Courtesy of comments on this MetaFilter thread about reviews of a couple of recent novels, two contrasting approaches to literary criticism.

First, brevity. MDS35 quotes Ambrose Bierce:

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Second, sustained mockery. Perhaps the classic example, cited by MrMoonPie: Mark Twain’s hilarious Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.

Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

How could I resist a little Hot Library Smut?

I’m particularly taken with the Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag: the sinuous curves of the stairs, the gorgeous colour scheme, all that ornate ironwork. But then, the Real Gabinete Portugues de Leitura Rio de Janeiro looks pretty damn fine too.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

Robin Kent, the head of new online music site SpiralFrog talks a good game:

“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” said Mr. Kent of SpiralFrog in a statement. “SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site.”

Sounds promising. I’m all for a good user experience.

Wait a minute:

For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones do. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements, and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.

They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog web site monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.

Yes, that’s clearly better than downloading a file that you can play on the most popular brand of portable music player in the world. Pardon me while I put my iPod and my Mac up for sale on eBay…

[Via Daring Fireball]

I suspect that half the British weblogging community will be linking to BBC Radio 4’s Meet the Bloggers series, featuring brief interviews with a variety of webloggers. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the first episode yet, but I will catch up with it over the next few days.

I’m mildly surprised that I’ve at least seen nine out of the ten sites chosen, and that I read several of them on a regular basis; I’d rather assumed that I was out of touch with the current weblogging scene. I used to try to cast an eye over new entries on the old GBlogs list whenever new weblogs showed up, but by the time that list went offline the growth of the ‘community’ was such that it was pretty impractical to keep up with the sites I was already reading and find time to cast an eye over every new site that showed up. I rely on word of mouth to point out new sites to me nowadays. (Although this site is listed at the BritBlog site, I’ve never made any use of that site’s Latest BritBlogs facility. Partly it’s because I don’t find that geographical proximity correlates very strongly with my interest in a site.)

Anyway, I’m rambling. The point I intended to make was that I think it’s a pity that not one of the sites whose authors the BBC is interviewing is a traditional linklog. The nearest thing to a linklog among the sites the BBC features is Instapundit, I suppose. Admittedly, it’s trickier to get across to a radio audience how a linklog works than it is with an online journal^* or a site where the author writes mini-essays which may or may not include a link to an external site, since for the latter types of site you can have the author read an entry or two and thereby give listeners a sense of what the site is like. However, if the idea of the BBC’s series is to give a sense of why people write weblogs and what they’re trying to achieve by writing them, surely the main point is to get the authors to talk engagingly and informatively about their site, rather than to find sites which hold content which can easily be translated into a radio programme. It would have been good to see someone who writes a linklog on the BBC’s list: Darren from LinkMachineGo, say, or Lindsay of Bifurcated Rivets. (Obviously I have no idea whether either of them was approached by the BBC. But even if they both declined to appear, if the BBC had wanted to I’m sure it could have found someone who writes a linklog, was willing to talk on the radio and was capable of sounding interesting and explaining their interest in the medium of weblogs.)

^* Which is what most weblogs seem to be nowadays – I think the meaning of the word ‘weblog’ is as fuzzy as that of the term ‘hacker’ nowadays.

For the avoidance of doubt, I want to make it clear that I have nothing whatsoever against online journals or sites where the author rambles on about whatever’s on their mind – as I say, I read several of the sites the BBC series features, and quite a few more such sites they didn’t. (And of course at times I ramble on myself right on this very linklog.) I just wish that the BBC’s series on weblogs would reflect the fact that when Jorn Barger coined the term he was talking about a site that ‘logged’ the neat sites the author had found that day.

The IMglish Dictionary is just a little scary: how on earth do people remember all those shorthand phrases? I mean, some of them are classics, used since the dawn of email (ROTFL, RTFM, IANAL – classics one and all), but I’ve never heard of SLIRK or GTRM or WDALYIC. I feel like an OF.

I think this one entry sums it up:

FMTYEWTK: far more than you ever wanted to know

[Via Away With Words]

Asda have been getting a lot of positive media coverage on the radio and TV today following their announcement that they’re not going to ask job applicants for their date of birth in future.

It’s all good PR for Asda, but will it really make on whit of a difference? It’s not as if they won’t be able to get a pretty fair idea of an applicant’s age by looking at the dates of their time at high school or university, or from the dates when they sat their GCE/CSE/GCSE exams, or even just from the length of their past employment in some cases.

Obviously a nontraditional-age student’s spell at university can throw that sort of guesswork out of whack, but only to a limited extent. I was at university between the ages of 29 and 32 myself, but it isn’t hard to correlate all the facts – not only that I was at university from 1992-1995 with the other data to hand, but also that I sat my ‘O’ Level exams in 1979 and was in the civil service from 1982-1992 – and figure out to within a year or two how old I am.

So, Asda deserve some credit for taking this step but it’s not likely to have a huge effect. The problem isn’t that employers know how old an applicant is, it’s that they’re inclined to disregard applications from people who are “too young” or “too old.” It’ll take a lot more than a change in the design of an application form to eradicate that attitude.

(Also, does this mean that in future Asda won’t be able to analyse the age mix of their staff to see how this policy is working, since they won’t have the information about their employees’ ages? Or will they still take details of your date of birth once they employ you? If the latter, I trust that they’ll withhold that information from the information passed on to managers when internal applicants apply for vacancies?)

The Register reports that the agency charged with maintaining the Australian government’s identity card database has discovered that some employees have been breaking the rules:

Australia’s identity card system was routinely searched for personal reasons by government agency employees, some of whom have been sacked.

Police are now investigating allegations of identity fraud resulting from the security breaches.

There were 790 security breaches at government agency Centrepoint involving 600 staff. Staff were found to have inappropriately accessed databases containing citizens’ information. The databases are part of a massive federal Government smart card project which will link medical, welfare, tax and other personal data on Australia’s 17m citizens. [...]

Of course, the UK’s proposed National Identity Register is going to be bigger and better than any similar system elsewhere in the world, so this sort of thing couldn’t possibly be a problem for British citizens one day soon…

(I find it interesting that the agency’s chief executive is quoted later in the article as suggesting that the cases that have been investigated involved staff looking up their family and neighbours. I’m sure some of that went on, but I’d have thought that at least some cases would involve looking up details for financial gain – staff taking a bribe in return for looking up details on behalf of … let’s say, interested third parties.)

I’ve seen the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch at the entrance to New York’s Grand Army Plaza in television and film on many occasions; every time I see it I feel a little disoriented because it so strongly resembles the Arc de Triomphe in Paris that I have to remind myself that the scene I’m watching is set in New York.

Until today, that was the sum total of my knowledge of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch: it was in New York, and it resembled one of the better-known Parisian landmarks. However, after reading David Byrne’s posts about the arch, I now know one more (rather incongruous) fact: the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch is used to store a puppet library’s holdings:

In 2004, Prospect Park, in return for a yearly series of free outdoor performances in the park, allowed the library to move into the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch at Prospect Park, where the original puppets were joined by puppets created for a yearly pageant commissioned by the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival and other New York events, as well as more puppets from Boston. The Red Hook space now functions as the stacks of the library.

This is the age of consent.

(Probably Not Safe For Work.)

These motivational posters in the style of Despair, Inc. are marvelous.

Blogging, Astrology and Nostalgia are all good, but the best has to be Awesome, which is exactly that.

[Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

After reading Jennifer Shahade’s interview with author J.C. Hallman I now have two more books for my reading list. For his latest book, The Devil is a Gentleman, Hallman investigated eight religious subcultures, including Satanism, Scientology, Druidism, Christian wrestling, Unarians and … atheists:

I think the most comic portrait in your book is the atheist convention you attended outside Chicago. What type of atheist attends an atheist convention?

That was an interesting event to go to. So many more people are saying that they have no religion. The CUNY survey shows that “no religion” was the third highest entry after Catholic and Baptist. But there are only 3,000 members of American Atheists. But they’re doing important work. Organized atheists are basically activists. For instance, the atheist chapter in Michigan organized a “godless march” on Lansing, partly to protest a bill that would allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in public. They’re worried that people equate religion with having a satisfied life. The woman who I attached myself to in atheism took it upon herself to show me that “atheists knew how to have fun.” And she was a wild character, a very lively grandmother. They formed a positive community, while at home they were forced to argue atheism with people who were believers. James believes that in the individual mystical experience you get a sense of the divine. Ironically, and almost invariably, the atheists reported a moment of clarity that told them “there was nothing out there.”

They saw the light!

Right. But they probably wouldn’t like it put that way. [...]

[Before anyone posts a comment pointing out that atheism isn't a religion, I should note that Hallman addresses that point a little later in the interview.]

Interesting as his latest book sounds, what really piqued my interest was the section of the interview where Jennifer Shahade described Hallman’s previous book, The Chess Artist:

In The Chess Artist, he connects disparate personalities in the chess subculture, from the megalomaniac dictator Kirsan Ilyumzhinov to the talented African-American amateur Glenn Ulmstead, by interweaving chapters with medieval stories on how the chess pieces came to be.

That sounds like a book I very much want to read. I can’t play chess to save my life, but I think the subculture around the game is fascinating.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

The International Astronomical Union have no idea of the trouble they’ve caused:

The orbital artillery barrage was in its third hour. They huddled in the storm drains and hoped the generators would hold out.

“Mommy, why do the Eightworlders hate us so much?”

“Well, Lisa, they worship the True Spheres differently than we do.”

“Differently?”

“Long ago, they decided that they would no longer worship any but the largest of the True Spheres. They denied Pluto first, then Ceres, and so on.” [...]

[Via Found]

Beautiful subways from around the world is devoted to urban rail systems that try that bit harder to look interesting.

Sometimes they achieve this by virtue of striking archtecture, and sometimes they just deploy amusing sculptures of crocodiles emerging from manhole covers (scroll down).

There’s quite a bit of overlap with the Metro Bits site I linked to just over a year ago. The Metro Bits site is more comprehensive, but I think there’s probably room on the web for two sites on the subject.

[Via MetaFilter]

This series of photographs is astonishing: I’ve never seen a boat bypass a dam by going uphill on rails before.

[Via GromBlog]