BillSaysThis

An interesting new online literary magazine. I sent a query to see if they’d be interested in publishing any of the Poetry by Bill, particularly Kena’s Trilogy. I like my poetry (Ed.: Duh!) and have gotten a few compliments on it over the years, so why the heck not?

[via jennet.radio]

When did you become who you are? And who else might you have been? Two very relevant questions for a person in my situation.

First scene with Britney shows us the starlet dancing and singing along to a Madonna tune wearing only panties and a tight, barely there top, then wriggling into pajama bottoms. So we know who the target audience is for this film, no doubt. Crossroads is a poorly made piece of pop twaddle which I only watched because TS1 desired it, and I was drained after two really good NCAA semifinal games. And there was the unintentionally hilarious scene where Spears and her high school pal rent a room to finally shed their virginity.

What’s wrong with Crossroads? Just to name a few things: she drives crosscountry to meet the mother who abandoned her at age three but the confrontation lasts all of 45 seconds and avoids the actual difficult emotional interaction; in what is alleged to be her first time singing on stage, Britney belts out I Love Rock and Roll using all kinds of tricks and techniques that only a professional knows; Dan Ackroyd plays her Poppy in yet another wooden, emotionless payday performance; and, every problem encountered by anyone in the cast is solved without more than shedding a few tears, except for one medical situation, which can’t have been very hard either since the girl involved is up and bouncing around a stage a short time later.

Recommended only for ogling Ms. Spears

I posted a thread to Metafilter: No more (universal) justice, just bookmarking it here.

Pardon me, can you spare $97.8 BILLION? Seems like I might owe the RIAA more than what I got in these pant pockets.

TS1 and I were watching Michael Chiarello’s Napa earlier today and he cooked two dishes that were reasonably Atkins-compatible, especially the Long Cooked Hen with Tomato Sauce. So I brought up his website, Michael Chiarello’s Napa, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that he’s published all the recipes from his TV shows (with a photo of the finished product) and not just used the site as a teaser for selling his cookbooks. Although the site does sell the cookbooks, signature cookware and food products (NapaStyle is Chiarello’s brand), but not in an obnoxious way. Check it out and manga!

Planets being born?

The latest addition to the site is in the Leisure section at left: New Film News. The page shows the additions to my film release news database made in the last 30 days, which is something I’ve wanted to have for awhile and now that I have the New PHP movie page code in place was a real piece of cake–just eight lines of code. I still want to write a custom data entry screen for this stuff and dump the PHPMyEdit-generated script but I hope that will not be too far in the future

Jeremy stands up from concealment

and smashes his elbow straight

into the face of another man

walking down the sidewalk.

Blood flies from his nose all

over his charcoal suit and fresh

white dress shirt.

The bloody man is named Thomas,

he looks up as the unknown assailant

rises to his full height and races off

down the crowded lunchtime sidewalk.

Thomas swears once, twice,

puts his hand to his nose and

feels an intense jolt of pain.

Riana sees the strange incident

but averts her head as she

comes alongside Thomas–

thinking that men deserve any

violence they encounter, so fine.

“What happened?” Thomas asks her

but Riana will not turn and answer,

shuddering as he bends over in pain,

blood dripping to the ground.

Another woman runs out from the store

on whose sidewalk this all has happened

and puts her arm around Thomas

while handing him some napkins for his nose;

“Do you need help?” she asks.

“Patience is a virtue” is one cliche’s advice I’ve never really mastered. For example, in the Hebrew alphabet, the letters each have a numerical value: aleph is one, gimmel is two, and chai (the letter has no English equivalent but is the first one in the word Hanukah) is eighteen. As in English, sometimes the same sound/word in Hebrew has more than one meaning. Chai also means life. Hence the song “To life, to life, l’chaim.” So 18 and multiples of it have special meaning; monetary gifts are often given in multiples of it in dollars or sheckels.

Today is double chai, or 36 days, until I marry Vivian. And I truly can’t wait. As Scoble wrote so eloquently last year in the weeks leading up to the wedding to his own Sweet One, Vivian is just the most wonderful woman in the world. She is kind, considerate, funny, friendly, sexy, charming, caring, and a good cook. Love, it’s a good thing. More of you should have it your own life, I only wish it for you.

So screw patience and let’s all do whatever’s necessary to get May 10 here as soon as possible, okay?

You see the book on the store shelf and think, Damn, that’s an ambitious title! But then you go ahead and say, David Brin, make me believe. And Brin does, in Earth he’s created a masterpiece of modern science fiction. Perhaps even a masterpiece of modern fiction, in the same way The Old Man and the Sea isn’t just a fishing story and The Treasure of Sierra Madre is more than a Western.

Published in 1990, Earth was runnerup for the Hugo award for best novel and that seems reasonable. Brin uses the novel as way to correlate all the ecological concerns into a holistic nightmare; several times he repeats the statement that Humanity keeps postponing the Big Dieback by one last minute invention or intervention or another but that can only last so long. Desertification, pollution, overpopulation, overstimulation, good intentions gone bad are all worked into a coherent collision in the year 2038 with one final invention too many: the ability of Alex Lustig, a brilliant scientist, to devise a machine (which Brin names a cavitron) that can manufacture a tiny black hole.

When Lustig’s first effort comes online to power an energy generation facility, a riot causes a malfunction which ruptures the containment vessel and the singularity sinks into the Earth; this bit takes place before the book starts and we learn about it during conversation, more or less. Lustig has found a wealthy new backer to finance his search for the missing depth charge, which they hope to find and capture before it’s gravitational force devours our planet. In their work, the team builds new technology they intend to use as a radar/sonar analog but which manipulates gravity as a side effect. And the scientists find another black hole tracing orbits deep inside Earth, larger, older, and more sophisticated than anything humans could have made.

So their quest becomes a race to tame Beta, as they call this monstrosity, but lingering national governments working on their own cause troubles. All of which are multiplied because in 2038 everything, even deeply secret government systems, are connected in the equivalent of the (not yet invented at the time of the novel’s writing) Worldwide Web.

One woman, Daisy, is both an ultimate master of software which can infiltrate and defeat any security measures and an ardent ‘priestess’ of Gaia; when she gets an inkling of what’s happening, she bends all her effort and tools to gaining control of these powerful instruments. Will she win and in so doing erase all but a handful of people from the planet? Another woman, Jen Wolling, is Alex’s grandmother as well as the person who created the modern ecological science that Daisy worships and Wolling is not one to sit back, even in her 90s, and allow a misguided disciple to go so far awry.

Brin has thrown everything into this book. As I’ve indicated he has a powerful plot and quite a few good characters. He also employs non-linear techniques like short entries from reference and news sources (a la Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica) and brief italicized passages explanation the planetary evolution of Earth (the opening sentence of the novel is “First came a supernova, dazzling the Universe in brief, spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral clouds of new formed atoms.”).

He even provides an Afterward, to ensure that no reader misses the warning he intends with his story. We must understand that our planet is a precious resource that is to be tended and nurtured so that its bounty can endure for millenia to come and not be wasted in a brief greedy burst of consumption.

Highly recommended

Had a very good two days up in Seattle, thanks for asking. Not nearly as much rain as one would expect based on all the chatter and such. A very nice city, in fact. Sorry for the mystery but I’ll say more when appropriate.

For all the fuss made about how San Francisco International Airport has weather-related problems due to fog and such, a survey published yesterday by the Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report ranks it tops in the US for on time departures and fifth for arrivals. Philadelphia and Boston come out on the bottom of all hub airports.

These days, one has trouble opening a newspaper or cable news channel without having to adjust for bias in one political direction or the other. So I found it strange to read Suit Challenges Right to Report Political Slurs and keep a straight face. Plus, I was once, for a very short time, a 20-something local paper reporter covering similar municipal meetings.

The linked article concerns a libel case that has reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and only eight years after the initiating event too. One night in 1995, at a meeting of a dinky little town council, one councilman stood up and “called the council president and the mayor ‘liars,’ ‘criminals,’ ‘draft dodgers’ and ‘child molesters’.” Silly local politics, with no truth to the accusations, but the cub reporter was there and used the outburst as the lead in the next day’s article.

The indiscreet councilman has already lost the libel suit filed against him, and lost the next election too when his voters realized his, er, suitability for office. But based on the instructions given by the judge, the same jury found that the newspaper was not guilty of anything because the article accurately detailed the event and did not add any judgement. The slurred politicians were not satisfied, of course, and appealed, getting the appellate court to overturn the verdict based on the ‘incorrect’ instruction given by the judge.

So the question up to the PA Supremes is whether a newspaper has the responsibility and is required to ascertain the truth of potentially libelous statements before printing them, rather than simply being required to accurately quote public figures. I find this kind of sad, that in 2003 reporters and newspapers still have to defend themselves from stupid politicians; in my view, the people have an absolute right in America to know all the details of their government, at all levels, and this was an event that took place at a public meeting! Heck, in some states I think the concept of the shield law is still not firmly established. Independent or not, judges are still a part of the political machinery and so I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Saddened, though. Let’s just hope that the correct decision is handed down.

[via garret]

He (and we) should only have it come true: Rivaldo’s Liverpool dream.

Image good for ending an online/email argument: Shut Up!

Pam gets all eloquent-like in describing the rapture she had at last night’s Bob and Bruce benefit concert, Life, Music , and the Pursuit of Happiness, for Jerry Garcia’s Rex Foundation. I am so glad she could have such an intense measure of pleasure in just one night!

An Australian film from 1988, Rikky and Pete is a so-so tale of two grown siblings who flee their domineering father and an angry, semi-psychotic copper in Brisbane for the mining works far north in the Outback. The plot’s just whacked together, with bits and characters coming in and out without too much reasoning involved, and the sister (Nina Landis) keeps getting up onstage to sing. Overall it has a certain charm but that may just be my general enchantment with all things Aussie.

Watchable if nothing else is on the tube

Another year, another season of Giants baseball annoying me by pre-empting the regular programming on KTVU. Fcukers! Network affiliates should not be allowed to do this.