Sunday, May 14, 2006
"Out of Ambit" has moved: this version is no longer being updated
The new home of "Out of Ambit" is here:http://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit
Thanks for stopping by! Please come visit us at the new location.Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/14/2006 01:38:00 PM | link to this post
Saturday, May 13, 2006
The Blogger version of "Out of Ambit" will close at 00:01, May 14: please change your bookmarks
For those of you reading this version of the weblog directly or via RSS/XML feed, please note that there will be no further posts here as of midnight tonight.
The blog isn't going away, by any means. You can still read it directly at its new home,http://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/.
The address for its feed is changing. The old feed at outofambit.blogspot.com/rss/outofambit.xml is being shut down: the new address is --
http://feeds.feedburner.com/OutOfAmbit.
If you're an LJ user and are reading a syndicated version of this weblog, you don't have to: we have an LJ mirror at
http://dduane.livejournal.com.
To all of you who've been frequent visitors over the past four years, thanks for your support, and I look forward to seeing you over at the weblog's new home! And thanks also to Blogger for these past years of hosting.
posted by Diane: 5/13/2006 10:42:00 AM | link to this post
Friday, May 12, 2006
Note to self: order one of these for Peter
I have no trouble going to sleep in lighted places if I'm tired enough, but for best results, P. needs it dark This looks like a useful answer: a Lights Out Sleep Mask. "It blocks out stray lightbeams that leak through those crappy free masks; it has an adjustable velcro strap; and the molded eyecups give your eyeballs freedom to flip around in REM sleep."
Sounds good. (Thanks to Gridskipper for the link.)
posted by Diane: 5/12/2006 03:13:00 PM | link to this post
Now this is what I call a casemod
...and a half.
The ElectriClerk was built as a prop for "a game of 'Cthulhu Lives' that has yet to be played". The builder took the guts of a 1988-vintage Mac and mounted them inside a 1923 Underwood typewriter. I particularly admire the trackball and number pad.
The maker's page also has the promotional literature he designed to go along with the "product".
Amazing stuff...
Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/12/2006 01:12:00 PM | link to this post
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
This blog is moving: please change your bookmarks
If you read "Out of Ambit". please note that it's changing addresses. Its new address is:http://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit
Please change your bookmarks. This version of the weblog will be frozen in Internet amber during the weekend of May 13-14.
Thanks!Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/09/2006 07:43:00 PM | link to this post
"The Big Meow" Chapter Four rescheduling (it's only slight)
For those of you who're subscribers to The Big Meow: A conflicting work commitment has come up which is going to make it impossible to get the subscribers' version of Chapter Four posted on its projected date of May 10th. I'm therefore rescheduling the posting date for May 12th. Apologies to everybody: but sometimes something comes up that has to be dealt with urgently, and this is one of those times.
Thanks for your patience!
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posted by Diane: 5/09/2006 11:02:00 AM | link to this post
Holy toast
Not Ghost. Toast.
If like us, you suffer from the almost constant disappointment of holy effigies failing to miraculously appear to you during breakfast, well fret no more, because help is at hand. The problem with your everyday religious apparitions is that, well for the fainthearted at least, they're a bit rubbish. Often it takes an almost suicidal leap of faith to see your chosen deity appear in your breakfast. You may have to squint sideways through blue Venetian silk stretched over the branches of a two hundred year old Abyssinian cedar tree, on the last Wednesday in June, whist standing on one leg in a an old sink half filled with water drawn by neutered goats from the 'Well of Indecision' high in the Kibla mountains - and even then, you may still find you're just looking at what will now be a rather cold piece of toast....
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with any deity whatever during breakfast. Until the caffeine kicks in, there's always the possibility that I might say something rash while reading the news...
posted by Diane: 5/09/2006 09:51:00 AM | link to this post
Monday, May 08, 2006
This makes me happy: Nokia and iPass team up
iPass Inc. and Nokia Enterprise Solutions today announced they are developing iPass wireless connectivity software for the Nokia 9500, the Nokia 9300i and the Nokia Eseries devices. Based on the award-winning iPassConnect(TM) universal client, this software will extend availability of the iPass secure remote access service to users of Nokia Business devices.
This is super. For a long time I've used iPass for my travel Internet access, and it was always a frustration when I heard that iPass had no plans to do a software implementation for mobile phones. (It had done one for PDAs, though.) However, it seems like something has made them change their minds. Yay!
posted by Diane: 5/08/2006 10:08:00 AM | link to this post
Friday, May 05, 2006
MI:III review, with something extra
The review itself is interesting enough, but I'm most glad I stumbled across it because in passing it helped me identify why I've stopped watching "24".
posted by Diane: 5/05/2006 10:04:00 AM | link to this post
Oh, Keith, what did you say?! Argh.
I still haven't gotten around to getting my NASN subscription going again, so I missed this particular moment. I'm sitll tyring to figure out what my reaction to hearing it live would have been. Probably the same large [headclutch!] that I did when I read this.
[Keith] Hernandez saw a woman in the Padres dugout and said, "Who is the girl in the dugout, with the long hair? What's going on here? You have got to be kidding me. Only player personnel in the dugout." He went on, "I won't say that women belong in the kitchen, but they don't belong in the dugout."
The woman in the dugout turned out to be Kelly Calabrese, a full-time massage therapist for the San Diego Padres.
Ah me. I need another cup of tea...
Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/05/2006 09:36:00 AM | link to this post
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Joy! The original "Star Wars" films finally out on DVD!
Now I'm happy.Geeks the world over have reason to celebrate today – George Lucas has finally listened to their pleas and is releasing the original versions of the 'Star Wars' trilogy on DVD.
On September 11, two-disc sets of 'Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope', 'Episode V The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Episode VI Return of the Jedi' will hit the streets, featuring the digitally restored and re-mastered versions of the movies.
And as bonus material, they will also include the holy grail for true 'Star Wars' fans - the original theatrical versions of the films.
And the article's writer says something that Peter has said about eight thousand times:
As a fan of the originals, I've avoided buying the updated versions of the films in the hope that Lucas would one day listen to sense and release them in an untainted form.
Can't wait...!
posted by Diane: 5/04/2006 07:54:00 PM | link to this post
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
A very annoying anecdote
I am not normally of a litigious turn of mind. But if the incision of the gentleman in this story fails to heal properly, and if I were he, by God would I hunt down someone at Paramount to sue.
Whose idea was this inane stunt...?!
Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/03/2006 04:41:00 PM | link to this post
Grasping the nettle
The other morning, an Irish actress and cookbook writer whose food writing I really like -- a lady named Biddy White Lennon -- was on the morning show on TV3. She was making nettle soup.
Now this is a dish that has a long history over here -- there were various hermits and hermit-saints who were reputedly fond of it, and there's even a legend about one of them who got snarky with his cook when he found the man was ruining the (theoretically) strict asceticism of the saint's nettles-only diet by sneaking oatmeal into the soup. Nettle soup also has something of a reputation as a spring tonic.
While I watched Biddy making the soup -- which took very little time -- I thought, "Hey, with all the physical stuff I've got going on at the moment, I can probably use a little detox..." This impulse was strengthened when the on-air personality handed one of the studio crew a bowl of the stuff to taste, and was utterly unable to pry it away from him afterwards.
So I made it, and it was really good. Here's how you do it.
You get a big pot, peel and chop a large onion, and saute it in the pot in a little butter. Then, when the onions are transparent, you put in about a liter and a half of water in a pot, and a bouillon cube / stock cube -- chicken for preference. Bring this up to a boil and otherwise leave it to its own devices while you peel and chop up three or four medium-sized potatoes, or two or three largish ones. You want a "floury" variety for this, a baking potato, not a waxy one or salad variety. Put the potatoes in the pot and let them cook in the stock for twenty minutes.
While that's going on, go out and pick your nettles. You want only the tender young tops -- say the first inch and a half's growth on a given stalk. The recipe as I saw it on screen called for 350 grams of nettles, but frankly, life is too busy around here to spend time weighing nettles. I saw the size of the container Biddy was using -- a colander about eight inches deep, with a twelve-inch diameter -- got my own colander, which was a rough match, and went out and picked nettles (wearing the rubber dishwashing gloves, naturally...) until it was full.
Once you've got your nettles, and when the potatoes are done, rinse the nettles well in some cold water, drain them and shake them to get rid of the excess, and dump them in the pot. You don't need to cook them very long: in fact, if you do, you'll ruin this dish, as you want to keep the maximum amount of the vitamins in place. Five minutes in the boiling stock/potato/onion mixture is plenty. The nettles are going to turn an impossibly vivid green (and the cooking very swiftly deactivates their stinging quality.).
When they've had their five minutes, take the pot off the heat, find the stick mixer (if you've got one: otherwise put the whole business in the blender, in stages) and liquefy the whole deal. You get a lovely thick soup with this astonishingly bright green springtime color.
Dish it out, add a swirl of cream (you can see my attempt to do so in the image, but for some reason the creme fraiche I was using came up in little bobbles instead: don't ask me why, the cream was fine...). Maybe a crouton or so would go well too. I put some chopped chives on top....and then devoured about three bowls of the stuff, one after another, because it was really good. If you like spinach soup, this would be right up your alley.
(Peter suggested that adding some smoked bacon to the sauteeing stage would improve the soup even more. But he would say that: he likes smoked bacon in most things...)
posted by Diane: 5/03/2006 11:48:00 AM | link to this post
The axe falls
Little, Brown has canceled Kaavya Viswanathan's two-book contract, and announced that no revised edition of her first book will be issued.
The Harvard Crimson is now also reporting similarities between passages in How Opal Mehta... and passages in The Princess Diaries.
(sigh) So the noise of this continues to roll 'round the world, with people reacting in all kinds of directions (especially many unsympathetic variations on "How can a kid smart enough to get into Harvard still be so stupid" -- sometimes with the added codicil "...as to get caught!") and decrying everything in sight. (I did actually see one article that said "Society's to blame!", but now I can't remember where I saw it. The best response to this probably remains the Pythonesque one: "Fine, let's arrest them instead.")
But the occasional voice can be heard rising from the noise and echoing my own opinion that Kaavya's not the only one responsible for the contents of the book or the results of its publication, and should not be left carrying the can...for there are two entities sharing the copyright. From Edward Hower at the Boston Globe:
Lest you think I'm the kind of reviewer who spends his spare time clubbing baby seals to death for sport, let me say up front that Kaavya Viswanathan, the 19-year-old author of ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," is unlikely to be responsible for all the inanities that abound in this product marketed under her name. The book, which the publisher is now racing to recall because of a plagiarism controversy, reads as if it were assembled by a committee, and, according to many reports, it was.
And here's a reaction I hadn't seen before. Under the article title "That Crazy Kaavya Chick Ruins Life For Us Legit Lit Lackeys", a YA writer wonders if this is going to make us all look bad --
Even with the critical success of novels like Harry Potter and the commercial success of series like Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (both Alloy projects), young-adult authors already sometimes struggle to be seen as legitimate writers deserving of their ever-increasing space on Barnes & Noble shelves. When a (then) 17-year-old girl is paid a half-million dollars to join those ranks and then plagiarizes, she’s certainly not raising esteem for her craft.
This concerns me particularly because I’m also writing a young-adult novel, to be published next year. Like all the memoirists out there who cringed at the unmasking of James Frey’s fabrications/exaggerations (and at his subsequent public flogging and blank-eyed, half-hearted apologies), or like the journalists who winced at the train wreck that was the short-lived newspaper career of Jayson Blair or the Hollywood-immortalized magazine career of Stephen Glass, as a young-adult writer, I feel the collective, Homeresque "D’oh!" Now, every time I tell someone what it is I do for a living, I find myself bracing for the inevitable question: "What do you think about that Harvard student … ?"
Somehow I doubt this is really going to be that much of a problem in the future. If anything, it's going to ensure that "real-world" YA stuff is going to be more carefully vetted, and originality will therefore have a better chance of being recognized. (Fantasy YA writers, of course, are these days routinely laboring under a burden that sits at an entirely different end of the spectrum. Rather than one writer having a work investigated and found to apparently borrow from others, many of us are now routinely assumed to be borrowing from one particular writer before anybody even cracks a cover to find out otherwise.) (Insert Rueful Grin here.)
But finally, here's a very interesting thought from a Washington Post article:
In fact, as it emerges from interviews she gave before the plagiarism scandal erupted, Viswanathan's unpackaged story was better than the processed story she -- or her helpers -- produced: the maternal grandfather in Madras who bought the 6-year-old Kaavya a copy of "Great Expectations" and made clear that his own expectation involved a doctor granddaughter. (She's thinking investment banking, actually.) The mother immersed in planning an over-the-top book party. ("They wanted to have a red carpet strewn with rose petals. And I've just woken up and I'm still in my pajamas and my mom will call, and she'll say like, 'Kaavya, would you prefer pink or white rose petals?' '')
The cutthroat environment of Viswanathan's science magnet school ("People would ask, 'Who's writing your recommendation for Yale?' And they wouldn't tell you because it gives you a competitive advantage if people don't know.") Viswanathan's own overwrought Harvard admissions story (the e-mail server on which she was supposed to get her early action notice crashed, three other classmates got in, and Viswanathan, assuming that meant she'd been rejected, "spent the whole night -- 13 straight hours -- weeping inconsolably and trying to look at life ahead.")
Life that is, in this case, more engaging, more nuanced and ultimately more disturbing than art.
Now there's a story I'd gladly have read more of.
Is there possibly -- despite all present appearances -- still a book that Kaavya might successfully get published? An after-the-fact book about this whole unhappy situation...?
Meta, rather than "Mehta"...
posted by Diane: 5/03/2006 09:35:00 AM | link to this post
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Oh, dear, it's not over yet: same book, more plagiarism...?
Just when you thought the Kaavya Viswanathan stuff might be about to die down a little, here comes the next wave.
Turns out one of the New York Times's readers has caught a number of passages that appear to have been lifted from a book called "Can You Keep A Secret?" by Sophie Kinsella. There are fewer of them, this time: only three. But still..
My first thought was, "How many more books is this going to turn out to be a mashup of?"...and the second was, "I bet that poor kid's become sorry this book ever saw the light of day."
(sigh)
Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/02/2006 08:34:00 AM | link to this post
Monday, May 01, 2006
Now here's a thought for you
We are apparently in the longest period since 113 B.C. during which no one has crossed the Rhine with fire and sword.
posted by Diane: 5/01/2006 09:26:00 PM | link to this post
If you've been reading the Blogger version of OOA...
...you might like to take this opportunity to change your bookmark for the weblog. It's moving to a new home and a WordPress version, and the Blogger version will shortly be frozen and no longer updated. (All old posts are duplicated at the new location, in case you were wondering.)
The new address is:
http://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/
If you're reading DD's LiveJournal version of OOA (at http://dduane.livejournal.com), you don't need to do anything, as the blog will continue to be automatically mirrored there. Those of you who're reading the syndicated LJ feed, however, may want to change over to DD's version above.
Thanks!Tags:
posted by Diane: 5/01/2006 08:31:00 AM | link to this post
That being the case, sometimes I want to talk about anything but writing (at least, writing per se).
This is the old Blogger version of where that would happen. Click here to see where it happens now.
Biography
Bibliography / filmography
2008:
The Geneva Convention
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