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…until I have one of these.
Now I have just got to find out what’s going on with these people. Er, pandas. …I see at least a couple of “stock” characters: the chipper, cute kid, the wise old mentor doctor… the bad guy with the eye-patch…
(But I’m still wondering what the “-Z” is for.)
(“Oh jeez,” Peter is muttering, “more anime stuff!” But even he can see the point of this. Meanwhile, at least he now knows what to get me this Yuletide…)
And not just in LA. Giant sunspots 484 and 486 continue to transit the face of the sun, spitting off X-class solar flares every now and then. This prominence, according to Spaceweather.com, is as tall as thirty Earths…
They go on to say: “…On Sunday, Oct. 26th, there were two such blasts — one from each sunspot. The explosions hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space and somewhat toward Earth.
“Because of these events, sky watchers should be alert for auroras during the nights ahead. High-latitude sites such as Alaska, Canada and US northern border states from Maine to Washington are favored, as usual, but auroras could descend to lower latitudes as well. Forecasters estimate a 25% chance of severe geomagnetic storming when the incoming CMEs sweep past Earth and deliver (probably glancing) blows to our planet’s magnetic field.”
For these parts, anyway, where “really, really cold” usually means -5C. …Everything is gently silvered around the edges, as if God dusted the whole area with a really high grade of confectioners’ sugar last night. Gravel doesn’t crunch underfoot: it’s like stone. Leaves glitter. 
The big long-dead oak tree across the field is tastefully adorned with rooks, all holding still, their feathers fluffed up against the cold; and at the top of the tree, like a Hallowe’en ornament, perches a single raven.
In the pre-birdsong silence, incoming red-eyes have begun to streak the sky. The only sound is the engine of a car heading up the road past the house — and then, as it tries to take the curve onto the hill, the wheelspin-whine and hitting-the-gravel skrunnnnch! of the driver’s attempt to control his/her skid on hitting the ice that inevitably forms there.
Take the digital camera outside for a few shots, and after no more than two minutes, your fingers are numb.
Here comes winter…
Usually when I coin a word I do it as a joke. Today I’m impelled to do it on purpose.
Probably somebody else has invented a better word for a feature in a program, or appliance, or whatever, that’s supposed to make your life easier, and instead makes it more difficult…really annoyingly so.
Anybody use Amazon.com in the last day or so?
Does anybody know how to turn off the damn “Search Inside The Book” feature, so that it doesn’t bring up tens of thousands of useless, irrelevant items in a search for a single book?
This feature has great sucktionality. Used sparingly, used only when you want it, it would be super. But not all the time!!
Note also an associated piece of naughtiness about halfway down the “How It Works” page. You input your search terms. You get those tens of thousands of results thrown up to you. Let’s say that in the first page of results you see a sentence or so that looks like it’s from the book you need. (And bearing in mind the sheer number of results that come up, this seems unlikely.) You click on that sentence to see the rest of the page on which the sentence appears. But then it turns out that you’d better already be registered with Amazon.com as a customer…because if you’re not, you’ll get no result from clicking on that link you want. They’re holding the rest of your search for ransom until you give them your e-mail address and other personal info.
Normally I would resist going to the Barnes & Noble site. (Personal reasons, nothing important.) But this feature will drive me to that site if Amazon doesn’t fix it so that its use in searches is elective rather than imposed.
Just my opinion. I’ve always felt kindly toward Amazon, but they’re on the brink of losing my business.
to go hear a performance of just about anything at this place.
This picture of him is probably my favorite because it’s the first one I ever took of him: we were having lunch at the restaurant by the Boat Basin in Central Park.
Today we go into Dublin to celebrate — a good Indian restaurant for dinner, and yet another discussion (I bet) of the upcoming Last Rewrite of The Ring. Business as usual…
…none of which would be much fun without him. We’re seventeen years together now. He is my world; he makes it all happen.
Happy birthday, sweetie!
That review in the blog entry of a couple days ago made me start thinking about the reviews I see a little more often than the ones in print: I mean the reviews on Amazon.
There are writers who’ll tell you they pay no attention to the reviews to be found on Amazon and at the Barnes & Noble site. I usually find this kind of hard to comprehend, though there must be those who genuinely don’t look…or don’t care. Yes, some writers will tell you that the only reviews worth paying attention to (and not always even those) are the ones done by professional reviewers, the ones that appear in the trades. Certainly all you have to do to find evidence on which to base this case is go over to Amazon World (which is worth a glimpse if you haven’t seen it).
Well, other writers can do what they like. I do look at those reviews from time to time. I hope it’s not always simply ego making me do it. It can’t always be bad for you to see someone saying that they liked your book, can it? God knows, there are times in the middle of the night when every writer wants to hear that…
And then there are the negative reviews. Some of them are funny. But at the same time I often find myself looking at one or another of them and thinking, “Well, never mind if that’s funny…is it right?” Certainly the “professionals” don’t have a monopoly on correctly identifying something that doesn’t work. So I look at the reviews with some care. You never can tell when you’ll run into something useful…
Here are some from Amazon and B&N that caught my attention recently. I’m not always going to comment…
By far, So You Want to Be a Wizard has the most reviews:
Um…okay. 
(Why do I keep thinking of that Kliban cartoon? “I really go for a man in a thick suit!” …I see a lot of variants on this theme, though, from people who find it unusual to read a book in a single sitting. But here’s the other side of the “thick book” argument:
About Deep Wizardry:
A lot of the DW reviews are like that. But if I start to get cocky, there are always plenty like this:
“The plot kinda sucked but the Stuff was cool.” That’s the kind of thing that makes you wake up at night thinking, “Stuff. What does ‘stuff’ mean? And how the heck can I do more of it?…”
And there are some that are equivocal:
Uh…make up your mind?! …And a few review titles in passing: “I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” … “Great Story” … “Good,but not as good as the first book.”
And one which brought me up short:
Mmmm…boy, I hope not. …On High Wizardry:
Hmm. Well, leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether my integrity is intact in this regard, I really think that — assuming an omnipotent and ultimately compassionate Deity — then for a mortal to declare his or her own limits on how much ability said Deity has to redeem is probably futile. Yes, I know this is a heresy. I forget which one. I’ll sort it out with Her some other time.
Is “really wanting to write another book with the same characters” the same as “milking the orginal concepts [to] make a bit more money”? Seems some people do get this idea…but trying to combat it head-on instantly brings up charges of “protesting too much”. Oh well…
Wow. Better tell the people at Harcourt not to open any mail from the International Court of Justice at The Hague…
Yet, in other comments: “The best”, “Best of the series!”, “Definitly the best book in the series so far”. And charmingly, “In my next life, I wanna be Peach.”
As regards A Wizard Abroad: “The best of the series.” “Amazing!” “Grrrrrrreat!” And:
Uh… This will probably make sense some day. Soon, I hope. …Meanwhile, this next one is particularly intriguing: I think it’s the enthusiasm that captivates me.
Other comments: “Not the best in the series, but okay”, “Not bad, but could be better”, “Well… definitly not the best…”, as well as “Super,” “I love these books!”.
…You get the idea. The reviews for Wizard’s Dilemma and A Wizard Alone are equally mixed. Balancing all the possible negatives, in my view, are the positive reviews given them by people with terminal diseases and people involved with autism. These have come to me mostly in letters: I’m not going to quote them here.
So now a new book is out, and the first review has already appeared: it’s a kindly one. Others won’t be. I’ll probably look in again in a month or so and laugh, or shake my head…and get on with another book. It’s all I can do…
I’ve been putting things in and taking them out… Meanwhile, if you’re tired of looking at the white-on-white color scheme, look down at the bottom of the third column…the links under “Style sheet preview” will offer you some other schemes to try out.
“Spitfire [a new publisher about to start up in the UK] wants a return to adventure stories where men are men and debauchery is welcomed along with smoking and drinking.
“Female characters look like they will be given short shrift in Spitfire stories, as Mr Elliot believes JK Rowling was wrong to have made Harry Potter’s friend Hermione his equal.
“‘It is typical of modern children’s books in which there is a boy and a girl and the girl is as good as the boy,’ he said.
“[Richmal Crompton’s] Just William is a much better read for boys. Violet Elizabeth Bott was a whingeing, snivelling sneak who was always frightened. That is how I would like the girls to be.” 
…However, this gent seems to be remembering some other Violet Elizabeth Bott, possibly one in an alternate universe. The Violet Elizabeth in the William books that I read was rarely afraid of anything, and was best known for the (lisping but utterly calculated) threat to “thcream and thcream and THCREAM until I’m thick!” (ominous pause) “I can…“, thus effortlessly railroading the hopelessly outclassed boys around her into doing whatever she wanted. That’s the kind of woman they want in their books now, huh? (grin) …Bring her on.
A little background here from Mary Cadogan’s Just William Through the Ages:
“William’s attitudes towards members of the fair sex are well defined in the early books. On the whole he has little time for them. As Richmal Crompton was to write much later (in the 1962 Collectors’ Digest Annual): ‘He dislikes little girls, not only because he considers them to belong to an inferior order of being but also because he suspects them of being allies of the civilization that threatens his liberty.’ (Throughout the saga he makes no secret of his contempt for civilization. His classic quote is: ‘I don’t WANT to behave like a civilized yuman bein’. I’d rather be a savage any day. I bet savages don’t let themselves be dragged off to dotty ol’ women when they’d rather go to see blood-curdlin’ an’ nerve-shatterin’ westerns.’)
“The fearful feminine threat to William’s freedom is expressed in his skirmishes with a variety of village stereotypes like Miss Milton, the astringent martinet, and Mrs Monks, the vicar’s wife, who, after having so many church functions wrecked by [William’s gang,] the Outlaws, feels fully justified in foiling their knavish tricks. There are also those solemn ladies who are concerned with Higher Thought or Perfect Love or Psychic Phenomena whose doings both intrigue and repel William. Generally speaking, these female seekers of truth or appreciators of art are not over-responsive to the male sex. As Miss Featherstone of the Literary Society nervously predicts, ‘as soon as you begin to have men in a thing it complicates it at once’.
“‘On the whole William can cope fairly well with the most determined of elderly or middle-aged females. The direst threat to his noble (or ignoble) savage state comes in the form of that frill-bedecked, diminutive bundle of pertness that is Violet Elizabeth, the darling only child of the stinkingly rich sauce magnate who lives with his family at the Hall.
“William’s first meeting with Violet Elizabeth in Still — William is a classic example of the clash between the sexes. ‘William, pirate and Red Indian and desperado, William, woman-hater and girl-despiser’ finds his worst fears about girlish ghastliness realized when he is forced by his mother to go to tea at the Botts’ and meet the lisping little horror. She has bubbly blonde curls, glowing like a golden halo, a squeaky-clean pink and white face and a filmy white lacy frock, from the ballet-type skirts of which peep white silk-socked legs and white buckskin shoes.
“She shamelessly imposes her will upon him by threatening tears (the famous threat to ‘thcream and thcream’ until she’s ‘thick’ comes a little later). For William there is no escape from her tear-filling eyes and trembling lips as she insists that he plays ‘little girlth gameth’ with her, that he really likes ‘all little girlth’ and — most humiliating and horrific of all — that he wishes he was a little girl.
“Er — yes. Honest I do,” said the unhappy William.
“Kith me,” she said, raising her glowing face.
William was broken. He brushed her cheek with his.
“But even worse torture is to follow that notorious kiss as she piles on the final indignity: ‘Now leth play fairieth. I’ll thow you how.’ He spends the rest of the afternoon agonizingly, ‘in the character of a gnome attending upon Violet Elizabeth in the character of the fairy queen.'”
So much for William, who, for all his “savagery”, reveals himself as a soft-hearted and irredeemable weenie, or, as Nigel Molesworth would say, “uterly wet and a weed.”
(Anyway, thanks to Jessa at Blog of a Bookslut for the link.)
Livejournal user Quislibet has taken this pop song and translated it into Latin. Brilliantly, I think.
An excerpt:
amica esse videtur istorum hominum rhythmicorum.
(She appears to be a girlfriend of one of those rhythmic-oration people.)
sed, ut scis,
(But, as you know)
quis homines huiusmodi intellegere potest?
(Who can understand persons of this sort?)
colloquuntur equidem cum ista eo tantum, quod scortum perfectum esse videtur.
(Verily, they converse with her for this reason only, namely, that she appears to be a complete whore.)
(Blogger now collapses in laughter, frightening the cats.)
However fleetingly. (Yes, it’s probably “premium content…” …sorry.) (We also made the Hollywood Reporter, in the October 3 issue, but that too is premium content, and I won’t bother linking to it.) From a report on Mipcom, which started today in Cannes:
“Mexico’s Televisa is fielding its latest telenovela, “Dark Fate”; Canada’s Chum is pushing reality show “The Morning After”; Germany’s Tandem is touting its Siegfried saga, “The Ring”; Oz’s Southern Star is highlighting its comedy “The Sleepover Club”; and Indian sellers like Star TV will be pushing Hindi movies.”