- I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
- Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:
Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.
- A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
- You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
- And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:
Like the “Enter†key that becomes a “Search†key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.
As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things†— apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]
doctor who
Tuesday various
- Textbooks Up Their Game. The Wall Street Journal looks at the evolving world of the textbook market and the role that e-book volumes will play in it.
The iPad does seem better suited to the textbook market than most other e-readers, if only for its versatility. But I can’t see app-ready editions of textbooks having much widespread appeal (beyond the student who already owns an iPad) or impact, unless the price of Apple’s reader and/or the books comes down significantly. Students are unlikely to pay $69.99 (much less $84.99) for a book they can’t re-sell and that, once the iPad stops working or needs to be replaced, is gone too.
- Daleks voted the greatest sci-fi monsters of all time. It’s a weird list. The original poll was for “Monsters, Supernatural Beings & Fantasy Creatures,” which means picks like Aslan makes more sense — although a CGI lion with the voice of Liam Neeson is a little monstrous, too — but Pilot from Farscape?
- Real or not, I think I can live without J.D. Salinger’s toilet.
- Deconstructing the Twikie. Surprisingly, this hasn’t been done by Cockeyed.com. [via]
- And finally, I’ve really been enjoying Zach Handlen’s Star Trek: The Next Generation recaps:
It can be difficult to convincingly show love in fiction, because the experience of falling for someone is both highly personal and curiously universal; the details and shared moments are what give the feeling texture, but the rush and elation of it are things that we all share. So you’ve got to find some way to make the small moments appear distinct and honest so that the big moments feel earned.
Tuesday various
- “Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday they have uncovered a circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.”
Is it wrong that my first thought was to wonder if it was the Pandorica? [via]
- Oh, good, because the one thing Torchwood hasn’t been is dark.
But I kid. A warning, by the way: that link contains a pretty huge spoiler for (the pretty terrific) Children of Earth.
- Tasha Robinson wonders: Should artists’ lives or opinions affect how people perceive their art?
- Along somewhat similar lines — that is, of appreciating art on a level perhaps different than what the artist intended — separating the poem from the novel in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Spoiler warnings here, too, I guess. Mostly, it just makes me want to re-read Nabokov’s book.
- And finally, Inside the City’s Last Silent Place
“I wish there were more drama,” said Alexander Rose, “but it’s convivial and collegiate. There’s no Norman Mailer trying to kill his wife in here. No tension, no melodrama.” Mr. Rose, author of American Rifle: A Biography, was taking a break from his work to tell the Transom about the Allen Room, a hush-hush space on the second floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the New York Public Library “main branch”) on Fifth Avenue. Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors. Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave,” Mr. Rose said of the room, which he heard about through the literary grapevine. “I looked it up, and it actually did exist.”
I work just a block from the Library. Now I guess I just need to write a book. [via]
Wednesday various
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Our muttons
Friday’s page from my Forgotten English calendar was “our muttons” meaning…well:
The farming community has given us another useful expression in our muttons. When we speak of something being our muttons, we mean that we like it especially well.
This according to Sydney Baker’s 1941 New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms, and if you can’t trust that, what can you trust?
I had a pretty our muttons-y sort of weekend, all things considered; a pretty late night of it yesterday meant I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, but overall I liked the weekend quite a lot.
I got a haircut, went to the library, and saw my second Broadway show of the week. Not too shabby, eh?
Back on Mother’s Day, we bought my mom tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter, since she’s long been a fan but never seen the singer in concert. The show was this weekend in Manhattan, and so to coincide with that (and last week’s Father’s Day), my sister and her husband drove to New York from Maryland. They brought their dog Chloe with them, which was an interesting experience, I think mostly for Chloe and for our much older — and much less interested in rambunctiousness — dog Tucker. We left the dogs at home (Chloe in her crate, Tucker in his pen) and drove into the city for a very nice dinner out. Then we split up, my father and mother off to see Carpenter at the New York School of Ethical Culture, and the other three of us to see American Idiot on Broadway.
I was a little worried about not liking the show. I like some Green Day songs well enough, and even have a few from the album on which the Broadway show is based in my iTunes catalog, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a huge fan. But the show was quite entertaining. It’s very loud and very bright, and if you blink you could miss the story, but the cast is undeniably talented and there’s a kind of pulse-pounding poetry to the whole thing. It’s a little like being inside a music video, with all the good and the bad that that suggests. It’s a breakneck ninety minutes, and it’s not without its faults, but it was hard not to be impressed by the end.
Since our show was over around 9:30, the three of us caught a train home instead of meeting back uptown with my parents. It’s maybe good that we didn’t stay in Manhattan, like we originally thought we might, since when we got home we discovered that Chloe had soiled her crate, her bedding, and herself while we were gone. Wet food and too much water earlier in the day had apparently not agreed with her. Catherine and Brian spent the next hour or so giving Chloe a bath on the front lawn — thank goodness it’s summer — and cleaning up the mess, while I tried to offer whatever help I could and look after Tucker. It was well after midnight before everyone was settled down — Chloe bathed, Tucker calmed, and my parents home.
Today was relatively calm and uneventful by comparison. I watched this week’s season finale of Doctor Who and thoroughly enjoyed it. As Betty says:
I’m not sure how much sense the finale actually made, but, oh, what wonderful, wonderful nonsense it was.
And I went for a short walk, despite the pretty oppressive heat. I worked on some fake horoscopes for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue — it’s a continuing feature, and the issue comes out next month — and on the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I have yet to finish.
Now I think I’m just going to watch a little TV and retire for the evening. Hopefully there will be more our muttons in the week to come.