2009/12/15 excerpt
All authors should have a website for this reason: I had never heard of Jim Butcher or The Dresden Files, and then I read a short story called The Restoration of Faith that is available for free on his website. Now I’ve bought and read the first book in the series (Storm Front) and the next couple are on top of my Christmas wishlist.
“I struggled to hold onto the yowling child while fumbling a quarter into the pay phone and jamming down the buttons to dial Nick’s mobile.” (read the rest of the story on butcher’s site)
2009/12/9 excerpt
Perhaps the most famous of H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling SciFi stories, The Call of Cthulhu (full text here) hooks you from the first line:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
2009/12/9 article
With four days until departure, and a week of traveling ahead, the most German I can manage before my arrival in Frankfurt is to memorize a few basic phrases. Ja, Nein, and Wo ist die nächste Kneipe? (Where is the next pub?) ranked high on the list, so I’ve got the important things down. Between now and then I’ll be so busy packing, driving, flying, visiting family, and slogging through security checkpoints that learning more German seems a distant concern.
All the same, I figured I could read on the plane, so I scoured a half dozen bookstores for a pocket reference guide for German phrases. They typically had several sizes of dictionary and nothing else. I was hoping for a handy and amusing book, something like Common German Insults and Pickup Lines, with which I can anger the men and woo the women. My antics with such a guide would all be forgiven, of course, because I’ll massacre the delivery, but there are no limits for good entertainment. Publishers take note. Need I point out the vast untapped profits (and laughs) ripe for the picking in such a market?
When I finally found a common phrase book, it was priced at twenty dollars, so I figured I’d save cash and not make a fool of myself, at least not at first. I’ll just pretend I’m mute instead. Nod and smile, or hope to god they speak English. If things gets out of hand, and my safety depends on recalling on cue that thirty letter safe word, and the metal chair they handcuffed me to is bolted to the floor, I’ll have to rely on my survival skills and the panic-induced strength that surges through my limbs when confronted by whip- and chain-weilding leather-clad vixens.
Once I got home from the bookstore, however, that thought began to worry me, so I dug around for a while and found a few websites to help me out. I bookmarked a basic German course on Wikibooks, the Google translator, and the jackpot of all reference pages for German (discovered after wading extensively through ads and other Internet muck). If you prefer video lessons YouTube has some decent ones, too, and it helps just to familiarize yourself with the sounds.
These resources will be more useful as a reference guide once I’ve been exposed to the language than they are right now, but anyone with considerable motivation and persistence could conceivably learn German without spending a cent beyond access to the Internet.
When I get to Frankfurt, I’ll do my best not to agree with anything I don’t fully understand, especially when it’s offered by a woman in tight leather. And if I don’t heed my own advice, at least it’ll be a good story. Otherwise I’m just going to jump right in. Klingt Spaß, ja?
2009/12/8 excerpt
This is a passage from Norman Mailer’s third novel, The Deer Park. It takes place after Sergius’s first liaison with the beautiful actress Lulu in Desert D’Or, Hollywood’s secluded party resort:
“With the dawn spreading out from me until it seemed to touch the Yacht Club with its light, I began to think of those mornings when I was out on a flight which started in the darkness of the hangars, the syrup of coffee on my tongue, the blast of my plane flaring two long fires into the night. We would take off an hour before dawn, and when morning came to meet us five miles high in the air with the night clouds warmed by a gold and silver light, I used to believe I could control the changes of the sky by a sway of my body as it was swelled by the power of the plane, and I had played with magic. For it was magic to fly an airplane; it was a gimmick and a drug. We knew that no matter what happened on ground, no matter how little or confusing we ourselves could be, there would always come those hours when we were alone in formation and on top of life, and so the magic was in the flight and the flight made us very cool, you know? and there was nothing which could happen once we were down which could not be fixed when the night went into the west and we ganged after it on our wings.
I had been careful to forget all of this, I had liked it too much, and it had not been easy to think that I would probably never have any magic again; but on this dawn with the taste of Lulu still teasing me, I knew that I could have something else, and I could be sad for those airplanes I deserted because there was something to take their place.”
2009/12/4 article
If it is true that Google “is profiting from online news pages” as this BBC article claims, then if Google limits access to free news, the newspaper industry will see a correlating increase in online revenue, right?
Not necessarily. I ran across this article by the Google CEO Eric Schmidt, dated one day before that misinformed BBC article was published. Schmidt argues that it is not the fault of the popular search engine that the newspaper industry is struggling against a thinning revenue stream, especially in the online market. They are struggling because the newspaper industry has failed to adapt their methods as technology evolves.
People that read news online today don’t buy a whole paper– or two or three. They skim the headlines on news aggregates (Google News, Newser), and pick and choose which articles they wish to read. Personally, I visit a dozen different websites daily for my news fix. Schmidt calls this the “atomic unit of consumption.”
Think about it. Newspapers have used the same presentation methods for decades with little adjustment. It worked for a long time. Then TV News came along and newspapers started to struggle. Since the rise of the Internet, they have been fighting not to drown.
The technology has changed, the methods of consumption have changed, but the news industry has not. So who is really to blame?
Curiously enough, the BBC article and Schmidt’s article both cite Murdoch–in defense of opposing sides. It is not even necessary to quote BBC. Schmidt’s case trumps the BBC article in evidence and logic:
“It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.”
One more thing: Schmidt mentioned a new project called Google Fast Flip:
“The theory—which seems to work in practice—is that if we make it easier to read articles, people will read more of them. Our news partners will receive the majority of the revenue generated by the display ads shown beside stories.”
This might be a win for both sides. News companies better hop on that bandwagon or start to write their own obituaries.