Complaints All Around

...about Internet radio royalty rates. Yeah, I know you know that, but thought this David Ho article snapshotted things well. [Via Law.com] Kevin Marks suggests a solution.
--Later: So does Doc.

Change Of Venue, Two Degrees North

Had a great L.A. day yesterday, hanging out here, here and here with old friends from college (gals' day!!!). The latter spot, Beverly Hot Springs, has a deceptive name. People always assume it's some chi-chi Beverly Hills spot where lab-coated raptor-ladies whisk you through delicately scented, deadly soothing surroundings, but they're way off base. This place is near downtown, off Western (on Beverly drive, hence the name), in the Korea Town district. It's a legitimate Korean bath house with hot and cold mineral pools fed by a natural spring, steam, sauna - a primal fount of moisture and heat. It's a fantastic enough experience just to go there for the pools. The hot-cold switch my drug of choice, agony at first, then pure bliss as the body lets go of the difference and you yearn to sit for hours with a stone dragon dripping water between your eyebrows, so chilly you're stunned it takes liquid form. But they also offer "treatments," which must be the English translation of "back alley mugging" in Korean. I desperately need to learn "GENTLY!" in the mother tongue of the round, laughing-eyed, bikini-clad, able-to-take-down-oxen-with-three-well-placed-blows denizens of the back room before our next trip (though I doubt it will help). Stavros??

After the pummelling, back to one of the gal-pals' houses in The Valley. There, someone is always the celebrity up the street, and in this urban-forested but nondescript neighborhood it's Kim Basinger. Twighlight swimming with the three, four and six year olds my buddies have been busy turning into little people, followed by a movie so good if you haven't seen it run out and get it NOW: O Brother, Where Art Thou? How did I miss this the first time around? My goal is to watch it enough times to commit the dialogue to memory. (Earlier in the week, at my husband's urging I also watched Imagine: John Lennon. Powerful stuff.)

Finally, a trend spotted: These Italian charm bracelets are on wrists all over Southern California - is this a regional, national or international phenomenon? In any event, it's the gift of the moment. Customize one for your honey and score big points. Nor is this purely the realm of the soccer mom - geekdom is not utterly neglected (see here; I've also seen emoticons and 1's and 0's would work well too ;->).

Large Summer Reading

Jeneane: "[H]is feet were very, very small."

John Irving (A Widow For One Year): "[S]he kept asking Ted, 'Timmy's not gone too--is he? Can you see if he's gone?' But Ted was a coward when it came to answering that question, which he left unanswered--and would leave unanswered. He asked one of the rescue workers to cover Timmy's leg with a tarpaulin, so Marion would not see it."

John Irving (A Prayer For Owen Meany): "[H]e was the smallest person I ever knew..."

On The Radio, On Linking

Listen to Cory Doctorow and NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio's Future Tense, over here.

Geoffrey Nunberg: On Calling A Blog A Blog, And Roiling Prose

Geoffrey Nunberg writes:

I did a piece on blogs a couple of months ago. After it ran I got an email from someone who objected to my use of the word, particularly when it's used to describe the records that people post on the web of their daily thoughts and doings. I should have called them "e-journals," she said. I could see her point, but blog is a syllable whose time has come. Who can resist that paleolithic pizazz? It's the tone you hear in a lot of programmer jargon, in words like kluge, munge, and scrog. That's how insiders demystify the technology. It sets them apart from the digital parvenus who lade their speech with technical-sounding language. When we use blog, it's as if to say we're all geeks now.

He goes on to consider the shortfalls of prefixes like "e-" and "cyber-", and concludes,

[A] lot of the things that have emerged online are genuinely novel, but then why strain to find their offline counterparts? That's the beauty of "blog." You could call these things virtual journals, e-clipping services, or cyber-Christmas-letters. But why can't they just be unique in all their bloggy essence?

In another recent piece, Nunberg nails one reason I find blogs more compelling than journalism these days - they speak a more direct dialect:

You don't hear roil a lot in everyday conversation. It isn't really a word of American English at all -- it belongs to the patois of that exotic alter-America that we read about in the newspapers, a world populated by strongmen, fugitive financiers, and troubled teens, where ire is always being fueled until violence flares, spawning hatred and stirring fears until hopes are dashed.

Both are excellent essays, go give them a read. I guess I enjoy Nunberg's take on these things so much because he's a linguist, and a good deal of linging goes on around here. [Via Fresh Air - oops, must get that form filled out] (Regarding American English, I'm sure the rest of the English speaking world eschews this sort of transgression. If not, ire is fueled and fears are stirred.)