- Don't blame me. I voted for Bartlet... and now he's advising Obama in one of the more creative, and interesting, comments on the current election process that I've seen.
- That, however, does not even begin to illuminate the problems with biology and politics. Sort of off to the side, consider refrigerators that don't require electricity as a possibility... and realize that both of these article came from outside the US, which says a number of very unfavorable things about the US today.
- It's September, so it must be time for the annual "it's only genre"1 flamewars to start out. Sarah Weinman has a pretty balanced assessment of the current shape of the debate. A more-extreme example goes off in a huff over the old "it exceeds the limits of its genre" argument, albeit with an extremely unsatisfactory list of works that purportedly demonstrate the point. And, well off the deep end, there's this intellectually dishonest — insultingly ignorant, too — rant against "literary" science fiction at IO9, the new champion of lowbrowism.
Finally for this topic, I'd offer Sarah Weinman another hat tip for this parody, but I think a friendly eye-gouging might be more appropriate. There are somethings that are just too much... and this is definitely one of them, however well done (so to speak) it may be.
- William Styron got treatment and survived to write more; Lucy Maud Montgomery didn't. What's that old saw about the narrow line between genius and insanity again?
- Last, and far from least, in the course of a book review the IPKat asks:
IP lawyers are acutely conscious of the jurisdictional differences that are reflected by copyright law, enforcement and licensing at national level, but this doesn't seem to be something that overly concerns economists. Is this just a misconception on his part or is this so (naturally, with good reason?).
It's not just the copyright lawyers, little kitten; it's the entire [expletive deleted] entertainment and publishing industry that substitutes a WAG for serious consideration of cross-jurisdictional valuation. One only needs to look at a trade fiction contract to see that! And it's even more disturbing in music, in trade nonfiction, and in film.
- But it's not genre. It's commercial category. "Genre" doesn't mean "where it's shelved in the bookstore"; it concerns only the form of a written work. But then, expecting the publishing industry to understand anything about the products that it is pushing would be positively un-American and inconsistent with modern management theory and education.