bookkeeping

emperor: 900 words, and about half of that after I'd "gone to bed" last night. It took me all day yesterday to get through one little conversation. *sigh*

By nature I am sedentary, and so it's easy for me to talk myself into forgetting how much better I feel when I get some exercise. And then I make it to my yoga class for the first time in a few weeks, and find myself going, Oh, right. Endorphins are nifty. Also that I am stronger and more skilled than I think of myself as being.

And it made the writing problems seem less insurmountable, too.

Memo to self: Exercise, you twit.

Fair and Balanced

Bookslut has been following the FOX News Network's lawsuit against Al Franken and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, a lawsuit in which FOX claims to have trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced."

Today, they (Bookslut) link to Neal Pollack, who has declared today tomorrow [and why did no one point out to me that I was posting on Thursday the fourteenth? --Ed.] Fair and Balanced Day on the internet:

This Friday, August 15, is Fair And Balanced day on the Internet. You are all hereby instructed to use the words Fair And Balanced in very creative ways on your various websites. My cosponsor in this effort, Atrios, informs me that many of you are already using "Fair And Balanced" in your taglines. Very good. Sometimes, I swear you don't even need instructions from me. But we can go further. Tell Fox News to take its Fair And Balanced slogan and shove it up its Fair And Balanced hole. Feel free to be more subtle than that, if you wish.

You heard the man.

Talk hard.

[Addendum: Making Light and Electrolite are on the ball, on the job, and on the money, as per usual.]

[Second addendum: I've added fair and balanced to my Interests list, as has (thus far) one other user.]

[Addendum to the second addendum, 3:30 p.m.: And now there are ten of us.]

[Third addendum: Bookslut also links to the list being compiled by the Authors Guild of books that could face legal action if the courts uphold FOX's idiocy.]

words are the heartbeat of language ... or something like that

matociquala pointed me to this story about a program, originally designed to predict heart-attacks, which is apparently doing very well at determining authorship of various early modern English plays.

There's something so sfnal about this that it just fills me with giddy delight.

(But please ignore the crack about "most Shakespeare scholars" down near the end of the article. Shakespeare scholars have been using computer programs to argue about authorship for decades.)