history

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]

Gardyloo!

The word for today on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “gardyloo,” which apparently was “a common cry in former days of the dwellers in the high flats of Edinburgh, who were in the habit of throwing urine, slops, &c. out of the window; from the French gare l’eau, beware of the water.”

So I guess, if nothing else, we should be thankful we don’t live in the former days of Edinburgh.

I spent today mostly working on the Sunday crossword (which I haven’t completed) and watching a few episodes of Eureka and Breaking Bad. I also joined my writing group for our regular Sunday free-writing exercise in Huntington. The group is usually more of an idea factory for me than anything, but this week I managed to pull together something approaching a narrative. We had multiple prompts to get us started, but it mostly came down to a shared sentence, the first one in the paragraphs below:

When the clown lost his head, Sandra knew that the party was over. The piñata lay smashed against the ground, foil-wrapped candies spilling everywhere, to be trampled underfoot, the afternoon’s lunch of spaghetti and marinara still caked to the wall opposite, in a pattern all too reminiscent of the guts and brains that had so thoroughly failed to explode out from the faulty robot’s bursting head. Sandra wasn’t even sure where all of the children had run off to, although she was sure it was just to one of the other playrooms, to create additional destruction, to revisit one of the other full-service party droids that had somehow managed to escape their original warpath.

The party was an unmitigated disaster. She’d be lucky if MechaPlay, Incorporated, didn’t sue for damages; she could absolutely kiss her initial deposit goodbye. She only hoped her son had enjoyed himself. Kyle’s tenth birthday had probably just cost them his entire college fund.

She stared down at what was left of the clown, marveled again at the detailed realism of its features. If she didn’t know better, if she couldn’t now see the mess of wires erupting from its neck, she’d have sworn that it was an actual zombie. Certainly, when it had shambled into the room, with its blood-spattered pasty white skin and angry grunts, Sandra had been taken aback, suffered a moment of genuine fear. She knew that it was based on one of the video games Kyle and his friends liked to play — Bozo Ghoul or Deadly Chuckles or something like that — but it was still quite a shock to see it in the flesh, so to speak. She’d rehearsed the line that would cause the droid’s head to explode, had been assured by helpful techs that it would seem real, if perfectly harmless.

But, like so much else that afternoon, it had not gone according to plan.

It’s a goofy idea, and I don’t know if it’s a story that has any legs to it, but I had fun writing it. And it was sort of nice to have something to read, however, short, at the end of our forty minutes than just an overview of the story idea I’d come up with.

You just can’t go wrong with malfunctioning zombie robot clowns.

Wednesday various

  • Following up on the “there is no Triceratops, only Zuul” story I posted yesterday, here’s Caitlin R. Kiernan’s take on the whole thing:

    People are used to looking at species as static entities. But biologists work with species (and all other taxonomic units— the case of Triceratops is a genus-level problem) as hypotheses. And any given hypothesis may be discarded by future discoveries. That is, the name Triceratops is a hypothesis seeking to explain a collection of seemingly related fossils of a Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur. The hypothesis says that all specimens of Triceratops are more closely related to one another than they are they are to any other genus of chasmosaurine dinosaur. But, like all hypotheses, it can be falsified in light of future discoveries. In this case, the discovery of new fossils giving us a more complete picture of Triceratops as a living population of animals, and allowing us to realize that the morph we used to call “Torosaurus” is actually only the very mature form of Triceratops. As an hypothesis, “Torosaurus” appears to have been falsified. Now, it’s possible that Scannella and Horner are wrong, and that future discoveries and/or research of old discoveries will show that Triceratops and “Torosaurus” really are two taxa (though I’ve read the paper, and this seems unlikely). All hypotheses are provisional. Nothing is ever certain. Never. The best argument may be in error. That’s how science works, even if the press seems unable to grasp this.

  • Following up on the Gaiman/McFarlane legal battles I also posted about yesterday, Erik Larsen’s defense of McFarlane needs some work [via]:

    It’s one thing to start a flame-war, or be a loudmouth, or try to argue that, say, a court ruling was unfair. That, after all, is just another Tuesday on Twitter. It’s a very different thing to blame a judicial ruling you disagree with on sexist caricatures of women as irrational, swooning groupies — especially if you’re starting to make a habit of it.

  • FBI wants its seal removed from Wikipedia. Whichever side is right in this, I do like Wikipedia’s official response [via]:

    While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us…

  • Gio Clairval on Lightness: Italo Calvino’s hope for the future of literature. There are some really interesting thoughts here:

    Steampunk is often—not always, but often—set during the industrial revolution, a time that revolves around the heaviness of steel. A weighty century, indeed. Too-heavy ships crossed the oceans. Eiffel’s tower represented Man’s victory over iron. The ponderous consciousness of matter—inevitable—dominated until the late eighties. Asimov imagined immense computers. Arthur C. Clarke let enormous steles fall from the sky.

    But today, what fascinates us most in Steampunk? Airships pulled upward by light gasses. Impossibly floating cities.

  • And finally, for something completely different, a dog mowing the lawn [via]:

Monday various

  • It’s just a normal Monday here in New York, but it’s apparently Picnic Day in parts of Australia!

    Picnic Day is a public holiday in the Northern Territory of Australia which takes place every year on the first Monday of August. It was originally declared a public holiday to enable Darwin’s railway workers to go to Adelaide River for a picnic.

    I kind of love the specificity of that, the idea that an entire holiday sprung up just because that’s the day these workers had off from work. And come on, how can you not like a holiday called Picnic Day?

  • Justin Bieber has written a memoir. This is just ridiculous on so many levels.
  • Wait. Now Frank Miller worries about looking silly?
  • If Titanic II was intended as a cheap direct-to-video sequel to the James Cameron movie, that would be weird and maybe worth talking about. But since it’s just about a ship called Titanic II — and is really just your run-of-the-mill crappy direct-to-video disaster movie — it’s really not.
  • And finally…

    For the past 20 years, scientists at the Farallones have been documenting more than just puffin nests and shark breeding around the windswept archipelago 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. They’ve been keeping a daily log of their dreams, which tend to be eerily similar.

    Apparently, it’s called “day residue.” [via]