Foolishness — Page 3

Fruit flies trespassing !!

28 April 2016 by Tom Simon 3 Comments

Today, this blog received a terribly interesting comment:

Hvor trÃ¦ls for ham. ForhÃ¥bentlig mÃ¸der han op til de samme klassekammerater, som han gik i 0. med sidste Ã¥r imorgen. Flotte frugtposer. Bananfluer adgang forbudt !!

Google Translate helpfully identifies the language as Danish, and the syntax as fractured:

How trÃ¦ls for him. ForhÃ ¥ hopefully he encounters with the same classmates, as he went 0 with last year ¥ s tomorrow. Beautiful fruit bags. Fruit flies trespassing !!

It is very good of this drive-by commenter (who is, I assume, not one of the 3.6 Loyal Readers) to warn me about the trespasses of fruit flies. Presumably they are doing it in aid of the beautiful fruit bags, or perhaps concealed inside of them. How trÃ¦ls for him. How very trÃ¦ls indeed.

Upon sober second thought, I have decided not to allow the comment to stand in its original place, but to immortalize it here, without the accompanying link.

In other news, I have been consulting my monstrous regiment of M.D.s, and they have concluded to keep me on vitamin D (which I have been taking lately) and renoberate my other medications, in the interest of preventing me from occasionally lapsing into narcolepsy. This should improve my ability to Get Work Done. I am still on the last stages of foot-slogging, or rather footnote-slogging, through Style is the Rocket; after which I shall probably put together a little collection of short fiction, tentatively entitled The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: spam

Why not just throw the book at them?

28 March 2016 by Tom Simon 15 Comments

I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.

—Susan Hill

(Hat tip to The Passive Voice)

I respond:

I love the book. I love the weight of it in my hand, the heft of it. I especially love the hardcover book, the stiffness of the boards under the cloth. The satisfying thwack! it makes when I knock a book fetishist on the noggin with it. You can’t hit fools upside the head with an ebook.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: books, ebooks, snobbery, susan hill

Calvin and Hobbes on writing

17 September 2015 by Tom Simon 1 Comment

Hat tip to Malcolm the Cynic.

There are two kinds of people involved in this game, whether as writers, readers, or what have you: Those who agree with Calvin, and those who wish to use writing as an actual means of communication. Which is as much as to say that there are parasites, and there are hosts.

Speaking of Malcolm the Cynic, he has an interesting piece up on Superversive SF: ‘Fixing the Abrams Star Trek Movies’. Very much in the vein of what I did with elements of the Star Wars prequels in ‘Creative discomfort and Star Wars’. I like his take on the Abrams Trek reboot very much.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: academia, bill watterson, calvin and hobbes, malcolm the cynic, writing

Advice on writing Great Literature

15 September 2015 by Tom Simon 30 Comments

In a discussion at The Passive Voice, one Lorraine Devon Wilke was mocked for ordering writers, ‘Do NOT write four books a year.’ She offered, as an exemplar of Good Writing, Donna Tartt, who took eleven years to write The Goldfinch. Among many other responses, Ed Ryan offered this:

I’m a math idiot so bear with me. Let’s assume (so I don’t have to look it up) the ‘masterpiece’ in question is 100k words long.

11 years means 10,000 words per year (ok that’s 110,000, see how lazy I am?)

10,000 words per year/ 365 days per year us a blistering 27.3 words per day.

We can pretend this hardworking visionary took days off from that grueling schedule and slaved over the novel for a mere 200 days each of those 11 years – an electric 50 word per day pace.

If the author rewrote the book 10 times the average jumps to a staggering 500 words per day. Being generous that’s 60 minutes of work per day.

I only hope the other 23hrs were relaxing.

Our Evil Alter Blogger responds:

Don’t be silly.

If you want to become a Major Literary Figure, you have to spend the other 23 hours in a constant flurry of activity. Hanging out in seedy Left Bank cafes, drinking absinthe with deranged expatriates. Being addicted to hard drugs. Cultivating interesting but debilitating mental illnesses. Pursuing weird sexual kinks in wildly unorthodox ménages. Kissing the bums of some of your fellow verminous literary lions, and fighting lifelong feuds with others. Going into rehab. Getting out of rehab. Writing angsty pseudo-philosophical anecdota about what you learned in rehab. Forgetting what you learned in rehab so you can repeat the process. I tell you, it’s a busy and thankless life.

The ideal literary author will write ONE book, and spend the rest of his life (it is preferably a he; if a she, she should go into pop music instead and aspire to be Amy Winehouse) desperately striving to live fast, die young, and leave a corpse that may not actually be good-looking, but will at least furnish material for hundreds of Ph.D. theses by twitterpated would-be academics.

You see, that is the ultimate goal of Literature. It’s all about the doctoral theses. Authors and books are just a necessary nuisance along the way.

(signed)
H. Smiggy McStudge

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: bad advice, donna tartt, ed ryan, h. smiggy mcstudge, literature, lorraine devon wilke, writing

Magic’s Pawnshop

4 August 2015 by Tom Simon 9 Comments

I had stopped to window-shop, then come in to price a bit of cheap jewellery. The proprietor must have liked the look of me, for he trusted me enough to take a display box of rings and gewgaws out from under glass and let me rummage through them on my own. While I was amusing myself with that, another customer came in, a bulging canvas bag over his shoulder. He was one of these adventurers by the look of him, and not an experienced one; he had on a lot of shiny new armour and other rubbish, more stylish than practical, probably sold to him by some huckster who spotted him for a rube and told him the yarn about how this stuff was just what he needed. This fellow was the counterpart to the first-time camper who goes ‘roughing it’ with six carts full of gear and all the discomforts of home.

Your true hero goes out with a flint and steel and a case-knife, and comes back with a hoard of treasure and a rescued princess – if he wants them. I knew one once, such an old hand that he didn’t even trouble with the flint, and only bothered with princesses if he could score a brace of them. He said it was no more trouble to rescue two at a time, and a lot more sporting to try and bring them back without having them scratch each other’s eyes out. Princesses are a jealous lot, and give the lie to the old yarn about breeding equating to good manners. If you want to see worse manners than wildcats fighting, just stir up two princesses with the same dress on, and set them down in a room together. It needn’t even be dresses; your more particular sort will start up if they both have the same colour of eyes. Jade-green and violet are the worst; especially the ones with tip-tilted noses—

But I digress. This raw young kid with about a hundred pounds of gear on his person, not counting the bag, sauntered in as if he was somebody and heaved the bag up on the counter. I kept still and listened. It is always good to see a skilful tradesman at work, even if he is only a pawnbroker; and this one was a master. He said:—

‘Can I help you?’

‘It says Cash for Treasures, Old and Rare,’ said the kid, referring to the sign outside. ‘If you’ve got the cash, I’ve got the treasures.’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: Fiction, Foolishness Tagged With: fantasyland, gaming

Visit Edmonton!

15 July 2015 by Tom Simon 3 Comments

The oldest and most vibrant Alberta tradition is the bitter rivalry, amounting to actual hatred, between Calgary and Edmonton. This dates back to 1905, when the Canadian government (over the objections of most Albertans) made Edmonton, then a village in the remote North, the capital of the new province, instead of the thriving young city of Calgary. As a sop, Calgary was supposed to be the site of the new University of Alberta… but that went to Edmonton as well. (Calgary did not get its own university until the 1960s.)

The long history of actual insults and injuries is largely forgotten now, except by old curmudgeons like myself; the rivalry has largely been sublimated into the realm of professional sports. The ‘Battle of Alberta’ between the NHL’s Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers, in particular, is heated and acrimonious, and in days gone by (when both teams were good) produced some of the most viciously entertaining hockey ever played. Just recently, the Oilers tried to freeze Calgary out of the act by trademarking the phrase ‘Battle of Alberta’, despite more than 30 years of usage in the public domain. This is how Albertans keep warm in the insanely long winters.

Herewith, one Calgarian’s effort to spruce up Edmonton’s public image.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: fine old traditional urban rivalries

Revenge of the Forbidden!

19 June 2015 by Tom Simon 11 Comments

Sarah Dimento, our Esteemed Cover Artist, offers some thoughts on her trade:

Your Generic-Ass Cover Makes Me Think There’s a Generic-Ass Book Inside

And in a heroic attempt to rid the world of generic-ass titles in the form ___ of ___:

The Cliché Fantasy Title Generator

Generate your own stupid fantasy title! Use at your own risk! Yes, you too can come up with classic titles at the touch of a button. Titles like:

Revenge of the Forbidden

Wizards of Evil

Evil of Wizards

Evil of Evil

and the ever-popular Arthurian saga:

Nightmare of the Round Table

Which ought to be the name of a book about a zombie King Arthur. Alas, there is a book (or at least a comic) that appears to be about a zombie King Arthur, or at any rate a zombie-killing King Arthur. It’s called Dead Future King, which is clearly the Wrong Title, because it has not got an of in it.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: comics, covers, sarah dimento, schlock, titles, writing, zombies

Coming back from walkabout

15 June 2015 by Tom Simon 27 Comments

I’m just stopping in to let the Loyal 3.6 know that I am still alive and (approximately) functioning, but I have been submerged in a wallow of trashy pop culture whilst waiting for my brain to return from going walkabout.

Thanks to all who spoke up in favour of my M*A*S*H pieces; I shall continue the series, and have the next instalment in drydock, waiting for the hull to be put on. This language may possibly be figurative. At present my shipyard has three or four unfinished essais, also including a new piece by H. Smiggy McStudge, and some all-new content to put in the Style is the Rocket collection, in a mean and scurvy attempt to part you all from three of your hard-earned dollars. My resident mathematical genius informs me that $3 × 3.6 = $10.80 or thereabouts, and I plan to squander this ill-gotten fortune upon riotous living. I may buy a pizza.

However, those pieces remain unfinished at present, because I took them up to the point where I required my brain to put in some work, and it was off doing Crocodile Dundee stuff somewhere in Western Australia. When last heard from, it was lounging about in the Pilbara, contemplating the ancient rock formations. Over three billion years ago, Pilbara was joined up with a chunk of what is now South Africa to form a primaeval continent which the geologists call Vaalbara; the oldest stone yet dated in the Earth’s crust, so I am told, is a chunk of sandstone from Vaalbara nearly four billion years old. Since sandstone is sedimentary, this rock formation was made up of the eroded rubble from still older Vaalbaran rocks – which takes you impressively close to the origins of the Earth itself. It is soothing and reassuring, at my brain’s age, to keep company with things even older than oneself.

Needless to say, I myself have never been to the Pilbara. My brain is ashamed of me and never takes me anywhere.

So I stayed behind, as I have said, wallowing in pop culture. I mentioned a while back that John Williams wrote the incidental music for both Star Wars and Gilligan’s Island; and I have come to the important conclusion that both these works are, in fact, the same story – if you squint at them just right. Five passengers and a crew of two board a rickety old vessel and set sail on what is supposed to be a short and routine voyage, whereupon everything imaginable goes wrong. It is true that the five passengers were never aboard the Millennium Falcon simultaneously; this is one of the ways in which George Lucas filed the serial numbers off of his sources. But once you have made the basic identification (as the folklorists would say), the rest becomes clear. Consider: [Read more…]