The other Ozymandias

I was not aware that Percy Shelly wrote the famous Ozymandius in a sonnet  competition with his friend Horace Smith (hat tip Social Evolution Forum).

Here is Horace's:

Ozymandias
Horace Smith

IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
      Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
      The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
    "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
      "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
    "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
      Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
    The site of this forgotten Babylon.

    We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
    Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
      Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
    He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
      What powerful but unrecorded race
      Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

 

Rather directly collapsing point don't you think?

 

And here is Shelley's better known piece (I got both from Wikipedia):

 

Ozymandias

Percy Shelly

 

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Another look at a slow collapse?

Within apocalyptic circles you get arguments about fast versus slow collapses.  In fiction, to get the ball rolling, the apocalyptic writers tend to want to move things along and go for fast.  Novels that talk about the slow destruction of an economy, the 1980s rustbelt used to be popular, are not usually labeled as "apocalyptic" but are thought of as situation-driven character studies.

 

My viewpoint is that we have had a serious leveling out, and gradually accelerating decline since somewhere are around 1973.  You had Vietnam War Debt, which has since turned into everything debt, an oil crises that not withstanding a lot of fracking-hand waving seems to be back with us, environmental issues that have been shifted oversees, only to come back as global, rather than local problems, and the huge expansion of the global labor arbitrage issue - the 1980s had the shoe companies, now we have Doctors and Architects.  There are other memes you could get into if you are in a gloomy mood, but one I saw recently and liked was the Old Economy Steve meme:

 
Old Economy Steve: A meme for frustrated Millennials
Daryl Paranada, Market Place, 28 May 2013 (hat tip: Big Picture)

Death of the brain teaser

Google started a fad, of asking its applicants completely off the wall questions: presumably to see how quickly and logically they could deal with unexpected situations.  I have never run into that type of questioning, but have seen it's close cousin, the hostile confrontational question, that is intended to much the same thing.

The problem?  They don't work.  They are predictive of nothing.  In fact most "job interview strategies" don't predict much of anything.  Those personality tests they give you, they have a very slight predictive value, which actually puts them ahead of most of the pack, which is why we will be answering them for a while.

So what types of questions would Google ask?

Google Finally Admits That Its Infamous Brainteasers Were Completely Useless for Hiring
Adam Pasick, The Atlantic, 20 June 2013 (hat tip: Big Picture)

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Of course the hands of a clock question has an answer if you don't cheat by saying it is digital :  22 times.  Because the clock is a base 12 system with no zeros (midnight is not zero our except in military time, and even there it rolls over from the 23:00 hour) you "loose" two of the hours.  The big advantage of this type of base-12 system (once very common with money) is that it makes it easy to get quarters and thirds without algebraic math (.25 and .3333 and all that) that is difficult for market place people with limited math skills.

 

The rest of the questions look like they would be fun to answer: if you didn't have this really high paying job on the line.

Apocalyptic publishing

I had not realized that there were such specialized apocalyptic publishers out there.  Then one of my G-mail (Google) alerts sent me to Permuted Press.

It appears to be zombie (with a few werewolves) central.  I am not as conversant with zombies as I might be, but I do recognize a number of the titles.

While I don't have anything in particular against supernatural apocalypses, or even virus induced supernatural apocalypses, as zombie attacks are now derived, I did ask them which of their titles were non-zombie or werewolf based.

The following list came back.

Long Voyage Back

14 by Peter Clines

Plaguesville, USA by Jim LaVigne

Neena Gathering by Valerie Nieman

Eleven Twenty-Three by Jason Hornsby

 

Long Voyage Back is a classic reprint that I have already reviewed.  Neena Gathering, dates back to 1988, and I already own based on some strong reviews I saw somewhere..  The other four are more recent, and of them, I have seen 14 get some strong reviews.  It certainly gets at the front of alphabetized lists.  If I ever get around to writing a novel, I will have to remember to call it "1!" by Aaron Aardvark.  Nothing like getting to the head of the line!