Tag: Sentential Links

It’s that time again, folks. Link time! Hooray!

:: We all knew this was how it would happen, slowly but steadily. We knew it. And now it’s happened to Rob Portman. It’s progress. It’s human. And I should be less churlish about it. (I see nothing to be gained in being a jerk about how someone comes to the conclusion that they’ve been wrong and joins the side of the angels. I wish it would happen more quickly, but that’s not for me to decide.)

:: I miss her. I’m glad she was here. I carry her with me for the rest of my life. And that’s not a bad thing. (I often wonder what kind of burden The Daughter will carry in life, knowing that for a time, she had a brother….)

:: BBC: I’m sorry, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to postpone the start of your season again. Budget concerns, you know. You’ll just have do make do with the back half of Season Seven and a couple of specials for your 50th anniversary.

Doctor Who Producer: But our series is a phenomenal success! It’s getting astounding ratings and great audience appreciation numbers every year, year in and year out! (And now Britain’s stupid austerity budgeting is hurting Doctor Who production? NEVER!!!)

:: I’ve always been Roger O. Green, or Roger O’Green, if you will. Some day, maybe I’ll discover whether I come by my faux designation legitimately. (I find that the older I get…my level of interest in my genealogy goes nowhere. Seriously. I know nothing about my family beyond my grandparents, and I suspect that’s the way it’s likely to stay.)

:: What novel do you have multiple well worn copies of? If you were in an old book store would you look for another older volume of the same book so that you can eventually find a first edition? If you are a Bibliophiles, you know what I am talking about and you are my people. (I don’t crave a first edition Lord of the Rings, but I do own multiple copies, for various reasons — mainly, every few years or so I see one that looks really nifty. Ditto a number of GGK’s novels. I want to get a single-volume edition of The Fionavar Tapestry at some point…and a proper Under Heaven, since my only copy of that one at this point is the ARC I got when the book was coming out.)

:: Also, house parties. I think all novels should have house parties in them. (Note to self: write a house party into Princesses II: The Wrath of the Princesses.)

:: I live it for wiser folk to figure out where she lies on the spectrum of Christian theology, but I do want to point out the hilarious middle panel, in which everyone was enjoying themselves watching basketball until she wandered in with dark warnings about the fact that death looms over us all, constantly. (Oh, Family Circus, never change!)

:: So, THE LAST DANGEROUS V… Er, I mean, THE REPUBLIC OF THIEVES! October 10th. And now it’s some other writer’s turn to wear the Crown of Lateness. I have already started work on the fourth Gentleman Bastard book, THE THORN OF EMBERLAIN. (Heh…at the rate I’m going, I’ll have Princesses In SPACE!!! III: The Search for Spock’s Princesses done by the time I somehow get Princesses published. But that day will come, by God!!! Joking aside, I’m glad that the new Locke Lamora book is on the way. I enjoy that series.)

More next week!

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Time for the weekly links.

:: I am now… (this is the super-cool part)… a historian. I get to record history. For a living. (Ayup, that’s pretty cool. I’m trying to make up history for a living! Not there yet, though.)

:: When I turned 50, I could think, “Maybe I still have another half a lifetime left.” After all, the number of centenarians in the United States has been growing. Willard Scott, with whom I share a birthday, BTW, still announces the birthdays of those over 100 on NBC-TV’s TODAY show, as far as I know.

Now that I am 60, though, I have to acknowledge that I’m not going to live another 60 years, even if I move to Azerbaijan and start eating yogurt soup. (And if I’m wrong, which one of you is going to write to correct me?) (I will. When Roger turns 120, I’ll be a sprightly 101.)

:: Earlier today,we saw that Batman was ready to retire, psychological paralyzed by an inferiority complex triggered when he took one measly bullet during a mission.

Problem–the plan misfired (duh), the menace was real, but Batman found out it was a plan and is now all “I hate you!” (I seem to recall that exact plot from episodes of The Brady Bunch, Three’s Company, and Eight is Enough.)

:: I will not buy anything I see in a pop-up ad. They are the most annoying form of advertising ever devised. I know the big problem with the internet is that no one has figured out yet how to make a substantial profit out of it. That certainly is my problem. Banner ads are only slightly effective. And newspapers and other sites have found it’s difficult to charge people for their services when other outlets will provide it for free. Why go to reputable newspapers when there are people like me in their underwear banging out blogs? (You know, this seems as good a time as any to get this out in the open: I have never, and will never, bang out material for this blog whilst in my underwear. Make fun of my overalls if you wish, but I am not blogging in my underwear. That is my pledge to you, dear Readers!)

:: Burroughs was pretty much done with Tarzan in 1914. He was feuding with his editor at All-Story over reprint rights and didn’t have a lot of motivation to continue the series. But when a new editor took over the magazine and promised to work with Burroughs on his complaints, Burroughs agreed. He even accepted the new editor’s idea of making the next story about Tarzan’s son, Jack, running away from London to Africa with an ape. It would be the last time Burroughs set part of a Tarzan story in England. (Michael May is digging into the literary past of Tarzan. Check it out!)

:: Good morning, America! Are you feeling a little … discombobulated? Like you didn’t get enough sleep? That’s because you’re under the boot heel of the United Nations and their one-world “Daylight Savings Time” plot.

More next week!

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Time for LINKS!!!

:: There was me, Amanda, and there was Amanda’s TED speech, and she was spending a lot more time with her TED speech than she was with me.

:: It’s that great moment of seeing something you loved when you were younger and haven’t revisited for a very long time and finding it holds up even better than you thought. (I was a bit older when Pulp Fiction came out, but it’s still one of my favorite movies. I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw it…in a theater all by myself, because it was brand new and word-of-mouth hadn’t started building yet.)

:: How does the play weather a fourth reading? Excellently. It was wasted on my teenaged self, but it was a revelation when I taught it to my son in 2003 and again when I brought it to my daughters in 2009. (Ah, Julius Caesar — the play that started me on the road to thinking “Hey, maybe there’s something to this Shakespeare fellow after all!” We read it in tenth grade, and we focused on all the usual stuff: Brutus and Anthony, Caesar’s arrogance, the Ides of March, “The good is oft interred with our bones”, et cetera. But when I re-read it last year, what struck me between the eyes was a brief and horrifying scene when the Roman crowd, whipped into a frenzy, kills an innocent poet who just happens to have the same name as one of the conspirators. I don’t recall my tenth grade teacher making much of Shakespeare’s cynicism regarding the malleability of mob opinion, but that’s what I think about now whenever I think about that play.)

:: And all this puts me in mind of the young man I used to be and somehow lost track of.

I miss him. (I think that everybody has this moment at some point in their lives. The sooner we realize that the young guy is still in there, the better life gets.)

:: Not only did he publish without me, he got a patent on the idea as well. He did include me in the acknowledgements, but in science that’s worth exactly nothing. (I’m often glad I didn’t end up in academia.)

:: You know what I think? I think wasted potential is a lot scarier than feeling overwhelmed. There is no monster greater than regret. I wouldn’t wish it on any one. (I could not agree more, and I have a post on this topic on the way!)

:: But what kind of a place is it, that people are armed to the teeth, and terrified at the prospect of home invasion? What does it mean to live in a country that was, for generations, defined by institutionalized racism? Is South Africa really just Texas with a Dutch accent? (I said that I‘m not snarking anymore. I didn’t say I wouldn’t occasionally link other people’s snark!)

More next week….

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Links. I got ’em.

:: Because I have a theory about rhyme, that we turned away from rhyme at the same time we turned away from dancing as a social and communal recreation, the same time we turned away from gathering around to sing together, the same time we, most of us, more of us than ever before in the history of the world, left our bodies in gray cubicles and began to take up full time residence inside our minds, our best gray thin and sickly approximations of the mind, divorced more and more from our blood, the same time TV came in and our towns began to glow with an eery blue light in summer evenings as the porches emptied and the fireflies and crickets did what nocturnal insects do undisturbed by laughing calling children running through the shadows and the cool dark grass.

:: The question is: How useful or realistic are the ray-guns of yore or the modern revamped directed energy weapons? (Ach, I don’t want ‘realism’ in my SF weapons! I want nifty.)

:: Stephen Donaldson has delivered the third and final draft of The Last Dark, the fourth and concluding novel in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. This will be the tenth Thomas Covenant novel overall, and is planned to conclude the entire series. (It’s really amazing that this series is still going on….)

:: Don’t feel bad if you don’t remember. You’re not alone. I’m pretty much the forgotten President. This day is always bittersweet for me. On the one hand it’s nice to be honored; on the other I’m the only President who always has to show proof.

:: I am extremely glad to be living in the 21st century right now.

:: Last year was the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Tarzan story and, frankly, I was disappointed by the lack of celebration overall. Especially by me, but I’ll be happy to point my finger elsewhere as a distraction. Couldn’t we at least have gotten a new Tarzan movie? (Huh…I’m not even sure I noticed our entry into the second Tarzanic Century. Weird….)

:: The astronauts who will live on the Moon in a decade or two are the ones who are playing with Lego now. Seems like a natural extension to me.

More next week!

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Want some linkage? Sure you do.

:: That eight hour chunk in the middle of the day when I am at, what they laughably call “work” — now that could go, quite easily. They keep insisting on giving me money for it, however (the fiends!) which I just can’t say no to. A big pile of cash could solve that quite easily, but they just don’t leave those lying around. Or maybe they do and I’m always late getting there. I don’t know. (Heh…tell me about it. I’m pretty sure some awful rapscallion is out there having fun on my dime, and it pisses me off!)

:: I have never heard such laughter in my house. I have never seen such smiles. And I have never seen such a heartfelt, spontaneous and natural mingling of cultures, sharing of customs — and a speedy exchange of phone numbers and Facebook pages. All because of pie.

:: And the time for debate is long since past anyway; the science is in, and it’s sound science. I’m tired of politicians equivocating and hemming and hawing about global warming. We need to stop fiddling while the world burns, and start putting out this fire.

:: The Piecemeal God is a powerful interdimensional entity, a survivor from the previous iteration of the universe, essentially trapped in the Void between worlds, and only able to manifest physically through its worshipers. Members of its cult cultivate purity of spirit, striving to attain a state of mind as close to that of their deity as possible. When a Cultist reaches that “purity”, the Piecemeal God crosses over into our universe, transforming its Cultist’s flesh into part of its unholy body. Because no single three-dimensional creature can contain this Lovecraftian entity, the Piecemeal God must content itself with this disconnected existence. (I’m not sure what to make of this….)

:: Remember, kids: it never gets better. Petty, childish, entitled arguments will always happen. Every day. Constantly. There are always boors and poseurs and selfish me-monkeys in life, no matter where you go, and being on the Internet simply opens up the possibility of running across more of them. It’s the dichotomy of existence: we yearn for connection and companionship and commiseration, only to find that there are few people who are truly worth the effort. Life really is high school with money.

The nice thing about growing up is that, unlike high school, you get the chance to limit your contact with the people who are annoying dicks about it.

:: If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally. (Wow, the things you learn!)

:: She knew she was in trouble when the film’s female lead, Marjorie Reynolds, started putting on the blackface and worrying aloud that what she’d hoped for the number was to be pretty… the implication being that, by portraying a black woman, she couldn’t be. (I don’t recall ever seeing that scene before, so I watched it on YouTube and…oh Lord, how awful. Ye Gods. My only memory of ever watching Holiday Inn was at Christmastime one year while I was in college, and my sister derisively saying, “Whoever thought of casting Bing Crosby as a romantic lead was insane.” In truth, I kinda had to agree. He had a wonderful voice, but the man did not in my eyes ever once radiate romantic vibes of any sort. In my head, Bing Crosby is always sixty years old and smoking a pipe.)

:: The writer Pete Hamill said in 2005 that he was “some mad combination of a Lindy’s waiter, Coney Island barker, Catskills comedian, irritated school principal and eccentric uncle.” This was meant as a compliment, and it’s pretty accurate. The praise he received was no doubt warranted, but somehow, I was not his biggest fan. (I don’t have too many thoughts on Ed Koch, to be honest…we moved to New York while he was mayor of NYC, and he ran for Governor a year after we arrived (and called all of us upstaters a bunch of rubes, basically). I dunno…he was just kind of there, I suppose.)

All for this week. Tune in next week!

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Let’s just keep saving the world, folks, one link at a time….

:: I can believe gullibility, I can believe catfishing, I can believe that some people are really good liars and willing to take advantage of people…but I have been in a long-distance relationship. I met my current wife over the Internet. And I can tell you with 100% certainty, if you care anything at all about your long-distance significant other, you are going to make an effort to see them. (This is where my ability to believe Te’o’s story falls apart as well. I just don’t buy this, nor do I buy, as some people have said, that he was just a college student who just couldn’t fly to LA at a moment’s notice. Maybe that’s true for a college student like I was, a run-of-the-mill philosophy major, but the star linebacker on one of the country’s most notable football teams? Come on.)

:: I almost never reread my own novels, once they are printed and on sale. The small exception is the period when I am choosing reading passages for a new one, and once or twice when I needed to help with a pitch for an older book for Hollywood purposes. (Guy Gavriel Kay only blogs when he is in the final stages of getting a new book published, so it’s nice to get a look in, once in a while. While it’s pretty meaningless coming from me, Mr. Still Unpublished, I have to admit that I, too, tend to not look at my earlier work all that much. I find that the short fiction stands up better than my aborted attempts at novels past, or even the screenplay that I wrote a few years ago, which will never see the light of day. (Don’t ask.) I suppose this is my way of finally, once and for all, declaring The Promised King dead. But even there, you never know…there’s no law that says you can’t go back to an earlier idea, once your skill improves. But it would have to be very different, given that there are aspects of that earlier book that manifest in Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).)

:: From those of us who are still living in Buck Rogers’ 25th Century, here’s wishing our very best to 70’s space hero – and intergalactic Romeo – Gil Gerard on his 70th birthday. (Just a one-sentence link, but holy crap — Gil Gerard is 70?! Quick, somebody freeze that guy for a while! Four hundred years oughta do it.)

(Hey, come to that, how come Buck Rogers hasn’t been rebooted yet? I’d be on board with a revisiting of that old property!)

:: There’s a somewhat startling 1978 Betty and Veronica story by Dan DeCarlo, the cartoonist who more than any other was responsible for defining the characters’ appearances and personalities, which attempted to make the point that there really is no choice at all: Betty and Veronica aren’t two different girls as much as they are two halves of the same girl.

:: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is now twenty years old. The first episode aired on 3 January 1993, whilst The Next Generation was still on the air, and it was for 176 episodes over seven seasons, ending in May 1999. (I really need to start re-watching Trek in a big way. Twenty years since DS9 started! I always thought that was the best of the Trek series, in terms of overall quality; at its best, it was utterly great, and it never seemed to get as downright bad as TOS or TNG could be at times.)

:: If, like many fans, you have spent decades wondering what the Red Skull smelled like, this was your lucky week: (Hmmmm…yeah, no. Never wondered that a single time. Weird!)

:: AMAZING STORIES, the world’s first science fiction magazine, is now open to the public. (This is actually very cool news! Go to MD’s site for details. Note to self: set up an account this week!)

More next week!

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OK, let’s try and get back to some semblance of normalcy around here, shall we? Linkage!

:: When someone, or several someones, say and do stuff that I think is crazy, I can yell and scream at them, but I have found this to be singularly unhelpful in getting rid of my frustration. It just doesn’t make me feel better, but rather, gives me the sense that I’m as out of control as they are. (I admire Roger’s ability to calm himself down in such situations. I’ve never much been tested thereof; I can only remember one such instance when someone shouted something to me from the safety of their moving car, and it was so stupid that I just stood there laughing. It was a kid who commented on my hair by yelling something like “Nice mullet!”, when my hair isn’t even a mullet. Cracked me up. But it gives me pause that I, a long-haired dude more often than not decked out in outfits that are less than fashionable, get this kind of thing less than a black guy. I’m pretty sure that I’m more odd than Roger. Strange world we live in.)

:: I am not one of those people who leave the TV on as “background noise” but there’s something about football noise that is sort of… I don’t know… comforting, I guess. It’s a relatively steady noise – the crowd noise and the constant chattering of the commentators. Sometimes the noise will go up in reaction to something happening in the game but overall there’s a uniformity to it. It’s almost like music. (This is true…plus there’s the fact that outside of one-sided blowouts, with most football games you can usually be assured that at some point, something of at least mild interest will take place on the field. Sure, you might miss a great play here and there, but few sports lend themselves to rejoining after not paying a lot of attention like football. That said, I watched less football this season than I have in many years — I have not watched a single game all the way through, and most weekends not a single play, since Week Four. I’m not sure if my general interest is waning or if it’s just the cumulative effect of thirteen years of my team being lousy, but even most years I can gin up interest in other games, here and there. Now, I’m not even sure I’ll bother watching the Super Bowl.

All that said, I am, as usual, insanely happy to see St. Tom the Overrated walk off the field a loser in his last game of the season!)

:: I’m trying to come up with a word to describe my feelings about this movie, and the word I keep coming up with is “ordeal.” This was an ordeal. This was less a film than an endurance test. What do I get for surviving it? (SamuraiFrog did not find Les Miserables to his liking. My review is forthcoming. It will be a tad more positive than his!)

:: I seem to remember epic snowfalls like this from my youth but maybe it just looked like a lot of snow because I was a smaller person. (There’s something to this, I think. Many a time I’ve revisited places I remember from my youth that I recall as being huge only to discover that they are, in fact, quite small.)

:: Oh the proverbial ‘pie in the face’ act. That gag never seems to go out of style. I guess you could say this was one of our ‘Why not?’ to-do’s. Fun for the sake of fun. It was either that or bathe in a tub full of jello, which John wouldn’t go for, so a pie in the face it was. (A wise choice, I think. Pies in the face are fun and whacky. A tub full of jello is…ewwww.)

:: I miss him. There is so much I still would love to say to him. I had always hoped (and, frankly, assumed) that we would get close again. I assumed our drifting apart was a phase. (He had drifted away from many of us in his last 3 years or so.) Unfortunately, I will never get that chance now. But I love him, and I will always love him: for who he was then, and for the many years of friendship that followed. He was the best. Truly the best. (I hope, when I am gone, that someone can write about me that way.)

:: So dear friends, live your life like it’s fiction. Love like a romance novel, seek like a good mystery, hope like an underdog story and fight like a fantasy warrior.

More next week!

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Links, for those wanting for linkage.

:: God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms. (Salty language alert…and interesting ruminations on race in fantasy. Race is a small factor in Princesses In SPACE!!!, as luck would have it. Or design, since I wrote it.)

:: So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. (Not a blog post, but a wonderful article by Paul Krugman about the Foundation Trilogy. Via.)

:: John Milius’s The Wind and the Lion is a truly wonderful film, and one I have a great deal of affection for. This film embodies everything I love about movies: great action scenes, an intriguing story (based VERY loosely on historical fact) and setting, well-drawn characters, and a wonderful sense of intelligence both cynical and insightful. When one is in the right mood, a movie like this just hits the spot. (It is a wonderful film, one which I’m overdue to rewatch. I also must mention that it boasts what might well be the best score Jerry Goldsmith ever wrote. Via.)

:: Roger Green, founder and president the organization Christmas Or Other Labels (COOL), has declared the war on Christmas in the United States to be officially over. People celebrating the holiday religiously, those celebrating it socially, and those not celebrating it at all were all declared victors in emotional celebrations across the country. (Huh. One wonders what Roger was waiting for, then, if he had the power to declare that conflict officially over!)

:: When times get tough, I usually start reading books about war. Maybe it satisfies my need for carnage and revenge.

:: Yes, I had that moment. The atheist at the end of his rope, totally desperate, confronting his beliefs and not sticking by them because, damn it, if there was a chance that the inevitable could be avoided, I would have recanted everything I’d ever said. And then finding his beliefs cemented and reaffirmed in the worst way possible.

:: ROM’s been in the news lately; Hasbro filed once again for the trademark on the property, prompting speculation that we may be in for a revival of the character. Personally, I don’t care so much about seeing future adventures as I do about getting reprints; if Marvel does get the rights back, the smart thing to do would be to pump out ‘Essential ROM’ Volumes 1 through However Many It Takes to Reprint His Every Appearance as fast as they can get the ink on the paper. Because ROM…ROM was freaking epic. (Wow…come to think of it, I have been seeing a lot of mentions of ROM in Blogistan of late….)

:: If this is your cue to complain about how this makes me an asshole, ask me if I care. Go on, ask! (John Scalzi gets angry. Justifiably. Which is fun. Oh, salty language, too! Yay, salty language!)

More next week!

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Time for linkage!

:: Maybe in a couple of years when Two and a Half Men has ended and he’s delivering pizzas for a living because no one wants to hire him after this, and his cult leader has taken all of his money, Chuck Lorre will let him wash his car or something. (This story cracked me up. I wonder if there’s something in the water on the set of that show.)

:: Any show that resorts to the use of Dr. Zarkov dialogue (named for the villain in the FLASH GORGON series, where one character tells another character something they both already know, for the benefit of the audience) is a bad sitcom. (Heh. In SF-writing circles, this is commonly referred to as an “As you know, Bob”. The CSI series used to do this a lot — don’t know if they still do. It would be like this: “Hmmmm, I can’t get any prints off it. But maybe the new ZXQ test will work?” “Oh, yeah, the ZXQ test. That’s the test that finds prints on things we can’t find prints on.” “Yup. It works by putting the item in the ZXQ tester….”)

:: I’m going to go out on a hypothetical limb, and suggest that if Skyfall had just 5 or 6 more lines of dialogue in specific places, and about 1 1/2 more scenes that were needed, I’d be championing this as potentially one of the top 5 Bonds ever. (I had to hold off on reading Snell’s exhaustive review of Skyfall until I finally saw the movie. Good work by him as always, even if I don’t agree on all particulars.)

:: I am her…at least at that place in my mind, heart and soul when I’ve escaped to the basement for little pieces of peace, silence and solitude.

:: For me, the pleasures of eating have been blunted by anxiety. And I fear that’s never going to change… ever. This is who I am now.

I hate it. (I have a good idea what Jason’s going through, for various reasons. I’m not in his position, but there’s a very good chance I will be, at some point. My approach has been not to lament the loss of carefree abandon toward food, but to take on an approach of ‘indulgence of high quality’. Seems to work thus far.)

:: I don’t know if I would call Little Women a “great” book but I would say that it is something much better than “great”: it is beloved. Beloved books are far rarer than great ones.

:: It’s practically a tradition; I rake leaves on Veterans Day, or shortly thereafter. (Ugh! I hate raking. I prefer the ‘run ’em over with a lawnmower’ approach, or just the ‘completely ignore them and let nature do its thing’ approach.)

:: Fun people like to get pies thrown in their faces. (See? See! A testimonial that says so!)

More next week!

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