- My sister is getting married in a couple of months — a little less than, actually — and I don’t think she’s taking her fiancé Brian’s last name. Apparently, however, 50% of Americans think she should be legally required to do so. I’m curious as to what these people think the legal repercussions for not taking your husband’s name should be. Thirty years hard labor? My future wife needn’t worry. I ask only a dowry of ten cows and three oxen from her village patriarch. Anyway, as I noted yesterday, my last name is frequently misspelled and -pronounced. [via]
- N. K. Jemisin on describing characters of color:
Because so much of fantasy takes place in settings that in no way resemble the real world, featuring species that in no way resemble human, fantasy writers often have trouble dealing with regular people. This is something that, I think, isn’t as much of a problem for mainstream writers, because they can simply describe the world around them and come up with a reasonably accurate representation of humanity. They can also fall back on the plethora of real-world terms used to describe human beings, racially and otherwise. But using these terms makes no sense if you’re dealing with a world that doesn’t share our political/cultural context. You can’t call someone “African American†if your world has no Africa, no America, and has never gone through a colonial phase in which people of disparate cultures were forcibly brought together, thus necessitating the term in the first place.
- Got $8,000? Why not buy your own Personal Satellite Kit? [via]
- On the other hand, if you have eight million dollars, maybe you want to bid on your very own rare T-Rex skeleton. (Maybe you could get an Ankylosaurus skeleton and make them fight.)
- And finally, if you’re going to complain about your job on Facebook, at the very least make sure your boss isn’t one of your friends. [via]
writing
Wednesday various
- Jack of all trades, master of none? The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. I’d post some further thoughts on this, but I’ve got about fifteen dozen other things I need to do right now.
- Zack Handlen looks for meaning in the films of Michael Bay. An unenviable task, to be sure:
[Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen] is, by any sensible measurement, a lousy piece of work. But it has a personality behind it. That personality is childish, shallow, and has some definite issues with women, but every time Bay frames up those giants staring to the heavens, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch means it. I sort of wish I could mean it too. Because sometimes the shit gets real, and that’s when winners have to fuck the prom queen, since fate rarely calls on us on a moment of our choosing to stop a giant asteroid from killing everyone we love.
- Jonesing for some poetry? Swindle is “an automated daily aggregator of contemporary poetry,” pulling in poems from literary journals, magazines, and other RSS feeds. Its creator describes it (at Bookslut) as “a little like Google News, if Google News had been built by a virtually unpublished poet using a second-string web server and a three-year-old book about web programming.”
- Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, A Brief History of Appropriative Writing. This was interesting, more so than I expected actually, though I still have issues with appropriation without attribution or at least passing acknowledgment. Artists borrow or steal all the time — that’s the nature of art — but it’s good form, if nothing else, to acknowledge the debt where it exists. [via]
- And finally, while I wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing Jack Harkness on Doctor Who again — and I think the ending of Children of Earth definitely made that a workable possibility — I definitely don’t want to see the two shows combined. Doctor Who can go into dark places — by its nature, there’s few places it can’t go — but it’s still at it’s heart a smart adventure show and at least partly aimed at kids. Torchwood, on the other hand, is best when it’s at its darkest…even it it’s at its worst when it’s just being dark (read: sexualized and “adult”) for its own sake. I don’t want the Doctor to be Torchwood‘s comic relief, any more than I want Captain Jack to be a dose of dreariness in Doctor Who. John Barrowman fits well into both worlds, but I’m not convinced the two worlds would fit well inside each other.
Then there’s The Longest Poem in the World, which, at about 4,000 verses a day, “aggregat[es] real-time public twitter updates and select[s] those that rhyme.” It’s an intriguing project, although any resemblance to good poetry is probably accidental. (There’s something reminiscent of flarf about these “verses.” I wonder if any of my tweets have ever turned up there. [via]
Sobering thoughts
Roger Ebert writes eloquently about his struggles with alcoholism and the long road to recovery through AA:
You may be wondering, in fact, why I’m violating the A.A. policy of anonymity and outing myself. A.A. is anonymous not because of shame but because of prudence; people who go public with their newly-found sobriety have an alarming tendency to relapse. Case studies: those pathetic celebrities who check into rehab and hold a press conference.
In my case, I haven’t taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God’s truth: Since the first A.A. meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been able to drink at all. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube, I believe I’m reasonably safe. So consider this blog entry what A.A. calls a “12th step,” which means sharing the program with others. There’s a chance somebody will read this and take the steps toward sobriety.
I hope so.
Tuesday various
- J.R. Blackwell on high school:
If my life now was like high school, if my “real life” as they say, was at all like the lack of freedom and harassment I experienced while in high school, then things wouldn’t be going well for me at all. Perhaps then, that is how high school prepares you for real life – but showing you what you have to work hard to stay away from – how your earning power gives you freedoms that if you lost, you would lose your freedoms as well. Perhaps high school is a warning for the young mind – fail, and you will go someplace very much like here, except in that place, there isn’t a prom.
- Frederik Pohl, who at 89 was just awarded his high school diploma would seem to agree:
Pohl speculates that perhaps, if he had finished high school, he might have gone on to spend the rest of his career at American Car and
Foundry, instead of writing multiple science fiction classics.”Just quit school, kids!
- A contest to pick the funniest joke and, surprisingly, none of them are terrible? What are the odds? Obviously your mileage may vary, and some — like the winner, I think — are maybe more drolly amusing that laugh-aloud funny, but in any “ten best” list, you expect at least some real clunkers. [via]
- Just how ridiculous are the “birthers”? Well… [via]
- And finally, while I debate buying this
G.I. Joe Complete Collector’s Set (no, seriously. I am honestly tempted), here’s…
Monday various
- Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
- An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via] It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.
- Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
- Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
- And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)