funny

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]

  • Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.

  • I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.

  • Yes, and this font joke. [via]

  • And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.

    Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.

    Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.

Tuesday various

  • You meddlesome kids get off Richard Schickel‘s lawn!
  • That, my friends, is one big bunny. [via]
  • There was a lot of talk recently about a new law in South Carolina that would require “subversive” organizations to register with the state. This, of course, put me in mind of a line from Good Morning, Vietnam: “Well, we walk up to someone and say, ‘Are you the enemy?’ And, if they say yes, then we shoot them.” Turns out, it isn’t exactly true. Or, rather, the law’s been on the books for about sixty years. There’s actually a bill before the SC legislature to repeal it. So, you know, that’s good. [via
  • Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times last month:

    To millions of “Twilight” fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, “Twilight” is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside — while they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series’ vast commercial empire. [via]

  • And fianlly, ever wonder what the Westminster dog show would look like from the opposite point-of-view? [via]

Tuesday various

  • Will singing “My Way” in the Philippines get you killed?

    Still, the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. [via]

  • Salon.com on Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat:

    And then I read Southwest’s apology to Smith, which includes such gems as “If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.” And I think, first, “If we allowed a cramped, restricted seating arrangement? Because ‘The Greyhound of the Skies’ is positively roomy when there are no fat people on board?” And second, I think, “Translation: Fat paying customers’ fully expected discomfort only becomes a problem for us if it also makes the paying customers we care about uncomfortable.” [via]

  • Speaking of apologies, does Tiger Woods owe you one? Probably not. [via]
  • A neat, albeit a little disturbing, H.R. Giger cake [via]
  • And finally, the truth behind elephant brain power:

    “We are a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the odd glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable.”

    Incidentally, today is your last day to listen to Inside the Elephant Mind on the BBC player. [via]

Thursday various

Tuesday various

  • Mother Jones on the death of literary magazines. To which my short answer is: same as it ever was, same as it ever was. I think there’s an argument to made that readership is down, but I don’t think that’s reflected in the number of different venues for writers. Some literary magazines will die off, or will be forced to adopt new business models — pay even less, change what they publish — but it seems like not a day goes by when another new magazine or journal doesn’t open up. [via]
  • How to make a Michael Cera movie [via]
  • Are there oceans of liquid diamond on Uranus and Neptune? [via]
  • I’m amused that somebody thinks “man listens to loud music and neighbors complain” is somehow more newsworthy because the loud music was John Denver.
  • And finally, I like this mashup of 2009’s top songs a whole lot more than the individual songs it’s made up of.