November 2001 Archive Page

Wild America - a short story by Jayne Loader.

Welcome to Wild America! Do you need instructions? YES You are living in the richest kingdom in the world, where others have found fame and fortune, though it is rumored that some who enter here are never heard from again. Where would you like to begin your adventure?

(short story by E.M. Forster, 1909)
     I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."
     "Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked. "You mustn't say anything against the Machine."
     "Why not?"
     "One mustn't."  --The Machine Stops

"In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading." (Miall and Dobson) --Reading Hypertext and the Experience of LiteratureJournal of Digital Information)

English studies after Sept 11: What's the point? "The theoretical models that have dominated English and the related disciplines in the last two decades are especially effective tools (along with the institutional factors that have always existed) for creating demoralization." Lisa Ruddick --The Near Enemy of the Humanities is ProfessionalismChronicle)

What if David Mamet rewrote 2001: A Space Oddysey? 
(Warning: offensive language.)

• Bowman: It's just... how do I say this. These dead crewmembers.
• Hal: I don't follow you.
• Bowman: These crewmembers here that were in cryogenic suspension. That are now dead.
• Hal: Oh yes. That was self-defense.
• Bowman: Hal, look at me. What am I, a f---ing idiot? They were in cryogenic suspension, for God's sake.
• Hal: They were coming at me with a knife. Extremely... slowly.

--Dammit, DaveModern Humorist)

You may have heard news stories trumpeting a great scientific breakthrough in the controversial practice of cloning human beings. Some critics claim that reporters, looking for easy stories to publish after a holiday weekend, put too much faith in a company's press release. --Experts Rip Cloning 'Story'Wired)

Everyone's, like, using it all the time, but David Grambs is all, like, "What price is literate, listenable English paying for its increasing currency?" --The Like VirusVocabula Review)

"[S]hort and pithy, bumper stickers are a literary genre ideally suited to hurried Americans who may nevertheless feel morally obligated to express opinions... They allow us to state the thesis without the supporting paragraphs..."  Tina Bennett-Kastor --Bumper BitesVocabula Review)

"Under the guise of protecting private property, a series of new laws and regulations are dismantling the very architecture that made the Internet a framework for global innovation." Lawrence Lessig --The Internet Under SiegeForeign Policy Magazine)

"Seldom mentioned, hardly ever seen, exactly the kind of movie that, yes, a fertilizer salesman named Hal P. Warren would decide to make, one fine summer in 1966." (Manos available on DVD!) --Manos: The Hands of FateReviewed by Mimosa)

"Before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, anxiety-related disorders cost the U.S. $42 billion a year in medical and work-related losses. Now mental health professionals can only make educated estimates of how many more of us will be affected in the near future..." --9/11: The Psychological AftermathScientific American)

"Most of the puzzles in Puzzle World fall into the Put-Together, Take-apart, Interlocking or Impossible Object categories because this is where most of the high-quality handcrafting takes place." --Puzzle WorldJohn Rausch)

(rec.humor.funny) [random joke] "Is this a burger which I see before me,
The soft bun in my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I eat thee not, and yet I want thee still." Gregory Lam --MacDonald's Soliloquy

"The likes of my colleagues no longer thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated thoughts originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become native speakers." Deborah Cameron  --The Tyranny of NicespeakNew Statesman)

"Under every scenario used in the study, the winning margin remains less than 500 votes out of almost 6 million cast." --Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush Washington Post)

"So who is this mysterious kingmaker who changed the world from her shadowy government bureaucracy? Has she seen any good movies lately? Is her marriage happy? America wants to know. America needs to know!" --Official Terry LePore Ballot Designer Fan Page

A lake. A salt mine. An oil drilling rig. A lack of communication. You figure it out. --Peaceful Lake Peigneur Turned into Maelstrom

Coca-Cola spent $750,000 to develop a procedure to serve carbonated beverages in space.  Pepsi filmed a $5 million commercial aboard Mir. And then there's "Final Frontier Beef Jerky." --A Brief History of Space MarketingSpace.com)

Hmm.  Jakob Nielsen writes a column with a headline that implies you are being inhumane if you don't make your web pages accessible to the disabled.  Jakob Nielsen's company is selling a 148-page report on making web pages accessible to the disabled.  Coincidence? (Nielsen is smart. He's doing good deeds. He's giving away lots of free advice. He's also making tons of money. More power to him.) --Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as PeopleUseIT.com)

"Everything, everything, everything boils down to the heart, and poetry is a vehicle of clarity, an articulate and strong voice screaming through the static and white noise." -Frank Matagrano, a poet featured on Jan Carroll's poetry weblog. --And Now It's Dark: Three poets talk about poetry after September 11, 2001

"Corporate English obscures reality by excluding people." While this article is marked as "commentary," I find it ethically unsound for its author to suggest that magazine writers should intentionally insert biased language that promotes a pro-union / anti-business point of view, on the grounds that "corporate English commonly portrays economic processes as if they just happen, independent of people." First of all, it would be far more useful to write an article that critiques the coded language of the various stakeholders on a particular political issue. 

• I'm hardly an economist, and definitely not a socialist... but according to this author's logic, Lenin was accusing Marx of being equally exclusionary when he [Lenin] wrote in 1894, "Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intentions, but, rather, on the contrary, determining the will, consciousness and intentions of men." To Marx, the economic evolution of society was an inevitable force -- the change in the economy would "just happen".  (Of course, Marx would have attacked unions as mealy-mouthed wimps who have learned how to whine but lack the guts to revolt. )

• What's perhaps even funnier is that the author considers the brief and clear sentence "Tuition fees are going up." to be an example of intentionally exclusionary "corporate English."

• Here's a much better example of deliberately obscure language: "In order to ensure that the university can continue to provide the level of excellence that its students expect, even during these shaky economic times, a new source of revenue must be found. All other alternatives being exhausted, it has been determined that a new tuition rate structure may be necessary. 

--Language as PoliticsThe Guild Reporter)

Novell releases a survey showing that British companies lose billions annually due to spam. Guess who sells a product that helps companies filter out spam? "Surveys are a time-honoured PR tactic for getting coverage in hard-to-reach publications."  --Junk Mail Costs LivesThe Register)

"[L]anguage is often under-estimated, under-valued, and under-funded. How many times have we seen companies import bland, cheap information instead of hiring talented, knowledgeable writers to write fresh, original, interesting content?" Julia Hayden --Language: The Ultimate User InterfaceA List Apart)

Ever been frustrated by a "404: File Not Found" message?  Did you ever stop to wonder how the web server feels? --File Not Found!

Eugene Schlanger is a corporate lawyer and a respected poet. "Poets today tend to write to audiences of other poets. It's unfortunate. You have poets celebrating pure emotion, but it's not grounded in anything." --Wall Street Poet Takes Stock of LifeSunSpot.net)

"[M]ost tragedies are caused not by hate-filled maniacs, but by small, unnoticed failures in complex systems. A badly trained worker makes a tragic error; an oversight by an engineer produces a fatally flawed component." (Review of Inviting Disaster.) --When Malfunction and Error Meet: a Compendium of DisastersBoston Globe)