Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 223

One Lonely Star

I am rarely delighted by my one-star Amazon reviews. Especially when I'm taken to task for making up dumb stuff, when in fact I did scrupulous research and the reviewer didn't bother to simply google the topic and find that out. (Okay, that one still rankles.)But at least I'm in good company. Jeanette Demain over at Salon has been brooding over one-star reviews of the classics. Jane Eyre by

Russia Breaks IKEA

So Swedish blond furniture giant IKEA decided to open outlets in Russia. Turns out it was a bad idea.From the start the company announced that even in Russia it would be adhering to its clearly-formulated Swedish rules, based on the Protestant work ethic and unanswerable logic. As a result, Khimki officials turned off the electricity just before the first Moscow shop opened. There was no

Istanbul

On April 1, one year ago today, I looked out the window of my hotel room and saw this. My oh my.

The Leaf, Trembling

I put aside my Nebula reading for some stories by W. Somerset Maugham, his collection The Trembling of a Leaf. These are stories set in Samoa or Honolulu or on the long passage somewhere between, and include "Rain," the story that introduced the world to Miss Sadie Thompson, the hooker with a heart of sulfuric acid played variously on the screen by Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth

LMAO, DOODZ!

It's World War II on Facebook. [via Janice:]

Back Taxes

So . . . as I was discussing my 2009 taxes with the Accountant, the Accountant asked: "What about property taxes for 2009?"Hmm. Interesting. I didn't remember paying property taxes for 2009. Or for that matter receiving a bill.So I've been on the phone with the County Clerk and the County Assessor and the County Treasurer. And it turns out that my purchase of the property 16 years ago was

Thought for the Day

If you don't give your reader the ending you promised him, then the ending you give him better be three times better than the ending you promised.

Gravity-Free Assembly

Courtesy of USA Today, an animation showing the decade-long assembly of the International Space Station.

Uh-Oh

From Bruce Schneier, we find that all that anonymous networking data isn't so anonymous after all . . . Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Dr Vitaly Shmatikov, from the University of Texas at Austin, developed the algorithm which turned the anonymous data back into names and addresses.The data sets are usually stripped of personally identifiable information, such as names, before it is sold

Unusual Apology

Betraying a refreshingly unusual attitude, the screenwriter who wrote Battlefield Earth apologizes for his work. It wasn't as I intended -- promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn't really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.It started, as so many of my choices do, with my Willy Wonker. It was 1994, and I had read