Diane's Site

Handbag hooks.

Get the purse or computer bag up off that sticky floor and into your more or less direct line of view when you're at table.

I'm going to get one of these. Getting tired of looping the purse/computer bag over my knee all the time and cutting off the circulation...

My old Star Trek novel editor, John Ordover, is getting a lot of attention over the hoax website he created, MarryOurDaughter.com. (Despite the fact that he told the New York Times that it was a hoax way back on September 11th.)  His intention was to publicize the bizarre disparity among US states of laws regarding what constitutes marriageable age, that age's relationship to the age of consent, and the role of parents in their (minor) children's marriages. (An example: in Texas, "...kids as young as 14 need parental permission to get married – unless, the law says, they have already been married before."  ...Ye gods.)

What I'm trying to work out at the moment is how anyone who got so far into the website as to read the testimonials could possibly have still thought it was real.

Looks like a lot of people didn't make it that far, though...  (See the various news stories on Google for details on the numerous cries of outrage.)

...for, sometime between the hours of 2 and 7:30 AM local time:

Failing to negotiate the curve in the road just east of our house...

...flying across the road, over the fieldstone wall and through the hedge...

...into the paddock next to the house, through it and the fence between them...

..and into our front yard, where you rammed into our house...

...and destroyed my biggest and most expensive plant pot, the one with the dragon on it, which I really really liked and was getting ready to plant a new apple tree in.

...After which you quietly opened the front gate, drove out, closed the gate behind you, and drove away.

...But you know what? You left us something else to remember you by...

Half your front number plate, and enough of your smashed front right headlight to know what kind of car you were driving. That's more than enough data for the Gardaí to identify you... and they'll be so interested to hear why you left the scene of an accident without calling them.

So, just in case you were wondering: you are now officially PWNED.

(Bwahahahahahahaha.)

Now he's gone, too, after a long, difficult illness that he never stopped fighting.

It's some years since we saw him in Dublin. It was a pleasure to be with him, even for such a short time: he was a smart and funny guy. We will miss you, Jim. Go well.

A new Tron movie!!

Commercial director Joseph Kosinski is in final negotiations to develop and direct "Tron," described as "the next chapter" of Disney's 1982 cult classic. Sean Bailey is producing via the Live Planet banner, as is Steven Lisberger, who co-wrote and directed the original film.

Kosinski, who last month signed on to helm the remake of "Logan's Run" for Warner Bros. Pictures, will oversee the visual development of the project and have input on the script, which is being written by "Lost" scribes Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. Story details are being kept secret.

Oh please Ghu don't let them screw it up!!

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

...Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

Fascinating...  Must go dig up the full article.

And so, to my great sorrow, passes one of the most senior, and certainly one of the most beloved, of this century's YA fantasy writers: one of the first of us to break out, over the course of years, into worldwide fame, and to general agreement that she "wasn't just writing kid stuff".

She was a gifted and powerfully imaginative writer with a graceful style. Unquestionably she was an influence on me, though perhaps not in the way people might think. I read her first few books in my late teens / early twenties; and while in a general way I liked what she was doing, I had personal niggles about the way she was doing it. Certainly there were things about A A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet that made me think, Hmmm... I'm not so sure about this. If I was going to do something of this sort, I'd do it this way (...there you have it in a phrase, the eternal/internal certainty that they have it right of writers everywhere...) -- and the result, somewhat later, was So You Want to Be a Wizard.

Plainly the general similarity in themes between SYWTBAW and L'Engle's early work has been noticed, for our books do often enough get mentioned in the same breath. It's a development that would have astounded me if I'd known about it when I first met her. That was twenty-some years ago, when my first editor at Delacorte (where SYW... debuted) took me to a party that was being thrown by the publisher in Madeleine's honor. We had a few moments to sit down and chat, after we were introduced, and I went into a strange sort of shock/horror after a few minutes when she said to me, "By the way, I read your new one. I liked it very much. What's the next one about? When are we going to see it?"

The shock/horror was, I now think (a) because no new writer really expects one of the greats to say something like that to them, no matter how you may daydream about it: (b) because up until that point I had given the idea no consideration whatsoever. Srsly. If there are now eight-going-on-nine books in the Young Wizards series, I think we can all blame L'Engle, because I went home to Philly that night thinking "Hmmmm....", and had a long, long look toward at the Great South Bay and the Atlantic past the Jersey wetlands as the Metroliner headed south. Deep Wizardry, surely, has L'Engle's shadow lying long over it. I will very much miss the sense that the woman who cast it is still just over the horizon, still working.

...But if life, and life after, have gone the way she expected... she still is. (sigh) Take care, cousin. See you later.

Check out this website, which specializes in nothing but the low cost airlines:

Momondo.com

If it can't find a carrier for a route you're interested in, it brings up a whole sheaf of other travel sites for you to search. Some of these I'd never even heard of (which is saying something).

There are also blogs associated with the site (the "wing blog" seems a little outdated, but the "wheel blog" and "bed blog" are more up to date). One interesting link that came up on the bed blog, btw: TabletHotels, "Hotels for Global Nomads". I always like it when a site offers me hotels I've stayed at and loved (it just showed me, in one of the hotel images, the very table I sat at in the dining room when I was last there). Check out this one, for example, attached to a famously cool spa facility I've wanted to go to for a long time.

(sigh) No time right now for any kind of travel except the virtual. But it's fun to be able to look at these things and think about when things get a little quieter, a couple of months down the line...

We have arrived at the rarest example of wizard-based lit -- that with the classy, masterfully executed illustration.... For those who love stories about small children who run afoul of dragons, and yet are ashamed to admit so publicly, we suggest hiding this book under your pillow, next to your collection of small handguns. The current cover is simply too pleasant to contemplate altering.

Turn it on and thousands of book icons suddenly populate the globe. These icons connect place names to their mention in books indexed by Google, providing yet another way to navigate information geospatially.