Had a nice night’s sleep, but didn’t get any extra… just about 7 hours. I don’t recall my dreams last night, but had a nice wake up Had a nice shower, and I’m ready for a new day.

ooooh… pretty, and nifty!

3-d flashmap of a lj person’s friends… mouse over, and you can see who they’re buddies with.

more coolio 3-d shockwave schtuff here.

Cluelessmailers.org has created The Spamdemic Map… documenting, as you might guess, the epidemic of spam. It shows who’s sending it and how. The point of the “cluelessmailers” name is that some of these companies clearly don’t even realize that they’re paying spammers and annoying potential customers.

I have to remember to call and confirm dinner plans with the mother and the brother. (Hmm… sounds like some kind of 70’s detective show… She’s a working single mom, trying to get by with a latchkey child…he’s a african-american disenfranchised street tough who’s got a heart of gold. together, they catch crooks and show that two different people can get along! Played by Susan Saint James, and JJ Walker.)

from provenance unknown –

“Remember when only celebrities and CEOs hired novelists to write their books?” the Washington Post asks. “Now the novelists are hiring novelists.”

Names like Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum are more like brands than names of a particular artist, the Post reports. Tom Clancy the person “oversees a vast farm of fiction writers who crank out stories that he imagines,” we learn.

I suppose the reason it works in some cases but not others is that some “artists” don’t mind putting their own name on other people’s work. I can’t wait until some contemporary artist tries this with a painting or sculpture done by a student… it would make a great joke, I think. (One (totally unsophisticated and doubtless unoriginal) pet theory of mine is that the essence of contemporary art is that it’s all a joke.)

And just imagine the brouhaha this must be raising in literary criticism circles.

Ah well… as long as the books are good, I’m happy. I don’t care so much about the author’s name as much as I care about the quality of product. Heck, I know that a gang of people wrote stories for the Shadow, and Doc Savage, way back when…with a single pen name. Now, if the quality varies to a great degree, then I’ll raise my fist to the air, and curse the publishing gods. Maybe. Probably, I’ll just find a better set of writers and stories somewhere else.

I’m going to leave Newtcam on all day today… to spy on the boy while at work