canada

Wednesday various

  • Stieg Larsson is turning out to be an incredibly prolific dead man.
  • Scientists have created software that can recognize sarcasm. Now if we could just figure out a way to transfer that ability to more people… [via]

  • Whatever your feelings about deaf culture and cochlear implants — personally, I sympathize, but I still believe deafness is a disability — it’s hard not to be a little moved by this video of an eight-month-old deaf baby hearing sound for the first time. [via]
    • And that child later would grow up to be…Iron Baby.
  • And finally, Lorne Michaels on being Canadian and comedic [via]:

    “I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it’s challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy. It’s allowed. It’s not encouraged, but it’s definitely allowed, and you stand very little chance of being shot.”

Something like a Sunday

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and the weather’s just been lovely, sort of perfect sit-in-the-backyard-with-the-iPad weather. Beyond that, and the ever-growing Kaleidotrope slush pile that I’m still trying to get through, I spent today watching Doctor Who Confidential and some of the special features on the Mystery Team DVD, finishing the New York Times Sunday crossword (for a change), meeting up with a friend for our weekly writing group, and reading the rest of Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. Heather, who sent me the book at my birthday, calls it “the bane of every twelfth grade student” in her native Canada (where the book is largely set), but I kind of liked it. There was a long stretch, in which nothing particularly happens, when I wasn’t so sure that was going to be the case, but I can actually see going on and reading the other two books in Davies’ trilogy. Not right now, of course — I feel like I need a good shot of science fiction to counteract my recent readings — but at some point in the future.

My more immediate future, however, involves maybe watching a little television, maybe reading a little more, and going to bed.

Tuesday various

  • It goes without saying that “Arizona’s draconian new immigration law is an abomination,” right? [via]

  • In semi-related news: Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black. [via]

  • The Canadian Science Fiction Review is an interesting idea, though I’m not sure I like their chances for getting fully funded by May 15, I’m sad to say. I was also surprised to discover that On Spec, “the Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic,” isn’t an SFWA qualifying market. [via]

  • I’m an editor, and even I don’t think we should get book royalties. [via]

  • And finally, Neil Gaiman on the path not taken:

    The nearest to a real job I ever came actually, is when I was starting out as a young journalist, my father informed me—he knew that I’d starve as a journalist—he had this great idea, I could show off show homes and I could write while I wasn’t showing people around, and I sort of really didn’t want to say no because it was such a kind thing to do, and I was starving.

    So I got on a bus and I went all the way across London by bus and went to this place where I was going to meet this guy for an interview and I sat in the reception for an hour, then they said “we’re really sorry, he’s had to go home, it’s too late” and I said oh okay, and I went back across London by bus. And then I thought, well that was that. I didn’t plan on going back across London by bus, it was a ridiculous bus journey, so I never went back, and that was the nearest I ever got to having a real job.

    Imagine if that guy had shown up!

Tuesday various

  • So Yoko Ono only okayed the Citroën car commercial to keep Lennon in the public conciousness? That’s good, because before this, I’m sure many people were thinking, “John Lennon? Who’s that?”
  • Another from the fine line between irony and hypocrisy department: Sarah Palin Crossed Border for Canadian Health Care. Why does she hate America? [via]
  • Having just recently rented or purchased some DVDs and Blu-Ray discs where this is a particular problem, I can totally get behind John Scalzi on this:

    …if someone were to introduce legislation requiring home entertainment companies to have a “just play the damn movie” button at the start of every DVD, Blu-Ray or any other future movie-playing technology, I would call my Senators and representative every fifteen minutes until they voted “yes” on that bill.

  • Charlie Stross on how books are made. [via]
  • And finally, A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever [via]

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.