"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
“I’m too old to understand this,” is an attitude I run across from time to time in, naturally enough, older people. (Here I am in my 60s talking about “older people” *sheesh*) It’s an attitude that seems to say, “I’m all finished living. I have nothing more I care to learn,” or worse, “I died a few years ago. My body just hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
If I ever get that old, just shoot me.
So, Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” character is coming to the big screen. Sort of. In One Shot (trailer below), Tom Cruise is inexplicably cast as Jack Reacher. WTF?!?
No, seriously: WTF?!?
The Character, as established by Child in–I think–17 novels is 6’5″, 250 pounds of phlegmatic, unstoppable force. I can think of exactly NO “negotiation” (read, “Reacher utterly destroys the bad guys in hand-to-hand, or head-to-face-butt”) scene in any of the books that a guy Tom Cruise’s size could survive, let alone wreak the havoc the Reacher character does.
And then there’s personality. The quirky, birdlike Cruise twitching from one girly-voiced dialog delivery to another is hardly the image of the laconic, phegmatic Reacher portrayed in so many successful novels to date. Absolutely nothing in the trailer, for instance, seems congruent with the Reacher character in the books.
I imagine those who have never read any of the books and have a crush on Pretty Boy Cruise will enjoy the thing, but while I applaud the fact that Lee Child is going to make some big bucks off the thing, I kind of wish he’d played the part of Reacher himself. It’d have been at least a little more believable.
Infant product class, that is. eBooks. I read a lot of ’em. So far, very few eBooks seem to take advantage of the medium to expand beyond print format, and many are weaker products than hardcopy books. Here’s a brief blurb of my consumer-of-print viewpoint.
Many books can benefit from maps, tables and other reference materials. With hardcopy books, these are often included, and if not I often have the material to hand (or nearby) to fill the gaps. eBooks that can benefit from such addenda need them even more than print works, because they’re often read in locales where such things are unavailable even to someone like me who has a wide-ranging reference library at hand. Such things should be included in eBooks that would benefit from them, and they should be, at the very least, context sensitive. For example, when maps are called for, scalable, zoomable satellite or aerial maps (with helpful labeling, perhaps) could be included with little more trouble than simple line-drawing maps. Use your imagination to supply supplementary materials lists eBook authors should include. You’ll have to, though, because so far very few authors have used theirs in that manner.
As to those eBooks that are weaker products than corresponding print works. *sigh* One of the worst examples I can think of offhand was a novel written by a very good writer before eBooks had really taken off. I read it expecting not great but good fun. The story was OK, as were the characters, descriptive narrative and dialog, but… he’d apparently just scanned it–or had it scanned–and converted to electronic format and apparently had not even had it proof read. Too many obvious scanning errors ruined enjoyment of the book. But that’s just one of the worst. Self-published, author edited or proofread (or author edited AND proofread) eBooks seem to be about 85% POORLY edited and proofread. Good lord, folks! Execrable grammar, spelling and punctuation just barely scratches the surface of many crap-laden plots, dialog, descriptive narrative and characters crudely drawn in crayon from B-movie central casting descriptions!
Yes, there are a lot of well-written, well-edited/proofread “Indie” published books available, but the numbers of well-written “Indie” books is only because so very much chaff is out there to winnow the well-written books out of. It’s a real pain in the neck (although the pain’s really quite a bit further south of there) to be reading along thinking, “Interesting story–OH CRAP! GETCHER SYNTAX OUTA YOUR ASS!” or “SPELLCHECK, DUMBASS, SPELLCHECK!!” or “WTF! YOU DIDN’T JUST ‘THERE’S’ ME AGAIN! over and over again.
I’m sure both the crap writing and the features blocks will work themselves out in time, though. eBooks are still in a development phase, and some writers, at least, seem to be thinking seriously about some of these things. Thank heavens. *sigh*
Ordering from Amazon. Placed order w/”2-day shipping” option. Received notice of shipping w/in an hour. By noon, the item was listed as having shipped from a Fedex location about 70 miles from me. Next a.m.? Scanned in at a Fedex location 370 miles from me, though it’d travel more than 400 miles to get here from there via Fedex.
If I’d had direct access to the Amazon Marketplace seller, Imight well have simply driven up and gotten the product, but in that case, paying the extra $3 or $4 (I forget which) for next day delivery… nah, wouldn’t have speeded things up, since item was ordered on Friday. Would probably still have been Monday. And yes, I know Amazon said it’d be here by Tuesday, but it’ll be Monday, if my experiences w/Fedex are any guide.
Still… it will have traveled almost 800 miles to get here from 70 miles away. Something’s just wrong there. It’s almost as if it were coming via the Post Office.* Continue reading “Modern Living”
Yeh, yeh, I drink pop. Soda. Whatever. Not so much as I used to, but I drink the stuff. At least I no longer drink Pepsi, long my preferred cola (never really did develop a taste for Coca-Cola; it always came across as too sweet to me, for one thing). I stopped drinking sugar and corn syrup sweetened pops long ago, and in fact even went off carbonated soft drinks entirely for a while, since artificial sweeteners just didn’t make the grade for me, although I’d partaken of them for some time under a mistaken impression they’d help me control my middle age spread (they didn’t seem to).
A couple of years ago, though, I discovered a cola that’s not only sugar free but tastes better to my palate than my old fav, Pepsi: Continue reading “Confessions of a Pop Drinker”
With the advent of Wintel tablets approaching, the tablet for factor may actually start to appeal to me for doing things other than just media/info-consuming. Sure, I’ve seen–and tried out–some of the office-type productivity app attempts on various tablets, and I’ve shuddered at Garage Band being touted on the iPhad (Garage Band and its ilk are represented as music content creation applications; they are “music content creation” apps as garbage collection–not even disposal–is to yard waste: a way to get the junk collected in one location). *meh* At best such things are kludgy. Of course, no tablet that come w/o included physical keyboards would be worth much to me for anything but media/info-consumption, either.
Yeh: might as well just look for a convertible touch screen notebook for me.
Unless… (and until) voice (and music) recognition advances would allow reasonable data input w/o a keyboard/mouse (or touchpad/screen) combo. Ideally, a wearable computer with a system that allowed projection of a virtual screen (while I continued to wear my prescription lenses) and could reliably translate subvocalized commands/data input into actions/content. Oh, yeh, music recognition capability that’d allow vocal or instrumental input and transcribe music played/sung with reasonable accuracy (as is now only reasonably done via direct midi input, although folks are working on decent transcription from live input). And an OS that allowed me to continue to use a music transcription software that can perfectly read my archives of scores already written. Combined w/decent ear buds and perhaps some motion-sensor gloves or wrist bands, such a system would be pretty much ideal for a portable computer for someone like me.
*sigh* Maybe such a system will be available before I’m too feeble-minded to be able to use it. (Some may say it’s too late for that already. *heh*)
In fiction, the less descriptive details detract from creating suspension of disbelief, the less they might drag a reader out of the story to say, “Nuh-uh! No way! Not so!” and so getting the little things right can make a difference in verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief, let alone simple enjoyment of a story well told.
Let me offer a very small example (one of, sadly, more than a few from a book now in hand):
Speaking about an event in Atilla’s life tied to a specific town in Italy in 452 A.D., a learned gentleman intones,
“The town was founded in the first century, so it was already three hundred years old when Atilla arrived.”
Really? Any (and I do mean ANY) literate person knows that the first century A.D. began with year 1 and went through 100 A.D. 452 A.D. was squarely in the middle of the FIFTH century. It would have made sense to have said, “The town was founded in the first century, so it was already FOUR hundred years old when Atilla arrived.”
When a novel that relies heavily on historical citations (and legends tied to history) begins to pile up errors like that, it starts to seriously detract from the story.
No, before you ask, it’s not a book by Dan Brown. It’s not within several orders of magnitude of being THAT bad. In fact, apart from niggling little things like the one noted above, and quite contra a Dan Brown prose atrocity, it’s actually pretty good reading, which is what makes these niggling little problems… problems.
[N.B. Added link to one example–of many, many examples–of behaviors in support of my thesis below. ;-)]
The Zero has been an open book enigma, wrapped in a con man’s smile, covered by a flack industry’s hand-waving distractions and outright lies.
All this stuff we’ve been seeing from The Zero, his fellow travelers and cronies–the gutting of the economy and building of “golden Solyndrachutes” for the Crony Class, the bowing and scraping and (at least metaphorical) bending of knee to all sorts of foreign potentates and outright enemies of the US, the shredding of constitutional guarantees of fundamental human rights, and on and on and on: it’s all about Moochele’s campaign to combat her childhood nemesis. Yep, her childhood obesity is driving all this.
Oh, I have no picture of her as a fat child, but her psychological derangement is blatantly apparent, and its most likely cause is her own self-image, formed growing up as a fat kid.
And how does this explain The Zero’s (and his fellow travelers, etc.) behaviors? Think about if for a nano-second (that’s about all it takes, of course, to understand so simple a set of minds).
And so it goes. Genius! It’s all about slowly weaning Americans from food entirely!
Weirded out a bit ago. Stuck inside all day working on various projects. Just went outside a bit ago and… my front lawn appears freshly mown. No kidding. Sure, I heard a neighbor on his riding mower earlier, but aside from a time more than 10 years ago when a different neighbor volunteered his riding mower when he saw me out working my push mower while wearing a knee brace and using a cane (real), nothing like this has ever happened before.
Stranger thing: I had just looked at the lawn last night and mentally scheduled to mow it come Friday evening.
Now, I can just skip on back to the back yard and do chores there. *heh*
As seen over and over again in the actual text of DNC speeches and delegates’ comments and Mass MEdia Podpeople “reports” (but I repeat myself *heh*), it’s difficult for people to reject the obvious lies their bigotry embraces and admit the facts staring them in the face demonstrate the wrongness of their positions.
Of course, it’s a problem for anyone–admitting one has been wrong because of bigotry, a fundamental bias against any particular really reality-based truth, and instead an embrace of “reality-based” fantasy–but I suppose it’s just that faux “liberals” are so very blatant about their bigotry, as seen in the brazenly racist motto so openly displayed at the DNC:
S’all right, y’all. You can come on over from the Dark Side. We’ll forgive you.