R.I.P. Pete Seeger — if you're an American over age 10 or so, you've encountered his music. And if you're not, you should encounter his music, and his passion for music and life and everything. Ignore the political cooties — contrary to Faux News, they're not fatal.
- But you'd better do so away from pop music "standardization" and jello-mold formats (hint: it's still jello!), and preferably before classical music dies (yet again) (or not). If it does die, though, it will be due to parasitism from the distribution stream (application to textual works, authorship, etc. is left as an exercise for the student).
- This will not do: Beer consumption continues downward trend in Germany, a nation with a four-century-old beer purity law.
- Here's a taste of what literature departments were like in the 1980s that seems more than a little familiar... and more than a little discouraging (the politics were so vicious because the stakes were so low)... and explains more than a little bit about "literary cooties" and underrated novels about literature departments (that suffer from both literary cooties and speculative fiction cooties).
- OMG gender-issue cooties in speculative fiction! Perhaps someone should explain the evolutionary and ecological problems with "monocultures" to some of these douchebags... on most of the plethora of "sides" in this unwitting/witless parody of a debate (and I'm not referring to Mr Hines). The irony that this arises in speculative fiction — which, if it has one unifying meme, is confrontation with Other — requires much more caffeine than is currently in my system to truly savor. And that's before I wipe the literary cooties all over the place. Or even the linguistic analysis cooties (LC's assertion that "Gender was a grammar term for how you referred to the different sexes" is so fundamentally wrong that I don't know where to start, except to note that even in the most strongly-gendered languages — English is not one of them! — gender has been diminishing in ordinary use for at least half a century).
- Kris Rusch is far too polite in her current attempts to educate writers about the realities of publishing. Commercial publishers, for the last half century or so (since the acceleration of conglomeration), have successfully avoided data cooties by never seeking replicable data. And replicable data cooties are even worse than regular data cooties, because they grow on their own and jeopardize not-invented-here syndrome. OK, they don't really jeopardize it, but they make it more difficult to justify to outsiders... like investment analysts. Not impossible — just more difficult.