Drug frenzy

Jacob Sullum pens the headline of the week:

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession.

Yahtzee kinda likes Grand Theft Auto IV

Lemons to video lemonade

When you can't afford studio time to record a music video, what are your options? In Britain, you can take advantage of the omnipresent Big Brother cameras:

But all is not lost. Boing Boing reports...

The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, 'performed' in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.

Yahtzee answers his critics

Oh, just in case you've never watched a Yahtzee review . . . er, not safe for work. Or if you're squeamish. Or if you're one of those people who hasn't yet grasped that life is a contact sport. Toughen up, princess!

QotD: Peter Jackson Isn't A Better Choice

Anyone who suffered through the Star Wars prequel trilogy — or Godfather III — will understand when I suggest that it's not always wise for a director to return to his old stomping grounds. Jackson left Middle Earth as a hero to geeks and film investors, and on such a creative high note, he essentially slacked through King Kong and no one gave him any crap for it. That being the case, what's the upside for him to re-direct in Middle Earth? If he does it perfectly and sticks the dismount, it's still not fresh. If he screws it up, the fan response will make the Phantom Menace backlash look like a group hug.

Jackson put a huge target on himself by agreeing to return to Middle Earth; getting someone else to direct gets him out of the line of fire. Now, if it works, he'll still get (producer) credit. If it fails, the audience will blame del Toro — because among other things, he's not Jackson, or more accurately, the imaginary Jackson who did the film perfectly.

That said, I don't think Jackson hired del Toro just to aim flak toward someone else. I think he hired del Toro because Jackson's aware that — contrary to O'Hehir's worry — these films need someone who isn't very much in love with either Tolkien or the world that he made.

This has to do with the subject matter, namely, The Hobbit. That book, written by Tolkien to amuse his kids, is a twee bit of fluff at best. Beloved, yes, but a bit squishy in the middle. This is fine for bedtime readings and Rankin-Bass animated adaptations, but for the continuation of one of the most successful film series of all time, every installment of which was nominated for Best Picture? The Hobbit needs someone willing to slice through the fat and mush and not ask himself WWTD (What Would Tolkien Do?) at every critical juncture. Jackson did this with The Lord of the Rings, which is why, among other things, the film series is thankfully Tom Bombadil-free, but The Hobbit needs an extra wash of astringency. Del Toro's love of the fantastic has never descended into huggy cuteness, which makes him perfect to save The Hobbit from itself.

John Scalzi, "Is Guillermo del Toro the Right Man for The Hobbit?", AMCTV SciFi Scanner, 2008-05-08

Wil Wheaton also offers some advice

After yesterday's John Scalzi link, today's writer-offering-kindly-advice link goes to Wil Wheaton:

hillary clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party

[. . .] It's over. She knows it's over. It's been over for almost three months, but she's been moving the goalposts and cynically and cravenly pandering to voters in a way that's not only insulting, but is embarrassing. John Cole frequently says that he can't believe he ever supported Bush, and I can now join him in saying that I can't believe I ever supported, defended and believed in the Clintons.

The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it's become clear that this whole thing isn't about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush's third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it's all about her. It's about her ego. It's about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said "No thanks. You're a good senator, but we want something different now."

It's been crystal clear for weeks, yet she refuses to put party and country over personal ambition and drop out of the race, forcing Barack Obama to not only run against McCain and the Media, but also against her. It's particularly galling, because she can only win if her campaign can force Democratic superdelegates (one of the worst creations in the history of politics) to tell millions of Democratic voters — many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone — to go fuck themselves.

Freedom of the (virtual) press?

Kathy "Five Feet of Fury" Shaidle is being harassed over a blog post — which merely quoted a section from a national newspaper:

So now this chick Mitra Kermani is calling me on the phone, telling me to take down this post.

I not-very-patiently explained to her that I can post whatever the hell I want on my blog, because this is Canada not Ooongaboongaland, that I got my info from a national newspaper and linked to it, so she has to take up her complaints with them

Based on the original story, you'd have to say that major Canadian corporations must not be running the country, because the kind of trouble Loblaws put up with would be unthinkable in most countries. If the corporate world really did run everything, there'd have been a scurry and hustle on the part of police and courts to cater to the whims of the all-mighty corporate leadership. Obviously that didn't happen in this case . . .

QotD: Audio recordings

I am, sadly, old enough to have been assistant manager at an A&A Records and Tapes and to remember the excitement and trepidation that came with the introduction of the CD. It was not just the new colder sound of these things but a sense of loss at all that acreage of cover art reduced to the CD's smaller footprint. They were so compact we used to shelve each CD in a cumbersome plastic box three times its length; the new digital format seemed all too easy to steal. Little did any of us see where that logic would lead.

Nick Packwood, "The return of the repressed", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-02-14

Like shooting conservative fish in a barrel

Radley Balko posts a link to the most popular 50 pages on Conservapedia under the heading Compensate Much?:

Advice for new bloggers

My usual piece of advice is to blog frequently, but Megan McArdle provides an even better word of advice:

Note to all new bloggers: this sort of thing is generally, at least in the blogging circles in which I travel, considered to be rather poor form. Worse, indeed, than accidentally neglecting to provide a link to someone you have already conceded to exist.

That doesn't excuse me for forgetting the link — I shouldn't be so careless on that score. But if you use substantial parts of another blogger's post, you should mention that you found it somewhere else. Direct paraphrase without even attempting attribution is regarded with less horror by bloggers than it is by English professors . . . but not all that much less horror. Especially since linking a source is a lot faster and easier than footnoting.

The answer to the question I posed in the title is, basically, "Always!" As Nick Gillespie noted yesterday, "there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers." Besides, as he also noted, if you go over the line you're very likely to be caught.

I'd add to what she says about linking being "a lot faster and easier than footnoting" that it's also significantly more useful for the reader. That argument seals the deal every time for me: if I want you to have to work hard to understand what I'm writing, I'd be an academic, not a blogger.

Book reviews . . . of DOOM

You know those books you read but would prefer that nobody knew that you read . . . no, not those ones. The worst trash you read. Everyone seems to have some reading vice like that. David Hines knows exactly what you feel:

You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO."

GHOST is Ringo's own admitted Lord King Badfic, his id run wild. By his own account, he was trying to write several books he was actually contracted for, but GHOST kept nudging at him, and finally he just wrote the damn thing to *make it go away* so he could get back to fulfilling his contracts. Ringo locked the spewings of his id away on his hard drive, until he mentioned in passing on an online forum that yeah, he'd written another book, but it was *awful* and would never see the light of day. Naturally, folks were curious, and when Ringo posted a sample, nobody was more surprised than him to find that the response was, more often than not, "Hey, man, I'd buy this."

So his publisher put it out, and the books are now doing pretty well for them. I'm sure this is a pleasant surprise if you're Ringo or his publisher, but it's also got to be a little embarrassing; he's committed the literary equivalent of charging money for folks to watch him roll naked in a pile of dead and smelly fish. And then being begged for encores. As of this writing, I have only the first three books in the series, because dammit, I will buy crap, but I refuse to buy crap in hardcover. That's *expensive.* I mean, I could be spending that money on *guns.*

I've read a few of these, and David is being very precise in his review. Ringo is a very good writer . . . and this series is gut-churningly disturbing. David continues:

I feel about the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series the way that a lot of people feel about ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN: it is so horrifically awful that it becomes TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. Unless, of course, you have triggers about some or all of this stuff, in which case my recommendation is TO RUN AS FAR AND AS FAST AS YOU CAN. I will, however, say that GHOST and its sequels are *excellent* for reading out loud to people, particularly friends who are horrified and actively begging you to stop. (And you will be inclined to disregard such pleas, because you will need to share the pain.)

Amusingly, John Ringo himself liked the review.

Two Gents

The best money you'll ever spend on amateur theatre . . . need I say more?

H/T to Meredith Hubbard.

Linguistic hypersensitivity

It must be a slow news week, because there's no other explanation I can think of for this article to be published:

"Nappy-headed hos," the phrase that cost radio shock jock Don Imus his job and triggered a debate on how far free speech can go, was named on Thursday as the most egregious politically incorrect turn of phrase in 2007.

Trailing behind that phrase in the annual survey by Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com), a word usage group, were "Ho-Ho-Ho" and "Carbon Footprint Stomping," said the group's president Paul JJ Payack.

"Ho-Ho-Ho" made the list after a staffing company in Sydney, Australia suggested to prospective Santas they drop their traditional greeting in favor of "Ha-Ha-Ha" so as not to invoke images of the derogatory slang term for women.

"Carbon Footprint Stomping" is a phrase used to describe flaunting environmentally "green" activities by doing things like driving gas-guzzling Hummers and flying private jets, which in these energy-conscious times might be considered the height of political incorrectness.

Okay, Imus was a twit — not that that was in any doubt before he uttered his prize-winning remark — but the other two examples are just dumb. Dumber than that, however, are the folks at Lindsey Gardiner's publishers who "asked [her] to eliminate a fire-breathing dragon from her new book because publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations."

How far detached from reality do you have to be to think that mentioning a mythical creature (already very well established in fairy tales) would somehow expose the publisher to being sued? More disturbingly . . . what if their fear was not only well-founded, but mathematically likely? The article doesn't say where the publisher is located, but in some jurisdictions it might be a consideration (the publisher is in Britain, which explains everything).

Their list of choices is rather unconvincing, as evidenced by the term "race card" somehow making it as a contender in 2007 . . . when it was in common use well before the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 (and in Britain in the 1960s).

So, how seriously should we take this list? Not very. This is how the announcing organization describes their methodology:

The Global Language Monitor uses a proprietary algorithm, the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) to track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere, as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted Index, factoring in: long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.

In other words, they pull it out of their collective asses. Nice work, Reuters. Here's a quarter . . . call us when you find some real news to report.

H/T to "Da Wife", who sent the link saying, "There is no way I can comment about this without risking that I will be on the list next year."

PTerry pays tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

In a partial BBC transcript, Terry Pratchett says goodbye to Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday:

Most notably he was the first British science fiction writer to break out of the genre ghetto. I mean, everyone had heard of Arthur C Clarke — The Goodies made jokes about him, Terry Wogan made jokes about him. He became a national treasure like Patrick Moore.

Before 2001 [the film based he created with Stanley Kubrick], you could see the string, you could see what was holding the rocket ships up. It seems almost a historical thing to relate it now, but just the first time you saw it you thought, "here's something totally new".

The amount of work and effort and research that went into that movie was just astonishing.

What I particularly recall was Arthur complaining the reason the apes never won the Oscar for best make-up was they were so good the judges thought they really were apes.

Is it just me?

I've never watched an episode of The Wire (the "best show on television"), nor did I ever see an episode of The Sopranos (which I gather from recent articles was the previous claimant to the "best show" accolade); I generally watch little-to-no broadcast television. I'm sure that's most of the reason I'm getting heartily sick of all the fin-de-siecle sturm-und-drang about the end of The Wire that seems to be clogging up every blog these days.

Even Reason, one of my favourite sources of information (both in print and online), has been posting their fair share of pissing and moaning about the demise of the "best thing on television".

I don't actually have anything to say about the show, but I had to register my petty annoyance somewhere. Guys, if television is that important to you all . . . you need to get out more!

Snarky video game reviews

More of the same sort of reviews here. H/T to Victor for the NSFW link.

Jesse Walker on D&D

Jesse Walker notes the passing of Gary Gygax, the seminal figure in the fantasy roleplaying phenomena of the 1970's and 80's:

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax has died. It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you've ever endured a D&Der's detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you'll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it's a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.

The comment thread starts off rather well, too:

Episiarch | March 4, 2008, 3:44pm | #
Uh, did you ever play, Jesse? Dungeon crawls were usually the way people got introduced to the game but a campaign could take place absolutely anywhere.

But if you are trying to say that D&D players' minds/imaginations are like filthy damp dungeons, that would be funny.

Hitchens on the New York Times

QotD: Some good advice

With the possible exception of Disney villains, Imagethief cannot think of a group of people that more richly deserve their miserable fates than Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen and his cavalcade of cupcakes.

If I sound unsympathetic here, that is because I am unsympathetic. Really, how dumb do you need to be? On all sides? Girls, here's a free piece of advice for you from your friendly neighborhood PR man: If you let a guy take digital nudie pix of you, sooner or later those pix are going to end up on the Internet. Not maybe. Not could be. Inevitably. The Internet is like a gravity well for nudity, and there is a 100 percent chance those pictures will end up there someday. Probably the week of your wedding.

[. . .]

But — and I say this with affection for my gender — dudes are stupid. We're especially stupid when it comes to managing technology effectively. We like to portray ourselves as masters of technological realm, with amazing powers of digital wizardry. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and in reality we're as screwed over by modern technology as your grandmother. Probably worse, because at least she doesn't pretend to understand it. We'd rather die — or inflict crushing humiliation on our girlfriends — than admit weakness.

"ImageThief", "Let me tell ya about Edison Chen's dirty photos", ImageThief, 2008-02-13

Banning performances

Hit and Run has a link to a story about idiotic campus officials banning a performance of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins:

A student production of "Assassins", the award-winning musical, was to have premiered Thursday night at Arkansas Tech University, but the administration banned it — and permitted a final dress rehearsal Wednesday night (so the cast could experience the play on which students have worked long hours) only on the condition that wooden stage guns were cut in half prior to the event and not used. Assassins is a musical in which the characters are the historic figures who have tried to kill a U.S. president.

The winner here? Honestly, the potential audience for the play, which was godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival). Assassins features ditties about various successful and unsuccessful attempts to kill various successful and unsuccessful American presidents. It's just one man's opinion, of course, but I dare anyone to listen to, say, the Leon Czolgosz number without wanting to put a bullet in his own head and then exhume the corpse of the Michigan-born killer and re-electrify it. Assassins is SCTV-style deep parody at its best and actual musical theater at just about its worst.

The loser here? Freedom of expression on college campuses, which has been taking it on the chin like Gerry Cooney in the first round.

Proving that I have no taste . . . I rather enjoyed Assassins when I saw it in Toronto in the mid-90's. But good or bad, the reaction of the educational bureaucracy is just insane.

Madonna as director

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian sums up in just a few brief words. You can't accuse them of being over-kind:

Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now — fiercely aspirational as ever — she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens. She is also the producer and co-author of the script. If she'd done the location catering as well, they'd have had a Jonestown situation on their hands.

QotD: The BBC view of "History"

On the BBC Radio Four News at 18:00 tonight, there was a story about a ceremony in Spain marking the two hundredth anniversary of a 'liberation struggle'.

The listeners were informed that this was a struggle against the Empire of Napoleon and it had helped create 'modern Europe' where everyone works together. Of course it was actually Napoleon who was working to 'get all of Europe working together' (it was called the Code Napoléon and Continental System). The words 'national independence', what the Spanish were actually fighting for, were not mentioned. And although it was mentioned that the British call the conflict 'the Peninsula War' the name "Wellington" was also not mentioned.

Sometimes I suspect that even North Korean radio presents a slightly less distorted view of the world than the BBC does.

Paul Marks, "'BBC History' strikes again", Samizdata, 2008-02-13

Advice to young writers

John Scalzi offers some unsoliticted financial advice to aspiring writers (and to other creative types):

Why am I offering this entirely unsolicited advice about money to new writers? Because it very often appears to me that regardless of how smart and clever and interesting and fun my fellow writers are on every other imaginable subject, when it comes to money — and specifically their own money — writers have as much sense as chimps on crack. It's not just writers — all creative people seem to have the "incredibly stupid with money" gene set for maximum expression — but since most of creative people I know are writers, they're the nexus of money stupidity I have the most experience with. It makes me sad and also embarrasses the crap out of me; people as smart as writers are ought to know better.

The following advice is not complete; there's lots I won’t be covering here. Some it is repeated from things I've written before but are so far down in the archives I know you'll never find them. Some of this advice may not apply to you; some of it may apply to you but you may be too delusional or arrogant to acknowledge it, or you may decide you don't like my tone and ignore it all because of that. Most of it is applicable to writers who are not new, too, but I don't know how many of them are interested in taking advice from me. This is US-centered although may be generally applicable elsewhere. It's meant for writers but may have application to you in other fields; decide for yourself.

I do not guarantee this advice will make you a more successful writer or a better human being. Follow this advice at your own peril. That said, know that it's generally worked for me. That's why I’m sharing it with you.

Firefly fans, meet Steven Brust

Thanks to a link from John Scalzi's Whatever, here is the page from which you can download Steven Brust's Firefly-verse novel "My Own Kind of Freedom".

You're welcome.

QotD: Those shadowy "others"

Who these "others" are is left unsaid, though one could argue that "information warfare" hardly counts as a "secret strategy." And while it is at least conceivable that the CIA would be stupid enough to cut off Iran's lifeline to an independent media (it is the CIA, after all), ABC's source for this claim, an "Internet columnist" called Ian Brockwell, is of dubious reliability. According to his online bio, Mr. Brockwell's interests include UFOs and climate change, the latter of which he attributes to the perfidy of the former. But here's some free advice for the kids at ABC: Be slightly more skeptical of claims by online columnists whose work can be found on Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel's website, such as Brockwell's crie du coeur against "people fear those who debate the 'Holocaust'?" (Scare quotes around Holocaust in original, naturally).

Michael C. Moynihan, "Who Cut the Cables? An ABC Investigation" Hit and Run, 2008-02-04

New media model needed

Kevin McLauchlan had some very interesting things to say in a recent thread on copy protection (from the Techwr-L mailing list), which I reproduce here with his permission. I'm trying to encourage him to start blogging, BTW.

[. . .] what your argument fails to consider is that there was a large mainstream(ish) demand for movies, music, and other such product (including good ole text-and-pictures, otherwise known as books), in modern formats (computer and portable) that people preferred them, and that the traditional media empires were not meeting that demand. For the first few years, they weren't even aware of it.

There was really no squawk from the traditional media when the first hackers came up with the first methods of recording and presenting audio and video on computing devices, because they were doing it for their own pleasure and convenience, and that of a small circle of their geeky friends.

Much like Bill Gates ignored the internet while concentrating on his then-traditional (office and home-island users of software), the studios and publishers ignored the web and the culture that was rapidly growing it . . . and being grown by it.

When they finally did notice that there was some potential loss of revenue happening to their existing model (in which they'd prospered for decades), they reacted by whining and hollering "Don't do that!", and allowing years to slide by before introducing their own services.

When those services appeared, they were already outdated, and they annoyed people because it was profoundly obvious that their major premise was enforcement, while the minor focus (the needs and desires of customers) was given short shrift at best. That is, they have far less interest in serving their customers than in preventing rip-offs.

Let's see:
- paying customers are made to jump through hoops and are treated like dirt
- non-paying "customers" get variety, convenience, ease-of-use and responsive "providers"

I had some sympathy for producers and distributors when audio and video "piracy" meant that somebody made physical copies of tapes and DVDs and sold them for money. It was supportable that the media companies would go after the makers and sellers of such "pirate" goods. Notice that they didn't go after the consumers of such goods.

But these days, most of the copies being distributed are free. Somebody might be losing some revenue (though there are convincing arguments that it's the old formats that are losing out and the studios/distributors just didn't jump fast enough to be ready for the current formats), but nobody is directly gaining illicit revenue when another bittorrent completes. Yet notice that the industry heavyweights are going after users/consumers, now.

As for all the creative work going away if studios and 20-million-dollar-a-film actors can't get their exclusive rights enforced, not everybody thinks that's such a bad thing. Lots of craftsmen were displaced when horse-and-buggy went out of fashion. Some whined and pouted (and died broke). Some found different ways to make a living or found new industries to use their same skills (like high-end auto-makers still needed people who could work in leather and fine woods).

You might have noticed that there are increasingly high-quality "movies" being produced for YouTube distribution (among all the dreck, of course), and that's with the studio blockbusters still in theatres (and people still paying to see movies on the big screen). Lots of smart, talented people are simply bypassing the corporate model of entertainment and information, and taking their own work to the masses.

That is, the problem — too easy distribution of works in digital form — is also the solution. People who would once have been content to "distribute" their labors-of-love to just a few friends now have the ability to reach everyone on the planet who is interested, and beyond.

It's a solution from the perspective of the people who are driven to produce art and from the perspective of people who want access to art.

Have you noticed that bands and performers that are already richer than god, and who can count on selling millions of copies of their next studio-made album, are still willing and eager to take their show on the road? There are two forces making that work. One is that the performers crave a live audience. As good as it is to polish off a new CD and get paid royalties, they still feel the need to get out where real live audiences are. At the same time, "consumers" who enjoy a studio album are still prepared to shell out big bucks (often hundreds of dollars per ticket) to experience live performances.

If all the major studios and distribution labels were to close tomorrow, I'm confident that there would still be touring rock bands, and there would still be talented people in their own studios creating recordings for internet distribution. It might be a different crop of productive talented people. It might be some of the ones who are already famous and rich — those who didn't go into a big sulk about the departure of the corporate recording business.

The same would apply to film. There'd be an upsurge of live theatre, and there'd be some real gems of recorded video drama appearing among the YouTube crud. True artists and performers simply can't just stop. They are driven. Only the mostly-mercenary ones would fold up their production companies and go away. Maybe they've had their day and rightfully so.

Have you noticed that TV shows like "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance" are not running out of talent? They tour the same big cities year after year, culling from the tens of thousands of people who choose to show up. Yet each year, there are more extremely gifted people among the also-rans and losers. It's not that new kids are growing up and becoming ready. The people who show up are all ages. For whatever reason, they didn't enter the contest previously. And that's just the ones who want fame and fortune (or the chance of it) via that particular route. There are tons and tons more talented artists of all kinds out there . . . I should say, out here, where we real people are. It's only the major studios and the top 2% earners among the "stars" who have a lot to lose if the world's entertainment-delivery model moves on . . . or moves back to an earlier model based on performers getting paid by the number of tickets they can sell to personal, live performances.

The same general argument applies to the written word and to other forms of art. If the concept of copyright was struck down tomorrow, some writers would stop writing. Most would keep doing what they are driven to do.

Yes, there's a shift in fortunes when there's a shift in paradigm. Some people drop out of sight. Some people adapt and continue to prosper. Some people find opportunity that wasn't there before.

There's a certain degree of success at selling MP3s, when the price is low enough. Nobody bothers to build timed expiry or number-of-playings expiry into simple recordings of songs. So people willingly pay a buck or two to download them, even though they could find free copies if they cared to look.

But the example was paying for a video download that was designed to die after 24 hours, whether it was convenient for you to view it within that time or not. That's just sick, and people have no sympathy. Theatrical and DVD releases still pay the production costs and generate profit for deserving movies. Demanding to get more than a buck or so of profit off a file that costs you nothing to serve, and using artificial methods to boost your revenue is ugly, and people shy away from it. The people who dreamed up that scheme are deliberately driving away potential customers; driving them into the open arms of the very "pirates" they vilify.

If people suddenly stop wanting the big-screen experience, then the model has finally changed, and first-run theatrical release will no longer pay the production costs of a blockbuster. Maybe the new model will no longer support $250-million dollar production costs. So be it.

It was a good ride for some people. The next wave will be a good ride for a different gang.

Maybe the new model will support only movies whose cost can be recouped by low-price, paid-for downloads, low enough in price that people will gladly pay the couple of bucks for a cupful of databits that they are going to show in their homes, on their equipment, using their electricity.

Rambo, Rimbaud, what's the difference?

A lengthy discussion of the Rambo series at Reason Online, finds some interesting nuggets:

Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America's movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone's bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you're rolling your eyes, you're not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film's reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as "torture porn," "jingoistic imperialism," and "the Schindler's List of B-list butchery."

For the most part I'll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can't dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

There are three things people forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was a novel called First Blood, written by a young John Barth scholar named David Morrell and published in 1972. It's about a Green Beret called Rambo — the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud —who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across America. It's also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn't want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict builds until it engulfs the entire town, with countless meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters' point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.

I don't think I've ever seen more than five minutes of any of the various Rambo films . . . and even after reading this article, I'd have to say that they're still of very minor interest to me.

Eccentric behaviour

Be on the watch for this sort of deviant eccentricism:

According to behavioral psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Schulz, Meyer's reading of entire books is abnormal and may be indicative of a more serious obsession with reading.

"Instead of just zoning out during a bus ride or spending hour after hour watching YouTube videos at night, Mr. Meyer, unlike most healthy males, looks to books for gratification," Schulz said. "Really, it's a classic case of deviant behavior."

"At least, that's what it seems like from what little I've skimmed on the topic," she added.

As bizarre as it may seem, Meyer isn't alone. Once a month, he and several other Greenwood residents reportedly gather at night not only to read books all the way through, but also to discuss them at length.

"I don't know, it's like this weird 'book club' they're all a part of," said Brian Cummings, a longtime coworker and friend of Meyer's. "Seriously, what a bunch of freaks."

Is this the return of "Morning in America"? Naw, probably not.

In the news you've all been breathlessly waiting for . . . the numbers are in:

In a close and bloody box office battle, the bumbling warriors of the spoof Meet the Spartans edged out aged mercenary John Rambo of the franchise flick Rambo to win the weekend box office by a tight margin of just $575,000, according to Sunday's estimates. Meet the Spartans grossed $18.725 mil while Rambo brought in $18.150 mil, but we'll have to wait for the final numbers to come out on Monday before officially declaring a winner. Still, this is good news for both films — well, good news for the Greek fighters and really good news for the Vietnam vet.

I dunno. If one of the things going through bin Laden's head was that America was a soft country incapable of defending itself against theologically motiviated suicide bombers, having a satire of one of the most famous battles in history starring Carmen Electra be the biggest movie in the country might kick off a whole new round of attacks. Then again, it may be a sign that all is right with the world again. Or, more probably, it means nothing beyond the good news that Kevin Sorbo won't be be collecting Social Security at age 67.

Juvenile writer wannabe . . . take hope

No matter how bad it is, you'd have to work long and hard to make something as painfully bad as this:

Scott Westerfeld: Recognition of the House of Eleven took no long time, and the lady midst the compliment was none other than wench Mary, a liaress whom I had met before in the rank combats of her style, and who had left more than one of the Clan Demonus with garrote between chin and breathless breast.

I doff my cap to Mr. Westerfeld for the balls-to-the-wall fearlessness to publicly read some of his juvenilia.

QotD: Bad SF books

[. . .] a lot of SF authors are more interested in the science than the people, so the psychological depth required for good writing is simply missing, whereas romance and mystery authors have to have some minor grasp of psychology, however bad they are. Written by Aspergers for Aspergers.

Rachel Ganz, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2008-01-20

QotD: Age and aging

Sometimes I suspect that everyone under the age of 50 or so thinks they need to get a promotion every few years in order to think of themselves as successful just because the characters on Star Trek all did.

It was noticeable that in the early series, pretty much every StarFleet admiral was either corrupt, insane or a traitor. They only seemed to ease off this unusual hiring policy once Kirk, Scotty, et al reached pensionable age.

Stuart Burnfield, posting to the Techwr-L mailing list, 2007-10-24

It's not Bullshit, but it is more Penn

If you're a fan of Penn & Teller's Bullshit, you may want to direct your browser here, for a selection of uninhibited, unedited, unshaven Penn Jillette.

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.

QotD: But what do you really think, James?

Insert slippery-slope argument here and an acknowledgment that decades on USENET has biased me in favor of crushing potentially destructive practices, exiling their adherents, sowing their homelands with cobalt-60, raising the temperature of their homeworld to one million degrees, detonating their sun and then ramming a galaxy into their home island universe.

James D. Nicoll, in a comment on Whatever, 2008-01-13

Flashman's creator

The Economist's obituary for George MacDonald Fraser includes a fond farewell to his his best-known fictional creation:

Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842; almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware — the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth ("richly deserved"), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, "yellow as yesterday's custard". But he always emerged in splendour.

And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer "who had raked and ridden harder than most". After the beauteous Fetnab (who "knew the ninety-seven ways of love . . . though . . . the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed"), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her "splendid golden nakedness" dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.

QotD: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, Canadian version

A skeptic might say I am going easy on Martin because I have met him, because he is a Canadian (and there is Canadian mafia), and/or because he gave me a copy of his book. May I reassure you that there is no Canadian mafia. Furthermore, I have met, worked with, and deeply admire Zaltman, so personal acquaintance has no sway. And if you think my good opinion can be purchased with a free book, well, I wonder if we should step into the corridor and discuss this further. (This is the Canadian version of Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense. Or, as we might call it in honor of the national sport, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense on ice.)

Grant McCracken, "Canada, the Martin Paradox, and The Opposable Mind", This Blog Sits at the, 2008-01-10

Vamping it up in your library

A very amusing discussion broke out on the Bujold mailing list, after this gem from Marna Nightingale:

Ok, seriously, can somebody tell me what is up with the Vampires?

I mean, look. They undoubtedly have terrible breath, you'd have to give up garlic, a big church wedding is Right Out, and you really don't ever want to go on a holiday somewhere remote with one. And they don't help with the yardwork. Or the school run.

Presumably they don't mind getting up with the baby, assuming that
a) they have not eated it and
b) they're not out batting about biting the necks of other nubiles,

but surely that's not by itself enough to overcome their other shortcomings as life partners to the extent that my library's romance section has almost entirely taken over by pointy-toothed dudes in penguin suits, is it?

No more Flashman, ever

I was saddened to hear of the death of George MacDonald Fraser yesterday at the age of 82. I've been a huge fan of his work since encountering his Flashman, the first of a series of "memoirs" of the fictional villain from Tom Brown's Schooldays:

MacDonald Fraser served as a soldier in Burma and India during World War II and later rose to be deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.

He was still working there when the first Flashman book was published in 1969.

A further 11 followed, the last in 2005.

The inspiration for Sir Harry Flashman came from the 19th century novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, where the character features as the cowardly bully who torments the hero, Tom.

MacDonald Fraser based his tales on the idea that Flashman's "memoirs" had been unearthed in an old trunk in a Leicestershire auction room.

Despite being a vain, cowardly rogue, as well as a racist and a sexist, the character managed to play a pivotal role in many of the 19th Century's most significant events, always emerging covered in glory.

If you've never read any of the Flashman series, do yourself a favour and pick up the original . . . if you have any taste for history at all, I think you'll be hooked.

John Sutherland wrote:

One sure way to determining true Britishness in a work of fiction is to see whether or not it joins the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, never making it across to the other side. [. . .]

With Flashman, Americans didn't understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser's gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes's prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

America just didn't get it. As Fraser recalled in an interview; "when Flashman appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of 40-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. 'The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers,' is the one that haunts me still . . . I was appalled . . . I'd never supposed that it would fool anybody."

Update, 8 January: Major General Flea has been kind enough to link to this post, and to offer in return a link to Fraser's final article in the Daily Mail:

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue — the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

Do, as they say, read the whole thing.

QotD: The key to generating blog comments

The secret to generating a huge number of comments on your blog: Write about Robert Heinlein and fanfic in the same week; each entry is at about 450 comments. By concatenation, this means writing an entry concerning fanfic about Heinlein books would come close to 1000 comments, and that writing erotic fanfic featuring Heinlein and Ayn Rand would generate so many comments that the entire power grid east of the Mississippi would collapse under the load. Given the severity of the weather at the moment, I am loath to do that. We’ll save it for summer.

John Scalzi, "Just In Case You Were Wondering", Whatever, 2007-12-16

Wanted: very high-end experts in brain chemistry

I'm quite upset to hear that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's Disease:

In a brief note to fans entitled "An Embuggerance," Pratchett, 59, said he was taking the news "fairly philosophically" and "possibly with a mild optimism."

"I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news," he wrote on the Web site of Paul Kidby, who has illustrated many of his books.

[. . .]

"Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)" he wrote in his message. "I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do,' but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

QotD: Facebook

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a benevolent dictatorship this clearly isn't one.

Cory Doctorow, "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook", Information Week, 2007-11-26

Facebook scrambles to repair (self-inflicted) reputational damage

A couple of reports in PC World's daily newsletter about the Facebook debacle:

Facebook could have avoided the strident, weeks-long controversy engulfing its Beacon ad system if, when designing and deploying it, the social-networking company had followed basic social etiquette principles, such as being considerate and candid.

It's not too late, though. Following the common sense and time-tested advice of Mister Rogers and Miss Manners could help Facebook end the nightmare that threatens to harm its business, affect its relationship with advertising partners, and erode its end-users' trust.

That's the consensus from several industry observers and online privacy experts regarding the embattled Beacon, introduced several weeks ago to a sustained chorus of boos.

And then, the response from Facebook:

Facebook is giving members of its social network the ability to completely decline participating in the company's controversial Beacon ad system, a reaction to intense criticism that Beacon is too intrusive and compromises people's privacy.

The announcement was made in an official blog post by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he also apologized for missteps in the design and deployment of Beacon.

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," Zuckerberg wrote.

The ability to skip Beacon altogether is the second major modification to the program. Last Thursday, Facebook gave members more control over Beacon and made the way it works clearer so that people could manage it properly.

This is an excellent example of how difficult it is to build up a strong public image and how easy it is to just piss it away in a moment of brainlessness.

Another good example of "spin"

A story came out earlier this week, heralded with scare headlines like "Internet Facing Meltdown" and "Internet Blackouts Predicted by 2010". I thought it was bullshit when I saw the headlines, but I was too busy to look at the report the articles were referencing to see how much the media was twisting the original information. Apparently the original authors were similarly impressed by the efforts of the spin-meisters:

When a small Illinois IT research firm published a study on the future of the Internet last week, it didn't expect to create an international furor.

"I had no idea it would get spun this way, twisted this way," report co-author Johna Till Johnson, president and a senior founding partner of Nemertes Research, said Wednesday.

"I've read all sorts of interesting stuff that bears little relation to the truth, but people seem to be basing it on the study."

All the study concluded, she says, is that a mismatch between demand and access capacity will be reached in three to five years that will have to be met by billions of dollars in spending by carriers. Otherwise, the next YouTube may be throttled because the Internet will be hard to access.

[. . .]

"We explicitly are not saying the Internet's going to break," she says.

In hindsight, she adds, the firm should have foreseen the reaction from Internet lobby groups who she says put their own negative spin on the report. "They really failed to see that it's entirely straightforward to build their case [for supporting the Internet] around the findings, which were intentionally policy-neutral."

"It surprised me there was this bipolar response that had nothing to do with the findings."

Of course, you might want to always filter any media scaremongering to do with the internet . . . the normal bias of news organizations to emphasize the dramatic is reinforced by the fact that the internet is, in effect, eating their lunch. Not to say that there aren't news items that deserve to be covered, but that you need to keep in mind the agenda not only of the originator but also that of the publicist.

QotD: Hillary Clinton

[. . .] I was happy to find in my stack a new copy of Hillary Clinton's famous bestseller, It Takes a Village, revised, updated, and reissued in a special anniversary edition to coincide with her presidential campaign, by which she seeks to take over the whole village.

Like Castro, like Ceausescu, like many other politicians, Mrs. Clinton prefers to be photographed surrounded by schoolchildren, an image that suggests either a kid's birthday party or a hostage situation, depending on your point of view.

Andrew Ferguson, "Read, Weep, and Vote", The Weekly Standard, 2007-12-03

Go, Royson, Go!

Toronto Star columnist Royson James got a public dressing-down from the mayor for his brilliant column on Friday. The mayor's letter was published on Saturday. James responds, with more restraint than I'd have expected:

[. . .] Mayor David Miller inserted his hectoring presence into the debate — and before you know it, a rhetorical hanging became a "public lynching," the memory of his "Uncle Jim" is exhumed and he has concluded that the very foundation of democracy is being threatened by one columnist raging against city hall spending.

As they say in basketball, no harm no foul. At issue is not whether Toronto councillors deserve to be hanged (I'm against capital punishment, banned in Canada), subjected to public flogging (opposed wherever it's practised), or run out of office (we've just elected them, they're in until 2010). At issue is how do we register our disgust — sorry, our displeasure — at their fiscal indiscretions.

A number of readers have emailed concern about the mayor's "over the top" rhetoric. Some, mine. Others fear I'll be beaten (metaphorically?) into submission, afraid to utter a single contrarian view in future. My bosses, far from moving to censure me, are more concerned that I might be "chilled" into overlooking wasteful habits as council embarks on this crucial 2008 budget cycle.

No worries. Let's just use the mayor's letter to the editor Saturday as the template for all further analysis and critique of city hall. Surely, an ink-stained wretch is allowed to borrow the mayor's own carefully crafted words.

A cursory glance at the mayor's letter, dripping with bile and bluster, reveals no cause for concern that one's criticism must now be facile, gracious or temperate. The mayor provides a list of choice adjectives and phrases that might now be at a columnist's disposal.

Appropriating the title of ombudsman, editor and publisher — in addition to chief magistrate and monarch — in an attempt to control all propaganda, er, communications in Hogtown, the official list of approved words and phrases include: "Beneath contempt," "Shows absolutely no respect for democracy," "stoop so low," "outrageous thoughts," "beyond belief," "hateful ruminations," "absolutely offensive," "loathsome advocacy."

The win goes to James, by knockout, in the second round.

Honest fear

Brian Micklethwait finds an honest expression of pants-wetting fear to be more honest than shameful:

Grayson Perry [. . .] a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:

"I’ve censored myself," Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat."

This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of 'betraying' it by . . . doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.

Is this one of those "Freedom from" issues? Freedom from fear of having your throat cut for drawing, painting, sculpting, filming, or writing something that someone feels is offensive to their religion? Hard to put on a button or T-shirt, but valid nonetheless.

QotD: Where factoids come from

Decades ago, in the days when I labo(u)red in the Central Laboratory at the bottle factory, one of my collegues was dispatched to a conference on air pollution. Upon his return, he related the contents of a paper there presented.

I don't remember the details, but recall the main thrust of it.

In those days, there were numerous claims that "air pollution costs every man, woman, and child in the United States $137.63 every year" or some such number. The paper in question addressed the source of that widely published figure.

It developed that around 1890, a Pittsburgh (The Smokey City) newspaper had printed an article which reported the cost of cleaning the exterior of each of several office buildings during the previous year.

A a year or so later, someone else totaled those figures, divided by the number of buildings reported, multiplied by the number of office buildings in the Golden Triangle and reported "Air Pollution Cost to Pittsburg Businesses".

Still later, someone took that figure, divided by the population of Pittsburgh, multiplied by the population of the Allegheny County, and published "Cost of Air Pollution for Allegheny County in 1910".

Later, someone divided that by the number of steel mills in Allegheny County, multiplied by the number of steel mills in the state and called the result "Pennsylvania's Cost of Air Pollution".

Later, someone multiplied that figure by the number of states east of the Mississippi to arrive at "Cost to Eastern United States Due to Air Pollution".

Along around 1925, someone adjusted the figure to account for inflation.

In the 1930's someone divided the 1925 figure by the population of the states east of the Mississippi to arrive at an "every man, woman, and child cost of air pollution".

Someone else compared the unadjusted pre-1925 figure to the adjusted 1925 figure, divided the difference by the population of the eastern states to obtain "Increase per capita in Cost of Air Pollution in a Single Year".

Just after WW2 (the big one), the 1930's "every man, etc.." figure was adjusted for inflation, multiplied by the population of the United States, divided by the number of states, and published as "Cost of Air Pollution to Each State".

Finally, after a few more such manipulations over the years, the then- current cost of $137.63 was published.

As noted in the beginning, that's not exactly what the paper said, but the general idea is there. Along the way it was noted that, for example, an alleged total cost for Pittsburgh in 1900 had been divided by the 1914 population of Pittsburgh to get a cost per capita, then multiplied by the 1920 population of Pennsylvania to get a total for the state, even though the population numbers changed from year to year.

The paper's conclusions were:

1) There is a cost incurred by air pollution.

2) No one knows what that cost is.

3) If it is $137.62 per capita, that's just good luck.

4) That the quoted "Cost of Air Pollution . . ." should be scrapped at once.

Robert Netzlof, posting to Yahoo Group "Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy", 2007-11-21

This nicely explains it

A post at Samizdata exactly captures my own feelings:

In recent times I have attacked the Economist for pretending to be pro free market whilst, when one reads it closely, not really being so. Articles like the one on the Australian elections mean I can no longer fairly make this charge. The Economist having now 'come out' as an openly leftist publication.

I've subscribed to The Economist for over 20 years, but I'm letting my current subscription lapse unrenewed. For the last few years, I've been less and less happy with both the editorial and news reporting aspects of the newspaper. They still pretend to support free markets, but so many of their articles in recent years have been apologies for more state involvement in the economy, more state control of private areas of endeavour, and generally more statism than laissez faire.

I'm going to miss reading it, but . . . I'm really missing The Economist of several years ago . . . not what they're currently publishing under that name.

Different, um, strokes?

I can't possibly improve on the title of the post at Hit and Run, "Bullwhips vs. Octopi in Japan":

The land of tentacle porn considers loosening up on Robert Mapplethorpe [. . .]

Joss Whedon returns to the small screen

There is news of a new Joss Whedon television series, called Dollhouse:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody's fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language — even muscle memory — for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments — or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo's burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

QotD: SF clichés

These shows owe a lot to "Forbidden Planet," or perhaps vice versa; it was just how people saw the future. A logical extension of their own norms. We do the same, of course, which is why Star Trek: The Next Generation had a sob-sister grief-counselor on the bridge. There weren't any women on 50s sci-fi ships. The captain was hard-boiled, the engineers were laconic and practical, and the enlisted men were whooping rabble who'd get drunk and throw a rock through the window of a deserted alien city. You suspect that the authors of these stories were all WW2 Navy vets.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-08

Pterry survives "mini stroke"

Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, just discovered that he'd had a stroke . . . and not even realized it:

But working on one of his manuscripts last August, he started to find it difficult to coordinate his hands and brain.

"I was having a bad day and my typing was going askew. It was as if I was typing wearing gloves."

Terry, who lives with his wife Lyn and has a 39-year-old daughter Rhianna, went to see his GP.

"After going through the symptoms, the first thing she asked was whether I'd suffered any memory loss and I wisecracked back: 'Not that I can recall.' "

Audi kicks Lexus in the yarbles

Grant McCracken gets all analytical about the ad:

This ad satisfies the two objectives of all creative. It gives us engaging and strategic.

Engaging:

"Parking" is visually arresting, impressive, amusing, darn near sublime. Tivos will stop for this one. Consumers will rewind. We will see this ad many times over it's lifetime on the air, and chances are it will be a gift that keeps on giving. It's a little like a magic trick. How did they do that?

Strategic:

This ad takes on the competitor very effectively.

[It mocks the Lexus's] ability to park itself. This is a remarkable accomplishment. It cancels the technological lead of a competitor. Lexus has just given its car thet and Lexus is justly proud. Not everyone is going to use this feature, but we are assuming that Lexus is assuming that the consumer is assuming that any car company with engineers capable of this kind of thing must be very good at everything else it does. The self parking ability is a part that stands for, and speaks for, the whole.

Now we are guessing that when Audi turned to its engineers to ask if this could be replicated, they scratched their heads and replied, "We need 18 to 36 months. Don't call us. We'll call you."

Unlike a lot of analysis of visual media, I enjoyed watching the ad more after reading Grant's posting.

QotD: The net

What's happening here? What is it about the network that makes it so potent? Simply this: the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. I've rewritten Gilmore's Law to reflect this:

"The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it."

For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has been joined. But this isn't going to be some full-on Armageddon, a battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesn't matter if you're a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob.

Mark Pesce, "Mob Rules (The Law of Fives)", hyperpeople, 2007-09-28

Two movies

James Lileks casts a jaundiced eye over the recent movie pairing of Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our fathers:

"Flags of our Fathers" spent as little time as necessary on Iwo Jima, and concentrated its rambling Mobius-strip narrative on the domestic propaganda uses of the flag-raising photo. The government, for the usual devious reasons, used the photo to bolster support for the war, which was going on for some reason or another; the details weren’t entirely clear. "Letters from Iwo Jima" spends as little time as necessary on the domestic front, but a flashback does give us a hint about Japanese society during the war. An officer assigned to Iwo Jima to enforce political purity — you know, the way the Navy regularly posted officers to make sure everyone bowed to a picture of FDR every day — reveals his moment of shame, when he was forced by a superior to kill . . . a dog. A family dog. That tells us everything, I guess: these guys will kill a family dog in front of the kids. I gather the dog is supposed to stand in for Nanking.

"Flags of our Fathers" informed me that there were no great causes, that the soldiers were a complaining, fractious lot who fought for each other, and there was no such thing as heroes, just "men like our fathers." The two being mutually exclusive, I guess. "Letters from Iwo Jima" told me that the enemy was full of honor and discipline, which was Tragically Misguided, and it was all quite sad because several of the Japanese officers had been posted to the United States, and performed charmingly at official functions where they were accepted as equals before that terrible misunderstanding at Pearl Harbor.

I almost quit the movie after the Yanks shot the surrendered soldiers. The recollection of the first film, with its vapid screaming PR displays and careful elisions and gruff cynical vets recalling the BS of it all, eventually overwhelmed the respectful treatment of the Japanese. If the same traits — death-worship, the nobility of suicide, fixation on honor not as a trait but a code — had been ascribed to Allied forces, it's impossible to imagine a Hollywood movie that would not have treated the characters as absolute lunatics. I have no problem with a respectful treatment of the soldiers who fought on the other side. But the point of the first movie seems to be the unfortunate effect of the battle on Ira Hayes. Clint Eastwood gave the hero of "Letters" an honorable death. Ira Hayes ended up face down in a pig farm.

Of course, this is merely the American flavour of how history is being taught nowadays: only the warts. It's as if British history was completely and accurately summed up by Cromwell, Glencoe, Amritsar, and the concentration camps. (Sadly, some people would argue strenuously that this is the case . . .)

It's not news, it's a Drew Curtis interview

Over on Reason Online, Katherine Mangu-Ward interviews the moving force behind fark.com:

In the golden summer of 1997, small-time ISP entrepreneur Drew Curtis bought fark.com when he noticed all of the good four-letter domains were being snapped up.

Until early 1999, fark.com featured a picture of a very brave squirrel and nothing else. Which, as Curtis notes, "some would argue this is better than what we have now." He briefly considered building a database of Indian curry recipes ("I like to cook, mostly because my wife can't"), but decided to go with Plan B, a site mocking the media (and occasionally Floridians) for their stupidity. Fark, he decided, should be the word for "what fills space when mass media runs out of news." Since then, Fark.com has become the go-to "news" site for the bored at work and sick at heart.

Stepping back from the day-to-day inanity/insanity of the news cycle, Curtis tries to figure out guiding principles behind why networks think it's a good idea to give airtime to 9/11 truthers ("Equal Time for Nut Jobs") or why every issue of Cosmo has exactly the same headlines ("Seasonal garbage") in his new book It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News (Gotham).

QotD: American Media

Indeed, compared to Europe, this country is doing pretty well. It's almost tabloid newspaper free, with a bifurcated media that generally separates celebrity gossip and news into separate publications—although there are exceptions like the New York Post. In Britain, the three highest circulating daily newspapers (The News of the World, The Sun and The Daily Mail) are aggressively low-brow, a mix of top-heavy women and conjecture-heavy, populist reporting. The country's parliament, often praised as an honest, if overly raucous, chamber of debate from which America could learn, is Crossfire on steroids (and with even less honesty and more partisan hackery). The largest-selling paper on the continent is the ridiculous German daily Bild, a tabloid whose softcore front page make its British cousins seem downright priggish.

Michael Moynihan, "There is no truth: The problem with Jon Stewart's media criticism", Reason Online, 2007-10-18