So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Hey, it puts bread on the table, right?

 

[Hercule]

^^^^^
Hey, it puts bread on the table, right?

No, not at all. The only writing that garners a paycheck is in the popular and commercial sector. Academic articles are not paid and in the sciences one actually pays to publish. Can't speak to the returns on books but I'd bet it's precious little given the sweat and tears that go into them. I just published a book myself (self published outside of academe) and don't expect to make anything off of it. Publishing is quite a complicated and at times onerous venture. But it is nice to see your work in print.

As for the the Calvin's all too true assessment of academic writing, I would refer you to the book Intellectual Morons by Daniel Flynn.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I was under the apparently mistaken impression that you were employed in the field, and that having to bang out a certain amount of hifalutin gobbledegook just went with the territory.

 

[Hercule]

^^^^^
I was under the apparently mistaken impression that you were employed in the field, and that having to bang out a certain amount of hifalutin gobbledegook just went with the territory.

Naw, I'm employed as a librarian. No professional productivity required there - I'd gauge my eyes out with a spoon if there were. I aspired to and did teach for a while but a bad bunch of students came through one semester and I subsequently fell afoul of the department head who, unfortunately, was at the time also acting director (I became his project), so that was the end of that. (How silly of me to have expected students to learn what is being taught.) In hind sight it was probably the best thing to have happened to me given the contempt I've developed for the students. They don't want to learn anything, they already know it all, and how dare you challenge their pre-conceptions. College teaching is nothing but a minefield anymore. I've always had a penchant for research and writing so a consolation career as a librarian has worked out well. My first five years I popped out one or two peer reviewed articles a year. A couple of years back I switched over to cataloging so I'm now behind a closed door and don't have to deal with students, which surely facilitated publishing my first book.

 

[MisterCairo]

...how simultaneously gorgeous and loud blue jays are.

 

[tonyb]

We have a large resident population of Canada geese. (Why migrate when the buffet comes to you?) They are spectacular birds, but large ones, and they leave behind droppings to rival those of a medium-sized dog.

 

[MisterCairo]

Grubs.

 

[Ticklishchap]

On the ‘really ticks you off theme’: this might be less relevant to Americans as each state has its own ‘lockdown’ policy (although there are some Federal rules/guidelines I think?). However here in Britain we are having some of the Covid restrictions eased - despite a very potent Indian variant of Covid emerging here.

What gets me are all the references in the media to ‘hugging’, accompanied by icky and saccharine sweet photos of ecstatic ‘Brits’ embracing, hugging and kissing each other, or film footage of the same, accompanied by incoherent, fox-like shrieks. Vomit territory. I am known for my man-hugs but that is only with very close friends and I don’t talk about it all the time. It’s an intimate and private thing. What happened to English reserve and the stiff upper lip? They had their virtues.

Now I’ve got that off my chest I can start my day’s work!!!

 

[Edward]

We have both Aldi and Lidl in my neighborhood.

Both exist in the UK. We've greatly missed taking the bus up to Lidl during the lockdown. I live almost opposite a flagship Sainsburys store, and went there out of habit for years. When we discovered there was a Lidl a short bus ride away, we gave it a go, about six years ago. Cut our weekly groceries bill by 50%, way more than I'd ever expected.

I can only guess why I see much less of this these days. Is it that the retailers are quicker to retrieve the stolen carts? Or are car-less people finding other ways to get their groceries home?

Mostly the retention tech has gotten better... they not only require a coin (or token) deposit to operate now, but many of them have some sort of inhibitor thingy that if you try to take it over a curb at the end of their territory snaps over one wheel and renders it useless.

I think, that must have been anywhere in the 90s, when men and women stopped to wear classic undershirts?? I can't temember, seeing people with bare lower back on any weather in my childhood.
With the 2000s, the low-waist jeans and the whale tail suddenly appeared here in old Germany and after 2005, the people succeeded without thong, but still with bare back.

The classic vest, T or A shape... I wore them as a kid, then some time in the eighties my printed band t-shirts took over. Wore it that way for years. Closing in on 30, I decided I really needed to go back to a traditional undershirt as a Ramones logo showing through didn't really cut it any more... About the same time I moved away from a skater-wallet on a chain, as it happens.... Wore plain white undershirts which I replace every year or two when they wear out in the Winter for a few years, then when I discovered this place I also learned about the benefits of wearing them year-round. We're in a minority, we vest-wearers, in the US and in parts of Northern Europe. Many men I know who originate from southern Europe or are of South Asian descent still wear them, though, and appreciate their use in Summer. In my patch of East London there's a big South Asian diaspora, which is probably in part why they are easy to find here.

And I find equally silly the practice of buying super high-end blue jeans and never getting them dirty and rarely laundering them, as is the habit among a small subset of denim aficionados.

Funny how some things make their way up the chain of formality... Jeans have been very common in my generation; I wouldn't as a rule wear them to work (though it's increasingly common as both academia and even legal practice in London become more casualised in dresscodes), but it's fascinating when you see footage and photos of even as recent a time as the eighties, and all the men out on the town are wearing a suit, often a tie; people going clubbing on a Saturday night or even to the pub dressed as how they might to go to a wedding nowadays. What still boggles my mind is the concept of "dress jeans". I imagine, though, a few generations ago the notion of the bowler hat as something a City Gent would wear to the office was rather outre too...

I keep thinking there has to be a backlash in fashion, swinging back to something more 'formal' again, just for the sake of the change on which fashion relies. I'm intrigued that the siren suit, or even a civilianised version of the two-piece Battle Dress, has never quite passed into regular fashion. The combination of practicality and presentability... I've seriously considered having a couple of Siren suits run up in black drill cotton for air travel - comfort, no belt at airport security.... and on.

^^^^^
I don’t know the age at which blue jeans might be inappropriate.

If there’s anything that isn’t a political or class signifier in this culture it is blue jeans. Maybe in times past a person might have gotten “too old” for blue jeans, but that time is indeed in the past. Elderly politicians left, right, and center often see to it they are photographed in blue jeans.

At worst it’s just a nod toward democracy. And at best it actually is democratizing.

In theory.... though I can still remember how many kids at school actively dreaded the annual end of term 'non-uniform day' on the basis that their jeans were the "wrong" label or not that year's fancy cut....

@tonyb

I don't no really, but I got the feeling since a while, that this could be a big part of Turkey's crisis. Clothing "Made in Turkey" is rarely seen, today, so I think, some manufacturing must have migrated from Turkey to Bangladesh.

Turkey's still the manufacturing location of quite a lot of more affordable garments made from selvedge denim from what I see.

That's one of the problems with Starbucks--all of that espresso makes them want to talk about coffee instead of drink it. Lousy college students...

Nah, Starbucks only have one flaw: they overcharge for tea. Maybe they think I'm as daft as people who drink foul-tasting coffee....

No, not at all. The only writing that garners a paycheck is in the popular and commercial sector. Academic articles are not paid and in the sciences one actually pays to publish. Can't speak to the returns on books but I'd bet it's precious little given the sweat and tears that go into them. I just published a book myself (self published outside of academe) and don't expect to make anything off of it. Publishing is quite a complicated and at times onerous venture. But it is nice to see your work in print.

As for the the Calvin's all too true assessment of academic writing, I would refer you to the book Intellectual Morons by Daniel Flynn.

Indeed. We live in a world where academic publishing is under-funded. All the big publishing houses have academic divisions, but they run them on a shoe-string. For journals, they pay you nothing (and even try to shaft you out of your copyright in most cases) - and they get away with it because we're all under such pressure to keep churning it out. There's more being published than ever in my field, and yet for all the greater quantity there's no more than ever there was which is of quality. (What's worth reading is indeed an ever-shrinking proportion.) That you publish and where you publish is more important than what you publish. The Oxbridgeification of academic research.

I'm trying to convince the wife to write a moronic, mummy-porn fluff based on some second rate fan fiction. That seems to be about the only way to make the big money nowadays...

Naw, I'm employed as a librarian. No professional productivity required there - I'd gauge my eyes out with a spoon if there were. I aspired to and did teach for a while but a bad bunch of students came through one semester and I subsequently fell afoul of the department head who, unfortunately, was at the time also acting director (I became his project), so that was the end of that. (How silly of me to have expected students to learn what is being taught.) In hind sight it was probably the best thing to have happened to me given the contempt I've developed for the students. They don't want to learn anything, they already know it all, and how dare you challenge their pre-conceptions. College teaching is nothing but a minefield anymore. I've always had a penchant for research and writing so a consolation career as a librarian has worked out well. My first five years I popped out one or two peer reviewed articles a year. A couple of years back I switched over to cataloging so I'm now behind a closed door and don't have to deal with students, which surely facilitated publishing my first book.

Aye, now, caring about your teaching was your first mistake.... Teaching is valuable to Senior Management now purely for the profit it drives in. Teaching staff themselves are of no value - we are a mere cost. Yay capitalism!

On the ‘really ticks you off theme’: this might be less relevant to Americans as each state has its own ‘lockdown’ policy (although there are some Federal rules/guidelines I think?). However here in Britain we are having some of the Covid restrictions eased - despite a very potent Indian variant of Covid emerging here.

What gets me are all the references in the media to ‘hugging’, accompanied by icky and saccharine sweet photos of ecstatic Brits’ embracing, hugging and kissing each other, or film footage of the same, accompanied by incoherent, fox-like shrieks. Vomit territory. I am known for my man-hugs but that is only with very close friends and I don’t talk about it all the time. It’s an intimate and private thing. What happened to English reserve and the stiff upper lip? They had their virtues.

Now I’ve got that off my chest I can start my day’s work!!!

It's all so ridiculous, the media portraying it as if it's all "over". Now, folks will jet off on holiday , go to the pub, take risks..... and, just like last year, we'll all have to be locked down again in the Autumn.

 

[Harp]

Rombauer caught me off guard Saturday; though I did have him on my tickets to place and show,
and despite being rode by Flavien Pratt other horses on the track were better picks than a developing horse
long shot. It happens. And Rombauer's trainer was shocked he won. For that matter, Rombauer was probably
shocked by his electrifying performance. I had a profitable day playing the undercard but looking over my notes
later I ruefully regarded my earlier dismissal of the rookie longshot.

 

[tonyb]

...
Mostly the retention tech has gotten better... they not only require a coin (or token) deposit to operate now, but many of them have some sort of inhibitor thingy that if you try to take it over a curb at the end of their territory snaps over one wheel and renders it useless.

...

I’ve yet to see a deposit required for a shopping cart (luggage carts at airports require a deposit, only a portion of which is refunded when the cart is returned; down-and-outers have been known to gather up the “abandoned” carts so as to pocket the refund, not so unlike scavenging for soda pop bottles back when I was a youngster).

Those wheel-lock systems are here and there but certainly not everywhere. My wholly anecdotal observation is that there are fewer now than there were a decade or so ago.

 

[Hercule]

Indeed. We live in a world where academic publishing is under-funded. All the big publishing houses have academic divisions, but they run them on a shoe-string. For journals, they pay you nothing (and even try to shaft you out of your copyright in most cases) - and they get away with it because we're all under such pressure to keep churning it out. There's more being published than ever in my field, and yet for all the greater quantity there's no more than ever there was which is of quality. (What's worth reading is indeed an ever-shrinking proportion.) That you publish and where you publish is more important than what you publish. The Oxbridgeification of academic research.

I never seemed to have much trouble with getting articles published. I can only remember one or two rejections, and I withdrew one when an editor became overbearing and heavy handed. I guess my success was in knowing where to submit my papers and which journals were out of my league, or had an editorial process I didn't respect (which is why I never submitted a paper to the leading journal in my field). Repeat business was never a problem either.

I can't speak to academic book publishing, but publishing in general can be a tough nut to crack, especially with an established commercial house. None of them take submissions or proposals. You have to go through a literary agent first, and good luck with that. There are always vanity publishers (pay to publish) but that can be very expensive and there always seems to be issues with rights and royalties. The last decade or so has seen a tremendous rise in indie (independent) print on demand publishing platforms, which is essentially do it yourself publishing. Pretty much all of them distribute globally and via Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. They too have their issues with royalties and rights but they seem to be much more manageable. There can be a bit of a learning curve depending which platform you decide to go with but in all it's relatively easy to work through. Thanks to resources such as Fiverr you can VERY affordably farm out as much or as little of the process as you want - formatting, design, editing, graphics etc.- and YOU stay in control and determine everything (including how much profit you want to make) all the way through the process.

I'm trying to convince the wife to write a moronic, mummy-porn fluff based on some second rate fan fiction. That seems to be about the only way to make the big money nowadays...

Sounds captivating! There are a lot of indie publishers out there actually making money off of such things. I say go for it, it would be great fun.

Aye, now, caring about your teaching was your first mistake.... Teaching is valuable to Senior Management now purely for the profit it drives in. Teaching staff themselves are of no value - we are a mere cost. Yay capitalism!

Maybe so. As I see my mistake was in trying to make it easy and fair for them, which apparently wasn't enough. That one group of snowflake SJW students was simply brutal. Frankly the writing was on the wall the moment they complained and the dept. head/administrator gave THEM the benefit of the doubt, undermining any authority I had in the class. That was a bad semester all the way around. It saw a very senior faculty member accused of sexual harassment for the cute double entendres he taught with for 40 years (I even remember them as a student; sadly he was battling the rapid onset of Lou Gerig's disease at the time. He passed away before the end of the next semester.) and a student instigated firing of another senior faculty member. Oddly enough both the semester before and after that one were very successful for me with regard to the class grades and teaching reviews.

I'm not sure what the actual value of tenured faculty is. In some fields they bring in grant money, but in general they're paid a lot to do very little. I depends on the emphasis of the institution, whether teaching or research oriented. My institution is supposedly focused on teaching so the full time faculty doesn't do much beyond pontificating. (I suppose their primary calling is to serve on committees anyway) Anymore adjuncts are relied on to do the actual teaching. But that's just my admittedly jaundiced view.

Heavy sigh, mine is to do what is asked of me and the rest is my own.

 

[Trenchfriend]

@Edward
Do you got good old Crisp Bread/Knäckebrot in the UK?

Knäckebrot with nougatcream is so good! Or with decent Salami. Or a Rollmops, maybe! All without butter.

 

[tonyb]

I never seemed to have much trouble with getting articles published. I can only remember one or two rejections, and I withdrew one when an editor became overbearing and heavy handed. I guess my success was in knowing where to submit my papers and which journals were out of my league, or had an editorial process I didn't respect (which is why I never submitted a paper to the leading journal in my field). Repeat business was never a problem either.

I can't speak to academic book publishing, but publishing in general can be a tough nut to crack, especially with an established commercial house. None of them take submissions or proposals. You have to go through a literary agent first, and good luck with that. There are always vanity publishers (pay to publish) but that can be very expensive and there always seems to be issues with rights and royalties. The last decade or so has seen a tremendous rise in indie (independent) print on demand publishing platforms, which is essentially do it yourself publishing. Pretty much all of them distribute globally and via Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. They too have their issues with royalties and rights but they seem to be much more manageable. There can be a bit of a learning curve depending which platform you decide to go with but in all it's relatively easy to work through. Thanks to resources such as Fiverr you can VERY affordably farm out as much or as little of the process as you want - formatting, design, editing, graphics etc.- and YOU stay in control and determine everything (including how much profit you want to make) all the way through the process.




Sounds captivating! There are a lot of indie publishers out there actually making money off of such things. I say go for it, it would be great fun.



Maybe so. As I see my mistake was in trying to make it easy and fair for them, which apparently wasn't enough. That one group of snowflake SJW students was simply brutal. Frankly the writing was on the wall the moment they complained and the dept. head/administrator gave THEM the benefit of the doubt, undermining any authority I had in the class. That was a bad semester all the way around. It saw a very senior faculty member accused of sexual harassment for the cute double entendres he taught with for 40 years (I even remember them as a student; sadly he was battling the rapid onset of Lou Gerig's disease at the time. He passed away before the end of the next semester.) and a student instigated firing of another senior faculty member. Oddly enough both the semester before and after that one were very successful for me with regard to the class grades and teaching reviews.

I'm not sure what the actual value of tenured faculty is. In some fields they bring in grant money, but in general they're paid a lot to do very little. I depends on the emphasis of the institution, whether teaching or research oriented. My institution is supposedly focused on teaching so the full time faculty doesn't do much beyond pontificating. (I suppose their primary calling is to serve on committees anyway) Anymore adjuncts are relied on to do the actual teaching. But that's just my admittedly jaundiced view.

Heavy sigh, mine is to do what is asked of me and the rest is my own.

An old friend’s kid, who must be near 40 now, cranks out romance novels. She ain’t getting rich off it, but it is worth her while. Those who like to read that stuff like to read lots of it, apparently. The market for it is nearly as reliable as the market for porn.

 

[Hercule]

An old friend’s kid, who must be near 40 now, cranks out romance novels. She ain’t getting rich off it, but it is worth her while. Those who like to read that stuff like to read lots of it, apparently. The market for it is nearly as reliable as the market for porn.

The operative term there is "cranks out". I did a lot of research in the process of self publishing my own book and there's a lot of talk about building your brand and establishing a following, so trying to catch repeat customers is the only way to get any kind of real return on your efforts. There will ALWAYS be a market for the good ol' 'bodice-ripper" so there's a whole lot of potential in soft-core. My grandmother read them all the time, staying up all night reading them and sucking on hard candy. Kind of incongruous were you to know my grandmother. My mom would even embarrassingly admit to reading one every once in a while (she was more of a bio/history/non-fiction reader). Pure escape-ism it is. It just sucks you in.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've written a lot of junk for money over the years, stuff that I have no interest in at all beyond the paycheck. I toyed with the idea once of doing these kinds of books, but I just couldn't get the hang of the genre -- the stuff I did came across as too insincere to sell. I think that's the hardest part of that kind of writing -- even if you don't believe in any of it, you've still got to come across as if you do, because the readers don't want to feel you're making fun of them.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I know at least one well educated professional woman who has a steamy romance novel habit. It was from her that I learned that, apparently, one standard plot involves the heroine having to choose between two extremely eligible suitors. “How was it?” I once asked. “Oh, the author cheated: one of the guys died tragically before she made her choice.”

 

[Edward]

@Edward
Do you got good old Crisp Bread/Knäckebrot in the UK?

Knäckebrot with nougatcream is so good! Or with decent Salami. Or a Rollmops, maybe! All without butter.

I'm sure it's available, though in truth it's not something I've tried. Sounds interesting.

The market for it is nearly as reliable as the market for porn.

Probably moreso now. Incredible as it may have seemed fifteen years ago or thereabouts, the bottom has fallen out of the porn market, and increasingly few people can make a serious living out of it, largely down to the sheer proliferation of free-to-view tubes and "homemade" material. It's an industry in decline - which makes it all the harder to regulate (one of my areas of professional interest). AS in so many areas of the media, the pros are generally keen to understand and stay on the right side of the law: they're not sexual revolutionaries, after all, they're businessmen. Fringe 'self-expressionists', on the other hand...

 

[tonyb]

I've written a lot of junk for money over the years, stuff that I have no interest in at all beyond the paycheck. I toyed with the idea once of doing these kinds of books, but I just couldn't get the hang of the genre -- the stuff I did came across as too insincere to sell. I think that's the hardest part of that kind of writing -- even if you don't believe in any of it, you've still got to come across as if you do, because the readers don't want to feel you're making fun of them.

I used to pick up extra scratch writing summer festival guides and the like. I felt less a hooker for doing that than some of the stuff I was compelled to do at my “regular” job — writing fluff about some restaurant or school principal or massage therapist new to the coverage area. At least the festival guides made no pretense of being anything other than advertising.

So much of that stuff has moved online now. I figure it will all shake out eventually, and people worth paying will find people willing to pay. But I couldn’t really fault a print publisher for throwing in the towel.

 

[Edward]

So much of that stuff has moved online now. I figure it will all shake out eventually, and people worth paying will find people willing to pay. But I couldn’t really fault a print publisher for throwing in the towel.

The streaming video world has certainly shown that if you have the right content online, people will be prepared to pay for it. Newspaper website seem to be having more mixed results. If, on the other hand, as some in cyberworld have suggested, we could have more control over selling (or not) the personal information regularly harvested by advertisers now, we would all have plenty of extra bucks lying around to cover buying what was worth paying for. The internet has a long way to go in the normalisation of paying for content, though.