Good day to stay away from the news

filkertom has a good post on today's significance. I'm going to leave it at that, because I hate to see what ought to be a somber memorial turned into an excuse for hatemongering, fearmongering, and political bombast.

Hope the rest of the week is better.

Free [strike]puppy[/strike] monitor

Free to a good home: 17" Hitachi SuperScan Elite 630 CRT monitor. Will out-perform any 17" LCD on the market. Can also be used as a doorstop, hurricane-rated paperweight, or small-room space heater.

On display at Grand Central Starport until Saturday, when it gets dragged off to be recycled. Mention this ad and I'll throw in a free CD.

A four-dimensional tribute to the late Madeleine L'Engle

NPR: A Four-Dimensional Tribute to the Late Madeleine L'Engle

An actual tesseract is best described as a four dimensional cube...and is kind of confusing. So, in memory of L'Engle, we met up with Physicist David Morgan who took a little time out of his day to talk tesseracts with the BPP. Put your measley three-dimensional brains to work on this (Via Boing Boing)

The "Daisy Ad", 43 years later

CONELRAD | DAISY: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF AN INFAMOUS AND ICONIC AD - PART ONE

Every election season when politicians unleash their expensive and (usually) unimaginative attack ads, op-ed writers invoke the unofficial title of the most notorious 60 seconds in advertising history: "The Daisy Ad" (official title: "Peace, Little Girl," aka "Daisy Girl," "The Daisy Spot, "aka "Little Girl – Countdown"). The spot features a little girl picking petals off of a daisy in a field and counting out of sequence just before an adult voiceover interjects a "military" countdown which is then followed by stock footage of a nuclear explosion and the cautionary words of President Lyndon B. Johnson: "These are the stakes – to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." The ad – which never identifies its target – was aimed at reinforcing the perception that the 1964 Republican candidate for president, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, could not be trusted with his finger on the button. Title screen from 'David and Bathsheba'As has often been recited, the Daisy ad aired only once as a paid advertisement – on NBC during the network movie (DAVID AND BATHSHEBA) on Monday, September 7, 1964. Since that long ago Labor Day, the film of the child and her daisies has been re-played millions of times.

(Via BoingBoing, of course.)

I've seen it. It was very effective.

Clearing my tabs: mainstream lit considered as a genre

Tangent Article - Rant Fantastic - Dave Wolverton

I recently read in Tangent #17 James Gunn's response to a question by Cynthia Ward, who asked about the dichotomy between mainstream literary standards and those of science fiction and fantasy, and asked someone to "Name names."

I respect Gunn's work a great deal, but I disagreed with his response, partly because I began my writing career in the literary mainstream, made my first money in that field, and eventually came to recognize that fundamentally I disagreed with much of what was being done. There are differences between my approach to writing as a modern fantasist (who makes no apologies for being a commercial writer) and the approach taken by literary mainstream writers. The issues aren't trivial.

Cynthia asked what the earmarks are of a mainstream story, and Gunn responded by saying that its "distinguishing characteristic is that it has no distinguishing genre characteristic."

This is of course what my professors taught me in English Lit 101. And it is somewhat true. The Western genre is defined by its setting. The Romance and Mystery genres are defined by the types of conflict the tales will deal with. Speculative fiction may be defined by the fact that we as authors and fans typically agree that nothing like the story that we tell has ever happened--though one could well argue that speculative fiction isn't a "genre" in the classical sense anyway.

But I contend that over the past 120 years, and particularly in the last 20 years, the literary mainstream has evolved into a genre with its own earmarks. It is just as rigid in its strictures and just as narrow in its accepted treatment of characters, conflicts and themes as any other genre.

(Via this post by kayshapero a couple of days ago.)