View 654 December 20 - 26, 2010 (original) (raw)

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Sunday, December 26, 2010

I'll be doing TWIT in about an hour.

(Turns out I had the day wrong: i will be doing TWIT NEXT Sunday, not today. I knew that, but somehow -- oh, to heck with it. Anyway not today. Next week.)

I'm still catching up from the holidays, but I'm not so far behind as I was. I should be in good shape by the end of next week. There's a lot of mail built up here, and I'll see how much I can get done, and the Chaos Manor Reviews mailbag is due; with luck I'll get it done tonight for posting tomorrow evening.

Jennifer has solved the problem of the OUTIES purchase page http://www.newbrooklandpress.com/purchase looking odd on Firefox on Windows. It has to do with the Firefox AdBloc setting being set by default to reject the Amazon Ap the bring in the page and the link. Amazon needs to work with that, but since communication with editorial people at Amazon is very difficult, that may take a while. She fixed the site by not using the Amazon apps, but rather getting the cover pictures and doing the links directly. Doesn't take all that long. The growing pains of the new revolution in publishing are being surmounted.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a new piece on authorial self publishing, featuring interviews with Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson. http://www.latimes.com/business/
la-fi-gatekeepers-20101226,0,7119214.story

The thrust of the article has to do with publishers as gatekeepers. We've said most of that here, but there are some items of interest.

For those who don't know, OUTIES is a novel set in the Mote in God's Eye universe by my daughter, Dr. Jennifer Pournelle. It's being published electronically, starting with Amazon and Nook and will eventually be in every format she can manage. She's also making arrangements to do it in print on demand for those who want a paper copy. It will eventually be in the Google book sales, but they have had it a week and nothing so far; holidays, perhaps. Amazon had the book up in a day once submitted. I don't know about iStore formats, of which there are many. I do read Kindle format books on my various Macs including iPhone.

I've been very interested in seeing just how this experiment in publication goes. One thing we have learned is that keeping formats simple is important. Maps are easier to insert than getting tables that look right. Clearly you can get tables -- I have A Farewell to Alms, one of the more important books of 2010 http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-
Economic-History-ebook/dp/B001EQ4OLA/jerrypournellcha on Kindle and there are a lot of charts and tables, all of which look right -- but it takes some fuss to do that. The only tables I generally have are casts of characters.

More another time.

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Tax Deductible Donations

Patrons of the Arts Carry a Heavy Burden...

Reflect on this during your next trip to the opera:

http://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/68164552.html?page=all

Merry Christmas!

Gordon Sollars

I have been pointing out for years that one purpose of non-profits and various NGO's is to pay very high salaries to their executives. Most people don't notice this, but a very great many non-profit executives make far more than anyone including the owners of the average small business for profit can dream of making. Even so, I confess being shocked -- I mean really shocked, not shocked, shocked -- to find

MY WIFE and I have season tickets for events at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. At intermissions, we sometimes watch absently as three or four men in gray suits emerge from the wings to move a piano into place or bring out extra music stands and chairs.

What they do is essential but unremarkable. Turns out that it is remarkably well-paid, however. Would you believe 422,599ayear?Plus422,599 a year? Plus 422,599ayear?Plus107,445 in benefits and deferred compensation?

That is what a fellow named Dennis O'Connell makes at Carnegie Hall. He is the props manager, the highest-paid stagehand.

Four other guys, two of them carpenters, two electricians, are paid somewhat lesser amounts, ranging down to 327,257,plus327,257, plus 327,257,plus76,459 in benefits and deferred compensation, for the junior member of the team, John Goodson, an electrician

I don't think the musicians make anything like that, and I doubt that many of the singers do either. It is of course the Iron Law in action yet once again.

My wife was part of the Opera League founders of the Los Angeles Opera. We have watched the LA staff grow and grow over the years, to the point there there is a bewildering variety of executives listed in the program. One of the LA Lakers executives sits next to us, and we were comparing notes: there are far more managers in the LA Opera than with the Lakers. We don't mean stage techs, costumers, voice coaches, and other production workers: this is just in the central office. Obviously some of them are involved in selling season tickets and raising money, but one does wonder if that many are needed.

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I got mail from Ellenberger which caused me to go back and look at the lengthy aggregate of material on The Velikovsky Affair that I collected here some years ago. If you have any interest in just what the Velikovsky mess was all about, you can find it here.

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