Towse: views from the hill

Anousheh Ansari lifts off with the Soyuz TMA-9 Expedition 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome tomorrow, Kazakhstan time, which means a bit more than fourteen hours from now. The crew members she’s flying with are NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.

Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-born American multi-millionaire, is flying up to the International Space station with both the Iranian and the USAn flags sewn on her suit.

She has an interesting story and a blog, of course. She won’t be blogging from space, but you can read her befores and her afters. Her husband will be blogging in her stead while she’s away.

We were in Bhutan on September 11, 2001, as part of a trip that took us through Nepal, up to Tibet, back to Nepal, then on to Bhutan. We spent a total of maybe three days in Kathmandu, wandering around, looking at things.

I was fascinated by Kumari Devi, the living goddess of Nepal, who lives in a building that looks out over Durbar Square.

Ian McDonald was fascinated by the living goddess too and wrote Little Goddess, loosely based on Kumari Devi and set at a time in the future. The story was published in Asimov’s, June 2005, and was a Hugo nominee for best novella this year. Inside Job by Connie Willis won the Hugo in that category.

Auntie K sent me a link the other day to an article about Kelly Link, a woman who self-published her first two collections of SFF short stories to great acclaim.

MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS (July 2005) got great reviews from Time Magazine, Salon, SFC and others and was a Locus Award winner. The book’s been picked up by Harcourt/Harvest, USA and has also been published in Japan, Italy, Russia, Germany and elsewhere.

Want to know what all the buzz is about?

The Faery Handbag, collected in MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, won a 2005 Hugo and a 2005 Nebula.

Link’s title story, Magic for Beginners was a Hugo award nominee for best novella this year. (Connie Willis won best novella with Inside Job.)

Here are links to other 2006 Hugo nominees. Hugo winners have been announced, so some links to nominated works are now 404.

but a few hours ago, the Bay Bridge was wading through it. 

The peahen next door to my parents’ place had a couple chicks this spring. The chicks are now half-grown and the family (sometimes with Dad, sometimes not) hang out on the redwood picnic table on the back deck.

Oh, I love this sort of stuff: The Museum of Useful Things.

49 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA.

Question is, is it still there? The Web site has dates of 2004. The “exhibits” articles’ latest date is 2003.

x’d fingers it’s still there when next I visit Boston.

An editor in Australia insists the serial comma is used in America and, therefore, Americans should use serial commas. Period.

(As a very minor matter, Father Luke is an American, so there should be a comma before the “and”. )

Not necessarily, as I pointed out on his blog. I write according to what an editor asks of me. If an editor wants serial commas, I’ll use them. If not, I don’t, unless the comma is needed to clarify what might be confusing writing. (The classic example of a sentence that needs a serial comma to make clear sense is the perhaps apocryphal book dedication: “I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”)

Not all Americans use serial commas, I said.

Alas, he swatted my demurs away. He edits American writing he said.

So? was my thought.

I was thumbing through my stacks of magazines today, ripping out pages, tossing the bulk. On a whim, I decided to see if there were serial commas in the articles, or a lack thereof.

I am here to report back that in the magazine I checked (W) there was a lack thereof. Seems not all American editors believe in serial commas. Of the articles I checked, all articles that had sentences that could have used serial commas didn’t.

I can’t find the September issue of W site on the Web but I did find a click to an article about Janet Jackson from W‘s October issue. Note that the first sentence of the article is missing the serial comma before the “and” that some people say Americans should always use.

House style for W seems to be no serial commas, but then that makes sense, doesn’t it? Why would there even be something called “the Harvard comma” (a nod to the fact that Harvard has the serial comma as part of their house style) if the serial comma is ubiquitous?

For Nobody (in case she missed it), a click to Joel Stein’s TIME essay, Cupcake Nation. [28Aug2006]

[...]

That’s what bugs me about cupcakes: they’re fake happiness, wrought in Wonka unfood colors. They appeal to the same unadventurous instincts that drive adults to read Harry Potter and watch Finding Nemo without a kid in the room. They’re small and safe, and so people convince themselves that they can’t have that many calories. They are the dessert of a civilization in decline.

[...]

What’s the use of having this, if it can’t be reached when the Blogger servers are having problems?

… and if it could be reached, it hasn’t been updated since late August?

Hello, Blogger! Hello, Google!

When your system’s unusable and flaking out, put information somewhere that lets people know you’re aware of the problem, working on it, and may even have an estimated “back up” goal.

Funny (Hahahahaha. Sad. No, funny!) note where the writers.com books, caelum press, infrapress submission guidelines should be:

We are very sorry, but we can no longer say that we are looking for submissions. This is not because we are not looking for more material to publish, it is due to the incessant email from people who evidently could not read our guidelines. We have a firm belief that if you cannot read, you should not write. Most publishers share this belief.

We encourage writing no matter what your goals are, but remind you: Although everyone has the right to write, not everyone has a right to be published. If you do deserve to be read, we hope that you find publication. Good luck.