The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Seth Ellis:

A quibble: Movie studios existed in Hollywood from the 1910's, were perfectly capable of adapting popular books, and in fact did so: The first adaptation of Peter Pan was made in 1924 (with heavy lesbian subtext, yet). Also, Ben Hur was always seen as a big historical potboiler, not particularly "serious."

That said, the "excuse for the delay" in LotR's adaptation was that the technology hadn't caught up with it, fantasy was widely perceived as dumb, and everybody thought it would hemmorhage money. Remember the first adaptation was a bad animated movie. It took about 50 years for popular conceptions and special effects to make it possible. In other words, the book>movie cycle is indeed impossible to predict. The Iliad just got done recently, for instance; so did Four Feathers for some reason.

Another thought about public domain vs. copyright in adaptation: Disney has of course made a lot of their money adapting stories in the public domain, and then viciously protecting their own "property." Some of those stories, like Treasure Island, I think would never have presented themselves as viable models for adaptation if they hadn't been around in the public domain for quite some time, so that people were still aware of them through other adaptations, retellings, etc. Charlie Stross is right that most works in copyright are out of print, and therefore forgotten. Public domain is a way of keeping those works alive longer. TO me, this is an argument for more limited copyright terms, like 10 or 20 years after death.

There's more about eMusic's new policy at MetaFilter, and a mini-rant by Cory Doctorow at boingboing.net.

It'll be interesting to see how the new policy will go over; people seem already to be jumping ship in droves. Myself, I don't think 25 cents a track is over the top, even for drive-by listenings of music I may or may not want to keep; if anything, some limitation will prevent me from obsessively downloading vastly more music than I'll ever listen to, which prevents me from paying enough attention to the downloads I do like (like the Decembrists, whom I just discovered a few weeks ago). But 40 or 60 downloads a month is too restrictive, and it'll lose them business.

It seems like, to remain viable, they'll have to come up with some cell-phone-like plan, in which the basic subscription gets you a certain number of tracks a month and then you micro-pay for each track above that. A smaller micro-payment amount, like 10 cents/track above the subscription, would be a good move.

Strangely, Forgotten NY's bibliography doesn't list one of my favorite books of photography: Stanley Greenberg's Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City, a collection of photos of mostly-abandoned industrial spaces in and around the city. It's very beautiful.

Woodrow Wilson I included because, regardless of his domestic policies, internationally he articulated publicly the principle that a people should have the right to determine how they should be governed.

Although he did invade Russia in July 1918, and kept the troops there until 1920, in an effort to head off the Bolsheviks. From a review of David Fogelsong's recent book on the subject:

He portrays Woodrow Wilson as an ambivalent, confused president, whose public high principles required him to evade and deceive American public opinion about U.S. clandestine military and economic operations against the Soviet government. His deceit was motivated by a desire not to lose the support of progressive public opinion and by a corresponding desire to let France, Great Britain, and Japan take the public blame for aggressive action against Soviet Russia. The United States could then portray itself as Russia's friend, defender of Russian democracy, and of course reap the political and economic benefits.

He articulated a policy of self-government, but didn't necessarily act on it.

I wonder if all those people who stockpiled duct tape found any use for it in the blackout.

On those long boring evenings without TV, you can always amuse yourself taping all the furniture to the ceiling.

In defense of the three-column layout, I'd entirely forgotten those quotes were there until Patrick put them in the third column. I certainly understand the info-architectural reasons for expanding to three columns.

Aesthetically, three columns don't bother me. I will say that the middle column is a bit easier to read further down the page; the lighter font weight and color of the quotes on the right are less visual competition than the bold blue links up top. Maybe creating a new un-bolded link style for the sidelight links would help people focus?

Technically, I think it's neat that it works now. Also, I too support the new non-popup comment link. I never used the popup link anyway.

Hey! It's working! Is this the final solution? I mean, in a CSS way? It looks clean, works fine.

Congratulations to whoever brought IE to heel.

It just started happening for me on Making Light, since Teresa published her fun summer projects post. I really think it's a file-length issue, though I can't back it up with the technical cause.

About righteous progressives not caring about CIA agents: I don't know specifically what an "operative" might be in Plame's case, but I do know that between the World Wars, something like a third of the archaeologists working in the Near East were spies for their respective governments. This isn't to say that they were trained agents masquerading as archaeologists; they were professional scholars who, as they trundled around the Near East with their surveying equipment, forwarded copies of their maps and information back to the equivalent of the State Department. A lot of the daily grind of intelligence-gathering is like this; these "operatives" were hardly evil warriors of the military-industrial complex. They certainly didn't deserve to be killed or compromised, as they might have been if the local Bedouin, for instance, had realized what they were up to (they wouldn't have been able to go back to that area, in any case, which would have meant the end of their archaeological career).

When I first read about the Plame outing, I assumed, with no particular evidence of course, that her case was something like this; she was an industry pro who kept her eyes out for the CIA. Speaking as a progressive, this doesn't excite my scorn. I'm glad our intelligence agencies are keeping track of nuclear weapons. Everyone who's been posting on this list seems to share that view, not only in this post-Plame thread but elsewhere in earlier Electrolite threads. I'm not sure where Yehudit's blanket assumption of blanket condemnation comes from.

Incidentally, I know this about the Near East because both my parents are Near Eastern archaeologists; that spy activity was before their time, but I remember meeting their older colleagues when I was young, some of whom may well have been part of that intelligence-gathering for all I know. None of them seemed like evil secret police types to me.

That's interesting; I usually use a Mozilla browser, and yesterday I looked at the site in IE 5, and I don't get that error either way. Given that, and that people have been saying this problem has only cropped up lately, I suspect that the issue is the sheer amount of content in the main column (according to my browser, the Making Light homepage is 125K of text).

On both blogs, the sidebar comes after the main column in the page's code, and so all the main column has to load before the sidebar is displayed. It may be that your browser just isn't getting to the end of the HTML file for some reason (you click on something?) and then when you resize the window, the page reloads. Or there may be a missing tag somewhere, but then you'd think it wouldn't work for me.

Including only the last two weeks of posts on the home page might be the answer. I don't know a technical solution; maybe more coffee will help.

Steve - It's IE 5.0. Good luck.

Dave - Yowza. That's some code. One thing, though: The example I linked to had columns of equal width (33%), but of course you could just as well define the width of any of them as an absolute (width: 190px, for instance). Fluid columns aren't required.

Mark - I'd be interested in hearing the general solution you have in mind, either here or in email.

Oops. I meant themodulator.org, of course.

Steve -

I'm afraid modulator.org is looking a little funky in IE 5 on PC. I'm getting the search & recent entries column overlaying the main content column.

Here's the hack-like solution I know.

It looks like your page is organized into two major divs, called "content" and "links." "Content" starts with these elements:

float: left;
width: 70%;

As I'm sure you know, this causes "content" to, well, start at the left and go on for 70% of the screen. Then "links" occupies the other 30% of the screen by default.

Two columns is all you can do with the CSS "float" property. So, to create 3 columns without redoing your whole stylesheet, here's what you can do:

- divide the total page into 2 columns.
- further divide one of those columns into two columns.

There's an example of that here. In the case of your page, a possible solution would be:

- contain both "content" and "links" in another div, called, say, "whole_shebang."
- create another div classification in your stylesheet called "further_goodness", float it left as well, and define its width.
- include this div in your HTML before the "whole_shebang" div.

By the way, if you're adding stuff, would you consider adding a Google search for the blog archives?

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