no one has commented on my cute capybara icon :(

[bunrab]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I am still packing stuff. Books, yarn, books, yarn. Got some kitchen stuff packed, and a couple boxes of knick-knacks as well. Let me see, 74 cardboard boxes, 9 plastic storage tubs, 4 bookcases, and a couple of particle-board storage shelf thingies in the storage unit so far. Why is it that I *still* can't see the surface of the coffee table, the hall table, the kitchen island, or this desk?

More clippings that I'm trying to clear up, such as the various science-related web sites from Science journal:

Science, 9 January 2004
http://www.sarsreference.com More than you wanted to know about SARS
Ecology education ideas for high school and college teachers: http://www.ecoed.net
http://www.theacsi.org American Customer Satisfaction Index, includes ratings of web sites

Science, 30 July 2004
Multicultural math http://www.ethnomath.org
http://www.genome.gov/LegislativeDatabase federal and state laws about DNA patenting
Map of natural disasters http://www.hazardmaps.gov

Hmmm, a Science News article about the genome project, specifically about the hedgehog tenrec: is it, or isn't it, related to the hedgehog?

from ??? a magazine page that doesn't include the magazine's name, issue date, or even page numbers:
Find out about how to calculate your personal impact on climate change and about sustaining urban forests at http://www.americanforests.org
keep up with the Mars rovers at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
http://www.unc.edu/depts/nccsi National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research
NOAA has a web cam at the north pole: http://www.arctic.noaa.gove/gallery_np.html

There, that gets a few more loose pages off the desk...

Comments

[momily.livejournal.com]

I'm still thinking about your entry regarding books/plots/characters/dialogue. I found myself agreeing with everything you said, and I remember a class I took in college in which we were to keep a critical journal of every short story we read. I relentlessly bitched about the fake-o conversations that people had in the stories, and the poor ability of men to write from a female point of view.

I would have bitched about women trying to write from a man's point of view, but I didn't have enough information to be factual.

Anyway, thanks for all the URLs, it's fun to go see them! Happy packing!

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Women writing about the man's point of view often get it wrong as well. Women usually include way more detail than a man would actually notice. For example, an almost infallible way to tell whether the writer of some mass-market book is a woman or a man, such as in series murder mysteries that are obviously under pen names: if the author mentions the eye color of the characters, it's a female. Straight men rarely notice, and don't give a damn about, eye color; it would never occur to a guy that eye color would be a detail anybody would care about at all, let alone want to read about. So if the female protagonist notices the male protagonist's steely blue eyes, the author is almost ceertainly female; if the female protagonist notices muscles but not eyes, the author is probably male. Doesn't matter what the pen name is; the eye color test is a far more reliable guide to the author's gender than the name on the cover is.

[stylizedboredom.livejournal.com]

Does mentioning eye color really have anything to do with point of view? So if a woman writes from a man's point of view and mentions the character's eye color, the attempt was completely unsuccessful? Maybe I'm confused: Are you talking about narrative voice or Weltanschauung?

But at any rate, I don't remember ever reading a story where eye color was involved. Then again, I don't read mass market mysteries/romance/etc books.