Wet May Monday Link Sausages

I spent most of the day running around today — starting with slipping and ripping a hole in my jacket on the way out the door, and going downhill from there. Thus, some rather late link sausages...

• From the department of goofy search engine results: Google considers "cougar dating" inconsistent with "family safe search results".
• Meanwhile, in a bit of offhand commentary that will make any scientist cringe, a Grauniad style writer claims that

  There is much that one can hope for from this alliance: a new way of politics, non-primary coloured ties. But so far, those ties remain decidedly primary-coloured and the compromises just seem to put everyone in a bad mood. Do blue and yellow even go together well?

  Where to start: Nicholas Clegg's tie is gold, not yellow, if one can trust the accompanying photo. More importantly, though, yellow is not a primary color. Yellow is a primary pigment; the primary colors are (as anyone who has looked at the basic settings on their monitors or taken high-school biology knows) red, blue, and green. Color is refractive; pigment is reflective; and they aren't the same... even in the fashion world.

• Congratulations to the recipients of the Nebula Awards for best science fiction/fantasy works published in 2009, selected and awarded by vote of the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.:
  • Novel (over 40k words): Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
  • Novella (17.5k-40k words): (the late) Kage Baker, The Women of Nell Gwynne's
  • Novelette (7.5k-17.5k words): Eugie Foster, "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast"
  • Short Story (under 7.5k words): Kij Johnson, "Spar"
  • Bradbury (dramatic presentation): Neill Blomkamp et al., District 9
  • Norton (book-length fiction for children/teen/YA audience): Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making

  Of some interest, not one of the winning works was published by a media conglomerate (or, in the case of the dramatic presentation, produced "in Hollywood").

  And further congratulations to the new elected officers, whose sentences begin who will take office on 01 July:

  • President: John Scalzi
  • Vice President: Mary Robinette Kowal
  • Secretary: Robert J. Howe
  • Treasurer: Amy Casil Sterling
  • Overseas Regional Director: Sean Williams
  • South-Central Regional Director: Lee Martindale

  For anyone wondering, the contest for Canadian Regional Director ended in a tie and is still being resolved.

• Professor Buchanan offers another pithy indictment of of a group known to take advantage of authors (and everyone else).