Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Nathan's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
9:36 pm	Ben & Jerry's What's the order of operations? Do Ben & Jerry come up with a combination of flavors and then set about naming it? Or do they start by coming up with a punny name and then figure out a flavor combo to match? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
4:20 pm	Question about Kashrut. Any Jews out there want to help me with this one, please? The no milk and meat thing comes from the commandment not to boil a kid in its mother's milk. Fair enough. I've heard several reasons for this. (1) It's not healthy. (2) It's immoral, cooking the kid in the milk meant to nourish it, or allowing the mother to see her kid being cooked in her milk. (3) It was a pagan tradition to cook a kid in its mothers milk because when you kill the kid, why let the milking mother's milk go to waste? So where do the Rabbis get off proclaiming that we can't have milk with poultry, either? Because I'd be rather curious to taste a chick cooked in its mothers-- oh. Right. Conversely, if it's (2), why is it kosher to eat, say, schnitzel, with chicken fried in egg? (Comment on this)
Friday, March 13th, 2009
6:12 pm	If everyone's going to persist in going on about it, can we at least come up with a less stupid word than RaceFail? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
9:33 am	they bellow 'til we're deaf Remember all the kerfuffle about how Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was marketed as lit rather than science fiction, and how he and Atwood and McCarthy and so on and so forth should stop being so pretentious and admit that they're no better than the rest of us? Well, the movie version, which is to star Keira Knightley, has no such pretensions: the "cloning-themed film" is being marketed as a "sci-fi thriller". I'm not going to see it unless they start promoting it as a mainstream drama. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 14th, 2009
8:16 pm	The first I heard of Vandana Singh was last year when she was mentioned several times in SF Signal's Mind Meld on the topic "tomorrow's big genre stars". Since then I've seen a couple of her stories in anthologies, picked up a couple of her novellas from Aqueduct Press, and now, finally, have gotten my grubby paws on her debut collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. I mention this now, before I've even read it, only because I've seen the book promoted nowhere, and it doesn't seem to be available through any of the big online retailers like Amazon or Powell's. It is, however, available from the publisher, and for quite a good price, so I recommend picking it up. It can be found here. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
8:58 am	Not to be a downer or anything, but we're in it up to our necks right now. When this trillion-dollar economic stimulus nonsense goes through it'll shoot right up to our eyeballs. At least. So why not take a minute and call your senator today, let your elected representative know what a bad idea this whole thing is. Not that it'll help. Remember the first stimulus package that didn't work? Remember how the people were roughly 80% opposed to it, and how government servers were crashing with the volume of e-mails people were sending saying no, and how the switchboards were swamped with calls from people saying no? Remember how, after it appeared for a second that the representatives would actually represent the people, even if only just to keep their jobs, they quickly turned around and bailed out the economy anyway? Yeah. Good job on that one guys. So why are we sending another trillion dollars we don't have down the toilet now? Really, if there's going to be a trillion dollars spent, let's spend it in ways that will actually stimulate the economy, y'know? So, yes, today would be a good day to call your senator and let the fine person know how you feel about this nonsense. It probably won't help, but at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you raised your voice against this spending in the hard years to come. P.S. -- Even if you think the plan is a good idea, let's delay it a bit longer. Remember how originally it was going to create 2 million jobs, and then 3 million, and then yesterday that was upgraded to 4 million? If we hold off another couple weeks we can probably have them promising it'll create 10 million jobs, and I think we can all agree that that would be much better! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 9th, 2009
7:04 am	Happy New Year! Happy Tu B'Shevat, everyone. It's the new year of the trees. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
9:57 pm	So I guess the random iTunes meme doesn't work for film score geeks IF SOMEONE SAYS 'ARE YOU OKAY' YOU SAY? Martinique No. 1 - André Previn ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
11:14 am	You know what animal doesn't get nearly enough attention? The star-nosed mole. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
6:17 pm	What's good on TV? I've been sick, and would like to get lost in a TV show. What show should I watch? Possibilities include but are not limited to: Deadwood, The Wire, Monk, Weeds, Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, Burn Notice, BBC's Robin Hood, Torchwood, Venture Bros., The Tudors, Supernatural . . . and, erm, I'm sure there are others I've been meaning to watch but never made the time to get into. Which one should be my first TV binge session of 2009? Any suggestions? (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2009
7:27 pm	One of my little bookish pet peeves is when the title of a book changes from the cover to the title pages. Recent examples: Jim Sallis' essay collection is Gently Into the Land of the Meateaters on the cover and Gently into the Land of the Meateaters on the inside. What the covers indicate are Richard Tierney's Scroll of Thoth and Liz Granville's Crack of Doom are The Scroll of Thoth and The Crack of Doom respectively. Is Seabury Quinn's novella Roads or . . .Roads? John Shirley's collection Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories is, on the inside, Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories. (When I asked him, he indicated he preferred the former title, as it better represented the contents of the collection.) And oh the headaching over whether to catalogue Nick Mamatas's first collection as 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once or 3000 Miles Per Hour in Every Direction at Once. (Speaking of which, any day now would be fine for the new collection, Prime. And the Langan collection. And Mike Jasper's novel. And whatever else I'm forgetting. And while we're on about overdue books for which I'm impatient, where's the new Graham Joyce, Night Shade? If I hadn't pre-ordered I'd have picked up the UK edition already!) Really I don't know why I fixate on such things. But I do. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
9:37 am	Books read, 2009 I used to read roughly a hundred books each year. This slowed down significantly in 2006, and even more in 2007, when I was working ridiculous hours. In 2008 I finished pitifully few books with no real excuse, but the pace picked up near the end of the year, and so far I seem generally back on track. And with new books coming out all the time, plus a huge amount published recently that I haven't got to yet, plus even larger numbers of books older still I'd like to read, I'm certainly never short of reading material. 1. . . .Roads by Seabury Quinn (1937) 2. The Time Traveler's Son by Jason Erik Lundberg (2008) 3. The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (1870) 4. Local by Brian Wood with art by Ryan Kelly (2005-2008) 5. Gently into the Land of the Meateaters: Essays by James Sallis (2000) 6. Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent (2006) 7. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (2008) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
11:00 am	So, I have internet trouble. I’ve got cable internet in my home and a wireless network set up. Most of the time, for browsing and such, I’ve got a fine, fast connection. But whenever I try to download any file larger than 20 megabytes or so, whether a music file, drivers, whatever, my internet cuts out after a few seconds of sustained high speed and then I have to wait minutes at a time as the modem resets or whatever it is that it’s doing, which makes downloading any large files an exercise in frustration. Anyone have any idea what might be causing this or what I might do about it? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
9:32 pm	I'm feeling maudlin, so here behind the cut's one of those survey things. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 5th, 2008
3:54 pm	Help Vera Writer, publisher and lovely human being Vera Nazarian could use your help. I know times are tough for everyone, but if you can donate, please consider doing so. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
12:18 pm	Google lawsuit settled From here: Because the online use of books only will increase, the best news is the creation of a new Books Rights Registry, which will do for authors what ASCAP now does for songwriters: monitor use and collect fees. The person who holds the rights to a book will be paid when it's pulled up on Google, downloaded at a public library, or otherwise accessed in digital format. According to the Authors Guild, "The Registry will be controlled by a board of authors and publishers; as part of the settlement, Google will pay $34.5 million to get the Registry up and running, notify rights holders of the settlement, and process claims." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
6:31 pm	Help me, LiveJournal! I've got a scene stuck in my head from a movie I saw at least a dozen years ago. Probably a vampire flick. Don't remember anything else about the movie, but this scene has a car in the desert with its accelerator pedal tamped down and its wheel turned so it's just describing a big circle in the sand over and over again. There may be someone unconscious inside the car. Anyone seen this movie? Have any idea what it could be? Thank you! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
8:06 am	When I am running for President, my memoir will be called Drinking the Kool-Aid. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
1:05 pm	Apparently Michael Crichton has died. RIP, sir. It's been many a year since I've read your books, but I used to enjoy them immensely. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
6:53 am	Yay Obama. Boo Proposition 8. Yay Proposition 48. Any bets on how long Bristol Palin's engagement will last now? (4 Comments |Comment on this)