Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Not all the stuff that happened today was bad, however. I recently groused about the Muppets being basically unavailable on DVD, while complete and utter drek was getting the Season-by-Season boxed set treatment. Well, now the Muppets is, too! According to TV Guide, The Muppet Show Season One (1976-77) will be available starting 8/9, list price $39.99 ($28 as a pre-order from amazon).

I am SO there. Manahmanah!

update: I’ve removed the amazon link, since the server they use for the associates links seems to be broken at the moment

Damn. The coolant and oil pressure lights went on in my car today so I took it to the mechanic; the bad news is that it’s going to take two or three hundred dollars to fully diagnose the problem; the worse news is that the cheaper of the two things it could be (given what they’ve discovered so far) is a cracked head-gasket which will run a grand or so to replace. If it’s the other thing, a cracked engine block, it would be about three to four grand, if I even wanted to bother. The car’s a 96 Saturn with 90,000 miles on it, so while by-and-large I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth on it….I sure didn’t want to replace it for a few more years.

Which means, among other things, I’m probably not taking any expensive vacations this summer. I almost booked a trip to Vancouver yesterday, and was trying to plan the dates to visit my family in the Bay Area in August, and now I’m thinking I can’t really afford it. Maybe if it was just the head-gasket, and I wanted to gamble on nothing else going seriously wrong for a while…sigh. It’ll be a few days at least before I know. Luckily, I don’t need the car every day, but it’s sure going to make shopping inconvenient. How inconvenient was driven home to me when I got home at 11:00, realized that I was completely out of certain necessities (the heaviest of which was kitty litter), and had to lug it back from the nearest 24-hour Rite Aid on foot.

Twice in the past week when the subject of Red Dwarf has come up and I’ve sung part of the theme¹. Some of my friends, who are certainly familiar with the show, have expressed surprise at the lyrics, which apparently never registered with them. So here they are, courtesy of Classic cult television theme song lyrics

Red Dwarf, Theme Tune

It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere,
I’m all alone, more or less,
Let me fly, far away from here,
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose,
Drinking fresh mango juice,
Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes,
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.

PALGN 2005 :: PSP pornography is ‘utterly undesirable’

With the launch of the very first pornographic movies on the PSP’s UMD video format imminent, Sony have spoken out on the subject to the Japanese press, denouncing the releases as ‘utterly undesirable’. Yet despite their decidedly dim view on the arrival of PSP porn, the Japanese giant is unable to prevent the discs from being released, as the firm can only monitor the content of games. From a legal standpoint, Sony have very little control over the content of films released on the new UMD format.

I think Sony is missing a bet here. I mean, watching something like Spiderman 2 on a handheld always struck me as a dubious proposition–and at around $30 each the PSP movies are expensive for something you can’t also play on your television. But people are willing to pay big money for porn (even monkeys will apparently pay for monkey porn, but that’s a different post)–I could definitely see this eating into the market for hotel-room cable porn. Even more discreet for the business traveler, and, hey, you can hold it in one hand…

By a startling coincidence, Miyazaki has made a movie that happens to have the same name as one of my favorite YA novels. Even some of the characters have the same names.

It wasn’t bad, exactly, although it was trite, but it does really raise the question of why Miyazaki even bothered to base it on the book if all he was going to use was a couple of chapters near the beginning. Not even the themes survived (Spirited Away was much closer to the themes of the Diana Wynne Jones book than the movie of Howl is). I guess he really liked the image of the castle that moves about under its own power, and the fire-demon that lives in the hearth.

It’s entirely possible that if you’ve never read the book, you’ll really enjoy the movie. But as hard as I tried to put aside my knowledge of the book, I just couldn’t get swept up in it, and the absurdly pat ending just left a sour taste in my mouth.

Shaenon Garrity, author of my favorite webcomic, Narbonic, just sent this to the mailing list:

This year, for the first time, Narbonic is nominated in the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards (www.ccawards.com). It’s nominated in two categories, Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Comedic Comic. During the WCCA voting period, from now until July 3, the entire Narbonic archives on www.moderntales.com will be free to all readers. Although Narbonic always offers free samples from the archives, this is the first time the entire five-year archive has been made available to non-subscribers since Modern Tales launched.

Since I know that some of you that I’ve recommended it to have been put off by having to pay to read the archives, now’s your chance to catch up free, gratis, and for nothing.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

And if you’re a blogger, you might consider joining the EFF.

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

For instance Handbook of the International Phonetic Association has the following SIPS: phonetic diphthongs, recorded passage, alveolar trill, transcribed passage, long counterparts, word final position, lexical stress, voiced obstruents, open syllables, stress placement, unstressed positions, nasalized vowels, educated speakers, velar nasal, front vowels, high vowels, vowel qualities, unstressed syllables

What puzzles me a little is that not all the books, even all the searchable books, have SIPS, and I’m not sure why.

Manahmahna

Which reminds me, why the hell is it that when every TV show under the sun is coming out in boxed sets (Hee-Haw, for crying out loud. Three’s Company. *Airwolf*), there’s still no season-by-season collections of the Muppet Show? There are a couple (four maybe?) DVD with some of the famous episodes, organized somewhat thematically (e.g. biggest name musical guests), but somebody somewhere is overlooking the opportunity to practically print money. Are the rights to the shows trapped in some legal Limbo?

hat tip Oxblog

I got a wireless card for my laptop today, so that I can work in one of the two air-conditioned rooms in the house, instead of being stuck in my office, which is getting increasingly uncomfortable as summer progresses. I think it was 90 Friday, and if it wasn’t outside, it sure felt that way inside. Wonder of wonders, the wireless card worked the first time I tried it. Of course, I’ve probably jinxed myself by writing that, but we’ll see bright and early tomorrow.