Sentential Links #48

Time again for some linkage to good and readable stuff!

:: Now, some magicians do magic with their speedy hands. Some contort their bodies in difficult ways. Some make you laugh. David Blaine is the only one I can think of whose tricks generally consist of him doing absolutely nothing at all. (Tell me about it. I’d rather watch an old Doug Henning act than any of Blaine’s “passive Evel Knievel” crap.)

:: So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure. (There’s just something cool about astrophysicist snark.)

:: The West is a haunted place where the new ghosts push the old ones a little farther back in memory all the time, even as the writers return them to life once again.

:: I don’t know that I have ever been in a bar as divey as even a reasonably nice OTB– I don’t think a bar could be that divey, or an opium den, either. OTB is a step above crackhouse on the glamour scale– barely. (Ouch.)

:: “She’ll always be Ensign Ro to me,” he concluded. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. (Blog found by Lynn.

:: Joss Whedon has the most persuasive and stunning vision of evil in all of popular culture. (You gotta like a blog that’s unafraid of a bold statement or two! Also via Lynn.)

:: Remember, it’s Monday. Everybody’s incompetent at 7 o’clock on a Monday morning.

:: There we were, cruising along nicely, and some doofus in the trumpet section came in two beats too early. (Shit, been there, my friend. One of the movements of Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy has these giant, smashing brass chords, like six of them, all in a row. One time I lost count and added a seventh. All by myself. Really loud. Well, if you’re gonna screw up, make it a big one, eh? BTW, this blogger’s having a rough time lately. Give him some love.)

:: The big advantage that writing (and especially written fiction, my preferred art form) has over other media for conveying experience is that the writer can try to incorporate bits of other, imaginary minds in their serialized stream of consciousness. Writing isn’t just a camera, or even a technicolor camera with Dolby surround-sound recording: it’s a camera with flickering, blurry, black-and-white, routinely-malfunctioning telepathy bolted on the side.

All for now. I’m off to shove something bristly up my nose and into my sinuses.