No problems, only marketing solutions

From Techdirt:

We wrote recently about how an author and her lawyer appeared to be quite overaggressive in trying to enforce the trademark on the title of a book she had written.

[…]

Imagine, instead, if Susan Jeffers, rather than having her lawyer send a letter demanding credit, had simply emailed the author of the original blog post and said "Hey, this is a great blog post, and I've written this book you might be interested in, which even uses that same phrase you mentioned, 'feel the fear and do it anyway.' I'm sure you'd like the book, so let me send you a copy. Thanks!" Think what might have happened?

Techdirt suggests that the blogger might have been interested in the book, and might therefore have written about it in the future. For myself, though, any comment like that would be just as likely to end up in the spam box. Still, it’s worth a shot for an author trying to sell a book, surely.

Save one magazine now, save six more for just a penny!

From Newsweek: “Can Anything Save Magazines?”:

If you are the kind of person who really enjoys vintage aprons—or rhinestone or leather aprons, for that matter—you just might be willing to shell out $14.99 for a copy of Apron*ology, a new magazine about "Aprons With Attitude." At least that's what publisher Stampington & Co. is betting, even though Apron*ology's hefty cover price is more than triple the $4.50 newsstand average for established magazine titles ($59.99 for a year's subscription). It sounds like a risky gamble in a bad economy, but a growing number of media experts believe it is a better strategy than the one pursued by magazines like the recently departed Condé Nast Portfolio.

Smaller niches, higher prices.

Poet, lost, needs your help

From Poetryfoundation.org:

Craig Arnold, whom some of you know, has gone missing on a small volcanic island in Japan while on a creative exchange fellowship. Craig, an experienced explorer of volcanoes, never returned to his inn after leaving alone to research the island’s active volcano for the afternoon. The authorities are on the third day of searching for Craig, and are scouring the small island (of only 160 inhabitants) with dogs and helicopters. If he is not found by the end of the day, the authorities will call off the search.

We need your help to insure that the search will continue. The island and areas surrounding the volcano are small enough that an extended search will surely lead to Craig’s discovery.WE NEED PEOPLE TO CONTACT THEIR LOCAL CONGRESSPEOPLE AND SENATORS TO PRESSURE THE JAPANESE STATE DEPARTMENT TO CONTINUE THE SEARCH. WE ALSO NEED HELP SPARKING MEDIA ATTENTION FOR THIS STORY, WHICH WE ALSO HOPE MIGHT INCREASE PRESSURE ON JAPANESE AUTHORITIES TO FIND CRAIG.

Link via Bookslut

Rare book award news

Live (well, not quite) from the Arthur C. Clarke awards!

It was all quite heartening even if this sense of continuity and lack of cynicism seemed at odds with the world outside the Apollo Cinema. If anyone was worried about swine flu, for instance, they weren't letting on. As someone pointed out to me, there was no point worrying anyway because the room we were in was so crowded that "we're all fucked anyway. And that's assuming that the tube journey here hadn't got them first".

From the Guardian.

!!! is a good band too, I guess

Stuart Jeffries bangs away in the Guardian:

Novelists (at least male ones) are apt to be mean-spirited about dog's cocks. "Cut out all those exclamation marks," wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. "An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes." It isn't actually. When one German starts a letter to another with "Liebe Franz!" they are merely obeying cultural norms, not laughing at their own jokes. Nor is chess notation, which teems with exclamation marks, especially funny. No matter. Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: "You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose." Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters insists that "Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind." In Maskerade, the 18th in the series, another character remarks: "And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."

Amazing(!)

Yes, they think they’re better than you

From Jezebel, a response to a quite stupid NY Times piece:

Alas, cries the New York Times, the Kindle, that sassy new reading thing-a-ma-jig that the kids are into, is destroying the world of "literary snobbism" as we know it. "The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper," writes Joanne Kaufman, "If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms."

Our sympathy towards book snobs abounds. Without physical book covers available to them to prove their great worth as people of superior taste, they are now reduced to using outrageously expensive electronic gadgets to proclaim themselves people of superior bank-balances. Which isn’t as much fun as simply sporting flash jewelry.

RIP: Bea Arthur

From the LA Times:

Beatrice Arthur, best known as the acerbic Maude Findlay on Norman Lear's sitcom "Maude" and as the strong-willed Dorothy Zbornak on the long-running "The Golden Girls," died Saturday. She was 86.
Arthur, a stage-trained actress who was a success on Broadway long before television audiences got to know her, died of cancer at her Los Angeles home.

I have fond childhood memories of watching the Golden Girls with my grandma. Later, I was introduced to Maude thanks to its TV Land revival. She was a funny, funny woman, and she will be missed.

Link via SF Signal.

Game Boy Regress.

Over at the 1up Retronauts blog:

As you may have heard, today is the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy's release, at least in Japan, though it soon reached the rest of the world and became the tiny titan of handheld games. It's kind of odd that the Game Boy doesn't get talked up as much among retro game nerds; These days, it's regarded as a tool for chiptune musicians, and the editorial love-ins are reserved for systems like the NES, PlayStation, or even the TurboGrafx. I'm guilty of that, too, and I feel especially shameful about it considering how much the Game Boy honestly affected my gaming life and was such a longstanding part of my childhood. But after 20 years, there's no use ignoring it anymore.

Ah, memories.

You gotta read that label

From the Consumerist:

That topical spray we mentioned last week—the one designed to help premature ejaculators—turns out to just be a mixture of lidocaine and prilocaine. Lidocaine is commonly used by dentists to numb the mouth, and prilocaine is used to numb skin before inserting a needle. But beyond that, Consumer Reports points out that side effects reported by the men and their partners in the study included a "rash on their penis" or "a burning sensation in their vagina."

Well, let’s see; I just happen to have a tube of Orajel right here. Let’s have a look at the label, shall we? Uh huh, benzocaine. Which is just one of many “caine” type anesthetic. Lidocaine is stronger, but it’s basically the same sort of thing. Also, back in the day there was a thing about how putting cocaine on one’s wang was suppose to make one last longer.

Heaven’s sake people, quite trying to turbo-charge your fun bits.

Bad news for Frank Caliendo

John Madden is retiring:

This morning, NBC announced that John Madden, Hall Of Fame coach with the Oakland Raiders and the gold standard for NFL color commentary for the last 30 years, has decided to retire from broadcasting. In his ellipses-abusing official statement, Madden sites his age (73-years-old) and his upcoming 50^th anniversary, as well as his extended family, including five grandchildren who “are at an age now when they know when I'm home and, more importantly, when I'm not.

Will they retire his Telestrator?

Matt and Trey given signed photo

… of Saddam Hussein.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a signed photo of Saddam Hussein by US marines after the former Iraqi leader was shown their movie in prison.

Link via: Slashdot

Sweet the beat

CJR has a response to this piece by Timothy Noah at Slate about something called “beat-sweeteners”. From the CJR response:

Timothy Noah has a fun column over at Slate on the journalism practice of “beat-sweeteners,” stories written about key sources to get in their good graces so they’ll give up the goods in the future.

The topic, normally a sort of wink-wink inside-baseball thing among reporters and their editors, has been bubbling a bit on left-leaning blogs, who’ve largely said that the practice is evidence of hypocrisy among the truth-tellers brigade.

Noah says he thinks differently:

    “A beat-sweetener is unethical only in the attenuated sense that a passionately devoted artisanal cobbler might regard as unethical a handmade loafer with poor stitching. It’s lousy craftsmanship, not an ethical lapse warranting extensive debate.”

See, bloggers? This is why J-school is so important for people who would write about current events; While ordinary people might consider such quid-pro-quo, mutual back-scratching to be highly unethical, real journalists know that it’s not a big fucking deal.

Goddamn memes again

Why am I unable to resist them? This time it’s Paul McAuley's List of Essential Fantasy & Horror Titles, spotted over at the SF Signal blog. Bold = books I’ve read.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Tales of Mystery and Imagination EDGAR ALLAN POE 1838
 A Christmas Carol CHARLES DICKENS 1843
Jane Eyre CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1847
 The Hunting of the Snark LEWIS CARROLL 1876
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON 1886
The Well At The World's End WILLIAM MORRIS 1896
 Dracula BRAM STOKER 1897
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary MR JAMES 1904
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things LAFCADIO HEARN 1904
The Wind in the Willows KENNETH GRAHAME 1908
Jurgen JAMES BRANCH CABELL 1919
A Voyage to Arcturus DAVID LINDSAY 1920
The King of Elfland's Daughter LORD DUNSANY 1924
The Trial FRANZ KAFKA 1925
Lud-in-the-Mist HOPE MIRRLEES 1926
Orlando VIRGINIA WOOLF 1928
The Big Sleep RAYMOND CHANDLER 1939
The Outsider and Others HP LOVECRAFT 1939
Gormenghast MERVYN PEAKE 1946
Night's Black Agents FRITZ LEIBER JR 1947
The Sword of Rhiannon LEIGH BRACKETT 1953
Conan the Barbarian ROBERT E HOWARD collected 1954
 The Lord of the Rings JRR TOLKEIN 1954-5
The Once and Future King TH WHITE 1958
The Haunting of Hill House SHIRLEY JACKSON 1959
The Wierdstone of Brinsingamen ALAN GARNER 1960
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase JOAN AIKEN 1962
Something Wicked This Way Comes RAY BRADBURY 1963
The Book of Imaginary Beings JORGE LUIS BORGES 1967
Ice ANA CAVAN 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 1967
Earthsea URSULA LE GUIN 1968-1972
Jirel of Joiry CL MOORE collected 1969
Grendel JOHN GARDNER 1971
The Pastel City M JOHN HARRISON 1971
Carrie STEPHEN KING 1974
Peace GENE WOLFE 1975
Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1978
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ANGELA CARTER 1979
Little, Big JOHN CROWLEY 1981
The Anubis Gates TIM POWERS 1983
 The Colour of Magic TERRY PRATCHETT 1983
Mythago Wood ROBERT HOLDSTOCK 1984

Ah, my results are disappointing.

The business, man

Uh… um, Mr. Fils-Aime? Sir? I know that when I signed up for the Nintendo Fun Club back in 1987 I agreed to never say anything negative about Nintendo or its personnel, but, um, sir? You are totally fucking wrong. I mean, seriously – do you even read the Internet?

MIT campus policeman arrested on drug charge

Just a news story we thought you might be interested in. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the fact that some folks hadn’t tried to get people to not see it.

April Fools: Good times

Well, we’ve had a lot of fun here, linking to all these fake news stories, but we’d like to close out the day by linking to at least one real piece of news: “Obama Depressed, Distant Since 'Battlestar Galactica' Series Finale”:

According to sources in the White House, President Barack Obama has been uncharacteristically distant and withdrawn ever since last month's two-hour series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

"The president seems to be someplace else lately," said one high-level official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Yesterday we were all being briefed on the encroachment of Iranian drone planes into Iraq, when he just looked up from the table and blurted out, 'What am I supposed to watch on Fridays at 10 p.m. now? Numb3rs?'"

Sobering, sobering news.

April Fools: Madcap laughter!

Whooooo, oh my! I’ve had to wrap myself up with duct tape to keep my sides from splitting! From the Miami Herald: Drug-resistant TB may ‘spiral out of control,' U.N. says:

The world is on the cusp of an explosion of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases that could deluge hospitals and leave physicians fighting a nearly untreatable malady with little help from modern drugs, global experts said Wednesday.

"The situation is already alarming, and poised to grow much worse very quickly," said Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization.

With Bill Gates at her side, Chan urged health officials from 27 countries at a three-day forum in Beijing on drug-resistant TB to recognize the warning signs of what looms ahead, saying that traditional drugs are useless against some strains of tuberculosis and health-care costs for treating those strains can be 100 to 200 times more than for regular tuberculosis.

Daaaaayum, Miami Herald – you guys are crazy!

April Fools: More tomfoolery!

The belly-laughs just keep coming – hilarious! From the Nashville Business Journal:

In a sign the recession is spreading unemployment woes, private sector employers cut 742,000 jobs from payrolls in March, according to ADP’s national employment report released Wednesday.

The decline was nearly 80,000 more than the average analyst forecast of 663,000 job losses and the largest monthly payroll decline since ADP began tracking it in January 2001.

ADP also revised upward its February job loss figure to 706,000 from a previously reported 697,000.

Stop! Stop! I’ll pee my pants if this keeps up!

April Fools: NFL wide receiver to be charged with manslaughter

The wacky shenanigans never stop! This, from the irrepressible Sports Network site:

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte' Stallworth is expected to be charged with DUI manslaughter Wednesday afternoon, according to the Miami Herald.

Stallworth was allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol when his Bentley struck and killed a pedestrian in Miami Beach on March 14.

Oh, you guys and your goofball word-smithing! You can’t fool us!

April Fools: “North” Korea?

From those scamps at CNN:

North Korea has begun fueling its long-range missile, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The fueling signals that the country could be in the final stages of what North Korea has said will be the launch of a satellite into space as early as this weekend, the senior U.S. military official said Wednesday.

Aaahhhh, you jokesters!