Just found a wonderful article on the misuse of English in academia. Excerpt:

In recent years leftist academics have been enraptured by Empire, a 500-page anti-globalization book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published in 2000. Empire collects all possible criticisms of free trade and wraps them in prose like this: “In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate.”

To commit a sentence like that is to subtract from the sum of human knowledge.

If you’ve ever visited IMDB.com, you know that it’s the site to visit to find information about movies, and especially about their availability in various media.

Over the past year, volunteers have begun the creation of the Internet Book List, which is an attempt to do the same for books of all kinds.

I’ve not have the opportunity to spend much time there yet, so I don’t know how good it is. However, I do know that it’s still young–the database has just reached 10,000 books, but there’s a lot more to go.

For example, the delightful Sarah Caudwell is listed, but only because she’s included in several anthologies in the database. None of her novels are listed yet.

They are looking for help; if you’ve been wanting to give back to the ‘net, this would be a fine way to do it.

Just this evening I watched Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service for the second time. The first time I watched it with the Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles, as Ian Hamet had recommended; so this time I watched it in English.

It feels like an entirely different movie, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. This is due mostly to the voice actors for Kiki herself, and for her black cat, Jiji. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong with Kiki’s voice; I guess sometimes it seemed like she was reading, rather than acting.

Jiji, on the other hand, I detested. In Japanese, Jiji is the voice of caution. He’s a bit of a scaredy cat, but he clearly wants what’s best for Kiki. In the English version, he has a big brash voice that’s completely at odds with his scaredy-cat appearance, and he sounds like he’s being contrary just for the hell of it. And he’s bored with it, in the bargain.

The visuals, however, remain delightful, and the other characters were not voiced so badly.

I did note one major difference in the dialogue–actually, there may have been quite a few, but there was only one I noticed for sure. Kiki and a friend of hers, an artist, are hitchhiking to the artist’s cabin. As a truck goes by in a cloud of dust, the driver hollers out “Ursula!” And the artist says, “Come on, I know this guy.”

In Japanese (or, at least, in the subtitles), those two lines do not exist.

On Terry Teachout’s new blog I see that Warner Brothers will be releasing two great big collections of Looney Tunes on DVD this October.

I haven’t words to describe how thoroughly, amazingly, totally cool this is.

I’ve written a piece of software called “Snit’s Not Incr Tcl”; it’s an object-framework for the Tcl programming language (you can find out more about it at the Snit Home Page if you’re interested).

I mention it because just today, Snit was added to
Tcllib, the Tcl standard library. This is exciting, and ranks as a very good thing.

For the first time in years I finally have a backup solution that I really like.

Some history is in order here: I remember (barely) when backing up your computer meant making another copy of the paper type with your BASIC program on it. That was nasty. It was followed by the floppy disk era, when backup meant copying your data floppy every so often (your system floppy was already a copy). Later, I knew the joy of buying a new program and spending an hour copying all of the program disks as a backup.

All that changed when we got our first hard disk. At 10 MB, it was so much bigger than any floppy disk that backups were nearly impossible. For a while I backed up my hard drive using a program called Fastback that copied the data on to floppies more quickly and safely than the DOS backup program. Later I got a tape drive–that was a joke. It was slow as molasses, and the only way be verify that it had worked was to copy it back on to the hard drive. No thank you.

Eventually I gave up on backing up the whole hard drive; I just started copying whatever I was working on onto a floppy from time to time. As my projects got bigger, I moved up to a Zip drive and used 100MB Zip disks. Then I got into digital photography–it was time for a CD burner. I’ve been through two of those, now, neither of which worked reliably; the third one, which came pre-installed in my PowerBook, seems to be OK.

But all of these solutions have been stopgaps. They preserve my data–but if my hard disk goes south it could be weeks before I’m back up again, depending on how soon I get a replacement machine, and how long it takes to re-install everything.

But now, finally, I have a backup solution that really works. I went out and got an external LaCie firewire hard drive. It’s plug and play with Mac OS X: I plug it in, and there’s another drive. It’s an 80 gigabyte drive; it cost less than a third as much as an 80 megabyte drive once cost me.

Now here’s the cool part. It’s big enough to hold everything on my laptop’s harddrive. I just use a program called Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my laptop’s disk to the external drive.

And here’s the really cool part: I can boot the laptop from either drive. (Thank you, Apple!) So if my laptop’s drive fails, I can boot from the external drive and go on working. When I get the main drive replaced, I just have Carbon Copy Cloner copy everything back over.

Way Cool.

I’m the #1
Duquette on Google!

Granted, the listed page is the old version of this weblog, but that’s still pretty cool.

This is by way of being a sort-of kind-of biography of
P.G. Wodehouse, relying mostly on Wodehouse’ letters and
(woefully few) writings about himself, as well as his attitudes as
expressed in his novels and short stories. Quoting Wodehouse as much as
it does, it is indeed a funny and easily-read book. As a biography, it’s
only so-so, especially as (as the book itself points out) you can’t
necessarily trust what Wodehouse says about himself.

I did learn a few interesting things, though. For most of Wodehouse’
childhood, his mother and father were living in the Far East, while he
himself was shuttled from, significantly, Aunt to Aunt. He had almost no
contact with his mother from the time he was about two years old until
he was in his teens. (They were not close.)

And then, after he left school he spent two years working at the London
branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghae Bank. (The book spells it
“Shanghai”, but this is an error.) (Yes, I know, the City of Shanghai is
usually spelled “Shanghai”. In the name of the bank, it’s “Shanghae”.)
He claims never to have understood what he was supposed to be doing there,
and was finally sacked for writing the beginnings of a story in a brand
new ledger. This was Defacing A Ledger, and was very bad.

After that, he became a full-time writer, and eventually moved
permanently to the United States, where with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern
he helped to invent the modern musical comedy. Before Wodehouse, the
songs in musical comedy frequently had little to do with the story being
told, but were selected for their perceived chance to become a hit.
After Wodehouse, it was expected that the songs served the story. His
efforts as a lyricist are virtually forgotten these days, but among many
other songs he wrote the lyrics for “Bill” from Showboat. He also
wrote a number of plays, which so far as I can tell are entirely
forgotten.

Wodehouse spent a total of eighteen months working in
Hollywood as a writer. His first stint consisted of two consecutive six
month contracts for Warner Brothers. He got paid a ridiculous
amount–$2000 a week in 1929 dollars–for doing virtually nothing. The
studio hired well-known writers, but didn’t ask them to write anything.
Weird. He spent another six months in Hollywood some few years later,
with similar results.

And while all this was going on, he was writing, constantly. For which
I’m heartily grateful.

So I got a new iPod, see? And I’m ripping CDs onto my computer to download to the iPod. And when I rip the CDs, iTunes goes and queries CDDB for the track titles and similar information. One of things CDDB tracks is the so-called “genre”.

A digression: when did “genre” stop referring to the form of the work (short story, novel) and start referring to the content (mystery, science fiction, romance)?

Now, Jane and I have a considerable amount of Irish, Scottish, and English traditional music on CD. And somehow, when I put a Planxty CD or a Silly Wizard CD into the slot, CDDB comes back and tells me that it’s “World” music.

There ain’t no such thing as “world” music, people. It’s simply a term that record stores use so that you can see from across the room where to find the music that’s sorted under its country of origin because they don’t know where else to put it. Beyond that, it’s not a useful designation.