The title sheet and indices for Cites & Insights Volume 10 are now available.
The PDF combines a volume title sheet, two-page index to articles cited, and 13-page general index.
That completes Volume 10. The paperback version will be announced when it’s ready.
It’s over, it’s over, this set is finished. What a relief. I know I didn’t actually start watching it until April, but it seems even longer than that, as some of the 1-hour films in this set felt like they’d taken whole days of my life. With the fervent hope that I never again encounter Tod Slaughter, and could actually do without ever seeing Bela Lugosi again either, here are the last two discs—one of them saving me loads of time because it’s entirely Hitchcock.
It’s Never Too Late (or It’s Never Too Late to Mend), 1937, b&w. David MacDonald (dir.), Tod Slaughter, Jack Livesey, Marjorie Taylor, Ian Colin, Laurence Hanray, D.J. Williams, Roy Russell. 1:10 [1:07].
This film is a horror, all right—another example of Tod “Snidely Whiplash” Slaughter’s astonishing range of acting, from V to Villainous to…V for Villainous. The excuse for this one is that it’s supposedly based on a book that exposed the horrors of 19th-century British prisons and caused Queen Victoria to clean them up. Maybe, but prison scenes (as brutal as they are, with the “visiting justices” apparently competing to see how vicious they can be towards prisoners) aren’t all of the film.
The plot? A young woman loves a young man who’s having trouble making a farm pay off. The Squire, a typically villain-tending-toward-insanity Slaughter role, wants the young woman for his own. He fails in framing the young man for poaching (which leads to most of the prison scenes, since an innocent friend of the young man “confesses” to prevent the frame), but the young man must go off to Australia to win his fortune, without which the young woman’s father will forbid the union.
The Squire, also the local Justice of the Peace, suborns the postman to assure that no letters between the two ever reach their destination, cultivates the father, and variously twirls his mustache and otherwise sneers. Oh, in the end, he fails, of course…another hallmark of a Slaughter flick. (Another: Despite his continuous sneering, debasement of others, etc., he seems to be viewed favorably by most.)
The only reason I’d give this any rating at all is for Slaughter fans (which apparently include every IMDB reviewer of this piece of…well, never mind.) In that case, I guess it’s no worse than most. As a revelation of bad conditions in prisons, it’s apparently several decades too late and mostly consists of sneering. As a Slaughter film, after which I had to go wash my hands and mind…well, kindly, $0.75.
The Bowery at Midnight, 1942, b&w. Wallace Fox (dir.), Bela Lugosi, John Archer, Wanda McKay, Tom Neal, Vince Barnett, Anna Hope. 1:01.
It’s an hour long. It stars Bela Lugosi in a role with two names. It’s…an incoherent mess, and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The only plausible explanation I can see for the way this movie doesn’t work is that it’s a summary version of a really bad serial—but that seems not to be the case. It’s surely a really bad movie. This time Lugosi’s not a mad scientist; he’s a professor of psychology (at a campus that looks like UC Berkeley but is apparently near the Bowery) who, in the evenings, runs a soup kitchen up top and an incredibly evil gang down below—a gang that pointedly leaves one of its members as corpse at each robbery.
Or does it? The has-been doctor who’s a support person (I guess) for this gang (which, at the point of the film, has maybe two members at a time) seems to be doing things with their bodies. Near the end, a bunch of fatalities seem so be taking care of the evil mastermind. I’d say “oh good, zombies,” but the very end has one apparent fatality reunited with his girlfriend.
Awful, awful, awful. Also, portions of the print are so faded as to be nearly unwatchable, and some dialog is missing just enough syllables for unintelligibility—which, fortunately, doesn’t harm this picture all that much. (Reading some of the IMDB raves for this trash…I guess true fans are true fans.) For Bela Lugosi completists, maybe, charitably, $0.50.
Number Seventeen
Previously reviewed (September 2009), $1.75.
The Face at the Window, 1939, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter…and what else do you need to know? 1:10 [1:04]
Mercy, I beg of you, mercy: Not another Slaughter melodrama! I tried. Honest, I did. And when the nobleman played by Slaughter attempted to woo the young woman half his age and began laughing His Laugh when informed she was in love with someone else…I snapped. No more, no more: Even 40 minutes more of Tod Slaughtering another role was too much.
The plot, from the sleeve: “The Wolf” is murdering people in Paris with no clues—and is, well, who else? I can predict the rest: The nobleman does his best to ruin the young man, does various evil deeds, and is eventually caught out, with good triumphing. Some of the same cast as The Ticket of Leave Man. Since I gave up part way through, I’ll just say that if I hope never to encounter endure another Slaughter melodrama. $0.
The Shadow of Silk Lennox, 1935, b&w. Ray Kirkwood & Jack Nelson (dir.), Lon Chaney Jr., Dean Benton, Marie Burton, Jack Mulhall, Eddie Gribbon, Theodore Lorch. 1:00.
Another one that involves a “Legend of Horror”—if Lon Chaney, Jr., really deserves that moniker. This one’s a gangster musical mystery of sorts, featuring Chaney as a nightclub owner that everybody assumes, correctly, is a gangster. The sleeve description seems entirely offbase: Everybody knows he’s a gangleader, and he doesn’t actually start killing off associates until one of them doublecrosses him.
The key, such as it is, is that he’s got locals in his pocket, making sure he’s bailed out and intimidating witnesses so nobody faults him (one sequence shows just how easy that is when anybody’s allowed into a lineup). But then the G-men arrive and things go wrong. There’s one plot line that appears to be a red herring and an undercover agent who’s accepted far too readily as being a safecracker who can also escape from jail. And there are musical numbers—quite a few of them for a one-hour flick. Unfortunately, the sound track’s extremely noisy through much of the film (the print’s also damaged at times).
Chaney Jr.’s not that impressive, and neither is the movie. I suppose it’s worth $0.75.
All previously-reviewed Hitchcock films: Champagne, $1.00; Juno and the Paycock, $0.75; The Manxman, $1; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Chaney Vase, $0.55; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, $0.
What’s a roominar? It’s like a webinar, but with all the participants in the same room for better understanding of body language and more freely-flowing communication.
Thanks to LSW/FF for inspiring this title.
Cites & Insights 10:12 (December 2010) is now published and available for downloading.
The 34-page issue is, as always, in PDF form. Five of the six (6! count them, 6) essays are available separately, using the links below. (As always, My Back Pages is exclusively for PDF readers.)
This is not the end of Volume 10, although it is the last issue as such. A title sheet and indices will follow, probably later in November, and the annual paperback print volume will become available at some point.
Announcing the publication of disContent: The Complete Collection, a limited-edition casebound. Also updating plans for The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010 and repeating the same info as the paragraph above regarding the rest of Volume 10.
Thoughts on good and bad futurism and (always-bad?) deathwatches…including the final disContent column, “‘Is Dead’ Isn’t Dead–But Maybe It Should Be.”
Kidstuff: Three CD-ROMs designed for kids, all of which I scored as Excellent back in the day. Two work, one doesn’t…the latter being perhaps the most intriguing of the lot.
The draft version of Chapter 2 of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010, the first of several chapters to appear in C&I. Note that this link yields a 6×9 PDF, formatted as the book will be, rather than an HTML page.
Discs 13-18 of this 60-disc 250-movie megacollection, including one classic and two near-classics.
Six snarky little essays in a bonus for whole-issue readers.
If you’re wondering, while Volume 10 is about 100 pages longer than I’d originally planned, it is not the longest volume. Volume 9 (2009) holds that honor(?), and I hope will continue to do so.
So I’m finishing up the October Wired (read, as usual, in brief spurts in the most appropriate room for Wired). And I run into a “WiredU” feature. Much or all of which I could grump about, but that would be taking Wired far too seriously.
And then I hit “Waste Studies,” a supposed course about waste, which features as a Guest Lecturer Saul Griffith, who apparently figured out how to audit his total energy consumption, not just the household consumption. (And found, in the process, that he was a wastrel–he was flying a LOT, apparently). So far, so good.
But the big infographic on Griffith’s energy consumption has this as the total headline:
Saul Griffith’s 2007 Energy Consumption: 18,000 Watts
Which is pure nonsense. No, I’m not willing to spend half an hour on a TED talk to see what Griffith actually said. I’d be very surprised if he said “I consumed 18,000 watts n 2007.”
You can no more consume 18,000 watts, with no additional qualifications, then you can go on a journey that’s 60mph long.
Watts measure rate–not quantity as such. If you have a 2.5kW photovoltaic generation system (as we do), that means the system is rated to generate 2,500 watts as a maximum rate of generation (or, most likely, somewhat more than that)…just as your car may be limited to go at a maximum speed of 120mph. Speed is a rate: it’s not a quantity as such.
Calories, miles, pounds, meters, grams: Those are all quantities. The equivalent for electricity is kWh, kilowatt-hours: One kWh is 1,000 watts for the period of one hour.
I’m pretty certain Griffith didn’t find that he used 18,000 watt/hours or 18kWh of energy in 2007: That would be incredibly low. (Our household electricity consumption over the last year was about 4,000kWh, and we run a very energy-efficient household…and that doesn’t count all the other uses of energy, including gas, transportation, etc., etc.)
It’s possible that Griffith found that his average rate of energy consumption was 18kW. That would translate to 157,680kWh for the year, and that is a lot of energy. On the other hand, the pie chart says gas and electricity only represented 6% of that, and 9460kWh for gas and electricity is actually pretty good–the average U.S. household uses more than that in electricity alone.
I’m not blaming Griffith for this. I’m about 99% certain he didn’t use 18,000 watts as a quantity. I’m blaming the Wired writer and editors. For a magazine that claims to be knowledgeable about technology, that level of sloppiness is hard to excuse.
In an odd and interesting FriendFeed thread today, I included this comment:
Derailing further, I find myself wanting to do a post about semi-related issues (the distinction between getting and liking)…and what I might call the Walter Carlos Williams problem (*not* Wendy Carlos Williams on later albums), or “is this a dancing bear?” Probably won’t; even that description is all over the place. [Oops: My bad. I've removed "Williams." Sorry.]
OK, I wrote “Walter Carlos Williams” and “Wendy Carlos Williams,” somehow having conflated William Carlos Williams–whose poetry I read in college–with Wendy Carlos (orig. Walter Carlos), whose synthesized classical recordings I was, at one point, very fond of. If you go to the thread, you’ll just see the right names–I don’t know how to do overstrikes in FF.
Now, as to the post itself, which isn’t directly about transliteracy but may be about new forms and whether you should be able to enjoy or even understand all of them…
Well, I didn’t mean “dancing bear” but “chess-playing bear,” where the marvel isn’t that it’s done well but that it’s done at all (if it is).
As for fleshing out that post: Not gonna happen. My thoughts there are too confused, even by my standards, and I’ll just leave them that way. If you take the implication that, when I went back to it 10 years later, I no longer found Switched-On Bach either revelatory or very enjoyable–well, that’s true. If you do find it either one, good for you: Tastes do and should differ.
It’s an ad–but not some tiny little offhand ad or a local ad.
It’s a two-page color ad, on special heavyweight slick paper, in a very large circulation national magazines.
The ad’s from British Airways. It’s about an impressive program, one in which BA flies “hundreds of small business owners” to meet with potential partners…for free.
And here’s the first sentence of the first paragraph of the actual ad copy:
Last year British Airways launched it’s Face-to-Face program and awarded hundreds of small businesses free flights and other services to nurture their business growth.
The. very. first. sentence. Yes, I know, British English and American English differ in some ways. Not this way, however: “It’s” is not a possessive in either language.
Is this stuff that hard? Shouldn’t copywriters at least have a basic command of the language?
I planned to do some actual blogging this week. Really, I did.
But somehow…well, I’ve certainly spent lots of time on blogs, but not blogging.
First, I finished up this “freemium” book (described in this post) as a different kind of experiment, a collection of well-edited columns on topics that should interest most librarians, in a form that simply won’t be available for free or through other means. Will it get 100 sales? Will it get one sale? We shall see.
(My own copy was shipped today, considerably faster than I’ve ever seen a casebound Lulu book shipped in the past. Depending on how it looks, there might be a different cover for other copies. Or, who knows, there could be a different cover every week or two. Collect them all! Hey, it seemed to work for TV Guide for a while. OK, Now I’m being foolish…)
Most of my time has gone to this “as universal as I can make it” survey of English-language liblogs, which you could call a research project or an obsession or a hobby. I finished the first draft of Chapter 6 (length of blogs and average length of posts) and figured to edit chapters 2-6 this week, at least enough to be ready to use a draft version of chapter 2 in the next Cites & Insights. That went more rapidly than expected…and I decided to start Chapter 7 (conversations–that is, comments).
Oh yeah, there was half a day in there discussing California propositions and offices with my wife, filling out our ballots, taking them over to the polling place…and, given the current margin in the local Congressional race (last I heard: our preferred candidate is 121 votes ahead of the guy who wants to shut down public schools, with considerably more than 160,000 votes cast…and some absentee ballots, like ours, probably won’t be counted for days yet), I’m even more glad than usual that we did vote. Odd to have California as one of the saner states, but this time around…
Well…Tuesday afternoon, after voting and all that, I was doing the prep work for some of the tables in Chapter 7, and doing some informal consistency checks, and saw something wrong or at least wildly unlikely. Given past problems with data seeming to shift around when I sort spreadsheet pages with some hidden columns and complex links and formulas, I took a belt-and-suspenders approach this time:
There’s a master spreadsheet with all the raw data, links and formulas–discussed here. I have two backup copies of that master spreadsheet. I don’t actually work with that spreadsheet at all.
Instead, I created a “fixed” spreadsheet that’s a page-by-page copy of the master, with one huge differences: Everything’s pasted as values and formats, turning all the links and formulas into simple data. That eliminates one set of potential problems–and if I doubt the Fixed spreadsheet, I can always recopy a page.
But I don’t actually work with the Fixed spreadsheet either. I work with a copy of it, called Work10, on the assumption that Work10 can be repeatedly recreated from Fixed any time I think there might be an issue.
Turns out that, ahem, I screwed up a few thousand of the formulas on the Comments page of the master spreadsheet. (OK, I actually screwed up somewhere between two and eight master formulas, but each formula gets copied-and-shifted 1,304 times, so that’s somewhere between 2,608 and 10,432 problematic formulas.) What really happened was that I copied them from the Length page, but I’d changed the order of other columns…
Anyway: Fixed the formulas, very carefully, checked them twice, did the 1,304-line copies, looked at results, then recopied values to Fixed and Work10.
And went to each other formula-based page in the spreadsheet to check for similar problems. Whew. The rest of the formulas appear to be correct. (These aren’t terribly complex formulas but they aren’t entirely trivial. Here’s an example:
=IF(I4>0,IF(G4>0,((I4-G4)/G4),IF(G4=0,10,0)),(IF(G4>0,IF(I4=0,-1,0),0)))
There’s probably a simpler way to do this, but I’m no Excelpert. (This is basically calculating a percentage change where the denominator might be zero and where either figure might be a special negative figure that means “there was no data here.”)
Wednesday’s hike was a long and good one, and by the time I was back and finished lunch it was 2 p.m., so Wednesday afternoon was entirely spent correcting the problems uncovered on Tuesday.
Ah, but then something else happened on Wednesday…
Today, I finished the draft of Chapter 7. I probably won’t touch the remaining chapters, including the all-important Chapter 1 (the chapter that won’t appear in C&I), until the December C&I is out. (There may be two or three more chapters in addition to Chapter 1. I’m not sure yet. I may also be adding to existing chapters.)
“Ah, but then something else happened on Wednesday…”
To wit, an LSW thread on FriendFeed in which someone whose views I usually respect was asserting that books in the library field should be public domain PDFs, given away by their authors. It got to be a strange discussion. I stopped contributing on Wednesday to control my temper, but came back to it today.
I might write a proper post about the implications of all this, but not now, and maybe not ever. It’s certainly not that I don’t believe some library books are overpriced and underdone. (Part of the reason I left the LITA Publications Committee and, now, LITA entirely, has to do with one publisher.) It’s certainly not that I don’t believe the free literature is worthwhile–after all, I probably contribute to it as much as anybody in the field I can think of offhand. As for other thoughts…well, see the subhead above. (For a few hours, I was honestly wondering whether I was damaging the field and setting up unreasonable expectations by continuing to write and give away Cites & Insights. I concluded that I’m not going to think about that. For now.)
I have thought of an interesting analogy, particularly given the suggestion that the Needs of the Many (librarians who can’t afford to pay for professional books) outweigh the “walking-around money” of the few, since, you know, all us writers have cushy jobs that should provide all the money we need (hmm: I must be missing something here). To wit:
Library schools should be free. Most courses are taught by adjunct faculty anyway, and the need of many potential librarians for cheap education outweighs the desire of a few dozen librarians serving as adjunct faculty for walking-around money.
To my ear, that’s an outrageous suggestion. I’m sure someone can tell me that it’s MUCH more difficult to prepare and present a library school course than it is to write a library monograph…or not. In any case, it’s not a serious suggestion…but it is an interesting analogy.
Sure, it’s only Thursday. But I really should wash the windows here, there’s reading (and laundry) to be done, there are essays to revise, and I clearly need to cool off further.
Available immediately–but only for four months or 100 copies, whichever comes first: disContent: The Complete Collection. It’s 314 pages long, hardcover (case-bound 6×9), signed (electronically) on the title page–and costs $50.
It’s a “freemium” experiment–something that carries a premium price but offers something you can’t find elsewhere. To wit, all the columns I wrote in EContent Magazine from 2001 through 2009, offering an amateur’s view of econtent, context, media, borgs and more–73 columns in all, each with a postscript bringing it up to date or otherwise commenting on it, for a total of roughly 88,000 words.
I regard some of these columns as absolutely first rate and most of them are as relevant today as they were when I wrote them. On the other hand, a few represent bad calls on my part or are otherwise mildly embarrassing at a remove–but they’re all here. For a little while: Four months or 100 copies, whichever comes first. (OK, technically, if there’s a flood of orders, the “100 copy” limit could be exceeded slightly, as I’ll take the book off sale the day after that target is reached…if it ever is. The four-month limit is firm: The book will go out of print on March 1, 2011, regardless of sales.)
It’s complete. It includes columns I might just as well forget. Most of you probably haven’t read these columns, since you’re probably not EContent subscribers–and it’s some of my best writing.
It helps support my ongoing research and writing. Not in any huge fiscal manner (if all 100 copies are sold, I’d wind up with around $2,400, not exactly a fortune), but in terms of interest and support.
I don’t much care for the term or the Andersonomics “econtent must be free” attitude behind it, but I’m always welcome to possibilities.
A few of these columns appeared in the early years of Cites & Insights. One–the last one, actually–appears in the December 2010 issue, at the end of the major essay in that issue. A few more will appear in future issues…but certainly not all.
Depending on the level of interest, it’s possible that I’ll strip this collection down to the 37 “best” columns, which would be just about half the length of this collection, and publish that as a regular trade paperback. That won’t happen before April 2011, and may not happen at all.
What’s in this collection? Here are some of the column titles:
Keeping the Faith: Playing Fair with your Visitors
Survey Says…Or Does It? [Fun with Statistics]
Who Do You Trust?
Contemplation and Content
The Coming of the Borgs
This is Going On Your Permanent Record
Rich Media is Hard
Shortcut Literacy
The Renascence of the Writer
Ghosts in the Social Networking Machines
Security, Naïveté, and the Limits of Pseudonymity
Long Live the Audience!
Will You Be My Friend?
The 24×7 Ubiquitous Connectivity Blues
Welcome to the Neighborhood
Can You Read Me?
Not Me, Inc.
The Top 10 Reasons You See So Many Lists
Authenticity and Sincerity
Is Dead Isn’t Dead—but Maybe it Should Be
It’s worth the $50. Go buy it. Do be aware that casebound books take an extra week or so to produce (no, I don’t have my own copy yet…) This one isn’t available as an ebook, although the selective collection (if it appears) will be.
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