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Once upon a time, when the Young Wizards series was just getting started and the books were still at Delacorte, I did a story called “Midnight Snack” for a Dell-published anthology of teen fiction called Sixteen. (This is the story with the first line, “My father came down with the flu that week, so I was the one who had to go down to the subway and feed the unicorns.”) The anthology did very well, and various of its stories, including mine, were selected for publication in numerous US textbooks.

Something interesting happened at that point. One of the young characters tells the other that a parent is concerned about the way they’ve been behaving, and suspects that one or both of them might be on drugs. The other character, knowing that both of them (but especially the first one) are completely innocent of this kind of thing, snorts and says, “You kidding? You wouldn’t know which side of your nose to put the marijuana up.” Seems positive enough, huh? Two “clean” kids dealing realistically with fallout from a fantastic situation. Well, imagine my bemusement when the first textbook publisher to want to use the story demanded that the drugs reference be excised.

I remember being annoyed at the time, but thinking that the issue wasn’t worth making a big deal over; I chopped the line and let the story go through otherwise unchanged. Now I’m beginning to wish I’d dug in my heels, for I find I was at the thin edge of a problem which has become much, much worse.

The Language Police goes into truly scary detail about how pressure groups from both the right and the left are insisting that any content that might possibly upset or challenge any student anywhere should be removed from their textbooks. A quote from the Washington Post review:

So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The spineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. “What’s left,” [author Diane] Ravitch asks, “after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?” Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:

“Stories that have no geographical location. . . . Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant. Stories in which men are fearful and women are brave. Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved. Stories in which blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone because their handicaps are not handicaps. Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time.”

In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch.

Grrrrrr.

No more excisions. One disservice to my younger readers, however minor, has been enough. I will never cave again.

…if there’s an online source for video of the Olympic opening ceremonies? My VCR decided to stop recording just before the arrival of the flame. (mutter)

(Courtesy of The Accordion Guy.)

What every health professional wants.

“Koko asked to meet her specialists. They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate.”

When you write, you occasionally get mail that makes you want to tear your hair. But some of us are more liable to get this kind of stuff than others. And sometimes you’re fortunate enough to see a response to the inbound idiocy that is just noble.

“‘Enemies of our country?’ There’s all kinds of enemies of our country. If 250 years ago people had supported ‘my government right or wrong’ and intrusion into rights of privacy and punitive measures taken against those who speak out when they feel injustice is being done, this country would never have been founded in the first place. This country was founded, not by those who believe in lockstep obedience, but those with big mouths who sign their full names to protesting documents and were liberal minded enough to say, ‘This is wrong, something should be done, let’s do it.'”

You go, PAD!!

“The Transcendent Pig is a CD player that walks on three mechanical legs! It has a built-in alarm clock and can be used to deter muggers.”

…Or so says The Prior-Art-O-Matic at TheSurrealist.co.uk.

Also recommended: Dr. Unheimlich’s Disease Registry (“If you can’t achieve immortality by not dying, you can at least achieve it by dying of something original.”).

Hmm. Symptoms sound about right. Cure seems a little harsh, though. Time for a second opinion.

See also on the same page: the “Dossier Sexupifier”, the “Infinite Teen Slang Dictionary”, and the “Advertising Slogan Generator.”

(Thanks, Harry!)

“Two Columbia University scientists have come up with a computer-based way to extract detailed information from the fleeting images of the world mirrored on the curved surface of the eye.”

Shree Nayar, a professor of computer science and co-director of the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center, took high-resolution photographs of people that include their eyes and, in particular, the transparent part of the eye called the cornea. Then, with a postdoctoral researcher, Ko Nishino, he devised computer algorithms that analyze the images reflected in these natural mirrors, revealing a wealth of information.

The system can automatically recover wide-angle views of what people are looking at, including panoramic details to the left, right and even slightly behind them. It can also calculate where people are gazing – for instance, at a single smiling face in a crowd.

Next week when the book’s finished.

How to turn your iPod into a universal remote!

Virus “harnessed to kill cancers”

The virus lacks a gene viruses normally use to disguise themselves so they can sneak into the cell unnoticed.

Normal cells can recognise they are under attack by the modified virus and commit suicide to prevent it from replicating and infecting other cells.

Cancer cells are programmed differently and resist suicide at all costs.

This “selfishness” on the cancer’s behalf allows the engineered virus to replicate within the cancer cells and spread through the tumour tissue.

King Arthur in Fifteen Minutes

New scans of some of the original film shot on the Apollo 11 mission have been made available at the Project Apollo Image gallery.

Images identified with the prefix AS11-40 are now seen for the first time in their clearest and most accurate presentation to date, and are a result of recent work by Johnson Space Center to digitally scan original Apollo film. The process involves removing each original film roll from a double-freezer, allowing it to thaw, then digitally scanning each frame using an Oxberry adapted HR-500 long roll film scanner.