Signifying nothing

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

From the Typewriter to the Bookstore: A Publishing Story

Best lines (not-exact):
"Authors take between 10 to 30 years to produce a text."
"The author will submit the text to an agent. The agent will staple it and submit it to the editor."
"Editors traditionally select character names."
"All communication between editor and author is conducted on twitter."

Monday, January 12, 2009

Dreaming of Yes

Dreaming of Yes
Originally uploaded by Theorris

While visiting friends in Colorado, I had the opportunity to go to the Benson Sculpture Garden in Loveland. It is certainly and excellent place and something that SLC would be wont to emulate. While the sculpture was a mixed bag, none of it was exceedingly bad nor amateurish. The garden certainly could appeal to a variety of tastes.

Imagine if SLC actually cared for its parks? Imagine a sculpture garden by Lindsay Gardens where the "Salt Lake Garden Club" started a park nearly a 100 years ago and it went to pot because no one cared enough to preserve it. Imagine.

I was a bad photographer and did not note the names of the sculptures I was imaging. This sculpture, however, is by far the coolest and most evocative sculpture in the Garden.

The motion of it is stunning. I fear I do it little justice.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Mystery heritage!

More than a month ago I submitted a DNA sample to the National Geographic Genographic project. Basically it traces your deep ancestry. While I'm fairly confident in my paternal heritage being Northern European and specifically Scottish/British (and perhaps, due to my specific clan, Viking in origin), I received the following message when I logged in to my Genographic page:

ADDITIONAL TESTING REQUIRED

Your sample has completed the DNA analysis phase of testing. However, during quality control your initial results failed to clearly indicate your haplogroup. We must perform additional testing to accurately determine your deep ancestral lineage. This is not uncommon, but will delay the posting of your results by two to three weeks.

We appreciate your patience. Please also note that this delay is a sign of the Project's success in increasing the diversity of samples in our database.

If we find that there is a problem at any point during the processing of your sample, you will receive an updated message when you log in to check your status."

The implication here seems to be that my particular genetic sample may be new to their database. How exciting! Perhaps my ancestry is not as clear-cut as I assumed. Or, more likely, I messed up the sample some how. It could perhaps also indicate that my genetic relatives are too tight-fisted to plunk down the money to get a genetic heritage test.