20 January 2010

Frosty's Fate

Our six inches of snow (of course, down on Frat Row they're insisting that it was eight inches) is finally melting off here.

  • Is the false lure of "professionalism" attributable to a truth explained by a professional musician and composer? It's more than money that matters... as my colleagues Charlie Stross and Rich White note: That when immediate monetized return is the only measure, "professionalism" suffers. Want more proof? Tune in at 2335 (2235 Central).
  • The New Yawkah profiles Neil Gaiman without enough acknowledgement of his fiancé... not so much because she's essential to his work (she's rather too recent in his life for that), but because the "story" followed through Gaiman's blog entries says a great deal about both the man and his work.
  • At the meatier end of things — if, that is, "brains" count as "meat" — here's a thought-provoking piece on collaboration and IP rights (that, unfortunately, concentrates far too much on corporate-corporate collaboration problems and far less on the more-common author-author collaboration problems). Then there's the danger of copying yourself (or, worse yet, pirating music online).
  • Over on the literary theory end of things, Jonathan Zasloff properly takes a reviewer to task for misusing "deconstruction"... and doesn't go quite far enough in condemning the particular method properly called "deconstruction" by pointing out its roots in the overinterpretation of certain reactions to logical positivism.
  • More bad news, favoring the source of all a helluva lot of evil in college football: USC defeats USC in trademark battle. I'm waiting now for accusations of dodgy officiating to surface...