Walt at Random

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, 1947, b&w. Stuart Heisler (dir.), Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Marsha Hunt, Eddie Albert. 1:43 [1:30]

A nightclub singer helps her boyfriend get a job as a radio singer. He succeeds. They marry. He succeeds more. She quits her job—after all, he’s making all the money they need or want. She has a baby. He’s gone a lot of the time. Meanwhile—well, the opening scene shows her downing a double (straight up) in about five seconds before going on, and as time goes on she has lots of doubles, to the point of seeing double, falling down drunk and starting out again the next morning. Also, she smokes and has a bad habit of dropping the lit cigarette when she’s pretty well lit. Eventually, her husband files for divorce and custody, she kidnaps the child…and, well, you can pretty much guess what happens next. After that, according to the sleeve, “with hard work and her husband’s support, she overcomes her addiction.”

Except that, in the version I saw (which appears to be missing a scene or three), the last minute of film has her going from being bandaged in a hospital bed to sitting up and assuring her husband that it’s all going to be OK from now on. No hard work, just instant cure. Never mind that. Susan Hayward is quite effective (good enough for an Oscar nomination), Eddie Albert is excellent as her husband’s songwriting partner and her friend and accompanist (the only constant through the breakup), and it’s well filmed (and a decent print), but certainly not a landmark in cinema, even as a “sudser” and precursor of all those Lifetime TV movies. Supposedly based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee. $1.25.

The Big Wheel, 1949, b&w. Edward Ludwig (dir.), Mickey Rooney, Thomas Mitchell, Mary Hatcher, Michael O’Shea, Spring Byington, Hattie McDaniel. 1:32 [1:23].

If you go by the sleeve, this is a similar story to Smash-Up, but with a race car driver as protagonist: He gets drunk, ruins his life (in this case by killing another driver because he doesn’t recognize that alcohol and gasoline don’t mix), and eventually manages to recover. Well, no. Set aside the fact that alcohol and gasoline mix very nicely; that’s not really the plot.

Mickey Rooney stars as a young would-be racecar driver whose father was also a race-car driver, who was killed in a crash at the Indy 500. The start of that last sentence may tell you a lot about how you’ll approach this flick. If you find Rooney immensely irritating as an actor, it helps that he’s playing an arrogant, bullheaded young driver—but makes him less sympathetic than I think he’s supposed to be. Anyway, yes, he crashes into another driver—and yes, he was drunk: But that was the night before, and he was trying to warn the other driver that his wheel was about to fall off. But, of course, since this punk was fond of saying “I’ll drive right over ‘em” with regard to other drivers, people aren’t likely to believe his story. That’s the key plot turn. Naturally, it all sort of works out in the end.

I’m not fond of Rooney and that may color my rating. It’s reasonably well filmed and not badly acted. Lots of car racing scenes. All things considered, it’s another middling $1.25.

Killing Heat (original title Gräset sjunger), 1981, color. Michael Raeburn (dir.), Karen Black, John Thaw, John Kani, John Moulder-Brown. 1:45 [1:30].

Let’s see if I can summarize the plot. A man asks a woman to marry him. She says yes. They wind up in South Africa (the old apartheid South Africa), on his badly-run farm. She’s miserable from the get-go, and doesn’t especially hide it, mostly moping around looking like death warmed over. He gets terribly ill from time to time. She winds up dead—but since the film begins with her dead, we knew that already.

The sleeve says something about her being a successful woman and having a hard time coping with the new country, and being involved with another man. None of that comes through in the picture. What comes through is…well, nothing much, as far as I could tell. Again, it might make more sense with the other 15 minutes. Maybe. Karen Black gives perhaps the most dispirited, dreary, flat performance of her career (or at least of any of her movies I’ve seen). I didn’t care about any of the characters. If I was watching this from start to end, I would have given up a third of the way in: It’s slow, uninteresting, with no particular point that I could find. It’s just blah, and unpleasant blah at that. Maybe I’m missing something, but I think I’m being charitable even to give it $0.25.

The Fat Spy, 1966, color. Joseph Cates (dir.), Phyllis Diller, Jack E. Leonard (in twin roles), Brian Donlevy, Johnny Tillotson, Jayne Mansfield, “the Wild Ones.” 1:20

I’d call this a triumph of programming. On its own, this teen/bikini/singing flick is a poor example of its kind, with third-rate songs (I’m being kind here), a plot that’s thin even by the standards of the genre, and dancers who don’t seem to much like dancing. But as the second disc on this side, it’s badly-needed comic relief with a little life to it, making it watchable nonsense.

It’s nonsense, to be sure, and mediocre nonsense at that. Maybe it’s intended as a spoof on the teen-bikini movies, but those always seemed to be spoofing themselves. Phyllis Diller is, well, Phyllis Diller. Jack E. Leonard is so-so in his twin parts. Jayne Mansfield makes the most of an odd part, but the script gives her nothing to work with. The Wild Ones were a very minor and (on evidence) not very talented band—apparently best known for doing the first, non-hit, version of “Wild Thing.” The print is very good and the sound is fine. Independently, probably $0.75. Through the genius move of pairing it with a depressing, badly-done downer, it shoots up to $1.00.

In the last three days, two more people have started following me on Twitter.

I’m flattered, I guess, because this means these are new readers–people who don’t know that I’m, well, not on Twitter.

I’ve been told that Twitter is no longer Hotel California software–that you actually can leave now. So I logged in (turned out I actually did remember my password), for the first time in months, and tried closing my account again.

This time, there’s no obvious sign that it didn’t take. So maybe I’m officially off Twitter (but can apparently recognize the error of my ways within the next six months and return…)

I guess I’ll know, if I don’t get more “followers.” And, yes, I am flattered that people chose to follow my twitters, even if there aren’t really any to follow.

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There’s a really interesting article on Slate today (2/26/08) on which is greener: Print newspapers or online newspapers. It’s not as obvious as you might think.

Lifecycle issues are complicated. Probably always will be. Take, for example, “which is better for the environment? Disposable diapers or washables?” The answer is, apparently, “It depends”–mostly on where you live.

I wouldn’t have read this Wired article at all, except that Peter Suber quoted a chunk of it…including portions of these two paragraphs.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media. [Emphasis added.]

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

Virtually all media. Isn’t that interesting? So, just to make it clear:

• Media: Commercial broadcast TV and radio. Most magazines and newspapers. Portions of the web.
• Not media: Books. Sound recordings. DVDs. Movies in general. Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc.) Other portions of the web.

OK, so he said virtually all Hmm. Let’s see what the government figures are for 2002 (they’ve changed since then, to be sure–but not enough to throw the percentages off all that much):

• Broadcast TV and radio, magazines, newspapers: $134 billion.
• Books, motion pictures and sound recordings: $106 billion.

I’m not sure that I can come up with any usage of “virtually all” that would fit $134 out of $240. Maybe my command of the English language is lacking. Or maybe my command of absurd generalizations is insufficient for me ever to get a job with Wired. I can live with that.

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Update: For some reason, I missed the Statistical Abstract when I was at the Census Bureau’s website. StatAbs has more recent figures–for 2005.

• Newspapers, periodicals, broadcasting: $149 billion
• Books, motion pictures, sound recordings: $120 billion

The percentages haven’t changed significantly: just under 45% of “the media” are paid for.

At first–here, I believe–I read the post, found it interesting, and went on by. The second one (if I’m not mistaken) isn’t in my aggregator, so I missed it. Then Rochelle encouraged others to play.

I’m not going to call it a meme. I think that term gets overused in blogging, and Rochelle hasn’t suggested that it is or should be. I’ll call it a discussion. I didn’t participate early on, mostly because my list of “TechNOs” is so long and mostly pretty transparent.

But Steve Lawson took things in an interesting direction and made me think, at which point I printed out some of the posts for later consideration. I see ten posts from nine sources; I’ll keep tracking the discussion for a little while, and might comment on it in Cites & Insights at some point.

What makes it comment-worthy is not that some bloggers, all of them techies or geeks at least to some extent, own up to being “low-tech” in some areas. As far as I can tell, everyone involved in the discussion has a life–and attempts to strike some balance between tech-oriented stuff and other stuff. Different people have different interests and needs.

What I find interesting is the contrast with an earlier set of discussions rolling around a few liblogs: The lists of skills that every library person must have, the universal tech competencies. So far, I haven’t chosen to talk about those lists, partly because I don’t work in a library. But I think there’s something to be said there. If our strengths and weaknesses in general technology areas can be complementary, why can’t–why shouldn’t?–the strengths, weaknesses, skills of staff members within a library be complementary?

Well, there’s something else that’s interesting about this discussion, and it’s something that I’m finding more of as time goes on (or maybe I’m ignoring the gaps). Civility–and, with very few exceptions, the lack of any need to tell people how to “get over” what they didn’t care about or understand. The whole discussion has been charming and positive–and, I think, useful.

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So, in the interests of ‘fessing up (although most readers already probably know most of these things about me), I’ll at least list the “TechNOs” that I share with others who’ve participated.

• I’m not a gamer or Second Lifer.
• I’ve really tried to listen to podcasts, but find it nearly impossible, probably because I don’t have a commute.
• I only use a cell phone in very special circumstances, and I’ve never even tried the camera in the cell phone we own. (When I hear about a $99/month unlimited calling and texting plan, I add up all that we spend on cell phone, landline phone, long distance, DSL, and cable TV: That still doesn’t add up to $99/month!)
• Tried Twitter. Didn’t like it. Can’t really leave. People still follow me–but they sure don’t get overloaded with messages!
• I do follow ebook developments (and am writing this when I should be working on a Kindle/ebook essay for C&I!), but not as something I’d personally use.
• Skype? I only use landline phones when necessary, and with PG&E, I’m not about to give up a phone that doesn’t require household power…
• When I wanted to help my Dad with an iMac problem, I found the Mac wholly unintuitive–because I wasn’t used to it.
• My wife (the photographer in the house) still uses an excellent compact 35mm film camera–but we might go digital for our next vacation.
• I didn’t own an MP3 player until this year, never owned a PDA of any sort or a pager or… –and while I now own a notebook, it’s essentially a mini-desktop, with no plans to carry it anywhere or even run it off battery power.

None of which should come as a surprise to anyone who reads my stuff.

The tale initiated here and continued here (hey, the WordPress paragraph-swallower strikes again!) continues, with an episode that won’t matter to most folks.
I’m continuing to use the notebook as my only PC. Haven’t done more downloading yet (because I really don’t need those applications yet). With one enormous exception, everything’s been going fine–the software works, it’s snappy, I prefer Vista, etc.

The enormous exception only involves one application–but that’s the application that, other than Firefox, matters most to me. Namely, Word 2007 was taking forever to close files, move between open files, and shut down–”forever” being anywhere from seven to ten seconds or more. (And 5-7 seconds to open a file.) Taking more than a second to switch between multiple open files is simply not acceptable; if I’d had that situation with Word 2000, I never would have done the blog investigations (they basically require two open files at all time, switching back and forth frequently, in addition to Excel and Firefox windows).

The open web to the rescue. Turns out it’s my fault (sort of), and probably won’t affect many of you. I’d reinstalled Acrobat 7–knowing that I’d probably need to move to 8 (there’s no way that 7 will recognize .docx) eventually, but that 7 might do in the meantime.

And Acrobat 7 installed a COM addin into Word 2007, even though it couldn’t actually work.

And that COM addin was the culprit–I’m not sure why, but it was adding absurd amounts of overhead to any file-change operation.

Here’s the thing: I don’t even need Acrobat to produce PDFs directly from Word: Microsoft’s free download to add PDF save-as capability to Office 2007 works beautifully. It seems to offer the same flexibility as the old Acrobat toolbar, it’s a lot faster than the old Acrobat/Distiller combination, the output’s actually a little smaller than the old Distiller output, the bookmarks are there… It is, in short, a better tool, fully integrated into Word (and the other Office 2007 applications). And, to be sure, it’s free.

Where I will need Acrobat: To produce the book version of Volume 8 (which requires combining multiple PDFs)–and probably to produce the book my wife is working on (which also seems likely to require combining multiple PDFs). So eventually I’ll pay the $99 or so for an upgrade to Acrobat 8 anyway.

For now? I uninstalled Acrobat 7. The problem went away. It still takes a little while to open a file (longer if it’s still in .doc format), but “a while” is a second or two. Closing a file: Instantaneous. Switching between open files: Instantaneous. Closing Word: Instantaneous. As it should be.

(Why doesn’t Adobe offer a way to let you back out plugins without removing the whole application? That would be too easy…)

There’s the advice, if Word 2007 seems sluggish in certain ways: Check for add-ins (the start/Office button, “Word Options” in the lower right-hand corner, Add-ins on the Options pane). Disable any that you don’t need–especially COM add-ins.

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Now here’s another one that will affect almost nobody else, I suspect.

When I tried out Word 2007 by opening the the current issue of Cites & Insights (in .doc) form, it came out a little longer–taking up just a little of a 37th page. OK, so the spacing’s a little different. Turns out that I only had to compress one paragraph by 0.1 points to fix that.

But: When I convert any of the Cites & Insights issues to .docx–taking Word out of “compatibility mode”–the resulting documents are a little shorter than they were (and a lot smaller on the disk–a known change). Not a lot shorter, but C&I 8:1 has about a quarter of an empty column on page 30. (So that’s about 0.25% change, but it’s never that simple.) Looking at a page or two, it appears that Word 2007 does a slightly better kerning job than Word 2000–or maybe it’s got a better hyphenation dictionary. Maybe both.

Again, this only affects me when it comes time to do a book version of volume 8, and the changes are so small that I suspect I won’t bother trying to make pages match up exactly. I certainly approve of tighter kerning and better hyphenation. (I’m also seeing better grammar suggestions and a general move to preferring close style–that is, combining two words without a hyphen when that’s sensible.)
Oh, and have I already said how clear it is that dual displays will improve my productivity–e.g., when I’m marking up a PLN page, assembling a page from blogs, working on a C&I essay that’s partly derived from blogs, and especially if I do any more blog investigations? Even yesterday, adding another movie to a 50-pack file, being able to have the full IMDB page for a movie open while also having a good-size Word window open made life easier…

Update: The migration to the new Vista notebook is going surprisingly well–well enough that I’m using it (with a dual-screen setup) as my working system while finding remaining issues. “Easy Transfer” got pretty much all the files and settings–with the singular exception of Firefox bookmarks (an easy manual transfer).

I’m now in the process of unlearning/relearning some advanced Word things (I knew that would be necessary). I’m a heavy template user, and Word2007 (Office2007 in general) sensibly treats sets of style definitions as, well, sets of style definitions–which can be part of themes and templates but can also be separate. You can switch a set of styles in an existing document. In Word2000, the only way to do that was to switch templates (which, as far as I can see, you can’t do in 2007). So in 2007, a template really is a template: A full document design for you to add text to. Separating themes (which, so far, I don’t quite grok) and style sets makes good sense, and it’s easy to save new style sets from old templates–once I figured that out (which took a while). This fits the general theme I’ve heard from Office2007 reviewers: Different and with a learning curve, but ultimately more logical and with more useful features made visible when they’re useful.
Other than an occasional startup switching the right-left placement of the primary and secondary display (now that I realize that’s a possibility, I won’t think my cursor’s simply stranded), it’s going pretty well. I have no desire to drop back to XP, and certainly no desire to drop back to Office 2000. Or, for that matter, to return the notebook: Time to send in the rebate form.

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A few weeks ago, I posted this request.

I got some good advice. I did some looking. I wasn’t convinced I’d found an answer. I was reminded of why I shop at Fry’s reluctantly and why I’m even more reluctant to shop at the big-box electronics chains (but really like our neighborhood Office Depot).

Looking at that post again, I can see that I ruled out an obvious choice–but my wife, who’s the smart person in the household and didn’t read the post, offered that obvious choice. To wit, she redefined the problem:

“You want a quiet computer? Why not buy a notebook?”

Consider the reasons I gave in the post for requiring a desktop and expansion slots:

• I wanted to keep using my wonderful wireless MS Natural Keyboard and mouse.

Hmm. Funny thing about connecting keyboard/mouse combos through a USB port: On any properly-built notebook, it adds them to what’s already built in.

• I wanted to go to a dual-screen system, sooner or later, which with most inexpensive desktops (might?) (would?) require adding a dual-head graphics card.

Hmm. Most contemporary notebooks have VGA ports–and at least with Windows Vista, the ability to define the internal screen and an external display as a two-screen system (as opposed to showing the same image on both) is supported at the OS level.

I also said I wanted at least 2GB RAM (the minimum for high-quality Vista Premium operations) and that I’d really prefer 3–and that I wanted at least 400GB disk space.

My wife really didn’t know about that last requirement–and when I thought about it, I had no idea why I wanted so much disk space. After all, in 5 years and 7 months, I’ve barely managed to fill half of my old computer’s 80GB drive, and the bulk of “my” files are 320K MP3s of my entire CD collection. And, you know, if I did start to do something requiring lots of storage space–well, external drives are really cheap and getting cheaper. Chances are, if I needed another (say) quarter-gig quarter-terabyte a year from now, it would cost less than $100 even as an external drive (that may be true now, for all I know).

So I broadened my search–and raised the price point to “around $800.”

That did the trick. While this is typed on my old computer, I’d guess I’ll finish shutting down that computer within the next week. Office Depot introduced a new “store-exclusive” notebook last week and, for some reason, chose to offer a $150 rebate up front, bringing the already-reasonable $850 down to $700–for a notebook with 15.4″ screen, Core 2 dual-core CPU (1.67GHz, but that’s fast enough, I think), the usual Intel integrated graphics–fine for the kind of work I usually do, 3GB 667MHz RAM, and 250GB disk.

And enough USB ports (3), a built-in webcam (dunno if I’ll ever use that, but it works just fine), 802.11 a/b/g/draft n (but I’ll be using it as a pseudodesktop, so the ethernet port is more important, since it’s one foot from our router/wifi/DSL modem)… Oh, and a startling garnet case. It weighs about 6 lbs., but this isn’t what I’d use on the road anyway.

Took it home to test the three critical factors: Was it quiet? Would it drive my desktop display as a second workspace? Would it recognize the wireless keyboard and mouse? Yes, yes, yes. I still have 12 days to return it–but since I’m just finishing the “easy transfer” of files and settings (21GB worth, and it seems to have picked up pretty much everything except Firefox bookmarks, which was an easy catch), it’s pretty certain I won’t be returning it.

Definitely not a technolust notebook–the CPU’s contemporary Intel technology (Core 2 Duo) but near the bottom of that range (1.67GHz), it would be a terrible gaming system, the display’s just fine but not quite as good as my wife’s Toshiba. But a technolust notebook would definitely be in the four-digit range, and the fact that I’m only anxious to replace this aging beast because Friday-afternoon virus/spyware scans slow everything else down so much suggests that I don’t need a high-end notebook.

I did a little due diligence: I tried putting together a comparable configuration at Dell and looked for closest Toshiba and HP models. A comparable Dell system would run around $1,100, as near as I could tell; same for the others. So, well, here’s another cow box. I guess that’s really Acer these days, and that’s OK with me.

Now comes the fun part: Checking everything that matters, so I don’t get rid of the old machine too soon. As soon as that’s done, I’ll have an odd dual-screen system (1280×1024 on one side, 1280×800 with considerably smaller pixels on the other) that should be highly productive and suit me just fine.

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Updated to change “quarter-gig” to “quarter-terabyte,” since that’s what I meant. Working at two computers simultaneously = the worst form of multitasking. Instant confusion.

And, just checking, I see that even relatively pricey chains do, in fact, already sell name-brand 250GB external 7200RPM drives for (just) under $100–but they also sell 500GB name-brand external 7200RPM drives for $110 to $150. So much for keeping up with the continued price efficiencies of that obsolete electromechanical device, the hard disk.

Interesting. I originally planned to publish the centenary issue of Cites & Insights toward the very end of February. Then, with all the copy ready, I moved that up to February 19 or so. Then, Friday, when I’d double-checked the draft printed version twice, after doing all the editing and copyfitting, I said “Oh, what the hey,” and published it right around 6 p.m. on Friday.

Including Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs, in which I finally offered as firm a projection as I’ve ever offered:

• That the format war might very well end this year, although there was also a chance it wouldn’t.
• That the most probable outcome was Blu-ray as the sole commercially-viable high-def disc format, with that happening “sometime in 2009 or possibly late 2008.”

Good thing I published it Friday night. I was way too cautious (I don’t claim to be a futurist or to have any inside knowledge), but at least I got the right direction.

It’s not entirely official yet, but apparently Toshiba isn’t quite as “stubborn and profitable” as I thought–or at least not as stubborn. It’s been reported, and apparently confirmed by a company official (although not a named one), that Toshiba’s pulling the plug on HD DVD in the very near future. (At a loss of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars: If you believe some observers, Toshiba’s been losing money on every player it sells, and one can only assume that Toshiba forked over a big chunk of the $150 million that helped Paramount & Dreamworks to say they’d only release HD DVD versions, a decision you can expect to see reversed in a few weeks or months.) Understand: I like Toshiba. My wife is delighted with her Toshiba Satellite notebook; the only real flaw (a tendency to drop WiFi once in a while when running on battery) is a Windows Vista power-management defect, not a Toshiba defect.

So maybe “sometime in 2009 or possibly late 2008″ becomes “in the first half of 2008″–although there’s a second part to that probable outcome: “Blu-ray as the sole commercially-viable high-def disc format.” Whether that will be true in the first half of 2008, or any time, probably depends on your definition of commercial viability.

No, I don’t buy Wired’s latest (and wholly predictable) note that it doesn’t matter because it’s all going to be downloads. As I imply in the Perspective, true high-def downloads aren’t really practical on a mass scale–and in any case a lot of us actually like to own some of the movies and programs we expect to watch more than once.

It seems highly probable that Blu-ray will be a total market (combining players, drives and discs) in the hundreds of millions of dollars this year (actually, it may have been in 2007, depending on what percentage of PS3 sales you consider to be Blu-ray sales). I think that counts as commercially viable, although still a relatively small percentage of overall video disc and player sales.

So: I was too cautious–but at least I got it right (and I’d been saying since the get-go that Blu-ray had the edge.)

Oh…and yes, I know it’s “Samsung” not “Samsong.” Even reading in print, twice, I still manage to miss at least one typo in every C&I. Such is life.

Cites & Insights 8:3 (March 2008) is now available.

This is the centenary issue–#100–a nice round number that I’m a little surprised to have achieved. Naturally, that milestone affects the issue–but not as you might expect.

The issue’s long–36 pages–and PDF as usual, although all but the last section (My Back Pages, always exclusively PDF) are also available in HTML form from the home page.

This issue includes:

• 100 Reasons for Doing Cites & Insights – an introduction
• Trends & Quick Takes – ink costs, life without software, the significance of good sound and more: six trends, ten quicker takes.
• Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs – including a prediction for the likely winner in the format war.
• Making it Work – the biggie: 19 pages devoted to aspects of making libraries better, including reading (reader’s advisory, slow reading, etc.), philosophy, hassles, balance, and “Library 2.0 debased.”
• Interesting & Peculiar Products – flashy labels, green PCs, supercheap laptops and more: 19 items in all.
• My Back Pages – 16 mini-perspectives, none of them terribly serious.

Ignore them, or at least most of them.

It was pointed out to me (indirectly) that, of the thousands of dead links to the old Cites & Insights site, some were under my control–that is, links in W.a.R. posts prior to July 2006.

So I’m fixing those links. I’m never quite sure what causes a post to look changed enough to trigger a feed. If these changes–which, with one minor exception, are nothing but URL changes–do that, then my apologies. I’m partway through, and will finish as soon as possible…

Sigh. At one point, C&I had a pagerank of seven (although I think Google’s generally adjusted pageranks downward). It’s at five now, and I wonder whether it will ever get back even to six, much less seven. Such is life on the open web.

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Update: I’m done. I’m hoping that the URL changes were too minimal to cause new feeds, but I’m not sure. If not, my apologies: There are a lot of W.a.R. posts mentioning Cites & Insights (imagine that!).

Well, at least they’re cleaned up before the centenary Cites & Insights appears–which is likely to be this weekend or shortly thereafter.

Most blog spam attempts are pretty lame. LISHost’s server settings trap a lot of them, I think. My refusal to allow pings/linkbacks gets rid of many more. Setting a limit of six months for comments (unless a thread is active) helps–spammers are mostly out to improve their own pageranks, so they try to hide spam comments on very old posts that nobody looks at any more.

For the rest, there’s Spam Karma 2, which continues to do great work. As far as I can tell, no more than about one spamment (spam comment) makes it through to the blog itself every month, maybe not that many–and I rescue legitimate comments from the spam list about as often (maybe once a month–usually for having too many links). That means I do still check the Spam Karma logs, typically 20 to 40 a day.

I’m particularly amused by spam comments that try to disguise themselves as real comments, by referring directly to the topic of the post. That’s pretty transparent with most attempts here, because my post titles are, how shall we say it, not direct subject headings by any means. (“Obscure” and “peculiar” will do equally well.) So you get some, well, really strange comments–most of which get trapped for the usual reasons anyway (blacklist matches, “Flash Gordon was here” [comment completed faster than any human could type], etc.)

I saved a few over the last six days to give you a flavor. I won’t cite the commenter’s “name” (frequently not a name at all) and certainly not the URL… After looking at these, I’m almost pleased to see the blatant ones that start “Your post about X,” where X is the topic of the link URL and has nothing to do with the post. Where it might not be clear, I put the post title (or the portion they quote) in bold, noting that sometimes it’s the last portion of the title–apparently following something like an apostrophe or ampersand–that gets used. Anyway:

• Hey! I found your site via Yahoo! when I was searching for [term not in this post], and this regarding Insights 7:11 available really sounds very interesting to me. Thanks.
• Hello webmaster. These days you never know what you are going to find when you click through from the search engines. I searched for [term not in this post] – But this is a good blog, and its full of interesting and relevant content. I particularly liked your post Even fewer posts.
• Another food post might be impressive since you showed spectacularly; thanks for the insight!
• Your view on Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples for your readers to be grateful for. My gratitude for this fabulous message!
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• You got that right slick – but not sure how useful the comment is.

Whew! That’s! more! exclamation! points! than I’d usually use in a week–and more wholly sincere praise than I can really tolerate. Now, back to preparing uncommon suggestions that will show spectacularly…

And, to be sure, if you see comments! like! these! on other blogs…now you have a clue as to how they got there.

I’m curious, and maybe just a little frustrated.

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples has been available from Lulu since August 25, 2007, and from Amazon/CreateSpace since August 30, 2007. To date, it’s sold 62 copies–disappointing for 5.5 months, but not disastrous.

But I haven’t seen any review or commentary anywhere–on any blog or list that I’m aware of. That’s the frustrating part.

I’m not necessarily looking for praise. Maybe the blogging books were bad ideas; maybe they were badly done. How would I know? You spend a couple hundred hours on something that you believe to be worthwhile, to contribute to the community, and you’re likely to have a blind spot about it.

One reason I’m so happy with the four reviews of Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity & Change (not quite at the 200-copy mark yet, if you’re wondering) is that, while all four were positive, none was an unalloyed rave. Every reviewer had negative as well as positive things to say.

And the first real review of that book appeared just under a month after the book became available. (The first comments appeared even sooner.)

Now, Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples hasn’t quite been out for a month yet (here’s the Amazon/CreateSpace link). I wouldn’t expect much in the way of sales or comments yet, particularly since it appeared right after Midwinter.

Still, here’s an invitation and a promise that apply to both books:

You’re invited to review either or both–on your own blog, presumably–and let me know you’ve done that. Or, for that matter, to comment on either or both books in some way short of a full review: Even maybe “why I wouldn’t advise anyone, including myself, to spend $20 or $29.50 for this book.” ($20 is the Lulu download price, $29.50 the paperback price. Still no way of bundling the two for, say, $40.)

If you review or comment on either or both, I’ll link to the review or comment. That’s part of the invitation.

Here’s the promise: No matter how negative the review or comment is,

• I won’t hold it against you personally. If you’re a friend/acquaintance now (and I’d guess that most people who read this blog fall into those categories), you’ll be a friend/acquaintance no matter what you say about the books or the advisability of doing them.
• I won’t argue about what you say. The only response I might make to negative comments/reviews is if you say something factually wrong that’s also important–e.g., if you said “Crawford probably didn’t actually look at all of these blogs; he probably just made most of it up.” I can’t imagine anyone would come that close to slander, and I really can’t imagine what someone would say that was factually erroneous. “Crawford can’t write his way out of a paper bag” is opinion; I wouldn’t argue.

I’m pondering future projects. (I’m also pondering buying a very small number of review copies to send to traditional library media–but given my recent history with print reviews, as in the lack of them for First Have Something to Say, I’m not in any great hurry…) Some of those projects might be research projects involving a fair amount of work–like the blogging books. A reality check would be useful.

---

Update April 11, 2008: Library Technology in Texas mentioned both books (and the series of “quintile” posts) in a nice post. Thanks!

Update December 28, 2008: Kate Davis (virtually a librarian) offered a nice comment on Public Library Blogs.

Update June 28, 2009: To my considerable surprise, the Queen City gazette (Cincinnati chapter of SLA) has a positive review of Academic Library Blogs in the March 2008 issue.

When I “discover” a liblog I hadn’t read before–usually through a reference–I’ll check the current posts and, frequently, subscribe to it for a while. I’ve added some interesting new voices to my library reading through that process.

Today, though, I was made aware of a liblog, tried to read the recent posts…and gave up after a while.

I think there might have been some good content–but the presentation was so lacking that it kept getting in the way. Not visual presentation (after all, in an aggregator, even orange-text-on-maroon-background comes through readable, and this wasn’t one of those light-on-dark blogs), but the language.

Homophones were consistently misused–they’re/there/their, it’s/its, lose/loose, you’re/your and so many others. Worse, lots of words were missing letters and whole syllables–and some sentences were missing important words. Worst, this was happening in post titles and topic sentences, not down in the second or third paragraph.

I don’t expect blog posts to be perfect. I assume that most bloggers post the way I do–on the fly, directly in blogging software, skimmed through once over lightly and posted. Sure, some people actually edit their own posts carefully; some even write offline, let posts sit and polish them until they shine–or so they tell us. Not me, and I’m guessing not most of you. When I spot what I think of as a typo (e.g., most homophones) in a blog post where I’m at all acquainted with the blogger, I might send a quick email saying “You might want to fix that” (especially if it’s in the first paragraph), but that’s as far as it goes (and, as one who almost never makes “quiet changes” in posts–that is, changes that aren’t flagged by strikeouts and the like–I believe that it’s legitimate and desirable to make quiet changes to typos, unless doing so makes a commenter look like an idiot).

I think of most blogging as casual speech–a trifle more formal than casual conversation but more casual than most written communication. It makes sense to forgive occasional sloppiness in casual writing. And, since I don’t believe I’ve yet seen an issue of Cites & Insights that’s totally free of typos or other errors, I’m not going to play Mr. Perfectionist here.

What I ran into on this blog was something different. It was somewhere between sloppy and slovenly: I’d guess that at least one-third of the blog titles were wrong. And the errors were so common, and so extreme, that I really couldn’t read through them to the content. So I gave up.
This isn’t a call to apply Strunk & White to blog posts. (I’m not that wild about Strunk & White anyway.) It’s not a call for 100% perfect grammar/syntax/spelling, by anyone’s set of rules, in blog posts. That’s ridiculous.

It is a call to show a little respect for your readers and your profession. After all, a blog that’s rife with wrong words and spelling errors suggests a level of literacy that casts doubt on the ML[I]S: “Geez, this idiot has a master’s?”

Gentle suggestions (not “rules” or anything like that–who am I to dictate to you?):

• Make sure your post titles use the words you think you’re using.

Homophone errors and missing syllables are one thing in the second paragraph of a post. In the two to five words of a post title, they’re much worse.

• If you know you have problems, try composing in Word or something like it–or at least run spellcheck before you publish.

When I say “try composing in Word or something like it,” I do mean with spellcheck and grammar checking on. I’m still using Word 2000 (not for long, I hope). The grammar check isn’t all that great: Most of the time, its suggestions are either wrong or flag “errors” that I intend to make (usually, when I have a sentence fragment or closing preposition, it’s because I damn well intend to have a sentence fragment or closing preposition). But even that particular blunt tool catches things just often enough that it’s worth my time to right-click on greenlined areas and see what’s up. I’m a halfway decent speller, so spelling errors are pretty rare–and Word catches those pretty well.

WordPress has a spell checker (or is that Firefox? It’s a right-click option). It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.

• It’s not about perfection. It’s about perception.

Make a typo here and there? We’ll assume I’ll assume you’re typing quickly and possibly multitasking. No big deal. I’ll probably pass right on by. Screw up every other post title? I’ll assume you don’t much care about what you’re doing–and I’ll suspect that your thinking might be as sloppy as your typing. (Incidentally, that wasn’t a post modification. It was one of those cute rhetorical tricks that blogging encourages: An interlinear clarification and rethinking-on-the-spot using crossout to give my first thought, before I backed away from universalizing.)

• If you don’t respect your readers, at least respect your profession.

Professional librarians have higher degrees. The public may not know that, but I believe the assumption is that most of you are at least reasonably well educated. When a blog comes across as semiliterate and claims to be written by a librarian, it makes librarians look bad.

Yes, this is a blind item–for what I believe to be obvious reasons. You can eliminate several hundred candidates by checking my public Bloglines subscription list, since I chose not to add this particular blog. That leaves several hundred (maybe several thousand) others. And that’s the only clue you’re going to get; maybe this particular person was having a really bad few weeks, and will snap right out of it.Now, back to writing and editing, knowing I’ll never be perfect…

Today’s paper has a story about the Independence–”the last [ocean] liner built in the United States to sail under the American flag”–being towed out of its San Francisco berth to an unknown future, most likely as scrap.

The Independence–now it’s called the Oceanic, since they seem to rename ships bound for scrapyards–was 57 years old. It spent its final two decades doing one-week Hawaii cruises for American Hawaii, until late 2001 when, partly because of 9/11, the parent company went bankrupt. NCL purchased the ship (probably as part of the strange deal that allowed NCL to reflag some foreign-built ships as American-built so they could do Hawaii cruises without going to foreign ports), but didn’t find it worthwhile to refit it and bring it up to contemporary cruise standards.

We were never on the Independence–but our very first cruise, a long time ago, was on her sister ship, the Constitution. They both did seven-day Hawaii cruises, visiting five ports on four islands and spending half a day cruising slowly past the magnificent cliffs and waterfalls of Molokai.

The ship was old even then. We couldn’t really afford a cruise, but we saved up and found a bargain price. Our cabin was directly below the bridge, which meant our portholes were covered at night with big wooden shutters (so light from our cabin wouldn’t mess up people on the bridge). That also meant that, when there was a good-sized tropical storm, we caught the brunt of it and found that, at least back then, neither of us seemed to suffer from seasickness at sea. (Half the crew got sick that night; it was a real storm, and these ships didn’t have modern stabilizers.)

The cruise was a magnificent way to see Hawaii in its varied splendors. When we went back for a land vacation, we stayed on Molokai–hardly the usual tourist spot. A few years later, we managed to pay for an Alaska cruise–and we’ve been seeing the world by cruise ship ever since (with a two-year interruption that will end late this spring). The Constitution wasn’t the worst ship we’ve been on, and certainly not the best; I’m not sure it was even the oldest.

But it was nearly unique: A relic of a time when American shipyards actually built liner-size ships and American crews ran them. You still get that on a number of riverboats and very small ships, but American Hawaii’s attempt to build two new, larger ships in American shipyards foundered.

The Constitution? It was deemed to expensive to bring it up to Safety of Life at Sea standards when that was done for the Independence. It was sold for scrap and sank somewhere at sea on its way to the scrapyards.

And now the Independence has left America, probably for the last time. Things change.

This disc is also available separately as a four-movie one-disc pack. At $4 or less, I’d buy it–for the first movie on each side, primarily for the true classic that takes up most of the B side. The second movie on each side…well, nobody’s forcing you to watch them.

China 9, Liberty 37, 1978, color. Monte Hellman and Tony Brandt (dirs.), Warren Oates, Fabio Testi, Jenny Agutter, Sam Peckinpah. Original title Amore, piombo e furore. 1:38 [1:32].

It’s a Spanish-Italian Western: Good production values, good background music, some odd accents from some of the actors, and in this case at least an unhurried plot marked by two or three big gun battles. The sleeve description almost gets it right. A condemned gunfighter Clayton Drumm (Testi), just about to be hanged in China (a tiny little Western town, 46 miles from Liberty), is reprieved so that he can shoot down Matthew Sebanek (Oates), a rancher, on behalf of the railroad that wants Matthew’s land. Only Clayton doesn’t do it, meets Matthew’s whole clan (three brothers)—and when he leaves, Matthew’s wife Catherine (Agutter) (who knifes Matthew in self-defense and mistakenly thinks she killed him) catches up with him.

This is all pretty slow-moving: lots of talk and essentially no action. Then the sleeve goes awry: “an enraged Matthew joins forces with the equally peeved railroad company to hunt the pair down.” Not exactly. Matthew and brothers try to gun down Clayton (and fail), and Matthew takes back his wife—but later, the railroad stooges are trying to get rid of both Clayton and Matthew, resulting in a 2.5-way gun battle that’s interesting and a little above the usual gunplay. Not to provide spoilers, but Clayton and Matthew (and Matthew’s wife) all wind up alive, with a fair number of other corpses around.

In the middle, there are some nice little side-plots, including Sam Peckinpah as a dime novelist trying to buy Clayton Drumm’s story—or, rather, lies—to sell to the folks back east, and a non-animal circus (acrobats, little people) whose head wants to hire Drumm as a sharpshooter/showman. If you can get past Clayton’s accent (explained by some dialogue about him coming over from Europe as a child) and the rather curious acting of the bride, it’s a decent flick if you like the slow, sometimes languid, actually fairly naturalistic style—which I do. $1.50.

Gone with the West, 1975, color. Bernard Girard (dir.), James Caan, Stefanie Powers, Aldo Ray, Barbara Werle, Robert Walker Jr., Sammy Davis Jr.. 1:32 [1:30].

Great cast. Good filming, decent print, good color, OK sound. Interesting acting. Stefanie Powers as an odd woman of unclear heritage is, well, odd, manic, amusing. Sammie Davis Jr. as Kid Dandy, a fast-draw artist, possibly a Marshal, mostly a pool player, is as subtle and convincing an actor as in Rat Pack outings. Aldo Ray is loud and stupid. James Caan is relatively subdued—but no scenery went unchewed in the making of this flick.

Remarkable last ten minutes or so. Lots of barroom brawls—indeed, a barroom that seems to be nothing but hysterical brawls and breaking furniture, a nonstop riot frequently spilling out to the streets of a really bad town full of really bad people. Repeated over-the-top operatic singing at barroom funerals, or maybe it’s the same footage used several times—there are a lot of deaths in this flick. Long catfight. Long “wrestling” match. Also some of the worst writing and editing I’ve ever seen in a professional production.

For the first three-quarters of the movie, I couldn’t make any sense of the plot at all. I guess it comes down to this: James Caan saw his homestead burned out and wife and children killed by the town bad man (Aldo Ray), who also molested Powers’ (Native American? Come on!) character. He comes back and, with her help (when he’s not kicking her in the backside or otherwise showing unspoken affection) does everyone in, little by little. Since the townspeople are caricatures of the worst of the old west, I guess that’s OK. I’m supposed to get from the very start that this is a spoof, a sendup of westerns. That certainly becomes clear, when James Caan and Powers are walking back into the mountains and Powers—who up to now has spoken mostly some tongue Caan doesn’t know—says in clear English “You killed everybody except the cameraman”—and Caan turns around and shoots the cameraman. It’s just not a coherent spoof. It is, to put it bluntly, a mess. An amusing mess, I guess, but a mess. Balancing the good, the incredibly bad (one insightful reviewer says it was edited by a Mixmaster) and the empty, I’ll give it $0.75, at least when viewed sober.

The Outlaw, 1943, b&w. Howard Hughes (dir.), Jack Buetel, Jane Russell, Thomas Mitchell, Walter Huston. 1:56.

Sometimes, they really are classics! I’d never seen Howard Hughes’ story of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Pat Garrett and Rio McDonald before, and I’m glad I finally did. I expected a spectacular, with lots of action—and got a well-played story of four people’s trails and how they cross, mostly a low-key psychological drama.

Fine acting, solid production and direction, fine screenwriting. I can’t imagine why this movie was considered defiant of the Hayes Code, censored, and banned in some countries—unless there’s even more somewhere than the 116 minutes on this DVD. (There may be—IMDB mentions a 20-minute scene between Billy and Rio—but what’s on the disc is the 116-minute version, not the 95-minute cut version.) Walter Huston is particularly fine as Doc Holliday, but Jack Buetel (Billy the Kid) also does a first-rate job, and the other major characters aren’t half bad. The music works, making extensive use of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (first movement) and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” although it’s sometimes a bit much.

After writing most of this review, I made the mistake of reading the IMDB reader reviews. I suppose if you’re looking for a shoot-‘em-up or hot sex, this would come off as pretty awful: In fact, the major shooting scenes aren’t won by the fastest draws and, at least in this cut, there’s very little explicit sex. I’ll stick with my original judgment: This is a fine movie, well acted and well filmed. It just isn’t a traditional western. This is definitely one I’ll watch again—atypical as a western but first-rate as a movie. Generally a very good to excellent print as well, although the sound is slightly edgy once in a while. That slight flaw is all that keeps this from getting the highest possible rating. Instead, it gets $2.25.

Arizona Stagecoach, 1942, b&w. S. Roy Luby (dir.), Ray Corrigan, John King, Max Terhune, Elmer, Nell O’Day. 0:58 [0:52].

On one hand, the print’s choppy—you lose lots of syllables and whole words, maybe more than that. On the other, it doesn’t much matter: This one’s so ludicrous that a pristine print wouldn’t help much. Where do we begin? How about with a mock lynching—but it’s a white guy, so it’s OK Turns out it’s just the devil-may-care Range Busters forcing one of their own to make good on a bet—to sing a song while upside down, in this case hanging from a tree. We’ve got three characters, all using their own names—Ray “Crash” Corrigan, John “Dusty” King and Max “Alibi” Terhune—oh, and Elmer, a ventriloquist’s dummy that acts as a lookout while the boys are chatting (!) and is later the only occupant of a house, chatting away as they enter. It’s Another Range Busters movie, one in a series (of 20!)—the opening and closing credits leave no doubt about that—and it’s bizarre.

Some elements are standard: The good guys always wear white (except when they’re pretending to be bad guys). The bad guys always wear black, which makes it easy to spot the apparent good guys that are actually bad guys—naturally with one of the prominent citizens being bad-guy-in-chief. Wells Fargo wagons to and from an Arizona town are consistently getting held up: consistently, much as though the bad guys knew whenever there was going to be a payload on the stage. So, of course, Wells Fargo doesn’t hire security to ride along with the stage, or maybe investigate the local Wells Fargo agent—no, they hire this bunch of clowns to look into it.

We have an “old west” where people are only too happy to string other people up on the spot—but where these three Range Busters (always in spotless dude attire) laugh and joke around as they drink their presumably nonalcoholic drinks in the tamest saloon I’ve ever seen in a western. The chief bad guy, when he’s listening at an open window and realizes the stagecoach driver’s spilling the beans (of course the holdups are inside jobs—that may be a spoiler, but this one’s pretty rotten already), doesn’t shoot the driver through the open window. Nope, he rides off to join the other crooks in a hopeless shootout with the good guys, then manages to ride off on his own after his group is mostly shot down. Just awful, even as they ride off, turn around and say “See you next time.” (Incidentally, the sole IMDB review is nonsense, misstating what little plot there is.) I’m being charitable at $0.50.