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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Tom Scudder's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, July 20th, 2008 | | 10:09 pm |
Short, shameful confession
I only watched the first 8 minutes or so of Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. | | Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | | 8:50 am |
| | Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | | 8:55 pm |
Curious Taxonomy Did you know Gary Larson has not one, but three species of insect named after him? I didn't know until I read his wikipedia entry, which cites curioustaxonomy.net. In addition to strigiphilus garylarsoni which anyone who's read The Pre-History of the Far Side knows about, there's also a beetle ( Garylarsonus) and a Ecuadorian butterfly ( Serratoterga larsoni). On the list of species named after people I also found Albunea groeningi, a sand crab named for Matt Groening, and the lovely troika of Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi, slime mold beetles named after the U.S. president, vice president, and defense secretary. | | 11:08 am |
| | Monday, June 23rd, 2008 | | 6:24 pm |
Al-hurra day on Yglesias Okay, so Matthew Yglesias has 2 posts on al-hurra today. I'd known the station had been a screw-up, but hadn't seen it outlined so clearly before. But anyway, what I'm really here to talk about is the youtube video he posted in his first post, which was a puff piece al-hurra did about the Arabic conversation meetup in DC. In which, if you look at the background in the interview clip starting about :36 in, you can see ME ME ME (on the far left, fittingly enough). | | Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 11:25 am |
I was going to title this "ZOMG I LOVE JONATHAN COULTON" but that seemed a bit much.
| | Friday, June 13th, 2008 | | 2:16 pm |
Deep written SF geekery: most promising writers of 1982, in hindsight Okay, so ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) james_nicoll, referencing the passing of Algis Budrys, posted Budrys's top 10 most promising sf writers of 1982: 1. Paul Preuss
2. Parke Godwin
3. Arsen Darnay
4. Michael Swanwick
5. Somtow Sucharitkul
6. Victor Besaw
7. Lucius Shepard
8. Madeline Robins
9. Robert L. Forward
10. Robert Frazier
dd_b opined that "none of them has in fact turned out to be at all important in the field". I asked him who he thought you could put on that kind of a list, in retrospect, and then proceeded to do a bunch of google-assisted brain-dredging. Here's as far as I'm willing to go on a list (in no particular order after #2): Basic rules here are the writer had to have something in print, but had to have not yet established him or herself as the important figure in the field they later became. 1 - Terry Pratchett (had written 2 minor SF novels and, years earlier, a juvie fantasy novel that he later completely rewrote before allowing it back into print; later became a significant portion of the entire British bookselling market) 2 - William Gibson (had published a few well-received short stories. Later published NEUROMANCER and became the father of cyberpunk) 3 - Orson Scott Card (had written the novella of "Ender's Game" but didn't publish the novel until 1984) 4 - Vernor Vinge (had been writing publishable stuff since the 60s, but only his then-recent novella "True Names" really caught fire. Later would publish a small number of extremely-well-received hardish SF novels). 5 - Connie Willis (Hadn't won any of her 34 or so Hugo Awards yet) 6 - David Brin (STARTIDE RISING came out in '83) 7 - Greg Bear (had written four novels, but didn't make his big splash until the short story "Blood Music" in 1983, and the novel EON (1985)) 8 - C. J. Cherryh 9 - Tim Powers (Had written 2 early SF novels plus THE DRAWING OF THE DARK - really took off with THE ANUBIS GATES In 1983). and 10 - Swanwick (dd_b says of Swanwick and Lucius Shepherd: "To my eye they're off in a dead corner of the field that they helped invent, but which never took off; but opinions may vary." Mine varies, at least in Swanwick's case.) Bonus: Robert Jordan was technically in print at the time, with a trilogy of historical romances under a different pen name, as well as a couple Conan books. However, it would have taken some truly heroic clairvoyance to see him as the huge commercial success he would later become, so I think he probably doesn't really count. | | 1:43 pm |
| | 12:13 pm |
Google search of the day "this was a triumph"(The song in the first link has turned into my own private symbol of hollow claims of victory. There's a certain Aqoul thread I considered posting it to, but the hell with it.) | | 8:40 am |
Scalzi on Obama's blackness Following on a rant about the Fox News "Baby Mamma" incident: It’s shit like this that makes this story on CNN, about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or biracial, an absolute hoot. Here’s a quick test on whether Obama should be considered fully black: Poof! Barack Obama has been magically transported to a KKK meeting in deepest, whitest Klanistan without his Secret Service detail. There’s a rope and a tree nearby. What happens to Obama? If you say, “why, Barack Obama walks out of there alive, of course” then sure, he’s biracial. Also, you’re a fucking idiot. To everybody who cares about Obama’s racial identity, either positively or negatively, the man is a black man, married to a black woman, who has black children. Black black black black black black black black. | | Monday, June 9th, 2008 | | 12:00 pm |
| | Saturday, June 7th, 2008 | | 12:51 pm |
Google search of the day "obama abu jamal" - 2 hits. Warning: the second third (well, one of them anyway) link (at the moment, and no I'm not going to link to them directly) is seriously disturbing. search terms snagged from an unfogged comment thread. | | Friday, June 6th, 2008 | | 12:42 pm |
| | Thursday, June 5th, 2008 | | 2:25 pm |
| | 10:37 am |
MyHope How I hope that you forget your MySpace
I hope it slips completely from your mind
And I hope it stays up long enough for the next generation to find
Lookie! It's the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past for a new generation! | | 10:05 am |
| | 9:05 am |
Counterprogramming Mark Schmitt on Hillary's late-campaign rhetoric & its appeal to working and middle-class voters: While Clinton was winning primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, much attention was paid to the reasons that white working-class voters in those states were not voting for Sen. Obama. Yet in every one of those primaries, turnout was two to three times higher than in previous presidential primaries, and in several cases exceeded the total votes for the Democrat in the general election of 2004. Voters don't turn out in such numbers to vote against someone. Support for Sen. Clinton among these voters, male and female, old and not-so-old, was overwhelmingly positive and affirmative. Even those of us who didn't find her candidacy inspiring have to acknowledge that Clinton gave her voters hope, every bit as much as Obama inspired younger voters, African Americans, and voters in other regions. | | Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 | | 10:41 am |
| | Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 | | 11:12 am |
Jon Stewart interviews McClellan Part 1, part 2. This was a really good interview. | | 9:33 am |
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