This came up the other day. Now I see that Mark Evanier has had an email about it too.
But then Mark does one of the things he does best and asks the next question. 
I’m very fond of the LJ community customers_suck. I read it often to remind myself of the dreadful crap that almost all service-providers have to put up with at one point or another… yet another reason to be nice to all the behind-the-counter people whose paths I cross. But also I read it because sometimes there’s just something so hilarious to be found there that it makes the whole afternoon or evening.
This is one. If I wrote this into a screenplay, my producer would send the scene back with “Not believable, nobody is really this stupid” scrawled across it. …Nonetheless, what a great scene it would be to write.
Here’s the announcement via MarketWatch.
Warner Bros. says they’re rescheduling “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” because summer releases are better for family-oriented “tentpole” projects, and because the Writers’ Guild strike of late ‘07 / early ‘08 has unpredictably changed the pattern of other studios’ film releases for ‘08 / ’09.
While those are both believable claims, you can bet that a lot of people aren’t accepting them at face value. (This LA Times article suggests, among other things, that it’s Batman’s fault.)
I get the feeling that Warner’s going to have to do more than just whimper “We love our fans…” to derail the anger over this…
(ETA: Nikki Finke’s take on the situation, from Deadline Hollywood Daily: with a rant from Entertainment Weekly)
(Hmm, sounds like a Doctor Who title. You can just hear the denouement. “All right, Masters of the Hydrox, now listen to me! In accordance with Section Eighteen, paragraph twelve of the Shadow Proclamation, and by virtue of the power vested in me as the last of the Time Lords, I order you to divest yourselves of all excess vanilla creme and — oh, all right, not all, don’t look that way! Just lose the transfats and Bob’s your uncle.”)
…I liked them well enough when I was a kid: it’ll be interesting to see how they taste these days. Apparently they’re being “reissued” sometime this month.
(See also HydroxCookies.com)
For those of you who’re interested: Peter and I both have stories out in DAW Books’ new fantasy anthology Enchantment Place. (There’s a lot of good company in the anthology, BTW: Jody Lynn Nye, Esther Friesner, Laura Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rausch, and numerous others.)
The anthology’s stories center around a shopping mall located in an alternate-Earth version of Chicago. This mall caters to the non-mundane sector of the local society — vampires and weres, witches and wizards. (You can guess why when I heard about the project I got interested right away.)
Our stories run back to back. Mine, “Out of the Frying Pan”, details a series of unusual occurrences in the work week of a witch who runs a store specializing in the supply of magical herbs, as a strange veiled woman starts turning up day after day, setting fire to some unusual paperwork. Peter’s story (“And Into the Fire”) carries Annabelle’s tale a little further along — into the kitchen of a very high-end Chicago restaurant and the fringes of an encounter with magical organized crime.
Just a side note on these: every now and then in this business you find yourself building a character who really grows on you as you work. That happened in these stories. Annabelle (the witch in question) was a lot of fun to write, but I have to admit that even more fun was someone created as part of the end of my story: Adelio Famagiusta, sorcerer and superstar celebrity chef / food writer —
—famous…for the chain of restaurants of which SPQR was flagship, as well as for his never-ending succession of cookbooks, his relentless self-promotion, his flamboyant lifestyle, and his temper.
Adelio (now that I look back) seems to combine some aspects of Antonio Carluccio (the BBC’s famous and much-loved resident Italian TV chef) and Anthony Bourdain, with liberal dashes of other celebrity chefs tossed in (though the nowadays-de-rigueur swearing is kept in the background and in Italian). I really like Adelio —
“See how I am disrespected,” he shouted, “in my own kitchen! Here is a woman blessed, yes, blessed by the gods, who have sent her to me, me! Adelio Famagiusta! To be her patron, to give her hundreds of thousands of my good dollars… And what is my reward for my kindness?”
“A media coup?” said Annabelle. “Even more money than you have already?”
Adelio paused, astonished, and then burst out into the big laugh that Annabelle suspected had really made him so famous and beloved across the world. His joviality and love of food were practically tangible things, and he was also as far from the PR image of a sorcerer as you could get. Too often in the popular consciousness they tended to be seen as saturnine, grim, ascetic people, often overwhelmed by their sense of the importance of their own magic. But the only thing that overwhelmed Adelio was his sense of his own importance, an absolutely unshakeable belief that the universe could not exist in its present form without him. Annabelle thought that this was probably true: he was a tremendously talented chef with a gift for making food that people loved — and loved to make at home, which was far more unusual. But it didn’t do to let him know you shared his opinion of himself. That was too much like feeding honey to a bear… one who would critique the flavor and the provenance of the honey even while he scoffed it down.
Adelio is nowhere near so completely ego-driven as he might look at first glance: he uses people’s perceptions of that aspect of him with clear eyes, as a marketing tool. And there’s a lot more going on with him, underneath the marketing and the calculated displays of the behaviors his public expects to see. I’m beginning to think that possibly Adelio might rate a book of his own at a later date. We’ll have to see how that works out, as (around here at least) you need considerably more than just a single interesting character to hang a whole novel on.
Meanwhile, here are the ISBNs for those of you who might want to order somewhere besides Amazon:
ISBN: 9–780756–405106
ISBN-13: 978–0–7564–0510–6
Which would be (originally) Independent Pizza Co. in Drumcondra, but (even more so) its younger sister-facility, Gotham Café in South Anne Street. The excellent Adam Kuban of Slice, the pizza lovers’ website par excellence, has just kindly posted a note I dropped him about the place.
Gotham Café is one of our favorite places to eat in Dublin. We’ve been going there ever since it opened, and have (by now) probably eaten enough pizzas there to completely pave South Anne Street. It’s also where the Star Trek novel Dark Mirror was conceived in 1991 (as the book’s acknowledgement page notes) secondary to a long and wide-ranging discussion with Peter about Starfleet uniform styles, over a large pizza with extra Mozzarella, extra sauce, pepperoni, and hot chiles, and a medium with extra Mozzarella, double garlic, hot chilies, and onions, along with two bottles of Orvieto Secco and a whole lot of Ballygowan water. (The framed cover commemorating this slightly crazed event still hangs, I believe, in the owners’ office.)
Last time we were passing through, we took some pics of what we were eating and sent them along to Adam. With luck, many more transiting pizza lovers will now grace David and Jackie’s front doors and sample what we firmly believe is the best New York-style pizza on the island of Ireland.
(When this article was written, Gotham had no website. Of course they do now, at http://gotham.ie. Meanwhile, the original article at Slice is here.)
(BTW, I take no responsibility for the article’s slugline. “When Irish Pies Are Smiling”? Ow ow ow ow ow ow.)
(ETA: Someone’s posted a Flickr image of the Gotham menu page that features their “specialty” pizzas.)
No, really.