May 2006 Archives

So, among the many shitty things I was dealing with this past holiday weekend was the final death knell for the Emmis version of my book about The Princess Bride. You may recall that I wrote about its sudden and totally unexpected demise a few months back -- in the interim, though, Amazon has been taking preorders on the book, the bookselling world continuing to move at a snail’s pace when it comes to updating information about what books are, in fact, about to be published. And there must have been a good few preorders, because the ranking -- which started above 1,000,000 -- reached into the 40,000s at one point.

I preordered the book myself after Emmis killed it, knowing that I would never be charged for it or receive a copy, just because I wanted to know what would happen when Amazon finally got word that the project was, at least from Emmis’s perspective, cancelled. And that moment came on Friday, when I received this email from Amazon:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We are sorry to report that the release of the following item has been cancelled:

MaryAnn Johanson "Behind the Screen: The Princess Bride (Behind the Screen)"

Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found that it will not be released after all. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience we have caused you.

We have cancelled this item from your order.

Your credit card will NOT BE CHARGED for this item because you only
pay for items when we ship them to you.

Your order is now closed.

Well, shit.

I’m working on cleaning up the manuscript a bit, and it’ll be published as print-on-demand title through Lulu.com... and it will eventually be available again through Amazon, after an interminable wait of 6 to 8 weeks for Amazon’s database to be updated. It kills me to think of all those preorders, and no way to get in touch with those buyers...

Anyway, the title will change -- even if Emmis doesn’t have a trademark on “Behind the Screen” (it was meant to be a series of books about cinema), I want the stink of it off me. I’m thinking of calling it, perhaps, As We Wish: Why We Love ‘The Princess Bride’.

Stay tuned. I’ll be sure to let you all know when the book is ready to purchase. Should be sometime in June.

(Technorati tag: Princess Bride)

X-Men: The Last Stand has arrived (read my review here), and so, Xes we have known and loved: Mac OS X, the XXX-rated Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg version), and Ray Milland, the man with the X-ray eyes.

(Technorati tags: X-Men, Mac OS X, Dirk Diggler, geek, dork, nerd)

How many geeky things can happen in a single day? Today is the third annual Towel Day, a day to honor the memory of Douglas Adams by carrying around a towel all day as if you were going to have to ward off the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal or something. Today’s installment of Savage Chickens -- always one of my first surfing stops of the day; it helps turn my Arthur Dent-esque early morning scream of horror into a chuckle -- reminded me that today is the 29th anniversary of the theatrical release of Star Wars in the United States, which is not only geeky in itself but was a major touchstone for Generation X’s twisted psychological development. An unrelated trip to the IMDB alerted me to the fact that today is Ian McKellen’s birthday, and he certainly has lots of geek interest, what with him being Gandalf, Magneto, and Frankenstein director James Whale all at the same time. (Also having birthdays today: Muppeteer extraordinaire Frank Oz and horror writer Poppy Z. Brite.) And on this day in 1961 is when JFK announced the Apollo program, without which we wouldn’t have Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and a ton of other cool shit like technology that helps us make better pizza, and kidney dialysis machines.

So have a geeky day this May 25, and remember that geekiness is all around you, especially that guy in the next cubicle wearing a towel around his head.

(Technorati tags: Towel Day, Douglas Adams, Savage Chickens, Star Wars, Ian McKellen, Apollo program)

How many times can you quote Lily Tomlin’s brilliant philosophical quandary -- “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up” -- before you want to break down and sob and never stop? I just about reached that point yesterday, when my favorite political bloggers Jon Aravosis and Duncan Black were all over an actually unbelievable story in the Washington Post about Senate majority leader and well-known nutjob Bill Frist. Honestly, it’s like an entry from the Bulwer-Lytton bad-writing contest, so horrendously awful that you can’t conceive of how anyone could have intended this to be taken seriously, never mind daring to attempt to convince someone else to actually publish it in one of the U.S. papers of record, much less actually achieving publication with it.

Oh, and it’s meant to be complimentary to Frist.

Yes, Chateau Picard will soon be on sale... or at least, some mocked-up bottles will be when auction house Christie’s hosts a sale of amazingly cool Star Trek crap in October. The two prop wine bottles are estimated to sell for between $500 and $700. Gosh, if I had money -- stupid dollars, as my geek pal Bonnie calls it, money to burn on cool crap the expense of which is hard to justify when you’re scraping the rent and the Con Ed together every month. But I don’t. Maybe I’ll buy a bottle or two of the vino from the actual Chateau Picard, which is fairly reasonably priced...

The real Chateau Picard has been around since long before the idea of Star Trek ever crossed Gene Roddenberry’s mind, but wine sellers are starting to try to cash in on the rise of the geek mindset. There was the hearty and delicious California cabernet called Cabzilla, the label of which featured the giant Japanese lizard monster with a tiny glass of wine in his hand. The wine, alas, is gone from shelves, the vintners having been caught up in a trademark battle in the courts with Toho, Godzillla’s home studio. I wish I’d taken a picture of a bottle while I could still find it, but I never imagined it’d disappear -- it was too tasty and pretty inexpensive, too. Even wine snobs liked it.

This is not one of my guys but a random cutie from the pages of Daily Kitten, which posts a new kitty pic every day at 3:07pm. (I dunno what time zone that is.) Each kitten is cuter than the last -- be sure to take your insulin shot before viewing.

(Technorati tags: cats, kittens)

Wow:

More than one billion people in the world have access to the Internet, with a quarter of them with broadband, or high-speed connections, according to a survey.

The report by the firm eMarketer said the milestone of one billion was reached in late 2005, and that nearly 250 million households had broadband connections.

The firm estimates that of these people, 845 million use the Internet regularly.

I know this means that the vast majority of the people on the planet still do not have access to the Internet -- as well as other such coolnessess as clean drinking water and reliable birth control -- but still: a billion people. A billion people interconnected. It’s not like the moment, whenever it was, when a billion people first had access to a telephone. That represented potential connection: you could, theoretically, call anybody else who had a phone, but for the connection thing to work, in a culturally meaningful way as well as in a technical way, you needed to have a reason to call someone as much as you needed the number at which to reach him or her. You had to already know with whom you wanted to communicate and what good they might do you -- from the good of calling a distant loved one just to hear the sound of his or her voice to the good of, oh, calling a newspaper reporter to blow the whistle on some corporate or governmental malfeasance -- in order for the social exchange to be achieved. Calling a number at random and attempting to communicate with whomever answered was unlikely to do much for you, and would probably piss off the recipient of such a call if he or she were unwilling to speak with you, which would probably be the case.

The Da Vinci Code is upon us (my review is here), and so, I ponder some of the many men who’ve hunted the grail: Indiana Jones, of course; MacGyver, who sought the relic in the episode “The Legend of the Holy Rose” (or somesuch), and it pains me to put Mac in the dork slot but honestly, the show was on the downslide by that point; and Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon, who is, in spite of Hanks’ kinda geeky kinda sexiness, a Da Vinci Code nerd.

(Technorati tags: Da Vinci Code, holy grail, Indiana Jones, MacGyver, geek, dork, nerd)

Geeks are a diverse lot, so making generalizations is always tricky, but I think maybe it’s safe to say that one attribute that unifies geeks is a love of books. Maybe not all the same books -- maybe one guy collects tons of comic books and someone else likes 18th-century French poetry and that girl over there, she’s into contemporary murder mysteries and yet another reader simply must own every science fiction novel ever published in Eastern Europe. Bibliophiles are by definition geeks, and maybe booklovers in ancient times were the original geeks. And part of what geekiness is today is a desire to look at the world from all sorts of angles, news ones as well as the tried-and-true, and what better way to do that than with books?

Me, my library was somewhat diminished by a poverty-induced selloff a few years back -- thank god for NYC’s Strand Bookstore and its bookbuying desk; I actually raised the rent one lean month by hauling in boxes and boxes of books. But it’s growing again, slowly, and the composition, subjectwise, hasn’t really changed much: lots of science (biology, psychology, physics), mythology (of the comparative type, mostly), history (a lot of fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things stuff), science fiction and fantasy, classics, a fair selection of children’s books (ones with aspects of the fantastic). Smatterings of all sorts of other things. I have a litmus test for new acquaintances visiting my apartment for the first time: the ones who say, “Wow, have you read all these books?” are the ones who might remain acquaintances but are unlikely to pass into the realm of “friend”; the ones who immediately go to the shelves, grunting approvingly while noting the spines, and ask to borrow a couple are the keepers.

I don’t want Geek Philosophy to turn into yet another political blog -- there are enough people, and better informed ones than me, already doing that -- but it’s hard to cut myself off from political topics when it seems like every day there’s another news story that sounds like a dispatch from a dystopian science fiction novel. It was only a few days ago that I thought I had seen the ultimate warning sign of the coming of the Republic of Gilead, but a horrifying article in today’s Washington Post smacked me in the face and invited me to think -- and scream -- again:

Forever Pregnant
Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant
By January W. Payne
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; Page HE01

New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

Assuming you can believe anything a government report tells you, the Brits have just punctured the balloons of alien lovers everywhere:

None of the numerous UFOs reported over Britain in the last 30 years was a flying saucer, the government said as it released previously secret defence files probing mysterious aerial sightings.

The declassified study -- "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in the UK Air Defence Region" -- concluded that such UAP do exist and are "usually described as coloured lights and sometimes as shapes"....

The study, which aimed to assess whether Britain was threatened by UAPs and "should the opportunity arise, to identify any potential military technologies of interest", concluded there was "nothing of defence intelligence value".

[from AFP via Breitbart.com]

As Paul at WizBang points out, in response to this breaking news:

Who are the most favoritest geeks of geeks themselves? The geek dating site Geek 2 Geek took a survey, and the winners are:

1. Bill Gates
2. Stephen Hawking
3. Steve Jobs
4. Albert Einstein
5. Linus Torvalds
6. Kevin Mitnick
7. Kevin Smith
8. Kevin Rose
9. Leo Laporte
10. Joss Whedon

Not a girl among them.

Perhaps, as Deanna Zandt commented recently on the Guardian blog Comment Is Free, “digital culture is still biased against women.” Perhaps, as Annalee Newitz noted recently on AlterNet, it’s the result of “dickish biology or dickish culture that creates a problem like Slashdot,” where a link to an article of hers prompted not “a lively debate about technology and social justice, [but] a popular thread in the ‘comments’ area about whether [she] was too fat to be considered attractive.” Perhaps, as alicetiara at the “feminism and technology” blog Tiara.org suggests, we all need to:

speak out against sexist or homophobic comments whenever we see them on any tech-related site. They may get modded down (unlikely, if they’re half-way articulate or include a particularly hilarious anti-Micro$oft/pro-Linux joke), they may get ignored, but if the diversity of the readership becomes reflected in the diversity of the participants, eventually sexism will be considered unacceptable on the site. Even if it’s just for being tacky or off-topic.

And perhaps the fact that Deanna and Annalee and alicetiara are already making some noise means we’re on our way to making some future most-favorite-geeks list.

Well, I just finished the last three episodes of the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who on my advance DVD, as I knew I'd have to, I couldn't wait to watch them on the Sci Fi Channel... and I'm devastated and exhausted and in awe of what Russell Davies has achieved. And I hate him, Russell Davies, and I love him, for making me get so intensely involved in a silly TV show and for getting in my head and pulling out everything amazing that I always knew Doctor Who could be but didn't realize other people knew it could be. And I'm madly in love with Christopher Eccleston and I hate him too, for being so damn riveting here and for giving it all up after only 13 episodes.

I will have much to say about the remaining seven episodes that I have yet to discuss in depth here, but right now, I need to go have a good long hard cry and then figure out how I can make a pilgrimage to grovel at Russell Davies' feet...

(scroll all the way down for links to discussion of other episodes)

see my brief overview of the DVD set at FlickFilosopher.com

Have you preordered your copy of the new Doctor Who on DVD yet? It won't be released in the United States till July, but I just got my hands on a copy (because I review DVDs, I often get advance copies), and so now comes the big dilemma: Do I wait to let the remaining episodes I have not yet seen roll out one at a time on the Sci Fi Channel, let the anticipation build week to week, or do I just dive right in and gobble them all up on DVD?

Oh, hell, there's only three more to go. Think I'll just watch 'em now...

Anyway, I mention the DVD because Russell Davies has a little introduction in the booklet inside, and it is as full of as much geeky enthusiasm as you might imagine he'd be able to muster. A taste:

I had always loved old Doctor Who (and there's nothing 'old' about it, not really -- watch it on repeats and look a little deeper, past the obvious 60s, 70s, 80sness of it, and you'll see the sheer imagination and fun of it all). But when the original show ended in 1989, I thought it was dead. Properly deceased. As the years passed, and TV sci-fi niched itself and became an American thing, I thought about the show less and less. Fading, like old loves do. Little ghosts remained -- when I found new fantasy shows to love, it was because they echoed of something of Doctor Who...

Yes, yes, yes! Davies gets it, gets how a show like Doctor Who really lives with us fans, becomes a part of the way we appreciate all the film and TV that comes after it.

Fleecey cat beds are nice on a cool, damp spring day...

Is Keith Olbermann reading Geek Philosophy? Oh man, wouldn’t I love to think so? Last night on Countdown he said flat out that George Orwell’s 1984 was not meant to be an instruction manual, which is exactly what I said recently. But of course that was hardly an original thought, or at least, hardly the kind of thought that you wouldn’t expect any thinking geek to have had recently. But it does prove that Keith and I are birds of a feather and hence destined to be married, right?

*sigh* Love in the time of rising fascism. It’s so romantic.

Anyway, there’s another dystopian novel that I keep being reminded of more and more of these days, like when I read about the Religious Right’s war on contraception in The New York Times Magazine that pretty much proves that these nutjobs are totally anti-sex, or at least anti-sexual pleasure as a divine right of womanhood:

Once in a while I pop into Deconsumption, a peak-oil, coming-crisis blog, and how cool is this: yesterday Steven Lagavulin, the blogger there, got into a big thing about Generation X and how our particular attitudes have been shaped by the world we grew up in, and how those attitudes will shape the next great form that American society will take:

Generation X is fundamentally unable to accept the self-centeredness and self-serving-ness mentality that signifies this era, the love for black-or-white ideological causes, and the blanket judgmentalism that Boomer leaders so comfortably buy into. Not to mention that they largely hate corporatism and authoritarian control in any form.... in their hearts Gen-X'ers have always hated the status quo they've grown-up within. They will hold little sentimentality for it when it collapses, and many in fact long for a chance to burn the whole system down and try to remake it in more equitable terms. Not because they're smarter, or right-er, or even capable of doing that well...but simply because they've never really felt they were at home in any of it. And that's also largely their problem--having never felt at home in it, they've also never felt they had a foothold from which to oppose it. So they tend to drag their feet a bit on the road to cultural maturity, or drop out altogether. In fact, many corporations are starting to quietly lament the management vacuum they're coming up against in recent years as the best and brightest of the new generation seem to be largely turning their backs on the corporate ladder.... Still, Time marches relentlessly on, and this generation is going to be stepping up to the plate whether they like the game that's being played or not. So regardless of whether Strauss & Howe are right in their theory of generational cycles, it's not hard to sense that a cultural revolution is coming, and it's going to be dramatic--and probably not altogether peaceful--as the next generation begins to inherit an America they never made.

But he also makes the point that generational pigeonholing is not meant to imply that these generalizations apply to everyone:

[P.S. -- I should acknowledge that Strauss & Howe's study by no means implies that the Boomers are blameworthy or that Gen-X is the only voice of authority for informing the new culture. Simply that as a general rule these two generations embody the "forces in conflict" during the years of crisis. Obviously the seminal movement toward a potential "culture of responsibility" was actually forged by Boomer Hippies who persisted in staying the course that most of their peers so wantonly abondoned....and certainly many Gen-X'ers will only let loose the keys to their Escalades when they get torn from their broken fingers....]

Amen to that.

In honor of David Blaine’s underwater idiocy, herewith Evil Knievel, Fonz and his shark jumping, and the Blaine-man himself.

I snagged the Fonz image from KLSI-Tokyo 3 -- it’s a hilarious phony Magic: The Gathering card:

UPDATE: Hey, remember how I said that all the URLs to old postings had changed? Well, I figured out how to make 'em match the old URLs. So, basically, never mind -- there shouldn't be any broken internal links... though there may be some broken image links. I'm working on fixing them, but lemme know if you come across any.

Yup, Geek Philosophy has a new web home, on the same server as my FlickFilosopher.com site, and with a new design that meshes with FlickFilosopher's. URLs to old postings will have changed -- sorry about that. I've got more space here, and more control over the site than Typepad was offering me... plus, I save the monthly Typepad fee. Yea!

Well, I, for one, welcome our new volcanic-rock-slab overlords:

Wow, is that cool!

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in Washington, USA. The rock slab, growing since last November, now extends about 100 meters out from one of the volcano's craters.

[from Astronomy Picture of the Day]

The winners of the tenth annual Webby Awards have been announced, and, rather depressingly, many of the nominees and winners across the wide range of categories are corporate sites. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t very many worthy sites in the bunch -- I’m pretty much madly in love with everything the BBC does online, for one -- but I would really like to see more recognition by the Webbys of the fact that what really drives the Web is individual effort -- the sites with multimillion-dollar backing may be the ones with the loudest voices, but it’s the collective effort of a million little voices that really makes the Net unique, and a powerful force in today’s global culture. I’m not sure, for instance, whether there isn’t a more important site in the world at this very moment than Riverbend’s blog Baghdad Burning, not merely for its insider look at the American invasion of Iraq but for the fact that it exists at all -- her work is truly revolutionary in every sense of the word.

And I say this as a Webby judge and member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the group that awards the Webbys. What, you thought I was just some dork with a Web site? No, this is what IADAS membership means:

One of these headlines is honest-to-God real (culled from the E! Online, actually), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?

Phish Collapses Onstage

Onion or AP?

Keith Richards' Brain Just Fine

Onion or AP?

“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.” --The Rolling Stones

It’s 9pm on the East Coast on Tuesday, May 9, 2006, and the poor geek without TiVo faces a dilemma: do I keep watching Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America on ABC, or do I switch over to House on Fox?

House is geeky, sure -- who doesn’t love a snarkier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou wiseass misanthrope? -- and House is geeky, sure, all that science and stuff. But I think I’ll stick with the bird-flu flick, cuz, holy crap, is it scaring me, or what. Makes me wish that Stu Redman was around to make us feel like everything was gonna be okay, that at least Molly Ringwald would survive, dammit.

But no: instead, we have the ABC producers reassuring us that this is all completely accurate, as one explained to the New York Post:

"We feel we're providing a level of awareness and we've gone to great effort to make sure the film is accurate," co-producer Judith Verno said. "We've included a lot of information we believe people need to know."

Yaaaaaaaa!

No Stu! Here, as a consolation prize, we have Joely Richardson telling us that we’re in for a “a long and brutal ordeal that will rip apart the fabric of society.” Crap. Oh, and coffee will be $19 a pound, if you can find it, after the pandemic hits. And suburban housewives will fight over a bottle of water like it was a $19 VCR at Wal-mart the day after Thanksgiving.

We are so fucked. It’s totally natural that Fatal Contact -- which keeps making me think that Sharon Stone as the hot CDC doctor is gonna flash her crotch at us -- is gonna give me nightmares about this dude:

And TV Squad reminds us that ABC is the same network that scared the shit outta us Xers when we were kids with The Day After. (And they brought to life Randall Flagg and Captain Tripps, too, didn't they?) Thanks, guys. Thanks a bunch.

(images from The Stand swiped from InfiniteCoolness.com)

UPDATE: 9:58pm, as Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America ends: I'm gonna go to bed and burrow under the covers and not wake up till around 2026, if that's okay with everyone...

If your parents had, for some reason, announced the arrival of their bouncing bundle of baby you via radio or television, would the insectoid hive mind on Tau Ceti have gotten word about you yet? What about the machine intelligences on Alpha Bootis? Broadcast transmissions radiate out from planet Earth at the speed of light, but even just our tiny corner of our speck of a galaxy is a big place. So who knows about you so far?

The totally useless but completely awesome light cone RSS feed tracks the growing spread of your (potential) influence throughout the universe. You plug in your date of birth, and each day the RSS feed tells you which new star news of fabulous you has reached. Or could have reached if your parents had had the foresight to make everyone out there could know about you. Or maybe just your thought processes impacted some quantum flunctuation that is even now causing a pseudobutterfly’s wings to flap in the upper atmosphere of Proxima Centauri and starting a hurricane that will destroy the ancient and noble civilization of that world.

Think about it.

This is your brain:

This is your brain on light cone:

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -- Albert Einstein (found here)

Whoa.

I’ve never gotten more mail about a single issue than I have over the last week or so about the new DVD release of the old, original, actual-unretouched Star Wars trilogy, coming in September. Hoorah, of course.

The official Star Wars site broke the news:

See the title crawl to Star Wars before it was known as Episode IV; see the pioneering, if dated, motion control model work on the attack on the Death Star; groove to Lapti Nek or the Ewok Celebration song like you did when you were a kid; and yes, see Han Solo shoot first.

This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st. International release will follow on or about the same day. Each original theatrical version will feature Dolby 2.0 Surround sound, close-captioning, and subtitles in English, French and Spanish for their U.S. release. International sound and subtitling vary by territory.

"Over the years, a truly countless number of fans have told us that they would love to see and own the original version that they remember experiencing in theaters," said Jim Ward, President of LucasArts and Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Ltd. "We returned to the Lucasfilm Archives to search exhaustively for source material that could be presented on DVD. This is something that we're very excited to be able to give to fans in response to their continuing enthusiasm for Star Wars. Topping it off with a new interactive adventure makes September 12 a red-letter day for Star Wars fans."

“The 33-year-old has spent seven days submerged in a water-filled sphere in New York, sustained by oxygen and feeding tubes.” So says BBC News. Why? Money. Fame. Who knows? Who cares? And what hath he reaped?

Daivd Blaine has described his seven days in a sphere of water as "horrific", saying he has never experienced pain like this before.

With only hours to go before David Blaine's televised grand finale, the illusionist - known for his brand of high profile, high publicity stunts - said he is experiencing terrible pain and is becoming concerned about his health.

"I think the time has started to really take its toll on my body. It has started to become horrific in many, many ways.

"Every muscle doesn't just ache, it feels like a sharp shooting pain, like a knife being stabbed."

Blaine's skin, which has shrivlled and pruned due to the water, hurts as well, and he is very concerend for his muscles - which have begun to atrophy.

"I don't think it's permanent, but I've never felt this kind of pain in a stunt before."

[from the Sydney Morning Herald]

Idiot.

Remember floppy disks? Remember how we thought they were so damn cool? It seems hilarious now, in retrospect -- my iBook doesn’t even have a floppy drive, and why should it? Anything small enough to fit on a floppy is small enough to email to someone. I, for instance, regularly receive files by email from clients that would maybe just about fit on one of those 3.5-inch floppies, but not at all on those 5.25-inch babies we all had hanging around in the late 1980s.

The blog Fosfor Gadgets has a sweetly hilarious look back at gadgets now and then, one of which is the late and not at all lamented 5.25 floppy:

In the end of the 80’s the most popular removable storage media was the 5 1/4 inch diskette, capable of storing 360 KB (later 1200 KB). If you compare that to a big compact flash card of today, you could store close to 25 000 diskettes on ONE 8GB CompactFlash card…

25,000 floppies? In the weird and roundabout way in which my brain makes connections between all sorts of seemingly distantly related stuff, this makes me think of the quote, from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson, who said, circa 1950ish, that “I think there would be a market for about five computers.” Which is funny now, but of course we have the benefit of hindsight, and of seeing what computers would do in the half century since he said that. If you had told me in 1986, only 20 years ago, that I might someday need to store as much as info as could be held on 25,000 floppies, I’d have laughed. And yet today, my already pathetically out-of-date digital camera uses a disc that can store more than my 1986 brain could have ever conceived of ever needing. And it’s all just dumb pictures of my cats.

I don’t have any old floppies still hanging around (though my mom may still have them in her attic, even though I keep telling her she can throw away all my old Commodore 64 shit that for some reason got left behind at my parents’ house), but if you do, you could always make a Starship Enterprise out of one of them. Or if you’re merely nostalgic for the old days, you could buy a floppy notebook from Acorn Studios -- very reasonable priced, and you’ll be the envy of all the equally nostalgic geeks in your social circle. (Acorm has lots of other cool geeky crap on offer, too. I love the creativity of geeks.)

Lest there be any doubt at all that science fiction is being taken seriously these days, the BBC’s spectacular new production of Doctor Who won a bunch of BAFTA awards last night (that would be the nods given out by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts). Sez Scotsman.com:

KILTED Doctor Who star David Tennant celebrated with co-star Billie Piper and writer Russell T Davis after the show scooped three Bafta awards.

Bathgate-born Tennant beamed and hugged co-star Piper when the awards for Best Drama Series and the Pioneer Audience Award for best programme of 2005 were read out at a glittering ceremony in the Grosvenor House Hotel in central London last night.

The creator of the new series Davies also won the Dennis Potter Award for outstanding writing for television.

A Dalek arrived on stage with Billie Piper to collect the Best Drama Series Award.

Not that the prospect of lovely David Tennant in a kilt doesn’t make my toes curl, but it is worth noting that these awards are for the batch of episodes, currently airing here in the States on the Sci Fi Channel, starring Christopher Eccleston (who I also would love to see in a kilt, or out of one).

And oh god yes I know that I’m ridiculously behind in my Doctor Who blogging, but I promise to catch up this week before Sci Fi Friday. Previous DW blogging -- covering the first four episodes -- is here and here.

It might seem kinda contradictory, but one of the things that being a devout reader of all kinds of science fiction has given me is a sense of history. Or perhaps I should say, Of a sense of history as a process, as a process that isn’t over yet. When you read SF set in the future, SF that has a sense of history itself (like, say Lois McMaster Bujold’s brilliant space opera series centered around Miles Vorkosigan), you start to develop the appreciation that we’re living in the middle of history, too. Will bored 14-year-old students who’d rather be outside playing low-gee tennis on the Martian surface 1000 years from now roll their eyes when their teacher introduces the topic “The Information Revolution: From Gutenberg to the Singularity, 1450-2250”? Will all the great and glorious mess that is the world around us right now at this very moment be reduced to a single line in a textbook: “The early 21st century (Old Calendar) on Earth was characterized by mass upheaval, mostly over the scarcity of natural resources”?

It makes you feel really small and insignificant.

It’s Free Comic Book Day, and I finally got around to reading the Serenity graphic novel Those Left Behind, and I’m so glad I did. It’s basically a missing episode of Firefly that bridges the ending of the TV series and the start of the movie. And the interior illustrations are as gorgeous as the cover -- I’ve often felt gypped when comics have beautiful painted covers and then far simpler and less interesting illustrations inside. But that’s not the case here.

The graphic novel has a fantastic introduction, by Nathan Fillion, who played Serenity’s captain, Mal Reynolds. We already knew Fillion is a major geek, and his essay, a lovely remembrance of growing up with comics, is a little masterpiece of geeky literature. I couldn’t find it online anywhere, but here’s how it starts:

Damn Cablevision cable Net access was out all afternoon, so I said to hell with it and went out to enjoy the gorgeous day. Now I'm home and the modem is working again, so here's a nice pic of the sleekness of Cassie (with Mrs. Kennedy looking on enviously in the background).

What does it mean when music and movies and books are pirated online, or via bootleg DVDs or CDs? It means there’s an avenue of demand that is not being met by the legitimate producers of the material and not, most likely, that ordinary consumers are looking to get away with getting something for nothing. iTunes has proven that people will pay for what they want -- in this case, downloadable singles -- when they are offered the opportunity to do so.

When I see people selling bootleg DVDs of new theatrical releases on the subway in New York (early this week, copies of An American Haunting were already being hawked, even though the film didn’t open till today), I don’t see people looking to undercut the efforts of the creative artists whose work they clearly enjoy -- I’m not even sure that most people appreciate that piracy means you’re taking money out of the pocket of actors and directors and musicians and writers. What I do see are people for whom the multiplex experience is not a vital component of enjoying a film, or people for whom extras-packed DVDs are not a vital component of enjoying a film at home. What I do see are people saying, “This is how I want to see a new movie,” and what I do see is that they are indeed paying for this... but instead of paying the legitimate producers of the material, they’re paying the well-oiled criminal organizations that produce the bootleg DVDs. It’s a revenue stream that the movie studios are ignoring, to their own detriment, for no reason that makes any sense. These people who want to watch movies like this are not going to go away, and if the studios were smart, they would figure out a way to get these people to pay them.

The TV networks are finally catching on to the concept that if so many people are willing to download episodes of TV shows from illegal sources, they may well be willing to download episodes of TV shows from legitimate sources. But maybe they don’t realize how huge the demand is. ABC got a shock early this week:

ABC Site Buckles as Network Streams First Ad-Supported Shows

ABC's Web site crashed twice [on Tuesday] as Internet users flocked to watch streaming versions of its most popular shows, including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives."

It was the first time the shows were available online directly from the network, and the first time the advertising community had gotten a look at what ad products would be offered. It was also the first opportunity for the industry to gauge how popular such an ad-supported offering might be with consumers.

[from ClickZ News]

What floors me is that ABC obviously dramatically underestimated how popular these offerings would be -- that’s the only explanation for the fact that its servers were overwhelmed. How execs there could not have had an inkling of the demand is a mystery... but perhaps if they see that there is money to made by giving viewers what they want, they’ll, you know, give it to us.

Spring is finally bustin' out all over: the trees are blossoming, the flowers are blooming, and the pollen is making our eyes run and noses itch. And so, to celebrate the season, plants: Seymour Krelborn's Audrey II, the evil trees of Oz, and a triffid (shown with a friend).

Reader Anne-Kari points out that uber-geek, uber-Xer Joss Whedon will be a “special honoree” at On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines, a benefit for Equality Now at NYC’s Symphony Space on Monday, May 15. Equality Now “works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world through the mobilization of public pressure,” according to the group’s site -- if only we could send in Buffy or Zoe to kick some ass in the backward places of the world where women are treated as less than human beings.

I can’t wait to see what Whedon does with Wonder Woman, but in the meantime, here’s Joss on his own feminism. This first excerpt is from a 2003 interview with IGN FilmForce -- the interview starts here; the excerpt is from page 2:

Liberty Girl, who is apparently America's bronze goddess of freedom -- not to be confused with me, America's pale goddess of geekiness -- reminds us that this Saturday, May 6, is Free Comic Book Day. C'mon, hook someone normal and boring on comics!

Is there anything geekier than a spelling bee? I think not, and yet -- in this strange new geekified world we’re suddenly living in -- this has not stopped the Scripps National Spelling Bee from, for the first time ever, airing on primetime network television. From the AP:

WASHINGTON - For the first time in its 79-year history, the National Spelling Bee — the original "reality TV" — will go prime time for next month's drama-filled finals. Thanks to recent movies, books and even a Broadway musical, young spellers are suddenly hot. After 12 years of showings by the sports cable network ESPN, the final rounds of the two-day Scripps National Spelling Bee will be shown live Thursday evening, June 1, on the ABC network.

"I think we're ready for prime time and I think America is ready for spelling bees in prime time, too," Paige Kimble, the bee's director and its 1981 national champion, said in an interview Tuesday.

Part of the reason is how surprisingly popular films about spelling bees have been over the last couple of years -- the latest, Akeelah and the Bee (read my review at FlickFilosopher.com) is even about a girl geek, which alone is worth celebrating.

And now comes the moment in which many things that have been derided about Generation X -- our snarkiness, our reflective irony, our inability to take anything except as a joke -- matures into a brand of discourse that may, quite literally, save the world.

Unless you watch CSPAN or read political bloggers, you’d barely know that Stephen Colbert, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday night, stood up a few feet from the president of the United States and announced that the emperor has no clothes. And you wouldn’t know this because the mainstream press is ignoring Colbert’s devastating blow, is pretending that the highlight of the evening was Bush’s good-natured ribbing of himself instead of Colbert’s “truthiness to power” performance that left the president scowling like a spoiled child who’s had his toys taken away from him.

Daily Kos points out that George Orwell’s worst nightmare -- a work previously considered to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for government -- continues to come to pass.

By declaration of the president of the United States, today, May 1, is Law Day:

Law Day, U.S.A., 2006
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

America's legal system is central to protecting the constitutional principles on which our Nation was founded. As we observe Law Day, we celebrate our heritage of freedom, justice, and equality under the law.

This year's Law Day theme, "Liberty Under Law: Separate Branches, Balanced Powers," honors the wisdom of the separation of powers that the Framers of our Constitution established for the Federal Government. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention recognized the risks that accompany the concentration of power and devised a system in which the Federal Government's authorities are divided among three independent branches. James Madison highlighted the importance of our Constitution's separation of powers when he wrote, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Throughout our Nation's history, we have been reminded repeatedly of the wisdom of the Framers' design....

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty eighth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirtieth.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Reminder of the wisdom of the Framers:

I’ve been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Kaavya Viswanathan debacle: you know, the 19-year-old Harvard student whose chick-lit novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is being pulled from bookstores because she lifted not just huge passages but huge ideas from the extremely similar novels of Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. (The book blog Galleycat has some excellent continuing commentary on the whole thing.)

But really, what can I say about an untested teenage writer who gets a half-million-dollar advance on a two-book deal? (It’s not like I’m bitter or anything.) Damn, even if she could write, even if she weren’t a literary thief, that’d be absurd. But she can’t, and she is, and she will eat some crow and mutter some mea culpas and bounce back with a one-million-dollar deal for a book in which she will wail about the unbearable pressures that Indian-American teens are under to succeed, and that’s why she had to steal from someone else -- it’s not her fault, you see. She’s the victim here. (DreamWorks has cancelled the movie version of Opal Mehta that was in the planning stages, but we’re sure to see, at the very least, a made-for-TV drama about Kaavya’s trials and triumphs.)