That tells you something about the insanity that has gripped the American media. Imagine if the leader of a Canadian political party decided, in the middle of an election campaign, to ignore Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson and Kevin Newman, and only do an appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

—John Doyle, Globe and Mail

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

Writing credits (WGA)

Hans Bauer	 	(1997 screenplay) and
Jim Cash	 	(1997 screenplay) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(1997 screenplay)

Hans Bauer	 	(story) and
Jim Cash	 	(story) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(story)

John Claflin	 	(screenplay) &
Daniel Zelman	 	(screenplay) and
Michael Miner	 	(screenplay) &
Edward Neumeier	 	(screenplay) (as Ed Neumeier)

The vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. ... If the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?

... Economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.

On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues.

— David Adams, Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

...

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

—Geoffrey K. Pullum

It was really tough to make the Japanese public perceive me as a serious actor or director. As an actor, one of the first films I worked on was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima, back in the early '80s. When it was released in Japan, I sneaked into the theater to see how the audience would react. I thought the film was great and my acting was not bad at all. I anticipated that the audience would be impressed by my performance, which was completely different from my comedy persona on TV shows. However, at the moment I appeared on the screen, every single person in the theater burst out laughing. I was devastated and humiliated by the experience, because the character I played in the film was not the kind of person to be laughed at. I swore then and there that I would stick to the serious and dark characters in any films or TV dramas thereafter, and I did. And it took years of playing dark characters, serial killers, and cult gurus for Beat Takeshi to be perceived as a serious actor.

The Secret House, David Bodanis.
A tour through the happens of your house at a mostly microscopic level, from dust to the air pockets in the fat of potato chips to vaporized toilet water particles. In one place where I happened to know a bit of the science it rang wrong, so I'm not 100% confident of the author's breezy summaries of the science and facts involved. Although it is very very engaging and informative, I am reluctant to recommend it to the disquieting effect it's had on me. Two things in particular have dominated too much of my thinking since picking up the book: the bacteria all around us, and the scams of the food manufacturers. While neither was exactly news to me, the depth and vividness of Bodanis' depiction has me shying away from dread moisture and loathing every bite of processed food. The revelation that lower-quality and spoiling ingredients are reserved for chocolate-flavored foods because chocolate hides rancid flavors better was especially disturbing.

Monster, John Gregory Dunne.
This has been sitting on my book to buy list for a long time, and it did not disappoint at all. A great page-turner describing multi-year experience of writing a Hollywood movie.

Nine Layers of Sky, Liz Williams
An engaging alternate universes story, featuring Russian folklore and central Asian settings, but limited by a weak ending and less satisfying overall than expected.

The trouble is getting back from vacating. In Copenhagen, with few friends, a haze of smoke in even the few good restaurants, an approaching summer that went into retreat in early June, the loudspeakered party room under my apartment, and a harbor view from my corner desk in the office, I didn't have a huge problem doing work. Back in LA, with my reassembled bicycle (about 0.5% of it didn't make it through shipping), good cheap food, old friends, abundant retail opportunities, and my grandmother's garage to help clean, it's been a bit harder to get into the groove. But groove I shall, because I am a seasoned professional. Also I've booked all my tickets to go back to Copenhagen in September to keep the ball rolling with the remaining projects that I'm doing with Collaboraid.

Meanwhile ... meanwhile I think it will be many months before Southern California doesn't feel like vacation, even when I'm working.

On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
“[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.”

On the VCR, 1983

"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

On the public domain, 1995

"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"

— Jack Valenti

Remember when you were in high school, and you really wanted to go to the prom with a gorgeous girl, but you couldn't ask her because she was really popular and already had served two terms as president of the United States, so you wound up asking John Kerry? That's the situation the Democrats are in now. — Dave Barry