On Patricia Briggs’s site, her husband Mike has put up a great section about copyright and internet piracy. I can’t even read to the end because the arguments in blue (which represent the piracy viewpoints that he’s refuting) are so painful. Clearly, the people who are arguing the economic justification for piracy have never taken an economics course, or read Charles Wheelan’s wonderfully simple book Naked Economics.
It’s International Blog Against Racism Week. Links are being collected at . I wrote a longer piece on this that’s currently under submission, so I’ll just paraphrase here–based on my experiences with discussions of race, I think white Americans have a severe underdog complex. Our society glorifies the underdog fighting against impossible odds to get to the top, to "make it", to jump from nobody to superstar in the land of opportunity. Everyone wants to be the underdog; no one wants to be the Man, the Establishment, the Authorities, whatever. Discussions of race tend to bring white people face to […]
One of the things that irritates me most about the English language is the fact that the imperfect tense is nearly identical to the passive voice. As I first learned in my French classes, there are two main forms of the immediate past tense: the complete past and the continuous past. In French, those are the imparfait, the continuous or ongoing past (je travaillais quand il m’interrompt), and the passé composé, the repetitive or complete past (j’ai travaillé). In English, the imparfait is the imperfect (I was working when he interrupted me) and the passé composé is the simple past […]
Watched a few episodes of the Dresden Files TV show online… decent by themselves, but when you know the books, they just fall very short. Too much of a crime show, not enough magic. It was probably budgeting issues at the ground level. It’s such a shame, because Paul Blackthorne really fits as Harry Dresden. And the ‘cover art’ with him holding up that little ball of bluish-white flame is gorgeous.
I was just thinking about buying a copy of Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Douglas Adams) and remembering how it kept jumping to my mind when I read American Gods (Neil Gaiman, review below). Because, honestly? Very different styles, but the plots hit every key note in perfect harmony. Metaphors aside, the real reason why the core of American Gods didn’t surprise me — I’d already seen it. Instinctively, I knew Wednesday was Odin, even before I consciously realized the Wodin’s Day connection… because it was deja vu from Tea-Time. It was like the time I was reading this […]