link to: 11:39 [GMT-6]

Half a Dozen to Go

 

With no further ado, here's the Saturday sausage platter! And, like every platter of link sausages, you really don't want to know how these were made... or how I came across the ingredients.

• Congratulations to the 2009 Nebula Nominees. Normally, I'd link to SFWA's own website... but the formatting and arrangement is a lot cleaner at SF Awards Watch.
• An octopus was practicing to become a many-tentacled overlord. Stupid humans! (HT: Pharyngula)
• From the Department of Ideology, here's an item from The Times describing the Iranian News Service's allegation that Harry Potter and Hollywood are a Zionist plot. I'm surprised that there hasn't been an equivalent IRINN piece that blames the entire financial system collapse on a conspiracy between Britney Spears and Jewish bankers... yet. Meanwhile, we should acknowledge science's debt to Islam, at a time when the shoes of ideology were on the other foot. Actually, it's arguable that Christianity had swallowed the shoe, excreted it, and hung it on its forehead during the thousand-year interregnum (roughly 576 to 1582), but that's for another time.
• Speaking of Hollywood, Salman Rushdie muses on whether a film can ever be a good adaptation of a book. This is, perhaps, proof that the critical acumen of writers is somewhat limited... because it is akin to asking whether a photograph can ever do a sculpture justice, forgetting that sometimes "justice" might involve smashing the damned thing. In this particular instance, tearing up the F. Scott Fitzgerald story while still in manuscript stage would have been an improvement; neither the story nor the film is really very good, except — perhaps — for the acting in the film.
• Here's a more-measured evaluation of the Facebook TOS controversy. Ultimately, though, I'm not sure that anything other than knowing that this isn't the first time Facebook has claimed perpetual ownership of information is really necessary. Neither will it be the last.
• Over at Scalzi's blog Whatever, he tries to explain why he doesn't care about Kindle's text-to-speech feature. Buried in the middle of the comments at number ten, though, one finds Cory Doctorow making the same mistake I've recently accused other techies of making: Treating one's policy preferences as if they are, in fact, what the law already is. Here's a sample, with interleaved comments (paragraphing is Doctorow's, but I've silently corrected some of the typography):

  ...Amazon doesn’t commit copyright infringement by making a tool that can commit copyright infringement. If there’s an infringement taking place on the Kindle, then the infringer is the user.

  These two sentences are a complete non sequitur, because they're missing a critical word: direct. As Grokster makes clear, under some circumstances a toolmaker does commit indirect (or what the Court ineptly called "secondary") infringement if it knows that users will use the tool to commit clear direct infringements and bases its business model on that knowledge.

  ...Amazon has no obligation to prevent its users from infringing, because tool makers are not required to take measures to prevent infringement from taking place using their devices. Kodak, Xerox, Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation are all free to deliver products that can (and DO!) infringe copyright without having to worry about designing their products to minimize infringement (this principle of law originates with the 1984 Supreme Court ruling in the Betamax [Sony] case).

  This is a gross overstatement of Sony, primarily because it inverts the Court's reasoning. Sony did not concern attempts to "minimize infringement;" it concerned whether there was a substantial noninfringing use to balance against any infringing use. That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it's not; Mr Doctorow's next paragraph makes clear why it matters...

  Finally, there is no way that Amazon could build a non-infringing TTS feature, because such a feature would have to be able to determine, a priori, whether a user was presently located in a jurisdiction in which a work was or was not in copyright — and more importantly, it would have to be able to adjudicate fair use claims (I’m sure that even if the [Authors' Guild] claims reading the whole book is infringing that they would agree that a short fragment does not necessarily infringe).

  Well, actually, this is all completely wrong, both technologically and legally. From the technological standpoint, Amazon could limit reading to passages of less than, say, 2:50 (the purported "sweet spot" for a pop song on 1960s/1970s radio), or build in a cutoff that will end a reading at the first terminal punctuation after that point. We'll slide over the jurisdiction issue for the moment, because it's a misstatement of the jurisdictional test for reasons that only a civil procedure nerd like me will even care about; it's simultaneously vastly more complex in analysis and vastly more simple in result than Mr Doctorow implies. That said, it's the last sentence that reveals everything about Mr Doctorow's approach. Fair use is a defense, not a right, under US copyright law (and even more so, although not codified as such or called "fair use", under the Berne Convention generally and under UK, German, Swiss, Austrian, and Japanese domestic copyright law — and probably others, but I've just not gone into satisfactory-to-me original-language depth elsewhere); that is, it cannot be "adjudicated" until the infringed copyright holder defines the scope of infringement that is at issue.

  This has been a difficult-to-digest sausage for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that ultimately I think the Kindle text-to-speech feature is not, itself, the source of any infringement... for the same reasons as the Court actually stated a quarter of a century ago in Sony. I strongly differ with Mr Doctorow's reasoning and statement of what "the law is," though, and perhaps this has been a useful exercise in showing — again — the distinction between, on one tentacle, the law's (often insanely bizarre) requirements and, on other tentacles, technological reality, policy preferences, and individual behavior. My ultimate point is that sometimes the law is not an ass — this time, instead, it's the Authors' Guild. Those with a sense of irony might note the Authors' Guild's inconsistent position in the proposed settlement of the Google Book Search lawsuit (and, as soon as I clear a conflict, I'll finish that rant), not to mention its inept initial position therein.

Labels: copyright, culture, intellectual property, jurisprudence, mass media, miscellany, publishing, science

link to: 11:09 [GMT-6]

Squirrel Sausages

 

• In the NYT, a lukewarm article (probably written by a journalism major) asks how we justify the humanities during a recession. Which begs two much larger questions:
  1. How do we justify MBA programs when MBA-think is what got us into this recession in the first place? Frankly, we can't — especially when what passes for quantitative reasoning in MBA programs is so divorced from the real world, and what passes for analysis in MBA programs is so focussed on short-term indicators of success that have been accepted as valid without any reasonable effort to correlate them to long-term success... or even define "success."
  2. How do we justify taking technically skilled people and making them devote their entire efforts to "management"? Perhaps the best example I can think of is the "management problems" we had in the military during the decade on each side of Gulf War I thanks to the "engineering curriculum" at the military academies... but spotting that problem required both being far enough on the inside to understand the the problem and being far enough on the outside to be willing and able to criticize it. (Not that it did an awful lot of good, although most of my non-Academy-graduate bosses ultimately agreed.)

     The most important justification for the humanities, though, is purely functional. At the university level, the humanities all concern how one communicates, and the assumptions that one makes while communicating. And if there is one thing that this particular recession comes from, it is a failure to communicate.

• Lee Goldberg doesn't understand the DVD release schedule for TV series... and he should if anyone does. But he doesn't, primarily because he's not thinking in terms of legal minutiae. Leaving aside the serious issue of the condition of archival materials — a nontrivial problem, but one that also applies to feature films — one must place most of the blame on the lawyers and beancounters. Really. (Like I have ever shown any reluctance to blame lawyers for anything, eh?) Too often, the cheapskate beancounter types who played manager in the 1960s through 1980s chose to save a tiny bit of money — tiny, that is, in comparison to the entire budget — by only clearing rights to other materials, such as music, for broadcast. Now, the value of the rights for recorded media has skyrocketed, and the Fram Oil Filter theory has come back to haunt them. Exhibit A: The classic, good PBS production of The Lathe of Heaven, which could probably have secured all of the rights in question for about $3,000 more in 1979... and was left in the vault for two decades thereafter. (Of course, the greed at Apple Corp. didn't help; it's not always the beancounters at the film producers who are at fault.) Now throw in the AMPTP's general reluctance to share silly things like residuals from DVDs with anyone else, and all of a sudden things make sense: They don't have to share residuals (or, at least, not as much of them) until the series as a whole is in positive-net territory, and all of those failed series aren't in positive-net territory, so...
• Here are some thoughful comments on why book reviews don't "work" from Tom Christenson. I will now apply my own humanities education and assert that there is a yet more fundamental reason that they don't "work": We can't agree on what "work" means. Often, a negative review is at least as valuable to the potential purchaser as is a positive one. For one thing, a reviewer who never issues (or seldom issues) negative reviews — at least those not fuelled by a preexisting feud with the author/editor of the book(s) in question! — has little or no credibility with those who actually pay attention to the content of the review, rather than its very existence. Understanding what someone does not like, and why, helps immensely when trying to give appropriate weight to his/her praise. Bluntly, one of the reasons that nobody really pays any attention to Kirkus anymore is that the bland bits of praise, in varying weights, that infect its reviews have no context, seem generic... and, all too often, end up being inconsistent with readers' experiences with the books. In strictly economic terms, a good book review helps me focus my limited time and other resources (such as bookshelf space!) on works that are more likely to have a reasonable return on my investment of time, money, energy, etc.; and sometimes, that necessarily requires eliminating the inadequate-but-heavily-marketed dreck so I can spend my decisionmaking time on the items that potentially are worth my attention.
• Perhaps the rhetoric is a bit overblown, but Joss Whedon does make some sense when explaining why — with one exception — DC's comics have not made good films. The problem is not the audience's inability to identify with god-like superheroes; if it was, the comic books themselves would not have been popular. The problem, instead, is that film as a medium is inappropriate for depicting god-like characters, because it doesn't leave enough to the imagination: It puts everything in the same frame of immediacy, and doesn't allow the audience a chance to pause and reflect. Except, that is, when watching it on DVD. So perhaps — just perhaps — the best way to adapt superhero comics might be via direct-to-DVD release with "frames" to anticipate audience pauses? And keep things in a episodic structure, just like the release of the actual comic books? I shudder to think of what Warner would do to material like Sandman that not just allows, but demands, audience reflection (and even flipping back a few pages to confirm what already happened)... because, if there's one thing that Warner's films do not do — even the relatively successful ones like The Dark Knight — it is encourage the audience to immerse itself more fully in the experience by taking a break in the middle.
• The Supreme Court restricted itself to the "It may be stupid; it may be offensive; but that's a political defect, not a constitutional one" meme that informs so much (perhaps too much) of the debate on government and religion in its decision this morning in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, No. 07–665 (25 Feb. 2009) (PDF). In this case, a distinct-minority religion (one might say "crackpot," as if that's any real distinction) wanted to put a monument with its Seven Aphorisms in a public park that already had nearly a dozen other religious monuments. The city rejected Summum's application, codified its reasons for rejecting the application, and gave Summum another chance... which Summum promptly blew by not following directions.

  On principle, I'd prefer not to have religious monuments on public land. Of any kind. But in this instance, the Court was caught between two different flavors of stupid, and chose the flavor of stupid least likely to cause further constitutional damage. I do not believe that this foreshadows anything about the other monument case this term... because in that instance, the government did not establish written criteria and yet explicitly allowed a monument that is exclusionary — not inclusive — in nature.

And now, off to the vet: Lucy needs her vaccinations and rabies shot. Then the local wildlife needs its daily dose of mortal fear.

Labels: arts, civil rights, copyright, culture, intellectual property, jurisprudence, life, mass media, miscellany, politics

link to: 11:42 [GMT-6]

Tearing Apart the Sausage Grinder

 

I'm mostly working under the hood on the blawg today, doing some long-overdue maintenance on the static panel and simplifying some style designations. Nothing to see here, citizens — move along. Well, maybe there is something to see:

First up, a little amusement from the land of right-wing ideology. And creationism. And, for that matter, ideology and fundamentalism in general...

   Now we'll transition to political cartoons, which often — via both cognitive dissonance and combining an image with words — have more that is valuable to say than do syndicated columnists (or editorial boards, broadcast and radio commentators, etc.). That is, some allegiance to art pays off, you dopes. And, as the subject of this cartoon indicates all too aptly, sometimes "art" does not... but that's part of the risk of engaging in public debate: Everyone makes mistakes, misstatements, and eventually looks stupid on something or other. If you don't, you're simply not trying hard enough, or caring enough about what you're doing to ever do it well.

   On the other hand, this can also end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Labels: culture, internet, politics, science

link to: 22:45 [GMT-6]

The World's a Mess

 

...and I just need to rule it. Saturday sausages:

• Of late, there have been more rumblings from the antivaccination crowd. The best response to those numbskulls is a description of the diseases in question. Better yet, a trip to a village stricken with pertussis.
• Shark attacks were way down in 2008, which is not surprising since lawyers are having trouble finding work and aren't cruising their usual hunting grounds. Fortunately, ex-Bushies are having trouble finding jobs, too. Schade.
• Computer use, free speech, and videogames have all been in the news lately. Just how much truly free speech will be left on the 'net if the government keeps records of internet use for two years? I've remarked on libel tourism here before; it's an interesting problem in choice of law and recognition of judgments, but the best solution is to force nations that have signed on to the UN Declaration of Human Rights to make their own domestic law consistent with it.

  And that leads us to videogames, in the fascinating matter of Video Software Dealers Ass'n v. Schwarzenegger (yes, Ahnold). A California law restricted sale of "overly violent" videogames to minors, but was just struck down in a needlessly-long opinion (PDF) from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. How long did it need to be? This would have been sufficient:

  Newly-enacted California Civil Code §§ 1746–1746.5 imposes restrictions and a labeling requirement on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. We need go no further than the face of the Act to discern that it constitutes a content-based restriction on speech. "Content-based regulations [of speech] are presumptively invalid." R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377, 382 (1992). Although the State may properly provide restrictions on actually harmful communications to minors, it may only due so — outside of the narrow exception of obscene, sexually explicit material, Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968) — through the least-restrictive means available, narrowly tailored to the factual interest. United States v. Playboy Entm't Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 813 (2000). That factual interest must be sound, and not based on mere conjecture; that interest must be expressed in "reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence. Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. v. FCC, 520 U.S. 180, 195 (1997). For the well-considered reasons stated in the decision below, the statute fails each and every one of these elements.

  The statute fares no better when considered as compelled speech by the dealers, who are forced to label purportedly violent games with a reference to the statute. Compelled speech must be restricted to purely factual matters, Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, 471 U.S. 626, 651 (1985), and does not extend to forced expression of a mere opinion with which the vendor disagrees, United States v. United Foods, Inc., 533 U.S. 405, 410 (2001). As noted above, and detailed by the District Court below, the Act's labelling requirements do not even come close to making a factual statement; they are, instead, an expression of opinion by individuals unfamiliar with news broadcasts on September 11, 2001.

  Affirmed.

  Any more than that needlessly dignifies the statute... and the invidious motives of its sponsors.

   In non-sausage news, I've finally got a new server up and running; I've recovered most of the files, so perhaps I'll post a couple of longer pieces that have been festering percolating for a while now. That leads to today's musical selection.

Labels: civil rights, internet, jurisprudence, law practice, mass media, politics, science

link to: 13:28 [GMT-6]

President's Day Sausages

 

I've spent most of the weekend doing recovery from the fried computer (sauced with a bit of ketsap manis), so things are a bit behind. Thus, a particularly miscellaneous set of link sausages...

• We'll start off with a song that sounds very much as if it was written for the immediate past resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC... but, sadly, it was written a couple of decades ago, so perhaps it's just a bit more universal than that.
• So, why don't Americans learn more about foreign culture? Sarcastically, I'd say that it starts with not knowing a whole helluva lot about their own. But this article points out another reason: Poor language skills. Ponder that in the context of the preceding sausage.
• Speaking of not knowing much about culture, here's an article that questions the "end" of lit crit in America. As is usual with the sorts of things that escape academia, it's full of wishful thinking. Nonetheless, this piece is particularly prone to only seeing what the writer desperately wants to be true... sort of like the Think Method. There's trouble in Television City, and that begins with a T which rhymes with C and that stands for Charlottesville...
• This is a rather dense sausage link, probably not chewable without Jaws of Steel^tm, on the interrelationship of various monetary issues in the arts. There's one piece of good news: arts funding survived in the stimulus bill. From here, though, it's all downhill. In Canada, there's a proposal to provide benefits for Canadian writers (and others in publishing), which sort of begs the question of what happens now... but nonetheless beats the news about UK freelancer earnings.

  In the meantime, history shows one way for publishers to srvive during a war. Needless to say, the current management in publishing does nothing of the sort. And they learn nothing from the music business, either. There's another EU copyright extension for music coming, which will not trickle its way down to the actual composers; the Muzak bankruptcy filing was largely caused because the company is hundreds of millions of dollars behind in payments to rightsholding entities like the truly evil Nashville Six (sort of like the Chicago Seven, but this time it's the defendants who are neofascist lunatics, not the judge).

  Things are no better in the visual arts at the end of the art boom... or, at least, an opportunity for the art boom to move underground as a new cohort of nouveau riche arises and discovers the need to impress each other. It happens about every thirty years or so — one traditional demographic generation; the last "collapse" in the art market was at the end of the 1970s, so we were about due.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, life, mass media, miscellany, politics, publishing

link to: 09:12 [GMT-6]

Fish and Chimps

 

These sausages have evolved — and will continue evolving in your intellectual digestive tract. In dubious honor of Charles Darwin, we have an all-Darwin sausage link platter (some of them uncooked)!

• Customize your vehicle with a Darwinfish (or, perhaps, a missing link).
• The NYT has a couple of items on Darwin. He's still influential, if not a celebrity. He's also wrongly blamed for misinterpretations of his work, as in that article; I'm afraid that particular MacArthur fellow didn't do enough research on the history of "creationism," which extends back to the time of Paracelsus.
• WaPo discusses discerning human evolution, in one of those recursive examples of the evolution of evolutionary theory... in response to facts, as we learn more about the facts.
• Across the pond, The Times covers bad science, and probably fraudulent science, concerning vaccines (implicating viral change over time) and what constitutes "evidence." Even church officials get involved in praising Darwin, at least half-heartedly (which is better than one can expect over here). Darwin's house, with its exhibits, is reopening to the public.
• The Economist joins the party with this internally inconsistent piece. I think it's supposed to be praise... but I'm afraid that The Economist has long had an inconsistent view of what constitutes science, particularly the kinds not dismal.
• Speaking of misusing data, Professor Myers offers two examples: one inept, demonstrating that "scientist" does not mean "knows all of science" (and I'm referring to Kurzweil there), and one ironically appropriate (particularly considering the science cuts from the stimulus-package proposal amounting to less than 0.5%).
• Last, and far from least, the Grauniad offers a full section on Darwin, including this interesting — more by implication than by depth of analysis, but the Grauniad is, after all, a general-circulation paper — selection of photographs and proof that there are "missing links" outside the Bible Belt. That last item seems particularly ironic, given that it comes from Northern Ireland... but then, understanding irony has never been a strength of any kind of fundamentalist, because it requires going beyond the literal meaning of a text.

Labels: culture, miscellany, politics, science

link to: 12:58 [GMT-6]

Murphy's Sausages

 

Still in the land of "technical difficulties": The dryer must have heard about all of the attention other things in the house were getting, because it decided to die.

• Here's a vastly amusing set of Hermione Granger music mashups (including a really disturbing Hermione/Snape implied-'ship bit, just in time for Valentine's Day)... posted by an IP law professor. I've waited until after the first caffeine should have hit my Monday readers before posting, for precisely this reason.
• Snurched from Professor Froomkin: One of Ed Felton's cabal tries desperately to explain to techies about being acquitted versus being searched, and simultaneously manages to imply — but not specifically discuss — two of the differences between, on one tentacle, lawyers, and on other tentacles, politicians, political scientists, businesspeople, and techies:
  1. There is a difference between "should be the law" and "is the law," particularly when it concerns any aspect of change or conflict. This is most frequently the problem for political scientists and techies, who have this inescapable urge to treat "my vision of what the law should be" as reality, without all that much reference to any other point of view. It's sort of ironic to accuse the community of political scientists — those arguing over the Second Amendment being a recent obvious example — of quasianarchism, but after all they are academics...
  2. Process and intermediate steps matter, particularly in the larger context of "what does this mean to an individual" instead of "what does this mean to me as an advocate of policy/technology/business plan x." There's a game-theory construct concerned with this sort of situation, sometimes called "maximum adverse excursion" (and often by other analogous names) that points out that a favorable end payoff may not be the best result for a player if the maximum adverse excursion along the path leading to that end payoff exceeds that player's risk tolerance — that is, the long-run payoff requires surviving short-run losses.
• Jay Lake talks about backing up your writings. Jay makes some good points about getting the raw data out of a single location, but neglects perhaps the most annoying aspect: Data format. The one real advantage of printouts is that they are not coding-dependent... as is the .doc file format that Jay prefers. When I'm writing a long piece, I save everything as RTF, not in a proprietary format. Even in the worst case — that Microsoft were to suddenly go out of business (remember WordStar?) — just about any program can already read and write RTF, and one can write a quick macro or filter to convert an RTF file to plain text (at worst) and probably formatted text.

  About a decade ago, we had an excellent example of what happens with data-format lockin: Remember the Y2K phenomenon, which was primarily caused by COBOL's default of two-digit years back in the 1950s and 1960s? That's not the last time it's going to happen; witness the recent dropping of DRM authentication by some music services.

  There's an additional bonus to using RTF: It won't store macros, so the chance of accidental infection is substantially lower.

• I am a combat-trained biochemist. It's February 2009. And, therefore, I celebrate a Darwinian bicentennary with some glee. It's sad that so many in England still reject evolution, despite virtually incontrovertible evidence that the broad outlines of the theory that evolved from Darwin's On the Origin of Species is a correct explanation that can be observed in action daily. It's even sadder that various surveys have demonstrated that acceptance of the theory of evolution is even lower on this side of the pond... but that is probably more an indictment of poor teaching and textbooks than anything else, because there's a big distinction in acceptance once one asks about the content of the theory instead of the labels for it.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, internet, jurisprudence, life, mass media, miscellany, politics

link to: 11:31 [GMT-6]

Handmade Sausages

 

Technical difficulties abound here: The cordless phone's battery is almost dead, and the motherboard on the main machine (the file server) is just about dead... to the point that it won't recognize either the mouse or the keyboard. Thus, this set of sausage links is virtually handmade, using a laptop that was initially certified for Windows98SE (and is still more powerful than the entire Apollo Program data processing system).

• First, cuteness and vulture power. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the best exhibit at the Oklahoma City Zoo, back when I was assigned there, was the vulture cage... because I was assigned to Tinker AFB right after the Penn Square Bank collapse. Besides, I sort of like (and resemble) a vulture's hairline.
• It's not just the automobile and financial industries that have excessive executive pay problems. Meanwhile, artists starve in Canada and the AP demonstrates — yet again — that it doesn't understand either the difference between "art" and "news" or the concept of transformative use... which is completely consistent with the AP's other demonstrated feelings of "entitlement" and excessive ownership.
• Here's an idea for a horror film: It Came From the Slush Pile... but nobody edited it. Of late, I've been wondering whether any of the "acquiring editors" at A Certain Media Conglomerate actually do any editing at all, so maybe this horror has gone mainstream.
• As the whole publishing world knows by now, Sara Nelson — the longtime EIC of PW — was "laid off" recently. The NY Observer — a former employer — pretended to do an "exit interview" with her, but it was rather unintentionally revealing.

  Ms. Nelson bristled Friday at the notion that her optimism in recent months was insincere. "I mean, how do I say this? It is sort of my way — it's sort of true to my personality to be that way," she said. "So it’s not like I was really going around growling, and then writing these kind of sunny things. First of all, I don't think they were so sunny, really, but it is true to my personality to make a joke or try to figure out where the good news is in the story. I think [my columns] were true to what I was feeling, but I’m a little bit that way." If Ms. Nelson is sensitive on this point, it’s probably because for all the cheerleading she has done from her perch atop PW, she retains the guts and inclinations of a reporter who, before taking over the industry bible, spent five years — first at [now-defunct] Inside.com, then the New York Observer and, finally, the New York Post — hunting from the outside for insider gossip, million-dollar book deals and dramatic job moves.

  (typography corrected; emphasis added; fake paragraphing removed for clarity) So that's what passes for journalism these days... and explains far, far too much about the shallowness of those "business features" that PW ran during her tenure.

• In contrast, consider what Stephen King has to say about a number of popular contemporary "novelists":

  Both [J.K.] Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

  On the other hand, Mr King isn't very good, either. He's not a worthless Dan Brown or "James Patterson" (although, given that Patterson doesn't actually write the books that come out under his name, that's not very fair, is it?) or John Grisham or replaceable-fake-romance-novelisté-of-the-week hack, but neither is he a good popular novelist... let alone artist. (He seems to have "celebrity author" down pretty damned well, I must admit.)

• Last, a sad note: the best bookstore in Chambanana has closed. That leaves this college community of well over 150,000 — it's hard to say exactly how many actually live here, since counting of students is extremely inconsistent (even among the three towns here, which can't even agree on rules for doing so!) — with exactly two trade bookstores: a small Barnes & Noble and a Borders... neither of which is accessible to most of the poorer parts of town without a long bus ride and at least one transfer.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, intellectual property, mass media, miscellany, publishing

link to: 17:41 [GMT-6]

Sausages Made Out of What???

 

Today's link platter is preceded by an antepasto recognition of Groundhog Day, in my usual sick, twisted manner.

And now, the main course.

• I was appalled — offended, even — by the halftime "show" at the Super Bowl. The only thing in that stadium bigger than Springsteen's paycheck was his ego, which must approach Shatneresque proportions if he thought collection of off-key, off-rhythm, off-pitch dreck was worthwhile. In honor of the now-defunct SAT word analogies:

  Springsteen : stadium rock :: _____ : folk-rock
  (a) Baez
  (b) Dylan
  (c) The Kingston Trio
  (d) A and B

  The correct answer is, of course, (b). If Jimi Hendrix were alive today, he'd be excusing his singing by comparing it to that performance last night — not to Dylan.

• That is, Springsteen's primary value is as a composer, not a performer; consider, for example, Manfred Mann's Earth Band. But how much do "professional composers" make, anyway? Apparently, not enough to avoid side gigs as a necessity... or yet another "advance" in Bowie Bonds.
• Hollywood journalism in decline shock horror! Simultaneously snide and serious question: How would you tell? The standards at both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter — in substance, in style, and in timing — are so low that they've been doing the limbo under George Bush's IQ for decades. While drunk (or otherwise mood-enhanced, in the tradition of Hollywood recreational chemistry). And not coming close to the bar.
• If you really want to get fired, just write a semiracy novel that includes a few characters who share forenames with other employers. Then, after you get fired, you might try suing for sexual harassment.
• Here's yet another ignorant assertion about the Civil War that neglects basic economics: The South did not have the industrial capacity to win the war; even had it won battles at Gettysburg or Vicksburg, or prevented Sherman's march, the best outcome it could hope for was a long stalemate. But then, the NEH hasn't done a very good job of selecting competent historians to write for it since, oh, the beginning of time.
• Speaking of problems with ignoring foundational economics, consider what a liberal Nobel Laureate in Economics says about bailouts for bunglers and ask yourself whether the "bonus culture" on Wall Street represents a triumph or a failing of rational-actor economics.
• Your best friend in a recession is your local library. (Actually, a good library is my best friend regardless of economic circumstances... but then, I'm a nerd.) Scalzi agrees, and points out other low-cost, high-value entertainment for the economically troubled.

  I won't bore you with theorizing on the relationship between ownership of copies and availability of entertainment, or time-slice ownership and/or determinatives, or anything else like that. Hopefully, though, just mentioning that in conjunction with the preceding paragraph might get y'all thinking.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, intellectual property, internet, military, miscellany, politics, publishing