Word Salad II

Who'll be watching the Watchmen...?

diane.duane@gmail.com — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:46:31 GMT

— if Fox has its way? A federal judge has denied Warner Bros.’ motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox’s current lawsuit against it, claiming that Fox still owns rights in the Watchmen project dating back to the 1990’s. And the release of “Watchmen” is presently scheduled for March ‘09.

This one could get very messy. (Side thought: did somebody at Warner neglect to sacrifice a goat to the Movie Gods this year? Or did the statute of limitations run out on that particular goat, maybe a few weeks after “The Dark Knight” premiered? They haven’t been having a very good month, what with one thing and another… ETA: Variety's discussion of this situation suggests they haven't had a very good six months.) But Nikki Finke suggests:

…The court is still contemplating Fox's motion for an injunction. This is indeed a stunning development which could imperil Warner Bros' entire 2009 movie slate. Sources point out to me that Warner Bros had a similar problem with the Dukes Of Hazzard movie before Judge Feess and had to pay tens of millions of dollars to release the film.

(wry look) And here’s an idle thought: You have to wonder if the angry prayers of hundreds of thousands of cranked-off Harry Potter fans have suddenly been half-answered. What does Warner do if it can’t release Watchmen in March ‘09? Well, how about plugging “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” into the gap? March ‘09 wouldn’t be November ‘08, but it wouldn’t be July ‘09 either…

Tags: 20th+Century+Fox, Warner+Bros., Watchmen, Alan+Moore, graphic+novel, Harry+Potter, Half-Blood+Prince

Advertising versus reality

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:29:54 GMT

This German website, when you click one or another spot on the main image, shows you both the inside and the outside of a package of food — that is, the difference between the “artist’s impression” / “serving suggestion” of a package, and what the contents really look like when you open the package and/or prepare them.

Some really frightening contrasts here and there. This one, for example. Normally I really like Zurcher geschnetzletes. It’s a Swiss dish, native to Zurich: the second word in the name comes from a word meaning to cut something into strips or thin slices. It normally involves strips of veal in a cream sauce with mushrooms (morels if you’re lucky), and it’s served with spaetzli (or other noodles) or rösti. But after seeing this stuff — ewwwww. I think I’m off the ‘schnetzli for a while.

Tags: food, ready+meal, ready+cooked, advertising, inside, outside, Zurich, geschnetzletes, veal, cream, morel, Zurcher

"Yes! I want to go to the bathroom!"

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:47:22 GMT

So who else remembers that great line from the film Crazy People? It featured Dudley Moore as an off-the-rails, burnt-or-burning-out ad exec who is chucked into a psychiatric hospital and then winds up (with the assistance of some of his fellow patients, one of them played by Darryl Hannah) doing something absolutely unthinkable: basing print and TV ad campaigns on the truth.

There are some hilarious fake ads in the film. “Buy Volvo! It’s boxy, but it’s good!”, one urges. Or: “Porsche! It’s a little too small for you to get laid inside. But you’ll get laid as soon as you get out!” And at the end of the film, there’s also this wildly un-PC fake Sony commercial that explains why Eastern electronics are so superior to Western ones.

But the ad from the movie that sticks most in my mind is a Metamucil ad. It says straightforwardly that if you don’t take Metamucil so that you can move your bowels regularly, you’ll get cancer and die. The next thing you see is a shot of a pharmacy being mobbed (and cleaned out of Metamucil) by middle-aged-and-older people frantically waving promotional coupons that say, “Yes! I want to go to the bathroom!”

For some reason, that was the line that flickered immediately through my mind when I ran into this (and thanks to Mark Evanier for the link: )

The Imodium Bathroom Finder

…Brought to you by a company that specializes in OTC antidiarrheal preparations. This would seem at first glimpse like a really useful online resource.

However, alas, there’s a catch. It appears that if you are anywhere but in the continental US, you are (so to speak: forgive me if the idiom suggests itself…) s**t out of luck. I guess the rest of us are all just going to have to hold it in.

Tags: Crazy+People, Imodium, Immodium, bathroom, toilet, finder, USA, bathroom, Dudley+Moore, Darryl+Hannah, diarrhea, diarrhoea, Metamucil

Useful: guide to available meals & food charges on US airlines

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:03:31 GMT

In the NY Times travel section.

Tags: food, prices, US+airlines, flights, US

That antichrist thing again

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:44:22 GMT

This came up the other day. Now I see that Mark Evanier has had an email about it too.

But then Mark does one of the things he does best and asks the next question.

Tags: Mark+Evanier, religion, humor, Barack+Obama, antichrist, end+times, noncanonical, election, 2008

Enceladus

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:37:12 GMT

Gorgeous.

Tags: Enceladus, Saturn, moon, space, probe, ice, life, solar+system

An unusually sucky customer

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:55:49 GMT

I’m very fond of the LJ community customers_suck. I read it often to remind myself of the dreadful crap that almost all service-providers have to put up with at one point or another… yet another reason to be nice to all the behind-the-counter people whose paths I cross. But also I read it because sometimes there’s just something so hilarious to be found there that it makes the whole afternoon or evening.

This is one. If I wrote this into a screenplay, my producer would send the scene back with “Not believable, nobody is really this stupid” scrawled across it. …Nonetheless, what a great scene it would be to write.

Tags: customers+suck, supermarket, bagger, mistaken+identity, embarrassment, unobservant

Way to annoy the fans, WB: Half-Blood Prince film suddenly moved to summer '09

diane.duane@gmail.com — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:42:00 GMT

Here’s the announcement via MarketWatch.

Warner Bros. says they’re rescheduling “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” because summer releases are better for family-oriented “tentpole” projects, and because the Writers’ Guild strike of late ‘07 / early ‘08 has unpredictably changed the pattern of other studios’ film releases for ‘08 / ’09.

While those are both believable claims, you can bet that a lot of people aren’t accepting them at face value. (This LA Times article suggests, among other things, that it’s Batman’s fault.)

I get the feeling that Warner’s going to have to do more than just whimper “We love our fans…” to derail the anger over this…

(ETA: Nikki Finke's take on the situation, from Deadline Hollywood Daily: with a rant from Entertainment Weekly)

Tags: Warner+Bros, Harry+Potter+and+the+Half-Blood+Prince, Rowling, delay, reschedule, anger

Something wry to start the day

diane.duane@gmail.com — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:45:24 GMT

Michael Moore begs Barack Obama to denounce him.

Tags: Michael+Moore, Barack+Obama, denunciation

Literary litigation (briefly) revisited: also, junk food junkie gives off

diane.duane@gmail.com — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:22:59 GMT

I’d been wondering in an idle way what was going on with the New Line / Tolkien family lawsuit when I stumbled across this link to a good LA Times article on the situation (in an LA Times blog entry that also referenced this equally good article about “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”). I must watch out for Rachel Abramowitz’s stuff in the future. I particularly note the line at the end of the first article:

Still, I bet you Warner Bros. isn't treating " Harry Potter's" J.K. Rowling this way.

No, I bet they’re not. …Meanwhile, like many others, I sit around waiting with considerable interest to see what comes of the Warner Bros. et al vs. RDR et al lawsuit. (Kind of amazing how long that discussion over at the Leaky Lounge has been going on.) It’s been, cripes, since April since the case went quiet. Though the judge is apparently quite a busy man, and is (I’d guess) also making sure he has all the pertinent case law neatly stacked up before ruling.

(sigh) …Anyway, time to get back to this screenplay (after a pause for a grilled cheese sandwich). Another day’s work will see the first draft .PDF’d and in the email boxes of those who need to see it. But meanwhile the grilled cheese is a sop to all the fried / junk food I immediately get the desire to be eating when I’m doing script work. (Don’t even ask how many bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos I went through when I was rewriting Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King.) (aka Ring of the Nibelungs, aka Sword of Xanten ((I nearly typed “Sword of Camden” there. SUCH a different story)), aka forty other titles in ninety other markets. Hey, IMdB has a lot of the aliases. Not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination.) Oh sweet Goddess but could I not demolish a case of Wise Potato Chips around now.

(SIGH) I’m whinging; don’t mind me. (Note to self: investigate why American slang apparently does not contain the word “whinging”. Investigate etymology of word. Investigate why there are no potato chips in the house.)

Tags: J.R.R.+Tolkien, New+Line, George+Lucas, Star+Wars:+The+Clone+Wars, litigation, lawsuit, Rowling, RDR, Warner+Bros., Ring+of+the+Nibelungs, Sword+of+Xanten, Dark+Kingdom:+The+Dragon+King, Wise+Potato+Chips, Leaky+Lounge, junk+food+junkie, etymology

I missed this somehow: the Return of the Hydrox

diane.duane@gmail.com — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:46:16 GMT

(Hmm, sounds like a Doctor Who title. You can just hear the denouement. “All right, Masters of the Hydrox, now listen to me! In accordance with Section Eighteen, paragraph twelve of the Shadow Proclamation, and by virtue of the power vested in me as the last of the Time Lords, I order you to divest yourselves of all excess vanilla creme and — oh, all right, not all, don’t look that way! Just lose the transfats and Bob’s your uncle.”)

…I liked them well enough when I was a kid: it’ll be interesting to see how they taste these days. Apparently they’re being “reissued” sometime this month.

(See also HydroxCookies.com)

Tags: Hydrox, cookies, return, reissue, Doctor+Who

A LOL for the day

diane.duane@gmail.com — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:08:56 GMT

Tags: LOL, bear, icanhascheezburger, bear+macro, Yogi+Bear, Mr.+Ranger

New short work from Morwood & Duane: "Enchantment Place"

diane.duane@gmail.com — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:39:19 GMT

For those of you who’re interested: Peter and I both have stories out in DAW Books’ new fantasy anthology Enchantment Place. (There’s a lot of good company in the anthology, BTW: Jody Lynn Nye, Esther Friesner, Laura Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rausch, and numerous others.)

The anthology’s stories center around a shopping mall located in an alternate-Earth version of Chicago. This mall caters to the non-mundane sector of the local society — vampires and weres, witches and wizards. (You can guess why when I heard about the project I got interested right away.)

Our stories run back to back. Mine, “Out of the Frying Pan”, details a series of unusual occurrences in the work week of a witch who runs a store specializing in the supply of magical herbs, as a strange veiled woman starts turning up day after day, setting fire to some unusual paperwork. Peter’s story (“And Into the Fire”) carries Annabelle’s tale a little further along — into the kitchen of a very high-end Chicago restaurant and the fringes of an encounter with magical organized crime.

Just a side note on these: every now and then in this business you find yourself building a character who really grows on you as you work. That happened in these stories. Annabelle (the witch in question) was a lot of fun to write, but I have to admit that even more fun was someone created as part of the end of my story: Adelio Famagiusta, sorcerer and superstar celebrity chef / food writer —

—famous…for the chain of restaurants of which SPQR was flagship, as well as for his never-ending succession of cookbooks, his relentless self-promotion, his flamboyant lifestyle, and his temper.

Adelio (now that I look back) seems to combine some aspects of Antonio Carluccio (the BBC’s famous and much-loved resident Italian TV chef) and Anthony Bourdain, with liberal dashes of other celebrity chefs tossed in (though the nowadays-de-rigueur swearing is kept in the background and in Italian). I really like Adelio —

“See how I am disrespected,” he shouted, “in my own kitchen! Here is a woman blessed, yes, blessed by the gods, who have sent her to me, me! Adelio Famagiusta! To be her patron, to give her hundreds of thousands of my good dollars… And what is my reward for my kindness?”
“A media coup?” said Annabelle. “Even more money than you have already?”
Adelio paused, astonished, and then burst out into the big laugh that Annabelle suspected had really made him so famous and beloved across the world. His joviality and love of food were practically tangible things, and he was also as far from the PR image of a sorcerer as you could get. Too often in the popular consciousness they tended to be seen as saturnine, grim, ascetic people, often overwhelmed by their sense of the importance of their own magic. But the only thing that overwhelmed Adelio was his sense of his own importance, an absolutely unshakeable belief that the universe could not exist in its present form without him. Annabelle thought that this was probably true: he was a tremendously talented chef with a gift for making food that people loved — and loved to make at home, which was far more unusual. But it didn’t do to let him know you shared his opinion of himself. That was too much like feeding honey to a bear… one who would critique the flavor and the provenance of the honey even while he scoffed it down.

Adelio is nowhere near so completely ego-driven as he might look at first glance: he uses people’s perceptions of that aspect of him with clear eyes, as a marketing tool. And there’s a lot more going on with him, underneath the marketing and the calculated displays of the behaviors his public expects to see. I’m beginning to think that possibly Adelio might rate a book of his own at a later date. We’ll have to see how that works out, as (around here at least) you need considerably more than just a single interesting character to hang a whole novel on.

Meanwhile, here are the ISBNs for those of you who might want to order somewhere besides Amazon:

ISBN: 9–780756–405106

ISBN-13: 978–0–7564–0510–6

Tags: TV+chef, restaurant, Chicago, Enchantment+Place, DAW+Books, food, out+of+the+frying+pan, into+the+fire, fantasy, short+story, Diane+Duane, Peter+Morwood

The Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter story takes an unusual turn

diane.duane@gmail.com — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:18:20 GMT

Yesterday, [his attorney] said his client asked for a copy of [Josepha Sherman's and Susan Shwartz's] Star Trek novel “Vulcan’s Forge.”

(Below is video of the August 11 press conference with Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter's attorney.)

Tags: Star+Trek, Vulcan's+Forge, Clark+Rockefeller, Christian+Gerhartsreiter

And now a word about our favorite pizza source in Dublin

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:37:03 GMT

Which would be (originally) Independent Pizza Co. in Drumcondra, but (even more so) its younger sister-facility, Gotham Café in South Anne Street. The excellent Adam Kuban of Slice, the pizza lovers’ website par excellence, has just kindly posted a note I dropped him about the place.

Gotham Café is one of our favorite places to eat in Dublin. We’ve been going there ever since it opened, and have (by now) probably eaten enough pizzas there to completely pave South Anne Street. It’s also where the Star Trek novel Dark Mirror was conceived in 1991 (as the book’s acknowledgement page notes) secondary to a long and wide-ranging discussion with Peter about Starfleet uniform styles, over a large pizza with extra Mozzarella, extra sauce, pepperoni, and hot chiles, and a medium with extra Mozzarella, double garlic, hot chilies, and onions, along with two bottles of Orvieto Secco and a whole lot of Ballygowan water. (The framed cover commemorating this slightly crazed event still hangs, I believe, in the owners’ office.)

Last time we were passing through, we took some pics of what we were eating and sent them along to Adam. With luck, many more transiting pizza lovers will now grace David and Jackie’s front doors and sample what we firmly believe is the best New York-style pizza on the island of Ireland.

(Gotham still has no website running. I wish they’d get busy with that. In the meantime, let the offering at Slice suffice.)

(However, I take no responsibility for the article’s slugline. “When Irish Pies Are Smiling”? Ow ow ow ow ow ow.)

(ETA: Someone's posted a Flickr image of the Gotham menu page that features the "specialty" pizzas.)

Tags: Star+Trek, Dark+Mirror, Gotham+Cafe, Independent+Pizza+Co., Drumcondra, Dublin, South+Anne+Street, Ireland, pizza, pizzeria

Okay, now I am vaguely creeped out: Anime contact lenses

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:11:07 GMT

No, really.

Tags: anime, contact+lenses

Well, about time

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:35:31 GMT

The Star Trek MMORPG is finally moving forward.

Yay!

Tags: Star+Trek, MMORPG

"Crockefeller": the story just keeps unfolding

diane.duane@gmail.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:05:40 GMT

I’ve continued to follow the “Clark Rockefeller” / Christian Gerhartsreiter story over the past few days as it just keeps getting more convoluted, and as the subject’s apparent/alleged pathway between Germany and the USA starts getting clearer. (With some surprises along the way. Today’s bizarre revelation: “Rockefeller” may have to give back his $800,000 divorce settlement, because it appears that he and the woman in question may not have been legally married. Get this — )

The 48-year-old suspect married London-based based management consultant Sandra Boss in 1995 during a small ceremony in Nantucket, Mass. But there is no official record of the union in Massachusetts, and it's unclear whether the couple provided a marriage license during divorce proceedings.
"They weren't legally married," Rockefeller's lawyer Stephen Hrones said. "How can you divorce when you're not legally married?"

(Boy, somebody missed something there. How did this piece of data not emerge during the divorce proceedings?? How do you get a divorce without producing proof that there was a marriage in the first place?)

Meanwhile I continue being fascinated as more data slowly adds itself layer on layer to the situation, and other people start to ruminate on where the truth of the case lies (mostly the question seems to be boiling down to: Is he crazy, or is he a con man, or both?) And on the first count — for a former psych nurse, at least — the temptation to play the Diagnosis At A Distance game is tough to resist.

The most interesting factor for me at the moment is Rockefeller’s / Gerhartsreiter’s purported memory loss. His attorney claims he doesn’t remember anything prior to 1993, except for fragments (“a Scottish nanny” , a “childhood visit to Mt. Rushmore in a station wagon”) — though if he is Gerhartsreiter, this would have taken place during a period when he had never yet left Germany). So is this real memory loss, or something else?

There’s a phenomenon known as “confabulation” in which the mind fabricates memories to fill in spaces it feels or knows “need filling”. Are these memories confabulation? Impossible to say at this distance, and without expert psychiatric evaluation and possibly also an MRI (some concrete physical causes for confabulation have been discovered).

The attorney elsewhere describes his client’s memory as “shattered”. It’s an interesting word. I’ve seen various internal crises produce this kind of spotty-memory result in patients, temporarily or over long periods — and sometimes the crises in question aren’t at all obvious, sometimes not even detectable. But then we have perhaps too much mythology in modern popular culture that suggests you need some kind of blatant, major trauma to cause an amnesic response (or similar broad-based mental unhinging).

The thing to remember is that the mind’s major priority is keep itself running as well as it can, and otherwise to preserve its own status quo, usually along the lines of the basic human existential position, “I am blameless!” . And I’ve seen parts of people’s brains run all kinds of just-forget-about-this numbers on other parts of their brains to keep them away from the dangerous, sometimes unbearable realization that they’ve failed, or done something wrong. Sometimes the wrongdoing / failures are surprisingly minor: sometimes very major indeed. But memory does sometimes fail, in small spots or big swathes, as a result of a prolonged imbalance or slow buildup of chronic issues rather than anything sudden — so that no other human being but the one most intimately involved may ever be aware of the event that starts the process of leaving the mind “overdrawn at the memory bank”.

(As of August 12, however, Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter’s recall seems to be improving. His attorney reports that he now remembers some details from his 1990’s California life, including the couple from whom he rented the San Marino guest house, though he says he “hardly knew them”.)

What Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter claims to be experiencing could indeed be real. The problem is that when criminal law starts getting involved, a certain amount of cynicism starts to intrude itself into the diagnostic process. In this case in particular, where there seem to be multiple aliases involved, a certain amount of intelligence and cunning, and a fair amount of manipulation (vide today’s story about a woman who claims the man married her strictly for the purpose of getting a US “green card”, then dumped her), it’s hard to avoid the idea that this “shattered” memory is very convenient. (Scroll down in this article for more details about what he claims he can remember.) Especially when it seems likely that at least some aspects of the criminal proceedings surrounding him are going to involve the determination of his (mental) fitness to stand trial. …Though this may of course be just me getting the wrong end of the diagnostic stick — as is all too likely when working at thousands’ of miles distance and with fifth– or twelfth-hand data. So, verbum sap., caveat emptor, and other similar cautionary adages.

But what keeps bringing up the cynic in me particularly strongly is the fact that some aspects of the man’s history as now presented make him sound like a fairly in-control scammer who also has (or has been developing over time) a medium-strength dose of something like narcissistic personality disorder, with maybe a dash of one of the other so-called “cluster B” / “dramatic-erratic” disorders, like borderline and histrionic personality disorders. A lot of the news accounts I’ve seen over recent days — especially some of those coming out of the man’s (apparent) hometown in Germany — particularly suggest that he has routinely displayed some of the major traits or symptoms of NPD. People who housed him or knew him describe the self-importance and haughty attitude, the spinning of elaborate and grandiose origin stories about royalty or otherwise important and monied people in the family background, and the unpredictable on-and-off charm, coupled with an underlying sense among the people around “Rockefeller” that they were being manipulated — a sense that grew so strong over time that many of these people seem to have been glad to have the relationship dissolve.

(ETA: And now we have the August 12th revelations, which complicate matters. Is this reported “improved recall” genuinely the slow recovery of lost or trauma-buried memory which is slowly being stimulated by questions about something the person hasn’t thought about, or wanted to think about, for years? Or are we simply seeing a man trying to keep a decades-long, consciously built “house of cards” of false identities from coming down all at once, by surrendering it a little at a time?…)

…(shrug) At the end of the day, there’s still no telling where the case may go. (Like any other CSI fan, I’m wondering when someone will suggest DNA testing, and how long it will take to meander its way through the labyrinth of legal barriers that will doubtless be involved.)

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens…

(BTW, fellow CSI fans: how many bets that something like this turns up in the next season of one or another of the series? Their writing staffs will be breaking out ‘09 script ideas in the story rooms just about now…)

*ETA: some more detail has turned up about this –

The woman who actually married Christian Gerhartsreiter, Amy Jersild Duhnke, 49, of Milwaukee, was unavailable for comment. In a telephone interview Friday, her husband, Eric Duhnke, confirmed that the marriage took place, but he said it lasted only a day. Public records obtained by The Associated Press indicate Amy Duhnke waited 11 years before filing for divorce from Gerhartstreiter.

Eric Duhnke promised to issue a clarifying statement Friday, but it never materialized.

Tags: Clark+Rockefeller, Christian+Gerhartsleiter, Crockefeller, personality+disorder, amnesia, memory+loss, confabulation

In the Completely Unexpected and Fairly Goofy Dep't: the HomerEuro

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:54:16 GMT

A one-Euro coin with Homer Simpson’s face on it has turned up in Spain.

No, really. (more here and here)

By rights, though, it should have turned up in Greece. (Just sayin’…)

Tags: Homer+Simpson, Euro, coin, forgery, hilarious, Simpsons, counterfeit, defacement

Probably the explanation for the Montauk Monster

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 06:59:31 GMT

Some days ago the thought occurred to me that the original story got very viral very quickly. Well, maybe there was a reason for that. Gawker puts forward their theory here…

Myself, I’ve been chuckling over the whole business since it started, as I have my own referent for monsters off Montauk. …For certain values of “monster”, that is. I like Ed.

(As it happens, Robert Heinlein liked him too. He said to me on the phone once, “You know, I’m a Navy man. We don’t like sharks. You made me like that shark. That was a dirty trick.”)

Meanwhile I find myself wondering when we’re going to get a more open / transparent clarification of the present Monster than the somewhat veiled one that Gawker describes….

Tags: Montauk+Monster, hoax, viral, Long+Island, Robert+A.+Heinlein

A webmastery interlude

diane.duane@gmail.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:49:44 GMT

(Non-technically inclined people, look away now. Or skip down to the bottom of this where it gets less technical.)

I have a lot more screenplay stuff to do today, but I had to take an hour or so off from that after having a quick look at the “Out of Ambit” log files on arising, and noticing that someone had been trying repeatedly to access pages on my site that didn’t exist. The URLs they were trying to reach had all the telltale signs of attempted SQL injection attacks, which I hate as they mess up my tidy logs. So I spent a relatively pleasurable short time watching the Doctor Who episode “The Girl in the Fireplace” on UK Gold while getting things fixed. (There was a certain enjoyable resonance to watching the Doctor blowing up robots while I dealt with other people’s bots to their detriment.)

I am not going to reproduce the actual string in question, but info about it and a detailed analysis of the string and the attack are here. If you’re a webmastery-type person, or you run a blog or website and are technically capable of dealing with problems of this kind, you should have a look at your logs and see if you’ve been having this sort of attack. Then decide how you want to deal with it — redirects, blocking via your .htaccess file, whatever. (IP blocking is of no use because the attacks are coming from all over the place.)

Since I didn’t feel like spending all day futzing around with writing redirects, I downloaded a copy of the Redirection plugin for WordPress, activated it, and created a custom redirect to deal with this problem. Works fine. The naughty people (or the poor bot-infested machines that have been dragooned into this) who come to OOA and attempt to inject this string are now being sent to a place of appropriate punishment.

That’s all the techie bit for today.

The only other thing of interest that’s happened is that (after finding myself thinking how long I’ve liked the Doctor, and liked him a whole lot) I got vaguely curious about the whereabouts of an article I wrote for a Balticon program book many years ago: a discussion of the uses of imagination (among other things). It was called “Meetings on the Stair”. I dug it out, updated and cleaned it up a little, and posted it so I can find it later if I want it for something: it’s here, if anybody’s interested. I suppose I’ll also stick it up as a pre-dated blog posting, so it won’t screw up the present blog entry sequence.

Now then… back to that script.

Tags: Balticon, injection, Doctor+Who, Girl+in+the+Fireplace, webmaster, redirection, plugin, WordPress, UK+Gold, bots, robots, program+book, Meetings+on+the+Stair

Hadron abuse

diane.duane@gmail.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:21:10 GMT

One more thing I hadn’t thought I needed to be worried about.

(with a tip of the hat to our cousins at Bad Astronomy Blog)

Tags: hadron, abuse, subatomic, particle, CERN

Oh dear, here we go

diane.duane@gmail.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:31:17 GMT

When those images of the big Berlin gathering at which Obama spoke started turning up on the Net, I said to myself, “Hmm, this is going to provoke certain kinds of language here and there…” And when the word “demagoguery” started turning up here and there in conjunction with his name, I thought, “Hmm. It’s only one step to… No, surely no one would try playing that card!”

(heh) Silly me.

McCain Web Ad Is Accused of Linking Obama To The Antichrist

Oh noes!! …But here, this should make us all feel better:

The Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of the [Left Behind] series, said in an interview that he recognized allusions to his work in the ad but comparisons between Sen. Obama and the antichrist are incorrect.
"The antichrist isn't going to be an American, so it can't possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania," the 82-year-old author said.

So we can all relax now. I think. (But the simile is peculiar. Since when is Romania obscure? It’s been important in human history for thousands of years: its language remains one of the most direct descendants of Latin as it was spoken in the Empire. And the country’s just sort of sitting there between Europe and Asia, right out in the open. It’s not like it’s trying to hide under Liechtenstein or something.)

(Sidebar: And to think I was getting bored with the US election campaigns when they started to obsess about tire gauges.)

Anyway, maybe now we can go straight to the Godwin’s Law stage of the campaigns and get that out of the way.* (eyeroll)

*Or maybe this has happened already. Doubtless somebody will let me know.

Tags: antichrist, Obama, LaHaye, idiocy, campaign

Such a strange piece of news to wake up to

diane.duane@gmail.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:31:30 GMT

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been following the “Clark Rockefeller” kidnapping case and its sequelae, bemused by the net of false identities that the guy seems to have woven around himself (partly because I’ve had a very annoying identity thief of my own in the past), and also now grimly interested by his linking to an unsolved missing persons / murder case in California.

But this article that I stumbled across in the Boston Globe this morning brought me up short… because the interviewee is an old business associate and friend.

Turns out one of the missing persons, Linda Sohus, used to work at the SF bookstore Dangerous Visions on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, which most Los Angeles-based science fiction fans would have known well. And Lydia Marano, to whom the postcard in the article was sent, ran the bookstore, and also worked closely with Brynne Stephens and me when we were story-editing the animated series “Dinosaucers” for the Valley-based production company DiC. To discover that the missing woman worked for Lydia is beyond strange, and makes me wonder whether (while passing in and out of DV over my time in LA) I may have met her. And now no one knows where she is, or even if she’s alive.

How weird life is sometimes…

(ETA: Apparently "Rockefeller's" brother in Germany has ID'd him.)

Tags: Clark+Rockefeller, Dangerous+Visions, Linda+Sohus

The effing chef

diane.duane@gmail.com — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:52:47 GMT

It was only a matter of time before someone did this…

(with a tip of the toque to Ed at Tomato)

Tags: restaurant, kitchen, chef, bad+language, do+you+eat+with+that+mouth+too, backlash, inevitable