[graphic design] 30 Ways To Die Of Electrocution In Greater Germany

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2875.This following diagram isn't just a good idea … it's the law. Or it should be.


The book this (and other pictures similar) is found in is one called Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern, published in Vienna in the early 1900s by a physician named Stefan Jellinek. The pictures are nice and direct and unambiguous; they teach, graphically, that the surest way to kill yourself with electricity is to form a complete path from source (usually the bright red arrow) to ground (the screened back, pink arrow. Arrowheads provide the path for current flow.

The pictures seem oddly timeless despite being drawn in a style instantly recognizable for that of Germany and environs in the early 20th Century. They're very evocative, showing the startled stunned dismay of the victims, and the drawings are strewn about with strange inscrutable devices with dials and terminals whose apparent function is to place lethal electrical current in places where foolish, thoughtless death is made even more convenient and unavoidable:



And electricity being what it is, not even animals are excused from appalling stupidity:




Who's a bad dog, then?

Really, considering the flagrant disregard for safety apparently exhibited by the German-speaking peoples during that time, it's doubly astounding that the Deutsches Kaiserreich even made it out of the Wilhelmine era, never mind Reich #3.

H/T http://www.brepettis.com/blog for this boon. View 30 of these überamusing diagrams at this flickr album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bre/sets/72157611077138836/. Via Google+ at this post: https://plus.google.com/u/0/112360867913985105653/posts/7advWsaN4KS.

[art] Well, That's One Way To Succeed In Graphic Design

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2884.I haven't been terribly successful at graphic design. But this guy found a way. Not something I'd do, in as much as it involved all that breaking of the law and stuff.

Sounds like material for a great book though …

Gregory M. Zimmerman, 36, was a key figure in a jet-setting band of suspected identity thieves. He produced high-quality identification for a group of "creepers," who burglarized commercial office buildings in many U.S. cities, stealing checks, credit cards and personal information to defraud banks, say federal prosecutors. 

Graphic designers. More dangerous than you know.

Man, I can just picture them strip-club confabs right now. Goodfellas with a bird on it.

[SF_Lit] Wingrove's Back: Chung Kuo 01-Son Of Heaven

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2888.Quite a long time ago (it'd seem) I'd fallen, and fallen hard, for a series by a British writer, David Wingrove, called Chung Kuo. Released through the 90s, it's a series that depicts a future history taking place starting at the fin de siecle of the 22nd Century and extending through the middle of the 23rd. In it, the Han Chinese had, with amazing technology in tow, ascended toward domination of the entirety of Earth, covering major sections of every inhabited continent with sealed arcologies - continental Cities - made of an impossibly durable and strong plastic material called ice.

The conflicts between the author's depiction of Han culture and European culture and the increasing demands of a global population exceeding 34 Billion-with-a-B provided the tension that drove the conflicts in the novel, both on the personal and the global level. This series extended to eight novels (seven very good ones and one unsatisfying concluding novel) and, though in reviews lauded with the best of Herbert's Dune, never got the lasting stature it deserved.

Well, Wingrove's back and he's rebooting Chung Kuo. To be honest, I'm a bit late to the party; he started this back in 2010 and I've only now gotten to read the first novel in the sequence, Son of Heaven. 

The original novel cycle started over 100 years after the conquering of the planet by the Tyrant, Tsao Ch'un, and his continent-girdling Cities of ice, with the advent of Han ascendency hinted at by flashes of backstory. This novel, in contrast, is set in two periods and places: a post-technological Dorsetshire of 2065, and a London of 2043 that is alternatively the land of the polished, glittering, technological elite and the lower castes who have been left behind by them.

The pivotal character is a man named Jake Reed, one of 2043's Masters Of The Universe; a financial wizard by way of William Gibson, a man who's equal parts 1-percenter and TRON. He worked in the 'datscape' (a word that perhaps suggests that all the good nicknames for the noosphere have pretty much been taken) managing the wealth of nations, taking a pretty cut for himself, and leading the charmed life, pretty much insulated from the incredible poverty that lies more or less invisible from him from his chauffeured 'hopper' flights and behind the security of the walls of enclaved communities.

The hammer falls through the actions, though the aren't apparent at first, of the Chinese named Tsao Ch'un, only hinted at in this first book. Essentially, everything is fine … until over the course of two days, it isn't. Well coordinated sleepers, infiltrated throughout the Western technological and financial strata, go off, rendering the West decapitated and vulnerable; nations collapse quicker than you can say "I can't load Facebook and I can't Google why."

The book itself is structured in three parts; In the first, we get to know Jake, his son, the community that took him in and the post-technological society of 2065 (essentially, S.M. Stirling's The Change with electricity); the second book portrays The Collapse starting just before its major inflection point (the assassination of the sixtieth American President, James Griffin, at Comiskey Park) through Jake's escape from a Collapsing London to the English countryside and his acceptance into a rural community; the third book portrays the coming of the Chinese and the invasion of the hivelike City onto the British isle.

As a beginning its particularly effective; as someone who was a fan of the original series, it's intriguing and exciting to explore the interregnum that gave growth to the globe-spanning society of the Han in the later books.  I get the sense that Wingrove has found a publisher and an editor who are sympathetic to him telling the story the way it always should have been told. The reborn Chung Kuo has the taste of a Director's Cut about it, a feeling reinforced by the author's own telling of how that book The Marriage of the Living Dark, was rushed out under pressure and made to be the end of a series that it was never meant to be. After reading this first book, I've got the feeling that we're about to see the story told the way he really wanted it to be told; in the beginning, I thought, why mess with what was already a great story? and now I can't wait to get my hands on the next volume.

Maybe now, Wingrove will get the world-building approbation he really is entitled to.

[teh_funnay] Blazers over Bobcast? it Takes A Sports Write!

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2891.Now, KGW, I've been ribbing you of late because I keep stumbling on these.

I love you. I love you dearly.

But, c'mon, guys. Words are your life. Either that, or the Charlotte NBA team can be downloaded into my iPod.

As of the writing of this missive, there is a story on the KGW website, Sports department, that looks as follows:



… well, without the red marks, of course.

Finding out that Steve Reed is an "AP Sports Write" was just a bonus. You don't get a twofer typically.

Updated, 2012-12-05 @ 00:28: The weak headline (it had more problems than someone calling Charlotte's team the Bobcast) has been rewritten into a properly-punchy sports headline: Blazers rally from 18 down, top Bobcats in OT. Steve Reed is still an AP Sports Write, however. Maybe he'll get the -er from the AP after he completes an interneship or something.

[writing] NaNoWriMo: The Two-Time Winner

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2893.It is my pride and joy to say that I've won NaNoWriMo 2012, making me someone who's won every year I've entered.

I first entered in 2011.

So, you see, I sometimes do not have a handle on my own PR. Because if I really wanted to impress you, I'd have left that part out.

Anyway, in case you happen by the blog and don't know the stardard of National Novel Writing Month, which at one time I rather lampooned, it's to either complete a novel of at least 50,000 words, or complete at least 50,000 words of a novel that's going to be longer than that … one way or the other, get 50,000 words down … by November 30th. The contest starts November 1st. That means you have to averages 1,667 words per day, one way or the other.

Having done this, I am entitled to let my lit flag fly, which, this year, looks like this:


Because I did. And I can be truthful about that, because I verified the novel's word count using their handy-dandy interocitor-based word counter, which is about 200 or 300 words ahead of my live in-editor word counter.

As last year, I came with the barest sketch of an idea. It's encouraging, to me, that I can finally have ideas. I'm coming out of a time which was creatively barren to me. It's affected everything I've done artistically, and took my own job search into the grave. I don't know if I can get that resurrected, but if I do, as guys at a certain point in their lives find themselves, it will probably be in some non-standard way. But now I'm losing the thread … the point is, and it took me 2 NaNos to figure, I'm still capable of having ideas.

And that's a great gift.

There's a great and fun culture that's grown among the NaNoWriMo tribe. Some of us call us NaNos, most of us call us WriMos, and if you're lucky enough to have a schedule that allows it, you can go to these adorable meetings. pound out words with a bunch of like-affected people and maybe be a winner that way too.

My schedule precludes a bunch of that, and I lack a laptop. While the schedule has no way of changing any time soon. Am considering some FreeGeekery for that laptop, though. Just something modest running Linux and OpenOffice is all we need here.

Here, then is my trajectory during the event:

 
… and this impressed a few. That slanting gray line there is the relentless pursuit of the goal; 50,000 words spread out over 30 days. 1,667 words/day, as I said. Now, the first day, I figured I'd break it open and get some words on the ground, and got it just above the daily averages but then left off on it for two large distractions, one being OryCon 34 and the other being the Presidential elections (something I've been addicted to, the spectacle thereof, near enough my entire life).

While I continued to produce, I did so at a rate that seemed to suggest I had no prospect of completing before November 30th. But I plugged, aided and abetted by a The Wife™ who, I'm sure, put off things we should have done so that I could write.

Coming into the home stretch, I was still below 30K, then did that 'reaching deep down inside' thing that you sometimes have to do, and closed the over 10,000-word gap in a mere 3 days.

And the ms itself? It's pretty lame, actually. Since I come up to NaNo with nothing but an idea to start off with, it happens in a haphazard way. A nemesis for my main character didn't happen as I'd thought … he proved a spur but not a huge villain, but the arc of the story followed more or less the trajectory I'd figured for it. There was a twist, a surprise at the end that made everything as it looked but not as it seemed at first … I did take some care to make it credible at least to myself.

What I have here, as I had with last year's, is a plowing of the ground, a placing of markers and laying out of rows to grow better things out of. For me, NaNoWriMo is an endurance test, a working of the soil so I can come up with better things later, should I choose to chase this crazy thing. I think what I have are two good ideas for larger stories, or broken down could (and probably ought to) become even better shorts (Raymond Carver and Chekhov and Harlan Ellison taught me something about taking short incidents and making them into stories).

I, in short, love NaNoWriMo. I was supposed to be some sort of artist, either with words or images, and my incessant diarizing certainly keeps the literature flowing from some sort of pen. And, if the 'novels' I cranked out so far are crap, I am reminded that manure makes the best fertilizer, and I have taken all that time to plow up the ground there.

See you in 2013, NaNo.

[liff] Google StreetView Immortality Missed By THAT Much in Corvallis

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2876.Before the word photobomb became en vogue, the real trick was to get yourself into Google StreetView by acting out or doing something odd when the StreetView photo car comes by.

It's not hard to notice. It's got this camera orb on a pillar over the trunk that looks like that odd monster on Star Trek's head who got all the historical personae to fight in that one episode.

But since you won't know when … or even if, or if ever … the car's coming your way, it's something you can never be really ready for. So, you wind up doing this:


This happened in Corvallis, on a little side street called Park Terrace, whose only function now is to funnel traffic on and off parking lots to Monroe Avenue at about NW 25th Street.

The sad thing is, he had his moment … and Google's fuzzed out his face.

Missed immortality by that much.

Here's the link to the actual picture.

[media] And Was His Stump Speech Written By Jim Steinman?

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2877.Today in our somewhat-involuntary chronicling of the Death of All Media, we stumble on this.

Actually, If I can digress a moment (well, usually I do) I've got to blandly admit that I'm surprised at how easily things like this are to find. I don't go looking for them, truly I don't. The impression I'm coming to is that media orgs are so desperate to put out content, and do so in such a blind frenzy sometimes, that they just don't look. Copy-editors and caution have clearly become a thing of the past, or or going that way even quicker than even I had suspected.

That out of the way, today's morsel comes from the Global Post, yet another news organization that strives to keep us informed (or at least distracted) by posting everything all the time. It would seem that Meat Loaf, that memorable exponent of 70s-80s tract-home and trailer-park down'n'dirty rock'n'roll (I say this having lived in a tract-home and a trailer-park, so I know whereof I speak) has endorsed Mitt Romney for President, a development that manages, in a a Möbius-strip way, to be both unexpected and completely unsurprising. And the caption on the photo can't seem to get straight just who it is they're talking about.


No, you aren't misreading it. The caption says that's Mitt Romney, not Meat Loaf at Mitt Romney's rally, but Mitt.

If so, he's had work done.

On the other hand, you could have the makings of a new movie here:

The Romney Horror Picture Show. [1]

Try not to worry. It'll just get you old early.

[1] Yeah, I ripped that one off. It was too good to leave alone.