#51 Best Old Testament joke I've seen all day...
Oh, lord, Kinkade...I get the urge to do a parody whenever his stuff comes up, but I can't really justify spending all that energy just to inflict "Happy Cottage of Light About to be Assaulted by Happy Ravening Orcish Hordes" upon the world.
And in addition to his crimes against aesthetics, the man publically urinated on a statue of Winnie the Pooh!*
I mean, there are limits!
(Well, so the LA Times claims. I wasn't there or anything...)
#370 -- Yeah, I was thinking the same thing! I only took a couple of college art classes in my mad pursuit of Making Art For A Living, but even then, I have vivid memories of my drawing prof, a tiny Russian woman who came up to my collarbone, staring out across a classroom worth of work and saying "Zees....Zees are some real turkeys."
I wonder if people in those programs develop their own code? I knew one instructor who, when she had nothing positive to say at all, would say, with painful enthusiasm, "I wonder how this would look outside? In natural light?" Eventually we all learned that this meant "I can find nothing redeeming about this piece at all, oh god, it burns, make it go away."
I rather suspect that anybody in a job where they were supposed to give critique but could not criticize student art at all might find themselves doing something similiar, and then the students have to learn to translate if they want to get any better.
Seems complicated.
I dunno, Eve, we've got coypu (better known as nutria) all over my home state of Oregon. I daresay they could have used some heavy editing, particularly when they ate all the ducks in the city parks.
#49 -- Hmm, apparently I grew up in the suburb of "That Flat-Topped Plateau Thingy Over There."
*sigh* I loved Arizona dearly. It had a kind of surly leave-me-alone-I-have-a-gun charm that I still miss, even if they did pass stupid laws like that...
It's the sort of day where you half-expect the whole neighborhood to suddenly break out into a perfectly choreographed musical number.
And if they did, I would sing along, and perhaps tap dance.
I'm very, very sorry. I had only recently realized that the guy I've seen posting here was also the author of some of my favorite Trek books, and...damn. That really, really sucks.
There was an episode of "Dirty Jobs" where the host was learning how to collect horse semen from a stud horse. No prostate stimulation or anything like that--they had a mare in heat standing on the other side of the fence, a kind of pommel-horse arrangement for the stud to mount, and then some poor bastard (the host, in this case) had to get in there with a rubber vagina and proceed manually. (I think he just had to get it on and hold it steady while the horse did the work, but they fuzzed out the areas in question, so I can't swear to that.)
In a later episode, he said the amazing thing was that the first shot had camera troubles, and they had to apologize to the owners and suggest they reschedule. The horse's handlers thought about this, and said "Nah, just wait," walked the stud horse for fifteen minutes, and then he was ready for round two.
It looked a lot more traumatic for the handlers than the horse, frankly. Amorous stallions are not generally known for their patience and docility.
This relates to something that I've tried to express a few times, generally not very well, which is why fantasy written by horror writers often seems to feel so much more fantastical than fantasy written by fantasy writers. It's like they don't feel the need to justify themselves. Some fantasy reads as if people are going "See! See! Look how solid this world is, and how realistic and how completely internally consistent! Now you HAVE to take it seriously!" And solidity and internal consistency are good things, obviously, and I'm hardly going to advocate against them, but too often it seems we go overboard and cut wonder out along with it.
Maybe it's the difference between having a foot in fairy tales and a foot in RPGs. (And I am an avid lover of the RPG, mind you, so this isn't a slam by any stretch.)
The best example I can think of this is Santa Claus. We all know Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and has flying reindeer and elves. And small geek amusements with working out the airspeed of a laden reindeer aside, we generally don't worry much about Santa's immortality or anything else, because hey, it's Santa Claus, and that's the way it WORKS. He is a singular, wonderous, and fantastical thing, and that's fine.
If Santa appeared in a lot of fantasy novels, he'd be the latest member of the dynastic ruling House of Klaus, in a society where young elves are telepathically bonded to flying reindeer at puberty, and sent out on dangerous missions to deliver the sacred Gifts, and by the third book in the series, Santa would have been assassinated by someone and the succession would be thrown into jeopardy when the young Claus Jr bonded to a reindeer against all tradition and reason, but it'd work out okay because the evil armies of Thanksgiving would be marching towards the pole, and only the plucky Claus and associated reindeer could smite the forces of the Turkey Berserkers and save the day.
Ah...you know, I had a point in there, but damnit, now I kinda want to go write about turkey berserkers...
Robert W. Service wrote many a poem
Of how the Yukon'd never been--
They generally rhyme, and tho' he's dead at this time
He'll be back when the ice-worms nest again.
(*cough* I should probably stick to the visual arts...)
Hey, I learn something new every day! My vague mental notion of the waltz was "probably came after discovery of fire," but I had no idea it was so recent.
*laugh* Sorry, Susan, you can tell I'm not the one researching these. Whalebone corsets was a random grab for a hypothetical example, not based on my intimate personal knowledge of Regency fashions.
But hey, my point obviously stands! You get these things wrong, and immediately somebody lets you know! Were I ever to attempt to write a Regency (which I will probably do before I scale Everest in a whalebone corset, but not much before) I'd research stuff like that in pure self-defense...
Out of curiousity, what do they generally do wrong with dancing? Dance history is entirely opaque to me, so as long as they're not doing the Electic Slide, I'd probably miss it...
Oh, no, I wasn't thinking it was a slam on romance writing in general! I was agreeing with you, three days is pure craziness.
While I, too, have the good-natured contempt for the romance novel that most people probably do, I gotta admit, my respect has increased after meeting a friend of mine, who writes Regency romances for a living (and who shall remain nameless since this could be taken as a slam on her fans, although it's not intended as such.) And the thing that keeps striking me is how much research goes into the things. I would not have guessed in a million years how much legwork she does on these books, to make sure the bodice being ripped is the right KIND of bodice, and the ravishing pirate hero is the appropriate type of ex-privateer from the appropriate nation during the appropriate war on the appropriate style of ship having kidnapped the appropriate sort of heroine being transported for the appropriate crimes. (Apparently the Regency was a helluva time, too. Who knew they had ether parties?)
The reason, though, didn't surprise me at all--apparently if you have the heroine peeling off her whalebone corset six months before the whalebone corset fashion was widely introduced, you get snarky letters from your fanbase about it.
Three days strikes me as just about enough time to make sure your heroine's costume is accurate to the period, right before the hero divests her of it.
*grin* My stepfather, Tom Rudd, puts big stone fish into rivers, designs sculpture gardens, and various other environmental installations. Mostly stuff in Oregon and Detroit, but they've been trying to break into larger scale pieces, hence the memorial park submission. ( http://www.mcruddart.com/ )
While I've only ever been on the periphery on either side of the process, there's DEFINITELY public art slush. You can get anywhere from two or three to two or three hundred submissions for any given project. I'm not sure how it would compare to editing, but it probably falls somewhere between that and vetting a political appointee--instead of a manuscript, you get slides and a generally incomprehensible artist's statement. And they have to have a message. If their message is fundamentally "Dude, I like big stone fish," (and really, who doesn't?) then they have to invent a better one and word it in GovSpeak. Plus, since it's public money, no matter what artist you pick, you're going to get yelled at by somebody. (I have a sneaking suspicion that the incomprehensibility of most public art statements is designed as a kind of Rorshach test for the viewer, so that whatever their particular agenda is, there's something they can squint at and say "Well, okay, then.")
I imagine there's about the same number of accusations of nepotism as in editing, though.
My parents, who do a lot of public art installations, actually submitted a design for this memorial, and I wound up glancing over quite a few of the other submissions during the process.
Frankly, as long as we didn't wind up with the one which had the parking lot spelling out "9/11" I'm happy. Not as happy as I'd be if my folks had gotten the gig, but at least we were spared that.
West Virginia? Safe? That's where Mothman lives, man!
Possibly sacks of hammers are subject to mob mentality? And so the collective intelligence of two sacks of hammers would be the number of hammers divided by the IQ of the dumbest hammer in the bag (or maybe t'other way around.)
Of course, how one determines which hammer in the bag is the dumbest is sort of an interesting question in and of itself, although we could probably get some vital clues by observing this gentleman from Alabama.
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