Towse: views from the hill

Water (or some other flowing liquid) on Mars.

Recently!

How cool is that?

Maybe it’s the season. Maybe that’s why I’m teary.

Maybe it’s the pictures the newspapers and news sites ran and the waiting and the hopes that everyone who knew the story had and that he was a local guy and we had that local connection and a bump in hope when mom and daughters were rescued while the search went on for the husband/dad who had trekked off for help.

He was found today and something about it all tears my heart to shreds.

Maybe because Dad’s bday was yesterday and this is the first bday we’ve had without him. Maybe because Skip’s bday is in a few days and I’ve never got through a December without tears since he died. Maybe because it’s December and dammit this shouldn’t happen.

But it does.

My heart goes out to the Kim family, his dad, his wife, his kids, his family, everyone who loved him.

This is not what any of us wanted to happen. We were all hoping against hope for days that the story would have a happy ending. A team of searchers spent all their energies in the end for naught except that they found his body and … closure.

The daughters will learn some day that their dad died looking for help for them and their mom and slogged on bravely with more courage than I think I would have had, through hunger and cold and pain and impossible conditions, bravely.

I am just so very sorry that he won’t be with them.

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, known collectively as RyanIsHungry have a video interview with Eric Case, discussing beta Blogger.

I was checking to see if Vienna Teng was going to be back in town for the holidays. A brief profile of her in the Examiner this morning made me think of it.

VT comes from that fair ville to the south of here where the younger, younger guys grew up. She graduated from the HS a couple few years ahead of the older younger guy, graduated from Stanford with a computer science degree, worked for Cisco and worked on her music while she was at Cisco, quit Cisco for her music, now lives here in the city, when she’s not elsewhere for her music.

The younger younger guy has been a fan of hers for a long time and gave me one of her CDs years back and said, listen to this, mom …

The Examiner, POS that it can be archive-wise since the ownership change, of course doesn’t have a link to the article in this morning’s paper for me to send on to the younger younger guy.

Home for the holidays, VT will be playing at the Independent, Dec 22-23. $20/. We went to her show at the Independent last December, on the eve of his nibs’ bday. The date’s a bit later, but … maybe this year too.

If you don’t know Vienna Teng and the music she makes, click some of the music clips she has up at myspace.com.

Gee those CDs would make excellent holiday presents, wouldn’t they?

Searching Google with her Vienna Teng moniker and the one she was born with, I found this click to the Houston Chronicle for the article that was in today’s Examiner. Funny thing, that.

What everyone needs: Bath Tissue Holder with Dock for Apple iPod™.

Includes two mid-range speakers, two high-range speakers, volume, power on/off. W00t!

Do your friends have this?!??!

I think not!

Be the envy of all the crowd!

Some discussion in comments re mashups and me being amazed that a Sony sort I’d met had just heard about mashups a day or two before. She had a seventeen-year-old kid for pete’s sake! Then turns out our Paula didn’t know mashups. A couple teenagers she asked didn’t know mashups.

Is it this city I live in? It’s not like I’m into the clubbing scene with its DJs and mashups nor do I hang out at avant garde theaters or art galleries. Mashups are just part of the scene and have been for years now.

Oh, forgot to come back, sorry. I asked two 13 year olds. They’d never heard of it. My daughter said it sounded like a gang bang, while her friend thought it had something to do with drugs. There ya go!

Wow. No kidding.

Mashups are the raging copyright infringement issue hereabouts. Music mashup creators take two or more pieces of music and mix and mash ‘em together to create something entirely distinct. Some are pretty clever, others are lame. Other mashup creators have moved into video mashups, expropriating images and clips. Recontextualizing, they call it.

e.g. music mashups:

Check this one out: A mashup with Jay Z, Beyonce and Britney. Yow! Yikes!

People Like Us’ Swinglargo

DJ John‘s Chariots of Fire vs Kalifornia vs Music vs It’s My Life

e.g. video mashups:

Faithless Hexstatic Mashup

Added: The Passion of Benny Hill (linker thingie lifted from Sour Grapes)

Fun stuff. Very annoying to some of the folks whose music/video/pictures are used. But I think being “very annoying” is part and parcel of the reason mashups exist.

The Bargain Barn, a cheap wine/liquor/stuff chain, has some marked down mashup Christmas CDs with old time favorites like Sinatra and Como paired with rappers and such like — for sale for 99 cents.

And, in honor of the season, a mashup which some people think is genius, but which I think is not hardly as good as they think it is: Santa Benz. Would I buy an album for this song? No.

Added #2: Over dinner at Perbacco his nibs pointed out to me (yes, we do discuss blog posts over dinner … how weird is that?) that mashups aren’t just music and video. There are a gazillion Google Maps mashups including mashups with Craigslist and Google Maps — HousingMaps f’rex — and mashups with Google maps and Yahoo Traffic like this. Interested? Check out Alan Taylor’s Mashup Resources.

Dragons, Knights, and Angels: the magazine of Christian fantasy and science fiction

submission guidelines

In 1999, Rebecca Shelley founded the Dragons, Knights, & Angels (DKA) magazine on the idea that the power of God is the greatest magic of all, and that idea remains at the core of our mission. We are not at all interested in stories that preach, tear down, or indict. Rather, we look for stories and poems that build up the reader and give them opportunity to be better for having read them.

DKA is open to edgy stories that explore the fullness of life. However, sexual content, profanity, and other elements that would be considered offensive to the general Christian community must be handled with great care and be essential to the story. Profanity can almost always be omitted, suggested, or implied. Sexual content can almost always be removed or referred to, rather than explicitly stated.

Needs: Fiction and poetry
Prefers <5K wds but will consider works up to 7K wds.

PAYS: $10 for short stories (<1500 wds)
$ 5 for flash fiction (<1500 wds)
$ 5 for poetry

by check or PayPal

Pays on acceptance for one time electronic rights. (… as well as archival rights). No simultaneous submissions.

[hattip to Rebecca Luella Miller]

Permanently stationed in San Francisco, the Cape Henry is part of the Ready Reserve Force. Mostly she just hangs around south of here, ready to do what ever needs to be done, should she be asked. Every once in a while, she goes out for a spin, just to make sure all her gears are oiled. 

podcast market

PseudoPod submission guidelines

Pseudopod is always looking for quality fiction to feed our listeners. If you’re a writer with a horror short story that you’d like to hear narrated by one of our talented performers, we’d like to see it. Probably.

Pseudopod is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for horror. We apply a fairly broad definition to “horror,” running the spectrum from supernatural horror (Dracula) to realistic horror (Cujo). We’re not going to try to pin down the genre’s boundaries and hack away at it until there’s nothing left. (We’ll leave that sort of hacking for your stories.) What matters is that the stories should be dark and they should be entertaining.

PAYS: $20 for short fiction and $10 for flash fiction.

I heard last week that Google Answers is history.

It is.

Luckily Google will be keeping the archives online.

What did them in? Competition. Yahoo! Answers in particular.

Yahoo! harnessed what Google always had, an army of folks willing to answer questions for free. Google charged for their answers. Yahoo doesn’t.

Is the quality of answers better? Do you get what you pay for? I don’t know.

I am glad, however, that Google Answers is leaving their archive online. I tap into it when I need to.