Andrew Sullivan informs us today that our troops in Iraq are, basically, cannon-fodder. Well, isn’t that lovely.

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Behold…the Tokyo Agent Smiths!!!

More here. (Courtesy I Love Everything.)

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Comics writer and artist Scott McCloud has been advocating micropayments for Web content for a few years now, as well as pioneering the Web as a medium for comics in general. Now he’s actually put up a comic, The Right Number, with the installments on sale for twenty-five cents each. I’ll be interested to see how this plays out; I find the idea of micropayments intriguing, but there are a lot of kinks to be ironed out. For instance, McCloud is using something called BitPass as his system for accepting payments, and thus anyone wanting to actually pay him for his work has to have a BitPass account. But I already have a PayPal account, and I really don’t want to open up all manner of new accounts with different online-payment services just to get different things, so it seems to me that online-payment services need to be like banks in the real world, accepting one another’s payments neatly and painlessly. (I haven’t delved too deeply into this, so it may well be that BitPass accepts PayPal after all, but that’s not the impression I got.)

One downside of online life is this mega-proliferation of UserIDs and passwords and whatnot. I’m starting to feel like my bathroom door is going to ask me to sign in with my user e-mail and password before I can go in there to take my shower.

(UPDATE: Apparently, you can use your PayPal account to buy a “prepaid card” for use with BitPass. But wouldn’t you still have to sign up for BitPass just to get through?)

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Teresa Nielsen-Hayden has an interesting post today about a new wrinkle in vanity publishing. Writers beware. (I’m not worried; I long ago decided that the only money I will spend on publishing is on paper, ink cartridges, and postage in sending the manuscripts. Which is at it’s supposed to be.)

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a really good book. As with all of the books in this series, there are a couple of rough spots, but still: it’s a really good book, full of imagination and magic. In lieu of a coherent essay, here are some bullet points on the good stuff (and the tiny amount of less-good stuff) in the book. I do give some mild spoilers, but I don’t totally divulge all of the plot points. Except for the fact that Voldemort is revealed to be Harry’s uncle. (No, not really.)

:: I don’t like the title, really. It’s too long and unwieldy, and it doesn’t scan well. The former titles in the series roll off the tongue, but here we have “the” occurring twice, which trips up the nice rhythm the earlier titles had. It reminds me of Paramount Pictures’ goofy decision to rename Raiders of the Lost Ark as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of course, at this point, JK Rowling could name the book Harry Potter Slaps the Queen of England With a Tuna and it wouldn’t much matter.

:: What I love most about this book is the way it does two things: it seems to set up the conflagrations and confrontations of the last two books (assuming the seven-book plan still holds), and explains or casts new light on things that have gone before. I liked finding out just why on Earth Harry keeps getting sent back to Privet Drive every summer, and that there is more to those awful relatives than meets the eye. It was also terribly appropriate that Harry started to see some of the warts in the people around him, the people he has loved and idolized but whose flaws he is beginning to notice.

Most of all, I liked how Rowling addressed something that’s been cited as a weak point in the previous books: the fact that Harry is, at times, a passive hero, coming through adventures unscathed (or less scathed than he should be) without, well, doing much of anything. Rowling doesn’t just show us that she is aware of this; she shows us that Harry himself is aware of this. It all plays into his growing sense of frustration and futility, which is fueled by his hormones, which are beginning to rage.

:: As for Harry’s teenage problems, Rowling handles these well, although I’m not sure I believe that Cho Chang would be attracted to the guy who brought back the dead body of the last guy she was attracted to. I had a slight problem with that whole storyline.

:: As usual, you have to pay attention in the first half of the book, because a lot of the stuff established there will later come into play in the last act of the book. Rowling doesn’t waste anything, and I’m hard-pressed to find anything in the book that isn’t there for some kind of reason. And that applies to bit-players and supporting characters from earlier books who suddenly become a lot more important this time out, which was a nice thing to see. Especially in the case of poor Neville Longbottom.

:: JK Rowling clearly subscribes to the theory of writing that says, “Step One: Create nice, likable characters. Step Two: Put them through hell.” She dumps so much crud on poor Harry that even when he gets to Hogwarts, things don’t brighten much, if at all, before getting immensely worse.

:: Is it just me, or was anyone else strongly reminded of Merry and Pippin in the Lord of the Rings movies whenever Fred and George Weasley showed up? (As opposed to the LOTR books. In the movies, Merry and Pippin are a lot more of a “dynamic duo”.) Their last moment in Order of the Phoenix is one of the best moments Rowling has yet written. I loved it, and she delivered it at just the right time in the book. I won’t say more than that.

:: I have a little trouble discussing the book’s big moment, the Death, without spoiling it. I’ll just say that it felt…perfunctory to me. The death didn’t seem to grow out of the story, so much as be required by it, as if Rowling said, “I have to kill off someone, so, I guess we’ll do away with Madame Pomfrey.” (No, it’s not Madame Pomfrey.) It just felt, I don’t know, arbitrary. I was expecting the book’s death to feel, in emotional storytelling terms, like Mr. Spock’s in The Wrath of Khan. But it didn’t, really.

:: Dolores Umbridge reminds me of the Director of Training at my last job: the cutesy, pleasant woman who’s really a cold-hearted meanie underneath. (Just to illustrate: in the last two years, my former company has advertised in the local paper for a new assistant for the Director of Training five times. That’s how quickly she chews people up and spits them out.)

:: I’m ready for Harry Potter and the Balance of the Force (working title). Bring it on, JK Rowling!

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Editing update: I am now about three-quarters of the way through editing The Promised King, Book I. At my current pace, I should be ready to start it on its inevitable journey towards lots of rejection in about two or three weeks. Actually, I’m slightly waffling a bit: I’m thinking that since I’m this close, I should go ahead and get a portion-and-outline ready and send it out right now, since by the time they’d look at it and respond (by asking to see the entire manuscript, I hope) I’d have the thing done and be on to typing up Book II. I may go ahead and do just that, in which case I’d hope to send out the first P&O next week. (For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about here, a “Portion and Outline” is just that: you send a publisher the first three chapters of your book, followed by a bare-bones summary of what happens after that. They peruse this, judging by the Portion if they like your writing and by the Outline if they like your story, and if the answer is affirmative on both counts, they request the full manuscript.)

Some little editing facts-and-figures: I have, to this point, cut 15,323 words from the manuscript. With six chapters and the epilogue to go, I think I’m pretty much guaranteed to hit my goal of cutting 18,700 words (that number being ten percent of my original manuscript, 187,377 words). My average chapter-length in the rough draft is 8,423 words; as of right now, the average chapter-length of the revised draft is 7,864 words. This means that I have almost cut two entire chapters of material from the book. That’s a lot of flab.

And just on a lark, the other day I did a small estimation of the word count of George R. R. Martin’s book A Storm of Swords, the third doorstop in his Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t recall the exact figure, but I know it was more than 400,000 words. (Methodology: I came up with an average number of words per line, multiplied that by the number of lines per page, and then multiplied that by the total number of pages in the book, not counting the appendices. This yields a very rough ball-park figure.) This means that one volume of Martin’s six-volume series is longer than the entirety of my two-volume set The Promised King is likely to be (assuming that Book II is about the same length as Book I). My conclusion is, of course, that I’m not working near hard enough.

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Remember the joke a few months back where you typed “French Military Victories” into Google, clicked the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and then got a fake Google page saying, “Did you mean French Military Defeats?”

Well, there’s a new wrinkle on that joke. Repeat the operation, but with the search phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

As Insty would say, “Heh.”

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Talk about getting pulled in two directions: On the one hand, President Bush thinks that putting the man-woman definition of marriage right into the United States Constitution may be a good idea if the lawyers can’t do it any other way; on the other hand, Wal-Mart has just added gays and lesbians to its antidiscrimination policy. I’m starting to think that Kevin Drum might be right, and that gay rights may just be a good wedge issue to start whittling away the GOP’s current coalition.

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Jesse wants to know why, O why, is Ann Coulter taken seriously at all. I wish I knew — I’ve long thought that she was the right’s version of Michael Moore, so much so that if the two of them ever came into physical contact with one another, both would annihilate each other with a sufficient release of energy to power the warp drive of a Federation starship. I pretty much completely ignore both of them.

I haven’t read any of Coulter’s books (I have read one of Moore’s, and thought I wanted to like it, I didn’t). I used to read her monthly columns in George, back when I had a subscription, and I pretty much blew her off as another weirdo trying to ride on Rush Limbaugh’s coat-tails, which is apparently the correct response. I mean, she’s thin, rich and blond — what the hell does she have to be so angry about? At least Michael Moore is overweight and male.

I completely stopped paying any attention to Coulter at all when she appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher one night during the whole 2000 election fiasco, while the recounting was going on. She made such an ass of herself on that show that I then never watched another episode of PI on which she appeared. At one point she literally tossed her head, folded her arms and threw herself back in her chair, just like a small child who’s just been informed that she can’t go to the park today because it’s raining, and said, “This is all Al Gore’s fault!” And I’m thinking, “Hmmm, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States thinks there’s a good chance that he might be the actual winner of Florida’s electoral votes and is therefore fighting for recounts. Inconceivable!” Then, a few minutes later, someone brings up all the votes for Buchanan in that heavily-Jewish county, where the infamous butterfly ballot was used, and Maher pointed out that even Buchanan himself had publically stated that all those votes were unlikely to be his, from the standpoint of voter intent. Coulter’s response? “Pat Buchanan is just being modest.”

Ummmm….OK. Well, I decided then and there that any person whose opinion on the 2000 Election required ascribing the personal quality of modesty to Pat Buchanan, a guy who has generally shown only slightly less modesty than Bill Clinton over the years, is not a person likely to contribute much to the onward march of human knowledge.

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An editorial appeared on the Army Times website a few days ago that was, shall we say, less than positive about the current Administration’s treatment of the military (despite the right’s insistence that Bill Clinton singlehandedly destroyed the military, but now that “the grown-ups” are in charge, everything is now just right-as-rain in our armed forces). Then, the article disappeared from that website.

But not before it was helpfully mirrored here.

[Mulder] You can’t silence all of us! We will continue to speak out! We will continue to seek the truth! [/Mulder]

(I would like to know the explanation behind the article’s removal, though. Was it for political reasons, or is this the Army Times equivalent of a major newspaper removing articles from the public website after a certain period?)

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