The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Greg Ioannou:

What does this say about the viability of Harlequin's traditional publishing? They'd trash their business model in favour of vanity publishing? Could vanity publishing really be that much more potentially profitable than Harlequin's romance publishing? I wonder just how badly they are doing to try something this desperate.

Jon @#114 I would never consider anything backed up on a Mac to be safe. I don't trust Apple's controlling behavior. Who is to say what they will find unacceptable in the future? Here's today's Apple attempt to limit our freedoms: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5924153/Apple-disconnects-Google-Voice-apps.html

Doug @ #93 That has been the case for generations, and there is a long tradition of such provisions being roundly ignored.

The Penguin book on my desk has their traditional British copyright bumph: "Except in the USA, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not ... be ... re-sold..."

Right. If anyone actually followed that, used bookstores and yard sales would be illegal.

Lawyers have tried to impose such insanity for years. Only a few particularly twisted corporations in history have ever tried to actually enforce it. Unfortunately, there's been a rash of that sort of thing lately. It won't last.

Because Apple insists on that type of control over the software you put on the devices they make, I've never had the slightest interest in using them. I use PCs, not Macs, and an MP3 player, not an iPod.

The Kindle is in that same category. Intriguing device, but far too tied to one supplier -- and one who has proven to be capricious at that. When someone puts out a reader that can handle various file formats comfortably, I'm interests.

From #21, Linkmeister: Languages and travel

Strasbourg, 1981 I live in Canada, so am used to occasionally seeing restaurant menus with English on one side and French on the other. In Strasbourg, I'm presented for the first time with bilingual French/German menus, and am struck by how comfortable the French suddenly seems.

Sophron, western Hungary, 1992 I encounter bilingual German/Hungarian menus, and suddenly German doesn't seem so incomprehensible any more.

Pecs, Hungary, 1992 In this town in southern Hungary I'm confronted with bilingual Hungarian/Croatian menus. I order by pointing at what a man at the next table is eating.

Yikes! I spend the weekend in an endless meeting and emerge to this news?

I hope you make a full and quick recovery, Teresa.

For what it's worth, my father had an episode that sounds like what you just went through when he was 40. He's now 85 and still going strong.

Marilee #489 Ah! OK. Thanks.

I was just looking something up on Preditors and Editors (http://anotherealm.com/prededitors/), and noticed the alarming notice on their home page:

"Help Defend P&E

Unfortunately, there are those who do not like P&E or its editor because we give out information that they would prefer remain hidden from writers. Usually, they slink away, but not this time. P&E is being sued and we are asking for donations to mount a legal defense in court. Please click on the link below and give if you can to help protect P&E so it can continue to defend writers as it has for the past eleven years."

Yikes! Anyone know what's going on?

KCDX Arizona's my favorite. It is totally random -- sometimes mainstream stuff, sometimes local artists I've never heard of. And nothing but music.

http://www.kcdx.com/about.php

I prefer the regular "red" Chimay to the blue, which I find to be a bit over the top -- just too intense for my taste. And I much prefer the quart bottles to the pints! I keep a pair of pliers in a kitchen cupboard, with the corkscrew, just for opening Chimays.

The Unibroue beers are terrific (except for the light one, Chambly, which is a bit pointless).

The labels are great. I especially like the label for Maudite (which means "damned"). It shows some poor guys paddling a canoe -- that's my idea of hell, too. I'm sure it is some religious or literary allusion or some such, but I prefer the idea that damnation is being stuck in a canoe.

http://www.unibroue.com/our_beers_eng.html

Larry @ 44. Probably. I typed in the performer's name and was shown a batch of album covers. I clicked on the one I wanted. There was no indication that it was going to the store rather than to my own album.

So it is programmed to try to sell me albums I already own? Useful feature, that.

I read a review recently that praised the Zune software. It said the program was well thought out and easy to use, and that it was a good choice for organizing a music collection, even if you don't have a Zune.

So I gave it a try. Easy to install. It quickly indexed my large collection of MP3s and organized them in a sensible, intuitive way. A great start.

Then I scrolled down to an album I want to hear and started to play it. Now this was an album I'd copied from the CD in my collection. (That's perfectly legal here in Canada.)

Instead of playing my album, Zune played me a 30-second clip from each cut, and offered me the opportunity to buy the album from Microsoft at 79 cents a track.

I then discovered that Zune uninstalls as easily as it installs.

I don't think Stapledon lost track of the human POV. It didn't especially interest him. In fact, the only character
in all of his writing that I can remember is Sirius, a dog. Stapledon
is like one of the first kids in a huge amusement park. He raced from
one incredible ride to the next, trying them all. Scoping out the
territory for those who followed. I adore Stapledon's imagination, and
love the incongruity between what he wrote about and his Victorian
writing style.

One measure of Clarke's ability as a writer: I actually read one of
his books about exploring the waters around Sri Lanka all the way
through. And enjoyed it. I dislike swimming quite intensely,
and can't imagine any other writer who could inspire me to read a book
on the topic. But it was the only Clarke book I could get that I hadn't read, so...

I discovered Arthur C. Clarke
and Isaac Asimov in grade 6. It is easy to be sure of where and when it
was, because I was in a different school the next year. I remember the
school library where I first read them. I was 11; it was 1965. Over the
next few years I inhaled everything they wrote, rereading when I
couldn't find new material. Every so often I'd throw a Heinlein or
Simak or someone else into the mix, but they never reached me the way
those two did. Together they shaped who I became. Asimov was likely the
greater influence on me, because I never connected with Clarke's
mystical streak. But Clarke
was the more beautiful writer, and painted the images that shaped my
imagination, from falls of moondust to his signature image of the stars
going out.

I feel orphaned tonight.

I wasn't trying to be trollish. It is hard for me to conceive of how this is going to make any difference in people's actual behaviour. "Secular, liberal" Islam seems to be basically a Good Thing, as such things go. It is like Unitarianism or Reconstructionist Jewdaism or any of those other religions that do no serious harm. Liberal Islam seems to basically ignore the primitive parts of the religion, just as most Christians and Jews pay no real attention to the primordial bits of Deuteronomy. And the people who think it is acceptable to execute a woman for witchcraft if her guy is infertile will presumably be unswayed by a modernization of the Hadith. So what changes? Nothing that I can see.

Oh, wow. Will Islam stay in the dark ages or make a great leap forward to the 1500s? So we'll have a new religious faction. Woo. Why is this supposed to be even mildly interesting?

Mary Dell, #40: Picky, picky, picky! Just rub the thing across whatever boob is handy.

I should try this at the office next time a CD misbehaves? Is there an etiquette for this sort of thing? I guess I should ask politely first. "Hi, could I please borrow your breast for a minute?" (Is "breast" the proper word to use in a work setting? Somehow "boob" sounds unbusinesslike. Or should I go with an office-jokey "bazoomba" or some such word?)

Presumably some breast coverings clean CDs better than others. Velvet, da! Chain-mail bra, nyet.

Office etiquette. Always such a minefield for me.

US-made chocolate already doesn't taste much like "real" chocolate, so I don't think the current regulations are much to cheer about. I've asked friends why chocolate like the stuff sold in Belgium or France seems to be pretty much unavailable in the US. The usual answer is something along the lines of "US regulations say you can't make it like that here." Does anyone know what regulation, if it in fact exists, they are talking about? (I suspect this discussion is going to make me hungry for a good, rich chunk of dark chocolate!)

Thanks! Much easier to read.

Now if only Dori could do something about the slabs of gray everywhere.

This discussion rang a vague bell -- I remember reading Peter Nicholls Science Fiction Encyclopedia (published in 1979) and being surprised that Tiptree was mentioned in the essay on New Wave. I've slightly misremembered. The essay says, "By the 1970s there no longer seemed very much point to the term [New Wave], although newcomers like Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr, Gardner Dozois, Barry Malzberg and Gene Wolfe clearly wrote in a style that would have been called New Wave only a year or so earlier."

Nicholls (correctly, in my view) gives the start of New Wave as Michael Moorcock's taking over the editorship of New Worlds (his first issue was May/June 1964) and seems to say that by the early 1970s it had pretty much become the mainstream of science fiction.

And that, of course, is well before Tiptree really became prominent. She was first published in 1968, but her first book wasn't until 1973 -- long after the wave had washed over the shore.

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