Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:05 PM

I always forget this until it happens, but today is The Seventh International Edible Book Festival. Some really pretty pictures, both among this year's participants and in the gallery. [via Neil Gaiman]

I'll do my usual lame-ass last-minute thing and repost the photo of our wedding cake.

Speaking of commemorative dates, Jessamyn West notes:

DEAR: Drop Everything And Read, April 12

Beverly Cleary is turning 90. Her publisher, Harper Collins, is declaring her birthday Drop Everything and Read Day.

Nice idea, but unfortunately, that's erev Pesach, so most Jews will be celebrating the annual "Drop Everything And Cook" before the first seder.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:30 PM

Last week, Ben Domenech was quickly fired from The Washington Post for plagiarizing P.J. O'Rourke.

Just now, on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, P.J. O'Rourke and Roxanne Roberts (of the Post) addressed the issue.

Here's the program link; the exchange took place at the end of "Bluff the Listener"

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:36 AM

Can't tell whether this is an April Fool's hoax or not, but The Forward has an article titled Should Jews Save The Werewolf From Extinction?

The decline of the modern-day werewolf should be of concern, since it is largely a metaphor for being Jewish in the 20th century. Consider the modern werewolf narrative: A hairy young outsider becomes saddled with an identity he doesn't want or particularly like, the meaning of which is told to him by an old European lady speaking a lot of mumbo jumbo. He is in love with a blond girl who loves him back, but their love is doomed. Eventually he gets chased and killed by a bunch of peasants with pitchforks and torches. And, oh, yes, he feasts on human blood, but it's not his fault.

The parallels between Jewish ideas of how non-Jews perceived us and the life cycle of the werewolf aren't surprising, considering that Jews effectively created the modern werewolf. Given how much has changed for Jews over the past half-century, should we try to save the werewolf or let him wander off into the California sunset? ... cont'd

What do you think: sincere or a spoof? Don't be put off by the March 31 dateline -- given timezones, I've seen some hoaxes posted early to catch GMT/UTC observers unaware.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:35 AM

Well, I was starting to compile a list of announcements, but Wikipedia has a more complete version.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:35 AM

Google Romance (Beta)

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:07 PM

Thee Summer Day Score Name Lis Riba (70) Thursday 20th April (95) 0 : 1 Loveliness Lovelier Lovely 1 : 1 Temperature 98.6° F 60° F 2 : 1 Lease 35.8 years 0.59 years 3 : 1 Complexion 4 : 1 Eyes Can See 2 N/A 6 : 1 Lis Riba is more lovely, and probably more temperate, than a summers day Compare Me To A Summers Day

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:00 AM

For some reason, Google News* linked to the article on BostonWorks without the photo, rather than the Boston Globe page with the photo by Josh Reynolds.

At the time this photo was snapped, Ian had just made breakfast, but I was in the middle of a thought and wanted to get that down before it slipped my mind.

For the record, although it's not visible under the blazer, I'm wearing my "I'm blogging this" babydoll t-shirt. On the table beside me is the galley proof of Farthing. [The photographer arrived when I was about five pages from the end.]

*Knowing the article was coming and not wanting to be taken by surprise, I created an RSS alert on my name...

PS: For some reason, my webserver has been down for the past hour. I hope that increased traffic from this news story hasn't caused any problems and that it rights itself shortly.

PPS: Mmm Hot macadamia nut pancakes!

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:45 AM

And now for the post I expected to be my first of the morning...

Bought His Majesty's dragon by Naomi Novik last night after work, and finished it before getting out of bed this morning.

Don't have time right now to give it a proper review, but this one passage just cracks me up every time and I simply have to share it.

The story involves a Napoleonic War Britain, with dragons. Laurence and Temeraire have just met another man and dragon: Captain James, on Volatilus:

"How old is that dragonet, and where did you get him?"

"I am three weeks and five days out of the shell, and Laurence won me in a battle," Temeraire said, before Laurence could reply. "How did you meet James?" he asked, addressing the other dragon.

Volatilus blinked large milky blue eyes and said, in a bright voice, "I was hatched! From an egg!"

I'm sorry, but Volly's dialog just cracks me up every time.

The first chapter of the book is available freely online, and I recommend it.

Now I have to wait another month for the sequel. [Yes, I know, those of you following longer or slower-paced series haven't the slightest bit of sympathy...]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:30 AM

Didn't intend for this to be my first post of the day, but I was interviewed for an article in this morning's Boston Globe

Job applicants' online musings get hard look
By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff | March 30, 2006

Lis Riba says she learned about indiscreet blogging the hard way.

In October 2002, after an interview for a job at a nonprofit, she said, someone at the organization read her blog, where she had broadcast to the world that she wasn't actually all that interested in the job and didn't plan to stay for even a year if she were hired.

No offer was forthcoming.

On a routine check of her server logs, she found that somebody from the nonprofit's site read her blog after her interview. ''I really believe I lost that job offer because of careless blogging," said Riba, 35, of Melrose. ''It was something I hadn't considered, and it taught me a lesson about discretion."

Riba, who now designs and writes software requirements for a Massachusetts company, hasn't stopped blogging, but she's developed a personal blogging policy, with rules such as not identifying her employer in online postings, not identifying colleagues, and not revealing proprietary information.

cont'd

For the record, here's the post in question. The incident took place after I had been blogging for less than six months, and it (along with the competitive intelligence class I took the following semester) really did teach me some valuable lessons.

Since I have access to server logs, I can say without any doubt that prospective employers do Google before conducting interviews.

I've been compiling my personal advice for combining a blog and professional employment that I've been meaning to post for a while now. [Intended as a followup to last year's Weblogs in a nutshell.] Perhaps this is just the incentive I need to get off my ass and finish the damn thing...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:30 PM

Ian just made macadamia-nut pancakes.

Yum.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:00 PM

• Microsoft employees blogging anonymously about the Vista delay

• The Mozilla bug that broke up an engagement

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:54 PM

Somebody on my friends list posted a link to the Oregon Trail emulator.

I clicked on the link, but much to my disappointment, it was the Apple II version.

My earliest memories of the game involved a teletype connected to the university mainframe in the late 1970s.

No graphics; hunting skill was measured by how fast one could type "BANG"

Wikipedia acknowledges this version in about two sentences, but the overwhelming majority of the entry focuses on the 1985 Apple II version.

Anybody else have fond memories of this version, or am I just an ancient relic?

Ooh! I just found an essay on the program, complete with the BASIC code!

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:30 PM

So, I see in the news that Andrew Card has left the White House.

Naturally, this news reminded me of my favorite post about Andy Card, which I'm surprised to discover I haven't previously blogged.

It comes from billmon, over at the Whiskey Bar, and provided brief retrospective of Card's career-to-date when rumors were swirling that he might be in line for Karl Rove's position.

A few highlights (or rather, lowlights):

But now, for a brief moment, we don't have Andy Card to kick around anymore.

I wonder which lobbyist he'll end up with?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:24 PM

While looking for something else, I came across this two-year-old Onion article:

Kerry Unveils One-Point Plan For Better America
August 11, 2004 | Issue 40•32

WICHITA, KS-Delivering the central speech of his 10-day "Solution For America" bus campaign tour Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:20 PM

PLA got me thinking about librarian action figures again...

Unfortunately, it seems like every different manufacturer makes their figures at a slightly different scale. Also, several of them would require breaking up sets in order to get the librarian.

Nonetheless, here's the list:

I want them all, but unfortunately, their disparate heights will probably look odd if I display them together. Why can't toymakers get along?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:05 PM

With Elizabeth Bear about to leave for three weeks in the UK, I feel this sudden urge to rush to write up several Shakespeare & Marlowe topics before she goes...

Forgotten but not gone

A few weeks ago, I heard a great Bob Mondello story on NPR about teen films based on Shakespeare's plots. The story was timed to coincide with She's the man (Twelfth night).

But he also mentioned several other recent films: O (Othello), Scotland PA (Macbeth), Ten things I hate about you (Taming of the shrew), and one I hadn't heard of: Get over it (Midsummer night's dream!?)

Although there was no shortage of mockery, he did remind listeners not to condemn the genre out-of-hand. After all, it brought us West Side Story.

Once they're all out on DVD, it might make a fun movie-marathon slumber-party fare...

Bear your bawdy more seeming

Duane at Such Shakespeare Stuff found this gem:

Shakespeare's Bawdy, The Sequel

Apparently there are still undiscovered sex references in Shakespeare's works. Héloïse Sénéchal, working on a new edition of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works, says that she's used "computer techniques" to find previously unrecognized double entendres. Apparently they're hoping to go for a more realistic appreciation of Shakespeare's time in their footnotes. They'll emphasize the base nature of the work to get away from the idea that it was all high class.

I don't know what sort of computer techniques she's using, exactly, but the rules seem pretty obvious, and completely Freudian (although he came later): anything longer than it is wide is a phallic symbol, and any reference to "hole", "gap", or any other sort of space where one might want to put something is.....well, I run a family blog here. ... cont'd

While I admire the sentiment, computer analysis seems like overkill. Ian added that a much cheaper way to find the bawdy is just to read the plays with a group of pubescent middle- and high-school kids. They'll snigger at anything remotely off-color.

Furthermore, not only are all the lines they quote from Pyramus and Thisbe utterly obvious to me (and no discovery at all), but John Meagher's Shakespeare's Shakespeare suggests an even dirtier reading of the scene by inferring the stage directions. [To paraphrase: Supposedly, "Wall" is holding his arm outstretched to form the chink through which the lovers kiss. But what if Snout's arm got heavy and he lowered it? Reread the scene imagining the lovers crouching to place their lips down there...]

FYI, the New York Review of Books has posted a joint review of two recent Marlowe biographies -- Riggs' World of CM and Honan's CM: poet and spy -- by Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the world)

Finally, I spent some time this weekend looking at competitors' databases, after seeing various demos at PLA. Uncovered a couple interesting literary rarites:

• An 1837 one-act play by Richard H. Horne, titled The Death of Marlowe. Mind you, this was nearly ninety years before Leslie Hoston discovered the coroner's report and the world learned the actual cause of death. So this was written in a time when all we had was rumors.
  Haven't had time to read it fully, but it appears that according to this account, Marlowe dies in a fight with Jacconot, a "Tavern-Pander" over the courtezan Cecilia... with Heywood and Middleton as witnesses.
 
• The Retvrne from Pernassvs was a 1606 play by the students of St. John's college which contains some nastily catty comments about contemporary playwrights, including Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Johnson. It's also listed under the subtitle The Scourge of Simony.
 
• Also, one more for my (much-in-need-of-updating) Marlowe in modern fiction list: "The Dream of Marlowe" by Jordan Smith appeared in Spring 1996 issue of Paris Review.

Speaking of my List, one reason for the delay in updates is that I may have found a way to make the columns dynamically sortable. Means some reformatting for me, but if you want to view the list in a different order than my default chronological view, you'll be able to do so at will.

And I think that's all I have for now.

How 'bout you?

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:58 PM

• Re: Sex with kings: 500 years of adultery, power, rivalry, and revenge (published 2004),
• and Sex with the queen: 900 years of vile kings, virile lovers, and passionate politics (on sale next month)

Looking at the Amazon reviews of Sex with kings, a frequent criticism is poor organization and frequent repetition.

Each chapter in Sex with kings is organized thematically: relations between mistress and wife, husbands of mistresses, royal bastards, jockeying for position among mistresses, mistresses in the political sphere, etcetera... Each topic gets a chapter. And, yes, because powerful women played many roles, the same figures appear in multiple chapters.

I'm pleased to inform folks that Sex with the queen is laid out in a chronological fashion. Aside from overview chapters in the beginning and end, each chapter is constrained by century (and sometimes by country: there's a whole chapter on Russia from Catherine I (wife of Peter the Great) through Catherine the Great).

While there are some references to queens in previous chapters, there's nowhere near the repetition seen in Sex with kings. Each queen+lover has their own discrete section, rather than being spread all over the book.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:02 PM

I was talking to a coworker about Google's holiday logos and the guy behind them, when I spotted this one from last week:

Persian New Year - March 21, 2006

I didn't see it, and don't remember anybody commenting upon it, so I suppose it only displayed for Google users from the region (based upon TLD and/or IP geolocation).

Still... I think this is one of the prettier logos I've seen in a while, and wanted to share it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:31 AM

A relatively new (one month old) comic strip worth reading:

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria

Remember, LiveJournal shows you the strips in reverse order. You may wish to start with the first strip and work forward...

PS (added later): A commenter on my LJ feed pointed out that earlier strips exist.
 • The comic started here on February 8th.
 • February 8th through 19th strips can be navigated through the next entry link on each page.
 • February 20th, the comic moved to the dedicated journal at the link above (erroneously labelled "the first strip")

Update the second: The entire archive, from the earliest comic can now be found on tnaoqv.livejournal.com. Ignore that earlier postscript; ignore the earlier link. It starts here and continues next day or next entry through the current strips. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:15 PM

• Sex with kings: 500 years of adultery, power, rivalry, and revenge, published 2004 (45 pages in)
• Sex with the queen: 900 years of vile kings, virile lovers, and passionate politics, publication next month (read)

I forgot to mention finding two reasonably interesting alternate history seeds in Sex with the queen:

1) In 1787, the Turks attacked Russia. "Potemkin quickly recruited tens of thousands of soldiers from across Europre. One young Corsican officer volunteered but was summarily turned down because he insolently demanded too high a rank. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte."

Had Napoleon fought for the Russians, how might that have changed history?

2) Marie, Queen of Romania, between the World Wars

Ferdinand and Marie (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) were crowned in 1914. As Herman puts it, the "just inherited World War I." For the most part, Marie ran the show, with the help of her lover and political advisor, Barbo Stirbey. By general accounts, they ran the country quite well, through the War and Russian Revolution, while keeping the people's love and maintaining a booming economy.

In 1925, Marie's oldest son, the erratic Crown Prince Carol, abdicated his rights to the throne and moved to Paris with his mistress. His father, who had been ailing, was devastated; his death eighteen months later was probably hastened by the scandal. Carol's five-year-old son, Michael, became king with Stirbey as his prime minister.

But in 1930 Carol, bored with stewing in France on little money, swooped back to Romania and proclaimed himself King Carol II. He marginalized his mother, whom he had resented for her affair with Stirbey [... and banished Stirbey from Romania.]

How might Romania's history been different had Marie and Stirbey retained the throne for longer? She died in 1938, but partly because her son wouldn't let her leave the country for medical treatments. Stirbey died in 1946. Could they have protected their country any better from the Nazis and Communists?

I don't know if anybody has written anything along these lines, but I thought I'd share them if anybody's looking for ideas.

Also, I have since stopped by the library to pick up Sex with kings, and made an interesting observation.

• Queens' lovers (at least those covered in the book) are invariably male.

• Kings' lovers can be male or female, though based on a quick scan of the index*, it looks like Sex with kings focuses only on straight relationships. [* No mention of famously gay kings, like Edward II or James VI/I, or their male lovers: Gaveston, Carr, Villiers, etc.]

Now compare the cover images to both books:

Kings Hardcover

Queens Hardcover

Wouldn't you think that one of these books should have a male on the cover?

I mean, either you're picturing the rulers -- in which case Kings would picture a man and Queens a woman -- or you're picturing their lovers -- in which case Kings displays a woman and Queens a man.

But both covers picture classical unclothed images of women.

Rather unjust, that, don't you think?

Finally, some offcolor royal snark, from Sex with kings:

By all accounts Lillie Langtry and the future Edward VII of Great Britain had a lusty sex life. [...] Lillie related that one day the prince said to her, "I've spend enough on you to buy a battleship." To which she tartly replied, "And you've spent enough in me to float one."

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:40 PM

I read and finished two forthcoming books this weekend (thank you PLA!), both of which are worth a look.

Farthing by Jo Walton
Publication date: August 2006

Have you ever read a book and thought, ‘By all rights, this will be an award-winning best-seller’? That was my reaction all the way through Farthing.

Jo Walton's previous book, Tooth and claw won the World Fantasy Award, started a small resurgence of Trollope reading, and included such literary gems as this passage:

It has been baldly stated in this narrative that Penn and Sher were friends at school and later at the Circle, and being gentle readers and not cruel and hungry readers who would visit a publisher's offices with the intention of rending and eating an author who had displeased them, you have taken this matter on trust.

But the dragons may have turned some readers off, limiting the book's appeal.

Farthing has a chance at becoming a crossover hit among mainstream audiences, in part because it avoids the more obvious fantasy elements and tells (what appears in the beginning to be) a more conventional story.

Even the cover has a more mainstream appearance:

The book is set in 1949 England, and posits an alternate universe where Rudolf Hess's mission was successful and Britain made peace with the Nazis in 1941. The story itself begins with a cozy murder mystery in a country estate.

The narrative alternates chapter-by-chapter between the first person account of Lucy Kahn née Eversley, a young heiress who's not quite as twitterpated as she appears on first glance, and a third person police procedural, focused on the stolid Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, because its unfolding is one of the delights of the book. Suffice it to say, both inspector and daughter take separate but parallel paths to uncovering the mystery, each learning only part of the story.

Lucy's voice is utterly captivating.

I don't suppose you've ever considered what it would mean to know that someone close to you had done something unspeakable -- and by that I don't mean shooting a fox or putting lemonade into a single malt, the way Daddy would.

Lucy's voice just wins me over every time she speaks. She's got the most charming personal shorthand for certain terms that I really wish would catch on more widely.

The most brilliant thing Naomi Novik's publisher did to market Temeraire / His Majesty's Dragon was to make the first chapter available freely, because the book just sells itself from that excerpt. Farthing's publisher ought to do the same.
Fortunately, Jo Walton already had that brainstorm, and you can read the first two chapters online. Go ahead; I'll wait. [Though you may not be able to afterwards.]

I have also read Sex with the queen: 900 years of vile kings, virile lovers, and passionate politics by Eleanor Herman, due in stores next month.

It's a nonfiction work chock full of delicious historical scandals punctuated by the cattiest of quips. In many respects, the personal history exposed helps make light of confusing aspects of global politics. [It always amazes me how the schools manage to make history so boring, when it's populated with such colorful characters.]

Makes me truly grateful to have such a wonderful marriage and great husband.

I enjoyed the book so much, I'm going to seek out the author's earlier book (which the foreward says was written simultaneously), Sex with kings: 500 years of adultery, power, rivalry, and revenge

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:50 AM

Among the vendors I noticed at PLA was Lightning Source, a print-on-demand publisher.

I meant to talk with them. They've published three novels related to Marlowe in the past year -- Water Lane : The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe, Was I Really That Boy? : The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe, and Vrolok. I have heard enough negative comments about self-publishing that I'm loath to actually spend money on these, but I meant to ask about the possibility of reviewer copies...

But I got busy and forgot. Oh well...

BTW, my Geoffrey Chaucer bobblehead (associated with Greenwood's forthcoming All things Chaucer) now sits on my shelf at work beside last year's Jane Austen bobblehead (a tie-in with last year's All things Austen). Googling around, I found out that Greenwood did release a Shakespeare bobblehead (to coincide with All things Shakespeare) at ALA Toronto...

Archie McPhee makes its own Shakespeare bobblehead, but it wouldn't be the same...

Alas.