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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open What's For Lunch? Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
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Saturday April 20, 2002 |
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of the Day Washington is... a city of Cocker Spaniels. It's a city of people who are more interested in being petted and admired, loved, than rendering the exercise of power. -- Elliot Richardson |
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Daily
Blog Figures are in Fahrenheit, BTW. If you're in a country with metric temperature, you'll have to convert. It's like -32 x 9/7 or something. Whatever, it's probably hot in your jungle anyway. Anyway, for some news items, before an article dissection. Good old racist, virulent, petty, ignorant, crude, rude, Ann Coulter. Anything she writes is comic gold, to the objective observer. • Some guy bagged two god salesmen 25 years ago, and is being tried for it again now. Is that really illegal? I mean killing door to door religious peddlers? And if it is, should it be? I'm joking of course, and there's absolutely nothing at all funny about shooting assholes who come to your door and bother you with their junkmail, newspaper subscriptions, overpriced candy sales, donations to the poor, religion, etc. I love them! I wouldn't wish death on more than 75 to 80% of them! So I didn't laugh at all at the article, which features quotes like this:
Remember, name tags are not targets! • A woman is suing a bar over patrons making jokes about her on some sort of promotional item. It's not real clear what's going on in the article. The funny part is her name, "Kimberly Ricksecker". With that last name, you'd seem to be sort of doomed to a life time of sexual jokes. Oddly enough, the article says the comments were about "Kim". Which doesn't rhyme with anything dirty. • In other humorous libel lawsuit news, a woman was on one of the numerous Fox shows that serve mainly as an affront to all human dignity. She lost on the show, and then refused to appear on some local radio program, and the DJs made jokes about her on the air. So she sued them. And lost. A glorious quote:
So what if they'd called her a "cocksucker" and a "complete asshole"? If she could have proven that she has never pleased a man orally, and that her body mass is less than 51% asshole, would she have won the case? • A couple of corrections on the Brian Lumley notes from yesterday: Deadspeak was the 4th book, not the 3rd. It had two 10 page recaps at the start of it, which I assumed were of the first two books. They were instead of the first three, (I guess) and just broken into two evenly-sized segments. I also don't have the next one, I have the 6th one, and it's not real interesting the first 100 pages or so. He's hitting the next generation problem that a lot of fantasy series get. No, nothing to do with Star Trek, the "next generation" problem is what happens often when the first 3 or 4 or 5 books in a series are of the original interesting characters and world, and then rather than calling it a series and going on, or writing prequels, or further adventures of, the author continues in the same world, but moves on to the kids of the characters. Who are almost invariably less interesting than their parents were, at the same age, 3 or 4 books earlier. The world they are in isn't new and fresh to the reader either, so the fun of discovery is mostly gone, and it's just dumb kids with variants of their parent's powers, doing more of less the same things that happened 20 or 25 years previously. Piers Anthony is notorious for this, as he ruined two long series (that I know of) in this fashion, with Xanth, which Jumped the Shark after about the 6th book, and certainly by the 8th or 9th when he was into the next-next generation, and also his Apprentice Adept series, which did a frickin' triple gainer over the shark after the initial trilogy, when there weren't just children, there were robot children. So Book 5 in Lumley's Necroscope series appears to be all about the main male character's teenaged sons fighting it out, and that continues in book 6, which is what I'm reading now. Maybe. A tip for writers seems to be to just stay in the same world, with the same characters, forever. Age them a bit, but mostly suspend reality. Tarzan, Conan, Superman, etc. Just keep doing the same thing over and over again, "further adventures of", etc. Ageless, and a new impossible quest and battle every week, isn't realistic, but readers like it. It's possible to write an infinite number of novels just in the same long story, but it's very hard. Both as a writer, to sustain the interest, and as a reader, to remember what was happening 2 months ago in the story, which might be 3 or 4 novels and 6 years back in real life. Example here is Jordan's Wheel of Time. He's up to 9 novels now, I believe, mostly 800+ pages each. Huge tomes, and the entire story has covered like 18 months. Individual novels have covered just a few days, and main characters aren't seen for 2 or 3 books at a time, so good luck remembering who was doing what next novel. I only started reading them a year or so ago, and read the first 8 or so (Sort of against my will, but I had to see what would happen next in the soap opera. Five novels later, I'm still waiting to find out.) in about 6 months, then read the 9th which was just out in hardcover. I'm sure by the time #10 comes out I'll have forgotten virtually everything from the earlier ones, and they aren't good enough to reread, and are so long you can't even hope to skim them for background detail reminders. • Yes, I know that Fahrenheit to Celsius is (F -32) * .56 = C , and Celsius to Fahrenheit is (C -32) * 1.8 = F, it was a joke. Now go chase the spider monkeys out of your hut. |
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Anyway, in this article Coulter goes on and on about how essential drilling in the Arctic Refuge is, and how anyone who doesn't support it is on the side of the terrorists. She of course points out that the administration has blocked all planned fuel efficiency increases, which would make a vastly bigger difference on our oil consumption than every drop in the Arctic Refuge. And she also is honor-bound to mention the huge cuts in funding that all sorts of alternative energy source work and research have been given since Dubya was "elected". Oh wait, my bad, she blatantly leaves both of those points out. Must have slipped her mind. Well then she must discuss how little oil there really is in the Arctic Refuge, and how it's hardly even worth doing? Nope, she doesn't talk about how much there will be, and in fact she digs up news that another Alaskan oil field 30 years ago was understimated in size. You don't suppose that our ability to estimate the size of an oil reserve has improved any in 30 years, do you? Must not have, or she'd have mentioned that, in her fair, balanced, honest editorializing. Well at least she writes professionally, and treats her ideological opponents with dignity and respect, right? You be the judge, here's a few quotes:
The last remark about John Kerry is probably her lowest. The man volunteered to serve combat missions in Vietnam, which is where he learned to fly, and he received 3 purple hearts while there. If he'd joined the National Guard to bravely protect Texas from the Vietcong, like the President did, you don't suppose Coulter would have taken a cheap shot about that, do you? (Does the pope wear a big hat?) His wife's first husband died in 1991, she's worked running the Heinz family charities since then, and she met, fell in love with, and married Kerry some years later. So the fact that he has a private plane from his first wife's fortune is relevant in what way, exactly? Could it be relevant that the President and VP who are pushing the arctic drilling are both multi-millionaires from oil money? So which does she choose to mention? On the whole, I find her article relatively disgusting, full of pointless (borderline libelous) cheap shots that do nothing to add to her argument. She leaves out massive amounts of information that would be of use to anyone who wanted to make an informed decision, and she twists and distorts and omits the few facts she goes anywhere near, so they appear to support her position. Oddly, I'm not entirely decided on the issue. I don't like the idea of drilling for relatively little oil in such a fragile area, but if we were taking other steps that would really cut foreign oil dependency, such as increasing fuel economy, practicing conservation, looking into additional renewable fuel sources, etc, the amount of oil we'd be adding from this new Alaskan drilling would be really substantial. If we were using 20% less oil, then it wouldn't be an insignificant % of our total, it would be a big chunk, and we could vastly cut the dependence on terrorist-funding oil. Instead we're doing nothing to conserve, doing much to use even more oil, and pushing for a very risky drilling project that will hardly make any difference. So does Coulter just an idiot, or is she a liar by omission? Even if I agreed completely with her PoV on the issue, I'd find her methods of arguing it repugnant, and her editorial grossly uninformative. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
ere's
why I'd never make a good political columnist. I can't lie well
enough. I can't just talk about one tiny aspect of something,
ignore all the other sides of an issue. I especially can't ignore
common sense and logic and the bigger picture. Ann Coulter has no
such hang ups, as