politics

Thursday various

  • John Scalzi on finding the time to write:

    So: Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is “yes, but,” then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say “no.” And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what “yes, but” means.

  • Janet Potter on the work of Stieg Laarson:

    Which is why, in the end, my problem with the Millennium trilogy is not its genre, or its plot, or its characters. It’s the fact that the bestselling books in the world are poorly written, erotic fan fiction that a man wrote about himself. [via]

  • Roger Ebert on the state of the nation:

    The time is here for responsible Americans to put up or shut up. I refer specifically to those who have credibility among the guileless and credulous citizens who have been infected with notions so carefully nurtured. We cannot afford to allow the next election to proceed under a cloud of falsehood and delusion.

  • Nancy Kress on bad movies:

    When you fall asleep at a movie and begin to snore, that constitutes a review. When no one around you goes “shhhh,” that constitutes another.

  • And finally, the CERN Choir on particle physics [via]:

Back at the old homestead

A quiet day at home, mostly finishing up a few chores and some cleaning, and watching more episodes of The Office. (I’m making good headway into Season 3.) I toyed with the idea of going to see The American, but didn’t, just hung around the house.

Nor did I go up the block to join the neighborhood block party. A few weeks ago, they sent around a somewhat passive-aggressive flier for the party, notifying us that because “some people” had disapproved, only the other end of the block would be closed off to traffic. I guess at this end, we’re just fun-hating spoilsports. Block parties around here have always been kind of an other-end-of-the-block thing anyway, and nowadays, with only a few exceptions, that’s where all the families with young children live.

I don’t know if they intentionally picked September 11 as the day of the party. It does seem a little weird. Though I also ran into a local “harvest festival” that had roads blocked today, and only one small gathering at the local flagpole commemorating the day. To be honest, aside from a few posts on Twitter, and the fact that they had some of the memorial services on TV at the deli when I went to buy lunch, I might not even have known today was September 11.

Actually, that’s not true. As Thud points out, those who most angrily declare that we’ve “forgotten 9/11” do so simply “because we don’t agree with them,” or because they’ve forgotten what actually happened that day, or learned the wrong lesson from it. (Like, oh, that all Islam is evil, or that burning Korans is a good idea.) I actually started this weblog a couple of days after the attacks. I have family and friends who were in Manhattan at the time, though thankfully no one who has hurt. Even as it’s become a day that, nine years later, I don’t dwell on for every moment, it’s also a day I’m not likely to forget.

Though it occurs to me now, a lot of the kids I saw up and down the block, headed to or from the block party? Plenty of them weren’t alive that day, or were too young to really remember it. That seems a little weird to me.

Anyway, after dinner this evening, I drove to the airport to pick up my parents. I may have mentioned, they were in London for the week. There was a little confusion about which terminal they were in — I was waiting around in Terminal 2 for about an hour, then I got a call saying they were waiting in Terminal 3 — but everybody’s home now safe. Our dog has already ripped up the stuffed Beefeater dog they bought him. Which is, of course, what he does to pretty much all his toys.

And that’s it. Tomorrow’s my last day off before heading back to work. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to it. On the other, I was just starting to get the hang of this “vacation” thing.

(Actually, I think the next time I take a vacation, I need to go somewhere.)

Wednesday various

  • You know, if you’re going to get a tramp stamp lower-back tatoo…
  • The other day, I posed a question on Twitter and Facebook: grammatically, should it be the Beatles or The Beatles? I wasn’t interested so much in this particular example, but what people thought about the capitalization of the lead-in article. My question brought in a flurry of responses, some very well thought out, most in favor of capitalizing the “The,” only one (not in favor) citing an actual style guide, but I don’t think we reached anything like a consensus. It’s one of those things that boils down, for the most part, to personal aesthetics. I almost always write the Beatles, lower-case t, just as I almost always don’t italicize the “the” before “the New York Times.” You can find lots of people (and style guides) that dictate one or the other, but it pretty much comes down to personal preference. This particular example wasn’t work-related, so I didn’t have the APA style guide to fall back on. Despite what I usually do, this time I went with the capital T.

    I bring all of this up simply because I was amused to see my initial question listed among Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars. You have to know which battles are worth picking. [via]

  • No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment. Just lame.
  • On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the idea of an Outer Limits movie. On the other hand, maybe a financially troubled studio and a pair of Saw writers aren’t the best people to see it through.

    I do find it curious that none of the reports I’ve seen mention the more recent ’90s adaptation of the show — which, for better or worse, ran 5 years longer than the original.

  • And finally, Jacob Weisberg on Sarah Palin:

    The non-Sarah Dittoheads among us have to decide whether to regard this babble—favoring creation science, aerial wolf-shooting, and freedom of the press, so long as the press is “accurate”—as scary or funny. During the 2008 campaign, when there was a real chance that Palin could become the automatic successor to an impulsive, elderly cancer survivor, I found it more scary than funny. After McCain lost, and after Palin terminated her governorship in the effusion of furious gibberish known as her resignation speech, I have found it mostly funny. To be alarmed by Palin today presumes a Republican Party suicidal enough to want her to do more than run its weekend paintball games.

    Me, I’m still a little scared. In today’s politics of the right, crazy is quickly becoming the new sane, and crazy seems to love it some Sarah Palin, you betcha. [via]

Thursday various

Monday various

  • Rachel Maddow takes on the “Scare White People” tactics of the right. That this is a tried and tested method for securing votes is only slightly less disheartening than the fact that it seems to be working even today. [via]
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose story “Mouse and I” appears in the April 2010 issue of Kaleidotrope, writes about finding her voice as a Filipino science fiction writer:

    I found myself thinking, yet again, on what kind of science fiction a Filipino would write, and how a writer can break free from being someone who emulates the works of writers he or she has admired to become a person who writes with a voice and with a story that comes from the writer’s own soul.

    What things influence the Filipino writer then? What’s our backstory? How can I as a writer coming from a country that has been so colonialized and that is still trapped in a colonial mindset free myself so I can write the fictions that only I can write?

  • She also shares a really terrific talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  • Apparently there is no gravity [via] and time is disappearing from the universe. [via] Or at least, those are some theories.
  • And finally, I don’t know if this story, about a Bosnian man who claims to have been hit by meteorites six times, is made more or less strange by the possibility that it’s all a hoax.