s about it, as far as today goes. Some good news at work, as far as the photo research goes, since our production department has an account with a stock photo site, and any images I can find there won’t cost us anything. And I started sending copies of the actual manuscript out for review, so I think the project is now well in hand.

Looking forward to the weekend. Nothing planned, not even my regular Sunday writing group, which is kind of hiatus for awhile. I’m again going to try to get caught up on Kaleidotrope slush — issue #10 is available for pre-order, by the way, and can ship in about a week — and do some writing of my own. Maybe watch a movie, get caught up on some TV. What’s that new show? !@#$% My Outsourced Dad’s Generation Says to Hawaii 5-Lonestar? Whatever.

How about you?

Thursday

A pretty quiet day, aside from the storm that rushed through here. Luckily, I got home ahead of the storm and missed all of the excitement in Manhattan, where apparently the Long Island Railroad shut down entirely. Good times.

Other than that… I finished reading Barry Lopez’s short story collection Light Action in the Caribbean. I liked the collection, even if some of the stories (including the title story) were a little strange, and even if none exactly lived up to “The Mappist,” the final story in the book and the one that introduced me to Lopez. (I heard it on Selected Shorts, where actor Joe Spano does a great job with it.)

And I wrote a little more today, making some slow but steady progress on a short story of my own I’ve been working on lately. I’m hoping to spend even more time with it over the weekend.

Oh, and I posted the cover and contents for Kaleidotrope #10 earlier today. I still can’t believe this will be ten issues, that I’ve been publishing the zine since October of 2006. (Just as I have trouble believing I’ve worked in my office since October of 2004.) I really like this issue, and I hope you will too. (You can pre-order copies now if you’re not already a subscriber!)

Wednesday

Today wasn’t Monday, I’ll say that much for it.

I’ve pretty much finalized the contents for Kaleidotrope #10 and hope to post them soon. If I’m having trouble believing that the week is half over, and that the month is half over, just imagine how much trouble I’m having with the idea that I’ve actually done ten issues of my zine. Ten? Egad.

And I’ve got at least two or three more issues already pretty full up. The mind, it’s doing that boggling thing again.

Otherwise, not much to report. I wrote a little more tonight, and am now watching Season 4 of The Office. Oh, and my father has bronchitis. He seems to think he was sick before he went to England, so these aren’t worldly European germs or anything, and he’s on antibiotics. Hopefully he’ll be feeling better in a few days.

Wednesday various

  • James Cameron doesn’t like Piranha 3-D:

    I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip..

    Something tells me he’s going to hate Jackass 3-D.

    Frankly, though, it’s films like that — cheap horror movies with visceral, jump-out-at-you scares — to which I think 3-D is actually most ideally suited. Cameron may be throwing his full weight behind it as a tool on the artistic palette, but even in Avatar I thought the 3-D was a lot less impressive than advertised. It has its uses, but even at its best, I don’t think it rises above a gimmick. (For which you trade a not-insignificant amount of brightness and comfort.) So a film like Piranha, which embraces it fully as gimmick, may actually be exactly what the technology is meant to do.

  • Eye chart for geeks.
  • And interesting look at Yiddish in America:

    The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)

    On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end. [via]

  • Have you been reading Kaleidotrope contributor Jason Heller’s weekly Frequency Rotation posts at Tor.com? You really should be.
  • And finally, based on this clip, I would totally buy Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rap album. [via]