MemeMachineGo!

=v= Acclimating to Nebraska means getting up to speed with seasons. There are seasons back in the Bay Area, of course, but they usually arrive with less hoopla. Apparently there's something here called "Huskers Season," which I got completely wrong, as I thought it involved harvesting corn. Well, live and learn.

I was clued in on the proper way to celebrate the Winter Season (which comes a few months early in these parts), so when the time came, I successfully participated in the annual Donning of the Union Suit. Naturally, I did this with the appropriate fanfare, courtesy of Billy Bragg (and his accent):

There's power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the 'ands of the worker
But it all comes to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a Union ... Suit

Yep, I'm finally starting to fit in here.

Potlatch 12 is a small literary speculative fiction convention coming up in San Francisco from February 21-23, 2003. Like last time it was in SF in 2001, I'm running the writers workshop. I'm very excited about the stellar group of workshop leaders we have this year, Cory Doctorow, Howard Hendrix, Rachel Holmen, and Debbie Notkin.

Critiquing is a great way to learn more about writing, and this is a great opportunity — I'd love to see any of you there.

Even if you're not a writer, but are a speculative fiction reader who enjoys intelligent conversation about books, check out the con.

People has chosen Ben Affleck as the sexiest man alive.

Once again they fail to recognize my work.

These things are so political.

There's another second Saturday of the month coming up in a week and a half, Saturday, December 14. And that means an SF Improv show at Cafe Eclectica, topically themed and titled 'Tis the Season for Loss of Reason.

Don't miss it, or you'll be trapped in a pit of self-loathing and despair.

=v= I am saddened to hear about the passing of Ivan Illich, a unconventional yet cogent social thinker. In his 1974 essay, "Energy and Equity," Illich demonstrated that the time saved by owning and using a car was less than that spent earning money to buy, fuel, and maintain one. His reasoning was what first led me to think seriously about living — and thriving — car-free.

ObComix: A cartoon version of Illich was on hand for the very first appearance of Roadkill Bill, and there was a series of "Illichville" strips in Roadkill Bill last year.

The Nativity will not be televised.

An English village school has banned parents from taking photos at its nativity play for fear the pictures will end up in the hands of paedophiles. Head teacher Sue Stokes wrote to parents instructing them not to bring cameras or videos to the play after school governors said modern technology meant pictures could be flashed around the world in seconds to be used by anyone. The school has refused to comment on the ban, ordered after a spate of investigations into paedophile activity, including the FBI's discovery of a 7,000 worldwide subscribers to a child porn site.

At first glimpse, I considered this ludicrous... what, is there some community of Nativity Play fetishists out there slavering to get Onanical over implied off-stage sex between a prepubescent Mary and the Holy Spirit?

And then I thought of all the actual communities of fetishists there are to be found on the Net.

And now I'm scared to look.

(Via Amorous Propensities)

A favorite book of mine is Daniel Pinkwater's collection of radio commentaries, Hoboken Fish and Chicago Whistle. Here's a lengthy excerpt. Each is too short to excerpt further without doing violence to it, so I'm not doing so.

Heartless Bitches International explains why "Nice Guys" are often such losers.

What's wrong with Nice Guys? The biggest problem is that most Nice Guys (tm) are hideously insecure. They are so anxious to be liked and loved that they do things for other people to gain acceptance and attention, rather than for the simply pleasure of giving. You never know if a Nice Guy really likes you for who you are, or if he has glommed onto you out of desperation because you actually payed some kind of attention to him.

Nice Guys exude insecurity — a big red target for the predators of the world. There are women out there who are "users" — just looking for a sucker to take advantage of. Users home-in on "Nice Guys", stroke their egos, take them for a ride, add a notch to their belts, and move on. It's no wonder so many Nice Guys complain about women being horrible, when the so often the kind of woman that get's [sic] attracted to them is the lowest form of life...

An interview with Jeffrey Masson, author of The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the Feline Heart:

Cats are different because somehow — and this is what I think is so fascinating — they have made the transition. Somewhere along the line, they've chosen to live with people and to form an intimate bond with them. And that has allowed them to become a social species. They haven't changed genetically in four thousand years. I just don't see any scientific explanation except that they've made a choice. It goes against their evolution to bond with an alien species.

Hmmm. I haven't read the book, but claiming that cats' relationship to humans "goes against their evolution" doesn't make sense to me on the face of it. As I've ranted previously, evolution is uncaring and mindless, not seeking to benefit species or making 'progress'. I don't consider it meaningful to speak of an animal species going against evolution. They do what they do, and pay the genetic consequences. If domesticated cats didn't survive to reproductive age and reproduce, then they'd die out. Either way, they'd be experiencing the effects of evolutionary forces.

And I actually mean 'animal' to be exclusive of humans, there. We're memetic replicators also and memes can trump genes, an assertion I'm not going to attempt to justify in this blog entry. As ever, see Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine for more. This should not be mistaken as a claim for human superiority: being subject to memetic evolutionary pressure confers no moral advantage over genetic evolutionary pressure.

An interview with sf author John Aegard:

It's much easier to write stuff you're enthusiastic about. Find projects that are fun and do them. There's so little reward to this game that you might as well be entertained by what you write.

[...] Heart always matters.

Long, rambling, raw transcript of a Grant Morrison interview:

I thought, 'What the Hell is Disney?' Walt Disney's dead now but Disney persists as a concept and people who were born after the death of Walt Disney grow up and assume positions within Disney. What are they assuming positions within? It's in this really devotional way too. What makes you grow up to wear a Mickey Mouse head and go round scaring children? Or 'I'm going to end up on the Board of Directors of Disney?' Why, why do these things occur? So I was just seeing them as in the way the Demons in the old Grimoires were seen which was kinda aggregates of power to which people could adhere themselves to or join in cultish fashion so I began to think I could talk to them like that and use ceremonial magic methods to talk to corporations and found there were ways of doing it — that's why I'm wearing a suit — this is my magical garb for this working.

[...] My Uncle Billy would give me magic books, like you I was into myths and legends, my family were very witchy, my mother read tea leaves but nothing interesting ever happened to me, or so I thought, like you say - I never thought about it in those terms, I would sit and talk with imaginary friends, communicating with foxes in the hills and all that kinda stuff which I later realised was quite shamanic or totemistic. But Billy would give me these books, this was when I was a teenager having a shitty time above Fine Fare — I started looking at these books: instead of just window dressing for the kind of stories I was making up when I was a teenager, y'know, you'd do some occult thing and the witch is wanting to say something with the entity, so I'd look up the book on witchcraft and copy out the spells an I began to think, 'Well, what are these actually saying, what is this?' and I was like 19 and I did a ritual from one of the books to se if it worked and it worked! I got a manifestation of energy which seemed to exert a gravitation pull on me — again, this is no bullshit - it was an intense, emotional vortex, or whatever the hell it was, with this strange visual component. And when I realised it worked I began to do lots of experiments and I've been doing it ever since to see how it works. In the nineties I realised the work I was doing was the magic, it was the same thing, which is where Flex Mentallo came from initially and then The Invisibles came from that, The Invisibles became the ongoing experiment into how closely I could get these things to work by actually drawing things by actually writing things down and making them happen. As is legendary to anyone whose read The Invisibles, I ended up in hospital.

(Via LinkMachineGo)

24 Qualities that Geniuses Have in Common:

1. Drive. Geniuses have a strong desire to work hard and long. They're willing to give all they've got to a project. Develop your drive by focusing on your future success, and keep going.
2. Courage. It takes courage to do things others consider impossible. Stop worrying about what people will think if you're different.
3. Devotion to goals. Geniuses know what they want and go after it. Get control of your life and schedule. Have something specific to accomplish each day.
4. Knowledge. Geniuses continually accumulate information. Never go to sleep at night without having learned at least one new thing each day. Read. And question people who know.
5. Honesty. Geniuses are frank, forthright and honest. Take the responsibility for things that go wrong. Be willing to admit, 'I goofed' and learned from my mistakes.
6. Optimism. Geniuses never doubt they will succeed. Deliberately focus your mind on something good coming up.
7. Ability to judge. Try to understand the facts of a situation before you judge. Evaluate things on an open-minded, unprejudiced basis and be willing to change your mind.
8. Enthusiasm. Geniuses are so excited about what they are doing, it encourages others to cooperate with them. Really believe that things will out well. Don’t hold back.
9. Willingness to take chances.Overcome your fear of failure. You won't be afraid to take chances once you realize you can learn from your mistakes.
10. Dynamic energy. Don’t sit on your butt waiting for something good to happen. Be determined to make it happen.
11. Enterprise. Geniuses are opportunity seekers. Be willing to take on jobs others won't touch. Never be afraid to try the unknown.
12. Persuasion. Geniuses know how to motivate people to help them get ahead. You'll find it easy to be persuasive if you believe in what you're doing.
13. Outgoingness. I've found geniuses able to make friends easily and be easy on their friends. Be a ‘booster’ not somebody who puts others down. That attitude will win you many valuable friends.
14. Ability to communicate. Geniuses are generally able to get their ideas across to others. Take every opportunity to explain your ideas to others.
15. Patience. Be patient with others most of the time, but always be impatient with your self. Expect far more of yourself than others.
16. Perception. Geniuses have their mental radar working full time. Think more of others' needs and wants than you do your own.
17. Perfectionism. Geniuses cannot tolerate mediocrity, particularly in themselves. Never be easily satisfied with your self. Always strive to do better.
18. Sense of humor. Be willing to laugh at your own expense. Don't take offense when the joke is on you.
19. Versatility. The more things you learn to accomplish, the more confidence you will develop. Don’t shy away from new endeavors.
20. Adaptability. Being flexible enables you to adapt to changing circumstances readily. Resist doing things the same old way. Be willing to consider new options.
21. Curiousity. An inquisitive, curious mind will help you seek out new information. Don't be afraid to admit you don’t know it all. Always ask questions about things you don’t understand.
22. Individualism. Do things the way you think they should be done, without fearing somebody's disapproval.
23. Idealism. Keep your feet on the ground — but have your head in the clouds. Strive to achieve great things, not just for yourself but for the better of mankind.
24. Imagination. Geniuses know how to think in new combinations, see things from a different perspective, than anyone else. Unclutter your mental environment to develop this type of imagination. Give yourself time each day to daydream, to fantasize, to drift into a dreamy inner life the way you did as a child.

Possessing 12 or more of these traits bears a high correlation with being a genius, but I must stress that this is provided for informational purposes only. A diagnosis of genius can only be made on the basis of a detailed history and mental status examination by a qualified professional.

(Via Circadian Shift)

David Rakoff on Stuart Little, closet case.

White does give Stuart a love interest. A small, wren-like bird named Margalo who stops briefly in the Little household. And Stuart's devotion is ardent to be sure, but not precisely romantic. It is closer in nature to Janet Reno's self-admitted "abiding fondness for men": somewhat theoretical and confusing. I'm not advocating that Stuart prove himself by engaging in a little hetero-normative trans-species loving; it is, after all, still a children's book. But even within that chaste context, Stuart is only playing at lover, as he plays at everything.

He is unable to resist stepping back in commentary, even as he is saving Margalo from the jaws of Snowbell, the Littles' cat. He grooves on the theatrics of the situation, casting himself in the Sidney Carton role: "'This is the finest thing I have ever done,' thought Stuart." But feelings of devotion and protective nobility are not love. Almost every gay boy I know had that awkward adolescent moment when he made his very close female friend doubt her own desirability because he displayed no interest in jumping her bones, even as he himself was thinking, "Well, lip-synching into hairbrushes to the Supremes in her bedroom ... this is really romantic ... right?"

Margalo eventually flies from the Little home, possibly tired of waiting around fruitlessly for a little action (the official White version being that the feline peril in the house has become too great). Stuart takes to the open road, ostensibly to find her and make her his own, although he doesn't entirely commit to the he(te)roism of that romantic quest, either. "While I'm about it, I might as well seek my fortune, too," he muses. It's a little bit like resignedly hoping that there might be some cute guys at your engagement party.

Mark Morford nails it:

Gosh sometimes the colon clench-inducing Bush political cowpies stack up so fast you almost can't keep track.

It's getting so it's nearly impossible to follow which war-crimes monster or which convicted lying felon or which mysterious pro-corporate stable boy is heading what major investigative commission or sinister domestic-surveillance database or cramming what vile homeland-security bill with how many tons of conservative pork. Whew.

It's the GOP's infamous rapid-punch, pile-on strategy, and it goes something like this:

Overload our collective gag reflex with enough reckless laws and appointments, enough shockingly irresponsible decisions any one of which would, by itself, offend and appall anyone with a cognitive pulse, and they all simply become a numbing swirl of indecipherable atrocities no one has the will to object to anymore.

"I'm going to commit suicide with a man I got acquainted with through an Internet bulletin board for those who want to kill themselves"

A man and a woman who were found dead in a Tokyo apartment in late October got acquainted through an Internet site for suicidal people and met with the sole purpose of dying together.

[...] It remains unclear through which suicide site the man and the woman got acquainted. There are numerous sites for those who want to kill themselves. One of them has received more than 160,000 page views since opening in April 2000.

Sure makes Salon's Match Made in Hell stories seem tame. Wonder if this'll catch on enough to be demonized. "We have to keep the children safe from Internet suicide sites."

Ted Rall's polemic, George W. Bush, Liberal:

On the surface, the main political story appears to be "Clueless Democratic Party Beaten to Pulp by Vibrant if Unscrupulous Republicans." But the bigger, weirder story is that liberals have won the culture wars — and have corrupted the GOP with the worst aspects of their beliefs. Incredibly, the hard-right Bush Administration has turned out to be composed of old-fashioned tax-and-spend, welfare-coddling, big-government liberals.

[...] In 2000 Democrats ridiculed the first part of Bush's "compassionate conservatism." Little did they suspect that the last half would turn out to be the real joke.

By every measure, Bush the Younger has pursed an agenda that attacks everything conservatism stands for — looking out for America first, smaller government, lower taxes, balancing the budget, respecting privacy rights. Even the neoconservatives who took over the GOP's ideological base during the 1980s — defined in the Dorsey Dictionary of American Politics and Government as opposed to "government regulation of personal behavior in areas of morality, school prayer, abortion and so on"--have been left out in the cold.

Ever since it was determined almost a decade ago, everyone knows how men find a specific waist-to-hip ratio attractive in women, immutable and consistent across all cultures and time. Too bad it's wrong.

The oft-repeated claim about the stability and time-invariance of the waist-to-hip ratio of Playboy centerfolds and Miss America winners has been used to support a theory about a highly specific and unmalleable preference built into male psychology through evolution by natural selection. As already noted, there are other reasons to be skeptical of the Darwinian explanation. Yet, regardless of its apparent merits, this paper shows that the empirical description of the self-reported WHR among these two sets of American beauty icons is not correct. For both groups, there is more variation in WHR than has been suggested and a more specific pattern of change over time.

(Via Follow Me Here)

I regularly toss links to Boing Boing, but I seem to have lost touch with the Boing Boing zeitgeist somewhere along the way... they've only run one of the last 20 or so links I suggested, the Evil Clown Face Generator I pinched from Eclectica. Occasionally, I suggest a link to New World Disorder. And I often toss links Vegan Porn's way. Like this one on, um, possum fur nipple warmers.

Possum fur nipple warmers are new, fun, and functional. [...] For luxury in nipple warmers you shouldn't go past possum fur.

Introduced into New Zealand about 150 years ago from Australia, the brushtail possum has multiplied now to over 70,000,000. With no predators, this pest has decimated huge tracts of New Zealand native forests eating 21,000 tons of vegetation nightly.

[...] All controls used in the past have had minimum impact. Poisoning of possums is an environmentally unacceptable way of control. Only through world wide marketing of possum fur products (Eco-fur products) can this pest be safely controlled.

One of the nice things about sharing links is others' takes. Quoth Herman in the Vegan Porn entry:

I owe Zed a beer, but then again, he just made mine shoot through my nose, so maybe we're even. [Quote from article] Uh-huh. Flagged as juvenile in anticipation of the comments. Make me proud.

(The previous link goes to the entry and comments.)

At first glimpse, I thought The latest Vegan Porn entry was in regard to the same Internet suicide pact I posted recently. But when I actually read all the words, I saw it was about a different Internet suicide pact.

A man has confessed to killing and eating another man who volunteered to be killed in one of Germany's strangest cases in years, prosecutors said yesterday. The 41-year-old suspect recorded the crime on a video camera after finding the apparently willing victim through an advertisement posted on the Internet, the state prosecutor's office in the central German city of Kassel said in a statement.

I've omitted the most grisly details. C'mon, click it. You know you want to.

What's the deal here? Is The Sorrows of Young Werther enjoying renewed popularity or something? (Hmm. It is ranked 1946 on amazon.de.)

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, et al, on Amy Hempel:

To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer's kitchen table for 10 weeks taking apart "The Harvest." The first thing you study is what Tom calls "horses." The metaphor is — if you drive a wagon from Utah to California, you use the same horses the whole way. Substitute the word "themes" or "choruses" and you get the idea. In minimalism, a story is a symphony, building and building, but never losing the original melody line. All characters and scenes, things that seem dissimilar, they all illustrate some aspect of the story's theme. In "The Harvest," we see how every detail is some part of mortality and dissolution, from kidney donors to stiff fingers to the television series Dynasty.

The next aspect, Spanbauer calls "burnt tongue." A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images, short-cut adverbs, and clichés.

In minimalism, clichés are called "received text."

In The Harvest, Hempel writes, "I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence." Right here, you have her "horses" of death and dissolution and her writing a sentence that slows you to a more deliberate, attentive speed.

Oh, and in minimalism, no abstracts. No silly adverbs like sleepily, irritably, sadly, please. And no measurements, no feet, yards, degrees or years-old. The phrase "an 18-year-old girl" — what does that mean?

In "The Harvest," Hempel writes, "The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me."

Instead of some dry age or measurement, we get the image of someone just becoming sophisticated, plus there's burnt tongue, plus she uses her "horse" of mortality.

[...] What else you learn about minimalism includes "recording angel." This means writing without passing any judgments. Nothing is fed to the reader as fat or happy. You can only describe actions and appearances in a way that makes a judgment occur in the reader's mind. Whatever it is, you unpack it into the details that will re-assemble themselves within the reader.

Amy Hempel does this. Instead of telling us the boyfriend in The Harvest is an asshole, we see him holding a sweater soaked with his girlfriend's blood and telling her, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."

I took At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom out of the library last night and read "The Harvest." Everything Palahniuk says about how carefully crafted her prose is is true. But I remain sufficiently a literary neanderthal to prefer stories whose virtues include plot.

For 17 years a Bay Area couple has spent $20 a day on lottery tickets, or $124,000. Recently they beat 24 trillion to one odds to win two California lottery games in one day. There are any number of things about this story and its presentation to croggle the brain.

It had to happen sooner or later for Angelo and Maria Gallina

Why, yes, if you spend $20/day on lottery tickets, it "has to happen" for you.

Since winning, about the only thing the Gallinas have spent money on is more lottery tickets. They were holding $20 worth for another SuperLotto Plus draw this week.

"Sure hope I win," said Angelo.

The Gallinas, who say the lottery is their primary form of recreation, are planning a trip — primarily, it seems, because planning a trip seems required of lottery winners and the Gallinas want to be good sports.

Good show. There's too little sportsmanship left in the world.

"We'll go to Oakland, maybe," said Angelo, smiling.

"Or maybe we'll go to Italy," said his wife, who comes from Bari, Italy.

"Easy, easy," replied her husband, putting a fiscally responsible hand on her arm.

Maria says she wants to buy a new house. Angelo says he isn't so sure. About the only thing they agreed on was that they would be sitting in front of the TV this week as always, holding hands and watching the numbered balls shoot from the lottery machine.

[...] The Gallinas say they hope all the money will not change their lives, except to make it easier to buy more lottery tickets. They also hope it will not generate the sudden appearance of long-lost relatives and best friends.

"We won't tell anybody," Angelo said, staring straight into a bank of cameras, "and maybe they won't find out."

[...] Shaking the gadget [which they used to generate numbers] over and over, week after week, and copying down the numbers was not easy, he said. He credited his windfall to "hard labor."

In the back of the room stood the couple's accountant, Mark Vranes, who said that spending $124,000 on lottery tickets was OK for the Gallinas because it has "added meaning to their lives."

[...] Also standing by was lottery manager Dolores Walton, who said the Gallinas were good customers and that spending $20 a day on lottery tickets was not unreasonable. For the past five years, the lottery has been ordered by the Legislature to print the words "Play Responsibly" and the phone number of a problem gamblers' counseling service on its tickets.

"I suppose this is playing responsibly," Walton said. "It paid off, didn't it?"

In other news, an oil industry executive said global warming is a myth.

My snarky tone is actually not aimed at the Gallinas. They obviously have a sense of humor, seem like nice enough people, and in the absence of any of the coverage suggesting otherwise, I assume they could comfortably afford the $20 a day, and so weren't hurting themselves or anyone. It was their chosen recreation, and they were having fun, and I've seen nothing to suggest that they were under any illusions about their likelihood of winning. Which isn't saying that I don't consider it a foolish use of money, just not any more foolish than any number of other things that are common, and many of which are harmful.

My snarkiness is reserved for presenting buying lottery tickets as a sensible investment, particularly a lottery official asserting that spending $20 a day is playing responsibly.

Scientists discover stress is bad for you.

Researchers have known for many decades that physical stress takes a toll on the body. But only relatively recently have the profound effects of psychological stress on health been widely acknowledged. Two decades ago, many basic scientists scoffed at the notion that mental state could affect illness. The link between mind and body was considered murky territory, best left to psychiatrists.

But in the last decade, researchers have convincingly demonstrated that psychological stress can increase vulnerability to disease and have begun to understand how that might occur.

Occasionally I hear some yahoo say "Modern life isn't stressful! We've got it easy! Our cavemen ancestors, facing down sabretooth tigers, they had stressful lives!"

Certainly modern life has any number of advantages over those days, but such yahoos are full of shit. People responded to their fight or flight reflexes. Stress is what happens when you suppress it, and smile and nod and grit your teeth and go back to your cubicle.

[...]Why do some people seem more vulnerable to life's pressures than others? Personality and health habits play a role. And severe stress in early life appears to cast a long shadow.

So if you have kids, please do what you can to give them a safe environment.

John Shirley's mental state of the union:

Thanks to that horrible street drug, I was temporarily able to experience full psychosis, artificially induced-hence I know what one form of psychosis is like, and have a sense of what the psychotic endure: the sense of being strapped to an evil carnival ride going ten times too fast, everything nauseating, everything terrifying, and it never seems to stop. The feeling of being utterly subjected to forces outside of your control. All that you have left is the part of you that experiences the nightmare.

But it was all over in 48 hours or so, and I was able to wake up from the nightmare. Some people are born into it; some people never wake up from it. It's so easy for the "sane" to shrug off the suffering of a psychotic. If only they knew...

(Via incuBLOGula)

Happy Yule. (The exact moment of the solstice is today at 16:14 PST.) S.A.D. sufferers, take heart: the days are only getting longer from here on out (well, for the next couple of seasons, anyway.)

MemeMachineGo! is three seasons old today.

Poplife by Matt Fraction (via Die Puny Humans):

I have no idea how producers—really good producers, actual in the trenches, up to the elbows, getting' the job done producers—do it. I try. Really, I try. But then, much like a teenage girl raccoon, I get distracted by shiny things and have mood swings. So all kinds of crap falls through the cracks. The producer that's allied with MK12 has a binder in which he keeps the supplies for his other binders. THAT is a good producer. And possibly a potential serial killer. But definitely a good producer.

I have a binder with a sandwich in it, I swear to god.

Herman Thrust is now a barber:

Yep, I cut my own hair. And why not? Girls seem to be able to do this easily enough, and I'm big on equality! The people that usually cut my hair don't generally have a university degree in physics, and how can you cut hair without a thorough grasp of physics, like I happen to have (on paper, anyway)? On a similar note, AngelA left about an hour before and wouldn't be coming back for at least 24 hours, and that definitely called for a round of bachelor university. I even knew where the scissors were, and they were that kind with the curly bit of metal on one finger loop — barber scissors! Why, that's like leaving a loaded gun around, as far as I'm concerned. I'm so not to blame here.

I tried cutting my own hair about six years ago, and it didn't exactly go well. I figured it was time to give it another try, because if nothing else, well, I know a lot more HTML. That's really all the rationalizing I need to do about something, folks.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Last June, bass player and all-round Music Guy Jon Sobel, with whom I've played before, emailed to ask if I'd be interested in joining a new band he was forming. "Pope," I answered smoothly. "Does the. Shit in the woods. Also, a bear." Fortunately, Jon is used to dealing with musicians, so he took that to mean "yes."

In Passing:

My girlfriend's ex-girlfriend likes to try to win her back, and it seems to happen whenever I've got a paper due. Seriously... let's see... yeah, four papers this semester, four ex attacks, perfectly timed. I think she's got a copy of my syllabus.

And a Toronto bike rack with a fitted cosy.

Merry Christmas, everyone. And if that's not your thing, have a happy December 25th anyway. Either way, check out E-sheep's Saturnalia.

One of my Xmas gifts this year (by request) was Writing the Romantic Comedy by Billy Mernit. I was interested in Rober Ebert's synopsis of the formula in his review of "Two Weeks Notice"

If I tell you "Two Weeks Notice" is a romantic comedy and it stars Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, what do you already know, and what do you need to know?

You already know: That when they meet the first time, they don't like each other. That circumstances bring them together. That they get along fine, but are sometimes scared by that and back off a little. That they are falling in love without knowing it. That just when they're about to know it, circumstances force them apart. That they seem doomed to live separately, their love never realized. That circumstances bring them back together again. That they finally cave in and admit they're in love.

You need to know: What her job is. What his job is. What they disagree about. What their personality flaws are. And whether, just when their eyes are about to meet, it is a woman who seems to lure him away, or a man who seems to lure her away? You also need to know certain plug-in details of the movie, such as which ethnic groups and ethnic foods it will assign, and what fantasy dreams it will realize.

I have not, by making these observations, spoiled the plot of the movie. I have spoiled the plot of every romantic comedy. Just last week I saw "Maid in Manhattan," and with that one you also know the same things and don't know the same things. The thing is, it doesn't matter that you know. If the actors are charming and the dialogue makes an effort to be witty and smart, the movie will work even though it faithfully follows the ancient formulas.

I'm taking a screenwriting course through the UC Berkeley extension this spring, and a couple of the things under consideration for what I'll write during the course are romantic comedies. Like Ebert says, they're the comfort food of movies, but like the titular character of Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels concludes, there's value in making people laugh.

"Being John Malkovich" was one of my favorite movies of recent years, so I eagerly anticipated "Adaptation" from the same screenwriter and director. And I wasn't disappointed. It's original and very funny. I think it and "About a Boy" were my favorite movies of the year, not that I saw many. I was surprised to see this extraordinarily inept review in Salon.

But just for kicks, let's do something adamantly un-meta and put "Adaptation" in context -- specifically, in the context of the unusually large number of fine, or at least interesting, movies that have been adapted from books, short stories or plays this year.

Here Zacharek displays the self-congratulation she's accusing the filmmakers of, while willfully missing the point. "Adaptation" is something different from an adaptation of The Orchid Thief

The refusal of Kaufman (the real one or the meta one) to bow to stupid Hollywood standards is both a kind of withdrawal and an avowal of superiority. The unspoken message seems to be: "Leave it to hacks like David Lean and John Huston to actually do the work of bringing books to the screen." Jonze and Kaufman are too good for it, and "Adaptation" is their assertion that the most interesting movie they could possibly make is one that's all about them.

I cannot find anything in the movie that's critical of the process of adaptation or the people who do it. It affirms how difficult it is. So difficult that the fictitious Kaufman gave up at even attempting to do it straight, and we're invited to believe that that mirrors the real Kaufman's experience. (Of course, we're invited to believe a lot, and the movie doesn't give us a lot of clues as to what are the boundaries of the fiction.)

I wondered what Orlean's thoughts were on being written into the movie in that fashion. Naturally, the web made it easy to find out.

When they wanted to bring the character of Susan Orlean into the script, the whole thing "seemed completely nuts," she said. They wanted her to have a relationship with her subject. They wanted her to use drugs and try to kill people. Even if you put aside the slanderous parts, the "fantasy parts" of the movie, she said, there were still lots of questions: "Did I want that much visibility? Did I want to be any kind of character?"

She recalled, "I initially said, `Well, go ahead, but change my name.' " Then she started wondering whether she really wanted her book in a movie with someone else's name on it. The answer was no. "I can't let them change my name," she said. It helped her to see "all the other kids jumping off the cliff," she said. That is, Mr. Laroche and Mr. McKee both let their real names and life stories be used. And of course there was Charlie Kaufman, who is not only portrayed as fat, bald and horrible looking (Ms. Orlean said that he's actually "adorable, cute, small, wiry and nice looking") but also is shown masturbating his way through the movie. Finally Ms. Orlean gave in: "What the heck? It's an adventure."

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and other fame, gave this interview:

A lot of Canadian expatriates such as yourself are doing wonderfully creative and innovative things in terms of new media and the Internet. Do you have any explanations or insights here? Is there something in the water north of the border?

Yes, we are taking over. We will eventually own the entire world.

Actually, Bruce Sterling thinks there is something unique about the Canadian perspective. In the introduction he wrote for my new short story collection "A Place So Foreign and Eight More" that is coming out in March, Bruce points out that being Canadian gives you a built-in window to the creepiest kind of alien of all, which is the alien that is almost just like you but is completely different.

I don't if you saw it, but there was a story titled "The Uncanny Valley" that went around the blogging universe in October. According to this bit of research on human perception and cognition, people of all cultures respond very positively to humanoid artifacts, so long as they aren't all that humanoid. So, Mickey Mouse or other sort of furry objects or certain robots are ok. But, that kind of warm response decreases sharply as the object becomes more humanoid. Then there is a point at which an object becomes too humanoid. If it looks a lot like a human but it isn't quite a human, then people react to that with complete revulsion: think of zombies

or of the cenotaphs in
target="_blank">Clive Barker's Hellraiser. So, the creepiest alien
of all is the thing that you can recognize as being you, but isn't you.

I agree with Bruce. I think Canadians have this built-in point of view
on America. Because you guys talk like us, you look like us, you listen
to the same music as we do. Your culture is a lot like ours. But you are
different in a lot of really strange ways. I don't think it is a
coincidence that
target="_blank">Marshall McLuhan came out of Canada. I think that
that was an almost inevitable occurrence. Because it takes being at 30
degrees off true to really see something clearly. It is hard to see
something clearly when you are in the belly of it.

I meant at the time to link to the Uncanny Valley article, but never did.

Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori is not exactly a household name — but, for the speculative fiction community at least, he could prove to be an important one. The reason why can be summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase that translates into English as “the uncanny valley”.

Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.

(I anticipated all this in the mid-'80's in a story called "Anthropomorphophobe" which was overall even worse than its title.)

(Via The Adventures of Accordionguy in the 21st Century)