Thought Palace

Call the roller of big dice,
The long-haired one, and bid him whip
On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s.
Let the fighters dawdle in such armor
As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap
Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon.
Let a fumble be finale of its caster:
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

So far, this blog’s main claim to fame has been as the #2-ranked Google hit for [apricot jam recipe]. But that’s no longer enough to sustain my extravagant lifestyle, so I’m following the next most obvious business opportunity: Elephant jokes! These were huge (the jokes) when I was a kid, but they seem to have been largely forgotten, which is a shame. I tested them out on my kids today, and they still work fine.

These jokes are, admittedly, about as unoriginal as my jam recipe. And the list was generated roughly the same way as the jam, by picking pre-existing collections, cleaning off the typos, and boiling them down a lot. In fact, I’ll lead off with an apricot joke:

Q: How is an elephant like an apricot?
A: They are both gray. Well, except the apricot.

Q: How can you tell if an elephant is in the refrigerator?
A: The door won’t shut.

Q: How can you tell if an elephant has been in the refrigerator earlier?
A: Footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you get an elephant into the fridge in the first place?
A: Open door; Insert elephant; Close door.

Q: How do you get a giraffe into the fridge?
A: Open door; Remove elephant; Insert giraffe; Close door.

iPhone playing cards by Meninos:

“Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.”—1998

Abstract.

Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing the author J.G. Ballard in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic nature surrounded the image of the award-winning novelist.

J.G. Ballard And The Conceptual Auto-Disaster.

J.G. Ballard died yesterday in his last car-crash. During his life he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the royal limousine, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a hæmorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the Princess Diana, with whom [...]

Roy Blount, president of the Authors’ Guild, writing in the New York Times, attempts to defend his groups assertion that the Amazon Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability is cheating authors out of audio-book royalties:

“What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.”

And that assertion makes absolutely no sense. The creator of an item does not have a right to impose an arbitrary tax on anyone who adds value to the item. Otherwise we’d be open to all sorts of nonsensical scenarios, like:

The RIAA hits Apple with a lawsuit, claiming that the trippy visualizer component built into iTunes adds value to the music, and demands extra visual-performance royalties.

Movie studios take issue with the “up-scaling” feature built into current DVD players, which increases the resolution of the image to improve picture quality on HTDVs. They point out that the output resolution is comparable to Blu-Ray, making the consumers’ DVDs roughly twice as valuable, and demand the DVD manufacturers cut them a share of that.

The CEO of Exxon-Mobil asserts that his company has a right to a share of the extra value that the Prius adds [...]

(This is more or less to the tune of Rock’n’Roll High School, or any other Ramones song for that matter. You have to imagine Joey Ramone singing it. Johnny, you just switch between C and F every couple of lines, got it?)

Well, back in March I got my feelins hurt
When Apple wouldn’t gimme no developer cert
The SDK they gave me had a “simulator” —
Fooled around with it, then said “see you lator!”

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Don’t care about iPhones on my screen
‘Cause that’s not where I wanna been
I just wanna run on the Device
I just wanna make it look nice

(I wanna be, an iPhone developer)

On Friday all the lucky devs they got paid
But my real cert came in the email today
Got my key set up, my device provisioned
Got my noob questions sent to the cocoa-dev list

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Now I R a l33t iPhone developx0r
Gonna sell my app at the iPhone App Store
I’m gonna price it at 99 cents
In a couple weeks, it’ll be payin’ my rent!

(L33t, l33t, l33t, l33t iPhone developx0r)

My app’s so rad, it’s got things to-do
When you go to White Castle it’ll get your tip too
Gonna raise it to a buck ninety-nine
When all of you buy it, I’ll [...]

Stickies and I hadn’t spoken in a while, but it called me this morning to announce it’s made its acting debut in a music video! That was unexpected, to say the least, but it’s an exciting career move, and I had to congratulate it; it does a great job:

Stickies makes its entrance at 0:53, if you want to skip directly to it, but really the entire video (and song) are excellent. I just wish they’d used Stickies in the opening scenes instead of Word—face it, Word is over the hill, especially that old Office 2004 version. (Did you see the bags under the Office Assistant’s eyes? Stickies told me they dragged it straight out of the Betty Ford Center to shoot those scenes, and it couldn’t remember any of its lines even though they were right up on the screen next to it in giant print. It’s sad, really. At least it hasn’t OD’d yet like that pathetic paperclip.)

This seems to be a fan-made video, by the way; but I think it’s better than the official one. Now the question is: will Apple use this in a commercial? I think they should!

[via 37signals]

Speaking of Arthur C. Clarke, another of his achievements was to live a long life without making a complete ass of himself. A goal we should all emulate, but one that’s eluded too many other SF writers.

For example! Take Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, having ceased putting any mental effort into their writing at least 25 years ago, now have the free time, in their dotage, to advise top government officials on national security issues … in their own inimitable way:

Members of the group recently offered a rambling, sometimes strident string of ideas at a panel discussion promoting the group at the DHS science and technology conference. Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven [...]
Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. “The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said. *

[Emphasis mine.] Hmm; this plan wouldn’t by chance require a huge reprint run of a Spanish edition of The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, to be [...]

CUPERTINO, California—March 14, 2008—Apple® today announced that more than 10,000 iPhone™ developers have received enigmatically-worded rejection letters for the beta iPhone Developer Program. The iPhone Developer Program provides developers with a complete and integrated process for developing, debugging, and distributing applications for iPhone and iPod touch, complete with real-world testing on iPhone.

“Developer reaction to our email has been incredible with more than 1,000 snarky posts and irate comments on high-profile Mac websites,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Also, over one hundred programmers, some real hotshots at big software companies, have been seen sobbing inconsolably at their Mac Pros, further demonstrating the incredible interest developers have in creating applications for the iPhone.”

“Apple gave us amazing tools that let us create a very functional demo in less than two weeks,” said Rand Race, hotshot programmer at big software company Prosolar Mechanix. “It was all lovey-dovey during our demo at the launch … but then they took away our magic developer key before we left the Apple campus, and since then we haven’t heard diddly-squat from them.” Race denied spending the days sitting next to the phone waiting for a call from Apple, but did admit to [...]

This is what happens when Steve Jobs announces that an iPhone SDK will be available for download within the hour: