Alison Flood, at the Guardian, on how “Neil Gaiman salute[d] his friend and inspiration“:
… Giving the annual Douglas Adams lecture last night, Gaiman spoke at length about his memories of his friend and fellow author, revealing the details of a conversation “almost 30 years ago now”, when the two were discussing the idea of ebooks.
“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks,” Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
“I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”
Adams told Gaiman: “‘Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books and no matter what happens books will survive.’ And he was right,” said Gaiman.
“Ebooks are much better at being two or more books and a newspaper, at the same time. Ebooks are great at being bookshelves, which is why they are great on trains. It’s also why the encyclopaedia proved not to be a shark, but to be a plesiosaur.”
And stories, said Gaiman, “aren’t books. Books are simply one of the many storage mechanisms in which stories can be kept. People are one of the other storage mechanisms for stories. And stories, like life forms, change.”…
Many charming anecdotes, and a YouTube video of Gaiman’s entire lecture [Gaiman comes on just after the 17minute mark, if you want to cheat], at the link.
(*antediluvian graffiti response: “If I get him the wool, will he make me one too?”)
***********
Apart from fondly remembering good people who left us too soon, what’s on the agenda for the day?
(Here in the Boston area, we’re supposed to get just enough new snow to screw up everyone’s morning commute, without quite breaking the total-snowfall record. The latest definition of “adding insult to injury”!)
srv
Talk about mind blowing anecdotes – Ben Carson says being gay is a choice, because a lot of people who go to prison go in straight and come out gay.
BillinGlendaleCA
There’s still 2 weeks and change left of Winter, I’m sure you all will break that record. We’re pulling for ya.
raven
@srv: Not that it matters but he apologized.
OzarkHillbilly
We got a little more snow yesterday, a high of 25 expected today. Then the temps start rising to the 50s for the wkend, getting into the 60s by Tuesday, Weds. It’s all just a tease. In another week or so, the bottom will drop out of the temps and we’ll get dumped on again. Probably just in time for my chickens.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Over a month since the sewer was finished and they still can’t do the asphalt!
Amir Khalid
I found on CNN this story about twins who don’t look at all alike.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Everything’s a tease.
raven
@Amir Khalid: I know triplets where two are identical and one is not. Oh yea, they are all veterinarians.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
So what, if some people do choose to be gay? Does Ben Carson mean to suggest they don’t have that right?
DivF
It’s still the middle of the night here but I am awake shivering with fever waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. There is nasty cold/flu bug going around and it caught up with me.
Mustang Bobby
It’s almost like getting a rave from the New York Times: an audit report to my office and our school district from the U.S. Department of Education on our big Race to the Top grant: “No findings were noted during this review.” Happy dance.
Schlemazel
@Amir Khalid:
No, he means that it gives everyone else to hat them and create laws prohibiting their activities.
Mustang Bobby
@Amir Khalid: Well, if they choose to be gay, we have a committee for that. There’s an application, a review process, a discussion — over brunch, of course — and then a final audition where they have to sing their favorite Judy Garland number. If they’re selected, they get the Radical Homosexual Agenda in a leather-bound (of course) portfolio and a gift certificate from Pier One.
MattF
Well, I was scheduled for cataract surgery today… and it was cancelled because of coming snowstorm. They’re predicting 4-7 inches during the day, and here in the DC area, that means everything shuts down. Not too pleased.
NotMax
Had an interesting one-on-one conversation with Alan Moore back about 1984 or ’85.
Remember he, several times, said that Robert Mayer’s novel Superfolks was a key inspiration.
DivF
@Mustang Bobby: what about bisexuals? Are there special rules for them?
NotMax
@DivF
Have to serve a probationary period in a halfway house?
DivF
@NotMax: well-played sir.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mustang Bobby: heehee
Baud
@Mustang Bobby:
Congrats on being unnoteworthy!
Mustang Bobby
@DivF: No, everyone’s welcome. Unlike Dr. Carson, we’re very open-minded. As Woody Allen once said, being bisexual doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
Baud
@Mustang Bobby:
It also doubles the number of people who will reject you. :-(
DivF
Another Woody Allenism: when replying to a dating ad, “Bay Area bisexual” told him he didn’t really meet ether alternative she had in mind.
Baud
I was in the Apple store and playing around with the iPhone. One thing I noticed is that it has very slow scrolling. In a long BJ thread, it would take a long time to get to the bottom. Anyone else notice the same thing with their iPhone? Is it adjustable?
MattF
@Baud: Scrolling down can be tedious, but scrolling up is fast– just tap the top of the screen.
Baud
@MattF:
Yeah, I have an old Itouch and that is one of the features I miss now that I use an android phone.
Matt McIrvin
The snow seems to have just barely missed us, though I can’t necessarily say that for the places we’ll be commuting to.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
Well that was exciting. The quiet, get a lot of reading security job completely blew up at 0406 this morning. Thank god it happened today and not on Friday, when I’ll be all by myself. I won’t go into any details, of course, but the IT boys were installing some sort of patch, forgot to inform us that they were doing so, and then completely crashed the system. You know, the system that the Department of Energy monitors because it has to be up and running ALL THE TIME.
The guy I was training with (the one who watched Friends all night until shit hit the fan) said he’d never seen anything as bad as what happened. When the account head got in at 0600, he said that nothing as comprehensive as had ever happened there.
There are going to be many, many meetings at Regional Energy Company today.
Baud
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Have the wingnuts you trained with blamed Obama yet?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Android doesn’t have a feature like iOS in the API(Samsung phones used to, but no longer do). What you may want to look for is a browser that you can drag the scroll bar handle. I know Chrome doesn’t have this feature, I’ve hear Dolphin does. I’ve seen this used on file manager apps. Basically you start scrolling by dragging, as the scroll bar handle appears, move your finger to that and you will be able to use the scroll bar handle to move either up or down very quickly. Windows scroll bars on touch screen device work in a similar manner.
ETA: There was some talk that the reason that Sammy dropped this feature is an Apple patent.
zzyzx
Winter? What is this “winter” you speak of?
I am so grateful this year that I’m not a skier as the conditions have sucked in the Pac NW.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Baud: No. We blamed IT. And the guy who was on call but answered neither his cell phone nor his home phone.
I found out that the guy I trained with up until tonight (when I was with the 3rd shift guy) is married to a liberal, so he has practice dealing with people like me and not killing them.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I find Chrome scrolling fast enough that I don’t feel the need for another browser. I stupidly got a phone with not much space, so I have to limit the number of apps I download.
Baud
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
I don’t think I’ll ever understand those relationships.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Baud: In fairness, if I understand the chronology right, he wasn’t a wingnut when they got married. That was before his multiple tours in Iraq, which is what drove him from being mostly apolitical to where he is now.
Baud
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Thanks. That does complicate things.
WereBear
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I can understand a stress like that altering one’s worldview. What I don’t understand is altering it in a way that makes no real sense and precludes further thought or understanding.
satby
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: When I was in IT, we used to call the kind of shenanigans your IT guys performed last night “career limiting moves”. Especially the on call guy… unless he was suddenly hospitalized and unconscious, he’s probably already been fired.
The only thing I miss is the money from those days.
satby
@WereBear: It’s brainwashing, pure and simple. They train them to have groupthink and not to question. I can’t talk politics at all with my Marine kid after 5 Iraq and Afghanistan tours.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@WereBear: I can understand it. I suspect that the vast majority of people who have to go to work every day dealing with the very real possibility that someone in the local population is going to try to kill them and be prepared to kill those people in return probably have to convince themselves that they really, truly hate the people in that population. I’m not sure how else most people could function. And that’s the kind of thing that’s really hard to turn back off once you leave the service.
Iowa Old Lady
9 below this morning. OTOH, next week it’s supposed to be 63 degrees warmer.
Mike E
@DivF: Feeling yer pain…I have a very public job (part time; the other job is public, too, but over the phone) so I must’ve dodged a million bugs before the inevitable got me :-(
Making chicken soup today!
Mike E
@Baud: To get to the end of an especially long B-J thread, hit any reply arrow and it will take you there in a jif! Just don’t hit the publish button.
Mustang Bobby
@Iowa Old Lady: It’s also -9 in Interlochen, Michigan, from whence comest my radio stream. OTOH, it’s 78 here in Miami.
Germy Shoemangler
When we gave up our landline last year and switched to cell phones, one of the perks was not getting ten or so telemarketing calls a day. Not even telemarketers making an “honest” attempt to sell something, just hangup calls. I’d google the number and see multiple complaints against them. Or phony “surveys” with questions that started with political opinions and veered toward personal questions about money and finances. Most mostly hangup calls.
And because my wife donated some money once to a presidential campaign, we were subjected to scam artists who would try to get her credit card # over the phone.
So when we stopped the landline, for about a year I had a “clean” cell phone. No bullshit calls. But then, little by little I’m compelled to give out my number for business purposes, and now the calls are returning.
Last week, I got a registered letter from National Grid. They said they’d authorized a private company to conduct an inspection of my gas lines. I’d received letters before, but assumed they were fake, because we always have people knocking on my door pretending to be national grid in an attempt to get me to switch to some bogus piggyback energy “supplier”
But I called National Grid and they verified that the inspections were legitimate. So I called the private company to schedule. They asked for my number. As soon as I gave it to them, I said to myself “uh oh.”
Last night, 8:30, I got a call from 630-283-7589. Left no message, just called and hung up. I googled them, and it’s a sketchy loan company?
And so it begins. I want to call National Grid and tell them I don’t appreciate their outsourced inspectors selling my cell number.
And that’s my rant.
PurpleGirl
@srv: Bernie Kerik bashed Carson’s comment. One point to Kerik, who I really don’t like, but he was a Corrections officer/commissioner and knows.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mustang Bobby: Shut up.
MattF
@Germy Shoemangler: Maybe this is obvious, but having CallerID is a big help with a landline. Anyone whose ID is ‘UNAVAILABLE’ or whose phone number is an 800 number gets no answer from me. Some of the scammers are catching on to this– I got a call yesterday with a CallerID showing my name and phone number. I answered the phone, out of curiosity, mostly, and it was “Rachel from cardmember services.” So, they’ve learned to spoof.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF: My cell shows the caller’s number. But if it rings I automatically assume it’s an important call. I wasn’t near my phone when they called last night. I wouldn’t have picked up. But it sucks to have it ringing all the time. And it bugs me that scammers are passing my phone around.
WereBear
@satby: Yes. This explains my oldest brother.
WereBear
@Germy Shoemangler: We went through the same process: we switched our landline number to a cell phone because you can control it better.
If the caller is not in our phone books, they can leave a message. Makes annoying calls ignorable.
Baud
@Mike E:
Brilliant!
Germy Shoemangler
630-283-7589… it’s not an obvious 800 telemarketer. So possibly I would have been annoyed after answering and hearing silence, or a recorded announcement.
I remember toward the end of our landline days, because my wife was naive enough to believe a scam survey was the real deal, we were bombarded with ten calls a day. After a while, I think it was the boiler room people just fucking with us. Hangup calls, etc. After one guy asked me if I wanted to answer questions, I told him to remove us from his call list, he laughed.
My wife is the most completely honest person I’ve ever met. Unfortunately, she assumes everyone is like her.
So when a creep calls and tells her “thanks for contributing to obama’s campaign, would you like to contribute more?” and while he’s talking I google his number and see multiple complaints of fraud… and then he asks for her credit card #, I want to personally track him down and crush his windpipe, so that any future calls can be conducted in a hoarse, barely-audible whisper.
Elizabelle
Florida, you haven’t failed us. Yet again.
Brother shoots sister in butt over penis cake
Baud
@Germy Shoemangler:
You should warn your wife about the scam mistermix just posted about.
Mustang Bobby
@Germy Shoemangler: Rachel started calling my cell phone, even though it’s on the Do Not Call list, too, which proves it’s a joke. If I have nothing better to do, I click through to the human and mess with them as in “Yeah, hi, this is great since I’ve been in bankruptcy ever since I was convicted of treason and child abuse…” or “Yeah, great, my job with the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Division doesn’t pay shit. What’s your name?” or I use a Russian/Yiddish accent.
MattF
@Mustang Bobby: FWIW, random robocalls are entirely against the rules. The notion of ‘previous business connection’ making it OK is bogus. You can file an informational complaint with the FTC– they use the information for tracking the scams.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF: Years ago I filed a complaint. I was told they need a certain number of complaints before they take action, so I don’t know if anything was done.
I was on the “do not call list” and that was like a goldfish showing a “do not eat” badge to a tomcat.
Iowa Old Lady
@MattF: Oh hey! I’ve talked to Rachel from Cardmember Services. Well, not talked to her, but heard her cheery voice.
Matt McIrvin
I think we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. Today and tomorrow will be below freezing (and it’s snowing to the south), but the weekend through next week looks like fine weather, sunny, high 30s and 40s. Most of the ice on the street is already melted, and the roofs are getting clear.
Matt McIrvin
…on the other hand, my daughter is sick with a terrible cold-like virus of some sort, with fever. I think I got it too, but it was just a mild case of the sniffles for me. Between this, the snow and winter break, she’s had hardly any school for the past month.
bemused
Our landline scrolls the caller’s number and vocally announces it making easy to ignore. Anyone ever get numbers 0000000000 or 1111111111?
Germy Shoemangler
630-283-7589 That’s the number on my call ID… when I googled it, I found complaints from people who said they’d received calls at 3:00am. My was at 8:45pm.
I like to leave my cell phone on all night, because I worry about not being reached during a family emergency. I’ll be pissed if these fuckers call me at 3:00am.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Amir Khalid:
I’ve mentioned before that my husband’s cousin is biracial (most USians would look at him and say he’s “black”), his wife is white, and their oldest son arrived with blond hair and blue eyes. Once the genes start mixing, you just don’t know how they’re going to line up, which is what makes it interesting.
henqiguai
@MattF (#48):
Hey! I just got a call from her! The b!tch; can’t stay with one guy worth a dern.
Tree With Water
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Mark Twain