Hermenautic Circle blog

newVideoPlayer("/icewarriortribute.flv", 506, 423,""); If news of the water ice on Mars has got you excited to discover alien life, you're in luck. Doctor Who has already discovered life on Mars for you, in the form of the whispery, strange-assed Ice Warriors. They only made appearances in a handful of episodes, mostly in the 1960s and early 70s. But the Ice Warriors are a notorious enough breed of alien that when Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies joked that he was bringing them back it practically broke the interwebz in two (no, they didn't come back). Here we've got a lovely introduction to our Martian pals, created by a YouTube user called Rassilon001. Note their whispery voices, and strangely bulbous rear ends. Also, nice helmets and claws! Trivia moment: Doctor Who writer Gary Russell once published a novel where an Ice Warrior takes off his suit and does the naughty Martian thing. Check out Rassilon001's whole collection of Whovian compilations.

Mike Edison appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #226. Edison is the author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.

Condition of the Show: Reinvestigating the purported death of Bat Segundo. (See also Show #199.)

Author: Mike Edison

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: First off, you have a lot of critical things to say about a lot of people.

Edison: I name names, brother!

Correspondent: Yeah, I know. But there’s a lot of shit-talking going on.

Edison: You think?

Correspondent: And I’m wondering if this book was written out of revenge or what?

Edison: Absolutely not. I mean, you know, I feel sorry for the people who weren’t nice to me in the last twenty years of my career. But, no, this was not written from a point of view of malice. That’s not a place to write a book from. The book’s a celebration. And, of course, a few people crossed me over the years and I do kind of take joy in sticking pins in them now. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there weren’t. But success is the best revenge. And history is written by the winners.

Correspondent: You consider yourself a success? You’re writing your own history here?

Edison: I’m on your radio show. I think there’s no greater sign of success than that.

Correspondent: (laughs)

The Bat Segundo Show #226: Mike Edison

This seems like something out of Gaddis's JR:

[John Fogerty] once immortalized [Saul] Zaentz in a song called "Zanz Kant Danz," while Zaentz countered with a plagiarism lawsuit, claiming that Fogerty's solo song "The Old Man Down the Road" ripped off the Creedence hit "Run Through the Jungle." The litigation went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. —Reuters (Yahoo)

Peter David appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #225. He is most recently the author of Tigerheart and the Incredible Hulk novelization.

Condition of the Show: Investigating claimed nemeses of Goliath.

Author: Peter David

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m wondering though if there has ever been an instance in your comic career, in which an editor has come to you and said, “Hey, Peter, the sales for this particular title are flagging. What can we do to raise things up?” Has this ever an influence?

David: Sure. Of course it’s an influence. I mean, look, when it comes to — particularly my work-for-hire material — my job at the end of the day is to do two things. As far as the publisher is concerned. This is purely my job as far as the publisher is concerned, okay? Number one: Turn in a publishable script. And number two: Do everything that is within my power to write a book that will sell. Okay? Because I could turn in absolutely kickass scripts that aren’t going to sell for crap. But I feel to a certain degree that part of my job is to try and do everything I can to keep the book marketable. I’ve been doing that my entire comic book career. When I was writing Hulk, during my initial twelve-year run, I regularly had access to sales figures ahead of time. Three, four months ahead of time. Because that’s how far ahead we were soliciting. And they were incredibly instructional. Because what would happen is, I would be aware of a sales drop months ahead of time. Months ahead of time. So that I would have the Hulk in a particular incarnation going through a particular series of events. If I saw sales starting to flag, I’d say to myself, “Okay. That incarnation of the Hulk seems to be running its course. Time to come up with something else.”

So if you want to have an idea of when sales were starting to drop during my twelve-year run, at any particular time, look to a point where the Hulk undergoes some kind of transformation, backdate yourself about six months and that’s when I was looking at the sales figures, going, “Okay. We have a drop.” The problem nowadays is that we don’t know sales figures until after the book is already on the stands. So instead of having a three to four month early warning system, so that I can course correct ahead of time, we are always behind the curve by three to four months. Because we don’t know the sales numbers until at least two months after the book has come out. I mean, you know, we see the sales numbers on ICv2 or whatever it is. That’s when I see the sales numbers. We see those sales numbers come out two to three months after the book is on the stands, plus we’re soliciting three months down the line. So you can find yourself in free-fall before you’re aware of the fact that you’ve got any kind of attrition problem. Because every book’s always going to have attrition. Every book. Every book. There’s no stopping it. There’s always going to be. You’re going to get a build. And then it’s going to level off. And then it’s going to start to drop. Always. No matter what the book is. Always. The thing I was able to do on Hulk is, when I saw it start to drop, I would say, “Okay. Time to do something different.” And I could come up with a new angle on The Hulk that would boost sales. Because we’d have people going, “Oh, they’re doing something new and different with The Hulk? Let’s see.” As it is, I can’t course correct. And it’s incredibly frustrating.

Correspondent: But I’m also wondering if some of the stuff that you do with, say, Fallen Angel — I mean, you had a post on your blog recently in which a gentleman couldn’t purchase it from his neighborhood comic store. Because he was the only person purchasing the issue.

David: Buying it, yeah.

Correspondent: So for something like this, is Fallen Angel more of an unfettered territory to write in?

David: It’s unfettered territory. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see sales be brought up.

The Bat Segundo Show #225: Peter David

I’ll do a solo show at the Echo Curio in Echo Park, Los Angeles, tomorrow night. Showtime loosely 9:45. No cover. Other acts on the bill are Mark Miller of skeeter truck, who plays in a lonesome slide style, and a fine bluegrass combo called the Homebillies.

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Transcriptease offers a very helpful summation on the racist shenanigans of Helix editor William Sanders. For those who missed out on this piece of news, writer Luke Jackson sent Sanders a story. The story featured Muslim characters. Sanders rejected it, noting in his rejection letter, “You did a good job of explaining the worm-brained mentality of those people.” The email then made the rounds on several science fiction sites. And several Helix contributors asked for their stories to be removed from the Helix archives.

Rather than perform the gentlemanly act and apologize for his mistake, Sanders issued an ultimatum to his contributors. If they wished to remove their stories from the archive and did not express their wish to do so within a month, they would be forced to pay $40 to have it removed later. Soon, Sanders retracted this offer and declared that nobody could have their stories removed at all.

Assuming that there is no written instrument, Sanders is in no position to make such demands of his contributors.

The question that nobody has asked here is whether any of the Helix contributors ever signed a contract or another written instrument upon having their stories appear in Helix. Sanders’s magazine lists all of the contents as falling under the copyright of Helix. This itself is fallacious, because according to Helix’s website, Helix is published by the Legends Group, which is described as an unincorporated association. Since Helix is based in Maryland, according to the Maryland Business Regulation Code, § 19-201, it can therefore be described as an organization. Therefore, if the copyright notice on the site is valid, should not the copyright read “©2008 The Legends Group” instead? And if The Legends Group has performed due diligence, then surely this would be reflected at the Register of Copyrights, right? After all, § 409 of United States Code, Title 17, states that each application for copyright must contain “(10) in the case of a published work containing material of which copies are required by section 601 to be manufactured in the United States, the names of the persons or organizations who performed the processes specified by subsection (c) of section 601 with.”

But over at the Library of Congress’s public catalog, we discover no such notices for these stories by either Helix, The Legends Group, or William Sanders. Searches for “Legends Group” and “The Legends Group” reveal no registered copyrights. And searches for “Helix” or “Sanders William” do not match up with any of the stories listed on the Helix site.

If the Helix contributors simply sent in their stories into Sanders and he agreed to publish them, and there was no contract, then this means that they retain the unregistered copyrights for their stories, and Sanders is in violation. If Sanders did not have a written instrument in place specifying that there was a transfer of copyright to Helix, then the copyright belongs to the author. Which would mean that the author controls whether or not the story appears on the website. To cite the specific code section under §204 of Title 17:

(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.

Of course, to uphold Sanders’s numerous copyright violations, the stories would need to be registered. If the writers who wish to have their stories removed from Helix were to register their stories with the Copyright Office, then Sanders be in clear violation of copyright and damages could be pursued.

Either way, Sanders does not come out of this looking well at all. The best thing for him to do is to remove any stories that authors wish for him to remove. And if Sanders cannot perform this basic courtesy, then the writers have the obligation to register their stories with the Copyright Office and take up the dispute in court to collect the dutiful damages that come from being associated with a racist editor.

Did you know they really exist, pack rats? Despite what certain parties might tell you, I am not quite as messy as a real pack rat--I do not preserve my surroundings with urine, for one--but I do live in a universe of private souvenirs whose meaning is clear only to me. And actually, not even, as I keep some things so long I forget why I ever had them.

This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that
a) I moved seven times in two and a half years
b) in a hasty move, which they always are, I'll throw all the remaining stuff into a box at the last minute, allegedly to be later unpacked, which it never is
c) whenever a pile of papers accumulates in my room or coffee table or kitchen chair, my quick-clean solution is to toss them into a box in the capacious garage/studio.

Now I have to deal with it.

Nothing in the world stirs up the emotional sediment more than moving. Any song I play, regardless of genre, can make me teary. That kind of goes for everything I do, actually. And it doesn't matter that I'm not leaving my house for good, that my things will remain stored here, that I'm leaving for a place I'm thrilled to be headed to, and that I'll be back in less than a year.

There is something about Going Through Stuff.

Old homes, old story drafts, old tickets, old programs, old lists, old lovers, old photos--photos I took, photos others took, photos sent to me across the country, the letters, oh the letters. Old tapes, VHS, cassettes, floppy disks, hard disks, ZIP disks, obsolete technology, all-access passes, address books never filled before becoming obsolete, an old Mac Powerbook from 1993, old journals, old trinkets, old boxes, old papers, old receipts, old bills, old statements, old promises, old articles, old scraps of writing, old love. Old life.

The old life is still in me of course; it can't be returned to, but neither can it be obliterated. All these scraps and files and shoddy archives overcompensate on both counts. The archiving impulse is a weak little fist shaken against mortality and forgetting. Universe: I was here, and I remember!

And I have the magnetic refrigerator calendar from Le Gamin in the East Village from 2003 to prove it.

Though NASA has been reporting for years that there is water ice on Mars, today the US space agency held a press conference to announce definitively that the Phoenix Lander has found traces of water ice on the red planet. As Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy points out, today's announcement was really about the continuation of the Phoenix mission, which was scheduled to sunset in the next few weeks. Now that the cool lander is scooping up hunks of ice in the sticky Martian dirt (plastered into the bottom of Phoenix's scoop, above), NASA has poured enough money into the project to keep it going at least through September. But pretty much every single news source reporting the Martian water story has neglected to tell you the most important thing about this "water ice." It's probably not drinkable. Nobody seems to be asking the most important question: What exactly is the chemical composition of this so-called water? Partly this is because it was only yesterday that scientists got a big enough chunk of the stuff inside Phoenix's ovens, where it can melt the ice and figure out its molecular composition using a mass spectrometer. So we won't know the exact composition of Martian water for a while. But mostly calling the stuff "water ice" vagues out the truth, which is that this ice is only technically water. No creature on Earth could drink it. In fact, as planetary scientist Andrew Knoll said at the AAAS meeting earlier this year, water on Mars is probably so salty and acidic that it would be essentially poison. So if you are totally freaking out about how all this water on Mars means we can set up colonies there right away, and meet the aliens who live on the stuff in vast underground aquifers, sorry. We're not going to be able to zoom up there and start ice mining to support our colonies. We'll need to pour a lot of resources into de-salinating the stuff, and sucking all the acid out, before it's potable. One of the interesting side-effects of this water discovery, however, is that it may re-awaken the scientific community's interest in searching for extraterrestrial life. As Eric Sofge argues on Popular Mechanics, Water is usually considered a precursor for living things, and now that we know water exists under the ground on our close planetary neighbor, it's becomes more statistically likely that water could exist elsewhere too. Or that life could exist on Mars. If you want the full story on Martian water as it's breaking, check out the excellent coverage on Popular Mechanics. But if you want some back story, check out what planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann had to say on The Scientific Activist about her work on the Martian ice water. Image via NASA.

There seems to be some confusion lately--especially by the current administration--about how exactly the birth control pill works. Em & Lo started the discussion, but I wanted to weigh in with the medical point of view. The birth control pill prevents pregnancy in several ways:

• Primarily, the pill prevents ovulation. No egg, no chance of pregnancy. Most months, a woman taking the pill won't release an egg.

• The pill changes your fallopian tube motility. If an egg is released, the pill makes it harder for it to travel to the uterus.

• The pill thickens your cervical mucus. This thickening makes it difficult for sperm to get to an egg if one is there.

• The pill alters your uterine lining. So if an egg was released, and if it manages to get through the fallopian tube, and if sperm were able to get to the egg, and if the egg was then fertilized--and that's a whole lot of ifs--the different lining makes it harder for a fertilized egg to implant. So at no point does the pill interfere with a fertilized egg: it just makes it less likely that the egg will land and become a pregnancy. It is this function of the pill that causes such a ruckus among those who hold that disruption of implantation is the same as an abortion--even though this function of the pill rarely comes into play.

After the tremendous success of I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as a scientist in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-plague-ravaged New York, Warners is going to follow up with a prequel. Director Francis Lawrence confirmed to Shock Til You Drop that the movie would star Smith, and would take place before the rise of the plague that empties out Manhattan and turns it into a lovely park full of greenery and deer. But what, exactly, will be the plot of this prequel? Lawrence said, "We're trying to figure out some ideas for it." It's not too late for us to influence his decision! So vote now in our poll for what the I Am Legend prequel should be all about. Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

newVideoPlayer("/Joe_space_65.flv", 506, 423,""); G.I. Joe's 2001-esque trip into space was not his first time in orbit (though it was his first visit to space with lifelike hair). Back in 1965, Joe, wrapped in a foil suit, rode a Mercury capsule into imaginary outer space. Because the capsule floated, realistic splashdowns could be accomplished—as long as you could talk mom into letting you set up the inflatable pool in your bedroom, like the lucky guys in the commercial. A 45 rpm record, with sound clips from John Glenn's orbital flight, made it even more ... dare I say? ... lifelike.

Rick Kleffel, the prolific podcaster behind the Agony Column, gets the interview treatment from Jeff VanderMeer.

George Lucas' favorite fan films are parodies — he's said in interviews that he thinks a good parody will often lead people back to the original story and turn them into fans. So it's no surprise that Lucas picked a popular parody, Padmé, as the winner of this year's Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge at Comic-Con. The short film is a mashup of teen pregnancy comedy Juno and the familiar Star Wars universe. There's even a cool song. [Padmé via Atom]

WCBS: “Cephus said he was bringing ice into a park, when he encountered two police officers checking for liquor. He dropped his bag, and says he was hit 10 to 12 times on the shoulder and upper arms, before a bystander’s camera even started.”

Amazingly, Police Union President Patrick Lynch claims this to be an appropriate amount of force. And while the officer involved has not been suspended, he has been confined to desk duty.

This violence comes only a day after a NYPD officer assaulted a Critical Mass cyclist, brutally pushing him from his bike while he was simply riding down the street.

The officer who assaulted Cephon is Michael Harrington. The officer who assaulted the cyclist is Patrick Pogan, and even Mayor Bloomberg believes Pogan went over the line.

Proving once again that its editorial team now prefers thoughtless and narcissistic essays over writing that chronicles the human condition, the Atlantic has commissioned Ann Patchett to throw a pity party about book tours. Look, if you’re an author and you can’t be bothered to have a bit of fun with a book tour, then you should either (a) insist on no book tours (as Denis Johnson and John Twelve Hawks have) or (b) stop bitching and moaning. Unless you suffer from Asperger’s or a Napoleon-like hubris, it takes exceptionally little skill to listen to someone and to remain patient even when a person has a predictable question that you’ve been asked four hundred times. (And besides, people are damn interesting, even when they ask obvious questions.) If you have any kind of brain, you can turn that question around into something complex and get the reader to think differently. A novel of yours from six years gets discussed? Tough titty, sweetheart. Once you’ve released the books to the public, they are no longer yours. Works you may deem greater or more significant won’t necessarily be what the audience deems greater or more significant. And what’s wrong with that? I don’t care if you’ve won the PEN/Faulkner or the Nobel. If you can’t appreciate the privilege of a literary life, then you deserve all the flack you get.

This week's bucket list edition goes out to reader Mandy, who really wants to have sex in a taxi. Here's how to do it right... Top Ten Tips on Having Sex in a Taxi 1. Wear a skirt and no underwear. For this reason, we don't recommend attempting this act in the middle of winter--that's the last place you want frostbite. 2. Get in a bit of foreplay before you hail the cab so you're both raring to go when you get in: make out on a street corner, sit in the back row at the movies, exchange some dirty text messages...

Robots and Monsters is finally done: above is the last one. Almost 200 drawings by myself, plus 35 by some fabulous contributors. Thanks to everyone who donated, devoted time to it, and helped out, be it blogging, drawing, helping mail or just looking. I, and more so, the people helped by the 12 K raised for AIDS support and research, very much appreciate it. Thanks.

So what's next? A bunch of stuff, most of which I'd rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it: let's just say this isn't the last you've heard of the project. One thing I can say is that the site will reopen soonish...as you or may not know, I am getting married in a few months, though, so if it takes a little longer to get back up to spped don't be surprised (note the lack of blogging for evidence of the awesome timesuck this seems to require.)

Thanks again, everyone!