07 July 2010

Creutzfeldt-Jacob Link Sausages

Lost yesterday to a migraine attack. Normally, the mashed brain bits are exactly what would end up in the sausages, but there was a USDA inspector nearby, so...

  • I'm worried about alien invasions now: Aliens' first chance to see us is I Love Lucy, and we're all dead if they have any sense and consider her a threat to the galaxy.
  • It's one thing to throw a stone at a glass house; what about throwing manuscripts at a Tin House? It's fascinating to see the mistaken attempts to deal with submissions... because the submission model is still based in the manual typewriter era. But that's a rant for another time; in the meantime, chew on Jeff Vandermeer's "prediction" that publishing's future is the small press, and then realize that a publisher's overall profits are seldom linked to the quality of what it publishes, above a certain (awfully low) minimum (that too many publishers of all sizes, but especially small presses, don't meet)...
  • The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection warns against inappropriate vanity press transactions. Ironically, although this looks like a consumer protection notice (and is so captioned), it's actually an unfair-trade-practices notice... because authors are not consumers and therefore cannot claim the benefit of consumer protection law; compare 815 ILCS 505 (Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, limited to consumers) with Wis. Stat. § 100.20 ("Little FTC" Act applicable to all "unfair" trade practices), although admittedly Wisconsin is a little less formalist about this than most states are.
  • You say "spinoff," I say "sequel" — and the divorce lawyer says "billable hours." This is a perfect example of what happens when one doesn't rely on specialists in drafting specialty-dependent documents: No IP-savvy attorney in his/her/its right mind would have approved the quoted language, precisely because it's inherently ambiguous (and has no legal standing either in copyright law or in the strange hybrid of industry custom and outright extortion prevalent in H'wood).
  • No more comments on the World Cup, unless something really astounding happens. I didn't even get to see about half of the game yesterday (couldn't focus, either mentally or visually).