ArmadilloCon 34

Hi, everyone!

Just a couple of quick minutes here: I’m heading to ArmadilloCon 34 this weekend.

If you’re in Austin, I’d love to see you there. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and to some lively discussions.

Here’s my schedule:

Fr2000SA Best SF/F Movie Series of the all time

Fri 8:00 PM-9:00 PM San Antonio

A. de Orive, R. Klaw*, B. Mahoney, R. Rogers, J. Rountree, H. Waldrop

Hobbits vs. Avengers? Star Wars vs. Star Trek? Aliens vs. Predators vs. Terminators? Our intrepid panelists attempt to ef the ineffable and address the truly deep questions: What constitutes not just a great SF/F movie, but an outstanding series?

 

Sa1100SA Fringe: Why We Like It -- or do we still?

Sat 11:00 AM-Noon San Antonio

B. Hale, R. Klaw*, G. Oliver, D. Potter, R. Rogers

How did this show become so watchable and interesting? Has it maintained its promise, or jumped the shark?

 

Sa1400SB SF/F Mysteries

Sat 2:00 PM-3:00 PM Sabine

S. Cupp, M. Maresca, R. Rogers, P. Sarath*, M. Wells

A discussion of good examples of this mixed subgenre and the special challenges of writing it.

 

Sa2230SM Reading

Sat 10:30 PM-11:00 PM San Marcos

Rob Rogers

Su1400DR Signing

Sun 2:00 PM-3:00 PM Dealers' Room

E. Burton, B. Denton, G. Faust, R. Rogers

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Make my logo bigger cream video

As someone who's worked in print and web design for several years, I found this video very funny and clever (and it reminded me of a client or two!). It's a little longer than it needs to be, but it's still good stuff.

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It's doughnut. Not donut.

It's kind of fun when my workday includes me needing to look up (for legitimate business reasons) the proper spelling of doughnut according to AP Style.

I'm a little surprised at AP, actually. It usually favors shorter spellings. And usually, if Rob's instinct is to do A, then AP tells me to do B instead (I'm more of a Chicago Style boy myself). This time, AP and I are in sync.

And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that that won't happen again soon.

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Which one's real?

This poor guy, a Bollywood actor named Salman Khan, has had a fatwa issued against him for allowing Madame Tussauds to create a wax figure of him. Sigh. I'll just say that I don't think the dude deserves a fatwa and leave it at that.

But here's my question: Can you tell which is the man and which is the wax figure? That Madame Tussaud is pretty talented.

Side note: Anyone know why Tussauds doesn't have an apostrophe?

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Priests to purify site after Bush visit

A funny story I came across from Excite. If the Democrate retake the White House next year, I wonder if they could hire these guys. The picture of the ruins is one I dug up, so to speak. More conversation, and a question of semantics related to the Bush administration, below the article.

Priests to Purify Site After Bush Visit
Mar 9, 12:20 AM (ET)
By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.

Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites - which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles - would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26-30.

Bush's trip has already has sparked protests elsewhere in Latin America, including protests and clashes with police in Brazil hours before his arrival. In Bogota, Colombia, which Bush will visit on Sunday, 200 masked students battled 300 riot police with rocks and small homemade explosives.

The tour is aimed at challenging a widespread perception that the United States has neglected the region and at combatting the rising influence of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez, who has called Bush "history's greatest killer" and "the devil."

Iximche, 30 miles west of the capital of Guatemala City, was founded as the capital of the Kaqchiqueles kingdom before the Spanish conquest in 1524.

This article reminded me of something that's been on my mind the last couple of days. Media stories about Bush's trip to Latin America have discussed his early promises of focusing attention on relations with Latin America, and how that changed after the September 11 attacks. The phrase I've been hearing a lot, and not from Bush's spokespeople, but mostly from news people on NPR, is that the war on terror "took priority" over relations with countries in Latin America. To me, that's pretty poor phrasing coming from a group that's supposed to be neutral to Bush, and certainly for one that's been accused of being too liberal and too hard on him. It takes a certain responsibility off of his shoulders.

What follows is probably less of a political rant than a linguistic one, so bear with me here. Priorities are assessed and decided on. What made the war on terror a priority over Latin America was a decision from the Bush administration, conscious or unconscious. The Bush administration made the one thing a priority over the other. It didn't just happen by itself.

Now I'm not saying that that was a bad decision. I think that Bush and his cronies have made lots of bad decisions, and that history will continue to turn up more and more of these. But if I had been president, I would have started focusing on terrorism over Latin America, too.*

On the other hand, the fact remains that a choice was made here. To use an extreme example, if there's a fire and I grab my children and get them out of the house and leave a toaster to get burned, that's a choice. It's the right one, but it's a choice. My kids didn't "take priority" over the toaster. I prioritized my kids above the toaster. The war on terror didn't "take priority" over Latin American relations. The Bush administration prioritized the war on terror over Latin American relations.

* At least for the year or so following those attacks. I likely wouldn't have gotten us into a war on Iraq, though, so I would have had a lot more time on my hands to get back to addressing other things, including maintaining relations with neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, signing the Kyoto Protocol, not alienating the entire world, etc.

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Um, guys...

I just noticed a story on Excite News (originating from the AP). It's about a comedy routine that Brad Garrett (best know as Raymond's brother Robert on Everyone Loves Raymond) performed during a gathering of advertisers for Fox, where Fox was highlighting his new sitcom. He made some jokes about Paula Abdul (hey, who wouldn't?), and the story, called "New Sitcom Start Goes After Paula Abdul," deals with that.

The odd thing is the image that accompanied the story. It's not of Brad Garrett. It's of Leif Garrett, fallen 70s icon, appearing bruised, battered, and in a bright orange "they're making me wear this" shirt at a court hearing in Los Angeles.

You'd think someone would have caught that. Other than me.

Here's the link, although I suspect it will be fixed pretty soon: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060519/D8HN1SIO0.html

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I can't help myself

According to an article on MSNBC.com, President Bush said today that, "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English...."

Sigh. Seems like it should be a requirement for presidents, too.

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The gunsel pumped metal with his gat at a bird on the gooseberry lay

I love mysteries and often enjoy reading hard-boiled books from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, with their particular brand of slang. Somewhere along the way, I found a web site that includes a very interesting glossary of some of those terms. It's a fun read, and makes me think that we might need to add a "talk like a gangster" day to the world's repertoir, a kind of companion to talk like a pirate day.

The same site with the glossary has a fun article about Dashiell Hammett's use of the term gooseberry lay and how he turned the term "gunsel," which originally meant something along the lines of "catamite," on its ear.

I particularly love that fact that the article involves two pillars of the mystery community: Hammett (who, of course, wrote The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other classics) and the article's writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, best known as the writer of the Perry Mason mysteries.

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Too... many... spaces...

In school, I was always taught to leave two spaces after the end of every sentence. The reason for this was that the original typewriters had only monospaced fonts; people needed the extra space for a visual cue that a sentence had ended.

Well, hardly anyone uses typewriters anymore. Computers use proportionally spaced fonts and, as a result, writers now only need to use a single space after a mark of punctuation.

A fellow copyeditor retrained me in this, explaining the reasoning to me and convincing me to stop hitting the spacebar that extra time. It was a bit jarring at first; it wasn't what I'd been taught. But after about a day, I got used to it.

For some reason, though, many people have never been taught to stop adding those extra spaces. Almost always, when I'm asked to edit a document, one of my first steps is run a search and replace, converting all double spaces into single ones. It's not a huge deal, but it's a pain. Someone needs to get out there and communicate to people that that extra space has gone the way of the dodo, disco, and "Dingoes Ate My Baby."

So there.

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A quip

The other night:

Dina: "How are you, honey?"
Me: "I've been worn down, yelled at, bit, and bonked on the forehead with a yo-yo. How are you?"

Of course, if I'd been writing it as a line of dialogue and had a little more time to think about it, I might have added some specific detail:

Me: "I've been worn down by Wal-Mart, yelled at, bit, and bonked on the forehead with a Finding Nemo yo-yo. How are you?"

I'm not sure that either of these is great art, in fact I'm sure that neither is, but I've found that a little bit of specific detail can add color to writing, as long as you don't overdo it.

Anyway, I've been dismal about posting here, and thought I'd at least jot down a few random thoughts to get the wheels greased again.

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Things that drive me nuts about Big Brother

Okay. True confession time.

Dina and I watch Big Brother 6. I'm not particularly proud of it, but there you go. Like the other Big Brother shows (we've watched all except Big Brother 2), it's somewhat addictive--the shenanigans, the shifting alliances, the silly games, the attempts at surprises (this year, the "Summer of Surprises," has so far failed to surprise much). And it's something we watch and chat about together during the summer.

But there are things that drive me nuts about the damn show, too. For example:

• Every time Julie Chen says the words "send shockwaves through the house."
• Stupid nicknames (in this case, Eric being called "Cappy" all the time).
• The way that players mangle the English language: "me and Kaysar have gotten to be good friends in the house" or "James and myself have formed an alliance." Argh!
• The way that Julie Chen mangles the English language (although I guess I should blame her script writers). Folks, "they" is not a singular pronoun.
• The way the show keeps trying to pretend that its secrets are still secrets. The players figured out the first week that they all had secret partners, but the game tried to milk it for weeks, acting as if the players should be surprised at this great secret they figured out early on. Or this week, when the "big reveal" is that one evicted player will return to the household. My dog Callie saw that one coming. Sigh.

Eh. I'll undoubtedly have more soon.

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Wedding Crashers and the copyediting geeks

Okay. I hinted at a Wedding Crashers anecdote, so here it is. Dina and I went to see the movie a couple of Saturdays ago. I recommend it, by the way. It's crude, but very funny, especially during the first half.

Fairly early in the movie, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn were reading about the wedding of Secretary Cleary's daughter (with Secretary Cleary played by Christopher Walken). The newspaper story was flashed on the screen for maybe a second and a half. During that time, I spotted a sentence that said something along the lines of "The Cleary's are expected to have...." Seeing it, I clucked silently to myself. That apostrophe should never have been there. Then I shrugged it off. It was only on screen for a second or so. I was probably the only person in America to notice the damn thing. What kind of geek was I to catch a misplaced apostrophe in a newspaper flashed onto a movie screen for that short of a time?

Then Dina turned and whispered to me, "There was a really bad apostrophe error in that newspaper."

Clearly, we were made for each other.

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