MemeMachineGo!

In lieu of actual content, here’s a picture of me with a cat on my head.

The Book of Bart:

Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, [the Gospel of John] forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.[…]

Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies — in this Gospel, Jesus isn’t born in Bethlehem, he doesn’t tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there’s no last supper. “None of that is found in John!” The crucifixion stories are different — in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross; in John, he’s perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.

“In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,” he says, his voice urgent. “In John, you do.” He points out that in the other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ’s ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from the beginning. […]

The Bible simply wasn’t error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

“Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament,” Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later — and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible — but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

I’ll have to put his Misquoting Jesus on my reading list.

At Hudson Valley Community College, I took a comparative religions class from a born-again preacher who’d packed the class with his ministry. His idea of comparative religion was to demonstrate how all other religions compared negatively to (his version of) Christianity. He believed the bible was the literal word of God, but was aware it had gone through translations and editing. But that was OK — each and every one of those translators and editors had been divinely inspired.

How fortunate for him that he’d happened to land on the one end-result for which that could be the case.

Everyone else has already linked to it; I’ll join in. Malcolm Gladwell, frequent MMG! link destination author, has a blog.

Read all of his articles and you’ll be smarter.

Understanding the difference between humans and zombies:

1. Muscles are made up of fibers.
2. Each fiber is made up of smaller fibers.
3. There are two kinds of smaller fibers.
4. Contraction occurs when these two fibers interact.
5. Thin fibers are anchored at places called “Z-lines.”
6. Human muscle Z-lines are weak.
7. Zombie muscle Z-lines are strong.
8. Zombies are awesome.

There were a lot of things I’d hoped to get done Saturday, but I was impaired by an allergy-induced sinus headache: it’s tree-pollen season in the San Francisco Bay Area. Anti-histamines have never done me any noticeable good, whether over-the-counter or prescription. One thing that does help is an over-the-counter decongestant, pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed.

Unfortunately, it’s ceasing to be over-the-counter.

Some highlights of the Patriot Act’s new provisions that would crack down on the manufacture, distribution and use of methamphetamine:

• Move cold medicines with pseudoephedrine, a main ingredient of methamphetamine, behind the counter in retail stores.
• Impose limits on how much a person can buy: 300 30-mg pills in a month and 120 a day. An exception would be “single-use” amounts of individually packaged pseudoephedrine products.
• Require signature and identification for purchases.

The adult pseudoephedrine dosage is 60 mg, to be taken up to every six hours. So that 300 30-mg limit would last anyone for a month. But if everyone in a family of five suffers from allergies, it suddenly becomes a big problem. Further:

This provision is anti-consumer, violates privacy and would be costly. It is a woeful misallocation of resources and would not eliminate the problems.

Common products such as Nyquil, Claritin-D and Alka-Seltzer Plus Night-Time Cold Medicine - and nearly 300 other medicines containing PSE - would be stuck behind pharmacy counters. This is bad because Americans are label readers, including when shopping for cold remedies. We read boxes, check prices, determine which is best for specific symptoms, and choose accordingly.

Requiring all cold medicines that contain PSE to be taken off consumer friendly shelves and distributed only by licensed pharmacists will make it nearly impossible to comparison shop for cold remedies by price or ingredient. And as pharmacists will have to share time formerly spent dispensing and advising on prescription drugs with OTC products, this will surely raise the cost of these medications.

This could pose even more serious problems for cold sufferers in some rural or inner-city areas where a full service pharmacy is distant or inconveniently located. These consumers purchase aspirin, Tums and cold pills from the local Circle K, the corner grocer or Wal-Mart shelves. This regulatory move will limit or even eliminate timely access for them.

And what about a person working third shift or whose child becomes sick in the middle of the night? Instead of running to the 24 hour grocery store for Children’s Tylenol Cold, Mom will now have to explain to little Joey that his miserable cold will have to wait until the full service pharmacy opens at 9:00 a.m. Not everyone schedules their cold or allergy attack during pharmacy hours.

The Combat Meth Act, and its being a rider on the Patriot Act, were pushed by one of my senators, DINO Dianne Feinstein.

There have been similar measures in Oklahoma and Texas. Some pharmacies have concluded that it’s made selling pseudoephedrine more bother than it’s worth, so they’ve simply ceased carrying it. These measures seem to have curbed domestic production of meth, but to have done nothing to curb meth abuse.

Police say a massive influx of meth made by Mexican “superlabs,” which can obtain tons of pseudoephedrine in Mexico, has kept meth plentiful and potent. The number of Oklahoma users shows no sign of falling, and property crime still keeps the Oklahoma County Jail at capacity.

“We took away their production,” said Tom Cunningham, task force coordinator for the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council. “That didn’t do anything for their addiction.”

Two decades of government effort have failed to curb the availability of meth. A new analysis of federal data by The Oregonian shows that the drug’s potency has hit levels not seen in a decade. Rising purity indicates the supply of meth is growing, and it means a $25 bag of meth will last a user longer. […]

“We have seen a lot of publicity associated with people’s access to the ingredients,” said Oklahoma County Commissioner Jim Roth. “But from our local government experience, we have not seen a corresponding decline in either the jail population or the social effects that seem to have still lingered from high meth use.”

Mexican cartels took little time flooding the Oklahoma meth market after the pseudoephedrine law took effect in April 2004.

“It hit us without much delay,” Lt. Charles Smallwood, a drug investigator with the Mayes County Sheriff’s Office, said of the arrival of Mexican-made meth. “We started seeing commercial methamphetamine almost immediately.”

The Mexican meth sold in Oklahoma is increasingly potent. Drugs seized by federal agents during the first six months of this year averaged 75 percent pure, up from 37 percent two years ago, data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration show.

In the past, sharp increases in purity have prompted comparable jumps in the number of addicts.

But declining local production combined with increasing Mexican imports appear to have canceled each other out in Oklahoma, leaving the supply of the drug stable.

From Reason magazine:

The PATRIOT Act’s new anti-meth provisions don’t end there. One would classify “methamphetamine precursors” such as pseudoephedrine in the same manner as “Schedule II” drugs” like opium in order to set domestic “production quotas.” And there are enhanced penalties and broadened definitions for “smuggling” and “money laundering” with no terrorism prerequisites.

The Heritage Foundation, which supports the PATRIOT Act and general drug-control measures, nevertheless charges that even the current loose definitions of money laundering and smuggling are leading to the “overcriminalization” of petty regulatory violations. […]

If bending the PATRIOT Act to combat meth isn’t legislative mission creep, nothing is.

It’s a month before the federal purchase limits take effect, and until 9/30 for the ID requirement to take effect. Stock up now. No, wait, don’t — that would look awfully suspicious.

It’s outrage week at MemeMachineGo!

A Rhode Island couple paid $6522 on their JC Penney credit card… and found that this triggered an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

“The more I’m on, the scarier it gets,” he said. “It’s scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.”

Eventually, his and his wife’s money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

It’s just un-American to get out of consumer debt.

A demonstration of defending family values in Oklahoma.

Beaumont moved to be with Meadows in his partner’s hometown of Bristow, Okla., a place of 4,300 people. Together, they bought a ranch and raised Beaumont’s three sons. The mortgage and most of the couple’s possessions were put in Meadows’ name.

During the day, Meadows worked as a comptroller for Black & Decker. He’d drop the boys at school on his way to work. At home, Beaumont took care of the ranch, feeding and tagging cattle, cooking and cleaning, and once built a barn.

“As far as I was concerned, I had two dads,” said one of Beaumont’s sons, now 33, who requested anonymity. He was 2 years old when Meadows joined the family. […]

But in 1999, Meadows had a stroke and Beaumont took care of him for a year until he died at age 56. That’s where the fantasy of a life together on the range collides with reality. After a quarter-century on the ranch he shared with his partner, Beaumont lost it all on a legal technicality in a state that doesn’t recognize domestic partnerships. Meadows’ will, which left everything to Beaumont, was fought in court by a cousin of the deceased and was declared invalid by the Oklahoma Court of Appeals in 2003 because it was short one witness signature.

A judge ruled the rancher had to put the property, which was appraised at $100,000, on the market. The animals were sold. Beaumont had to move. Because Meadows had no biological children or surviving parents, his estate was divided up among his heirs. When the ranch sells, the proceeds are to be divided among dozens of Meadows’ cousins.

“They took the estate away from me,” said Beaumont, who said he put about $200,000 of his own money into the ranch. “Everything that had Earl’s name on it, they took. They took it all and didn’t bat an eye.”

Every state has common-law marriage rules that protect heterosexual couples. If someone dies without a will, or with a faulty one, his or her live-in partner is treated as the rightful inheritor. But only seven states currently give gay couples protections — such as inheritance rights and health benefits — through marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships. What’s more, Oklahoma last year amended its state constitution to ensure that neither marriage nor any similar arrangement is extended to same-sex couples.[…]

Last year, Beaumont moved to nearby Wewoka, Okla., to a one-bedroom place with 350 acres for his horses, white Pyrenees and Great Dane to roam. He said he was continuing to fight the cousins, who are suing for back rent for the years he lived on the ranch.

Let me emphasize. “Who are suing for back rent.” That’s just what Jesus’d do, I’m sure.

(via Berin Kinsman)

The flouting of a reasonable request:

He said after he started at Endeavor in September - where he said he could make up lost credits that he couldn’t have received at his previous high school - he found Hispanic students there often were sent to the office for speaking Spanish.

On Nov. 28, Zachariah was on a bathroom break from science class when a friend asked him, in Spanish, to borrow a dollar. Zachariah said he responded, ‘No hay problema’ - Spanish for “no problem.”

A teacher overheard the exchange and sent Zachariah to the principal for speaking Spanish. It was the second time that day he was disciplined for using that language, Chionuma said.

“When she said she was sending me to the office, she pushed the intercom in front of everybody, and said ‘I’m sending Zach up to speak Spanish to you,’” he said.

Principal Jennifer Watts later told the boy she was suspending him for speaking Spanish. The discipline referral says he was suspended for a day and a half for disobeying “a reasonable request (not to speak Spanish at school).”

Substantiating Orwell through vitiating Orwell:

Many people remember reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it “impossible to say which was which.”

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

See also.

Predicting the future can be a serious exercise based on an understanding of historical processes, extrapolation of trends, and application of well-researched data. Or it can consist of a bunch of self-proclaimed know-it-alls sitting around in a room and saying “So whaddaya think is gonna happen now?”

Not that I have any serious problems with the latter; it provides hours of harmless fun for college undergrads and bored intellectuals. And it makes certain firms an impressive amount of money. The recent sidebar in Fast Company magazine, “Six Jobs That Won’t Exist in 2016”, seems to fall into this category as well. They seem to have come up with a couple of commonplaces, some mistaken conclusions, and some outright blather.

• Bloggers: Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we’re getting paid for this?
  Sure, blogging as a paying job doesn’t have much of a future, except for a handful of media professionals. But bloggers are not going to go away. What other technology allows anyone to be their own publisher, regardless of whether or not anyone reads it?
• Advertising creatives: Talented amateurs making ads for fun and posting them online seem to be better at your job than you are. Bonus: No more “whither the 30-second spot” whining.
  Reality check: you’re a high-level manager at an advertising firm. A Fortune 500 client is considering contracting you for a major national ad campaign. Do you hire some professionals to do the job, or do you search the Web for amateur content that might happen to match the client’s needs? Maybe the job of creating advertising content will be farmed out to consultants in the future, but no way is it going to disappear.
• Auto mechanics: As cars run on software, the grease monkey will need a makeover.
  I’d call this half-true. Yes, the person servicing your car is going to need a lot more knowledge and training on the software side of things, but the mechanical workings are just as important. We may very well see the end of the local corner garage, because more expensive, specialized equipment will be required to service newer cars. I don’t take my Honda Insight anywhere but to the dealership for service, and a lot of old-style auto mechanics won’t touch a newer car for fear of breaking something while trying to fix it.
• U.S. high-tech jobs: But software engineers can always get a job down at the garage.
  Was that a joke? … That was the sound of me not laughing.
  “U.S. high-tech jobs” is such a broad category that any prediction that they’ll all be gone is ridiculous. Yes, you need to go overseas if you want to find cheap software engineers. But engineers and developers aren’t the only ones necessary to make a high-tech project successful. And most American companies have already discovered that management and business analysis skills aren’t as easy to come by in the global market as software development experience.
  Also, there are some projects that are just too complex to succeed just by throwing cheap code-monkeys at them. Developers who can actually think about the problem, and who can be trusted to make decisions about how to solve the problem, are much more rare and valuable than those who just follow instructions like a recipie. Such people could be found anywhere, but American firms are going to find them more easily in the U.S.
• Indian call-center operators: American customer service is rescued from oxymoron status as companies realize that being nice to the people with the money is the only way to win.
  Is it just me, or does that sentence not make much sense?
  
  Overseas call centers are likely to get better at customer service as time goes on. This will probably make some of them more expensive and bring the American call centers back into competition. And like good software developers, customer service reps who can actually think are going to be more valuable no matter where they come from. But the first-line, reading-from-a-script customer service people can come from anywhere, as long as they’re fluent in the language of the customers.
• Gatekeepers: TV schedulers, A&R guys, Wall Street researchers, cool hunters. As punishment, now it’s our turn to ram stuff down your throats. Hope you like Bon Jovi!
  I plead “insufficient data” on this one. I don’t know what the jobs mentioned have in common that makes them “gatekeepers”, or what is meant by “gatekeeper” in this context. And who exactly is doing the talking when they say “our turn”?
  In short, I have no freakin’ clue about this.
  And anyway, when it comes to retro 80’s metal, I prefer Dio.

Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex farewell speech:

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. […]

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

On first reading this, I wasn’t sure what Eisenhower was calling the major 20th century war among great nations in which the U.S. wasn’t involved. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was in recent memory, and set the stage for the Suez Crisis, in even more recent memory. There are also the First Indochina War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the nascent Vietnam War (in which U.S. soldiers had already died at the time of this speech.) There are so many to choose from.

I posed the qustion to my father, who suggested the Spanish Civil War. I think that must be right.

Pocahontas found Outrage Week so depressing that I promised her I’d have a week of good news or happy things. Let’s see if I can make it without resorting to links to Cute Overload.

When a Missouri family lost their home to a tornado, their Amish neighbors rebuilt it in a day.

The next morning, more than 100 men and boys from surrounding Amish homesteads got to work. Wraber’s brother, Ernest, said the workers “looked like a bunch of ants.”

“Everybody helps out,” he said.

Less than 15 hours after the tornado hit, Chris Graber stood in a new 36-by-64 foot house and workshop, with sturdy aluminum siding covering the walls and roof.

“I didn’t realize that many people would come,” Graber said. “I figured there would be help, but I had picking up the mess more in mind.”

The article doesn’t make it clear whether the Grabers themselves are Amish.

Godchecker features more than 2850 deities.

Meanwhile, The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters identifies the religions of hundreds of comic book characters, including God himself. But they seem to me to stretch some points. Their chart lists Death (from the Sandman) as a Mormon despite their detailed entry accurately stating “There is no indication within the text of the Sandman comics that Neil Gaiman thinks of Death herself as being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Likewise the kids of Power Pack are listed as Mormons in the face of no evidence. Their entry refers to “rumors” that they were Mormons, and cites some guy asserting they had “an obvious Mormon heritage.”

I’ve started a new blog, Strange Loopiness:

I’ve often felt inspired to blog about programming or other technically detailed subjects, but I’ve wanted MemeMachineGo! to remain of general interest and accessibility (at least relatively) and not to put one of my co-bloggers to sleep.

(Wow. Movable Type’s default template is a lot more attractive than it used to be.)

Read it as you are so moved.

Sumana tells how to write a stand-up routine and gives examples.

Think of something you are cranky about, or one of those anecdotes you always pull out at parties. Look at its causes or predict likely outcomes of this incongruity. Extrapolate into absurdity, preferably retaining a kernel of the original truth-in-paradox. Make multiple jokes about each premise for a cascade of punchlines at the climax of each bit. Repeat for each topic.

Construct shortest-path segues, turning your group of unrelated bits into a set. Practice saying your set in a little speech to yourself or to friends who have a sense of humor, testing rhythm and diction, iterating through better and better versions of the set. Preferably you’ll have at least three punchlines per minute. Once it reliably makes people laugh, it might not make you laugh anymore, but it’s ready for the stage.

This AskMe question offers more ways to break it down.

It’s kind or true in that you can indeed divide jokes (or stories, or haikus, or ice cream flavors) into 7 categories, or 5 categories, or 36 categories. And sometimes those divisions are very helpful. It’s useful for me to be able to recognize the common skeleton of a bunch of other jokes, and then to just drape the skin of a new joke over it. The most common form is probably “the rule of three,” where you have two examples of something to establish a pattern, and then a third example to break the pattern in a humorous way. For example: “President Bush’s primary policy focuses are getting his Supreme Court nominee through Congress, avoiding a rebellion from disaffected elements within his own party, and sucking.”

Here’s some genuinely good news: the Gnu General Public License has been upheld in court. Again.

The GPL is a free software license. A huge amount of the most important free software, e.g. Linux, was released under the GPL. Very roughly speaking, it lets you do whatever you want with the code, except redistribute it without making the source code available, or (this is the biggie) distributing derivative works without releasing them under the GPL — the work is copylefted.

So I could make my own modifications to the Linux kernel, and I could even charge you for a copy of my new, improved kernel. But my modifications would be under the GPL. I would be obligated to give you a copy of the source code if you asked, and I couldn’t stop you from freely redistributing my kernel or source code.

The GPL’s critics complain that it’s not about giving away free code — it’s about forcing you to give away your code for free. And there’s some sense in which that’s true. But it also means that someone else can’t make trivial changes to your code and get rich from it while not giving anything back to the free software community and not giving you credit.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously said “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” going on to lie that “the way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.” That isn’t even close — witness the commercial Linux distributions. They make available source code, including their own customizations, for GPLed code, but charge for CDs that feature both this code and their own proprietary code.

Critics have also liked to complain that the GPL is really unenforcible and had never been tested in court. Well, now that’s also not even close.

The judge in the recent case said:

[T]he GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.

In praise of Woz:

Before Apple went public in 1980, Woz gave away a lot of stock to friends and family, or sold shares at face value to fellow engineers whom he felt weren’t fairly recognized in the stock allocation. In fact, Woz gave away so many shares, he forced the company into an early, possibly premature IPO. (The company had to go public or be in breach of SEC rules dictating private companies can have no more than 500 shareholders.) […]

When I visited Bruce [the proprietor of a private computer museum], he was in the process of organizing his collection. On one dusty workbench sat several old Apple machines and a long cardboard contraption called the “Mac chimney.” A tapered box open at both ends, the Mac chimney was an after-market add-on designed to stop the original Macintosh from overheating. Placed on top of the Mac, it drew heat upward by convection.

Bruce thought it hilarious. It was big and preposterous and ruined the aesthetics of the neat, compact machine — it looked like the Mac was wearing a dunce’s cap.

The chimney was necessary only because Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the driving force behind the machine, couldn’t stand the sound of a cooling fan. So the Mac shipped without one, even though it needed it, and a lot of users were forced to buy cardboard chimneys to stop their machines melting on their desks.

Bruce thought the chimney was a charming example of Jobs’ uncompromising genius. Jobs wasn’t always right, but he always got what he wanted. Bruce noted that most people couldn’t jury rig their own fan because the case was sealed shut, requiring an unusual screwdriver to crack it open.

Next to the Mac sat an old Apple an Apple II GS Woz Edition — a limited run of the last of the Apple IIs, named in honor of its chief designer. As I reported at the time:

“Damer popped the lid to reveal the GS’ motherboard. It’s a classic Woz design,’ Damer explained. ‘Few chips. Lots of slots. Open.’

“He gestured to the original Macintosh, the brainchild of Steve Jobs, sitting on a bench nearby.

“‘The Mac is from the same time but is the total opposite,’ he said. ‘Jobs closed it up. You need a special screwdriver to open the case. No slots. Closed and proprietary. There’s the two cultures of Apple right there. One open, one closed.’”

I was a big fan of the Apple II series. I was not a fan of the Mac. That cultural difference has a lot to do with it.

Here’s a recent interview with Woz:

After my initial year at Berkeley I started the first dial-a-joke in the Bay Area. Back then you couldn’t really get an answering machine unless you were a movie theater. Even then, you’d have to lease it from the phone company. So that’s what I did. I met my first wife when she called the dial-a-joke line. Usually I’d just turn the machine on, but I happened to answer that time. I said, “I bet I can hang up faster than you,” and hung up. But she called back and we talked. I’ve always been extremely involved in pranking. Some of my pranks are so complicated that they take days, even months, to work out. I think humor is a creative act. Pranks are just a creative form of logic. My iPod is filled with comedy as well as songs.

I can only but hope that the forthcoming novel Don’t Look Down is as funny as the story of its creation.

One evening in Maui, Jenny Crusie was watching the sun set over the Pacific when Bob Mayer sat down beside her and said, “What do you write?” Jenny said, “Well, basically, in my books, people have sex and get married.” Bob said, “In my books, people have sex and die.”

Naturally they decided to collaborate. Nine months later, Don’t Look Down was done.

It was pretty simple, really. They decided that the Crusie heroine would, as usual, come from the normal world, and the Mayer hero would, as usual, come from the covert ops world, and that they’d meet because the Crusie heroine would be working for a normal-world boss who was really a Bad Guy that the Mayer hero would have to take out of the picture.

Jenny: “I want to write about a woman who runs a B&B or a woman who’s a film director.”
Bob: “How many people can I kill in a B&B?”
Jenny: “I’ll do the film director.”

They began with only one rule: they each had final say on their point of view characters, Jenny on Lucy and Bob on Wilder. Bob said, “I don’t do that Yucky Emotional Crap,” so they agreed that Jenny would do YEC, and Bob would be violent. They hammered out a rough plot line using different plotting styles: When the action lagged, Jenny would put in a turning point and Bob would shoot somebody.

Jenny: “You can’t keep killing characters. My readers get attached to them.”
Bob: “Then why do you keep giving them names?”

As Jed notes, it sounds almost like a novel-length version of the Net classic tandem writing assignment.

Survey says:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

And, yet, I’ve got to say that I’ve never felt discriminated against on the basis of my irreligion.

A study examines whether dominant men smell more attractive.

The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males’ scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate. Which, given previous studies that show dominant men are indeed more likely than others to leave a woman holding the baby, makes perfect sense.