| Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland |
[Dec. 5th, 2009|12:08 am] |
Over the years, I would say that my three favourite popular music beat combos slash single exponents have been Steely Dan (and parts thereof), Tom Robinson (with and without Band) and The Alan Parsons Project. Yes, I realise if I had any cred this would torpedo it here and now.
I am still a big fan of Steely Dan and the gentleman broadcast, but the Alan Parsons Project somewhat less. The last time I listened to Turn Of A Friendly Card my reactions were
'I can't believe I was such a big fan of this'
and
'Oooh prog-tastic'
and
'This is batshit insane'
and
'Actually this is one of the great prog albums'
I then listened to Pyramid, and really didn't particularly like it. Ah well, tastes change.
Obviously this post provoked by the death of Eric Woolfson. The BBC News obit says inter alia 'His friend Deborah Owen said: "Eric was very much a self-made man. He couldn't read music but if you asked him to play anything he could do it straight away." Another of these 'he couldn't read music' things that people say, which I can never quite understand or believe.
Anyway, an amusing footnote to the APP. Two tracks from Vulture Culture were issued with the same music video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOBP2hmubpA
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alMWbBx5ZfY
Let's Talk About Me and The Traveller. As you can see the video fits the former but not the latter. This is not, I am pretty sure, just someone taking one video and putting the other song to it on YouTube (despite lots of the comments on YouTube making this point). |
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| Cats! |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|10:20 pm] |
You know that kneading thing that cats* do with their paws? When they paw you or another available surface with their front paws, often purring at the same time?
I grew up just calling it "kneading", but then ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mostlyacat introduced me to calling it "making pudding". Only, then I realised that mirrorshard calls it "happy feet". And inevitably each of them says the other is Wrong. ;-)
What do *you* call it?
Poll #1494598 Cats paw!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31A cat is doing that kneading thing on you with their paws. What is it they are doing?
* And Nick. And occasionally me. And sometimes one or two of my friends. |
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| 14. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), dir. Vincente Minnelli |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|10:14 pm] |
I saw this on Wednesday evening at the Cottage Road Cinema with ms_siobhan, planet_andy and big_daz. Classic film nights are a regular feature at the Cottage Road Cinema, and it's not just the film itself you get to see, but a Pathé news reel and some period adverts as well. It was ace! We saw news items about a new cable-car being opened in Wales, and another about Russian plans to import British cattle for breeding, the not-terribly-subtle subtext of both being effectively "Three cheers for good old Blighty, and down with everyone else!" Then we saw adverts for local fabric shops, record emporia and restaurants, all conveniently located in Caernarfon in the early 1960s. Finally - and best of all - we were wished a very Happy Christmas and a Gay 1964 - in tinsel. Whereupon I had no option but to punch the air in post-ironic joy.
Also, there was a film! I've seen isolated chunks of it before, as you do when channel-hopping, so knew I was in for a lavish technicolor Saint Judy-fest (as ms_siobhan quite rightly calls her) - and in that I was not disappointed! I was kind of assuming the film would turn out to have some kind of a plot when seen all in one go, but honestly the efforts in that direction were a bit half-hearted, really. It's more like a series of set-pieces, really, and quite a few turns of events never really get explained or followed up properly. Not that that matters, because the set-pieces are ace. I think I possibly liked Saint Judy beating up the insipid, generic boy next door best of all... though it was a bit more disappointing when she later agreed to marry him. :-( Also, there were some great lines - especially from the little kid, Tootie. Like, "I have to have two kinds of ice cream. I'm recuperating." So, really, who cares about the plot.
Finally, as the credits rolled, the Cottage Road Cinema put the last touch to the period-appropriate atmosphere by playing 'God Save the Queen', and projecting a youthful picture of Her Madge onto the screen. And because it was the kind of place where everyone was really getting into the Classic spirit of the thing and doing the same, big_daz and I stood up. It made for a perfect end to the evening - and I can't wait for the next one.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
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| The Problem of River and Ten |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|10:08 pm] |
Now as beloved as River Song is, I know there have been some problems as people try to work out how she met Ten (as people believe she did) considering he's regenerating shortly and there's been no sign of their meeting. Well I think I've hit upon the answer. She did't ( River's Future )
( Read more... ) |
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| Sexism is alive and well. Predictably. |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|08:22 pm] |
Edited to add: The verdict has now been announced and Amanda Knox has been found guilty. Which is, I'm sure, a result of compelling evidence. The thing that concerned me, and which prompted this post, is the fact the papers found her guilty purely because of her sexual activity - there were little to no reports of the evidence which prompted Italian authorities to prosecute her, which I assume - hope - was more constructive in the beginning than the newspaper reports would suggest, and certainly it was must have been a more comprehensive body of evidence by the end of the trial.
Has anyone else been following the Amanda Knox trial in the papers? And by the papers I mean the gossip rags.
From what I can see, the most important argument of the prosecution is that Knox enjoyed sex, was openly sexually active, perhaps even promiscuous and kept a private diary about her activities and feelings surrounding sex. Whilst this is relevant in as much as the murder of Meredith Kercher was supposedly sexually motivated it is horrifying to see a woman's character assassinated because she had a vibrator in her bag.
I've got several vibrators. And a load of condoms. And some lube. And a few other sexually weighted items in my bedroom. Sometimes, if I'm going out dancing I take condoms in my bag. Does this mean if someone I know or am connected to is killed in a sexually motivated crime I am likely to be implicated because I am sexually self aware?
I know finding the footing I need to be saying what I want to is very difficult on the uncertain ground of there not yet being a verdict on the case, but headline after headline proclaiming 'Foxy Knoxy' was 'always thinking about sex' or selfishly keeping condoms in the bathroom she shared with Kercher even though it made the latter 'uncomfortable' is beginning to concern me. In what way is it relevant that Kercher was uncomfortable with Knox's sexual activity and openness? That hardly proves Knox is a cold blooded, hard arsed killer, it just means that she, like a thousand other young women, had a flatmate with whom she didn't get on and whose values differed significantly from her own.
There are, undoubtedly, a lot of peculiarities in Knox's behaviour which quite logically led the shadow of suspicion to fall on her, but owning a vibrator? Having a stash of condoms? - a stash of condoms whilst in a relationship with a man, no less. The tabloids dubbing her 'Foxy Knoxy' in the most obvious assignation of femme fatale status? Impossibly anachronistic.
This post was originally made on dreamwidth and cross-posted here. If you would like to comment you can do so here on LJ or here, at the original post on Dreamwidth using OpenID. |
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| Raise Your Glass |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|02:33 pm] |
A toast! My friend Sick is moving up in the world...to you, my sweet!
I remember the old days when we spent so many evenings with you licking whipped cream off of me on top of the coffin at The Morgue (btw, are any of those pix still extant?)...and here you are, making your mark on the world. Slainte!
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|08:08 pm] |
I've been writing christmas cards for the Amnesty campaign, and I have a fair few left over.
Let me know your address of you'd like a christmas card! |
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| Short Fiction and You |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|03:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
John Scalzi, Duke of the Internet (I think the hierarchy behaves much like a court where the monarch is perpetually away), posted an entry about what he gets paid for short fiction, and his thoughts on same.
Now, I'm not on Scalzi's level as an author--I don't make his sales or his money. But I'm fairly safely mid-career these days (average career length being five years I'm actually in the mature career category, but I look at it more as: I've progressed, I'm growing up, but I'm not living up to my potential yet, report card wise). Anyway, I find his post interesting because it's the opposite of how I think of short fiction.
See, I write a lot of short fiction. At any given time I'm committed to 3-5 pieces for a number of publications. Only once since I started writing short stories have I ever had a clean slate--that is, no requests for material, and free to write for any market I liked. This is why I haven't been published in the Big Three, or Strange Horizons, or Tor.com, or a number of other places. I never get to write anything that isn't immediately promised to someone else. It's a crazy world I live in, and Not Normal, I know, in the world where many bemoan the idea that one can't make a living on short fiction, but that's the situation.
The other part of the situation is that novel advances are few and far between. Especially given that I couldn't sell a book in 2008. I have to wait months for any major check. So short fiction is actually how I make a goodly chunk of my income--especially when you figure in the Omikuji Project, which is a short story per month as long as people keep wanting them. Short fiction, for me, pays the bills.
So it's funny--Scalzi talks about how little one gets paid for fiction per word and posted his per word rates, which are almost all higher than I've ever been paid for anything.
I've made 25 cents a word a couple of times. Once I got paid $1 a word for a textbook contribution (still fiction, a retelling of a Greek myth). But for the most part, I work for page-mine rates. 5 cents a word. I'm thrilled if I get 7 cents, ecstatic if it's 10. And occasionally, if I'm friends with the editor or it's for charity, I work for less than 5 cents a word. But for a long time, my policy has been: if it pays pro rate, I'll do it.
Because I couldn't afford not to. Still can't, really. I'm fighting to hollow out recovery time in between the 5 stories I owe various markets right now.
But look--5 cents a word, with my average short story being 5000 words or so, comes out to about $250 for a short story. Is that a ton of money? No. Is it a couple of bills paid, or a half tank of heating oil, or a third of my rent? Yes, it is. And it adds up. I write fast. It rarely takes me more than a day or two to write a short story, once I have it in my head (it's the getting of it in my head that takes time, grasping the idea, smoothing it out in my brain, coaxing it, but mainly getting the idea at all) and if the story's good enough it might make a Year's Best anthology for another $100, or maybe another $30, depending on the anthology. But all those small numbers add up, and if I write two short stories a month, which I usually do, plus Omikuji and whatever other freelancing things I'm up to at the moment...well, that's how you live from day to day.
Without short fiction, I'd have had to quit this gig a long time ago.
I can't even imagine getting 50 cents a word for anything I'd write. I've had two short fiction gigs lately that paid about 25 cents a word and I was over the moon about it. When it comes to short fiction, I almost always say yes, as long as it comes with a deadline and isn't a vague "send us a story sometime." It's a massive part of my working life--even though I never set out to be a short fiction writer and had to learn the hard way how to do it--just by doing it, over and over, until I didn't hate everything I wrote.
I do agree, absolutely, that as writers we must be paid for what we do unless we choose to forgo payment for reasons that seem right to the individual author. And as someone progresses in their career, what they can afford to write changes. It's only in the last year that I've even started to limit myself to pro rates--though I would never have accepted the fifth of a cent rate that started this whole debate. But for me, pro rate is a good, solid rate, nothing great, nothing spectacular, but solid enough to count on, and I work for it regularly. It's the bedrock of my ability to write full-time. Not as exciting as a novel sale, but without it, I'd be in freefall. |
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| Looking for Playmobil |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|12:56 pm] |
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Where is there a good selection of Playmobil, preferably close to Whyte Avenue, Bonnie Doon Mall, or possibly Southgate or South Common? |
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| Politics of boasting about sex |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|07:18 pm] |
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Guido Fawkes slags off John Bercow
for writing a nasty-sounding sex tip guide in the 80s. Which, fine, no problem.
Then he implies that he once slept with Bercow’s wife. Which seems a nasty thing to say on the country’s most widely read
political blog. (If he was just saying it to his mates, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.)
I’m not sure it should seem a nasty thing to say. Views? |
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| SNOW!!! |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|12:50 pm] |
HOLY FORNICATING GODS OF MY ANCESTORS!!!IT'S SNOWING!!!!IN TEXAS! I MUST GO FROLIC!!!
/we now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast |
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| Ask the Magic 8 Ball |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|12:35 pm] |
Still doing readings, if you didn't get one yesterday.
If you want one, please comment here...the other thread has gotten too crowded to maneuver through expeditiously.
If any of you feel like doing a reading for me, any and all advice is much much appreciated. |
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| LJ2ANYONE that has done a PhD and lived SOS SOS MAYDAY |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|05:51 pm] |
I was led to believe from the beginning that writing up was hellish. I've been doing my writing-up since April and have to submit by Feb 1st-ish. Out of 3 chapters that contain data, I have done one big one in its entirety, the other big one is complete except for a few bits of intro and discussion. The third data chapter, where I set out how I developed most of my assays and basic techniques, has been partly written already as part of my MPhil upgrade. The overall introduction I can patch together from the introductions I've written for the big data chapters and a review I got published a few years ago.
The overall discussion? Well I have it in outline format and most of the references in my reference manager but for now, let's not go there.
However, on closer inspection, a lot of the data for my first data chapter is either faulty, missing or unconvincing. I am now in full-on panic. I don't think there is any way I am going to be able to submit an examinable thesis by Feb if at all. What the hell do I do? I am already working on it 12 hours a day give or take, and am still grinding slowly towards finishing Big Data Chapter 2 (which I think I will be happy with when I am done, but I suspect that is because I am a techie at heart and it's mainly technical not theoretical).
How important are data chapters? How the hell have two chapters taken almost 9 months to write!? How am I going to write another data chapter, introduction and discussion by Feb 1st, get it printed and bound to go to the examiners!? Should I just sketch out the remaining data chapter and spend more time on my discussion? On top of this I have a book chapter to write by end Jan and an invited review.
I'm totally fucked! When I tell my supervisor, he just says helpful things like "just keep going, you worry too much" when I almost failed my MPhil upgrade (well, I got given a really hard time and half the brown scared out of me, but I passed, so make of that what you will) and also when I was in the middle of having a breakdown that then needed 6months to recover from. |
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