Vending machine in China dispenses live crabs:

me: why do the norwegians get their own hug day? i suspect racism
B: I think there is some other group that gets one too, so clearly there is no racism at all.
me: well, there you go. if two group both get hugs, we have clearly vanquished racism forever
B: Well Obama is president you see so that was all that was left to do

So WisCon rescinded Moon’s offer after all. This makes me want to take back my cautious optimism on the earlier state of the argument and revert to my usual, seldom-disappointed misanthropy.

I’m on vacation, so no comments here. In two weeks when I get back, I may have cooled off enough to write some more about this whole fiasco.

I don’t understand half of the things that John Clute says in his columns, but they’re always really interesting to read.

(I also can’t decide if he’s crazy, or brilliant, or just pretentious.)

Doing a Google image search for “bacon” returns a surprising number of NSFW images.

Thought you’d like to know.

I picked this up from Language Log, where they’re discussing the fact that Britney Spears uses a linguo-labial /l/ in several music videos. The video which proves this astounded me:

For those of you who aren’t linguists, let me explain what makes this so remarkable. As the above video shows, when Britney is pronouncing an “l” sound, she doesn’t merely place her tongue against the back of her teeth, as is normal for English speakers. Instead, she sticks her tongue out of her mouth and presses it against her upper lip. This sort of articulation is known as linguo-labial (or apico-labial) because it involves both the tongue and the lip. Now, linguo-labial sounds are extremely rare in the world’s languages, and are completely unheard of in English. So video above appears to present an unprecedented native English speaker who at least sometimes pronounces /l/ with a linguo-labial articulation.

Except maybe not. The commenters at the Language Log come up with a better hypothesis: this is a lip-syncing technique for exaggerating the articulation of the /l/, to aid in matching up video with audio and provide stronger cues for viewers. Commenters dug up music videos of other performers with the same articulation, though this is slightly mitigated by a live video of Britney which shows her doing the same thing. Unless you think that (heaven forfend!) Britney may have lip-synced a live performance.

Not every venue can be great all of the time. For some reason, many of my favorite short story magazines have been giving up duds, lately, which has been very disappointing.

In the most recent Clarkesworld we got Thirteen Ways of Looking At Space-Time by Catherynne Valente, an author I’ve really enjoyed in the past. But this story didn’t work at any level: a series of creation myths mish-mashed with quantum physics technobabble, mixed with autobiographical vignettes. I’m sure that was very cathartic to write, but that doesn’t mean it was very interesting to read. We also have Messenger by Julia Sidorova, a Secret History of Jesus story. Secret histories, traditionally, offer us us an alternate, fantastical explanation for historical events whose mundane details we already know. However, the existing story of Jesus is already plenty fantastical, so what Sidorova did instead is give us a slightly different set of miracles which “explain” the familiar ones. If I read this story just as a tale of a rebellious angel, it works fine, but the Jesus elements become a glaring distraction, a Chekov gun that never fires. But as a commentary on the stories of Jesus, it’s just silly. Either way, I couldn’t get anything out of it.

Over at Brain Harvest we get Invisible by Lisa Marten, which attempts to make a banal political point by way of highly exaggerated physical crudity. Not even worth the five minutes it took to read.

Strange Horizons has done marginally better. The most recent story The Big Splash was unremarkable, and the one before that (Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier) I didn’t even finish. But at least none of them were actually bad.

On the plus side, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has been doing very well, with Prashkina’s Fire, Eighth Eye, and The Isthmus Variation as recent highlights.