The Voters Have Spoken

The Backspace contest winners are posted!

It's been interesting watching this contest mutate; first, it was popular vote only, then it was half popular vote + half a panel of pro judges; the announcement date shifted from the 17th to the 20th; and now there are two partial winners as well as the initially-promised three. It would also be interesting to see the math behind the scenes, as the final results don't have much correlation to the popular votes.

As for my own results... oh, well. It was good for exposure, anyway. Congratulations to the winners; I hope they have a blast at the conference!

Free the Books!

We stopped for a bite last night at the local branch of Claddagh Irish Pubs, which I suspect is about as Irish as green beer, but we like the food and for once they weren't having live music. This is one of those places that has shelves all around the eating areas, and the shelves are filled with a mishmash of decorative objects, including a lot of old books. Being, well, us, the housemate & I both started browsing.

They had an omnibus of the first two Quintain books! And an atlas-history of the Second Great War published in 1942!

You're darned right we asked if they'd sell them. Imagine our disappointment to be told that they used to, but then Corporate came around once and there were almost no books on display, so they forbid the practice. Those books have to stay there doing nothing but being Things To Dust, unread, even though there are people who want to read them.

That's right; Claddagh Corporate thinks it's more important for them to have arbitrary 3-dimensional book-binding wallpaper than that these (obviously desirable to somebody, since they got cleaned out) books be read.

A midnight raid to liberate All The Books is probably impractical, though don't think I didn't consider it. A tart letter to Claddagh Corporate is doubtless more sensible, though I don't imagine there's much chance of getting through to the sort of people who think that books should be dead decorations at the cost of the stories within them being unable to interact with anyone -- even with the additional carrot of pointing out that they could charge $1 a book, replace them at $0.50 from any overstuffed used bookstore, and donate the remaining $0.50 per to charity for a corporate PR win.

Taking along a couple of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (an abomination upon the face of literature anyway) and surreptitiously swapping them for the desirable books the next time we go there is an approach that keeps sitting in the back of my brain saying, "You could, y'know." Claddagh Corporate would still have just as much occupied shelf space, and since one book's the same as any other to people who don't realize there's something between the covers, there'd be no harm to them, a benefit to me, and a great wrong righted....