Month: July 2006

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I read it on the Internet!

A few weeks ago, some extremely pro-life blogger read a satire piece about abortion in The Onion, responded to it as though it were real, and instantly became the object of derision throughout all Blogistan.

Well, now something similar happens again, although this time not quite on so inflammatory a subject as abortion: Ken Jennings has a blog now, and a few days ago he wrote a post in which he poked fun at Jeopardy!, the show that made Ken Jennings, you know, Ken Jennings. Written from the ostensible standpoint that Jeopardy! needs to shake things up a bit to stay fresh after something like, oh, forever with the same basic format, Jennings says things like this:

On Price Is Right, Bob Barker ends every show with a plug for his personal favorite cause. “Spay or neuter your pet!” or whatever. Something like this would humanize Trebek. I propose a new sign-off, along the lines of, “Can our returning champion do it again on tomorrow’s show? Tune in and find out, everybody. Legalize cannabis. Good night.”

Now, I found that incredibly funny. In fact, the entire piece is hilarious, and you’d figure that it’s unmistakably a humor piece. But then along comes an entertainment writer for the New York Post:

In a snarky “Dear Jeopardy!” letter posted on his Web site, ken-jennings.com, the winningest contestant ever needles the game show for being out of step and out of date.

He calls the show’s categories “effete, left-coast crap nobody’s heard of” and even snipes at show host Alex Trebek.

Man. Wait until this guy finds about Celebrity Jeopardy!. “Suck it, Trebek!”

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Now what does that remind me of?

A reader e-mails me this item:

Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important.

But the ancient port uncovered last November in the Yenikapi neighborhood is of a different scale: It has grown into the largest archaeological dig in Istanbul’s history, and the port’s extent is only now being revealed.

Archaeologists call it the “Port of Theodosius,” after the emperor of Rome and Byzantium who died in A.D. 395. They expect to gain insights into ancient commercial life in the city, once called Constantinople, that was the capital of the eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

Hmmmmm…an old seaport discovered in what was once Constantinople…archaeological wonders found on the shores of…nah, that can’t be it.

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Sentential Links #58

Here we go again. Failure to click these links will be noted on your PERMANENT RECORD.

:: Thank God Hell’s Kitchen returned last night. Two weeks with nary an expletive use of the word “DONKEY!” and I nearly passed out from the shakes. I’m addicted, I tell you. I’m addicted! (Me too, I gotta admit. I wouldn’t mind getting a DVD of this show sometime, so I could hear Ramsay’s unbleeped kitchen bellowings. Personally, I think “You f***ing DONKEY!” should be the next phrase to sweep the nation.)

:: Poor Warren Spahn. It’s like you’re in a best-looking dude contest and you find out George Clooney is entered. (Yeah, I hate when that happens!)

:: And so I end my reign of being the last human being on Earth who hasn’t seen Jaws. (My God! That’s like not having seen Star Wars.)

:: We were trying to think of much better ways to determine the winner of Miss Universe:

-Make them answer geography questions.
-Make them play Risk.
-Make them fight each other with the traditional weapons of their country.

:: Ok, this whole blog thing is getting too inbred. Arrive at blog A. Follow link to B. Follow link to C. Then follow a link and find yourself back at A. Too many closed circles. I’m as guilty as anyone of perpetuating this. (Fair enough:)

:: I am a geek. I have rehearsed world domination monologues while shaving my legs. I have finely tuned plans for what I will do if I fall into a vat of radioactive waste and emerge with superstrength. And I am just as entitled to my self-indulgent adolescent power fantasies as any male comic book nerd.

:: Here’s McCarty Glacier in Alaska, as photographed by Ulysses Sherman Grant in 1909 (black-and-white) and by Bruce F. Molnia in 2004 (color): (Wow.)

:: Going to college is pretty much like going to kindergarten, but with less structure and discipline.

And finally:

:: My friends, of course, the ones I’ve made and the ones I’ve kept over these years, are my biggest accomplishment. (A happy belated birthday to the Indestructible Mr. Jones, whom I have known longer than anyone currently in my life save my immediate family.)

Onward and upward….

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness (Monday Edition)

Yesterday was the kind of day that we get once in a while, plopped into the middle of an otherwise hot and humid July, when the temperatures only hover around the mid-70s and the humidity is way down and it’s just generally refreshing after day after day after day of staying inside with the A/C running until 9:00 pm or so. Those kinds of days don’t come round all that often in July, and when they do, they are short-lived, so it behooves one to take proper advantage.

Proper advantage doesn’t mean blogging. So that’s why the Sunday Burst never showed up yesterday.

Anyhow, here’s a fairly creepy story about something that apparently can happen in real life:

She bounds along on all fours through long grass, panting towards water with her tongue hanging out. When she reaches the tap she paws at the ground with her forefeet, drinks noisily with her jaws wide and lets the water cascade over her head.
Oxana Malaya

Up to this point, you think the girl could be acting – but the moment she shakes her head and neck free of droplets, exactly like a dog when it emerges from a swim, you get a creepy sense that this is something beyond imitation. Then, she barks.

The furious sound she makes is not like a human being pretending to be a dog. It is a proper, chilling, canine burst of aggression and it is coming from the mouth of a young woman, dressed in T-shirt and shorts.

This is 23-year-old Oxana Malaya reverting to behaviour she learnt as a young child when she was brought up by a pack of dogs on a rundown farm in the village of Novaya Blagoveschenka, in the Ukraine. When she showed her boyfriend what she once was and what she could still do – the barking, the whining, the four-footed running – he took fright. It was a party trick too far and the relationship ended.

It doesn’t just happen in an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, apparently….

(via)

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Continuing the Answers: space opera

Here are a couple more answers to Ask Me Anything!. These ones are all related, so I’ll print them all first and then reply:

I want a space-opera-reading update: Have you read any yet? Are there any of the suggestions that you received that you refuse to read? In what order are you going to read the space opera books that you do read? Have you read any that you’re sorry you’ve read? Or that you’re really glad you’ve read?

For newer readers (hey, I can have newer readers!), this is in reference to the long-term project I announced here. I want to read lots and lots of space opera.

Now, my plan was never to spend months reading nothing but space opera, so I hope it won’t serve as a disappointment that I’ve so far read exactly one space opera book since I solicited titles. That book is Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry, of which I’m not going to say much in this space because I read it for review in GMR. I’m writing and submitting that review early next week, and then it’ll run at some point thereafter; I’ll link it when it appears. (But I can at least note that I liked the book a good deal.)

My aims on reading space opera is to make this basically an “over the next few years” kind of thing, and maybe even beyond. I’m the type of reader who rarely reads books of the same genre back-to-back, and who also jumps about from one book to the next, based sometimes on whim and other times on recommendation and other times on certain authors having new books out and other times on seeing some book mentioned on some blog or some such place. So I’m unlikely to plow through four or five consecutive space opera novels; it’s just not how I do things.

But what I have done is acquired quite a bit of the stuff through eBay booksellers and the like, and I’ve also rejoined the Science Fiction Book Club. Titles include The Man Who Wanted Stars, The Enchanted Planet, The Starmen of Llyrdis, Neverness, Assault on the Gods, and so on. I’m not just interested in the well-known names of SF, but also the lesser-known lights who may have left little veins of ore in those mountains for me to find. (God, what an awful metaphor….)

And I swear the SFBC is tailoring things specifically toward me as I rejoin them, and they’re scheming to have me part with as much of my money as they can get. (Well, duh!) I opened my latest mailing from them this morning, to find three omnibus editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Barsoom” novels. I’ll probably get the first one to start with — if memory serves, A Princess of Mars is Burroughs’s first Barsoom tale — and then pick up the other two at a later time. And in addition to the Barsoom books, there’s a big full-page advert for this collection from David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, who happen to be two of the best anthologists you’ll ever find. Sigh. Just what I need: more space opera to read!

(Oh, wait — that actually is just what I need! Bless you, SFBC!)

A commenter recommended H. Beam Piper in response to the earlier post; I’m keeping an eye on eBay for his work. I’d also love to read some space opera comics or manga, if anyone can suggest any. In terms of how I pick the books to read, well, I tend to kind of go at random. I briefly considered a chronological approach, but what if I missed something? Ditto a “reverse” chronological approach, as well — so I settled on what my usual modus operandi: no approach at all. I’ll just grab a space opera and read away. Some I’ll finish, some I will bounce off. The ones I bounce off, I will attempt again one day. (I tend to give books two chances to impress me, because I’ve too often had the experience of hating a book at first and then loving it when I returned to it a while later. But I am an experienced enough reader by now to be able to distinguish between bouncing off a book and just plain hating it. Case in point: I’m not ever going to return to The Celestine Prophecy on the off chance I may like it, because I’m willing to bet that I won’t.)

Finally, is there any book or author I refuse to read? Well, not so strongly as that, but I can say this: while I know that as long as Ender’s Game sits unread on my shelf there’s a hole in my SF-reading background, and eventually I’ll probably get tired of that hole and read the book in order to fill that hole in, it’ll be a good long while before I do. Maybe his books are just wonderful, but Orson Scott Card’s politics make me want to vomit. A strange position to stake, I know, coming from a guy who loves the music of Wagner despite that fact that had Wagner lived fifty years later he would have been happily composing scores to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, but there it is. I’m large and I contain multitudes and yada yada yada.

So when do I plan to do some serious space opera reading? Soon, after I get a couple more GMR review books swept aside. I’ll be ready for a good dose of spaceships and action by then.

(BTW, if you were a commenter on that earlier thread, rest assured that I saved all the recommendations there before I removed the old commenting system.)

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It’s not like they come with an instruction manual or anything….

I got a hit today from a Google search for, of all things, how to wear overalls. Well, I guess they can appear confusing, so here’s how it goes:

1. Put right leg into right leg of overalls.
2. Put left leg into left leg of overalls.
3. Depending on your handedness, pull one of the straps over your shoulder.
4. Fasten strap to bib.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 with the other strap.
6. Tuck in shirt and button up side buttons as desired.
7. Adjust bib.

Off you go. What’s so hard about that?

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Answers, part the first

Time to start catching up on the answers to the First Round of Ask Me Anything!. (The second round will come maybe a few months from now, when I get bored again or something.) I’m answering these in fairly randomized order. Well, OK, there’s nothing random about it; I’m taking the ones that lend themselves to “short answers” first.

:: Have you read any of Star Wars On Trial? What do you think of it.

I have, in fact, not read it. In fact, I don’t know what it is! So off to Google I go…

[insert whirring sound of Google in action here]

OK, apparently Star Wars on Trial is a book in which David Brin (who is known to hate Star Wars) and Matthew Stover (who wrote one of the novelizations and maybe some other stuff) debate some points about Star Wars, such as “Science Fiction Filmmaking Has Been Reduced by Star Wars to Poorly Written Special Effects Extravaganzas”. Maybe I’ll seek this book out sometime, but I have to admit that at the outset it sounds like something that would piss me off at least half the time. I mean, just to that one “issue” I cite above (and not even granting the premise that Star Wars is badly written), it’s not as if SF filmmaking was exactly a font of well-written movies before George Lucas came along. And so on.

So David Brin can bite me. Harumph!

Why is Dave Letterman so mean to Paul?

Huh. I confess that I’ve never found Letterman particularly “mean” to Paul — he ribs the guy a lot, but to me Letterman always shows a great deal of respect for Paul and his talents. Now, Dave’s certainly mean to Alan Kalter on occasion, but I suspect that’s mostly schtick, anyway.

What did you think of V for Vendetta (the movie)?

Haven’t seen it, and I haven’t really decided if I want to or not. I dunno. I’m not that big a fan of the Wachowski’s, liking The Matrix less every time I watch it and having fallen asleep in the first half hour of The Matrix Reloaded. The comic, though, was brilliant, although I haven’t read it since 1989 or so.

Superpower: flying or invisibility?

Invisibility all the way. I could do a lot of good if I were invisible. Yeah…good…heh heh heh….

Who’s your favorite Wilbury, and why?

Assuming we’re talking about the Traveling Wilbury’s, my fave is Roy Orbison.

If you could, scratch that, make it HAD TO – change one, at least fairly major, thing about the Star Wars prequels, what would it be?

Hmmmm…a tough one! I’ve never hated Jake Lloyd’s performance in The Phantom Menace, but given how important the kid is to that movie and the skill he’s shown with directing kids in the past, if Steven Spielberg was ever going to direct a Star Wars movie, that would have been the one.

(Other possible answers include having Frank Darabont do the scripts based on Lucas’s story outlines, and to make a change to the actual storylines, having an attempt on Padme’s life take place on Naboo in Attack of the Clones.)

And here are a few related ones:

What sort of carrot would it take to pull a Sampson & Delilah on that hair of yours, and what further impetus would be needed to shave the mug?

I had long hair in the mid and late 90s, but got it whacked when I left Pizza Hut to go work for Bob Evans, a company that had a strict hair-length policy for men. At the time I was grossly unhappy working for Pizza Hut, so leaving them for a company that was going to pay me more and treat me more professionally was worth losing the hair.

I eventually left Bob’s when I decided that I just didn’t want to be a restaurant manager (nothing against Bob’s at all), and aside from going to Fantastic Sam’s every so often to get the ends trimmed up, I’ve never had a haircut since. That was in January of 2000.

So there are circumstances under which I’d get the hair whacked. Right now, though, I can’t imagine what they’d be. It’d have to be a job I really want at a place that genuinely forbids long hair.

Along other lines, having to undergo chemo or some other medical procedure that requires hair-cutting or results in hair loss would he endured if they came along.

With the beard, roughly the same answers apply. I just like this look. So if anyone’s looking to entice me with some kind of bet, like “If the Bills win, I’ll shave my head, but if the Jets win, you shave yourhead!”, you’ll need to find some other kind of bet-losing penalty!

In a question that echoes Buffalogeek’s #3, what would it take to get you to lose the overalls?

An act of God.

Under threat of losing your right thumb and pinky toes, would you shave the beard, cut the hair, AND lose the overalls?

OK…I’m sensing a bit of distaste for my fashion choices from the citizens of Blogistan….

I don’t have a question question; I just wanted to say I like the hair, the beard and the overalls.

Ha!

and the tie dye too.

Hooray!

More answers tomorrow or the day after, folks. Thanks to all who posed queries! This turns out to be a pretty fun exercise.

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(Geez…thought I was done)

Yeah, I say I’m not going to post for a day or two, and then I find two things to post about. Yeesh.

:: The guy who posted the MP3 of his phone call to AOL to cancel his account is back in the news, because someone has “leaked” the AOL training manual for the employees who handle the cancellation calls. The major revelation here is the idea that a cancellation call is viewed as a sales opportunity by AOL.

And here’s what I wrote over a month ago on this:

Now, this particular operator most certainly does go way over the line in dealing with a customer — we can all agree on that — but what interests me isn’t so much that this call shows how far customer service has fallen in today’s business world, but rather what today’s business world thinks customer service is.

For companies, it boils down to one simple rule: Service equals sales. Seriously, that’s how companies view service today. Customer service is indistinguishable from sales, and every interaction with the customer is to be approached as an opportunity to sell.

I was a month ahead of some guy who writes for the New York Times. Heh! But really, for anyone who’s ever worked in any kind of sales environment, there is absolutely nothing shocking about AOL’s “retention guide”.

:: Sean e-mailed this to me a week or so ago, and I promptly forgot about it until he linked it himself today: Forbes’s 150 cheap places to live rich. Buffalo’s on the list, and here’s what they have to say:

Don’t let Buffalo’s reputation as a frigid Lake Erie town fool you. There’s plenty of heat here—particularly in the arts. Keep your toes tappin’ at one of the major concert venues in Buffalo, which routinely bring jazz, chamber music, rock, blues, and bluegrass sounds to town. For more urbane fare, take in a touring Broadway show at Shea’s Performing Arts Center, a restored 1926 movie palace. And Buffalo isn’t the year-round icebox you think. The “snowbelt” actually lies south of the city.

OK, but who gives a shit about the snow belt? Why not point out that we have awesome winter sports, our winters aren’t as cold or windily unpleasant as, say, Chicago’s, our summers have never once tipped 100 degrees in all the time they’ve been keeping records, and our autumns are utterly stunning? Oh well. Good press for Buffalo is always welcome.

:: OK, that’s it. Don’t forget to Ask Me Anything!

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Ask Me Anything!

Always one to follow a meme-thing, here’s one via Paul and Simon: you all get to ask me, well, anything. Just hop into comments and ask me something. In a few days when I’ve gathered enough questions, I’ll come up with some answers. Some of them may even be honest!

So ask some questions. Weird stuff, not weird stuff, opinions, “Have you ever…”, you name it. If I deem a question too outrageous, I’ll just answer it in a mocking fashion. Bring it on.

UPDATE: Some good queries so far, so keep them coming! We’re talking “anything” here, folks.

I have some reviews to catch up on for GMR, so I won’t be posting Tuesday or Wednesday, and possibly not even Thursday. My plan is to start answering these queries over this coming weekend, so keep on posing questions! Note that there’s no rule limiting commenters to one question, here.

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