A tale of bats stuck in windows… and unstuck.
“‘I’m a little disappointed,’ [Al Franken] told CNN. ‘I had hoped they would keep it going a few more news cycles.’
“‘It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity he’s normally accustomed to,’ a Fox spokeswoman later told CNN.”
Peter’s comment: “Can our books please have some of that kind of obscurity, too??”
The usual pre-Worldcon madness is setting in while I’m still finishing work on this book… (Sigh.) Blogging at the end of the week may be more sporadic than usual, due to running into people and hugging them constantly, or less so, due to being surrounded by WiFi hotspots. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, Jim and Abby’s wedding went very well: they’re off in the Algarve somewhere now, toasting themselves. I have barely unpacked from this trip (and indeed I barely unpacked from the last one before leaving for the wedding in Glasgow): most things are just getting fired straight into a bigger suitcase. At least, since we’re flying straight from Dublin to Toronto, I don’t have to leave any bags unlocked… 🙂
So yesterday, after some delay, my new laptop showed up. Ryoh-ohki II (aka Ryoh-chan) is the US version of the Sharp Mebius MT1 — a Sharp Actius UM32W. Slightly bigger HD (40 gig instead of 30), faster processor (1 GHz), onboard 802.11 (one less dongle to carry), Firewire, USB 2.0, various other bits and pieces. Her chassis is exactly the same size as Ryoh-ohki’s, her weight just a shade more (about three pounds).
The only thing that’s slightly off is the case, which is plastic rather than (as in the older machine) metal, and feels less…reassuring, somehow. It’s also going to be less forgiving of scratches and so on…which is a nuisance. But I may be able to do something about it. If I’m not mistaken, there was a slightly older version of this machine which Dynamism carried for a while before Sharp started marketing the “Actius” line (just the Mebius “Muramasa” machines rebadged) directly into the US. I’m betting that the Japanese version had a metal shell, and (if it did) I’m going to see if it’s possible to send the new one to Japan to be recased. We shall see…
Jeez, look at me, finding fault with the poor thing before it’s been in the house for even a day. Oh well…don’t have much time to worry any further about it: I have this book to finish before the week’s out. While I busy myself with that, Ryoh-chan is undergoing a “brain transplant” from Ryoh-ohki via PC Relocator. This should take another couple of hours to finish, according to the countdown clock. After that, Ryoh-ohki gets wrapped up in the new machine’s packaging and sent off to Dynamism to get that poor sake-soaked keyboard taken care of…
Anyway, the big machine is not so much “over” its disk crash as it’s had most of the important things replaced. It remains to get some data recovered from the crashed hard drive, which is going to cost mucho dinero, unfortunately…but it needs to be done. Sigh…
Well, only insofar as the people responsible for his movie scripts won’t be getting any residuals from TV showings until the recall is over, as FCC regulations (specifically the “equal time rule”) mean that Ahhhnold’s films won’t be airing in California until the dust has settled. Just as “Star Trek” was removed from the LA airwaves in ’73, while George Takei was running for LA City Council…
“…somebody…told me she was reading [Coraline] to her 8 year old son and got rather upset, and nervous, and freaked-out, and her son patted her on the hand and said ‘It’s okay, it’s only a story.’ Which I thought was a very reassuring place to be. Kids understand that. Kids are really good at fiction.”
You tell ’em, Neil. A nice interview on SuicideGirls.com with Mr. Gaiman, one of my favorite people and a very smart man (though I do sometimes wonder why he used to keep his sunglasses on all the time: even in the breakfast room at Claridges. Ileen Maisel is still talking about that, Neil…).
Harcourt is beginning to reissue the “Young Wizards” books in a digest format (they’re still being issued in standard mass-market paperbacks as well, but with covers by Cliff Nielsen, who’s also doing the hardcover editions). The first piece of work by the new artist, Greg Swearingen, was the cover for the 20th-anniversary edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard (you can see the digest version of it below). Here also are his covers for Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry.
I like them all well enough, but I think I like the “Deep” cover best.
“A big galaxy is gobbling a tiny one, just as astronomers have long suspected, and for the first time there is photographic evidence of this kind of galactic cannibalism, snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope.”
(A precis of the paper in question and some images can be found here.)
The St. Clair Inc. Safety Sign Builder! Bring up the page, insert your text and whatever characters or headers you feel appropriate, hit the “go” button, and the web page produces a .PDF file with the graphic. (Thanks to Coolio’s for the link.)
Heh heh.
“New JK Rowlings are ten a penny (which must be galling for the Actual JK Rowling)… ” Louisa Young writes today in the Guardian. (Thanks to Blog of a Bookslut for the link. Hey, feel better, Jessa!)
…It makes me think of the old show-business progression, the Stages of a Career:
(1) Who’s J. K. Rowling?
(2) Get me J. K. Rowling.
(3) I want a cheaper J. K. Rowling.
(4) I want a younger J. K. Rowling.
(5) Who’s J. K. Rowling?
Granted, for novelists the whole arc seems to take considerably longer to happen than it does for movie, TV and music people. I guess we should be grateful.