Tennis, Anyone? -- the 2015 report

Last year I chose to skip the US Open tennis qualifying, which I enjoy quite a bit, in order to go to Eurocon and see Dublin after the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention.  It was nice to be back after a year's absence.

Some changes since two years ago.  It's the first time since the JABberwocky offices moved to Manhattan, so popping into the office for a few minutes now meant walking into Manhattan, visiting for a few minutes from 9-10am, and then taking the subway out to the tennis.  The mileage isn't much different, adding up the walk to the office, to the subway, and from the subway to the tennis, than if I just walked to the tennis, but it felt like I was walking way less.

It's also the first time I got to see the qualifying with use of the new improved Courts 4/5/6 that opened last year, all of which offer excellent elevated seating on both ends.  Court 5 has a little shade in front of the TV booth, though it wasn't hot enough this year for shade options to dictate my court choices.

And it's the first year I went to qualifying since they "enhanced" the security measures.  Because a bag check of a small bag wasn't enough.  Starting the first day with a bag check, a metal detector and a wanding wasn't enjoyable.  I adjusted a little the next days by using a small bag to put everything from my pockets into the large bag.  But on the whole, I'd rather have fewer guns and fewer metal detectors in the US than more of each.  And come Monday, with the arrival of 25,000 people for the main event, the line to get in and go through the security screening will itself be a soft target.

Finally, the older I get the slower my metabolism, the less my appetite.  I used to pack a lunch and then eat a full dinner after, and get an ice cream bar, and the Lemon Ice King and etc. etc.  Now I have to lighten the sweets load and have a lighter lunch in order to have a full dinner.  And I still feel like I'm overeating.  Of course, I also need to hydrate.  The weather topped out at 90 degrees on Tuesday, warmer than predicted, and I had to refill my two water bottles often.  The other days, put in my 40oz at the start of the day and didn't need to visit the water fountains much afterward.

The first round of the qualifying is often not very scintillating.  A lot of bad players, a lot of one-sided matches or dull matches.  And this year, Tuesday was pretty bad even by the standards of bad first round matches.  In fact, looking over the results the only thing to come of the day was noticing Elias Ymer, a 19-year old from Sweden, on Court 5, while I was watching a match on Court 6, who looked better than what I was watching.

Wednesday's schedule was a feast of riches.  Alexander Zverev, who had some good results over the summer right after the deadline for automatic entry into the Open, was playing.  Veteran players like Jurgen Melzer and Nicolas Almagro were on the schedule.  I started the day watching a young Japanese player Yoshihito Nishioka playing Indonesia's Yuki Bhambri.  Good match.  Marked Nishioka as a player to watch.

That match was chosen because it was the #23 seed I'd never heard of vs. another player I'd never heard of, which is often my way of choosing first round matches.  But for my next, I did opt to watch Nicolas Almagro, who's been in the top 10, playing Igor Sijsling, who's been in the top 55.  Almagro won, but not too easily.  The match went into a first set tie-break.   But history aside, Almagro, who just turned 30 a week ago, didn't look like a slam dunk to beat the best qualifiers.

I stayed on Court 6 for the next match, which featured a Russian veteran, Alexander Kudryavtsev, against a 19-year old Chilean, Nicolas Jarry.  The match was a demolition derby; Kudryavtsev won the first set in just 18 minutes, which might be the fastest set of men's tennis I've ever seen, and the second 6-4 set was just 34 minutes.  But even though Jarry lost, it didn't seem to be a skill issue.  Rather, Jarry was just spraying shots all over the place, seeming 100% overwhelmed by the moment even though he's done qualifying for the last two grand slams.  If he could get his head in the game...  Tuesday I could barely bare to watch the winners.  Wednesday even the losers were interesting.

Alexander Zverev, the 18-year old German, is a major up-and-comer.  In 2015, he's won matches in around 10 ATP tour events, reaching the quarter-finals at DC's Citi Open, the semis at the Swedish Open, and the quarters in Marseilles and the round of 64 in Miami, the last two even before his 18th birthday.  How all that didn't collect points enough for him to be in the automatic entry for the US Open, I don't know, but seeing his name in the qualifying draw reminded me of ten years ago, when Andy Murray had a break-through summer a little too late to avoid US Open qualifying.

I was expecting Zverev to march through the qualifying like I remembered Andy Murray doing, and there was every sign of that in his first match as he took only 50 minutes to beat Horacio Zeballos.  But his second match on Thursday was a dog-fight against another German, Nils Langer.  Zverev showed quite a bit of temper, arguing about line calls consistently.  On one occasion, he screamed quite loudly that a ball could not possibly have been out even though he was at the diagonally furthest end of the court from where the call was made and couldn't possibly have seen it.  As there were many Germans watching this match between two of them, I was able to get translation for another call.  The first part I didn't really need a translator because you know what's being said:  "the ball was out."  The second part, however...  when his opponent refused to acknowledge that the ball was out, Zverev said "maybe where you come from in the South," referring to the different regions of Germany the two players were from.  Zverev lost the second set in a tie-break in 68 minutes and then went down a break in the third set, but apparently his opponent's physical fortitude was less resilient than Zverev's complaining.  Nils Langer just sort of drifted away in the latter half of the third set, and practically gave Zverev the match. On Friday, I had to settle for standing at the back of the seats in Court 13 to watch the last half of another dog fight with Ivan Dodig, a Croatian veteran, now 30.  A tight tie-break ended a 72-minute first set, and then the second set was tight as well, ending anti-climactically when Dodig lost focus in the final game and double-faulted to end the 128-minute two-set match.  It's as rare for a set to go 72 minutes as it is to go 16.  But ultimately, Zverev prevailed, and advances to the main draw.  Whatever player, whatever ranking, you don't want to find him as your first round opponent.  This kid is going places.

Turning back the clock to Wednesday...  After sitting in-between two stultifying matches on the backwater Courts 14 and 15, I heard the announcement of a new match getting underway on Court 11, and drifted over to watch Marcos Giron, a 22-year old NCAA champion, against Alejandro Gonzalez from Columbia, a few years older and one of the seeds in the qualifying with a rank in the low 100s.  Very entertaining match.  Gonzalez won, but not easily.  Giron looked good, but he kept putting books short and into the middle of the court allowing Gonzalez to then all too often take control of the points.  If Giron could do that a little less often, he has potential.  Again, better losers on Wednesday than winners on Tuesday.  And Gonzalez ended up winning his next two matches to qualify.  In fact, his match on Friday ended around a minute after Zverev's on the next court over, but the press of humanity watching the two matches was so vast that I could barely turn around to try and peek over anyone's head to see it.

Zverev, Ymer and Nishioka were my three main follows for the qualifying tournament, and for better or worse, something interesting happened -- they all won all three of their matches.  Better, because it means I found good players to follow.  Worse, because sometimes when the player you really like in Round 1 loses in the later rounds you've found someone even better to watch later on.

Court 17 gets the marquees matches in the qualifying, but it has no "open" seating, so unless you get to the court before the start of the match you can be stuck waiting for several minutes in a dank enclosure below the court to gain admittance.  Hence, there were some other players that maybe I could have seen, like Wimbledon boys champ Tommy Paul, whom I missed because I didn't have feel like dealing with Court 17 and never had good timing to go there for the start of a new match.  I did see the final few points of the qualifying match for Andrey Rublev, a 17-year old Russian who looks like a live wire, potent and promising.

Looking at the main draw...

Tommy Paul has a match against the 25th seed Andreas Seppi, whom I saw years ago in qualifying.  I don't consider Seppi to be any kind of world-beater, and on a good day with crowd support, Tommy Paul could win this.  It has the looks of a Grandstand Court match.

Elias Ymer is blessed.  He's going to play the 75th ranked Diego Schwartzman, which is a winnable match.

Alejandro Gonzalez may be even luckier.  He has the 98th-ranked Filip Krajinovic to play.  This is about as close to a qualifier-qualifier match as you can get in the first round of the main draw without actually getting it.

Andrey Rublev less lucky.  He has Top 20 player Kevin Anderson of South Africa in the first round.

Luckiest?  I might have to give that to Yoshihito Nishioka, who has one of those qualifier-qualifer matches in the first round, and goes up against Paul-Henri Mathieu.  This 33-year old Frenchmen got as high as #12 in the world in 2008, but that's a very long time ago.  Nishioka has some clear disadvantages in height and experience, but I wouldn't be complaining to have this first round match.

Not so lucky.  Alexander Zverev.  After the joys of playing a second-tier countryman in the qualifying he goes up against Philip Kohlschreiber, the top-ranked German and #29 seed.

Not entirely a surprise that Nicolas Almagro couldn't make it through the qualifying.  He lost in the 2nd round, and doesn't have a chance even to be a "lucky loser," a loser in the final round of qualifying who is randomly drawn to fill any spots that open up in the next few days from last-minute withdrawals.

I'm reasonably certain I'll be enjoying some of the players I saw this year on my TV set in the years to come.  Which I can't always say.

Food:

On two days, I got both a mint chocolate chip and vanilla chocolate chip from the Lemon Ice King of Corona.  I got a meatball hero from Pat LaFreida stand at the Open.  Too long in the warmer, so the ricotta cheese was a cold coating on top of the meatballs.  Served warm on a busier day, it might be OK.  I ate at Pho Banc, a Vietnamese restaurant in Elmhust that was excellent, and which I will return to.  At Mustang Thakali Kitchen, a Nepalese/Tibetan in Jackson Heights, that was very good.  And at De Mole, my standby for Mexican in Sunnyside.  One Cherry Garcia bar from Ben & Jerry's.  Some heirloom tomatoes and apples that I brown-bagged.

Stupid Security Cocktails

So Hachette was having a cocktail reception this afternoon for literary agents to show off their beautiful new open plan offices.

To which I RSVPed on December 15.

Now, I'm curious as I walk up what kind of security thing they'll have, because having dozens or hundreds of agents waiting in line for their building passes would be kind of silly.

So they have this check-in desk with a little Hachette sign and people holding scads of pre-printed bar-coded building passes.  And we're told that these are under the agency names, and I say I'm there from JABberwocky, and like half the people on line, I'm told "we don't have your badge; you'll have to check in with the main desk" where you need to get a nice individual photo guest barcoded badge.

And I just didn't feel like it.

Did they have the badge under my name even though I was told twice it should be under the agency's name?  The email signature on my RSVP did just have my name on it and not the company name, though in theory if they're checking the RSVPs the database list would have both, and if they aren't certain, maybe somebody could check both my name and the agency's name, but Person A might have one letter of the alphabet and Person B might have the other letter, and do I really want to spend my time asking them "are you sure, do you want to check under name name as well as the agency name" when they're all so sure the badge is under the agency name?

What's the point of the security charade anyway, because pretty much anyone can say they're here for the Hachette reception and get a badge regardless of whether they're on the list or not.  So just walk over to 1290 Avenue of the Americas right this instant, wait on the first line, then have them tell you to go on the second line, and you're golden.  You can do whatever you want.  Shit, tell them you're Joshua Bilmes.

It's just bullshit, and I've got better things to do with my time than deal with bullshit in order to get a glass of wine or champagne from Hachette Book Group.

Like write a quick blog post to call Vornado, the landlord of Hachette's building, and Hachette, on their bullshit.  This is stupid security theatre.  It's scores or hundreds of agents each having to wait on line, or on multiple lines, for three or five minutes.  It's five hours of productive time on this Earth that's lost for no reason at all.

Apocalty Now

Yesterday I told you what royalty statements looked like at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 1980s.

As we progressed through the 1990s, publishers slowly started to provide "better" royalty statements.  As with the Random House portal, which has been around for two years now, I am always surprised when publishers make it easier for authors and agents to find information, though maybe I shouldn't always be because even publishers can sometimes recognize the cost of keeping secrets.  Unlike, let's say, the NSA. 

That said, the additional information is often provided in a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" kind of a way.  It's sometimes so hard to find the information and so difficult to interpret it that the improvements are less significant than I would wish.

Before continuing, this post's reminder that in major trade publishing that most of the books publishers send to bookstores can be returned to the publisher for full credit.  Hence, the publisher is entitled to take a reserve against returns to guard against paying royalties for books that are later returned. 

Furthermore, your profitability to the publisher is dependent in some ways upon the efficiency of your sale, i.e., how many print copies the publisher has to send out into the world in order to sell one copy.  This is a little less the case today than twenty years ago because of ebooks, but it is still important,  If it costs $2 to print a $25 hardcover, and if the publisher gets $12 of that $25, it is harder to make money if the publisher has to print three copies in order to sell one,  $6 of the $12 is already out the door to the printer, $2.50 or $3.75 to your royalty, and there could be $2 or $3 left from each copy sold for the publisher to pay for your cover, the copy-editor, the editor, etc.  If the publisher sells four of every five copies, then the printer gets $10 of every $48, your royalty is $10 or $15, and the publisher can have over twice as much money left per copy sold to pay overhead and direct expenses.

Because of this, it is very important if you want to judge how big an advance you should get from your publisher to know your "sell-thru" percentage,  Higher sell-thru equals more money for the publisher equals more money to pay you.

I am simplifying a little bit.  The publisher can make decisions that can artificially inflate or deflate your efficiency.  As an example, for Brandon Sanderson's debut YA novels in 2013, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, both Tor and Delacorte decided to invest in shipping more books into channels like Costco, Walmart and Target that generally have higher return rates.  However, each publisher still had expectations on what the size of the investment would look like after the final numbers came in, relative to their profit expectations and their overall marketing budgets for each book.

Since these things are important, I think any decent royalty statement today should clearly tell you how many copies were shipped, how many copies were returned, and what the reserve against returns is.

Penguin started to provide that information only as we got into the mid 2000s; even for Dead Until Dark which the Berkley Publishing Group published in 2001, the earliest royalty statement was the old-fashioned (your number) Berkley royalty statement.  I feel they provide the gold standard for royalty reporting.  Each print format or ISBN gets one or two clean concise pages that give the current information for copies shipped and sold, for the reserve against returns at the start and finish, and at the bottom, summarize that information cumulatively for prior, current and ending totals.  If you want to figure out your sell-thru percentage for the life of your book, you need to pull only that one most recent piece of paper.

Pretty much every other publisher falls short of this in one way or another.

Scholastic is surprisingly awful for a big US publisher in the 2010s, and their statements are relics of a last age, with the reserve against returns still hidden, and no information given on copies shipped and returned.

St. Martin's is slightly better, but only slightly.  They provide cumulative total copies sold by channel, while Scholastic provides only a grand total, which is a little better.  As an example, if you are a Canadian author, you might want to know how much of your business is coming from Canada, and St. Martin's is a little better for this.  And St. Martin's does give the reserve against returns, albeit only in dollars and not in units, which is something I will discuss in more detail in a later post that deals exclusively with reserves.

St. Martin's is owned by a big publishing conglomerate Macmillan, and strangely other Macmillan imprints like Tor provide information on copies shipped and returned that the St. Martin's statements do not.  We are told this is because St. Martin's purchased the new royalty system earlier and got the budget version.  But same conglomerate, same warehouse, same computers tracking everything, and they haven't had a chance to upgrade?

Even the better statements from other Macmillan imprints have a tragic flaw.  They only provide a cumulative total for net copies sold, and not for copies shipped and copies returned.  Hence, if you want to know what your vitally important sell-thru is you still have to collect information from many pieces of paper dating back many years, and there is no positive change there as against the royalty statements I saw in 1988.

Other publishers are unable to present information on one page.

Simon & Schuster was one of the first publishers to provide more "informative" royalty statements, but the statements could take three or five pages to tell you that three or five copies had sold.  If you are wondering why I have a "watch what you wish for, you might get it" approach to these newer royalty statements, look no further.

Other publishers have layering problems.  i.e., like airline security they took their old systems and loaded new stuff on top of it.

Historically William Morrow and Avon had provided slightly better detail on their royalty statements, and when HarperCollins purchased Morrow/Avon, they just added more pages without looking at the overall quality of their reporting.  It's a mess, spread over many pages.  Perseus, which had been distributed by Harper, has a similar-looking statement that looks a little prettier but isn't any easier to use.

Random House made a big fuss when they switched from putting "your number" on a computer-fold oversize piece of paper to putting it on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but it was the same information or lack thereof only more manageably presented.  When they finally got around to providing information on copies shipped, copies returned, and reserves against returns, they kept that same 8.5x11 sheet of paper around as the first page of the new royalty statement.  To put it less politely, the first page of your Random House statement is the same utter bullshit that we got 25 years ago.  They do provide more information but you have to go hunting for it.  And they don't automatically provide information on copies shipped and returned for the life of your book.  They automatically provide a sheet with that information for books that have reserves activity, but if they stop holding a reserve on your hardcover after two or three years that page suddenly disappears.  They provide that information by price point, so if your mass market price changed from $6.99 to $7.99, you may now only get the page for the $7.99 copies.  If you ask them by ISBN and price point to provide the missing pages, they will provide them to you, but only if you ask.  Or, you can ask them to provide you with all the "Print Summary" pages every time.  Since e-books can be sold at many different prices, this may result in you receiving a 40-page royalty statement.  Every time.  You can choose to drown in information, you can choose not to have information, or you can choose to add a semi-annual e-mail request for select additional information while also being sure to archive sheets of paper from several years ago.  The one good thing in these statements:  Random House is on of the only publishers that will tell you how many copies they print and when they print them.  On the other hand, the calculation of actual royalties earned is on a different page than the detail of how many copies were shipped and returned.  At its best and simplest, you'll still have three pages of information (summary, royalty calculation, ship/return/reserve detail) vs. the one page from Penguin.

Penguin has one layering issue of its own.  Early in the e-book era each e-book format had its own ISBN, and their system was designed to generate a page for each ISBN.  Suddenly, we would have six pages of royalty reports for e-books.  For less popular formats, those pages might list a handful of copies if any.  The pages didn't have a place to tell you which ISBN was the Amazon one and which was the B&N one, so there were no benefits to having the information spread over multiple pages.    Over time, ISBNs have been consolidated, but they do not have a way to purge the inactive ISBNs from the ongoing reports.

Especially now that the ebook ISBNs are consolidated, I clearly prefer the Penguin reports to the Random House reports and am curious to see which will prevail as the combined companies merge operations.

So on the one hand, we've come a long way, and on the other hand not.  After two or three years the old statements were reasonably accurate for what they were, and you had just one page that anyone could understand.   Now, we generally have much better visibility on reserves against returns, but there are still serious problems across the industry in giving basic cumulative information on copies shipped and returned, and the royalty statements are differently annoying with each publisher in their layers, pages, complexity and presentation.

We shall continue this series with a discussion of our internal processing of these pieces of paper,  Suffice to say just sticking these pieces of paper in the file isn't going to be very helpful when we actually need to make use of the information that is hiding within these reports....

Omar and The Lunchbox go to Bethlehem

I did indeed manage to get to Omar in the week following the Oscars, if just barely, catching a 10:45 show on the Sunday morning a week following.

This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie.  It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe!  in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter.  It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical.  If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be enjoyed for how the story plays out thereafter or the quality of its performances no matter what justification you're willing to ascribe (or not) to the primary incident.  Taken in by Israeli security forces afterwards, Omar is forced to become collaborator.  It helps that saying "I will never confess" is, according to the film, considered a confession in and of itself by the Israeli military courts that govern. Torn between his Israeli handler, his love interest, his friend and competitor for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and some of the internal politics in the occupied territories, Omar has some soul-searching and growing up to do.  It's quite a good film, and worth seeking out.

Interestingly, an Israeli film called Bethlehem opens almost simultaneously, and is playing along with Omar at the Angelika in New York, and takes a different but parallel path that reaches virtually the same place at the end.  Bethlehem starts a little slowly.  Adam Bakri's performance as Omar hits its target with the audience from pretty much the first close-up shot of the film, and carries us from there.  Bethlehem is a little broader in its approach.  The politics between different Palestinian factions that lurk in the background of Omar are in the foreground, which presents a broader canvas, and more jumping around from place to place and person to person, before ultimately settling on a similar relationship between a Palestinian and a handler in the Israeli intelligence forces.  Here, the Palestinian is the brother of a much-wanted terrorist who may be taking money and/or orders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.  Omar has a lot of little chase scenes, Bethlehem one extended set piece.  I liked both differently, and similarly.

These movies I'd heard some buzz on for some months ahead of their release.  Between the two of them on a kind of triple feature, I saw an Indian movie called The Lunchbox that came to my attention on the basis of some good reviews in the NY papers when it opened this weekend.  Really?  This is the story of an Indian woman who uses the famed lunch delivery system in Mumbai to send her husband a hot meal every day, but somehow or other her meals end up getting cross-shipped.  She and the "other man" start exchanging notes back-and-forth in the lunches.  There are an awful lot of shots of him, sitting at his desk, reading her notes.   Her, opening up the lunch-box at the end of the day to see if there is a return note hiding in an empty container.  Lots of shots of people riding the trains to work.  Subplots.  She yells upstairs to her auntie to share confidences, and auntie yells back with advice and gives recipe ideas.  He is asked to train his replacement, a particularly annoying person.  One dissenting review I read from Richard Brody in the New Yorker, sadly after I saw the movie, called it twenty minutes of story in a much longer film, and that's about the long -- and short! -- of it.  During Omar, when I was feeling bleary-eyed after losing the hour to the Daylight Savings switch the night before, I resisted sleep.  During The Lunchbox, there was plenty of time to sleep off the meal.

Her -- See Her!

Rather to my surprise, Her turns out to be a great science fiction film, every bit as worthy of your attention as Gravity.  If you read my blog, there's an excellent chance that you have an interest in science fiction, and so you really really do need to go and see Her.

Why a surprise?  I like Spike Jonze's Weezer videos, but his previous feature films haven't been favorites of mine.  Being John Malkovich was a nice concept but petered out, and Adaptation I thought was just plain bad.  I've disliked these or thought these overrated enough that in my mind I've given Spike Jonze credit for other bad films by people he worked with on his own bad films.   While the coming attraction for Her made it look interesting, I just thought of Adaptation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or other dreary critics darlings.

Color me wrong!

Take your Mac worship to the next level, and imagine that Siri has a crush on you, that you have a crush on Siri, and that your conversations with your computer go another level or two in intimacy.  That's what we've got here.  Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, downloads the latest OS for his computer.  It asks for a few pieces of information in order to get to know and serve him better.  The sexy, sultry, but accessible voice of Scarlett Johansson starts coming out of the box, and it's pretty much love at first phonic. 

The lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix is amazingly good, a career best.  It isn't natural to fall in love with a computer voice, but everything, every word and note of Phoenix's performance, is real and believable.   He's just a guy, a very relatable guy.  His job is writing nice letters for other people, and he's kind of ready to have something nice happen to him.  Didn't happen with his ex-wife.  Can't happen with the girl next door, who's in a relationship.  It's not like he's trying to fall in love with his OS, but when it starts to happen he's ready for that.  There are a lot of good performances vying for a Best Actor nomination.  Tom Hanks alone has two of them, and Bruce Dern in Nebraska and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave and Robert Redford in All is Lost.  At least seven worthy performances and only five people can get on the ballot.  This performance is up there with all of them.

Scarlett Johansson is spot on perfect as the voice he falls in love with.

But the movie isn't great sf just because of the acting.  It's the vision of the world that's fully realized, and which works very nicely.  It wouldn't be enough just to have the idea of someone falling in love with Siri.  I haven't given Siri a spin on my new iPad, but I've got enough Apple love in me when I think of my iPad, or even think of how I first fell in love with an Apple when someone in my dorm turned one on and we saw how it smiled at us...  It's all the other little touches in the world.

Twombly writes letters for a website called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com which to me is just about the epitome of computer age personalization.  (For a dissenting view, theawl.com).  In a world where almost all my Christmas cards are email attachments that do nothing for me emotionally and a lot more to use up wireless data on my iPad, why not this.

The production design, the costume design, the apartments people live in and the places they work in, they all look just a little bit in the future.  Not what we have today, but not some rocket-ships-whizzing along vision of the world.  Walk across a pedestrian bridge and the security cameras on the lighting stanchions are just perfectly there.

Play a videogame, and it's a perfect example of a game that could be played tomorrow, but not quite today.

I could believe in this movie.

When the movie gets away from its central relationship, it loses a little something.  I didn't buy the relationship with the ex-wife, I didn't quite see what was there between Twombly and his neighbor.

The movie is around 15 minutes too long, and I did start to feel the weight of those extra minutes.  If it could have lost 15 minutes of some of the stuff that didn't work it would be just about perfect.

It is time to start filling out the Hugo Nomination ballot, and this will certainly be going on it in the Dramatic Presentation - Long Form.

SF Signal considers this one of the best sf movies in recent history as well.

Guns & Butter

After the gun shootings at the theatre in Aurora or the school in Connecticut, those of us who favor gun control were told that the problem was, in fact, gun control.  If there had been people in the theatre or teachers/security guards in the school who had guns, then somebody would have stopped the shooter and it would have been so much better for everyone.

This week's shooting took place on a government military installation, and 12 people died.

It might have been worse.  The gunman had to "settle" for buying a handgun when Virginia state law didn't allow him to buy something more powerful.

From what I've read, the shooting spree might have been extended when the gunman was able to take a gun from one of his victims.

I'm not sure how to square this with the whole idea that gun control costs lives, and that having more people with more guns saves them.

I will certainly be told that the problem isn't with gun laws or the lack of gun laws.  The problem will be the lack of enforcement, or that this guy was a bad apple and nobody connected the dots, and he never should have had a security clearance and never should have been allowed on base.

All of these things are true.

But if all of those things had been equally true, and it had been harder for him to buy a gun...

Everything else which we consider to be a bad thing, we make it harder to do.  If we want less gun violence, we should make guns harder to have.

Surprise!

So the US Open has announced that the gates are going to open a half hour earlier.

Why?

Because, per my last post, their useless extra security procedures are almost certainly leading to much more than the "slight delays" predicted in the press release.

So much wasted money, so much wasted time, so much waste and stupidity in order to add absolutely nothing other than wasted money and wasted time to a procedure in which every bag was already opened and inspected on the way in to the tennis center.

The Never-Ending War

So New For 2013, as the main draw of the US Open tennis begins Monday, they have announced that this year everyone will get to be wanded and go through a magnetometer.

Why?

For the past ten years, you've only been able to bring in one small bag, and that one small bag has been hand-inspected as you go in.  There's no way that the Boston Marathon scenario could repeat at the US Open as it has been run, security wise, for the past decade.

Adding a magnetometer adds no additional security.

None.

Nada.

Zilch.

Of course, it is a nice make-work program, because now the company that provides the security forces for the US Open gets to hire more people!  Most of these people are temps of some or another sort, and I am sure the contractor that provides this service for the Open makes a nice additional profit.

Of course, it is a nice make-work program for the people who make wands and magnetometers.

Of course it makes everyone feel so much more secure.  Even though it doesn't add any actual security.

It does add nicely to the time people will spend queuing to get into the Open.  Let's be very conservative and say that it's just an extra two minutes.  That's very very conservative.  But there are 40,000 people a day going to the open, so that's 80,000 minutes, for 14 days.  That's over two years of lost time.

Just dandy.

And of course, there's no going backward on any of this.  The day will never come when the polie or anyone else will say that the world has gotten safer and we can go back and do less, spend less money and lose less time and less productivity and still be reasonably safe.  It will only get worse.  Because no matter what we do, we will never be 100% safe.  There is risk to everything we do every day, and some day some other bad thing will happen that will require us to come up with some other layer of security.

Happy happy joy joy.

Securely Ranting -- For the World to See

Just to get on my high horse again about the ludicrousness of our allowing our government to waste so much money spying on us, bringing it back a little to the business of JABberwocky...

We at JABberwocky believe in information.  We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail.

Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point.  Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up.  The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover.  The paperback and e-book will flow upward.  They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sales for your book, and from there to your series, and from there to your work with a particular publisher and then a particular territory. We do that in all major territories for your work, we try and have basic information in smaller territories in spreadsheets.  If your career takes off after your fifth book, or Hollywood decides to take an option on your eighth book and some hotshot writer needs information on your sales to help get financing for the movie, we have your global sales information ready at hand.  If we need to gather that information after your eighth book is published when that call from Hollywood calls, it is a lot harder to gather all the information retrospectively.

Sounds great, doesn't it!

Who wouldn't want the government to do just that, so if in two years or four years some evildoer is involved in some terrorist plot, we've got all the data to find him, and find his co-conspirators, and save us all!!

However, we face real world constraints which apparently our government doesn't feel it needs to confront on our behalf.

Simply put, as our business grows and we have more clients selling more books in more places in more formats, the information we have to process keeps growing and growing.

We must make compromises.

We sold 200 books to Audible last year and are starting to get audio royalty statements for some of those.  Some of those books are titles that haven't been in print since ten years ago or more.  Suffice to say the spreadsheets we put together for those titles cannot and should not be as detailed as when we had only 30 books with Audible to keep track of.

As more information floods in, we have a harder time prioritizing it.  Do we do the big pile of Audible statements first because those still come in on paper and make a visible dent on the desk, while we delay processing Random House royalty statements for major agency clients like Peter Brett and Elizabeth Moon that have come in as PDFs?  Well, it is tempting to deal with the visible pile of paper first.

We also have a harder time doing all of it correctly.  Who is going to look over the person who does the basic entry work as we have more and more clients taking up more and more of our time?  Two years ago I could do that and it wasn't too big a hassle, but now it's kind of impossible for me to give the same quality time to absolutely everything.

I am running a business.  I have to justify expenses.  I can't just hire more and more and more people to deal with every last bit of data that can theoretically be processed.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

The NSA isn't worried about money.  It isn't worried about cost-benefit analysis.  Its budget is secret.  We don't debate it.  If we did, we'd be told that we should never for a moment think that our security can be valued that way.

Which is balderdash.

The NSA is no different from JABberwocky.  The more information it decides it must have, the less good it can be at dealing with all of that information, even with the ability to hire infinitely, and build office space and server farms and everything else infinitely.  And when it makes mistakes, those have serious consequences, way more than if JABberwocky screws something up.

It's not just wrong constitutionally and morally for the government to collect all of this information on us, but it's a bad investment for our country.

And just to make clear:

Yes, your information is being collected.

If you write "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an email and the government is interested in Bad Guy X, it will start digging deeper in what you say and do just because you put the words "Bad Guy X" into your e-mail.

Oh, sure, there are procedures in place to be sure that they don't go too far, that they dig just deep enough to determine that you are a US citizen, or that you didn't actually conspire with Bad Guy X but really did just say "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an innocent way in an e-mail.

But of course those procedures don't work perfectly.  The government admits to thousands of times when its procedures don't work.

No, thank you!  I'd rather you not be spending my money on this.

Disappointysium -- a guest review by Tim Akers

It was so much fun doing an exchange of movie reviews with Bryce Moore last month for Pacific Rim that I thought it would be fun to do another one with my client Tim Akers for Elysium.  Tim has just started selling an e-collection Bones of Veridon which collects some of the short fiction that first attracted me to Tim's work,  and you can also enjoy two Veridon novels, Dead of Veridon and Heart of Veridon.  Also highly recommended -- Horns of Ruin, the first fully realized blend of steampunk and sword & sorcery.
The JABberwocky page for Tim Akers
Tim's Blog, main link
My review, on Tim's blog.

Disappointysium

I want to start by saying that I kind of liked this movie, in the sense that I didn't walk out and I didn't feel like I had wasted my money and I only got blood-humming angry a couple times. But really, it was a movie of great potential that made dozens of small mistakes and one major mistake that killed it for me. I wanted to like it more, but didn't. Here's why.

Elysium felt strangely like a science fiction movie written by someone with no experience in science fiction. That's odd, because Blomkamp delivered the excellent District 9 (enjoyed it, will never see it again) and is supposed to be something of a ninja among science fiction directors. But from the very beginning there were a number of gaffes that felt like they were being made by someone who heard about this science fiction thing, and thought maybe he'd try his hand at it. Let me tell you, it's not for everyone.

Let's start with the science stuff. I'm not the kind of guy who freaks out about impractical science in my fiction, especially movies. I have a friend who hates Firefly because of the kitchen table in the space ship. It's too big, he says. You'd never waste that kind of space in a real space ship, and certainly not with a wooden table. I'm not that guy. But from the very start of the movie there were just. So. Many. Things. There's an early scene where a bunch of 'unfortunates' tries to sneak into Elysium with some stolen shuttle IDs. Three shuttles go up, two get destroyed en route by a (wait for it) shoulder launched missile system, and the third crashes into someone's lawn. Everyone is rapidly rounded up by adorable droids, except for a mother and her daughter. These two break into someone's house and, using the forged DNA-ID on the kid, use the rich people's health care to cure the girl of something debilitating.

Begin the questioning, sir.

Why are they shooting at this shuttle from earth, rather from the station itself? Wait, how are they going to land when there must be some kind of shield keeping the atmosphere in the... huh. Ok, how are they keeping the atmosphere in the... wait, they caught *everyone* in a matter of minutes? Well what's the point of trying to get up here if literally everyone gets caught? Oh, so this scene is some combination of the voter ID laws, universal health care and white privilege, I guess? Ok... but...

And that's all the stuff that came to me in one scene, and there's one thing I'm leaving out that's *huge* to the plot that, I guess, never occurred to the director. But I'll get to that later, when I'm yelling about the ending. Spoiler: fuck the ending.

This kind of bizarre, poorly thought out inconsistency in the mechanics of the world, both societal and technological, never ends. I kind of hoped it was just some convenient hand waving at the start of the movie to demonstrate the shape of the world and to foreshadow the rest of the plot, but no. No luck. I can't go through every little thing that happened because it's a lot of things, but suffice to say that there's not a scene in the movie where I wasn't questioning some bit of the technology. That bothered me mostly because I'm really, really not that guy. I'm *so* good at suspending disbelief. But for most of the movie, I just couldn't do it.

Ok, so that's the technology/science stuff. Next up, characters. Max is that type of main character who makes mistakes to move the plot forward. I don't like that kind of character. He basically keeps falling forward until everything works out (for everyone except him). Sure, the system he's stuck in is horrible, and he's just trying to make the best of a bad situation, but there simply wasn't a lot of appeal. I won't go into his girlfriend, because she was just a foil for her child. I won't talk about her child because honestly nearly every line they gave that child made me sick to the stomach.

Also, and this is important, the second you meet the kid she tells you she's sick. It's literally the first thing that she says. And you immediately flash back to that early scene I was bitching about, with the mother and the kid and they steal their way to Elysium so the kid can be cured. And now you know what's going to happen for the rest of the movie. The only person who doesn't know that this is the shape of the rest of the movie? The protagonist. And what active role does he take in this forward movement of the plot? None, at least not until the very end. The kid and her mom get up there on the same ship as our hero, but not because of anything specific that he's done. No, they're just along for the ride, and so the antagonist and his pals can constantly threaten to rape the mother. Got it.

There's other character stuff. The antagonist is just a monster. Jodie Foster's character... I don't know how best to say this. She's portrayed as one of these people who will do anything, commit any atrocity, push any boundary to accomplish her goals. She authorizes lethal force against those shuttles at the beginning. When those assets are taken away from her (without being replaced by more humane or politically acceptable systems. I really don't understand why they aren't replaced, or why there's NO APPRECIABLE DATA SECURITY anywhere in this world that apparently runs on data and algorithms) she conspires to overthrow the government by way of a system reboot (as a former helpdesk nerd, I couldn't help but say "Society not working? Have you tried turning it off and then back on?") because the programs that run Elysium apparently function in such a mechanical way that if you reboot the central computer and put your name in the data field labeled "President" you're suddenly the president. And when the homicidal rapist murderer who just got his face shot off and rebuilt does something stupid, she goes down there without any security and berates him. Because who would *dare* try to stop her? But when that same homicidal rapist murderer puts a piece of glass in her throat and throws her into a room with a nurse, and that nurse tries to bandage the wound so that they can get this woman to one of the billions of miracle-laser medbays that are just outside the door, what does this unstoppable force of nature do?

She gives up. She lets herself die. Because...?

Again, these are the most obvious things. There are more things, but I don't want to get into all of them. Suffice it to say that I doubted a lot of the character choices. But whatever.

I'm going to talk about the ending now, because up until the end I was still enjoying the movie. I know it sounds like I wasn't, but there was enough fun stuff going on that I was able to push most of this behind me. And then we got to the ending, and I was all 'Screw it!' and then there were some credits.

Here are the relevant details. Jodie Foster is going to overthrow the database. I mean government. She's going to overthrow the government with a database. To do this, she employs the assistance of Jerk #1, CEO of the company that builds all of these lovely droids that are everywhere. Jerk #1 does something in a unix shell that, when uploaded to the central computer in Elysium, will reboot the system and make Jodie Foster president.

Let's pause, because while that's ridiculous at nearly every level, I'm going to let it slide. It's the kind of big idea that science fiction sometimes depends on, and since the movie is nothing more than a clumsy metaphor for disenfranchisement, we're going to let it go. After all, in my first book there was a church that was based on strange pieces of machinery that floated down a river, and they built a god by fitting the pieces together even though they had idea which parts went where. So metaphor is a thing I enjoy. The problem, though, is one of plotting. Jodie Foster explains her plan to Jerk #1 while they're on Elysium. He then goes back to earth (with nearly no security) writes the program to carry out this mischief, encrypts it with a 'fatal' algorithm (more on that later) and then travels back to Elysium. Except, of course, he doesn't make it back. He gets hijacked by our hero, who downloads the contents of Jerk #1's brain into his own brain, to steal bank accounts or passwords or something. And instead of bank accounts, he ends up with this program to overthrow Elysium. Then Jerk #1 dies.

Let's talk about that encryption program for just a second. How is it supposed to work? I'm not going to dwell on how encryption actually works, because that's irrelevant in this world, it's just shorthand for 'protected'. So if it's supposed to protect this data with a 'fatal' algorithm, how should that work, if you really want to protect that data? Shouldn't it kill anyone who tries to download it without permission? That's how it would work if it were my head being hijacked. But no, that's not how it works. It kills the person carrying the data, but only after it's been download. Why? Because otherwise the plot wouldn't work, that's why. So Matt Damon is able to download this protected data, and then other people are able to view it, and finally he's able to run the program on Elysium (more on that later) and then tragically die. Very tidy. Almost as if someone wrote it that way.

Anyway!

At the end of the movie, Matt Damon runs this program on Elysium, only instead of making Jodie Foster the president (she's dead, anyway) they make all the people of earth citizens of Elysium. So now the droids can't arrest them, the medbays will heal them, and they all get matching polo shirts with the swell Elysium logo.

Actually, I want a polo shirt with the Elysium logo. I think that would be cool.

So all that happens and Matt Damon dies and the day is saved. All the world's problems have now been solved by universal health care.

Except obviously they haven't. Things are the way they are on earth because of overpopulation, environmental disasters, poor resource management and a general societal collapse. There are no jobs! Resources are scarce! Are you going to solve those things with the fifty or so medbays you just shipped down to earth? No. No you are not. You are going to cause riots, all while disabling the primary security system you've put in place (the droids, who can apparently no longer arrest people because they're citizens of Elysium) oh and now all of those people are probably going to try to fly up to the space station and live there because why not? What's to stop them?

Here's the final kicker? Remember that first scene I was bitching about, where the shuttle crash lands and the people go running out and then get apprehended and deported? Each one of those people had been given a valid Elysium ID, burned into their skin. The medbays scanned them as valid citizens. Theoretically, since it's all one big database, the droids would have too. Oh, and the droids were able to arrest those citizens, because...?

So when they reboot the system on Elysium and make everyone a citizen, those droids are not able to arrest the new citizens even though they were able to earlier. And there's no system in place for reversion of citizenship, or amending the terms of citizenship, or any kind of backdoor anything to undo this act. Because...?

Look. I actually liked the movie, kind of. But it failed on so many levels, in so many little ways. It was lazy in its metaphor, inconsistent in its application of technology, poorly paced (I didn't even get into the movie's structure. Gods, the pacing!), and the characters frustrated me. But that ending! What. The. Hell.

Seriously.

by Tim Akers

guns and butter

OK, let's wade into this debate, and let's say pretty bluntly, anyone who agrees with "best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun" post-Newton argument doesn't have the right end of this argument.  Reasonable gun control is perfectly reasonable, and we should have a whole lot more of it.

And I'm not the crazy one for saying this.

And FYI, I grew up in a small town in rural New York State, first day of hunting season kids would take off from school, the highway would be full of people doing the hunting thing, full of police doing spot checks that cars didn't have more dead deer than the allocation.  Wasn't my scene, but I'm not without familiarity with a culture of sport hunting.

However:

The common sense way to keep bad things from happening, the way that we keep any other bad thing from happening that you can possibly think of, is to make it more difficult for that thing to happen.  You want less speeding, you add speed bumps or other traffic calming measures, you have and enforce a speed limit that's lower in front of a schoolyard, you don't say that the solution to speeding is to soup up cop cars.  In fact, police departments usually have regulations on when cops can engage in hot pursuit.  You want less bank robberies, you add dye packs and glass partitions and security cameras, the NYPD has even gotten on some banks that they think make their banks too easy to rob in the name of customer service.

And you want less dead hunters, you get real strict on the idea that people went out to the woods in hunting attire.  You want people to take only as many deer as they are supposed to, you spot check on the highway on the first day of hunting season.

Since common sense is on my side, I think the people who want to argue that gun violence is the one bad thing that can be reduced by having more guns with more people in more places have the onus of explaining why gun violence is the exception to the common sense idea that you make things more difficult if you want them to happen less.

One person I know tweeted after last summer's movie massacre that the solution was clearly to have more concealed carry holders in the theatre.  What about friendly fire? Which the best-trained best-equipped US military still has happen every now and again.

So if you're going to seriously argue that the solution is that we have more people with more guns in more places -- well, we won't give all of them military training, but what kind of licensing or training requirements are you going to require of these people so that we can at least go some distance toward having friendly fire incidents in movie theatres that won't be too much worse than what the best military in the world might have.

Because let's say you've got multiple people with guns in that movie theatre?  The other people are going to be stampeding for the exits, they're not going to be ducking for cover and acting like a trained soldier who's just come under ambush. A second person starts shooting, are they taking aim at shooter #1 or are they part of a plot with shooter #1?  There are a lot of quick decisions to be made that should be given at least the attention that I got in a driver's ed simulator in high school.  IPDE -- identify prepare decide execute -- trained enough I can still tell you about it long after I stopped driving a car regularly.

But of course, most people who want more people with more guns in more places want it 100% on the honor system that the people will take gun classes and be trained and keep their guns securely protected when they aren't being used.  I'm sure they'll all do that, just like we all have 16-character passwords for our websites that are different and include a symbol, a number, and an upper-case.

There's also the fact that a successful functioning state is one where the state has a monopoly on the use of force.  Failed states are ones where lots of people have guns and group into their own militias and can act independently of the state.  We worry about a country like Libya becoming a failed state if the state doesn't gain control of the militias.  We worry about states like Somalia that are essentially failed because everyone has guns but the state  Yet, in the US, where we have a right to bear arms based on this language "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" the current thought is that second amendment rights mean not only that we should have guns independent of any "well-regulated" or "militia" or "well-regulated militia."  We're told we have "second amendment remedies" to Obama or Obamacare? That doesn't sound like it goes along with "necessary to the security of a free state."

It's also suggested that the problem isn't our guns but our culture of violent movies and video games.  These violent games and movies are among our most successful exports to the rest of the world, yet the US has a uniquely high rate of gun violence.  There's a lot of searching to find excuses for our high rate of gun violence that don't come down to "we have more people with more guns in more places."

There are always counterfactuals.  The person who wasn't wearing a seat belt, so the person was thrown free of a crash and otherwise would have been killed.  But good public policy should be based on usual outcomes, on the better odds.

So why is limiting gun purchases to one a month crazy?  I think of growing up, I think of families having a gun -- a, as in one person -- and maybe passing one down like a family heirloom, not of having arsenals.  Cameras at gun stores don't strike me as more of an issue than cameras at the bank, both would film thousands of people doing things they are entitled to do and likely never capture a criminal but why is one worse than the other?  If we could spot check for killing too many deer, can't we stop thinking of silly reasons why fingerprinting guns or ammo or gunpowder is a miserable way to back-trace someone who actually does kill too many people?

Maybe I am crazy, I look at concentrations of policeman and say "what kind of dangerous thing is happening or about to happen here where I need all these policemen to protect me" and feel less safe in that kind of environment.

This post isn't full of links to this study or that study, this or that statistic.  I don't think I need them.  You want less of something to happen you make it more difficult for that thing to happen.  You want to say more guns are the solution, you need to tell me how you're going to train all those gun owners to make good decisions in the crunch.  I don't know if George Zimmerman was right or wrong under Florida law to take aim at Trayvon Martin, but don't you think it's strange to have the state of Florida giving him more or a right to shoot his gun than the police or a GI??

Three by Three

My big sit two weeks ago really can't compare to seeing Django Unchained, Les Miz and Zero Dark Thirty back-to-back-to-back.  The good news, I guess, is that I saw all three in different theatres so I got some fresh air in-between.

Django Unchained was kind of frustrating to me.  The writer/director Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, a student of cinema, a craftsman.  He does films that won't be confused with anyone else's.  This one is, as many of his often are, a bit wacko in the descriptions.  A German bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War south decides to buy a slave, teach him to assist in his job, the slave proves to be a natural with a gun, and then agrees to go to buy the slave's wife.  The slave is played by Jamie Foxx, the German by Christoph Waltz who was a deserving Oscar winner for Supporting Actor in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the plantation owner who has Foxx's wife by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Quite a cast.  Kerry Washington is the wife, and a house slave on the plantation is played by Samuel L. Jackson.  There are also a gazillion cameos from Jonah Hill, Don Johnson, Tarantino himself, and more.  It's not only a good cast, but it's well taken care of by the director.  Everyone is good or very good, except maybe Tarantino himself, but to me the stand-out is Samuel L.  Jackson.  There's no Samuel L. Jackson in him this time around, he's been doing films for ten or twenty years now by being Samuel L. Jackson, and here he's completely his character and not himself at all.

Technically, the film is brilliant, rich with allusion to cinematic history and yet entirely its own.  Music couldn't be used more perfectly, Django has his own theme song that hearkens back to classic Western cinema, the kind of theme song parodies by the F Troop song but here done most subtly.  There are spectacular individual shots, one of the family gathered under a large tree for a funeral leaps off the screen.  There is rich choreographed pageantry, especially as Waltz and Foxx enter on to a plantation, the parade of their horses or the looks of the slaves.  One moment you can be reminded of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the next of Kubrick, maybe some John Ford or some Scorcese mixed in.

If you're going to see the film, do yourself a favor and see it now in theatres, it's the kind of movie that deserves that.  And when you're at the theatre, if you have a choice of screens why not be sure to go to the auditorium with the biggest screen.  This is a movie that fills the screen, it wants to grow and expand to fill every square meter the way sea monkeys want to grow when you've poured hot water on them.  You could probably teach a film class using just this film and it's direct ancestors as the text.

But alas, all that is good about the film is ultimately being used toward one goal, which is to get us to another Quentin Tarantino gore-fest, it's like a tasting menu with lots of little violent morsels along the way as the odd-numbered courses and bits of cinematic brilliance for the even-numbered courses, and then the dessert is some massive thing, a molten chocolate cake that bleeds blood covered by blood-colored ice cream with bullet sprinkles and hot blood topping and pistol barrels taking the place of the bananas.  I haven't even seen every movie written or directed by Tarantino, and I've already seen this in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, here, Inglourious Basterds, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk till Dawn.

Other great directors like Kubrick and Scorcese have applied their skills to lots of different kinds of movies, some more successful than others, but they've gotten around.  I could forgive Tarantino his complete disinterest in moving beyond the bloodbath if he had some niche he was amazingly good at, kind of like the way a James Burrows or a Jay Sandrich could direct a sitcom like nobody's business, but Tarantino is every bit as inconsistent as Scorcese without any compensating ambition.

It's possible to interpret this as Tarantino using his violent ends as a way of sugaring thematic medicine. Django Unchained is a great romance, or it's the first film in decades to look at slavery from the black point of view.  Please.  In Django Unchained, there's this question DiCaprio asks of why slaves haven't killed their masters, it's a good question wondering about the motivations of the Samuel L. Jackson character to care more for the plantation master than the slave.  The film answers this question by having DiCaprio bring a skull out to the dinner table and launch into a discussion of phrenology that would fit right at home in DePalma's Untouchables.  But it doesn't give a serious answer to the question, it doesn't for a moment think seriously about that question or any other question related to slavery.

And it is indulgent.  Much as I admired the film, beats and scenes could often have been shortened, I didn't need to be sitting in a theatre for three hours (inclusive of coming attractions) for this movie.

Les Miz has gotten a lot of attention for stylistic reasons as well.  Most musicals pre-record the songs then have the cast lip sync to their recordings while doing their actual performances.  Here, director Tom Hooper (King's Speech, Oscar winner) uses small mikes to record performances actually being filmed, the mics then removed digitally in post-production.  He also films most of the numbers in tight close-up.  Charles Isherwood, a theatre critic for the NY Times, isn't kidding when he says he had the map of Eddie Redmayne's freckles memorized by the end of the move.  Also, he isn't kidding when he says he had to go to the movie twice because he dozed off the first time.  I'm just not that big into Les Miz, I saw the musical near the end of its can and can hardly remember a thing about it.  The movie, in turn, isn't bad, it's probably a very good adaptation of the musical, but it doesn't elevate it from what it is/was on the stage.  The drama's a bit of a mess, there are songs that are memorable for the duration of the show but that disappear very quickly once removed.  I didn't care as much for Anne Hathaway's performance as the rest of the world does, in fact it was toward the end of her Dreamed a Dream big solo number that I started my brief slumber during the film.  I was most taken in the case with Eddie Redmayne's performance, I was taken with him in Marilyn as well.  And Broadway veteran Aaron Tveit is very good as a fellow revolutionary with Redmayne, overall I felt that the cast of young schoolboy revolutionaries was the highlight of the film, but I'm biased.  Still and all, Russell Crowe can't sing that well, Hugh Jackman doesn't seem as engaging here as when hosting an award show or even in some of the X-Men movies.  The stylistic choices by Tom Hooper work sometimes and not in others.  Certainly better choices than the ones in Anna Karenina.  The close-ups aren't vertiginous, which some reviews have suggested, they are held for a long time and the film is so consistently in close-up that I never felt like I was zooming in and out, in and out.  In the last fifteen or twenty minutes the choice actually pays off quite nicely, and I ended the film much more effected by the closing moments than I would have expected.  The main problem I have is that even the best stylistic choice sometimes needs to be used selectively.  There are things that you can do on stage that you can't as easily do on film, as an example have multiple characters on stage singing a duet in tandem on different sets.  The close-ups work really well when they need to, but in a climactic section when you've got everyone singing right before the barricades are going up and the final battle close to hand you don't get a real sense of that at all.  There isn't a lot in the big production number category, which Les Miz should have more of.  At least as long movies go, this one needed to be, you can't really take a three hour Broadway musical and make a two hour movie out of it.

Finally, Zero Dark Thirty.  This is a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden, with threads that the film might date from early "enhanced interrogation" soon after 9/11 to the actual killing in 2011.  I'm not going to use this as an entry point into the torture debate.  I'll state quite flatly that I am opposed to torture, that we shouldn't have done it, and I would feel that way whether or not some piece of intel gained from a torture session was helpful to catching bin Laden.  Simply put, turn the tables, ask how we would feel if our soldiers were being tortured.  But my personal opinion about torture shouldn't cover the appropriateness of its inclusion in this film.  It happened.  It has to be part of this story, especially since we can't tease out whether or not we needed it to get bin Laden.  Even if every last videotape of every last interrogation sentence, enhanced or not, were in the public record, I doubt we'd have crystal clarity.  And aside from whether or not torture should be part of it, this just isn't a great film.  It's a decent one, but not close to great.  As virtues, you get a solid sense of some of the tradecraft, the bits and pieces of taking information and analyzing and inferring, the difficulty of finding bin Laden's courier.  The musical score by Alexandre Deplat is one of the years best. But the acting is haphazard.  The CIA execs don't have the personality that Bryan Cranston gives in his role in Argo, the only one who comes close is James Gandolfini and even he seems very constrained.  A very good actor like Kyle Chandler seems neutered here.  Jessica Chastaine as the CIA analyst whose eyes we look through for most of the movie is so single-handedly focused on this one thing that she's ultimately boring, she has that vacant-eyed look of the marine recruits getting haircuts in the early montage in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.  The only person with any personality that comes thru in the script or direction (by the Hurt Locker team of Mark Boals and Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker was a much better film than this) is the male CIA interrogator who reveals some sense of an internal life within a role that doesn't always allow it.

You don't want to have an Obama impersonator, but if someone wants to tell me that the film does play politics with torture by only choosing to show Obama in a clip decrying and ending the use of torture by the US, which the film strongly implies is a stupid decision, I can't argue.  Obama had a role here.  The role of invigorating the search for Al Qaeda activists to kill is handed off to some CIA guy who does a fly-by dress-down at the US embassy in Pakistan and Obama doesn't have a role there.  The implication of the movie is clearly that the only proper and right decision was to go in and get Osama the way we went in to get him, but that isn't a decision that everyone would have made, and so the film again subtly denies Obama any credit for something that happened on his watch.  So, OK, I'm avoiding the torture debate, but I'm arguing with the film's politics anyway.

Finally, this film is too long, and is too indulgent.  The movie skips a lot of interesting stuff about the search for bin Laden, it doesn't delve much at all into the planning for the mission to get him, the decisions on what kind of mission to wage, on the training for the mission, we don't even really know that there was a training mock-up.  Rather, it detours from its main mission to give us a Forrest Gump kind of history lesson.  We see the attacks on the London transit system and other major attacks subsequent to 9-11, though in a bit of historical bias we don't get anything on the Madrid rail bombings.  Our lead character is inserted into the bombing of the Pakistan Marriott, the bombing itself has a better argument to be referenced than some to the extent that some of the intelligence gathering might be HQed in the US embassy in Islamabad, but having our lead character in the hotel at the time is a dramatic invention since our lead is a composite, a Hollywood invention.  And we spend several long minutes getting to know another character in the embassy just to add emotional resonance to a reenactment of the suicide bombing that took out several CIA agents, including some experts, who were so excited to have a powerful defector that they dropped security procedures at the meeting.  This, again, has an argument for inclusion, it shows the foolhardiness of desperation.  But coming at the end of a long string of unnecessary diversions into the terrorist timeline, I didn't have any patience for it.

Just as an idle note, I saw Les Miz at the Ziegfeld almost 30 years to the date after going there for the first time, to see Gandhi.  A good crowd, half full or more, 30 years ago the place could routinely sell out for an epic movie, these days half full is impressive.

The After Sandy

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!

For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.

I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled.  Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles.  Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur.  Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is.  One of the world's richest cities should do better.  I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis.  Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be.  When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.

On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6.  Five wins in a week against top 20 players.  The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one.  Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention.  Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.

Comic books.  DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes.  The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good.  This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid.  Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant.  First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest.  I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.

And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.

I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.

Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.

The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events.  But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.

So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event.  Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain.  "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside.  All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security.  And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.

As to extreme climate events?

Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much.  Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done.  It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening.  We're not talking about that at all.  We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs.  It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.

What gives?

For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly.  It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt.  Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out.   Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs.  We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses.  And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago.  It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.

Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods.  An example:  you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit.  It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps).  Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money.  The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time.  If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline.  There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.

And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.

Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them.  There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly.  And since government is us, all joined together...

So what do we have?

The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding.  I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots.  And all that money might better have been spent on something else.

I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much.  The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past.  And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.

Pengdom House

I'm not a big fan of pontificating too much about things with too much uncertainty, and believe it or not there are a lot of uncertainties about Random House's acquisition of Penguin that make it a mistake for people to get too far ahead of themselves.

The first major uncertainty is government regulation.  In both the US and UK, the merger will give the combined company large market share in the publishing industry.  Will there be any divestitures required?  My guess is we're not looking at a lot, because 25% market share with four other decent-sized competitors is hardly a dominant market position.  But will the government look more closely at any particular categories?  As an example in sf/fantasy, the merged company would control Ace, Roc, Del Rey, and distribute DAW.  Which would be quite a dominant market share.  Our Bookscan account doesn't offer market share data, but it's out there, if anyone who reads this post has any light to shed on their position in certain genres it would be very interesting.

And the second uncertainty?  Well, quite frankly, not even the people at Random House know what they're doing with the new toy.  The people at the highest levels of Bertelsmann have crunched numbers and found a price that makes sense, but they haven't formed the committees that actually make everything come together.  Obviously the people at Random House like the Random House contract, but that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a committee to decide who actually has the better language on rights reversions, or termination in the event of non-delivery of a manuscript, or a gazillion other things.  There hasn't been a committee formed to see who has the better royalty statement format, and how you get the computers to talk to one another to eventually consolidate the systems.  I'm told on hearsay that Penguin has a 99-year lease that would go for at least another 80 years on its office space, and Random House has some kind of fancy condominium arrangement I think for its office space, and there hasn't been a committee formed to decide if they want to keep the offices separate or move people here or there or come to an arrangement with a new developer for 99 years of space in some new building.

We do know that Random House gives more editorial autonomy than in other large publishing companies, and I see no reason why they'd change that practice.  What this means is that they are happier to let the different editorial divisions compete for books than at other companies, so at least until we get to a situation where Ace and Del Rey both want the same book, or Viking and Crown want the same book, they'll let people go at it.  S&S is much pickier about needing to know if/who else in the conglomerate is also looking at something.

We do know that this won't be like when Penguin purchased Berkley 20 years ago, and then let the Berkley people come in and run things because they were very well managed.  I can't see Bertelsmann looking at Penguin and thinking "oh, let's buy them for their management expertise!"  Bertelsmann has been running book businesses for many many decades.

For JABberwocky, selfishly:

We like our Penguin contract more than our Random House contract, but I don't dislike our Random House contract, and I think over time as Peter Brett becomes a more prominent author for Random House and we're now selling Brandon Sanderson to Random/Delacorte with his Steelheart series, there's a likely move to be able to make our Random House contract better over time.    If you told me we had to move all of our Penguin authors to Macmillan boilerplate moving forward, I wouldn't be thrilled.  And as I mentioned above, who knows whose contract we'll actually get moving forward.

We do a lot of business with Penguin, too much in some ways, because I hate to have too many eggs in one basket.  Having Peter Brett become a breakout author for Random House and Brandon Sanderson the same with Tor has given me a lot more comfort than six or eight years ago, now we're going to have a very big Pengdom House basket and the Tor basket looking that much smaller.

When I started in the business, Penguin was this very strange conglomerate that did all sorts of things that the other big conglomerates were smart enough not to do, examples of this would be that Penguin would do big three-book deals, and dole out half the advance on signing, and all the rest on delivery of the manuscript.  Over time, bean-counters started to crack down on some of these things.  Penguin payout is more like other payouts.  The agita when I tried to suggest a client should get his Penguin delivery advance for a book he hadn't finished revisions on last year, oy!  Still, Penguin I would say is a somewhat less corporate place than Random House is.

I do most of my business at Penguin with their Berkley imprint, and Berkley has been an amazingly stable company.  I've been doing business with Ginjer Buchanan and Susan Allison for about as long as I've been in the business, and they've been working with the same people atop of them for as long as more.  I can tell you exactly when I read that Susan Allison would be taking over Ace, and that was in 1981 when I was still in high school and Jim Baen announced in the final issue of his Destinies "bookazine" that he was going off to get a Jim Baen Presents imprint at Tor and would be turning the reins over to Susan.  That's an amazing run.  They keep losing excellent junior people because the downside of good stable management is that you eventually run out of promotions and new titles to hand out to ambitious people.  I've also got to say, Susan's had a long run because she's razor sharp and deserves it.

Del Rey has been an amazingly unstable company, to be blunt.  When I started in the business, and when Random House was still an "independent' publishing company, if you can use that term for an arm of the Newhouse's Advance Communications conglomerate, it was still run by Judy and Lester del Rey.  Can we even keep track of how many people have been running Del Rey since it hasn't been the del Reys?  For many years, I had this impression that Del Rey was an imprint with a lot of senior people and not a lot of less senior people, "too many chiefs and not enough Indians."  I don't think that any more, Scott Shannon seems to have found the right people balance for the Del Rey and Spectra imprints.  But it's come with a huge human cost to people working at the companies.  The designated heir to the del Reys, Owen Locke, departed.   Editors like Jim Minz and Liz Scheier came in and out way too quickly, too quickly for their departures to be based on any profit & loss report card for things they'd purchased.  The consolidation of Del Rey and Bantam Spectra led to other departures.  This is hardly a full list of people to be in and out of Del Rey and Spectra, my apologies to all the many people I am not specifically naming (yes, Steve, that means you).  Elizabeth Moon has had five editors in ten years with Del Rey, it would have been much more difficult to "achieve" that "feat" at the Penguin sf imprints.

If I get a little queasy thinking on some of the less stable aspects of the Random House corporate structure weighing on Berkley, I think I'm excited at seeing Penguin benefit from some of the digitial stuff that Random House is up to.  Peter Brett and I had a marketing meeting on plans for The Daylight War in September, my general experience with publisher marketing plans is that they can spend a lot of time coming up with six pages that say "we will send out review copies and galleys" or, today, "review copies, galleys, and we'll do shit on Facebook."  The Del Rey plan here looked and felt different, leveraging different things like Suvudu that Random House has invested in over the years, with an awful lot of dedicated digital marketing people, with a lot of coordination and involvement with the editorial and other people at Del Rey.  I might be over-stating the import of this, because all the big publishers will do a lot of things for an author like Peter V. Brett that they see heading to bestseller lists that they don't do generally, but I'm not sure I am.  I felt like the plan was using more things that are actually embedded in what Random House is doing and has been doing, and that they went beyond what I see from other publishers for other of our bestselling authors.

I hope Random House will switch to Penguin's royalty reporting.  Random House has updated their royalty statements the way the TSA updates airport security, grafting layer after layer after layer on to what they were doing when I started in the business, it looks prettier in some ways but you have to keep flipping back and forth between pages to properly read, and they do not routinely provide across-the-board the information on copies shipped and returned the last six months, which is what you actually need, while providing a few lines of information on the total sales of the 1993 edition of your book that hasn't been in print or selling since 1996.   Penguin needs to do a little better job of purging sheets of paper on old inactive ISBNs from their reports, but otherwise they provide statements that are a model of clarity.   Information on copies shipped and returned is found easily, and there's summary information telling you that information in a big picture way before and during the current period and then in total following.

So this isn't the answer to all of your questions, not even the publisher knows the answer to all of its questions.

Just in a big picture way, what does this mean?  Well, I'm never fond of mergers that reduce competition for my authors, reduce the number of markets that I can sell authors to (especially because there are plenty of good books that don't find a market when they should, every time a new publisher starts up they are often buying books other people rejected and finding success with some of them), increase the clout of the people at the other end of the bargaining table.  However, the fact that I don't like it when these things happen doesn't keep them from happening, the question is how you deal with what actually comes out the other side, and right now we have no way of knowing anything about that in much detail.