Chrononautic Log

January 19, 2006

I was talking to someone about Roger Elwood, some time in the last few weeks, only I couldn’t remember his name. Elwood . . .

. . . is best known for the bizarre episode in which he flooded the SF market in 1972-1975 with carelessly edited theme anthologies.

Prior to that time, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be a surer bet than novels. Roger Elwood ended that, singlehandedly breaking the story collection / anthology market. It has never wholly recovered. He squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers’ faith in collections. . . .

By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.

Wikipedia has the scoop. With graphs and everything.

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January 12, 2006

The Wiscon panel survey is out, and the World’s Most Narcissistic Panelist has metastasized — two panels on sex education and redefining American masculinity, one on masturbation and redefining American masculinity, one on childrearing and redefining American masculinity, one on the evils of patriarchal religion and redefining American masculinity, one on singlehandedly stopping war through redefining American masculinity . . . there might have been more, but I lost count.

I have a dream . . . a dream that some day we can approach these issues intelligently, instead of asking loaded questions that presuppose their own answers . . . a dream that some day we won’t see the same canned stories from one panelist’s day job trotted out as the answer to every evil under the sun . . . a dream that some day the moderators will moderate, instead of using the panels as a form of self-affirming group therapy . . .

With your help, we can achieve that dream.

If you’re going, you’ve probably already got an email from Betsy Lundsten in your inbox, with a link to the survey. Please click it. Please stop the madness.

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. . . but this is going to give the anti-Catholic wingnuts a whole new box of ammunition.

Vatican moves to clear reviled disciple’s name

JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars.

The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan.”

Next up: Brutus and Cassius.

At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching
A sinner, in the manner of a brake,
So that he three of them tormented thus.
To him in front the biting was as naught
Unto the clawing, for sometimes the spine
Utterly stripped of all the skin remained.
“That soul up there which has the greatest pain,”
The Master said, “is Judas Iscariot;
With head inside, he plies his legs without.
Of the two others, who head downward are,
The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus;
See how he writhes himself, and speaks no word.
And the other, who so stalwart seems, is Cassius.
But night is reascending, and ’tis time
That we depart, for we have seen the whole.”

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January 10, 2006

I don’t know how I’m going to manage this and WisCon (and I am going to manage this and WisCon) but I’ve just accepted an invitation to attend Rio Hondo 2006, June 11-June 18.

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The Four Things finally cornered me, thanks to Rob. But like good old Artie Schopenhauer says:

If you observe that your opponent has taken up a line of argument which will end in your defeat, you must not allow him to carry it to its conclusion, but interrupt the course of the dispute in time, or break it off altogether, or lead him away from the subject, and bring him to others.

So I’m making up my own questions.

• Four jobs I’ve blown the interview for:
  1. Summer-camp model-building instructor
  2. Undergraduate writing tutor
  3. Technical writer
  4. Software engineer
• Four movies I’ve watched one time more than was good for me:
  1. Lone Star
  2. Miller’s Crossing
  3. The Lion in Winter
  4. Apocalypse Now: Redux
• Four places I’ve never gone back to:
  1. Athens
  2. Tehran
  3. Capitola
  4. Oxford
• Four other places I’ve never gone back to:
  1. Crete
  2. Isfahan
  3. Reno
  4. Cornwall
• Four TV shows I never watched:
  1. Friends
  2. Seinfeld
  3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  4. The Sopranos
• Four web sites I stopped visiting:
  1. C|Net
  2. Slashdot
  3. Locusmag.com
  4. the Washington Post
• Four serious culinary mistakes:
  1. Toblerone fondue à la micro-onde
  2. Lipton’s onion soup with Cheerios
  3. Pan-fried refrigerator cookies
  4. Spaghetti alla carbonara with lukewarm spaghetti
• Four places I wonder if I’ll ever get to:
  1. Olduvai Gorge
  2. Samarkand
  3. Manaus
  4. Darwin
• Four albums I used to really like that I don’t really ever need to hear again:
  1. The Police, Every Breath You Take: The Singles
  2. The Police, Sychronicity
  3. Sting, Dream of the Blue Turtles
  4. Sting, . . . well, pretty much anything, really

Tag! . . . er, who hasn’t done this yet?

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Unsurprisingly, this random Garfield strip generator is much funnier than any of the original strips.

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January 9, 2006

“Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results,” sayeth the Onion.

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January 6, 2006

I’ve seen some of these before, but this is the best list I’ve run across. Many of them are not especially funny, but many are. A few samples:

• We place a spherical cage in the desert and enter it. We then perform an inverse operation with respect to the cage. The lion is then inside the cage and we are outside.
• The set theoretic method: We observe that the desert is a separable space. It therefore contains an enumerable dense set of points from which can be extracted a sequence having the lion as the limit. We then approach the lion stealthily along this sequence bearing with us suitable equipment.
• In the usual way construct a curve containing every point in the desert. It has been proven that such a curve can be traversed in arbitrarily short time. Now we traverse the curve, carrying a spear, in a time less than what it takes the lion to move a distance equal to its own length.
• The lion has the homotopy type of a one-dimensional complex and hence he is a K(Pi, 1) space. If Pi is noncommutative then the lion is not a member of the international commutist conspiracy and hence he must be friendly. If Pi is commutative then the lion has the homotopy type of the space of loops on a K(Pi, 2) space. We hire a stunt pilot to loop the loops, thereby hopelessly entangling the lion and rendering him helpless.

(I can’t help but think that this style of writing can be instructive, if I intend to continue being so brassy as to write things like “establish a metastable equilibrium that allows convex regions with real and virtual histories to coexist in four-dimensional space-time, while remaining both topologically distinct and contiguous in five-space” with a straight face.)

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Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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Lawrence M. Schoen’s “The Sky’s The Limit,” from ASZAS, has made the preliminary Nebula ballot!

(First person to properly cast that in the Damon-Runyon-speak of Schoen’s narrator gets a prize . . . I’m not sure what prize, though.)

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January 4, 2006

Five years later . . .

As some of you know, for some time now, but particularly since a week or two before World Fantasy, the charming and persusasive Mr. Rosenbaum has been tirelessly working to entice me to follow his example and voyage to the land of Alps, cheese, chocolate, pocketknives, Calvinism, and Neutralitätspraxis. In mid-December these efforts culminated in a visit with the fine people at Genedata AG.

There followed two weeks of soul-searching, several Talks with capital Ts, and a tiny bit of negotiation — darn that capitalism — while the box of books I’d optimistically ordered from Amazon.de back in early December finally arrived, and sat unopened on my desk and in the corner of my eye, following my every move with a reproachful gaze.

Today the box is opened!

And today I accepted Genedata’s offer.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be packing most of my earthly possessions off to my dad’s place in Florida, and following them out there in a crazy two-week road trip: south as far as LA, then east; left at Albuquerque (thanks, Bugs), or maybe Oklahoma City, to visit cousin Beth in the other Manhattan; stop off in Kansas City, and then down to visit Andy in Tuscaloosa (back row, first from left). A few days in Jacksonville to unwind, then away (I, demens, et saevas curre per Alpes), probably out of Chicago (motto: Close to Wiscon), maybe with a short side trip to Madison.

And then!

And then? Well, we’ll see. Six years ago my plan was to stop off in Seattle for a few weeks that summer while I worked on my master’s thesis.

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P.S.: Happy New Year!

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