Earworm attack

Normally, I loathe Todd Rundgren. I've never understood what the big deal was about him, kinda like I've never quite understood what the big deal was about Genesis. But I've had "I don't wanna work, I just want to bang on the drum all day!" as a murderous earworm all morning.

In which our hero attempts to make Jay break out in hives.

Jay Lake (jaylake), has gone in six years from having no fingerprint on the publishing world to having six novels and 200 short stories out there in one form or another. His is a shining example that someday I might emulate. He recently praised Justine Larbalestier's method for writing a novel with a single quibble. He says, "Her spreadsheet thing would make me insane."

Well, I went one better. Since I use emacs and a very customized para-outline-mode anyway, there's metadata at the top of all of my "in progress" stories, and I figured, hey, all that metadata adds up, so why not use it usefully? Monday night I wrote my little Ruby script to extract the metadata from the headers, chapter order from the filenames, and filesize from the file system, and viola: my computer generates my spreadsheet for me. Screw word counts, this is where the real progress indicators lie: ( Spreadsheet! )

Playboy: curves on top, lines below

I haven't looked at Playboy in years. My porn-consuming habits have more or less died down in recent years, maybe just because real life is so much more compelling. I still read FleshBot once in a while, and this week decided to click through the Babelogs collection of the week. I wasn't impressed for the most part: it's "previews" and "teasers," and most of the women there are more artifice than attractant.

Playboy seems to be a big player in this space: they still have the best photographers, the best studios, a huge warchest and a solid reputation, even if Hef himself has confessed that he's too old for sex and would rather "just play dominoes with [his] girls."

Every single woman I looked at from the Playboy sets had no butt. They all had pretty faces and enormous busts, not all of which were convincingly natural, but from the rear they may as well have been boys, and not very attractive boys. Maybe it's just that I am not Hef and have a more appreciative eyes for a well-shaped woman's ass than I do for ample bosoms (not to mention my preference for brunettes over blondes, and an appreciation for girls with glasses), but I found the look disappointing. Is this just Playboy's thing? To Hef's spec of "Shirley Temple's eyes, Jayne Mansfield's bust" should we add "Mark Spitz's airbrushed rear end?"

It must be a Playboy thing. My comment about the eyeglasses thing was a bit of a snark: only three times in history has a woman who wears corrective lenses appeared on the centerfold, and in each of the three cases she was inundated with fan mail from optometrists offering free contact lenses.