Links for 2009-12-22

"Sports information is like electricity or water. When the power's on and everything's flowing regularly, nobody notices. Everybody takes these things for granted. But whenever anything goes wrong, people act like it's the end of the world. Sports information directors are expected to be perfect, to have the entire school record book on the tip of their tongues, to make sure everything along every scorer's table runs correctly and efficiently during games. And they usually are perfect, spending their days in perfect anonymity.

Which is why they're the true saints of this business, the unsung heroes of Our Game. If you believe that heaven is the inverse of earth, SID's will inherit mansions in the clouds, white Lamborghinis and front-row Elvis tickets. The job is so thankless, and there is so little respect afforded them, that when they're quoted in a news story, it's usually as "university spokesman." It's as if "sports information director" is a synonym for "sanitary worker." "

"Desolation Road is a magic realist science fiction novel. Everything in it makes literal science fictional and technological sense, but everything feels like magical realism and makes sense on an emotional and mystical level. There's a fair bit of science fiction that feels like fantasy, and vice versa, but Desolation Road is the only book I know that holds this particular balance. "

"I decided I would follow up on that article and ask some of my writer friends about their own experiences discovering the title.

They came out in droves, as you will see below. Like becoming published for the first time, every writer walks a different path when it comes to discovering their titles. Some writers have never had a title change; others have had it happen to every one of their books. Most authors are somewhere in the middle, however, and some of their former titles might surprise you."

"Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions Of Guns N' Roses

Amazingly, these are not just downloaded MIDI files fed into GarageBand. Someone actually sat down and recorded neutered versions of "Welcome To The Jungle" and 11 other GNR tunes with "soothing mellotrons, vibraphones and bells." As bad as that sounds on paper, listening to Lullaby Renditions Of Guns N' Roses is much, much worse. Stripped of bass, drums, lyrics, and balls, "Paradise City" is a repetitive mess. And if your children do manage to doze off while enduring these ill-conceived kiddie tunes, they'll probably be awakened by the randomly inserted animal sounds, usually percussive frog noises. The big question raised by this album--"Why?"--is harder to answer than any insistent toddler query. "

"Having finally wrapped up his revenge trilogy, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook moved along to tackle vampires, another subject that would still let him put a lot of blood on the screen. His horror film Thirst is unconventional, as vampire stories go, but even though his vamps are disease-carriers rather than the undead, they still need plenty of the red stuff to keep themselves going, and that often gets messy. So a bag of fake blood seems like the most effective possible reminder both of the film's nature and of Park's sensibilities. And as a twisted but perfectly apropos bonus, it comes with a straw. Granted, while Thirst's protagonist spends plenty of time getting his blood-fix in hospitals, he doesn't drink from donation bags--but apparently Focus Features decided there were some liability issues involved in providing each potential reviewer with a fat Korean guy in a coma, for movie-authentic bloodsucking purposes."