A Writer's Life

The Age of Instant Video Is Here

I don't usually rave about products on this blog, but I can't contain my enthusiasm for this nifty new gadget that we bought our daughter for her birthday. It's the Pure Digital Point-and-Shoot Video Camcorder. It's the size of an iPod and every bit as simple and ingenious. You just point and shoot. It's that easy. There's nothing to learn. (It's also cheap...$125 at your local Target store or on Amazon). There's a record button, a play button, and a delete button.  And a little rocker button that doubles as a zoom and volume control. You can watch videos instantly on the tiny color screen. The Point-and-Shoot runs on two AA batteries, holds 30 minutes of video, and plugs into your computer with it's built-in USB cable (and, if you like, automatically loads easy-to-use video playback, management, and emailing software on your hard-drive). Within seconds, and I mean seconds, you can email your videos all over the planet.  It's amazing. One minute after she unwrapped the present, my daughter became the next Sofia Coppola, directing epics all over the house.  I don't understand why this wonderful product hasn't become the Next Big Thing...or am I so out-of-touch that it already has and I missed it?

Think Geek

A reader sent me a link to a great site called Think Geek, which is filled with all kinds of useful and ridiculous gadgets, from a CD/DVD shredder to a Zippo Lighter Spy Camera. Other goodies include USB Lava Lamps, a Swiss Army Knife with a USB flash drive, a USB Microscope, and a wristwatch with a built-in universal remote. Truly a site for the Maxwell Smart in all of us.

Big Mouth Billy Bass

Ever wonder how that "Big Mouth Billy Bass: The Singing Fish" works? Now the mystery is solved. Here's an interesting fact. It's also how David Hasselhoff works.

Book Vending Machines

The French have developed a new twist on bookselling:  Book Vending Machines.  They are installed in busy metro stations and on some street corners.

"We have customers who know exactly what they want and come at all hours to get it," said Xavier Chambon, president of Maxi-Livres, a low-cost publisher and book store chain that debuted the vending machines in June. "It's as if our stores were open 24 hours a day."

Stocked with 25 of Maxi-Livres best-selling titles, the machines cover the gamut of literary genres and tastes. Classics like "The Odyssey" by Homer and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" share the limited shelf space with such practical must-haves as "100 Delicious Couscous" and "Verb Conjugations."

"Our biggest vending machine sellers are 'The Wok Cookbook' and a French-English dictionary," said Chambon, who added that poet Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" — "The Flowers of Evil" — also is "very popular."

Regardless of whether they fall into the category of high culture or low, all books cost a modest $2.45.

(Thanks to Bill Rabkin for the tip)

Scientific Breakthroughs Nobody Can Live Without

Now you can take what's on your home TV anywhere you go and not get bitten by a single mosquito while you do it.

"Slingbox, which costs about $250, is from Sling Media Inc. of San Mateo, Calif. Using a box connected to your home TV setup, it sends the signal out onto the Internet, allowing you to watch a video stream of your home channels from any Windows computer with broadband access and the Sling software installed...In addition to the signal, Slingbox sends along the TiVo controls I have at home. "

"This summer, I tried something new: killer threads — clothing that supposedly zaps bugs before they can zap you. It's called Buzz Off Insect Repellent Apparel. You wear it instead of insecticide, although it may be more accurate to say you become a walking tower of insecticide.

A Must-Have for the True Geek

The Salt Lake Tribune reports (via TVSquad) that Sona Mobile will manufacture a cell phone that's a replica of the original Star Trek communicator. What's next...Maxwell Smart's shoe?

Outsourcing Signings

Author Margaret Atwood has stirred up quite a controversy by creating a "remote booksigning device" that would allow her to "attend" booksignings without actually being there.  She wrote about her invention, and the controversy, in today's Los Angeles Times.

In an effort to simplify the most grueling part of the book-publication process — the dreaded Author Tour — I dreamed up the concept of a remote book-signing device. (I've spent far too many evenings crawling around on hotel room floors, eating Pringles because I was too exhausted to call room service, so I needed this!) The author would be able to relax at his or her home base and could see and speak with a book buyer in a bookstore thousands of miles away. That much can happen already.

But in addition, the author would be able to actually sign — in real time, and with real ink — the book buyer's book (or the singer's album, or the actor's photograph). You would no longer have to be in the bookstore to write "Happy Birthday, Aunt Sylvia." You would simply write on a little pad (somewhat like the one the UPS messenger brings to your door) and on the other end, your message and signature would be duplicated in the book.

Think of the plane trips avoided, the beer nuts left uneaten in the hotel mini-bar, and — from the publisher's point of view — the money saved! For it costs a lot to whiz a bunch of disoriented and grumpy authors around the world.

That's exactly what she's doing...thinking of the author or,more accurately, herself. What she's proposing is the customer support approach towards her readers.  What's wrong with an automated menu and no live operator? What's wrong if that live operator is someone you can barely understand in Singapore or India? It's still customer service, right? RIGHT?

She's forgetting the personal touch, the human interaction. The respect. It's not just the signature that's important to most readers, it's the chance to meet someone who has had a dramatic and often emotional impact on their lives and imaginations. It's a way to meet someone who has inspired and entertained you. It's also a way for authors to see the face of the people they are writing for, the people who have supported them in their art. It's a way to say "Thank you," for both author and reader.  It's not just a signature. And looking into a computer screen and shaking hands with a robot arm isn't quite the same thing. What's astonishing is that she doesn't get that... or maybe she does.

The only difference between the author-at-a-distance and the author-in-the-flesh would be that no author's DNA would get onto the book, and no readers' germs would get onto the author.

I think this is where she betrays her real attitudes towards signings and her readers.  But there's something else I find personally offensive about her booksigning-at-a-distance machine: it's her broad, caricatured characterization of authors as cranky assholes who think it's a burden to meet readers.

This may come as shock to Margaret Atwood and everyone else on the planet Vulcan, but lots of authors enjoy meeting their readers, enjoy the personal contact, and derive enormous pleasure from being able to sign their books in person.

She may have unintentionally succeeded in her goal of avoiding book tours. Given her attitude towards signing and readers, who would ever want this woman to sign their books again? Who would ever want her in their store? Not me.

Bigger. Stronger. Less Titanium

Tod here reporting on the new and improved version of Lee. My understanding, from sources close to the surgery, is that Lee was awake for the entire surgery and watched with eager pleasure as his crack staff of doctors removed all the precious metals from his arm. While watching this occur, Lee was horrified to learn that aliens had implanted a tracking device into his arm at some point in the past and that all his thoughts, emotions, true feelings about the likelyhood that Richard Hatch and the Dagget once copulated, and a pilot idea for a show about crime fighting crossover TV/ fan fiction writers ("This week, the cast of the Love Boat solves the mystery of who shot JR...") had been turned into a database that will later be used to enslave all of mankind deep in the center of the earth.

All that being said, he's in good shape and eagerly awaiting word from the Mothership.

Remote Sex

Most women have to fight over the remote control with their husbands and boyfriends. But here's one remote they won't be fighting over. ABC News reports that Dr. Stuart Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem,  accidentally stumbled on a device that will give women extreme orgasms... by remote control. It's an adolescent sex fantasy come to true, no pun intended.

While Meloy was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.

"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "

Meloy soon realized he may have discovered a device that could help thousands of women who have trouble achieving orgasm.

"The device is the use of a pre-existing device called a spinal cord stimulator," he said. "Instead of treating chronic pain with the stimulator, we're treating orgasmic dysfunction." 

In a surgical procedure done in his office, Meloy implants the electrodes from this device into the back of the patient, at the bottom part of the spinal cord. When the electrodes are stimulated with a remote control, the brain interprets the signal as an orgasm, he said. The device is about the size of a pacemaker and can be turned on and off with a handheld remote control.

In a study he conducted for the Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists,  ninety-one percent of the women he tested experienced orgasms.  Not surprisingly, the test subjects didn't want to give the machine back when the study was over. One patient commented:

"When I gave it back, I came in the office and Dr. Meloy took the electrodes out of, you know, out of the back and it was like I was losing my best friend. It was very hard to give it back."

Now, if they could combine the orgasmatron with a Tivo remote, think how many marriages could be saved!

TVBGone.com

Tired of the TV blaring in your favorite restaurant or bar, making it impossible for you to have a conversation without yelling? You could ask the owner to turn the set off... or, now, you can do it yourself without anyone even knowing it was you who did it. According tothe LA Times, someone has come up with a handy, key-chain remote that will turn off any television set.

For someone who just wanted a little peace and quiet, Mitch Altman is causing quite a ruckus. The San Francisco entrepreneur, perennially irritated by televisions blaring in restaurants and other gathering spots, revealed this week that he had come up with a solution: a cheap remote that shuts down almost every model of TV.

After the story of Altman's invention zapped around the Internet, so many people visited TVBGone.com that the website crashed. Even so, Altman had taken 2,000 orders by early Wednesday, accounting for the entire first production run. Through mobile phones, pocket TVs and other devices, gadget makers have spent two decades devising ways to keep people constantly "on." The buzz over Altman's device shows that some people are eager to turn off.

"I can see it turning into a sort of punky instrument of disruption," Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin said of the $15 devices, "a sort of new-style culture jam that's within a lot of people's means."

Gitlin warned that with TV such a big part of daily life — Americans watch an average of more than four hours a day — incautious use of TV-B-Gone could be unwise. Picture, for example, a sports bar during Wednesday night's decisive match-up between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.

Altman started mulling over what became TV-B-Gone after he and some friends found themselves watching a soundless TV in a restaurant, abandoning what had been an entertaining conversation.

Altman, an engineer, tinkered in his studio apartment and then ordered as many of the keychain devices as his one-employee company could afford: 20,000. The gadget works by emitting every known set manufacturer's signal to shut down. In his daily experiments in stores and elsewhere, Altman said, few people have objected.

"TVs are so ubiquitous that they don't even think about it," Altman said. They see TV-B-Gone as giving them "some way of controlling their lives."

Amherst College sociologist Ron Lembo described Americans as ambivalent about TV. They want to turn it off, he said, but can't stop watching. TV-B-Gone "plays into deeper resentment," Lembo said. But even if Altman's gadget catches on, "you can't turn off where television is and how important it is in the culture."

Along with customer orders, Altman said, he has been deluged with suggestions for follow-up products, including Car-Alarm-B-Gone, Booming-Bass-Speakers-B-Gone, and the clear favorite, Cellphone-B-Gone.

Altman has put some thought into that last one. "There are many possible ways to do it," he said, "but I don't think any of them are legal."