Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:50 PM

A meme's been making the rounds to share the first sentence of the first post of each month of the year. I decided to hold onto it for my last post of the year:

Okay, rounding up the numbers, I read a total of 143 books or novel-length fanfics (ones with wordcount greater than 50,000).¹ Can't sleep.² Last night, I finished my first work of fiction in nearly thirteen years.³ Folks (who are reading my weblog on my site, rather than thru an aggregator) may notice that my sidebar's gotten a wee bit shorter recently.⁴ I know posting has been sparse, I haven't had much energy (nor information) to share.⁵ It's Wednesday, so time to check my Free Will Astrology horoscope.⁶ I thought this was just going to be a regular old 3-day weekend.⁷ Isn't it annoying when you recognize an in-joke at work that you know nobody around you will get and it's company confidential so you can't share it with anybody outside the company whom you know will appreciate it?⁸ For the last several days, I've just been glued to the screen reading everything I can find about what's going on down in New Orleans.⁹ The world is quiet here.^A I may have erred in postdating my Who are you entry.^B Ian wrote up the eagle story I hinted at yesterday.^C

Here's wishing for a 2006 better than 2005.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:05 AM

Quick technical question.

Trying to do some end-of-the-year backups (no, I don't have any backup software; I haven't found anything I like as much as Dantz Retrospect, but (a) I still can't find my disks since the fire/cleaning, and (b) I'm not paying the exorbitant price for the current version).

I have several Windows Briefcase folders on my drives, and they don't copy to CD. I don't want to risk breaking the links to original files, so any tips on easily backing up Briefcase folders? Thanks.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:50 PM

Been meaning to post this for a while, and I suppose Arisia panel prep gives me an excuse:

Titles from Shakespeare

Over the years Shakespeare has proved a remarkably rich source for titles of books and plays. The accompanying lists are by by no means complete; after all, Shakespeare has been providing us with titles for four hundred years. What's more, the lists never will be complete -- not so long as writers keep turning to favorite Shakespearean phrases and images for their titles.

Yup. If you want to talk about Shakespeare's influence on the world of literature, may as well start with the titles themselves.

The Hamlet listings have grown so large, they needed a separate page for each Act. "[T]here are over 150 titles from the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy alone."

Hm. Site needs an author search. But I don't see Connie Willis' "Winter's Tale" (Do you think "Ado" should count, or is that just too brief?) nor any of Simon Hawke's Shakespeare & Smythe mysteries (Mystery of errors, The Slaying of the shrew, Much ado about murder, The Merchant of vengeance). For that matter, the nonfiction Marlowe bio The Reckoning takes its name from As You Like It

I'll have to go thru my reading lists at some point to compare and compile...

[Via Such Shakespeare Stuff]

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:15 PM

A couple amusing diversions have crossed my path in the past day and I feel like passing them along to y'all:

First, may I present The Housewives' Tarot: Divination using iconic 1950s advertising art.
I can think of at least two readers who I know have to see this. [via KightP]

Meanwhile, there's something funny going on in the latest issue of the BMJ (British Medical Journal).
Articles include:

• “White coats and fingerprints: diagnostic reasoning in medicine and investigative methods of fictional detectives”
• “The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute”
• “Harry Potter casts a spell on accident prone children”
• “Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members”
• “Shape of glass and amount of alcohol poured: comparative study of effect of practice and concentration”
• “Interventions for preventing or treating alcohol hangover: systematic review of randomised controlled trials”
• “Depictions of substance use in reality television: a content analysis of The Osbournes”
• “Epidemiology and prognosis of coma in daytime television dramas”
• “From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: a Medline search for literary and other allusions in biomedical titles”

And more. Better yet, most of these articles have the full-text freely available online (at least for now). [via pleonastic piranha]

So, is this an annual thing for BMJ or just a very special issue? For that matter, isn't there another scientific association that does regular end-of-the-year gag articles, diagnosing fictional or historic figures like “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood” in the CMAJ?

Further checking shows CMAJ does seem to encourage humour. “Head injuries in nursery rhymes” is another past great, and this month's issue includes a particularly heavy dose of fun, including:

• “Refrigerator blindness: selective loss of visual acuity in association with a common foraging behaviour”
• “A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen,” which features this inauspicious opening sentence:
  We describe the off-label use of a recreational device (the Super Soaker Max-D 5000) in the alleviation of a socially emergent ear condition...
• “Nodding and napping in medical lectures: an instructive systematic review”

British and Canadian medical journals. Any domestic (American) journals showing this kind of native wit?

Finally, my office held a Festivus party last Wednesday. This morning, I noticed there were still a few pieces of the sheetcake in the office fridge. Should I be disturbed that when I poked an exposed side, it was still soft? [What kind of chemicals must they be using to keep it from going rock-hard-stale?] Should I be even more disturbed that I was tempted enough to take a piece for after lunch? [FWIW, it tasted fine and I don't feel at all unwell.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:20 PM

Is the preliminary Arisia program available online?

I've noticed several program participants talking about their schedules, but I don't see a general program listing online.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm strongly considering skipping Arisia this year. But before I make that decision, I'd like to skim the program list for any must-see events.

[Two years ago, Arisia held a Shakespeare and SF panel, last year it was Shakespeare in Fantasy and Horror; I'm wondering what they'll follow these up with this year. Will they extend the run to another genre, just alternate back to SF, or forgo a Bard panel entirely?]

PS, Added later: Shadesong has started compiling a communal program asking other participants to send her their schedules so she can build a list from it. And in the comments, it looks like Michael Burstein has found this year's Shakespeare panel.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

Rigoberto Alpizar was the man shot December 7 by air marshals at Miami International Airport after an incident on American Airlines Flight 924.

What's going on with this story?

Google News is almost entirely editorials, and there's lots of opining in the blogosphere, but no further facts have emerged since December 9th.

Usually with events like this, new details drop and recolor impressions like autumn leaves. But this story's gone totally silent.

I didn't blog about it at the time, because I was waiting for the truth to unfold and didn't want to rush to false-judgement, making statements I might have to retract. [Think about the evolving story of the London shooting at the Stockwell tube station (Jean Charles de Menezes).]

Anybody have any updates?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:00 PM

When did theatrical productions start offering intermissions?

Shakespeare's plays weren't written with intermissions. Whereas Gilbert & Sullivan designed their plays in a two-act structure with a scene change at the break.

That puts it somewhere between the 1600s and Victorian era...

Anybody have a sense of theatrical history which can narrow it further?

As long as I'm wool information-gathering, this speculation was an outgrowth of an earlier conversation about films that run over three hours.

So, I was wondering whether there was any list of such epic-length mainstream commercial films (I don't care about arthouse experiments or gimmicks), including their runtimes and years, just to look at the trends.

In both these cases (long movies and intermissions) I'm curious, and thought somebody reading this might have a readier answer than I can search out.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:25 PM

UPI reports:

Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them

WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

Let's do the math:

• Since 2001, the judges have modified 179 requests.
• 173 of these court-ordered modifications took place in 2003 and 2004.
• That makes six (6) modficiations in 2001 and 2002.

The administration began bypassing the Court shortly after 9/11, in late 2001.

The headline and first paragraph of the news story suggests challenges led to Bush's decision to eschew court approval, when in fact they were simultaneous developments.

More accurately:

U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps before the court challenged him because the court was challenging him.

Via John Cole, who sees the story as a partisan litmus test:

Republicans can claim that the court was playing politics with Bush's wiretap requests, liberals can claim Bush is such a threat that even the mild-mannered FISA court, which approves almost every request, had to try to restrain the 'Imperial President.'

Unfortunately for Bush supporters, the cause-and-effect defense is negated if the administration started bypassing the court before they received (m)any rejections or modifications.

PS Added Later: Think of this as Lakoff-style framing of the message. The GOP has been playing the "judicial activism" spin on heavy rotation. Making Bush's actions seem like a reaction to the Court plays into that, relieves the administration of responsibility and unfairly blames the Court for something they were responding to.
For example, see tonight's DailyKos (emphasis mine):

Bush was put on notice that his intended method of surveillance was not lawful. In response, like a petulant child, he stomped his feet and stubbornly insisted upon having it his way.

Unflattering to Bush, sure, but he was only responding; he didn't start it.
Frankly, I love the Doug Berman's counter-coinage that "the fitting label for Bush's behavior is executive activism."

Also, on a related note Glenn Greenwald wonders who tipped off the press on these statistics? They seemingly favor Bush by supporting this framing. Probably should expect more such administration-friendly revelations until something takes hold.