Matt Ruff's Blog, page 62

oh hai

Via Research Maven, video of the newest residents of Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo:


Now we just need to figure who on staff to bribe to get visiting privileges.

So does this make Foghorn Leghorn a non-rhoticity chicken?

Via jaylake , Language Log has an entertainingly ranty post about the "I before E, except after C..." spelling rule and a recent suggestion by the British government that the rule is not worth teaching.

It's a digression from the rant's main point, but the following parenthetical caught my attention:

<>The word "weird" is sometimes cited as an exception [to the rule:], but in British English it is not: the <ei> represents the diphthong [ɪə:], not the monophthong [i:]. (There might be analyses of rhoti</>

Digital dust jackets

The most widely repeated -- and mocked -- remark from this year's BookExpo America is Sherman Alexie's assertion that the Amazon Kindle is "elitist." Paul Constant, reporting on BEA in the Stranger, gets Alexie to offer some additional thoughts about ebooks:

<>In an e-mail, Alexie lamented to me the potential loss of one of the great pleasures of book culture: "Have you ever fallen in love with somebody, a stranger, just because of the book they happened to be reading? And what about the recent awe</>

Making quarters smaller... because they can!

My friend Pablos Holman gave a lecture at Seattle's Town Hall last week. After about half an hour of cranking up Lisa's security phobia with stories about bump keys, RFID scanners, and other fun hacker tricks, Pablos talked about the work going at the local mad scientists' consortium, Intellectual Ventures. Recent projects include an anti-mosquito laser fence and a nuclear reactor that uses depleted uranium as fuel.

Pablos also showed a cool bit of video, filmed with a special camera capable of c

First, they came for the dwarves...

Fresh off their unsuccessful attempt to rebrand tuna and marlin as "sea kittens," the PETA organization has decided to raise a fuss about "fish tossing" as practiced in the Seattle Pike Place Market:

<>PETA heard that the American Veterinary Medical Association asked some Pike Place Market fish throwers to be the opening act for their July 10 convention at the convention center.

Ron DeHaven, chief executive of the AVMA says his organization thought having one of Seattle's top tourist attractions -- </>

Simulating a low-gravity environment on film

Yesterday's New York Times had a Dave Itzkoff piece talking up Moon, the new SF film by Duncan Jones (aka Zowie Bowie) and starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey. The movie sounds interesting, and I look forward to seeing it. Itzkoff's article, however, included a throwaway line about the "scientific accuracy" of 2001: A Space Odyssey that woke up my inner Aspergers' child, because seriously, 2001 is a Bible picture for pot-smoking atheists, and the fact that they turn the sound off during the s

So I'm halfway through "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans"...

...in which Rhona Mitra takes over for Kate Beckinsale in the ass-kicking vampire chick role, and it occurs to me, "Rhona" has the same number of syllables as "Lola," and "vampire" has the same number of syllables as "showgirl," so if you wanted to do a parody song set the to the tune of Barry Manilow's Copacabana ('Viktor went a bit too far / lycans sailed across the bar..."), you'd have a good running start.

Because, yeah, it's the kind of film where you think about that sort of thing.