That Mitchell and Webb Look presents the biggest thing on television since Pimp My Iron Junkyard Surviving Brother:
Extruded Books: a cautionary tale
16 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
For some thirty years now, I have been following the commercial publishing industry, particularly in its various New York mutations, and trying (for commercial reasons of my own) to figure out why apparently intelligent people would do business in such cockeyed ways. I don’t pretend to have figured out the whole story, but I have pieced together a good deal of evidence, and I believe I can point out the major turnings in the road that led publishers to the pass they are in today. Rather than bore you, my 3.6 Loyal Readers, with dry details and rubbishy statistics, I shall shamelessly exploit my status as a spinner of tall tales to set forth the data under cover of a fictitious example. All names have been changed to protect the manifestly guilty; so let me introduce you to Nathan Extruded, founder and publisher of Extruded Books. [Read more…]
Disk Vader
8 April 2012 by 1 Comment
For those benighted souls who haven’t yet seen it (and I was one of you, five minutes ago):
The Imperial March from Star Wars — played on two 3.5-inch floppy drives!
The publisher’s tale
29 September 2011 by Leave a Comment
‘I would have liked to know my great-great-great-great-great-uncle Cholmondeley Witherhead,’ the Publisher told me sadly. ‘He used to work as a gatekeeper on London Wall, two or three hundred years ago. Terribly upset he was, when he heard they were going to knock it down; and not just because it put him out of a job. It was a whole way of life that he mourned, and what he feared was nothing less than the end of civilization.
‘ “By my good faith, Sir,” said Uncle Cholmondeley, “I and my Brethren at the Gates are true Servants of the Publick, and London will be the worse without us. How will any one get in or out of the City, if there be no Gatekeepers to let them pass?”
‘And you know,’ the Publisher added in a tone of sad reflection, ‘I have never figured out how those Londoners ever managed without him.’
Silly observation #68
15 November 2010 by Leave a Comment
I spilled ink in a pet shop. Now I have a pet spot. His name is Dog.
John C. Wright on the Nebula Awards
17 May 2010 by Leave a Comment
John C. Wright explains how they pick the Nebula Award winners:
The selection process is relatively simple: the survivors of a Deathball tournament are examined by the Colossus-Skynet system for irregulationary defects, and if found acceptable, are sent to the haunted planet Arisia for mind-to-mind examination by the alien superbeing known as Mentor, and those who return sane are conducted to Wallach IV where the Bene Gesserit Witches test the candidate with a “gom jabbar” and the Box of Pain to distinguish the true humans from the mere human animals. Survivors are taught the Martian Language in order to achieve fourth level consciousness and exposed to the mind-altering rays of the Evolutionary Granolith, and expected to make at least one “drop” in full kit onto a planet controlled by the Klendathu. Then any remaining candidates are sent to Trantor, or maybe some other world covered entirely with buildings, and examined by the Jedi Council and the Psychohistorians to see whether passing the candidate will cause a disturbance in the force or throw off the predictive plan of history. The remaining candidates then cover themselves with walrus grease and wrestle nude with Harlan Ellison, or his evil twin Zebulon Ellison, in the Arena of Death, on a tightrope above a field of radio-active radium-knives. The winner is granted by the Padishah Emperor any space-kingdom on any of the garden-planets accidentally created by the Genesis Machine in the Multiple Green Sun system at the core of the galaxy, and any space princess for his bride, with the one exception (obviously) of the voluptuous yet deadly Princess Venomia, the Black Widow of Outer Space. The year Leigh Brackett won, instead of a space princess, she demanded her beloved World-Wrecker Hamilton be released from his disembodied confinement within the death-asteroid of the limbo dimension. The Padishah Emperor was loathe to set free so dangerous a planet-killer, but he had no choice.
I always thought SFWA was up to something fishier than meets the fishy eye.
Internet sociology
13 February 2010 by Leave a Comment
I have done a meticulous and exhaustive study, and found that 94.6% of flamewars in message boards and blog comments begin something like this:
Poster #1: X.
Poster #2: What do you mean, Q?
#1: I didn’t say Q, I said X.
#2: There you go again with Q.
#1: No, I’m telling you I said X.
#2: Q? Q?!! How DARE you say Q, you (expletives deleted)!
Poster #3: Calm down, buddy, he’s only saying K.
#2: That’s what I said . . . he’s saying Q . . . and don’t tell me to calm down!
. . . . . . .
Poster #1138: Oh, for Pete’s sake.
Meritocracy: a fable
4 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
The Lion having been shot by a passing hunter, the other beasts held a council to decide which of them should succeed him as King. All were agreed that the new king should be the one best fitted to rule, as excelling in the highest and most noble qualities of a ruler. But there was a trifle of difficulty in agreeing which quality best befitted a monarch.
English as she is spoke
4 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
Academic, n. One who, lacking the gift of natural stupidity, has attained stupidity by degrees.
C. S. Lewis on ‘Kelsie’
29 October 2008 by Leave a Comment
Excerpt of a letter from C.S. Lewis to his brother Warnie, 1 July 1921, as printed in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol. I, p. 561:
Saturday evening . . . I dined alone with Kelsie. She always had her on days and her off days: and for many years now there have been times when I found têtes a têtes with her longer by mental measurement than the clock would vouch for. But on this occasion, honestly it was so boring that there was an air of insanity about it all: connected perhaps with the terrible heat and with that crowded tiny dining room at the Mitre. She never paused. Stories that I have heard from those same lips so often before followed one another: somebody was engaged and somebody else had broken off an engagement: the inevitable discussion of the Greeves’s: had I heard about so and so: did I remember what Willie Jaffé had done on such and such an occasion?
When we went up to the private room again, I could do no more. Wrapping my gown round her head to stifle her cries, I seized our cousin by the left ankle and precipitated her from the window. She flew out over the High in a great arc: the strolling butties and undergraduates looked up and shouted. But to my horror, just as she descended on one of the pinnacles of St. Mary’s spires, her dress developed a certain balloon like quality: instead of breaking into a thousand pieces she rose up on the giddy ledge and, just as I lost consciousness, I could hear her proclaim distinctly to the whole town ‘I once saw an awfully funny thing happen to a girl at Aldershot — .’ I can’t quite swear to all this having happened exactly as it is here set down: but something like it must have taken place, since the undoubted fact remains that I did get away.
Wendy Delmater explains admirably where Lewis went wrong:
He had no idea that seizing the offending drone by the left ankle always has that unfortunate effect. However, should one seize a bore by the right ankle and dangle him or her while making suitable threats, one might walk away with a pair of tickets to the theater. Even if one is forced to take the bore to the theater, good manners will suffice to keep the person quiet (except for intermission).
Do not ask me how I came by this clandestine knowledge. It is sufficient that I know.
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