Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 78

the pen is mightier than the bull?

The new Hemingway Review had a fascinating article by Richard Hishmeh about Hemingway and Lord Byron. EH owned three biographies of Byron and checked others out of the library, so it was more than a passing interest.

The article goes beyond the similarities in the two men – Hemingway was Byronic and Byron was Hemingwayish! – to the fascinating and verifiable observation that both men consciously forged a public persona, and their success at that arguably had a deleterious effect on their writ...

tv

We watched some curious television last night. "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?" (no) and "America's Got Talent" [but not to excess:]. In fact, even I missed some of the fifth-grader questions, like "Which state borders Missouri to the south?" I would've known that in the fifth grade, but then I would have studied the map the night before the test.

Most of the contestants were abysmally stupid, of course; the show wouldn't be much fun with someone who just answered the questions. They...

cars 'n' ads

[The conversation in sff.net has taken an automotive turn . . .:]

A constant puzzlement, Sean. "What kind of person buys stuff on the basis of annoying advertisements?" – the answer is "lots of people." Maybe not me and thee, or maybe we do respond, but at some level to which we don't have conscious access.

The existence of staggeringly expensive commercials is indirect proof that they work. (Like the existence of all those staggeringly expensive missile-filled silos.) But would anybody adm...

art? movie?

The air conditioner is acting up, making the house an oven in the late afternoon. We sort of escaped home to go see the art film "Exit Through the Gift Shop."

It was annoying and interesting in about equal measures. A documentary or mockumentory or mock-you-docu-pomo-mentary, whatever. About as sincere as a Warhol Campbell's Soup can, but also as interesting.

The conceit is that this weird French guy with an accent that can't be real, Thierry Guetta, lives in LA and (in response to a child...

Two movies

Saw a couple of science fiction movies, one you can hardly say anything about and one that ought to generate as much talk as Matrix.

The Book of Eli is sort of like a short-short by Frederic Brown or Saki inflated to movie length – a killer punch line that follows an otherwise predictable movie. Lone black dude wanders through apocalypse kicking ass and survives. Eli is Denzel Washington, so of course the character has gravitas and cool intelligence as well as killer chops, which in this cas...

Theo-logical

Pat Lobrutto sent this lovely anecdote to Sherry Gottleib's humor remailing --

==============


In the small Texas town of Mt. Vernon, Drummond's Bar began construction on a new building to increase their business. The local Baptist church immediately started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayers.

Work progressed right up till the week before opening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.

The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after th...

It's dead, Jim.

[Go away for a few weeks and the damnedest things happen. My sffnet blog has morphed into a Star Trek forum!:]

. . . Back from Europe and suddenly beamed up into a 40-year-old TV show?

Like Dave, I was sort of off to boarding school during the original series, though my school was the federally-funded one of Hard Knocks, buzzing bullets and jungle rot.

It was funny that Paramount asked me to pick up the Star Trek novelization thing after Jim Blish died. The decision (by Fred Pohl) was made on ...

art 'n' tarts

We've been on a mad art whirl since we got off the train in London and trundled our suitcases to the Clutes' place in Camden Town. Judith fed us a good pasta-and-pesto lunch and we were off to the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, where we crawled around the wing that housed 15th-century European (mostly Italian and Netherlands) paintings, relevant to Judith's work, Uccello especially. I'd only given them passing notice before. Stylized, meticulous, brilliant. The curious Van Eyck p...

games and gaming

I've probably told this online before, but it bears repeating here. About twenty years ago I was in Vegas playing poker, and killed some time over at Caesar's Palace at a blackjack table. It was about three in the morning and I was the only one playing. It was a three-deck game.

My basic bet was $10, the minimum. I'd go up to $20 and $30 when the count was good (that is, when the percentage of face cards, tens, and aces dealt had declined sufficiently to tip the odds in favor of the player...

the vice of gambling & the virtue of insurance

[ln sff.net, they're talking about blackjack and poker . . . :]

xxx
(Michael said "they quote
David Sklansky (from his "Theory of Poker" I believe) on his definition of what
makes something a game of chance. If you can arrange to lose, it's skill. If
not, it's gambling.")


That's an interestingly negative definition, Michael. But I do think one can "arrange to lose" a game of pure chance by being unrelentingly stupid. You will lose at slots, for instance, if you keep playing for...