Category: Uncategorized

A fellow fantasy writer – one of the Dragonlance successors – shares his two cents:

I just read your article and wanted to drop you a line. You’re probably right about Potter. I’ve heard from my kids that it’s not as hip as it used to be to like Harry Potter. Add to that the fact that the books have become more mature as they went on, ostensibly to keep up with their aging audience. That means they’re not pulling younger readers into the series like they were in the beginning.

But as a fellow author, I must ask, is it really a bad thing that people won’t be reading Harry Potter books in ten years? Do books have to be momentous just because they’re popular?

I’ve got to admit, it’s a pet peeve of mine that some people demand that popular things also be deep and meaningful. This group can’t stand it when something that is pure entertainment value becomes popular. They see it as a waste of time and somehow beneath the decency of man.

I’ve never understood it.

Sure, anyone who’s read any of my books will know I like popcorn entertainment, but what’s wrong with that? Sometimes people just want to be entertained without having to wade through the cumbersome vehicle of the author’s position piece. If you want to give the world your opinion, they say, write an op-ed for the paper?

I would argue that Harry Potter will dwindle anyway, just like Narnia, and Lord of the Rings have. Sure, there still popular, but nowhere near what they were. You can still be well read in the genre without having read them.

I largely agree, except for the idea that Narnia and Lord of the Rings have faded, and that one can be well-read in the fantasy genre without having read them. What’s unusual about both Narnia and LOTR is that they are still being read and widely imitated decades after their authors died. What I’m primarily objecting to is the idea that the Harry Potter books are a classic that will last forty or fifty years the way the Lewis and Tolkein books have. Considering that Potter is a fantasy spin on the Tom Brown books and was somewhat anticipated by the Diane Duane Wizard series, it’s hard to say what a Harry Potter imitation would even be, let alone imagine whole new series of them being produced thirty years from now.

Peter King can’t understand how anyone could possibly do what most of mankind has done throughout history:

It sounds very much like Smith empathizes with Vick’s plight and doesn’t find it very objectionable that Vick might have put a few bucks down on dogfights. Is he serious? Is there anything justifiable about Vick going to a single dogfight, or gambling a dime on a dogfight? Should the feds, once they had evidence from four corroborating witnesses that placed Vick in the middle of one dogfight after another, have ignored the evidence and not gone after him?

I have no problem whatsoever with people betting on dogfights, cockfights or EUR/USD exchange rate. And yes, going to dogfights is perfectly justifiable, as is gambling a dime or more on it. Don’t give me that “it’s the law” nonsense either, if Vick was being indicted for breaking federal marijuana laws, King would be equally outraged, but at the feds for pursuing such a petty law.

Dogs die. Fighting them and gambling is low class entertainment, but most of the world is lower class, by definition. Considering that Peter King makes a living writing about men bashing their bodies into each other and permanently damaging themselves, his pretense that dogfighting is somehow beyond the pale isn’t just silly, it’s hypocritical.

And I’m told people have been known to wager on the NFL too.

It’s a sad day when a punchline for a political joke obviously understands how the bifactional ruling party works better than most of the political commentators out there:

“The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th century, except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal income taxes, not one but two World Wars, Japanese concentration camps, and not one but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan – all brought to us via the Democrats.”
– Cindy Sheehan

She may be an attention whore and she may be an irrational leftist, but she certainly understands what’s going on better than any of the mainstream media whores on the right or the left.

I waded through page after page
of broken verse
of angry grumbles
about unappreciative husbands
or old classmates
or
the lesbian grunts and growls
of anger anger anger or
some excruciatingly explicitly
biological confessional gay porn
mixed in with
the ingrateful poetic hand-bites
of adult children who clearly wished
their parents
had stayed
in whatever third-world pesthole
they’d originally come from
all topped-off with
scoop upon glop of thick word salad
of the sort produced
by stroke and closed-head injury patients
who
are struggling to remember
precisely the right words to
express exactly bungalow torpid giraffe.

Oh, not done-done. There will be any amount of fiddling, tweaking and going back and forth with the publisher, but the first draft of TIA is basically complete, and, one hopes, reasonably coherent. I can definitely send it off Monday, anyhow, which is a relief.

Strangely anti-climactic, to be honest, but I’m having a Disaronno-laced espresso to celebrate anyhow.

DH notes the following scientific marvel:

French doctors are puzzling over the case of 44-year-old civil servant who has led a quite normal life — but with an extraordinarily tiny brain…. Scans by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that the man’s cerebral cavities, called ventricles, had massively expanded.

“The brain itself, meaning the grey matter and white matter, was completely crushed against the sides of the skull,” Feuillet told AFP. “The images were most unusual… the brain was virtually absent,” he said.

Is any comment really necessary? I don’t think so.

This is actually supposed to be advice to a man who isn’t attracted to his overweight wife:

Anyone whose bride is curvaceous should expect after ten years and a child or two to have some changes. By now your marriage should have reached the stage of friendship rather than pure lust. You should be more interested in her personality rather than being obsessed about her weight. Is it that you are not, in reality, worrying about her appearance but rather her obvious loss of youth and that you feel this reflects on you? Enjoy her company and don’t give a damn if she is a size 16 or a size 12.

There’s really not much point to marrying in the first place if you’re just going to be friends in 10 years. If you’re just friends, then why should she object if you’re dating a nineteen year-old waitress? And of course a wife’s appearance reflects on her husband, both men and women predominantly judge a man by the quality of the woman accompanying him. When a woman lets herself go, she is not only harming herself, but also how her husband is viewed by the rest of the world.

I suspect this is why some discontent wives seem to take positive satisfaction in getting fat, cutting off their hair and refusing to maintain themselves, because it is a way of striking at their husband’s status. It’s also why men who achieve success during their marriage prefer the proverbial trophy wife. Few things look stranger to the human eye than a successful and powerful man with a frumpy, overweight woman with bad teeth on his arm.

The problem is that while you can lead a horse to water, you can’t lead a human being to the gym or duct-tape her mouth shut. I’m fortunate in that Spacebunny is quite willing to put in the effort required to maintain herself, although that’s also an artifact of my refusal to date any woman who wasn’t at least somewhat of a gym rat.

If you’re okay with a rotund mate, that’s fine, personal tastes vary. If you’re not, then you’ll just have to drag her – or him – to the gym with you every day, work out with them and eat the same high-protein, low-carb diet they do for the next year. Don’t take no for an answer and ignore the inevitable whining, they can do it and they’ll probably even appreciate it in the end, they just need you to provide them with the willpower they’re lacking. Every time they hit a goal, reward them with something they want that isn’t food-related.

It’s perfectly doable, it’s just a question of your will or theirs coming out on top. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that neither gentle persuasion, logic nor an appeal to your feelings is ever to work on anyone whose primary drive is hedonistic.

I thought the full text of the final Harry Potter book would be available in one of my preferred formats two days ago, but better late than never. It’s just as well, I probably won’t get around to reading it until next week since I’m hoping to wrap up the first draft of TIA on Monday.

I know I’m excited about the 38th anniversary of the faked Moon landing. How about you?