Some Words

This is why we can’t have nice things. Note the people in the comments claiming they will never respect Conan after he wasted money with the sketches in the last three nights of his show, instead of sending that money to Hati. This is in the comment thread discussing his final episode, in which he notes that they did not actually spend that money. Hell, do people really think that someone would sell him an original Picaso on that short notice? This is why we can’t have nice things in our society. People are always there waiting to get indignant and angry, even when there is nothing to yell about. In three years, America’s number one export will be manufactured rage. But hey, at least the manufacturing jobs will be back… right? Right? I’m sorry CoCo, that might have been a little cynical.

These top 20 science fiction books of the decade list, part of the general rush of end of the year/decades list from last month, is proof that people don’t even bother to try anymore when they’re going to get their hate on about this or that popular thing. Just to sound old for a moment, when I was a teen, you thought up an almost unrelated reason to hate something, be it pop music or whatever. We took pride in our contrary notions. We crafted them carefully. If you disliked something, even if it was for made up reasons, you came up with better reasons. You didn’t just declare something poorly written or poorly composed. You claimed that it was crassly mercantile or that it was selling out. I suppose it’s impossible to sell out in the realm of writing, so people just say that something is poorly written these days, even if it’s just their taste. I may not like a book, but just because I was ambivalent about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel (I wasn’t. I quite liked it.) I didn’t say that it was because it was poorly written. In my day you had the “decency” to claim that it is an act of veiled racism or something. Where has this disingenuous and more comically awkward disdain gone? Why has it been replaced by people actually seeming to believe (instead of just claiming) they are tastemakers? Has our self delusion completed that delicate shift from knowing self delusion into actual self delusion? Or is it just too late at night, and I should acknowledge that school is starting again soon, and I should readjust my sleep schedule?

From time to time, I lament that Boing Boing no longer seems to be bringing me the amazing and absurd at quite the clip that it used to. They even seem to have dropped the “A Directory of Wonderful Things” slogan I recall them having. There is a stead stream of guest bloggers and the “wow, I never would have imagined that” moment seem farther and farther between. Meanwhile the political stuff I agree with but am annoyed by how they present continues to increase. Also, the steampunk stuff that isn’t steampunk has been on the rise. It is at this point that I remind myself that I am friends with a man I can only call the one man Boing Boing. Sadly for the world, he does not have blog, but I’m friends with him on Facebook, and that means my feed brings me weird and wonderful things.

For example, because of this man, I saw this particular video long before Boing Boing found it, and without all the weak sex jokes in the comment thread.

Anyone who doesn’t know Wizard/Casaubon is missing out. I leave him in his semi anonymous state because he always worried about getting a teaching position if his name got out. If I was on a hiring committee, I’d want to know that my life would be 100% more interesting with him around. Of course I didn’t say better… We can’t have him getting an ego.

P.S. Wizard, if you sent me an animal carcass in preservative fluid like you suggest you might send people in your January Christmas gifts note… lets just consider this whole note as a case of it being opposite day.

A while back I meant to say more about this stuff, but I’m going to just close the tabs…

Apparently there is a backlash against Ian McEwan going on. I can’t help but think that part of this is that there is a subset of readers (of whom I am often a part) who want authors to be perfect creators of wonderful gem like novels that change your life every time you read one, and are always as good as the last. There’s a reason we’re so often disappointed. McEwan also suffers from being successful enough that other people get a kick out of hating him. I’ve been guilty of this one from time to time as well, though not direct at him. The drummer from Phish once said he’d know they’d made it when people started hating them just for who they were, not their music. I’m guessing McEwan isn’t loosing a lot of sleep over this one. I’m also guessing that a lot of the people who are saying they hate him now are just disappointed because he didn’t live up to their over inflated expectations.

Mark Millar on the other hand I frequently feel is presented as far deeper than he really is. Much of his stuff seems like empty crap done for shock value. He probably isn’t loosing any sleep over me though either.

After having viewed the second half of the end of Russel T. Davies and David Tennant’s finale I’ve been feeling a little better about it. I still wouldn’t downgrade it to merely “farty” as Colin suggested, but it is less crap when viewed as a whole. My primary complaints remain however.

There was no real payoff for the Master making everyone on earth the Master, unless you count the “Master Race” pun, which still makes me want to punch RTD in the face. So I guess I’m not counting it.

The whole thing could have been edited drastically. I know they’re saying goodbye to someone a lot of people really loved, but the end sequence where he sees

everyone

again was a bit much, especially when it happened at the end of the last series already. And did they need the lighting bolts/junkyard confrontation in the first episode? Not in the end as it turns out. What is the point of being able to shoot lighting bolts that cause explosions when it just gives the guy you shoot at indigestion anyhow?

At any rate, it was not as bad as all that, almost pleasant in the end, and I did think that the acting was well done, when decent lines were there to make it possible. On to Smith/Moffat, which I have high hopes for, though it’s hilarious to see people complaining that Smith is not attractive. Because everyone wanted a piece of Pertwee and McCoy back in the day…

Okay, so the author of this New York Times article on cocktails of the last decade is not so full of hubris as to claim that they are listing the top cocktails of the past decade. The article does point out some interesting developments in cocktails, which have made quite the comeback, at least in some parts of the country. Granted, I started the decade unable to legally drink, but my perception at the time was that people were heavily oriented toward vodka in fruit juices for their libations. Now I’ll grant that I was wandering through the world of college at the time, where people have a tendency to go for the cheap/disgusting/potent triple play. A lot of people in that age group are sadly drinking to get drunk. Still, getting out of college and into the Twin Cities, there did not seem to be a lot of bars where tasty for its own sake, but not too sugary, was part of the drinking culture. Now I hear that there are a bevy of new beers becoming available there, to combine with Bells (the region’s standard setter for beer as far as I’m concerned) making the scene there much more delicious. Perhaps there are even a few bars serving better cocktails. I didn’t get out to the bars much in my later time in Minneapolis, but as I was getting ready to move, there were a few that I bumped into that seemed to be edging toward the idea of better cocktails making happier drinkers.

Is the list in the article a little heavy on New York bars? Yeah, but it’s the New York Times. I’ve got a little bias for west coast bartenders, but that may just be tinting my glasses against this article, which really only mentions west coast drinking once. Those recipes they list on the sidebar of the article remain delicious, no matter what my bias is.

It turns out that while car lanes continue through the intersection, at least one local judge thinks that the bike lanes don’t. Okay, so he’s a judge pro tem. Either way, the fact that the law’s interpretation can be mangled to this extent is absurd. What is the point of having bike lanes if some guy decides that they are not operative at the point in the road where they are most needed?

It was gratifying to see that others felt the Christmas episode of Dr. Who was . . . lacking. I know that this is a show aimed at children, but it has a large adult following, and I think that everyone, children and adults, appreciates plot pacing and structure on some subconscious level. When you set aside the bad dialog, the thin plot, the “master race” pun(!), and the grating Obama references (I wanted to punch Russel T. Davies at several of these points, not the least of which was when, in the documentary that BBC America showed afterward, he seemed to think that using Obama was particularly savvy of him) the editing left me wondering if scenes were cut severely in the editing room. Scenes just sort of ended, switching in mid stream. If they came back, I could have considered it an editing choice, to increase tension, but they would just drop what was going on and switch to something else. Did Davies develop narrative ADD?

I could forgive all of this if he hadn’t come off as so unbelievably smug in every interview I’ve seen, cackling gleefully about how good he is and how amazing we’ll all say he was. Everyone has a bad episode from time to time and it would have just been an unfortunate way to end a run on a show. Instead, I am now questioning Davies writing as a whole. Perhaps he needs to fall on his face again so that he remembers that people don’t love things just because he wrote them but rather because he wrote something good? He certainly isn’t deserving of being declared Master of geek science fiction. Of course neither, to my mind, does the infantile wish fulfillment of Mark Millar who appears on io9’s list as well. In fact, that list shows that things are looking a bit weak in the realm of science fiction.

Donkeylicious has a post citing the Bard for the use of they as singular, which is both convenient and technically forbidden. Having had a talk with a professor about this very issue. (I hadn’t done it, but I’d screwed up my use of ‘effect’ which was embarrassing for an English major.) This needs to become accepted. I had no idea that Shakespeare had done this, and am glad it was pointed out. The other options, as they point out in the post, are either inadequate or absurd. Fifty years from now, they will be available for use as singular. The question is really how long it takes to get there.

It’s been a while, and I’m going to start things off slow, though there are several things I hope to get to.

Starting off slow means this video, which is of Lissie recording Little Lovin. The song pulls off the neat trick of sounding like something I’ve heard before, even on the first listen. I’m still not sure it isn’t a cover, but my cursory search revealed nothing. Cover or not, it’s good.

There are a handful of webcomics that I have been reading for years. Some of them I have read since their inception. I started reading Scary Go Round when its author stopped writing Bobbins. He stopped writing Scary Go Round today. It’s worth checking out though, all seven and a half years of it. And there’s doubtless going to be something great coming in a few weeks, as he’s just on to new and better things. If you have the time to start from the beginning I recommend it, and webcomics being what they are, I also recommend tossing in for a shirt or something to help him keep going, if you like it. Generally webcomic t-shirts can be hit and miss, and often rely on in jokes that non-readers won’t get. John Allison, the author, generally scores more hits than misses with his merchandise. Though it is too late to get the ghost band, or the panda chasing beer, (two favorites of mine, which I won’t bother to explain because I’m lazy) you can still get Bears Will Eat You and several others. Okay, now that I’ve gotten that crass commercialization out of the way (Can you sell out to an independent artist?) it is back to reading about income tax.

Denby’s article on snark for the Guardian is better and wider ranging than it was, perhaps, intended to be. I found myself thinking about how I talked in a way that I had not since last reading Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, which was more recent than you would think. I have a friend who reads 1984 once a year, or at least used to. I might have to do that with Politics and the English Language, the most telling part is how much of it I realize applies to me, every time I read it.