Tad Williams's Blog, page 33

Lord Love a Duck

16 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

My friend Peter Stampfel playing deejay, serving up some mellow Tokyo sounds to help you recover from a manic Monday.

Just kidding — it’s bat-@#$& crazy.

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Fly safely, English kin. We miss you guys already. Once I put my mother-in-law in St. Clare’s it’s going to be really quiet around here.

15 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

Ah, yes.

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Lord love a duck, it was actually sunny outside today. It lifted my spirits, in the fullest expansive significance of the cliché. I need to spend more time outside, and so does my family. We have been hermit-like and scuttling for weeks. I need a good walk.

14 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

My favorite Sworsach so far. (internet meme alert) Which means since last night.

13 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

Had to share this picture of Timothy B. McCormick’s shirt from back in the day. The My-O-My was our old club in downtown Palo Alto, sponsored by pretty much the entire Stallings family, my best friend Josh and his brother Lark, sisters Shaun and Lisa, and his mom and her boyfriend. We all hung out there, slept there, worked and played there, rehearsed and then performed there. For a couple of years, it was the off-kilter center of our suburban world.

Here’s a very sensible op-ed piece that makes a lot of sense about the Ozzie Guillen flack. Non-sports fans — it’s politics! Politics haters — it’s sports!

Castrogate Follies

www.grantland.com

What Ozzie said was idiotic — but what came after is even worse.

12 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

As Lisa said — fun ad.

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11 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

Now that the guessing is over on the Captain Hook picture, I can post my profile pic. As you can tell, I’m having One of Those Days.

I was trolling for profile pictures and found this. See if you can figure out who this is dressed as Captain Hook.

Took the mixed British-American gang to the Monterey Aquarium today, which is still just wonderful. It was p#ssing down rain, so it was a good day to do an indoor thing, but I wish we were providing our short-term visitors with better weather. California is letting them down.

I want this so bad I’ve already put ads on Craigslist to sell one or both of my children so I can afford it.

10 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

Olga Dubina

Hey, Ozzie Guillen: Thou shalt not buck the right-wing, anti-Castro line in South Florida. But you probably figured that out already, huh?

The rain has returned, suddenly and stealthily. I am going to pretend I don’t notice, just to piss it off.

9 April 2012

Tad’s Mood Today

Scroll down for the video of the machine in action.

Record-Breaking Rube Goldberg Machine Pops Balloon in 300 Steps

www.wired.com

Based on the work of famous American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, there’s no shortage of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. But none are more complex — in terms of total sequenced steps — than the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers’s latest creation.

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Published on April 17, 2012 20:42

From “Publishers’ Lunch”: Press Defends Publishers Over Justice (and Amazon)

It’s rare to see the NYT and WSJ philosophically aligned on how the government uses its power, but they and others in press seem to be coming together to raise questions about why the Department of Justice is beating up on publishers, apparently serving the interests of a retailer bigger than the entire industry.

Holman Jenkins Jr. writes in the WSJ, “in essence, Justice says that, beginning in 2008, several plankton, in the form of five publishers, conspired against a whale, Amazon, whose monopoly clout had imposed a $9.99 retail price for e-books.” He argues: “Given Amazon’s dominance, it’s hardly offensive that all five used the opportunity of Apple’s arrival in the market to reclaim that power. Justice calls it collusion. In reality, publishers have nothing to collude about, except maybe Clive Cussler’s next advance. Books don’t compete with each other. Nobody walks into a store and says, ‘Toni Morrison looks expensive today. Give me some Stephen Hawking.’”

Jenkins says, “let’s face it: Publishers have every reason to fear Amazon’s exploitative behavior.” He adds, “the book industry is defending the very survivability of a book industry whose products are anything but uniform.” His closing line: “Judging by Justice’s slobbering over Amazon, as if whatever Amazon wants is the Lord’s ordained order in the e-book market, many of those résumés are headed to Seattle.”

WSJ

David Carr, writing in the NYT calls the lawsuit and settlements “the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ‘N’ Groceries on Route 19 instead.” He suggests that “why the crumbling book business is worthy of so much attention from Justice while Wall Street skates is a broader question we’ll leave for another day.” But Carr concludes that “after a week of watching the Justice Department and Amazon team up, I’ve learned that low prices come with a big cost.”

NYT

For one more voice, there’s Barry C. Lynn writing at Slate, who also believes “the DoJ got this issue…spectacularly wrong.” He writes:

“Lower prices enable horizontal predation; when a fatly capitalized retailer (like Amazon) wants to bankrupt its less-wealthy direct competitors, it simply undersells them day after day after day. Furthermore, lower prices can be used in vertical predation, against producers; when a powerful retailer (like Amazon) wants to extract more wealth from its now-captive suppliers, it can set prices to promote those firms who accept its terms and to punish those who resist….

“Over time, it became clear that the best way to lower prices over the long run was in fact to allow producers to set higher prices today. That’s because doing so forces producers to compete with producers rather than retailers. And it forces retailers to compete with retailers rather than with producers. The result being that we end up with both producers and retailers doing a better job of serving the consumer.”

Slate

Michael Shermer writes another op-ed, for the LAT: “The Justice Department should have left things alone. Essentially, two titans — Apple and Amazon — clashed, and competition was working…. Amazon will gain a government-aided advantage over the competition.”

He adds: “What this lawsuit probably will do instead is return to Amazon the power to monopolize the e-book market through predatory pricing to the detriment of publishers, authors and, ultimately, readers.”

LAT

(Source: Press Defends Publishers Over Justice (and Amazon))