New Frontiers in Grammar

We know about the passive voice, of course. The classic example is: Mistakes were made.

At my prompting, Debbie Notkin has come up with an extension to this:

The Passive-Aggressive Voice

Example: It would be nice if you noticed me.

The Demon-Spawn of Lin Carter

The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-earth For Dummies®

The Demon-Spawn of Lester Del Rey

The Quality Paperback Book Club included in a recent mailing a flyer that read:

Tired of Tolkien? Take up the Sword of Truth

Naked Empire

by Terry Goodkind

Bill Gibson is No Longer Blogging

Last Postcard from Costa del Blog

Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging.

I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel — that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.

WRGPT13 Registration Open

The Thirteenth Annual World Rec.Gambling Poker Tournament is now open for registration.

WRGPT is a no-limit Texas hold'em tournament, structured similarly to the championship event at the World Series of Poker, played entirely through email. Players put no money up, and there is no prize for the winner — except for bragging rights. You don't even get to watch the final table on the Travel Channel.

It has come a long way since 1991, when Will Hyde dealt out hands and boards by hand, and sent them to a field of 30 players. Last year's tournament started with 1,086 players and lasted 281 days. When I registered this morning, there were 444 other players signed up. (The registration announcement email was sent out 10:38PM PDT last night.)

Good luck to all participants. I expect to see you — and r00l you mercilessly — at the final table.

From Harlan Ellison to Phil Hellmuth

Acquired Situational Narcissism

We all know that movie stars, professional athletes, rich people and politicians often act like complete jackasses, but Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School and the medical adviser to Major League Baseball, thinks he knows why. The cause, he says, is acquired situational narcissism, a psychological dysfunction that Millman was the first to identify and that he treats in his celebrity patients.

(via Bill Gibson)

That Morning

We were lying in bed, taking our lazy time before getting up. The telephone rang; Deb went to answer it.

It was Guy Thomas our downstairs neighbor Fred Teti, calling, telling us that the World Trade Center in New York had been attacked. Deb relayed the information to me.

"Oh, fuck!" I said. "Osama bin Laden." (The flash of insight was motivated strictly by my understanding that bin Laden's organization had been behind the 1993 truck bombing of the WTC.)

"Palestine is going to be glass," Debbie said.

"We're at war," I said, getting out of bed. "On the wrong bloody side."

I turned on the radio to listen to events as they unfolded. The Pentagon had been hit too, and there were also reports of a carbomb in front of the State Department. Eyewitnesses in New York were saying they couldn't see one of the two towers of the WTC.

After a few minutes, I turned the radio off again. We would find out more soon enough, but in the meanwhile, I knew just how crazymaking it would be to try to follow the media coverage.

Lying unfinished at my bedside was a book: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. As the nation prepared for a war of revenge on Afghanistan, I couldn't bring myself to finish a book that began with Dr. William Brydon's sole survival of the retreat from Kabul.

We didn't bomb the West Bank into trinitite, at least. What actually happened was bad enough.

Good Riddance

Edward Teller died yesterday at his home on the Stanford University campus, near Palo Alto, California. He was 95 years old.

If I were to have made one of those silly lists of the greatest and worst figures of the 20th century that were the talk of the blogosphere last month, Teller would have been on my list of the worst. He is known as the "father" of the hydrogen bomb — but because his overblown and ill-considered attempts at bomb design didn't work, he justified his failure by falsely claiming that J. Robert Oppenheimer's opposition to the project was responsible. His lies resulted in the destruction of Oppenheimer's career.

Stanislaw Ulam saved Teller's bacon by inventing a new approach to igniting thermonuclear explosions, and Teller turned this approach into a working bomb design, and in doing so attempted to take all the credit for himself. The attempt didn't work (although the bomb itself did), and so people in the know refer to the "Teller-Ulam idea" of using the pulse of radiation from a fission explosion to ignite the fusion reaction.

Teller founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to "compete" with the original Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Los Alamos scientists basically wouldn't work with Teller any more.) The Livermore labs reflected the competence and moral compass of their founder — Teller protege Lowell Wood famously lied to Congress about test results for an H-bomb-pumped gamma-ray laser during the height of the Star Wars boondoggle (Wood said the laser worked; it didn't). Negligence and malfeasance at LLNL remain ongoing scandals to this day.

Rule Eleven

Fox News' lawsuit intended to sabotage the publication of Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right was prepared by Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracy A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger,
who are associates at Hogan & Hartson LLP, the law firm retained by Fox News.

Realitychecker.org is calling on the legal profession to Discourage Frivolous Lawsuits by Naming Names. (Patrick Nielsen Hayden doesn't call it "frivolous"; he says it is "political barratry." So does Avedon Carol.)

US District Court Judge Denny Chin declared of the lawsuit prepared and filed by Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracy A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger, all employed by Hogan & Hartson LLP, "This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

Al Franken, the target of the lawsuit, said that the filing by Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracy A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger, all employed by Hogan & Hartson LLP, was "one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life."

C.E. Petit writes the publishing law blog Scrivener's Error. Petit says of Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracy A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger, all employed by Hogan & Hartson LLP, "The idiots who filed Fox v. Franken would, in Illinois, be required to turn themselves in to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission for filing a lawsuit without a good faith basis in fact or law for the purpose of harrassment (or another improper purpose)."

Can it really be that Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracy A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger, all employed by Hogan & Hartson LLP, are ignorant of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?

Rule 11. Signing of Pleadings, Motions, and Other Papers; Representations to Court; Sanctions

(b) Representations to Court.

By presenting to the court (whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating) a pleading, written motion, or other paper, an attorney or unrepresented party is certifying that to the best of the person's knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances,--

(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation;

(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions therein are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law or the establishment of new law;

(3) the allegations and other factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, are likely to have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and

(4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on a lack of information or belief.