Legendary science fiction author Ursula Le Guin is doing everything she can to dissuade fans of her books from watching the Legend of Earthsea mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel.

She's most offended by the decision to change the races of her characters, making most of them white:

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

Publishing · 2004/12/22 · 1 COMMENT · Link

I Want to Be a Better Neuron

Looking at Technorati this morning, I realized that none of the entries on my hand-coded weblogs are showing up there, presumably because I haven't been sending update pings to weblog notification services like Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, and Ping-o-Matic.

For a weblog to be a properly firing neuron in the information-gathering nervous system that Jon Udell describes on InfoWorld, tools like Technorati must learn in real time what's being linked, and by whom.

To fix this, I'm writing a PHP class library to ping notification services over XML-RPC, using Edd Dumbill's XML-RPC for PHP library.

The code works successfully for Weblogs.Com and Ping-o-Matic, but I haven't had any luck calling Blo.gs over XML-RPC.

According to the documentation, I should be able to call the site's XML-RPC server at http://ping.blo.gs/, port 80, with the method weblogupdates.ping and parameters "Ekzemplo" (weblog title), "http://www.ekzemplo.com" (weblog link).

I can't get this to work with my own PHP code or the Dumpleton XML-RPC debugger, so I'm hunting for examples of working code that connects to the Blo.gs XML-RPC server.

Php · Wordzilla · Xml-rpc · 2004/12/22 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Jack Newfield, a muck-raking journalist and author whose expose, The Shame of Boxing, was one of the best investigative sports pieces in years, has died of cancer at age 66.

Newfield, who loved boxing writing so much he celebrated A.J. Liebling's 100th birth anniversary in October, had this take on the sweet science:

At its infrequent best, boxing can be the art of hitting and not getting hit -- a ballet with blood, geometry with guile. At its frequent worst, it is fakery, burlesque, cruelty, injustice, exploitation and death.

Sports · 2004/12/21 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Look, Ma, I'm on TeeVee

On a recent episode of CSI: NY, one of the bit characters looked so familiar that I couldn't think about anything else until I figured out who it was.

When I realized who I had seen, I was so haunted by the experience that I wrote an article about him for TeeVee.

If you're unfamiliar with the site, you've missed eight years of funny, snarky writing by a group of television obsessives that includes Jason Snell and Greg Knauss. How this site never made them rich, even during the years in which the stock market threw millions at lightweights like TheGlobe founders, is a mystery to me. At the very least, they should be thousandaires.

2004/12/20 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

All Aboard the Polar Express

I saw Polar Express this afternoon, and like Roger Ebert was completely floored by how good it was:

The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year.

I haven't been as certain a film would become a Christmas classic since Ralphie shot his eye out with the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model in A Christmas Story.

Kids always talk during children's movies, but I can't recall one in which every single child in the theater talked out loud to the screen, urging the characters in suspensful moments.

At one point near the end, I glanced back at the projector. Four or five children were standing up in the row behind me, inches from my face, and their hands were clasped to the seats as they watched in absolute awe.

2004/12/18 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Great feature in the New York Times this morning about Slab City, a lawless, rentless, taxless community of 3,000 who bring their RVs and trailers to an abandoned military base in the Mojave Desert:

Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea.

The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years.

A site has been created to work on Slab City's trash problem:

Some residents of Slab City talk bad about this website, and our growing group of trash haters. Take a good look at the photo on the right, and keep in mind that the same people who stuff trash into any empty bus, are the same ones who are against our efforts to clean up the area.

2004/12/17 · Comment · Link

Weblog Software Priced to Move

A factoid from a Ben and Mena Trott interview for anyone starting a mom-and-pop business selling commercial weblog software:

Mena Trott: For the two years that we were just Ben and myself, the donations and commercial licenses supported Ben and myself to run the operation, and we never had to use our savings to pay for our rent or anything; this covered our costs. And we've had a lot of downloads and we've had -- numbers have been really large, but the average price, I mean the average --

Ben Trott: The average donation per download --

Mena: -- is 38 cents, lifetime, not per month! So 38 cents is basically what people have paid for Movable Type, and that's because of the generosity of other people that have decided that they wanted to pay.

Movable Type · 2004/12/16 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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