Legends of the Blue Pencil

I used to work for a guy who was the God of Copy Editors.

He was an intense, slightly built man with fine features, a Roman nose, and long flowing brown hair. He wore tailored clothes and carried a man-purse. He spoke precisely with a fairly thick East Coast urban accent. He had been editing copy for 20 years when I met him. I was a young ex-rock-critic demoted to editorial assistant at a medical journal, and not at my peak of maturity, but I learned a lot from him.

He had geek social skills and frequently alienated others because he spoke very directly and did not engage in argument; he was just right. There were no differences of opinion about editing. There was a right way, and a wrong way. When the style guide offered two ways, he had one. His knowledge of all sorts of journalism, book editing, and publishing production was encyclopedic. We used to joke that he should be placed in a four-sided cubicle prison and have worked dropped in the top that he would slide out the bottom to avoid interpersonal conflict.

He remained a friend after I left that job. Years later, he took another technical editing job where he reported to an editor-in-chief who did not enjoy his brusque way with small editing disagreements. He would just say "You're wrong. This is the way to do it." Increasingly, she felt her authority was being undermined, and although he was undeniably talented and experienced, she was after all the boss.

One day he corrected her in his usual charming way on some small, abstruse bit of style. I think it was a type size, or whether a caption should be in italics. She finally lost her cool. "Goddamnit!" she yelled "I'm sick of you telling me all the time what to do without any reference. I'm the editor-in-chief here, and you're not in charge. If you're going to reverse everything I do you have to cite an accepted style guide for this or I'm not going to change a single thing!"

Without any pause and without looking up from his desk, he said: "Words Into Type, page 169. The footnote."

She walked over to the bookcase, pulled out Words Into Type, and paged a bit. There was a long pause. With a snort she slammed the book back into the shelf and walked out for a long lunch.

He was right. After that, she didn't yell at him any more.

I miss that guy.

Tragicomedy gold: How to Date White Women

Courtesy Anna Pirhana, here's an Amazon listing for How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men, a very important book for "Asian" men, which I assume refers to United States residents of East Asian descent and not to Sri Lankans, Uighurs, or Kashmiris. Amazon's "Better Together" suggestion is surprisingly apropos: they recommend The Complete Asshole's Guide to Handling Chicks as an ideal companion volume.

The best review of this book is by Crazy Ed from Cupertino, who says:

I personally found the book lacking, in what I like to call "chutzpah". I gave this book to a friend who needed some help and the "step-by-step guide" provided in this tome is anything but. In many cases he found the steps to be nebulous, ambagious, and even geared towards the derelict reader. The book, as a whole, was definitely not multifarious. I would not extol this literary work.

Thanks for the tip there, Ed. I like my racist sex advice books to be multifarious and loaded with "chutzpah", and I wouldn't buy anything you didn't extol.

People who considered this book were apparently also interested in How to Date Young Women: For Men over 35 vol II (Advanced Skills), which begs the question of what the first volume left out, and what kind of "advanced skills" might be necessary for us over-35 guys to get us some young tender flesh. Maybe the advanced volume tells us how to get two young girlfriends, or how to get away with dating high school girls and not end up in jail or dead, or how to date your own children. I'm sure I should stick to Volume I as a first step, though. You have to learn slowly from the Master.

A thing I fear.

Podcasting is bad. I've bitched about it already. Mouth-breathing geeks droning about technology. Even the ones who are good writers (0.1%) are unlistenable like bad college professors. Fire it into the sun.

But something worse looms. The video iPod and its cousins, and the ease of making small downloadable portable video magazines, offers a future of what I'm sure they're calling vodcasting. This unfortunately does not provide vodka, but may require it. The thought of tapping on my handheld video device and seeing Dave Winer or some person who has the best blog about Babylon 5 talk at me is, frankly, emetic.

My opinion is that mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks who insist on being media personalities should restrict themselves to text like the other mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks over the last 10,000 years and stay out of the public eye and ear. The reason we're not all on the radio and the TV is not just that access to media is limited. It's also that very few people have either the skills or the charisma to do either of those things without making others dizzy with loathing.

But I can deal with that just by not watching any of it. The second part of this is worse. Right now, blogging is a text medium, and I love it. I have maybe 200 RSS subscriptions to personal and institutional weblogs and weblog-like things and I get a lot out of it. I make fun of the bozosphere, but mostly it's great.

Video may not kill it, but it'll be a huge kick in the stomach. Video is seductive. It's immediate and TV-like. It's visual. It makes people feel like stars to be in videos. It's dumbed down and easy. And it's made for ad insertion. Video podcasting, when it gets to a certain point, will be adopted by just about all the commercially-run weblogs and a huge portion of the homebrew ones. And I see it as having an unpleasantly TV-like effect on the web. You might not think a three-paragraph blog update on one of the Weblogs Inc. or Gawker sites is a heavy chunk of ideas, but it'll get smaller and dumber in a video. Instead of a galaxy of smart little snide magazine article squibs, we'll have huge numbers of local news quality "segments" with stock footage and maybe 200 words of idea in them. Inevitably the commercial blogs will be done by prettier and prettier faces. And because there's less money in blogging than in actual TV, the use of stock provided footage from commercial sources will be universal.

With luck, we'll keep a core of text-based weblogging that has actual ideas in it, the way we kept an intelligent chunk of the Web after the flashmonsters and marketing droids ate most of it. But it's not a good thing, not at all.

I hate video.

FRIEZE!

IT'S THE ART POLICE!

Only in Italy would they have enough to protect and the will to care.

The TPC have recorded over 630,000 thefts in the past 30 years. They have recovered more than 185,000 art works and more than 450,000 archeological objects. They have confiscated over 60,000 fakes during the 1990s alone.

They're serving in Iraq now too, trying to hunt down missing Mesopotamian artifacts.

Tiny Pandas In My Hand

[Poll #610473]

a riot of my own

1. Ali G interviews NBA stars as promos for NBA on TNT. "Why don't you just get three fly honeys talking nonsense?"
   
   
2. No, this ad isn't from 1961. It's a new one from GM. Lame on about five levels.
   
   
3. I always thought Dean Koontz was a pretty nice guy, especially locally here where he dumps money on libraries and the arts. Apparently he's also a complete racist asshole. In response, Bookslut invites entries in the Man, is Dean Koontz a Prick or What? contest for slashfic featuring Dean and a Japanese guy.
   
   
4. Plant attached to theremin = singing plant! Feed me, Seymour.
   
   
5. Murder on the Nile! Forty centuries ago.