MemeMachineGo!

Poor bloke:

I was chatting with one of our auditors today and noticed his British accent.

Ovid: What brought you to the US?
Auditor (sadly): The right-wing politics of Margaret Thatcher.

Everyone knows that a calorie is a unit of heat energy defined to be what’s required to raise one milliliter of water one degree Celsius¹. I had assumed it was a metric unit. Mais non! System Internationale has only 7 basic units, and 22 more named derived units. 13 more units outside the SI are officially approved for use with SI units. And 11 more are currently accepted, but continued use is discouraged. And calorie isn’t to be found in any of those lists.

More fun metric facts! The kilogram is the only SI unit with a prefix as part of its name and symbol.

¹ For small values of everyone. And it’s actually more complicated than that.

UPC codes have 12 digits. But if you look at the back of a recent book you didn’t buy at the drugstore, you’ll see a 13-digit barcode. Books don’t use a UPC (well, unless they do); they use the EAN, the European Article Number. EAN’s begin with a country code.

But all books’ EAN’s begin 978. It’s a special country-code defined for books.

Bookland. Where all books come from.

It must be the happiest place on Earth!

Anyone who thinks the police planted a bomb in his or her luggage would have to be a raving paranoid lunatic, right?

Not necessarily:

Airport police deliberately placed a bag containing up to five ounces of plastic explosives in luggage early Friday evening, Bouquin said. The luggage was lost on a conveyor belt carrying bags through a restricted area from check-in to planes.

The explosives could have made it onto one of up to 90 flights leaving Charles de Gaulle airport. Police didn’t know the bag’s destination and quickly alerted the relevant airlines.

Try explaining that one to Homeland Security.

=v= The Sierra Club is concerned that you'll be "the lone environmentalist at the dinner table" this holiday season, so they've set up a website of scripted conversations with your troublesome kinfolk. One such nemesis is your dreadlocked pottymouthed "Sis," who thinks you're a sell-out, and says wacky things such as, "environmentalists should be visionaries, not realists."

The conversation follows the trajectory one might expect from the reality-based-community dialogue authors at the Sierra Club, until Sis makes her fatal mistake, questioning car culture:

They should be walking or biking or taking public transport to work.

Your role here (you, the reasonable Sierra Clubber) is to calmly redirect her back to cussing, then wrapping it up with a nice parochial lecture.

After dessert, of course, you can enjoy the Hybrid SUV ads in your copy of Sierra, while Sis heads off to the New Year's Eve Critical Mass ride.

Potlatch is a small literary speculative fiction convention. Potlatch 14 will be in San Francisco next March. Memberships are $45 until February 15. For a sample of what goes on, check out these notes on previous Potlatch panels.

If you’ve never been to a con before, this is a great place to start. If you have been to cons, and you like them cozy, smart and bookish, you shouldn’t miss it.

As with the past couple of San Francisco Potlatches, I’m organizing the writers workshop. We’ve got a great group of critique session leaders, and it’s a great chance to get feedback from a professional.

It’d be great to see you there!

I heard something about an Earthsea movie. I generally don’t expect much of film adaptations, and don’t have cable anyway, so I didn’t think much of it besides that it was an awfully pale cast .

Ursula Le Guin herself emphasizes that that’s an important difference.

The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from North Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify easily straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees — hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin,” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.

I was never questioned about this by any editor. No objection was ever raised. I think this is greatly to the credit of my first editors at Parnassus and Atheneum, who bought the books before they had a reputation to carry them. These editors took a risk without complaint.

But I had endless trouble with cover art. Not on the great cover of the first edition — a strong, red-brown profile of Ged — or with Margaret Chodos Irvine’s four fine paintings — but all too often. The first British “Wizard” was this pallid, droopy, lily-like guy — I screamed at sight of him.

Gradually I got a little more clout, a little more say-so about covers. And very, very, very gradually the cover departments of major publishers may be beginning to lose their blind, panic terror of putting a colored face on a book. “Hurts sales, hurts sales” is the mantra. Yeah, so? On my books, Ged with a white face is a lie, a betrayal — a betrayal of the book, and of the potential reader. A brown face might hurt sales in the short run, but my books are long-distance runners, and for the long haul, only the truth will serve.

I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don’t notice, don’t care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being “colorblind.” Nobody else does.

And in response to the director’s inept attribution of her intent, she has further comments.

They’re very good books. I hope the film, and Le Guin’s comments (excerpted on Slate) inspire a lot more readers to pick them up.

For a long time, comics was the most ephemeral of media. Once published, a story was pretty much gone forever. Occasionally, a story might be reprinted to fill pages in an annual, or as a replacement if a monthly title was behind schedule. In the ‘70’s, a couple of popular series had monthly reprint titles. There were some digest reprints, and a few trade paperback anthologies. But you couldn’t count on any given story being reprinted.

In the ‘80’s, reprints of limited series started to catch on, with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Strikes Back as early successes. In the ‘90’s, putting books on conventional bookstores’ shelves started becoming a big part of comics publishers’ business.

Fast forward to today, when you can actually expect that a successful series will be collected.

Many people prefer to read the collections: they’re a little cheaper than the individual issues; you get a whole story at once, without having to wait a month between installments; there are no ads. (I’m firmly in this camp.) Some people forego individual issues altogether, and just get the trade paperback collections.

This has some creators frothing at the mouth, insisting that these people are ruining the industry. Good titles are being cancelled, they say, due to lost sales from people waiting for the trade. Of course, everyone likes the additional sales from the trades. But these creators are very concerned that something be done to punish people for waiting, like making sure the reprints are at least a year behind the monthlies.

When I was unemployed, my comics purchasing slowed to a trickle. Now that I’m gainfully employed again, I’m buying more comics. And I’m very happy that publishers aren’t following that advice. Here’s a whole stack of titles I’m buying by the issue because the prompt collections made it easy to catch up: Captain America and the Falcon, Daredevil, Fables, The Losers, The Pulse, Supreme Power. There’s only one title I’ve resumed buying by the issue despite the collections being way behind, Lucifer.

So, note to frothing creators: this issue cuts more than one way.

(At some point MMG ended up on this “Comics Weblog Updates” list, so I feel I really should post about comics every once in a while…)

In Walnut Creek, a wealthy suburb on the other side of the hills in the East Bay, you can be ticketed if your car isn’t big enough.

When he came out of a Contra Costa County Mayors’ Conference meeting in Walnut Creek awhile back, Martinez City Councilman Bill Wainwright was surprised to see a ticket on his windshield.

He was even more surprised when he saw what it was for.

Wainwright had been tagged for having too small a car.

Seriously. The city parking lot where he had found a spot has two rows of slots reserved for vehicles 6-foot-5 inches or taller, according to a sign posted in the garage. Wainwright, with his Acura, was too short to park there.

Woo hoo! The Emperor Norton Bridge may finally get its rightful name. He ordered it built in 1872, but his subjects didn’t do so for another sixty years. Officially it’s the James “Sunny Jim” Rolph Bridge, named for a California governor (and former San Francisco Mayor) who died in office in 1934, while the bridge was being constructed. But no one knows that. I usually hear it called the Oakland Bay Bridge. And, oddly enough, Oaktown isn’t wild about the idea of renaming it.

The Wikipedia has a good article on Norton.

The Emperor would also issue his own money on occasion in order to pay for certain debts, and this was generally accepted as legal tender by local businesses. (Typically these notes came in denominations of 50 cents to five dollars, and the few notes still existent have fetched thousands of dollars at recent auctions).

In Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Eye in the Pyramid, they note:

Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico… He lived in the [19th] century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. […]

Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green’s Mutual Bank and Spooner’s People’s Bank. That’s because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat… But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate.

Stealth engineering:

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.

These photos show people apparently gunning for the Darwin Awards. (I don’t endorse the site’s title for them.)

The director of a North Carolina homeless shelter evicted an eight months pregnant woman and her three boys just before Chirstmas, because the woman had let their aunt and uncle visit in their room in violation of the shelter’s rule against men in the rooms.

“These people need tough love,” Robinson said. “I don’t feel comfortable with it. God don’t get no pleasure punishing us. But he does it. Jesus would have done the same thing.”

Suddenly, all those W.W.J.D. bumper stickers make a lot more sense.

(Via Clea’s Cave)

I’m not an early adopter when it comes to hardware. When it comes to free software, sure. But for hardware, I’ll let the pioneers get the arrows in their backs and jump on the bandwagon when things are better and cheaper.

For instance, it was only last year I finally got a wireless router for the house. The only thing we’re getting out of it, really, is not needing to run an ethernet cable to Malasada’ computer. Once, a visitor made use of it on his laptop. I never did get the wireless card working on my vintage 1998 laptop.

Recently, a friend of mine upgraded from the lesser 15” Powerbook to the greater one, and loaned me the lesser one. (I’ve got good friends.) For the past week, for the first time ever, I’ve been travelling with a wireless laptop.

I was thinking, ok, I’ll be able to check my email when I visit my one sister, whose husband is a geek with a wireless router. But while I was staying at my other sister’s house, I thought I’d check whether any of her neighbors had WiFi. Turned out I had my choice of three networks.

Later in the trip, we were staying at a friend of Malasada’. Her household had a wireless router.

And right now, I’m writing this at JFK Airport, courtesy of JetBlue.

Yes, I know how far behind the curve I am, and I know you were sick of reading “gee whiz! I have net access away from home!” blog entries in 1999.

But, gee whiz! I have net access away from home!