Wednesday miscellany

The second paragraph of this piece was so extraordinarily vicious that I read to the end with a kind of enthralled fascination! I have no reason to disagree with its verdict, and I too am rendered extraordinarily irritable by slack writing, but it has also always seemed to me that it is bad for the soul to write a review of this ilk very often...

At Tor.com, Fabio Fernandes on translating A Clockwork Orange into Brazilian Portuguese.

A countdown of the hundred best fantasy and science-fiction novels?

The syllabus for Matthew Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar on simulations.

Last but not least: Charlie Williams prefers typecasting to podcasting.

This week's mostly all about catching up on miscellaneous medical appointments (nothing major), rehearsing for Tino's Guggenheim piece and trying to sort out a good exercise routine - not doing so well on the last front, but it is a work in progress. The other major activity is a massive reading binge - at the humane society charity shop in Cayman, one of the volumes I picked up was Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. I liked Dunnett's mystery novels very much when I was a teenager, but her historical ones never held much appeal for me, despite my dear friend E.B.T.'s enthusiastic advocacy of them during our grad school years. But long is good when it comes to charity-shop light reading, and though I wouldn't say it's my perfect light reading (also it suffers from the unfortunate juxtaposition with Hilary Mantel's really brilliant Wolf Hall!), I certainly enjoyed the first installment enough to go and check out volumes two through seven from the Barnard Library yesterday.

(Where, by the way, I ran into a colleague of mine who is also doing Tino's piece - and as we discussed it, the young lady behind the library checkout counter exclaimed, "Are you doing Tino's piece? So am I!" It is a cast of thousands!)

There is something truly lovely and addictive about reading through a huge series in a relatively small amount of time. I read Lian Hearn's trilogy like that; Susan Howatch is perhaps my most recent long immersive series-reading experience, at least the one that comes most strongly to mind; but I was reminded as I plucked Dunnetts from the shelf of how I held out for a long time against the Aubrey-Maturin novels and then read the first one and basically couldn't really do anything else until I had read all of them - every day I went to Cross-Campus Library at Yale and checked out another armful or four or five of them and took them home and read them all, four or five days later I was done and wished I had eked them out for longer, but it was well worth it!

(On which note, I will conclude by adding that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, another long book I read in fits of transport...)

Toy story

I have a slight yen for a fake hamster myself, but a fake hamster as a substitute for a real one is not a good deal.

Warp factor ten

Ozzy Osbourne's memoir excerpted at the Sunday Times:

1982. Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman show involved the hanging of midgets, a giant mechanical arm, and a catapult that fired raw meat into the audience. But on this occasion it was a prop supplied by the audience that stole the show.

On January 20, 1982, we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines.

The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.

Then, from out of the audience came this bat. Obviously a toy, I thought.

So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.

Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.

CHOMP.

Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.

Then the head in my mouth twitched.

Oh, f*** me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a f***ing bat, did I?

So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!”

Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room.

Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. I had more holes in me than a lump of f***ing Swiss cheese.

"Wooden hot dogs with plastic buns"

The hot dog found a good home!

(I do not think hot dogs are camp or unappetizing - I probably only eat one once a year, but I think they are delicious, especially with a decorative squiggle of ketchup and/or when cooked on a grill. In Stockholm, you can get a delicious hot dog on the street outside of a club at 4am....)

The Method

At the Times, Kim Severson on film food:

For the 2000 movie “American Psycho,” Ms. Weinstein had prepared several vegetarian dishes for the actor Willem Dafoe, who, she was told, didn’t eat meat. But at the last minute, he decided his character was a carnivore. In deference to his Method acting technique, she had to send out for steaks and figure out how to cook them on the set.

Also: 60 deboned ducks; 25 cakes; hard-to-find cheese; off-camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitoring lobster health....

"Tempting little rectangles"

The Spam cook of the year.

"They were reduced to despair"

Via the Times Archive Blog:
Curiously, just the other day I was contemplating The Tale of Two Bad Mice:

Fighting dragons

Oh dear - other than writing my page quota in the morning and going to a swim clinic in the afternoon, the only thing I did all day and night was wrestle with Dragon Naturally Speaking!

I have been indulging in some wishful thinking - I had persuaded myself that last time, when I put this program aside out of a sense that it did not meet my needs, did not count and it might suit me better this time - I thought it was going to semi-magically and with only mild inaccuracy let me translate my handwritten pages into typed manuscript pages!

Alas, it was not to be....

1:00-2:00pm. Wrestle with the Dragon. Conclusion: ARGHHHHH, cannot get this microphone to work, will have to deal with it when I get back from swimming...

5:30pm. Purchase new headset microphone at Columbia University Bookstore in vain hope that it might be hardware error.

5:45-6:30pm. Finally realize that I cannot get the audio levels in a suitable range. Decide to use digital recorder to transfer data to the program. Read page into recording device.

7:30pm. Contemplate the program's stab at a transcription of the trial page of read-out-loud manuscript with utter despair! (Text below.)

8:00pm. Decide it is worth going over to see if I can get better sound functionality on the office computer. Foray to office with Dragon disks (minor miracle that I was able to find 'em!) and the first book of manuscript. Install software, 'train' program by reading several pages of Alice in Wonderland (apt choice!), start reading it some opening sentences - and realize that it is just as bad as the digital recorder's version!

10:30pm. Sushi dinner with 'light reading' - fit for nothing else by this point....

Anyway, for your garbled amusement, a scene that falls about a third of the way through The Snow Queen, in the Dragon's version (NB the novel is not written in the first person!):

Into leave it until. When Michael mentions the notion of adding a-carrying module facilities bicycle, though, I jumped up and let them through the shed, and amazing treasure-and listens to her but Sophie felt sheepishly unable to appreciate in all glories. She let herself as we wander in the other to pick food he showed been cleaned with excitement at various lines. At first she so on-bound to stay and watch, but after making several observations that fell on deaf ears, she wanted to the size of lingo.

Sophie!

It was an altogether pleasant sensation we got to feeling a little tight in her hair seemed to have grown the wound or something one for her and she suspect and prove Peterson, who occasion to express regret never having had a daughter, a plot in the Sophie too quickly wrong and began wearing an elaborate Scandinavian-style claps like the one she sported herself -- she was not the first idea but it seemed to her unlikely to result in the same smooth shiny a way to prove Peterson was able to achieve in a matter of less than a minute).

They had a terrific source of the contest, and go at first it made her feel fairly off-balance as she worried about whether she had enough side clearance to get through the wire baskets that have been edited out for either side of the rear wheel, she agreed with the machines in refers but is admirably lightweight and convenient solution the contraption they have fixed to the front of the basket for person justice purposes or quote that fact half of yours," as Michael insisted on calling him). It had a wood frame and will matter to the sheepskin at the bottom so that the Progress constantly

You have to shut him in, I think, or observed as he showed Sophie have a watch work on-well, you trace were not going to be asked to get in it, so that he might have want to call it a trap, it was so much like what they used to catch lobsters the north Atlantic fisheries, but that man is so tactless Sophie resolved to banish it utterly from her thoughts -- the receptacle, that was a good inside merge.

She wrote several times around the yard with and without cargo, and Michael told her that the best test of whether the arrangement with suitor would be packing panniers with her own your luggage when they run home in a day. It seems sad to think of what Sophie could not help thinking of as a rustic all right all with only a slight tension of community would be so brief. They had time for the instruction swimming in the sea so it was time to be back at the house for tea, and she and Michael made a pact with each other but they would get up at the crack of going to come back down to the beach and so the minute morning before breakfast. In the event, of course, neither of them will in time to do anything but go on their clothes and have a quick breakfast of pancakes and food and ham and cheese and café au lait before getting back on their bikes. From Peterson was skeptical about whether Sophie really wanted to carry such a slow road back to town, but Michael and Sophie both earnestly assured her it was a crucial test of the bicycle evacuation system and an opportunity not to be messed.

In a way the whole season could be thought of as one of festivities, with the poorest hospitality component is right, for that in September and first week of October feature series of parties and celebrations of news's birthday, which fell in October 7 and had been declared a national holiday by the government close parenthesis is slightly mournful face and heavy brows also adored a postage stamp.

It would be a party at the parliament building on the day itself but the birth like to invite a larger and less select group to join them at their Carlsberg mention that it would be on Friday the week after tax, but in fact in the meantime so think a risk that one evening that week in a small escapade that set her thinking again about some of the things you put aside without regret from leaving Scotland's.

It is not sensible, I will just have to type it myself - I am a fast but inaccurate typist, it will be doable....

(NB to give the Dragon credit where credit is due, I am impressed that it got the phrase "café au lait," and the phrase "bicycle evacuation system" is authentically Davidsonian!)