Wednesday various

  • John Scalzi’s Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Winter, I Learned From Science Fiction Movies column is nice, but it really just makes me want to watch The Thing again.
  • “Let’s get the reformed alcoholic punk-rock 45-year-old drummer from another country with a broad accent — that’s the way to go in the late-night world.” I’m starting to think I really should be watching Craig Ferguson’s show more often. Apparently, he just aired an hour-long, audience-free conversation with Stephen Fry. He’s slowly morphing into an antic Tom Snyder with puppets, and that sounds very intriguing to me. [via]
  • Ever wonder how to pronounce an author’s name? It’s an incomplete list, obviously, but it’s a terrific concept. [via]
  • Inside the Antiques Roadshow [via]
  • And finally, Stephen Merritt on the perverse art or love songs:

    You know, most love songs are not cheesy and corny. Most love songs are complaints, I think. Or about unrequited love, coming at it from some oblique angle. Only the ones that say “I love you” over and over are the cheesy, corny ones that people complain about. At least half the songs people hear in the world are love songs. I feel like my love songs, probably none of which just say “I love you” over and over again, are in the mainstream of that tradition of being a little off.

    I also like his thoughts on clichés and how he felt the need to clarify that by “Oprah” he was referring to “the TV show starring Oprah Winfrey.”

Monday various

  • I think the most interesting thing about this new Dante’s Inferno video game — which itself sounds pretty silly, a mashup that misses the point of both sides — is this quote:

    “We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

    Because it underlines that Disney made it big by adapting well known tales it didn’t originate (from the very beginning, actually) but nowadays runs for its lawyers anytime someone tries to do the same to it. This is nothing new, but shouldn’t Mickey Mouse be, you know, out of copyright by now?

  • The headline reads, After Taliban hit supplies, Army chef serves up 42 days of Spam. [via]
  • You can keep your fart noise generators, this is the only iPhone app I’d really love to have. If they make it available for the iPad, I may just have to break down and buy one.
  • “A third of all children aged five to 16 are convinced that the body of one of their teachers has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being.” Tell me, can you prove that they haven’t? (Then again: “The survey was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to coincide with the release of Aliens In the Attic on DVD.” So, you know, grain of salt and everything.) [via]
  • And finally, I’m basically just copying this from Making Light, but I agree that Cat Valente makes maybe one of the best arguments for why we still need publishers in the world of e-publishing:

    Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

    And writers would line up at their door.

    I’m obviously biased, since I work as an editor (for a smaller textbook and professional publisher). But sometimes, there’s a middleman for a reason.

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…

Wednesday various

  • I wish my company had letterhead this cool. [via]
  • An in-depth interview with Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos about their recent deal with Warner Bros. I think this goes a long way to explaining the deal and why it’s ultimately a boon to Netflix subscribers. (As such, the interview is maybe only of interest to subscribers.) There’s been a lot of anger over the planned 28-day window between when DVDs go on sale and when they’ll be available for rent at Netflix. But I really don’t have a problem with it — not if it means more, and better streaming content and a greater likelihood that when a new release is available, there will actually be enough stock for me to get a copy.
  • An interest Catch-22 of science fiction translations revealed:

    Because it takes so long for English-language science fiction to get translated, people in non-English speaking countries are often reading books that are several years behind the current fashion in English speaking countries. They then write books in response to what they have read, but when those books are offered for translation into English the big publishers reject them as “old fashioned”. [via]

  • For most authors, breaking 1,000 words wouldn’t seem like much. For Bruce Holland Rogers (who contributed to Kaleidotrope #3, by the way), it’s practically a novel!
  • And finally, some truly beautiful papercraft [via]

Monday various

  • Exploding Chewing Gum Kills Student. I have to admit, this sounded like a hoax or urban legend when I first read about it, but it seems distrubingly legit. At least, I didn’t find anything discounting the story at Snopes. [via]
  • Well this is disappointing and surprising: the Internet Review of Science Fiction is closing after its February issue.
  • Grant Morrison on what appeals to him about comics as a storytelling medium:

    The essentially magical qualities of inert words and ink pictures working together with reader consciousness to create a holographic Sensurround emotional experience. What else?

  • I’ve seen some talk about how 2010 is the real end of the past decade — that the decade is still going on, that is — since there was never a Year Zero. I think this is maybe true on a very pedantic, technical level, but I also think it’s a battle that was lost two thousand years ago, in Year Ten. When people talk about the last decade, they’re including 2000-2001, not miscounting. As Bad Astronomy points out [via], the argument that 2010 isn’t the start of a new decade suggests that “people [are] confused on how we delineate time.”
  • And finally, Daniel’s Daily Monster:

    Every week day (starting from 7th May 2009) I draw a little monster card to go in my son’s lunchbox.

    These are just really delightful. [via]