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

I have been led to believe that the Patent Office's behavior is a kind of civil disobedience. They keep asking Congress for enough money to do their job well, Congress keeps denying them, and in return, because they don't have the money to do the job right, they let everything through, putting the burden on the courts and private entities to sort it out.

Of course, the people who believe that government can't solve problems, i.e., the party that controls Congress, have no interest in fixing the dysfunctional Patent Office, nor is it sexy enough for the opposition party to fight for.

We need a revolution in representation, to get people in office who actually believe that government can actually make things better and are willing to work for it.

Bill:

Though I don't speak for all Howling Curmudgeons, I will have to chime in on David's side: It's "Spider-Man", one hyphen, two capital letters, and it matters.

To be perhaps a little grandiose about it, I think that it's a basic human dignity to be called what you choose to be called. Mormons are, for example, Christians, because they call themselves Christians, even if most other Christians would call them non-Christian.

My friend Pete Vonder Haar's last name is another example: If you don't spell it with that particular spacing and capitalization, you've simply gotten it wrong, and that is disrespectful to him.

Extrapolating the principal to fictional characters is admittedly more marginal, but even as the claim to human dignity wanes, the call of orthodox orthography remains at least as strong.

Plus, it's a fact thing; David and I happen to be expert comics nerds, so we know certain details, which, when wrong, stand out to us. A beam jockey would notice and care if someone mistypes some fact about the Main Injector just the same, I would expect.

I rather consciously invoked Sturgeon's law, of course, to lead into what I intended as my point, that, fortunately, there's enough good stuff in the other 10% to keep my book queue full.

If I erred, it was in failing to express my support for the relativity of qualitative opinions. There are, evidently, lots of people I don't understand at all who like to read the same fantasy novel over and over with different titles.

I sympathize; I read superhero comics in order to experience again the too-rare thrill of "Suddenly, they appear. A soldier with a voice that could command a god--'Get those fires out! We don't want a gas main going up'--and does. Suddenly it's raining so hard it hurts."

Heck, I've even read all of the Nero Wolfe books more than once. I practice reiterative reading, too.

So everybody's entitled to their opinion. And in my crowd, it may be de rigeur to add "and yours is wrong", but that jocularity isn't necessarily evident in cold print.

Anyway. Hey, how about that Robert Sawyer Hugo win? I'm beginning to work my way through his backlist; Calculating God hit just about all of my sweet spots.

Or R.A. MacAvoy's?

90% of all new fantasy novels are crud. My life is too short to wade through the soulless, deliberately commercial and undistinguishable drek produced by Robert Jordan or "David Farland".

Unfortunately, brick-shaped fantasy tomes are what sell. Because 90% of the audience are let's-be-generous-and-say uncritical.

Fortunately the market is big, probably bigger than it has ever been, and there is at least some room for quirky, creative writers who aren't writing the same warmed-over Tolkien.

Not that I have a strong opinion or anything.

My favorite part of Franken's book was Operation: Ignore. Carefully documented, thorough piling on of example after example after example of Bush's White House failing to move forward on anti-terrorism and missing opportunities to do something about terrorism before 11 Sep.

If we had real investigative media in this country, Bush's pre-11 Sep security indolence would have led to a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2002.

Frankly, I'm delighted with Bob Riley and the rest of the Alabama conservatives who have decided not to be hypocritical about their commitment to Jesus.

I think that the current mainstream (i.e., cheap-labor) conservative domestic policy is clearly immoral. I think that a proper moral approach to domestic policy inevitably leads one to a progressive formulation of domestic policy.

The whole American Prospect article is fascinating reading. Don't miss the discussion of the opposition to the tax referendum, which is led by a "Christian" group which gets most of its funding from the people and corporations who will be taxed more heavily by the new plan, and which does not bother to try and refute the Christian arguments of Hamill, Riley, et al.

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