Sentential Links #263

Time for linkage!

:: Now I did not live there. It was only four days. But there was a point, walking by the Royal Ontario Museum on our second day there, when I said to my wife: “I think I could live here,” assuming that we had employment, etc. Good mass transit, bikes, educational capital, intellectual stimulation, massive multiculturalism; there were plenty of places we DIDN’T get a chance to see. And there are angrier people in lots of US cities I’ve been to, starting with Albany, NY. (Toronto really is a fantastic place...and it increasingly irritates me that I haven't been there in five years. WTF, self?!)

:: There are not too many things I am good at but RILING UP my father is something I EXCEL at! (Knowing Andy personally...I'll bet this is totally accurate.)

:: If we can't make you look good, you're ugly! (Well, sheesh....)

:: Nope, for DC Comics, their greatest strength, that enormous back catalog and mind-numbingly rich cache of characters available to them isn't a strength. They see it as a weakness, something that will drive readers away.

:: Putting in 18-hour writing days for the past week has made me curious about how other writers write. A lot has changed through the centuries. From painting on cave walls to uploading eBooks, we've been through a lot of writing evolution, but a basic truth remains the same: writers need their own space.

:: Elvis Presley never did talk shows, he never appeared on Johnny Carson, he never “made the rounds” of promotion like other entertainers did. He was completely elusive to the press, which of course added to the mystique (but also, conversely, isolated him). The isolation did work in his favor, as it kept Presley sightings to a bare minimum, upping his worth even more. (Sheila has been posting a lot about Elvis Presley, in typically amazing fashion. It occurred to me, at some point whilst reading her series of posts, that I don't currently own any Elvis in my music collection. None, at all. It's weird how our music collections "morph" over time, isn't it? As we embrace one format and then the next and then the next? I used to have some Elvis...on cassette. I may have owned a CD or two -- in fact, I may still own a CD or two, in some box somewhere. But as I more and more see "my music" as "what's taking up huge amounts of GB on my external drive", owning something on CD somehow becomes "not really owning it"...despite the fact that owning something physical, like a CD, seems more intuitively real than owning a digital storage device that currently happens to contain somewhere within a sequence of ones and zeroes that, when processed by a computer program, constitute the thing in question. If that makes any sense at all.)

:: Kerosene needed to be cheaper than whale oil to force a global change. In other words, no one would switch until we had killed all the whales. (This is what depresses me about the state of things today: we know the problems we face, and to a large extent we know what we need to do to fix them. But we do none of the things we're going to have to do someday anyway, because...hell, I don't know. But we don't.)

More next week!