(no subject)

James Patterson placed a full page ad in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Book Review demanding the government save publishing. When Salon asked him what he thought the government should do, he said, "I haven’t thought about it but I’m sure there are things that can be done."

I think that's fairly representative of what's wrong with publishing, don't you?

(no subject)

The chief editor of the OED is retiring. Time interviewed him. This is my favorite exchange:

When you did the revision, what letter did you start with?

We didn’t start at A because nobody in their right minds starts at A. You should steer clear of vowels until you know what you’re doing—a’s and o’s are interchangeable in some contexts. It causes all sorts of problems. You’re much better off starting with a consonant.

Oh, well, obviously.

What strikes me about this is, he's been at the OED since 1976. They've been working on the fourth edition since the 1990s, and he says it will be another ten to fifteen years until it's ready. That seems such an old idea of life's work--that it truly is an entire lifetime's work, many lifetimes' work, in fact--to create such a dictionary. Now, where most jobs only last a few years, and even if you're a company man, there's always a new project, to spend decades on one thing? That's something.

It reminds me of the seventeenth century astronomers who discovered taht the moon's orbit oscillates every seventeen years. Because you have to observe it every night for thirty-four years at least to see the pattern.