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28.2.03

Best Job Ever:
I want to be paid to Translate blank Books
That is all.

Oh, and by the way: I still don't think that joke is funny. How people can amuse themselves by writing reviews on amazon describing that book with the word encyclopedic is beyond me. They're the same people who walk around saying "nice weather" when it's raining, and "how you feeling" to people missing limbs and gushing blood. Ooh. Clever.
And, whereas I don't really think This one is the worst offender, they sure as hell took the joke too far. Yeah. Ha ha. It's blank. You say it isn't, but it is. They offered to come do a booksigning.
OK, so maybe I'm just bitter because we sold out of it, and there are standing orders for it. Yeah. Nobody ever said it took a post-high-school degree to be a customer at BookPeople; that's just to get a job here.
Posted at 5:31 PM

OK, is the downtown hotel in Austin spelled Driskell or Driskill? It came up at work. Googlefight says this. Which is the right spelling?

The answer.
Thanks to Invisible City for pointing me to Googlefight.
Posted at 4:12 PM

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27.2.03

Then again, if one's ass is alive, one would think, mustn't the rest of one also be?

Also, for those who care, new(ish) Francesca Lia Block.
Posted at 3:43 PM

Poor Word Choice

   If you are the emperor, that means you are in charge. It means you head up an empire, and that you are the ruler of said empire.
   If you are the emperor of cheese, that means that you are a ruler, but you are a ruler of cheese. It means that when cheese is involved, you are the person to whom one should look. It means that you are like an emperor, but in the specialized world of cheese. If there were a question of cheese, one would not immediately think to go running for the emperor; One would seek the Emperor of Cheese.
   Here's my question, and maybe this point has already been made: The term "Axis of Evil" was used recently by the current administration to describe the governments of the world that knowingly support terrorism, specifically Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
   It has now been a year since the state-of-the-union address in which Bush used the term "axis of evil" to describe these states, but the phrase is still in use. Let me put this to you: If those are the axis of evil, and Nazi Germany, Fascist Russia and Imperial Japan were the Axis (There is clearly a reference here. If he wanted to call these countries evil without making a World War II reference, he'd have said Allegiance of Evil or Evil Arrangement. The term Axis of Evil is a clear and definite reference to the Axis Powers from World War II.), doesn't this serve to de-vilify the Nazis and Fascists? In fact, by saying for fifty years that those administrations were the most evil on record, that they committed atrocities, and that nothing they did was anything but the lowest kind of villainy, we have associated the term "Axis" with the word Evil. By calling Iran, Iraq and North Korea the "Axis Of Evil," he is suggesting that the previous axis were not, in fact evil. He's saying that they are like the Axis, but they are specifically the Axis of Evil. They're the one that's actually evil. The other Axis, the one we tend to think of when the word Axis is brought up in a geopolitical sense, they aren't the evil one. So, by saying that Iran, Iraq and North Korea are the Axis of Evil, he's supporting the "Nazis Weren't Evil" theory. You're welcome to think what you want about the Nazis, but the President isn't. He has to stick by the party line; the one that is father, the previous President Bush coined when he said Iraq's Hussein was the new Hitler. Does the new president's statement mean that his father was saying Hussein was a dynamic leader working to pull his country out of an economic quagmire, finding a scapegoat and forcing them into camps? That is true, but it's not what George H.W. Bush meant when he said that. He meant that Hussein was a threat to the world who must be eliminated. Apparently, George W. Bush believes that Hussein is the Evil Hitler.
   So, Hussein is like Hitler, only Evil. Think about that.

Posted at 11:31 AM

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21.2.03

   It's not a store. It's four stores.
   Customers know the store that is right now. It's the store that most of the employees live in, too. It's the books on the shelves, the displays up, the "where's the goddam event book," that kind of thing. It's an employee walking up to a customer and asking, may I find your book for you? It is the store that is.
   There's the store that has been. The returns, those books sent back either as damaged or simply unpopular. A book has, effectively, three months to be sold before a specialized employee comes along and, smelling its age and impending must, sends it back from whence it came.
   There's the store that is forming. It happens slowly, on long wooden tables in receiving. The floor employees who see it rarely realize what it is: it's their reality being created before them. In a day, these books will be on the shelves, and the books from the shelves will be leaving the store, either sold or returned. When a books exists either here or in returns. the average floor employee panics. It takes a specialist to fish a book from the black hole of returns or the nebulous swirling gasses of receiving. Panicked voices call from below, "Where Is My Boo-oo-ook?" Powerful, assured answers come from on high, "Right here. I'm sending it down. Jeez, keep yer shirt on."
   Finally, and most abstractly, there is the store that will be. In months, the books ordered through publishing representatives by the mysterious and unfathomable Section Buyers will arrive in nondescript cardboard boxes, shaping the reality for future employees not yet hired and customers not yet greeted. This store is the least considered, I think, by the average employee. Every so often, though, a customer comes in who lives in this store of tomorrow. He asks for he next Martin or Rowling or Bradbury; he expects The Final Weel of Time to be ready for purchase, despite its not having been written; he ponders the availability of Grass's newest effort, Crabwalk, in English.
   Just thinkin'.
Posted at 10:43 AM

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20.2.03

Although wackywackyfun, entering javascript via blogger does not allow putting in the wakka-bang-dash-dash (<!--) commenting out for javascripting. Otherwise, it's a nifty-keen way to practice. Yippee.
Posted at 5:17 PM

Hee hee.

Posted at 10:17 AM

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19.2.03

Your topic for today:

Don't Bother.

Write if you dare. hee hee.
Posted at 11:36 AM

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18.2.03

Click here.

Posted at 2:22 PM

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17.2.03

Wow. Google let me down on "Evil Tool-Using Bears." Oh well.
Posted at 11:40 AM

OK, lemme just vent on this a little. And no, not "Evil Tool-Using Bears," which, by the way, sucks.

   Funny-Book Daredevil was always a little creepy. Movie Daredevil, though, is just a wack-job, pure and simple. At one point in the movie, he throws a guy in front of a train and laughs as he's cut in half. He punishes murderers by murdering them horribly.
   There's a moment, toward the end of the movie, in which Bullseye is painted to be a Christ character. He is then (I hope I'm not giving too much away. The good guy wins. That's what happens in all of these movies. The good guy wins. Even if he's a rotten good guy and a serial killer, he wins) murdered by the Devil, or rather, murdered by an outside force meant to eliminate the Devil which is then redirected.
   Then, the Devil goes after the force responsible for Bullseye Christ. He criples and banishes God (in this case, the bad guys are painted to be the Christian figures. Surprise), going to his gleaming, white tower and beating the, pardon, Holy Hell out of him.
   Throughout the movie, Daredevil has one friend: the Catholic Church. I hope they have something to say about this. The attack is deliberate, heavy-handed and unsubtle. Whee.
   The movie, though, wasn't bad. It's impossible to like the hero, but hey, that's so often true. I mean, look at Pretty Woman and (shudder) Richard Gere. Hee hee.
Posted at 9:29 AM

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13.2.03

Yes, yes, it's a sick fascination, and I know I'm something of a conspiracy theorist at heart, but here's an interesting article.
Posted at 4:50 PM

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11.2.03

This has only happened to me once:
I emailed a guy with a document attached. He said thanks, and sent it back to me in the reply. Hee hee.
Posted at 9:23 AM

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6.2.03

According to This, peeps are a favorite "in... barbecues during the Summer". Hmm. Smoked Marshmello Peep. Never tried that one.

Thanks to the good folks at Invisible City for the link.
Posted at 12:05 PM

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4.2.03

No, no. We keep narrowly AVERTING armageddon. Pessimistic nihilist assholes, I swear.
I don't care what you believe. I don't care if you believe a middle-eastern man was nailed to a piece of wood so you can sleep at night. I don't care if you believe a pink lizard led your ancestors to lumps of gold in the new world. I don't care if you believe that only be wearing a tutu and singing "Poingee peTui Poingee peTui" can your soul find salvation. I don't care. If you sit there and fervently believe that, at any monent, the world is going to end and everything is going to be destroyed, you're not contributing to a healthy society. Look at the 80's. We were all so convinced that the world was ending tomorrow that we didn't mind wearing pink in public. C'mon people: hot pink is the sign of sick society.
I'm just sayin' is all.
Posted at 12:49 PM

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3.2.03

An impassioned diatribe on the future state of Austin:
   It needs to be possible to navigate without prior knowledge of the city. Out-of-town visitors are uniformly puzzled by the layout of Austin and the counter-intuitive way the roads are laid out. We are a large city. We need a loop is a circle. We are a large city. We need more than one viable north-south road that actually connects to something. We are a large city. We need even a single East-West road that will enable quick transit across the breadth of the city without the ubiquitous stop-lights and one-way confusion of downtown, or the random dead ends and criss-cross pattern of the riverside/barton springs/barton skyway complex.
   Austin needs to admit that it has become a large city, and that transit has become an important aspect of everyday life. A city's people are its blood, and its roads are its veins ant arteries. Ours were laid out with a weed-whacker "darts-at-a-map" approach to city planning.
   Changing this approach, admitting that the city is growing and that it will remain large, will create an attitude that will allow the city to remain liveable. Actual city planning, not random mutation is the answer. Consideration of the employees as well as the employers is the answer. Understanding that "weird" does not necessarily mean "incomprehensible" is the answer. This attitude shift will not only make life in Austin better five years from now, it will make life in Austin desirable five years from now.
Posted at 12:30 PM

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