Verrry innnterestink.... but stupid.
Feb. 28th, 2011 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI tend to keep tabs open forever on things I just never get around to reading, listening to or doing- like listening to the whole audio of the old Vaughn Meader "Economy Lunch" track from the 60s First Family album (recently reinspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
firynze posting a recipe for borscht), or following the instructions on the app I downloaded to backup my Outlook 2003 email before it makes me crazy for a third time in 2011- but sometimes the old tabs update with new sidebar stuff that I find even more interesting.
This, for instance, a new linky on a forever-open NPR tab:
Kathryn Stockett, author of the massive best-seller The Help, is being sued by her brother's family's longtime nanny, who says Stockett borrowed her likeness and her story without permission — and portrayed her in a way that she found painful and humiliating.
On today's Tell Me More, Michel Martin will talk to an English professor and two authors about the book, the lawsuit and the tricky matter of basing fictional characters on real people.
There's more to the story, naturally: the coinkydink being between a fictional character named Aibileen and the real one named Ablene- not exactly like being in a room of Australian philosophers named Bruce in terms of likelihood. Making it even more interesting is that Stockett's brother is siding with the former nanny and not with his sister.
For me, it just brings home the advice that we used to give scriptwriters on our online webseries in the 90s, which became particularly relevant after one of the authors (and one of the older ones, as in my age or older, got into similar trouble for naming a character after a woman he'd been snitting with): Get your characters' last names out of the phone book and their first names out of a baby name book. If the combination doesn't sound right, go back to both and pick new ones from each.
Even well-established authors like Dexter's Jeff Lindsay can cause inadvertent confusion, if not bigger problems: roughly a quarter way into the latest novel, he conjures a police mucketymuck by the name of "Major Nelson," which to my generation instantly brings forth images of Larry Hagman in his pre-Dallas days and essentially serves as foreshadowing for a Miami-Dade coroner by the name of Doctor Bellows.
firynze posting a recipe for borscht), or following the instructions on the app I downloaded to backup my Outlook 2003 email before it makes me crazy for a third time in 2011- but sometimes the old tabs update with new sidebar stuff that I find even more interesting.This, for instance, a new linky on a forever-open NPR tab:
Kathryn Stockett, author of the massive best-seller The Help, is being sued by her brother's family's longtime nanny, who says Stockett borrowed her likeness and her story without permission — and portrayed her in a way that she found painful and humiliating.
On today's Tell Me More, Michel Martin will talk to an English professor and two authors about the book, the lawsuit and the tricky matter of basing fictional characters on real people.
There's more to the story, naturally: the coinkydink being between a fictional character named Aibileen and the real one named Ablene- not exactly like being in a room of Australian philosophers named Bruce in terms of likelihood. Making it even more interesting is that Stockett's brother is siding with the former nanny and not with his sister.
For me, it just brings home the advice that we used to give scriptwriters on our online webseries in the 90s, which became particularly relevant after one of the authors (and one of the older ones, as in my age or older, got into similar trouble for naming a character after a woman he'd been snitting with): Get your characters' last names out of the phone book and their first names out of a baby name book. If the combination doesn't sound right, go back to both and pick new ones from each.
Even well-established authors like Dexter's Jeff Lindsay can cause inadvertent confusion, if not bigger problems: roughly a quarter way into the latest novel, he conjures a police mucketymuck by the name of "Major Nelson," which to my generation instantly brings forth images of Larry Hagman in his pre-Dallas days and essentially serves as foreshadowing for a Miami-Dade coroner by the name of Doctor Bellows.