It is not a joke.
It is a seemingly never ending cascade of WTF. $90 bridal gowns and oil paintings by an artist who you would never in a million years guess is self-taught and weird poems and a recipe for apple pie and appallingly bad writing.
Archive for category Category For Things That Don't Fit Anywhere Else But That I Don't Want to Call 'Uncategorized'
The anti-fanfic brigade must be gnashing their anal-retentive teeth. Or maybe it’s not their teeth they are gnashing (can you gnash your anus? I wonder.)
John Scalzi is looking for a publisher for his fanfic.
I am, or was, on record as being a fence-sitter on the whole fanfic issue. On the one hand, there is no question that fanfic is a violation of copyright. Left unchecked, it could eventually cut into an author’s revenue stream.
On the other hand, nothing is new.
Back on the first hand, fanfic is like copying your friend’s test answers and changing the order of the words.
Returning to the second hand, it is very common. Almost every writer, whether they admit it or not, has written at least some stuff that would be classed as fan fiction.
And on the first hand, it’s just wrong. Wrong to copy somebody else’s intellectual property and use it for your own. It is a form of stealing.
On the other (fanfic) hand, it isn’t stealing if nothing is taken. And isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery?
The arguments go on and on, and I see the arguments on both sides. There is merit in both camps. Copyright laws were originally enacted to prevent people from wholesale copying of a text – in Dickens’ time, it was common for unscrupulous booksellers to typeset and print their own copies of a new work within days of it being published – and were not intended to protect all aspects of a work as some believe they do now.
Regardless of the merits of Scalzi’s work, he has provided the fanficcers with a boatload of ammo.
Resolved:
Mar 31
The sport of soccer to be renamed Bad Acting on Grass with Very Occasional Approaches to the Goal.
A Practical Joke
Mar 2
I’ve thought of what must be the most elaborate practical joke ever.
- Create a company. It doesn’t matter what it does, could be anything. But you want it to be a smallish company.
- The company must be named Vandelay Industries.
- Hire and fire and endure turnover. You want a lot of people coming and going. Perhaps, for this reason, you should start an IT company.
- Allow the company to go out of business. Take all the cash and head for Brazil, maybe, or do what other people do and award yourself salary and bonuses sufficient to bankrupt the company.
- Now, all those people who used to work at the company will put Vandelay Industries on their resumes, and nobody will believe them! They’ll never even be interviewed, because who would interview an obvious liar?
- From your large house in Calgary or your 400 SF apartment in Vancouver, laugh at all the people who are now unemployable.
Winter? Not So Much
Feb 17
HA2.0 is on Spring Break (her school decided to move their break to coincide with the Olympics) so I’m working from home while she chats on Facebook. We decided to walk down to a local cafe for lunch … in jeans and hoodies. It’s all blue skies and sunshine here today, a balmy 15C/59F. The crocuses and snowdrops are up, I’ve spotted a couple cherry trees starting to blossom, and Dean drove home with the top down. I would post pictures, to taunt our eastern readers, but my camera died the other day.
Anyhow, sorry about the lack of snow for all you winter Olympians. On the bright side, if they cancel your event, you can always hang out at the beach and work on your tan.
The New New Year
Jan 12
I hereby declare that the new year starts on January 13th.
This is so that today, January 12th, will be part of 2009, a year that I am glad to see the last of as of midnight tonight.
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
The Man in Black, The Princess Bride
A selection of some of the albums I carry around on my IPod, and what sort of a drink they’d be if they were a drink.
KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope. Tunstall is different, a pop star with weight and intelligence. I think if this album could be drunk, it would be a high quality Californian Merlot, smooth and rich with spicy top notes.
Black Sabbath Vol 4. This little known album is my favourite. Sabbath’s sound reaches its heaviest on this album, and it is heavy indeed. If you could drink this, it would be good espresso, with notes so strong you taste them for minutes afterward.
Pink Floyd Meddle. I have an uneasy relationship with Pink Floyd, but I like this album. As a drink, I think it would be a Shirley Temple with maybe a 1/4 oz of vodka slipped in.
David Bowie Young Americans. This album was widely loved when I was a kid, but as the years have passed the critics have been harder and harder on it. At the time, it was unusual for someone as thin and white as Bowie to do something so soulful. Now this is seen as ersatz, but I don’t know. I just enjoy this album. If I could pour it in a mug, it would be instant coffee with condensed milk and a shot of good rum.
Rolling Stones 12×5. I like early Stones pretty well, although I don’t listen to it as much as I do mid-period stuff. This is my favourite Brian Jones era Stones album, and if you could drink it it would be rum and coke, although with a lot more rum than the thin sweet stuff the Beatles were serving at their house.
Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet. Decent beer, consumed on a warm summer night down by the river, with women who know themselves. You can drink this over and over and over again and never get tired of it, and it will always intoxicate you in the same way, gently, with a sure sweet hand.
Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street. Bourbon. Cheap bourbon, and lots of it, purchased by the glass at a dark bar with sawdust on the floor. You worry about what’s in the glass, but by the third shot, you don’t care any more. It lights a fire in your belly, every time.
The Clash The Clash. I became a Clash convert the instant I heard ‘I Fought the Law’ blasting out of the demo car stereo at Kelly’s Stereo Mart in Penticton in about 1977 or 78. If you could drink it, it would be cheap vodka, jittery and packing a hell of a punch. Such a drink as to make you question authority and your place in the world.
I could keep doing this all day, but I have to wrap it up now and get going.
My Ultralogical Mind
Jan 6
Something has bugged me for years. I’d forgotten about it, but yesterday I was home from work sick and the radio was on. The song ‘Last Kiss’ by Pearl Jam came on.
I originally heard the song back in about 1973, when a minor Canadian pop band called Wednesday had a minor hit (#34 in the US) with the song. If you haven’t heard it, or have heard it but forgotten it, it’s a schmaltzy chick sort of song in which a young man sings of the loss of his baby in a car accident and how he kissed her one last kiss as she lay dying, realized his love, and now he has to live a good life so he will get to see her when he dies.
The song starts:
We were out on a date in my daddy’s car
We hadn’t driven very far
There in the road, straight ahead
A car was stalled, the engine was dead
I couldn’t stop, so I swerved to the right…
And the chorus
Oh where, oh where, can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven, so I’ve got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world
My problem with this song is the line ‘the Lord took her away from me’ – surely it was the narrator’s own crappy driving that took her away from him? If you’re driving fast enough that you can’t stop for an object in the road, you’re driving like an idiot and the loss of your baby has nothing to do with the Lord.
Maybe I’m too critical. Maybe I should just relax and immerse myself in the teenie oh-isn’t-that-so-tragically-romantic? vibe of the tune. But I can’t seem to help it. Such logical inconsistencies drive me crazy. They’re even worse when they’re associated with an earwormy tune like ‘Last Kiss’.
If you’ve ever watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, you’ll know the basic formula. A family writes to the show with a sob story. Diseases and death are common themes.
If they have the sobbiest sob story, the show arrives and people yell a lot while they build a gigantic house, or expand the existing house to ludicrious proportions. At the end, a van pulls up and hides the new house from the family until the van drives away and then there’s lots of shouting and crying.
I don’t watch this show. Watched it once. That once was enough to last me a lifetime.
Anyway, it seems that one of the families who got the Extreme home treatment is in trouble and has listed the (5300 SF!) house for sale at 1.3 mil.
The kicker? Turns out they took a $400,000 ARM on the place in 2005, and are having trouble paying for it. The utility bills are $1200 month, he’s a truck driver, and she doesn’t work.
What kind of nut takes out a 400k mortgage when you’re a truck driver and your electric bill is $1200 a month? What kind of nut gives a truck driver with a $1200 electric bill 400k?