Book of Screed

I note that Paul S. Kemp is giving away two signed galleys of his upcoming novel Shadowrealm, the conclusion to his excellent Shadow War trilogy, which I described as “the sort of book Robert E. Howard might have written if he’d straightened out his head, realized the whole Aryan-supremacy thing was a bad idea, and lived another thirty years.”

Proceed hither at once if you are interested. Though I myself will not be entering the contest.

The Insufferably Noble High-Minded Reason:

I will buy the book when it comes out.

The Actual Reason:

Cuz if I actually did win a galley, I wouldn’t have time to read it until the middle of October or so. Mr. Kemp has a distressing - distressing!- tendency of publishing books during weeks I pull down ten or twenty hours of overtime. Clearly, this is evidence of a conspiracy. I blame the shadowy machinations of Nick Mamatas.

-JM

Remember the “Jewel of Medina” thing I wrote about a few weeks ago? Turns out the book was released in Serbia, where it went to the stores without a ripple of trouble, and the local Muslim community calmly and civilly ignored the book and went on with their lives.

Or not (via Adnkronos.com):

The Islamic Community in Serbia said on Monday it was not satisfied with the withdrawal of Sherry Jones’ novel, The Jewel of Medina, from the country’s bookshops.

See, the Serbian Muslim community demanded that the publisher withdraw the book, but that was not enough:

Referring to the book released by Belgrade publisher Beobuk three weeks ago, the organisation’s leader Muamer Zukorlic said it was “offensive to Muslims” and demanded all of the published copies be handed in.

Because we’ve always been at war with Oceania, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guilty of thoughtcrime.

There’s a level of irony in seeing all this outrage over a book come from a religion whose founder was, according to the testimony of his followers, illiterate. But, you know. If your ethnic group, religion, or philosophical system isn’t getting enough respect, just start a few riots, blow some stuff up, or start suing everyone in sight (this worked great for Scientology). People won’t dare publish anything critical about you then.

-JM

Apparently, Dell will be including Ubuntu 8.04 on their new subnotebook line.

Like the man said, it’s all part of the plan.

-JM

Here’s an interesting article on the increasing popularity of the Ubuntu Linux distrubtion:

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20049/1090/1/0/

The article’s tone is interesting. Apparently the author got the bum’s rush from Canonical PR, and so can’t quite resist the temptation to portray Ubuntu as a force insidiously conquering the Internet, masterminded by the Darth Sidious-esque Mark Shuttleworth. It just serves as a reminder to take everything you read with a grain of salt. After all, the thing about Linux is that (outside of the workplace, anyway) one installs and uses it entirely by choice. So there’s clearly more happening here in terms of quality than just a slick PR campaign.

Though Ubuntu has risen astonishingly fast. Long-time blog readers know that I’m fond of it, and that I use it on almost a daily basis. (Though at the moment I am writing this post on a Mac.) I’m definitely looking forward to Ubuntu 8.10’s arrival later this year.

-JM

Apparently, medieval peasants had it better than we do:

When family rights advocate John De Graff started doing some historical research, he came across a shocking discovery — that medieval European peasants had more vacation time than modern American office workers.

De Graff, the national coordinator of Take Back Your Time Day, based his figures on the number of religious holidays peasants took off to eat, drink, and spend time with their families, and found it was about two weeks extra. He even printed up T-shirts saying: “Medieval Peasants Had More Vacation Than You.”

Yeeeeeeah.

Of course, medieval peasants tended to, you know, starve to death. Or die like flies when the Black Death came. Or get slaughtered when their lord went to war with another lord over a creek or something stupid like that. Or get carried off into slavery as Muslim raiders prowled the Mediterranean. Plus, they had a life expectancy of around fifty, and all their teeth tended to fall out. Which, due to the aforementioned starving to death, may not have been all that great a loss.

Not to mention that they were universally illiterate, and that the average peasant rarely traveled more than twenty miles from his birthplace. So I guess his two weeks of extra vacation were a “staycation” after all.

But what an intensely stupid rhetorical point. You want to trade places with a medieval peasant, go right ahead. I’ll stay here in the overworked twenty-first century with my air conditioner and my teeth, thanks very much.

-JM

See the results here.

My personal favorite:

“Hmm . . .” thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.”

-Andrea Bowers

Second favorite:

Vito watched as Robert squirmed in his life vest while the Great White brushed against his chum-soaked and shackled body, but it wasn’t until the terrible fish circled back, finally ending Robert’s evening, that Vito, with the vision of the legless torso undulating up and down in the Farallon current had his epiphany, and uncovered one of life’s truly great mysteries: when you shorten Robert you really do get bob.

-Paul Olson

Read the whole thing.

-JM

I was hugely amused to see this story. Apparently a Wisconsin family, so outraged by Favre’s decision to go with the Jets, piled all their Official Favre Memorabilia outside and had themselves a bonfire. The article did not mention if alcohol was involved, but I think we can safely assume that it was.

I find this hilarious because the entire time I lived in Wisconsin, Brett Favre was a god, and the media served as his devoted priests. When Hurricane Katrina struck, the biggest story in Wisconsin was the damage to Favre’s house. Countless pages and numberless broadcast hours have been devoted to the minutae of his life. Indeed, if the Lord Jesus Christ were to return to earth in glory, with the hosts of heaven arrayed behind him in all their awesome splendor, I suspect the headline in Wisconsin would be“The Second Coming is upon us - how will the End of Days affect Favre’s passing ability in the preseason? More at ten!”

Now, though…Favre is a traitor. Worse. An apostate! I’m rather looking forward to the next time I go to Wisconsin, just to see if the tone of the news coverage of the Great Man has become somewhat less worshipful.

Conan O’Brien said it best:

“Brett Favre will take the Jets to the Super Bowl…where they will be seated in section 275.”

-JM

I write query/cover letters on a regular basis, and tonight I happened to write this one:

Here is (TITLE), a (WORK) about 8000 words wrong.

Yes. 8000 words wrong. Nothing like putting your best foot forward. Fortunately I fixed it before it went out. But, man. Talk about your Freudian slips.

-JM

Since it’s the weekend, I’ve been playing Rome: Total War again, and I’ve noticed two things:

-Conquering the Mediterranean world is pretty easy.

-Paying for it all is hard.

I mean, you’ve got to find wages for all those soldiers. And then you’ve got to pay for ships to transport them. After a province is conquered, you’ve got to find the money to pay for roads, city walls, the local garrison, water supplies, watchtowers, forts, ports, land clearance, mining, and impressive-looking governmental buildings. And the people keep revolting! If you don’t build an aqueduct, they revolt. If you raise taxes to pay for the aqueduct, they revolt. Once they do revolt, you’ve got to the send in the Legions (which costs more money) to kill off all the taxpayers and raze the place to the ground, since Rome does not tolerate rebellion, and build it all over again…which costs more money.

No wonder the Roman Empire fell. In fact, I’ll bet the Empire actually didn’t fall. It was dismantled for tax purposes, with the Emperor currently hiding in Arkansas under an assumed name to avoid his creditors.

-JM

You know all those rumors that former presidential candidate John Edwards was secretly gay? Turns out that they were 100% false!

What a weasel. Making a big show about how he cares about the poor, and all the while he’s just another expensively coiffed weasel doinking the help on the side. Him and Clinton and Spitzer and Giuliani and Gingrich and the Reverend Jesse “Love Child” Jackson. Maybe they ought to form the Official Weasel club and get together on Thursdays for bridge and keeping it classy.

Though I do think that it’s a bit disturbing that the National Enquirer (which broke the Edwards story) has become the most accurate newspaper in America.

-JM