Yesterday I prepared to get on the 'L'. My preparation ritual consists of getting a paper to read and work the puzzles while on the train. The little (and it is little) shop embedded in the station that I buy my paper from had a customer taking up most of the aisle with a large suitcase, so I waited outside the door, fishing the change out of my pocket that I'd use to purchase the paper.

"Here you go."

I turned. A woman was holding out maybe three dollars to me.

[A couple of seconds go by as I blink].

"Um, no thank you."

I turn back to the door, wondering why a random passer-by would try to give me money. Then I realized that I probably was going through the same motions as someone desperately looking for enough money to get onto the 'L'.

I took a step back and thought about it. Was there really no amazing novels penned by a female author this year? Of course not! It was actually a great year for women authors– Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall took home the Booker, and A. S. Byatt’s latest came out to rave reviews (and was nominated for the Booker) as did Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. 2 of the 5 fiction writers nominated for the National Book Award are women. Even Amazon’s top 10 included women: 4 to be exact (for 3 books).

Via mobylives_feed, of course.

For those not seeing this lately, there's been a remarkable number of anthologies and best-of lists that either do not have any woman authors at all, or if they do, fail to list anyone female on the cover. The most recent example is the top ten list from Publishers Weekly.

Contrary to a post I made eleven months ago, Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away October 30th (Obituary from the New York Times 4 November 2009).

I also get rained on when my home team wins

My mood was somewhat patronizingly sympathetic as I read one LJ writer's travails with his country's mail service, when I got a text message from someone I did work for, asking why I hadn't deposited the check that they mailed to me. A month ago.

Mickey Zucker Reichert signed to produce new series of Dr Susan Calvin stories (29 October 2009 The Guardian).

First We'll Take Chicago, Then We'll Take Berlin

According to newly developed personality maps, the Windy City is balkanized on a whole different level.

Data came from http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/. "Its 45-question survey allows people to assess themselves in terms of five basic personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neurosis and conscientiousness." (Chicago Tribune, 26 October 2009).

Coincidence? You Decide!

My two DVDs from Netflix this month were Constantine and The Prophecy. No special plan was involved. I was interested to see how the Americanized John Constantine would turn out, and I remembered The Prophecy being favorably reviewed in comparison with the other horror movies of that year and put it next in my queue.

( Here there be major spoilers, I'm not kidding. )

Hmph. I thought I bought my place in 1999. Actually, it was 1998. So much for a multiple-of-ten anniversary.

Deciding what day counts as The Day is a little tricky. The whole title thing happened October 16^th, but the final mortgage signing didn't happen until November 5^th, and the professional movers did their job December 8^th (I had done the moving of delicate stuff myself).

As I recall, I was doing this when the "Buy a gumball, get a free mortgage" scam was taking off, and I remember having to tell the first person I dealt with that no, I did not want an adjustable rate mortgage, nor did I want some other creative financing method that I can't remember anymore, I was was going to be boring. Here's the money I can put down, here's what the condominium is going for, what do you calculate will be the monthly payments?

I still remember his surprise when he said, "that'll be less than your rent now!" Well, yes, that's one of the points of doing this, right? I wasn't quite aware of the concept of flipping then.

Continuing a thought made in a different social network altogether, are there any modern amateur detective stories being written these days?

Amateur in this case means no official contact with the police. That is, working in a lab that occasionally does work for a police agency disqualifies you, as does working in the court system in any capacity.

For that matter, having been retired or fired from the police force removes you from the amateur category.

You may have a cop buddy, but she or he can't be the one doing the heavy lifting. Yes, this is a judgment call.

A very casual mulling over made me think that this is primarily a 1920's phenomenon. That is, even though the characters' stories were written well into the 1980s, they tended to have their first story or novel in the 1920s. Exceptions might include the investigative journalist, which I suspect had a post-Watergate origin (Hiaasen and Brookmyre might be candidates?).

Any thoughts?

They Live, John Carpenter's story of the Reagan administration our secret masters, is on Google video.

She is 80 today, October 21^st.



It's hard to say what my first LeGuin story was -- probably something in a DAW Best of the Year anthology. The Left Hand of Darkness was the first novel of hers that I read, followed by the Earthsea books and her short story collections. And I'm very grateful for the new books that she continues to write.

Happy Birthday.

He is 95 today, October 21^st.

I came across his first two Mathematical Games collections back when I was in high school, and the revelation that math didn't have to be exclusively about the quadratic formula was very liberating. To this day I remain very fond of superellipses, phi (and its crackpots), and the range of possibilities of fractals.

The discovery of his The Annotated Alice was just icing on the cake.

Happy Birthday.

Kurt Vonnegut has two short stories on Gutenberg now.

Yes, there is such a thing as a vegetarian spider. (Via james_nicoll)

Your 1930s Reading Habits Are Not My 1980s Reading Habits

There was a little article at The Register here, which was of interest to me because an Android-based e-reader might be the first really useful Kindle-ish item out there, but let's face it, it's not interesting enough to make a post.

But this comment on the article is:

People keep saying this on every ebook thread - "if i drop it in the bath it won't dry out like a book would, so there's no point for me fiddle de dee"

Firstoff, who takes a bath? A bath? Where are you, the 1930s?

Second, who READS in the bath? The water gets cold quickly, and soon you're sitting in cold water holding something that isn't waterproof out of the water (yes, they'll dry out, but try reading the bastard once it's soaked) aching your arm. What kind of masochistic pensionable crank enjoys that?

Showers and ebook readers, or baths, bath salts, pipe, slippers, werthers original, coronary heart disease and death. Your choice. Probably.

( Poll below the cut! )

Super-Social Networking: Superhero Facebook Status Updates.

Acquired, as all truly weird things are, from theweaselking.

We have assimilated your memories with fixed-width text

Gone Fishing, by James H. Schmitz.

On the other hand, this seems quite natural: Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.

Cabbages and handmaidens

Ursula K. Le Guin laments the passing of the squid: '[L]ast night on the Lehrer news hour Margaret Atwood did not say she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking squids, but said that she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking cabbages. I am pondering the significance of this change from sea beast to land vegetable, but so far it escapes me. She was otherwise charming, and I do think The Year of the Flood is good science fiction even though its cabbages are speechless.' (23 September) Those eloquent cabbages presumably live on Planet X: the indefatigable Ms Atwood told the New York Times that her work is not sf since 'I don't write about Planet X, I write about where we are now.' (21 September)

Family's Always Embarrassing

From October's Ansible: John M. Ford (1957-2006) is still fondly remembered, but his non-fan family would rather we didn't. Rumours of awkwardness have been circulating for some time, and NESFA's Instant Message 825 reports that a hoped paperback reissue of their Ford collection is unlikely: '... it does not appear that the Estate will license any further printings. This appears to be the policy for all of Ford's works, not just the Nesfa Press book, so that only those works under contract can be reprinted.'

By coincidence, Moby Lives (Live Journal feed: mobylives_feed) had an entry on James Joyce's grandson: "Carol Loeb Shloss had first won the right to republish her book Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake with the expurgated material restored in a 2007 court decision, and now the Joyce estate has finally agreed to pay her litigation costs for that case to the tune of $240,000."

"... Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce, 'had become notorious in scholarly circles for its conflicts with scholars, authors and Joyce enthusiasts,' with a 'history of suits and threats of suit ....'"

The article links to a 16 June 2006 New Yorker article that I remember reading (and pissing me off), which described, among other things, of his destroying papers he didn't like or which he didn't think reflected well on the family.

Yesterday I received Songs of Dying Earth. A little late, as I went all-out and ordered the slipcase edition. I am very happy, and I am glad that George R. R. Martin stopped wasting his time with that Song of Ice and Fire stuff and got this done.

Ya gotta know where your priorities are.

Sarah Palin's book is ghost-written. No shock there.

She picked a right-wing creationist to be her ghost writer. Yeah, so?

The ghost writer has on her resume books by a white supremacist and a Lieutenant General who knew he was fighting a holy war for Jesus.

Um.

Rio in 2016!

I wonder if there's an equivalent movement in Rio?

Corrections

"In our Aug. 27 issue, we erroneously reported that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In actual fact, while superficial similarities between a species' stages of embryonic development and the adult stages of that species' distant ancestors may exist, said similarities are subjective and cannot be classified as functionally equivalent in any meaningful biological sense. The Onion regrets the error."

(From this week's The Onion. Sorry, can't provide a direct link, but it is currently sitting on the Opinions page.)

Not a fetish community for Texans

A few days ago there was a bizarre post over in tex_latex, claiming to be a moderator smack-down from "evilmohawk" about abusive posts. Problem is, the links posted, including one referring to tex_latex's profile with the community rules, all in reality went to Russian web sites, presumably with spam (I couldn't read them).

It was late at night, I didn't think to save a screen capture.

Right now tex_latex's latest post was made back on July 4th. This may have been its last legitimate post, although I thought there were others. Has anyone heard of anything about this?

Oh, yeah, explanatory links: Tex, and LaTex.