See more of Telling Tales with Teeth by Stephanie C. Kincaid »

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012091.html

A few lines from Wikipedia’s summary of the anime film TAMALA2010: A Punk Cat in Space:

The film is in a large part a cartoon cat version of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 […] It begins in Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders through streets with an axe embedded in its head repeating an advertisement for meat over a loudspeaker.

(via Calamity Jon)

Also, looking over Pynchon’s page on Wikiquote has me determined to finally get around to reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Might need new glasses for Against the Day, though.

And hey, look:

“If America was a person, — and it sat down, — Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.” — Mason & Dixon (1997)

“If the U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness” — Against the Day (2006)

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012090.html

As further proof of Jim Henley’s boast that SF&F geek culture is the new mainstream, the NY Times has run an article about something bored role-playing gamers have been doing ever since the white box days: Packing dice together in odd configurations.

I look forward to the upcoming five-part series investigating the world of doodling on graph paper and quoting Monty Python.

I’m still working like crazy, but still clinging to that New Year’s Resolution and writing every day. Sometimes it’s only a few hundred words, but I’m hanging in there. It’ll be a lot easier (and I’ll be a lot more prolific) when I’m out from under these Fort Freak edits. They are EPIC. And a little frightening. But they’re going to make for a huge improvement.

So! I think now’s the time to go ahead and debut the first word-metrics of the year, with regards to Hellbent — since that’s the only fiction project for which I’m composing new words at this time.* Ergo, voila. Here are this year’s stats on my second vampire adventure — this time with my sexy thief, her shady agent, a cigar box full of magical penis bones, a mentally ill former NASA engineer-turned-sorceress, and the continued fabulosity of a Cuban drag queen:

Project: Hellbent
Deadline: August 9, 2010
New Words Written: 5421
Present Total Word Count: 5421



Darling duJour: “The busker leaned into the lyrics of ‘Yellow’ like each word was a hook he was extracting from his eyelids.”

Things Accomplished in Fiction: Introduction; some recap from previous book; introduction of the weaselly but hilarious little agent; a rather alarming number of dick jokes.

Things Accomplished in Real Life: Wrapped up a day-job project and received another one to replace it; did my usual run/exercise — at which I am seriously no good whatsoever, but I’m working on it; spent all afternoon plowing through “Remember the Rathole” on which I wrote one full new section and seriously amended two others; regretfully declined my fifth invitation to blurb a book this year - which is mostly notable because I don’t think I even got five requests last year (and usually I try to say “yes,” but I’m totally swamped right now); that’s pretty much it.

And because every time I start posting these stats again, a dozen people pipe up wanting to know where I got my word-stat bar — here you go. Get one of your very own, and tally away.

In other news, I suppose I shall leave you with a links round-up before taking a few minutes to just sit on the couch and drink cheap red wine for an hour or two because I BELIEVE I DESERVE IT. Ahem.

• “Tanglefoot” reprint — Got word last night that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are picking up my novelette “Tanglefoot” for their STEAMPUNK RELOADED anthology! I, for one, am tickled well beyond pink. I’m tickled … like … fuchsia or something. Excessively tickled, anyway. That’s for damn sure.

• Chiarascuro reviews Boneshaker - As a matter of full disclosure, I used to review for these very fine folks. But I don’t read for them anymore, and I had no idea they were going to review Boneshaker, much less that they would like it.

• Shiny Shelf also tackles Boneshaker - Poking it with a friendly stick.

• See also, AdamChristopher.co.uk - Where Boneshaker is declared one of the site’s top “awesome and radical” titles of the year … right next to Stephen King, like I’m gonna complain about that.

• This really did happen the other day - Though I wasn’t scared, just surprised. They shanghaied me in the midst of looking around for my missing husband; and frankly, I’m just not accustomed to being recognized, so it always throws me for a tiny loop when it happens. They were very cool, though!
  

15:03 URGENT: Support marriage equality by telling judge to televise Prop 8 trial. bit.ly/6cLxIm @credomobile @couragecampaign Please RT #

15:22 Clothing destroyed instead of donated: bit.ly/5Nmcht (link to NYTimes) (via @marahverse) #

15:32 Bottled honey shuts down California airport bit.ly/4qRrZm (via @BoingBoing) #morons #

http://mrs-o.org/newdata/2010/1/6/a-staple-suit.html

Image used with kind permission from Small Dog Electronics

I thought we could use a new post to tide us over until Mrs. O is back on the official first lady circuit in Washington. Though a bit after the fact, I recently received permission from a photographer to feature a photo of Mrs. O taken at a White House holiday reception on December 7. It's notable because it gives us another look at Mrs. O's Michael Kors gold lurex suit jacket and pencil skirt.

For those keeping count, Mrs. O has worn at least three of these Michael Kors suits, including the red silk shantung and yellow lacquered boucle versions shown below. It's interesting to see how different fabrics can take the same suit through various seasons.

Image by Rick Gershon / Getty Images

Photo by Mary Riley / Reuters

Place to discuss Your Itch.

Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there.

See more of Owl-Eyed by Lucas E Ahlsen »

p 392: “…every branch of trade in which the merchant can sell his goods for a price which replaces to him, with the ordinary profits of stock, the whole capital employed in preparing and sending them to market, can be carried on without a bounty.”

This is not the first time we’ve seen that phrase, “the ordinary profits of stock.”  But what, exactly, does it mean?  Smith appears to believe that, when money is productively invested, a certain amount of profit is natural and normal.  What determines this amount?  What is the percentage, and why?  For someone so precise in other things, this vagueness really stands out.  It goes back to his assertion, in Book 1, that the value of commodities comes from wages, rent, and profit.  In fact, that is how (most) of the value is divided after the sale, but it isn’t it’s source of the value.  There is no “ordinary profit of stock.”

Later, he makes another fundamental (thought perfectly understandable) error.  On page 397, speaking of corn (ie, grain), he says, “It regulates the money price of labour, which must always be such as to enable the labourer to purchase a quantity of corn sufficient to maintain him and his family either in the liberal, moderate, or scanty manner in which the advancing, stationary, or declining circumstances of the society oblige his employers to maintain him.”  And further down, “The money price of labour, and of everything that is the produce either of land or labour, must necessarily either rise or fall in proportion to the money price of corn.”

In other words, because grain is the staple food, it controls the price of labor, and the price of labor controls the value of commodities.  But even in his day, the cost or price of labor (wages), insofar as it was determined by the cost of necessaries the worker, was also determined by the price of wool, leather, furnishings, cotton, and all of the other things consumed by the worker.  Moreover, the value of a commodity is determined by the value of labor (measured in time), not the cost of labor.  Raising the value of basic necessities effectively lowers wages, but this does not change the value of those commodities (whether expressed in labor-time, money, or even grain).

Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there.