What I've got open right now:
Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King
Year's Best Fantasy #4, ed. by David G. Harwell and Kathryn Cramer
It Takes One To Know One by Joey Adams
and the latest BUST magazine.
I'm glad this is a literary open thread, because I came with the hidden agenda of helping a mailing-list acquaintance answer the following question:
"Name the story:
A man of Romany descent is cursed with galloping psoriasis for turning his back on tradition. His devoted secretary (AI) manages to get the curse transferred from him to herself, and in turn rapidly infects all the computers that keep the world running.
The story's final scene is of an old woman riding in her horse-drawn cart past the wrecked vehicles of those 'who had had somewhere to go, on the day when John Blank was cured.'
Possibly by Roger Zelazny."
Any thoughts?
This is really more of a comment than a question, but I wonder if, in situations where conference papers referenced each other, this might be like a sound art project I heard about years ago, in which the artist recorded a sound in a particular room, then played back the room sound and recorded that, then played back *that* recording and etc., until the artist discovered the resonant frequency of the room. Perhaps one could discover the most resonant sentence for a particular convention center.
Under these conditions the conference might run a little long.
So far I haven't seen what I consider the probable real reason for using Access: It's all the consultants and/or programmers involved knew how to use, and so their "survey" of suitable programs automatically settled upon Access because everything else is "too hard to work with." They had the hammer, they decided everything needed to be nailed.
I don't deny the possibility of malice, you understand... but there's still a chance we could attribute the initial choice to stupidity.
It's puzzled me for a long time that no liberal organizations seem to have taken up the cudgel (put their think tank into heavy rotation, funded a few columnists, etc.) the way that the conservative organizations have done. Or at least hired a good team of publicists. I promise that when I win the lottery I will focus my attention on this, but aren't there any more rich progressives or liberals willing to think in the longer term? Coordinated activity isn't a sin.
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