John Crowley's Blog, page 11

crowleycrow @ 2013-08-19T09:25:00

Wonderful when a giant and probably dreadful possibility for the future lies doggo and bland in a sentence of the morning paper.  This one in an article from today's Times about "biobots" -- combinations of gel and living cells that can move on their own, and are perhaps able to be small enough to (say) travel in the body.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/printing-out-a-biological-machine.html?ref=science

This is the sentence:

The work is part of a multi-university research project, financed by the National Science Foundation, to develop multicellular devices with applications in health care, security and other fields.

Security?

crowleycrow @ 2013-08-16T16:12:00

In Slate:  Of course it was a legal-eagle fact checker who made this sentence nonsense.  I don't think that allegedly vandalizing something is all that bad an idea, but actually I can't work that out.

It’s Not a Great Idea to Allegedly Vandalize a Police Station Minutes After Being Released From Said Police Station

Reactionary

North Carolina has become a "conservative" state in the modern sense, which has to do with changing and discarding and promoting various things rather than conserving them -- but not the conservative (restorative?) twist at the end here:

"The Republicans not only cut taxes and business regulations, as many had expected, but also allowed stricter regulations on abortion clinics, ended teacher tenure, blocked the expansion of Medicaid, cut unemployment benefits, removed obstacles to the death penalty, allowed concealed guns in bars and restaurants, and mandated the teaching of cursive writing."  (NY Times)

Well!  The Spenserian?  The Palmer?  The nun's style taught in Catholic schools from books named after the style's developers (or the textbook publisher) whose double name now escapes me?  The "secretary" hand?  Who knows cursive now well enough to teach it?  Have funds been allocated to teach the teachers?

crowleycrow @ 2013-08-04T07:39:00

I think sometimes writers try to avoid complex sentences for the sake of clarity, and often end up in muddles.  From the Times' subheads today about abortion laws in Wisconsin:

A federal judge issued an injunction that blocks a law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals for another four months.

Of course it was not admitting privileges for another four months that were blocked, though it reads like that.  It should have been thus:

A federal judge issued an injunction that blocks for another four months a law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

But this may have seemed to headline writers too complex a word order for quick reading.

Reflector

Long life of a cultural icon and identifier:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/if-this-was-your-mother-doctor/?ref=health

Years ago -- years and years -- I noticed that doctors on TV and in commercials and ads were still wearing those reflectors on their heads whose utility must have ended sometime in the 1950s (a guess) -- but which continued to be worn by fake doctors as easy recognition.  It finally lapsed and vanished except in jokes, but here it is again.  I wonder how many young people recognize it.

Headliners

Intriguing headline on the Yale News I get every so often:

New app, new discovery about PKD, national honors, and better detection
That's Polycystic Kidney Disease, which shares initial with a writer who has received some national honors (Library of America publication, etc.) and perhaps could use better detection.

P pod

Gil Roth, of the sublimely selfless publishing venture Virtual Memories, has posted the podcast he made with me at Readercon a week (two weeks?) ago, and it can be found here:

http://chimeraobscura.com/vm/podcast-readercon-2013-fairies-and-zombiesor you can use the shortlink http://bit.ly/13Vkic1

Tough one

Manola Daris reviewing "The Conjuring":

Mr. Wan — whose first sly shot is of a cracked, smiling face — sets a relentlessly uneasy tone that imperceptively shifts between intense seriousness and lightly mocking.

Of course that wasn't the word she meant, but the fun is trying to think of what she might have  meant if she did mean it.  "A relentlessly uneasy tone that crassly shits...?  Blindly shifts...?

crowleycrow @ 2013-07-13T06:36:00

From Gail Collins's NY Times column today:

“The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each other. But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and give to others in the country,” said Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee during a speech in Memphis.

In other words, this is not a Christian nation, and people like Fincher do not want it to be.  A Christian nation would have to act like a Christian person or a Christian community, and find ways to take care of one another.  But this Christian says no to that.  I'm personally fine with ours not being a Christian nation -- though a community that finds ways to take care of one another -- that, yes.

Snowden

The Times reports that certain human rights activists and also some "conservative" or "conservative-leaning" Russian politicos or officials support his application to stay in Russia.  Can any of the wise readers here tell me what "conservative" implies or denotes in modern Russia, or what policies or visions attach to it?