The Blue Candle Society

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Posted in General writing things

Hard to think of a better way to relive my school days than staying home and watching an hour watching Plinko.

Of course, for a counterpoint, see here.

Posted in Uncategorized

Not that it needs any further justification, but in order to tie this back to literary matters, I will just point out the brilliant simile used in the marketing slogan for the car: Powerful like a gorilla, yet soft like a Nerf ball.

Posted in Metaphor!

So you may have heard about a recent, all too rare victory of common sense over a patent troll.  In this case, the troll in question was Chris Crawford, who sued 18 companies since 1992, based on a patent involving the idea of backing up PCs over the internet.  Now, naturally, Crawford hadn’t actually done any of this backing up – it was 1992, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it with the odd dial-up modem that was available.  But, being a troll, that didn’t stop him from making millions of dollars off people who actually did figure out how to do it, because he’d had this awesome idea (or, more to the point, because he’d filed a patent – obviously, thousands of people had this idea by 1992).

And it would have worked, too, if not for Carbonite, and their dog, or rather team of lawyers.  Because it turned out that it hadn’t really been Chris Crawford’s idea anyway – he’d just been the note taker at meetings of folks talking about the idea.  And of course, he hadn’t gotten around to telling all these partners that he’d been going around suing people based on their idea (and they, not being sociopaths, had not thought to patent an idea they’d never been able to successfully implement).  But Carbonite’s lawyers, in digging through all the documentation related to the patent, found a deposition from Mr. Crawford, where he talked about how the whole thing was “Jack Byrd’s idea”, which kind of put a hole in his claim to deserve money from people (or, at the very least, his claim to be the only person getting the windfall).

Now, here is where it gets language-y, because under questioning by the team of lawyers, Crawford claimed that no, he hadn’t meant it was Jack Byrd’s idea – the whole thing was because of a misplaced apostrophe.  Of course, there are a lot of people who mis-use apostrophes – there are whole websites devoted to the phenomenon (granted, there are whole websites about just about everything, and, by Rule 34, porn websites about just about everything, and no, I will not be linking to apostrophe porn.  Pervert).  Anyway, my point is that it would be no surprise that Crawford wouldn’t know how to use an apostrophe to represent the possessive.  But of course the question is what on earth could he have meant, in theory?  Something to do with multiple Jack Byrds?  Did he mean to not have the “s” there at all?  There is literally no other interpretation that makes sense, as far as I can tell.  Crawford took a desperate refuge in strict prescriptivism by saying that if the apostrophe was misplaced then the whole sentence must collapse into inadmissible nonsense.  But in this case, a more descriptivist approach, that whether the apostrophe was placed correctly or not we all know what he meant, won the day.  Though one can’t really be hard on prescriptivism in this case, because let’s face it, the apostrophe was right where it was supposed to be.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

Mina Harker Does Not Approve of Your Adaptation

This post on unfaithful science fiction movie adaptations got me thinking.  First of all, as I recall from my youth, one basically expected any movie adaptation of a science fiction or fantasy book to be horrible.  It seems to me decent adaptations were simply not done.  I mean, “The book was better than the movie” is sort of a classic thing for all genres, but science fiction, yeesh, forget about it.

Now, as the list on IO9 amply demonstrates, there are plenty of more recent adaptations that are bad or just get the source material wrong, but I have a notion things have improved of late.  In part, of course, this due to special effects technology improving, so movie makers don’t need to take the shortcuts they used to, and, I don’t know, change a scene set in the Galactic Council of Planets to one set in a hotel conference room.  But mainly I think it has to do with the steadily growing respect geek culture has.  I mean, back in the day, Comicon used to be a few hundred people talking about comics, and now it is the place the movie folks go to demonstrate their respect for the source material.

Not that they always get it right, of course, but it seems more likely that an attempt will be made these days, and even the unfaithful adaptations are more likely to be good, Blade Runner-y type mis-adaptations (Children of Men, for example –  great movie, even if it didn’t hew to the book).  Of course, your i, Robots show that the days of just taking the name of a story and banging out some movie that has nothing to do with it are not over (though, of course short stories get the worst of it there, something I’ve never understood since the majority of the target audience has probably never heard of the short story in question anyway).

Of course, the real thing that struck me about the list was the glaring absence of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  Granted, it was a comic book series rather than a novel per se, and it actually hit some of the high points of the plot and kept most of the characters, but it did such horrible things to those characters that those responsible didn’t so much deserve bad reviews as a trial in The Hague.

Posted in General writing things

Well, people are using an idiom wrong again, and this time it is terribly widespread, I’m afraid.  I refer, of course to the “carrot and stick approach”.  Now, all right-thinking people, naturally, know that this refers to the act of tying a carrot to a stick and dangling it front of an animal (usually a donkey, since they are notably intractable and could use the extra motivation) to make it move forward.  That is to say, it refers to motivation through reward, or the promise of reward.

But some people are using the idiom to mean a combination of motivation through reward (the carrot) and punishment (the stick).  Now, you and I know this makes no sense.  How would you use the carrot without the stick to dangle it from?  The donkey will just snatch it out of your hand and eat it.  Apparently this second meaning is useful and applicable to various situations, but that’s no excuse – there is surely some other metaphor one could use.

The odd thing is, I did some research when composing this post (I don’t just dash these things off, you know), and while the top returns on a search of the phrase tend to refer to the second (wrong) meaning, the top image searches all show the proper image of some person or critter with a carrot dangling on a stick in front of them.  So I think folks know, deep down.

I did find an interesting discussion of the two possible meanings at the Boston Globe, here.  Now, I will admit, based on the admirably thorough research that Ms. Freeman performed, that the second (wrong) meaning does have a long pedigree, all the way back to 1876, and at first it almost seems older than the other (correct) meaning.  But Ms. Freeman did discover that references to other root vegetables dangling from sticks (turnips, say) date back even further, so we can conclude it is not only the more logical interpretation, but it has seniority.  Oddly, Ms. Freeman labors mightily to make the interpretation “fair” by saying that you could read these references from 1846 also mention sticks used for trashing so it could be interpreted either way, but lets face it, a “whip of strong blackthorn twigs” is not a stick, and if the whole point is that you throw it aside in favor of a carrot and stick, the case is scarcely made.  So let us hear no more of it.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

There is a rather slow-paced and artsy beer commercial out right now for Stella Artois beer.  I actually find the beer quite nice, but the commercial drives me crazy.  It shows someone hand-blowing and painting a glass for the beer, then passing it out to a bar where it is filled with delicious Stella Artois and handed to the obligatory beautiful woman, who meets the glassblower.  If that were all there were to it, I’d have no problem, as product fantasies go it is certainly more restrained than the standard beer can pop top filling a pool with water and bikini-clad women, or making a train come out of a car tunnel or something.

But then they have to go an add the tagline “If this much care goes in to the Chalice, imagine what goes in to the beer”.  Now, in logic terms, we can reformat this as “If this much care goes into the chalice, something like this much care goes into the beer.”  Or “if x then y”, where x represents a great deal of care in making the chalice, and y represents a great deal of care in making the beer.  And as well all know, in this formulation, if x is true, then so is y.  But of course x isn’t true.  Which means we have no way of knowing the state of y (at least they didn’t say “If and only if this much care goes in to the Chalice, imagine what goes in to the beer”, but still).  The Stella Artois people, and their parent corporation InBev, have ruined the social contract of fantasy ads by making everything explicit.  That is supposed to be subtext, dammit – once you straight up tell us that the fantasy will come true if we just buy your product we kind of know what’s happening.  Just sell your beer, and leave the formal logic to others.

Posted in Uncategorized

As everyone has no doubt heard, an  appeals court in California has ruled that the warden of Pelican Bay State Prison can’t ban The Silver Crown, by Mathilda Madden.  Now, I haven’t read the book in question, but I suspect it may not be the greatest book ever (sorry for the snap judgement if you are reading this, Ms. Madden).  But I think the ruling is a good one, personally.  I’m sure there are plenty of books floating around that prison I wouldn’t much like, actually.  I suppose one could argue that keeping violent books out of a prison would be a good idea, but one gets the sense that the warden was more upset by the fact that there was a sexual encounter in every chapter.  Big woop de do, I say, but then I’m currently beta reading something that averages closer to a sexual encounter in every scene.  Or perhaps it was the hot human/werewold contact that upset the warden, in which case he needs to get out more (and by get out more, I mean be more aware of trends in literature, I’m not implying that there are actually wereolves and humans having sex all over the place that he might be seeing.  Not when there isn’t a full moon anyway).  Actually, the sad thing is that after two grim, werewolf erotica-free years, things have moved on, so it is entirely possible the prisoners no longer care.  Paranormal erotica is a bit passe now.  I just hope we don’t have to fight this battle all over again with clockpunk erotica, is all.

Posted in General writing things

Why is it banking?

There’s an interesting post at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination about science fiction convention, necessary and unnecessary.  As the post indicates, there are good reasons for conventions in science fiction writing.  The famous Turkey City Lexicon calls the issues at hand “re-inventing the wheel” (going to enormous lengths to create a science-fictional situation already tiresomely familiar to the experienced reader).  Rather than spend a lot of time on exposition, it is sometimes better let some tropes fly and get on with the story.  But the thrust of the post is to caution authors against relying too heavily on convention.

While I am sympathetic to the idea that authors shouldn’t get complacent,  I’m not sure I agree with the notion that science fiction in general is in danger of relying on tired convention and allowing the genre to stagnate, though,.  Science fiction writers are as likely to focus overmuch on some thrilling new idea that blows the hell out of convention (The “Steam-grommet factory,” as the Turkey City Lexicon calls it) because generally speaking, that’s the whole point of sci-fi.  Certainly, there are plenty of sci-fi stories that simply use a pile of tropes as a backdrop to tell a character-driven story or what have you.  Those don’t exactly push the bounds of science, but they don’t do much harm either.  And I suspect there will always be plenty of “Hey, check out this idea!” stories to keep the genre moving and give scientists ideas.

To me, the problem is more around the edges.  For instance, the ASU post brings up the dogfighting spacecraft in Star Wars as an example of a convention that helps tell the story.  Personally, I think they could have kept the dogfights without the convention of having them act like World War II planes flying in an atmosphere.  Having x-wings and tie fighters move like they are actually in a vacuum wouldn’t have added to the genre, but it wouldn’t have hurt, and it would have added a bit of “realism”.  There are many examples like that, I think, where authors do some big interesting thing, but perhaps forget the little things.  But that isn’t a problem for the genre as a whole, just individual stories.

Posted in General writing things

I hesitate to post on this topic, both because so many smarter and more august persons have already done so, and because whenever I post about something that could be considered a “woman’s issue” I am bombarded with comment spam selling knockoff handbags (which, not even going to get into that).  But there is one aspect of the SFWA Bulletin imbroglio I wanted to comment on.  I don’t get the bulletin myself, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge, and like I say a lot of clever SFWA members have already commented on the important parts of the controversy.

But what the heck is up with Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg writing about “lady editors” and “lady writers”?  Set aside the discussion of how hawt they are – I recall thinking that was a bizarre and clunky formulation when MacGyver used it to refer to a “lady general” in the cold open of the classic episode “Target McGyver” in nineteen-friggin-eighty-five (by the way, the fact that this episode also features the comically re-dubbed Axminster makes it easily the most awesome episode of MacGyver, and possibly any TV show, ever).

It just seems to me that it behooves a wordsmith, particularly one engaged in speculative fiction, to be up enough on the current lingo to avoid using phrases that sounded dated about thirty years ago.

Posted in General writing things, Grammar Gripery