Towse: views from the hill

Tom Jobim rolls over in his grave.

Listen up!

Be sure to listen all the way through. (cough. um. cough) Well, Vinicius de Moraes is rolling too.

from Dictionaraoke: the Singing Dictionary.

Don’t miss
Manilow’s Copa. Copacaban … aaaah.

Wikiquote

Wikiquote, a free online compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, including sources (where known), translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information! The English version of Wikiquote has 6,206 pages so far with many thousands of quotations and proverbs.

Quotes are also available sorted by films | literary works | occupations | proverbs | television shows | themes | electronic games | mnemonics.

e.g. films/TIME BANDITS

    Evil Genius: God is not interested in technology… He knows nothing of the potential of the micro-chip or the silicon revolution. He’s obsessed with making the grass grow and getting rainbows right… Look at what he spends his time on. 43 species of parrot! Nipples… for men!

    Robert: Slugs.

    Evil Genius: Slugs! HE created slugs! They can’t hear. They can’t speak. They can’t operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?

Alls usns are gearing up for the 18th of April when San Francisco will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.

UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library has pulled together the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection Website.

The project is a joint effort of the Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, the California State Library, Stanford University, the Huntington Library, and the Society of California Pioneers.

The site includes pictures, text, links, references, and search capability. Check out the very cool 360deg panoramic collage view of the devastated city. Bancroft Library created the collage from eleven photographs taken from the roof of the Fairmont Hotel at the top of Nob Hill.

The site also has an interactive map. Click the piece of the City you’re interested in and the site serves up photos of the earthquake aftermath for that area.

Telegraph.co.uk has hooked novelist Louise Doughty for a new column teaching the art of writing fiction: A Novel In A Year.

Check it out.

[via Miss Snark]

From Toasted Cheese:

12 Baby Steps to a Complete Story

This tutorial takes you through a twelve-month process to writing a story.

e.g.
January: Characters
Exercise #1

Post and ask for feedback on it. Do readers like your characters? Hate them? Are they eager to find out what happens to these people? Make changes/additions incorporating the suggestions you’re given.

Note: All of the exercises/months assume you have a posse that will provide feedback.

[via the comments thread at Miss Snark]

Sara Donati/Rosina Lippi’s “storytelling: sex scenes”

Bookmarked for future reference. Packed full of useful information and examples.

This collection of essays on writing sex scenes is just a part of Rosina Lippi’s site and her blog, titled storytelling.

Found a reference to C’etait un Rendezvous at n-judah love song.

The N-Judah, for those not familiar, is the San Francisco Muni Metro route that runs from the Caltrain station downtown to Ocean Beach out by, yes, the Ocean.

n-judah love song is a paean to the city by someone who works at Six Apart.

By the time I clicked the link, the flick was no longer available at the URL she’d given. I went off on a search, popping / rendezvous20_04.mov / into my search engine of choice. Next link I found, no longer available. No longer available. No longer available.

Eventually — persistence pays off! — I found a working link in someone’s directory, which link I won’t put here because he’ll probably get overage charges from the number of people hitting his site.

Say, maybe that’s why the other sites are down.

The film is a thrill.

Here is the film as described at n-judah love song, lifted from elsewhere and ad infinitum: “On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive him at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. [...] Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”

Vicarious thrills.

(n.b. Sounds of gunning engines and squealy brakes. ‘Ware those considering logging on from work.)

Update: Found on the N-Judah came up with another link. Try this one.

Today is a federal holiday to honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Schools, libraries, city, state and federal offices are closed. The Post Office won’t be delivering mail. The stock market is closed. But here in Silicon Valley, most private firms are not taking the day off.

I read an interview this past week in Parade Magazine with a young woman who used to make appearances at churches and other gatherings when she was just seven years old, bringing people to tears by reciting King’s I Have A Dream speech. Today, she is a young adult, dedicating herself to that dream.

King should be remembered not only for his dream, but also for his work to bring that dream to reality, for his decision that the time had come to take steps to reach that dream.

In April, 1963, four months before he gave his Dream speech, King was thrown in jail for leading protests in Birmingham, AL.

Local white clergymen in a letter to the Birmingham News criticized King for coming to Birmingham as an “outsider” to lead demonstrations that were “unwise and untimely.”

King responded with what is probably his second-best known work, his Letter from Birmingham Jail wherein he says

[...]

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

[...]

I would hope, that if King could somehow see where we are today, he would be encouraged by how much things have changed. I would hope, that if King could somehow see where we are today, he would not despair, that things have not changed as much as they could … or should.

Update: A friend just sent this link to the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, which is raising funds for a memorial in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Caution: the site’s lead page has both streaming audio excerpts of MLK’s Dream speech and streaming video of other events and people. Takes a while to load even at broadband speeds, perhaps all the moreso because today is MLK Day and the URL is whizzing around the cyberweb.

doyle sent me a link to the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma last Sunday and I decided to add it to the journalism links on the non-fiction links page.

As long as I was editing the page, I decided to go through my latest NetMechanic report and clean up the busted links NetMechanic had identified.

Knowing that NetMechanic isn’t perfect and has problems identifying re-directs and similar issues, I wound up wiling away hours Tuesday click-click-clicking through all the links on the non-fiction links page to check them and update them and replace them until every last URL had been vetted.

Today I decided to add chaseadventure.com to my paying markets list and, what with this and with that, wound up click-click-clicking through all the markets listed on the A-B page and the P-R page. I deleted dead markets, updated information I spotted that had changed re pay rates and what-not, moved market information to other pages if magazine titles had changed, updated 404 and redirect URLs, and so on and so on.

Now I need some exercise and fresh air to clear the cobwebs from my brain before I continue on with the cobweb cleaning on the Web site.

Happy New Year, and thanks, doyle. See what you caused?