Best thing I've seen today

George Takei, for real

Nostrum is back? Is Amazon buying them too?

I really don’t know what to make of this.

There was a posting yesterday on Jules’s Nostrum Nation blog that he and the Nostrumite were bringing back Nostrum. Again. They’re calling it Nostrum Series III, A Very Special (Batch o') Episode(s), (AKA the Codswallop Chronicles), and you now know as much about it as I do. He gave no timetable, and no indication why it was back or what it will cover. For that matter, he gave no indication of what he and the Nostrumite have been up to since they were last heard from a couple of years ago. Has all this talk about my writing somehow lit a fire under them to get back to their writing? Maybe they’re just jealous. I have no idea. I’ll see if I can track one or the other of them down over the weekend and get some details.

Anyhow, speaking of writing, this morning it was announced that Amazon will be buying Goodreads. Now I can’t say that I’m much of a follower of Goodreads; I don’t exactly need advice on reading, given how little I get to do on my own dime. And as the VCA knows, I’m not that big a user of social media. I especially don’t rely on the advice of strangers to recommend how I spend my time, or how I spend my mental energy. Trusted critics are one thing; the Great Unwashed are something else altogether. The Fifty Shades books, for instance, get an average of 4 stars according to Amazon customers. The likelihood that I would enjoy an average of 4 stars worth of Fifty Shadesness, however, is extremely small. If my daughter were to recommend a book I might like, however, I’d pick it up right away, and I’d probably like it. But that’s just me. Goodreads is a big deal in what you might call the reading community, and the last I heard, Amazon is something of a big deal in the bookselling community. Any question why I’m going to use Amazon as the outlet for The House on Summer Street? Amazon may or may not be the latest edition of evil incarnate, but when it comes to books, they are increasingly the only game in town. The are integrated vertically, horizontally, elliptically and widdershins. I can’t wait to hear how the publishing community takes this news. There are going to be some unhappy campers out there.

Come Monday, I’ll get back into writing up my adventures publishing the new book. This weekend should be fun; I’m popping down to NYC tomorrow for some museumness, and then dropping in on O’C, who is screening Willow for the assembled multitudes. Now, I can’t say I care one way or the other about Willow, but I do have a fondness for the assembled multitudes, which will include my daughter and JV and God knows who-all. Then Easter is a family day, out to eat at a local joint that does a nice Easter dinner complete with rabbit stew, which strikes me as either perfect or wildly inappropriate, much like having reindeer stew on Christmas Eve. It gets the Aged P out and about, however, which is a good thing once in a while. And then Monday night, we have a tentative workshop for the Sailor Speecho-Americans heading to the State finals, which means that I keep at least a marginal hand in such things for a little while longer.

Book production, chez moi

Writing is easy enough, or not. You do it until you’re done and you trust that your skills are good enough to pull your readers through it all. What you have at that point is a manuscript.

Books, regardless of whether they’re physical or digital, require certain steps beyond writing per se. One of these steps is production. Obviously the production of a digital book is different from the production of a physical book in a lot of ways. You don’t have to decide on trim size or paper quality, for one thing. And page design in an era where you are trying to be device-agnostic is pretty much plain vanilla, so that people can play with the type size themselves, adjusting to their own taste or needs. A physical book can be a gorgeous item. A digital book is its content. Or at least that’s true when you’re talking about a novel. You can tart up the design a tad, I guess, but otherwise it’s all about the words. In nonfiction, things might be different as the technology develops. I’m reading a book on Da Vinci at the moment, and when I originally bought it I thought long and hard about what format I wanted it in, and decided that, because of the illustrations, I had to go physical. The basic Kindle just doesn’t have the chops yet to deliver good graphics. This will no doubt change over time, and electronic publishing will come to rival print publishing for design and illustration. The iBook app can already do this, but honestly I prefer the passive Kindle screen over the iPad for reading. This will all sort itself out, sooner rather than later. Electronic reading was around for a while before it took off; the arrival of the cheap Kindle made the difference. Henceforth it’s simply a matter of evolution. The revolution is over. For a long time if you wanted to read a book, that meant reading a literal book, period. No longer. Digital publishing won’t put literal books completely out of business, for a variety of reasons, but instead of being the only game in town, the printed book will find niches where it will continue to make sense. I can’t predict the particulars of all of this, but I have my thoughts. Anyone in publishing will tell you roughly the same thing. The amount of wisdom you will hear from them will vary from publisher to publisher.

In any case, while digital novels are, as I say, vanilla, vanilla still needs to taste good. The documentation from Kindle Publishing tells the budding writer to do things like spell check and use Word’s grammar checker. Well, yes to spell checking, of course, but the grammar checker is not only painfully slow but it’s also not particularly useful, at least not for me. My writing, if you ask the grammar checker, is virtually unreadable. My sentences are too long, my use of subordinate phrases and parentheses is mind-numbing, and my word choices are inevitably incorrect.

What’s wrong with this picture?

There might be someone on earth for whom the grammar checker makes sense, but probably not the average fiction writer. Let’s say you’re writing in the first person. Well, then you’d want to mold your writing to reflect that narrator’s thoughts. If your narrator is not a copy editor at heart, he or she will probably not think entirely in perfect grammar. End of grammar checker. And if your writing has any personality whatsoever, first or third person, the grammar checker will simply scratch its head and shake its finger at you and annoy you until you turn it off. I turned it off the first week I had it in the very first version of Word I ever owned. I haven’t turned it back on since.

Some folks tell you that you should hire, A, a professional editor and B, a professional copy editor (and more, which we’ll get to eventually). I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but I didn’t do it. I can do these things myself pretty well, and since, as I explained yesterday, it’s easy for me to distance myself from my work, I’m pretty confident that I lost nothing by not having them. Having, as a writer, dealt with professional editors, and as an editor, dealt with professional writers, I have to say that while editors are great as sounding boards and fresh eyes, it all comes down to the writer sooner or later. “Uh, Mr. Joyce, I was thinking, maybe, that you’d want to clarify some of the writing here. I mean, shouldn’t riverrun be capitalized? And I think it’s two words. And I’m not quite sure who Eve and Adam are in the context of the paragraph…” Or, “Well, Hermie, I like it, don’t get me wrong, but let me tell you, whales just aren’t selling in today’s market. Have you thought of going with Cthulhu? Or maybe zombies? Great White Zombies has a real nice ring to it…”

So I have, to my mind, completely created the book and, following the elementary instructions from Kindle on page breaks and chapter heads and the like for Word, come up with the "production" copy of the book, short of the step of porting it to html and checking it in situ. I have not had to resort to any sort of typesetting, page design, copy editing, galley reading or query answering, which in the normal process of physical publishing can take two or three months. My production work took an hour or so. That’s one real benefit of digital publishing. Regardless of whether the end product is good, bad or indifferent, there’s no question that creating it is a quick business. It takes just as long to write a book, but producing it is virtually instantaneous. This leads, of course, to the availability of way more bad books, since all the expense of production is removed and the means placed in the hands of anyone with access to a computer, but so it goes.

My manuscript it ready. I have a production copy. Onward.

Editing my own work

I can’t really speak to the act of writing a book, having been only marginally successful at it. I mean, yes, I’ve gotten a few books published and done okay with them, but I’ve also gotten a few books not published. I think that, at heart, I’m a pretty good stylist but only a so-so storyteller, and to be honest, commercial success requires more of the latter than the former. Whatever. It’s not like I’m sitting around cursing my life or anything. All that time not writing NY Times bestsellers allowed me to create Nostrum. Twice. If that hasn’t left the world a better place, then I don’t know what has.

Of course, I can speak to the act of reading books, as I’ve done here explicitly as I do it for the DJ. I have a pretty good sense of books in general. I always find it strange reading anything I’ve written myself after, say, a couple of months have passed. I absolutely have no instinctive recollection of having written it. I can look at my own text in a state of total amnesia, which strikes me as rather odd. Most writers I know are completely wedded to their words, indelibly lined to every comma and adjective. They are their books. They are their writing. Their spirit is on the page. Maybe that’s why I never broke through. My spirit, I guess, is somewhere else. But that does make me a good editor of my own work. If I put something aside for long enough, it’s as if it’s not my own work anymore, and I know quite well that I am expert at editing the work of others, having done it for the last 40 years or so. I edit myself just fine. My writing process comprises, first, getting it all on paper in the first place, from start to finish, which is the hardest part. Then I comb through it and comb through it and comb through it, with great ruthlessness. It doesn't come out all that good in the first place, but I can edit it into shape given enough time. And every time I do, it's all new again. I'm probably lucky with that. Otherwise I don't think I'd have the stamina to stick with it.

The process of putting together Summer Street, after I completed enough drafts on my own to send it on, was mostly in aid of polishing the narrator’s voice. It is written in the first person, told by a kid. This is sort of tricky, and I was told to keep polishing it so that any vestigial non-kid writing was expunged. Good advice, and I think that I managed to do it. I won’t be going through it again, aside from checking the formatting per Kindle. It is what it is. I remember looking at Lingo when it first went electronic years after it was published, to see about updating it a little. But that was a mug’s game. Being me, with my personal writing amnesia, I read it as if I’d never seen it before, found it pretty amusing, clarified maybe two sentences that stopped me, and that was it. It was so much a part of its technological time that updating it would have done nothing for it. After all, it was make believe in the first place. How grounded in reality is make believe supposed to be? An old Apple computer couldn’t come to life? Does that mean a new one can? Pul-leeze.

The House on Summer Street, in other words, is as edited as it’s going to get. I spell-checked it one last time, and I’ll look over the formatting after I port it over to Amazon, but that’s it. In other words, I have about five minutes of work left on the text before I pull the trigger and make it live. But there are considerations other than the text themselves. Like the cover, for instance. I spent a lot of time last night playing with that, and I’ll pass along my thoughts next time.

More articles we [did not] [had to] finish reading

These headlines are all real, directly copied from our RSS feed without editing.

First, the did-nots.

• Sarah Palin’s Writing A Book About Christmas
  
• Charlie Sheen Just Told 9 Million People To Throw Dog Shit At His Daughter’s School
  
• Justin Bieber’s Hamster Is Dead
  
• Recreate Original McDonald’s Menu Items at Home
  
• ‘Atlas Shrugged Part 3′ Greenlit, Hitting Theaters Summer 2014
  
  

On the other hand, a couple of articles that had to read:

• ‘World’s First’ Gender-Based Breakfast Cereal, Improves Sexual Performance
  
• Nic Cage's Face On All 151 1st Generation Pokemon
  

In which I write a new novel

The new book is entitled The House on Summer Street. I wrote it about two years ago, and went through the rigmarole of finding a publisher, but without success. This was back when Kate was still working at an agency, and they all liked it and gave it the old college try, but they just couldn’t swing a sale. Publishing is like that. I had written it to entertain myself, mostly because I like to write, so I can’t say I had particularly tried to do anything to make it commercial. Come to think of it, I had the same problem with Lingo, although there obviously I did have a publisher and ended up doing fine. The problem there was that, while it was on face a science fiction novel, it wasn’t really genre. Plus, while trying to be some sort of thriller, it was also funny (or while trying to be funny it was also some sort of thriller), and unclear boundaries were claimed to be anathema. So it goes.

The House on Summer Street is, perhaps, aimed at young adults. Perhaps not. And I’ve subtitled it, “A Novel With Ghosts.” Already it sounds uncommercial. After failing to sell it, I let it sit for a while, but I’ve decided, what the hell, I’ll publish it myself. Amazon makes it easy enough to do so. They’ll publish any damned thing, which is why they are in the process of destroying publishing as we (i.e., publishers—don’t forget my DJ) know it. I could write about that at great length (and, knowing me, I probably will), but I’ll stick to the main story for the moment.

I haven’t made too many decisions yet, since as one’s own publisher one is in charge of everything. The first thing I decided, though, was to get it copyrighted. I understand copyright well enough to understand that, officially, this wasn’t necessary, but I’ve been doing this for too long not to. And it’s no big deal to get a copyright. You go onto the government website, click a few buttons, and—

It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. Our fine U.S. government allows you to register and pay on line and send them an electronic copy of the work, except it doesn’t work on Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Of course not. It only works on IE. Imagine that, Mac users. Internet Explorer. Do even Windows users use IE anymore? I’m surprised they didn’t make me use dial-up. I turned off (and on) every pop-up blocker and javascript allower and whatall-you-name-it in all those other browsers before remembering that I do, indeed, have IE on my Windows 7 emulator (with which I tab). That worked (after more pop-up blockers going on and off and javacripts being allowed or not and whatall-you-name-it) so, finally, after about an hour of nonsense that could only be conjured by the combination of government website and Microsoft, Inc., I acquired a copyright for the book.

Next up, the formatting. Amazon has ways it wants you to Kindle-ize your docx manuscript. So I did them. No big deal. Essentially you make sure that there's no long marches of new empty paragraphs (apparently the great unwashed find forced page breaks the kiss of death, given how many times Amazon warns you that you must use them or spend eternity in hell), you format paragraphs to include indents (no tabs) and you allow a little extra leading between paragraphs. And you style chapters as unique headings (but that doesn't matter much in a novel where they're just numbers). And in the end, you save it as a filtered html file, which would be fine if there were actually an option in Word to save as a filtered html file. That was as far as I've gotten. For a moment I wondered if the U.S. government had somehow crossed over into the process, and that I'd have to do the whole thing in IE...

The adventure will continue.

The website is revised

All right. Enough of this trivia nonsense. Back to business.

I have, for all practical purposes, finished the update of my jimmenick.com website. It doesn’t look all that different from the previous incarnation, but it is better organized. I played around with the design tools provided by my site host, but didn’t really like any of the templates, plus I found them more trouble to adjust than it was worth. I did like the way Squarespace.com allowed me to build the NYSDCA site last year, but I was not interested in porting everything over to them, again in deference to the concept of more trouble than it was worth. So the site is still living inside a very static CSS template I picked up somewhere, using very boring old html that never goes very far beyond a "TD" command. So, it won’t win the beauty prize for site of the year any time soon. But it is, as I say, better organized, and there’s nothing wrong with that. At some point the content of the site is more important than the look of it.

I’ve updated a bunch of things on the forensics page. I find it heartening that most things hold true even as the years seem to change them, and that the underlying philosophies of debate remain the same even as the structures rumble and tumble. I did have to edit a few things here and there to make them viable in 2013, but not as much as you would think. I feel that I can honestly present what is there to anyone putting together a team or to my own students or any other learners and feel confident that they will not be misled. Even some of the occasional stuff like the Geopolitics lecture held up, with a bit of fine tuning to remove it from the immediate resolution that sparked it. There’s a lot of good material at this site.

Now if I could only get the Sailors to take advantage of it…

The newest addition is the writing page, where I’ve tried to isolate things that aren’t strictly debate materials. Granted that a lot of it is debate-based, e.g., Nostrum, but it is nevertheless writing qua writing. It allows me now to push Lingo a little bit, and provides a launching pad for the new book coming out shortly. (I’m self-publishing that one, and I’ll detail its journey here. needless to say.)

I can’t say that I’ve gone and listened to everything on my audio page to clean that one up, but I have, again, organized it better. Needless to say, there’s a lot of overlap on all these pages, and that’s been the hardest thing to keep straight. But I think I’ve done it well enough. In any case, this weekend I took the big old tabbing printer out of the car and put it into the basement, thinking to myself that it is now six months until my next tournament. Holy cow! That’s a lot of time to spend doing something other than tabbing, especially if it’s going to be winter from now until then, as it would appear to be if today’s forecast is any indication. Oh, well. I do have a tendency to keep myself busy enough. And when I fall off the busy wagon, Tik pronounced teek is there to nap along with me. Life goes on.

Final Beans

The final bunch.

Robo-questions, or, These are not the droids you're looking for:

• In what film did Jude Law play a robot? (They got it.)
  
• Name a famous astromech droid? (Zip was on it!)
  
• What is Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth-Class? (No problemo.)
  
• The robot in the Oz stories? (Crickets. Lots of crickets. I would have suggested a Menickean lifeline, but this was the elimination round.)
  

Water, water everywhere:

• Where is Easter Island? (No, Disney World is not the correct answer.)
  
• Name three countries surrounding the Japan sea. (They got it.)
  
• The Coral Sea is between what two countries? (They got it. I'll bet you didn't.)
  

Our special feature star was the Beeb. No one could possibly know any of these, and they didn't. Neither should you.

• How many Madame Toussaud's have wax figures of him?
  
• How many Twitter followers does he have - 3 million, 33 million, 330 million?
  
• What was his highest Klout score?
  
• (I didn't ask this one, and it may be the only one you might know.) In what movie did he appear as an alien (on TV monitors)? I'll give you the answer: MIB3.
  

Then there were thingummies.

• What is a lunula? (They knew it. I was stunned.)
  
• What is a dewclaw? (Nope.)
  
• What is a philtrum? (Another surprise correct answer.)
  

And finally, a few slogans:

• Life's short, play more. (They should have gotten this.)
  
• It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. (They knew what sort of item it was, but not the maker. Not good enough.)
  
• Just do it. (They did it.)
  
• A mind is a terrible thing to waste. (No, which meant one less Dan Quayle joke for the night.)
  
• Breakfast of champions. (Nope. Sailors don't eat breakfast, I guess.)
  

And so another bout of Beans bit the dust. Lots of questions in these categories were left over, so I'm ready to pick up where I left off at the drop of a hat.

An amazing guitarist

Here's his website: MarkKross.com. (You find the most unexpected things at Failblog.)

Coachean Feed: sexism, classism, Bertrand Russell, racism, our animalistic roots

More links of interest to the debate community.

• From one of the women in the Glasgow debacle: Rebecca Meredith - Why We Still Need Feminism
  
• In short, class has stopped being the basis for a political identity; it has become a form of identity politics. As Wallop puts it: ‘Class is no longer what we do with our hands nine to five, it is what we do with our wallets at the weekend." From class politics to classy products
  
• Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy: I can't say I know much about Russell, but this short piece indicates that he was my kind of guy.
  
• How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies: Racism, even just the anticipation of racism, leads to a stress response. Stress leads to poorer health. Ergo, racism --> stress among minorities --> worse health for minorities.
  
• Frans de Waal's Bottom-Up Morality: We're Not Good Because Of God: Book review, the subject being the evolution of empathy. Why shouldn't our thoughts have evolved as have our physical selves?
  

Virtual Beans #8

Probably the easiest category was this one, food with place names:

• A hard boiled egg wrapped in sausage. (They liked the sound of it even if they couldn't identify it.)
  
• A cake filled with custard and frosted with chocolate. (They got it.)
  
• A thinly sliced beef sandwich with cheese and onions. (They got it.)
  
• Deep fried potatoes. (As I said, easy.)
  
• A pastry with cheese or prune preserves. (Now that we're eliminating panivorous types right and left, the team will eat anything. They got it.)
  
• A sandwich with ham and cheese and pickles. (Finally, another one they hadn't had for lunch that day.)
  
• Eggy bread. (A piece of cake, so to speak.)
  

Then they had to translate the following from British to English:

• zed (yes)
  
• kip (surprisingly, yes)
  
• starkers (nope)
  
• gormless (nope)
  
• fagging (nope — thought it had something to do with cigarettes)
  
• mufti (nope)
  
• barmy (nope)
  
• c of e (nope, and honestly, that's not even a Britishism, but I threw it in as a gimme. I didn't have to gim it.)
  
• quid (nope)
  
• shirty (yes, again surprisingly, considering their bad record on this category)
  
• bespoke (nope, but then again, given that the latest Sailor fashion statement at a tournament was fuzzy slippers, what do you expect?)
  
• knackered (nope)
  
• gobsmacked (nope, although when I demonstrated it the answer was clear)
  
• codswallop (needless to say, given the nature of Sailordom, they did indeed understand the concept of codswallop)
  
• a dicky ticker (yes, but only because I was demonstrating furiously as I awaited the answer)
  

Virtual Beans 7

So you'd think that Sailors might know something about NYC, being that if you stacked them one on top of the other the highest one would be able to see it on a clear day? Well, you'd be wrong.

• What is Tudor City? (They thought it might be a restaurant.)
  
• What kind of restaurants do you find on Mott Street? (All they could say was, "Can you spell Mott?" And tell me what street / compares to Mott Street / in July...)
  
• What kind of restaurants do you find on Mulberry Street? (Their answer was mulberry restaurants.)
  
• Who was Laguardia? (I am still recovering from the shock of hearing the correct answer to this one.)
  

And then there was Latin. They got all of these wrong except for one.

• Ecce homo
  
• Habeas corpus
  
• E pluribus unum
  
• Non compos mentis
  
• In hoc signo vinces
  
• In media res
  
• Cave canem
  
• Alea iacta est
  
• Ars longa vita brevis
  

Which one? Okay, apparently they watch a lot of lawyer shows on TV.

I now understand why Steely Dan took so long to get into the R&R Hall of Fame

I crashed while watching this, so I lost the via link. Too bad. I want to remove that site from my feed. Forever. And then some.

Virtual Beans 6

Another one of my favorite categories: Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.

I had to explain it about a hundred times...

• The guitarist for the Sex Pistols? (They had no idea.)
  
• A grungy guy who shot himself? (You'd think that grunge, repeated and emphasized, would have given it away. It didn't.)
  
• He liked to light his guitar on fire. (They got it.)
  
• He died behind the wheel of his Porsche. (Lost them on that one.)
  
• She sang with Big Brother and the Holding Company. (Not a clue.)
  
• From "The Day the Music Died" name one of the people who, well, died that day. (They didn't get it. Instead, they told me it was the guy who died behind the wheel of his Porsche. The 50s are a blur to these people.)
  
• Finally, a 19 year old who was burned at the stake. (Even when I threw in that she's a nickname at a diner, no reaction.) (French fries, if you didn't know it already.) (I should have asked about Noah's wife.)
  

Then all they had to do was identify which actor portrayed James Bond in the following movies. The third one was the only one correctly answered, which proves that, when it comes to pop culture, the Sailors totally get it backwards. (Except, of course, pop spelled backwards is, shockingly enough, pop, but that's not my fault): Diamonds are Forever, The World is Not Enough and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Calvin and Hobbes

Virtual Beans 5

Three more categories:

I'll name the characters, you name the musical. The Sailors got all 3:

• Conrad, Albert, Rosie
  
• Jean, Marius, Fontine
  
• Skimbleshanks, Jennyanydots, Rumpleteazer

Ikea meatballs (AKA horses):

• What did Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed do that is very rare? (Not a clue.)
  
• Who is the author of Black Beauty? ("I read that seven times." Pause. "There was a horse in it?" Lifeline was drawn and failed.)
  
• Who was Bucephalus? (They didn't know, but spent about six hours not knowing it.)
  
• What's a farrier? (Panivore, Jr., could, and did, answer this in his sleep. I'm not sure why he was sleeping, though.)
  
• What is the source of the phrase "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"? (Frankly, I was looking for the author, but with this group, I accepted the general idea.)
  

And famous pairs. I provided one, they provided the other. Or not:

• Siegfried and ... (Got it.)
  
• Butthead and ... (Got it, of course.)
  
• Gilbert and ... (Glazed expression.)
  
• Jake Blues and ... (Well, they at least knew it was a relative, but not the name.)
  
• Bertie Wooster and ... (I would not have accepted House, but then again, nothing but blank stares were offered.)
  
• Pyramus and ... (This was known, surprisingly enough.)
  
• Heloise and ... (Even when I told them the answer, the stares remained blank. I kept my "Ouch" jokes to myself.)
  

Virtual Beans 4

Happiness is just a thing called Joe. That was the category. You had to name the Joe.

• A husband of Marilyn Monroe. (They knew this, which surprised me.)
  
• A Polish author writing in English. (Meh knew that it was the author of Secret Agent, but couldn't conjure the name. A lifeline text to O'C yielded no response [oh, the horror], but then it finally occurred to her. Who thinks of Secret Agent first? Weird.)
  
• The founder of a religion. (They missed it.)
  
• The father of a political clan. (I might as well have been talking about the 11th Emperor of Oogabooga.)
  
• Who is Joseph Ratzinger? (Nope. But to be fair, I pronounced it Joe. Rat. Zinger. Still.... How soon they forget.)
  
• A Russian leader. (No sweat.)
  
• A tailgunning anti-communist. (Once again my miracle freshman pulled it out of the air at the last moment. She came in 3rd overall.)
  

Virtual Beans 3

The "Audrey or Kate" category (it can be the same in both) only got hit once. Which Hepburn was in War and Peace? Which Hepburn was in Robin and Marian?

Ditto the Woody or Hitch category: Which one directed Notorious? Love and Death?

My favorite category required you to say if a character was from Nostrum, Star Wars, Oz or Dickens. It only came up once. Again, it doesn't have to be one of each. Go!
Rogue Riderhood
Salacious B. Crumb
Sally Brass
San Hill

And then, there was the category of doctors, real and fictional:

• Who is Theodor Geisel? (Easy peasy.)
  
• Dr. Cliff Huxtable was played by? (They got it, which surprised me.)
  
• In what movies do you find Dr Evil? (Nope. Are those movies dead already?)
  
• What was Dr. Kevorkian famous for? (Answered correctly. Apparently one never wants to wake up in a hospital and see Dr. Kevorkian's name on the chart.)
  
• Name a TV show about doctors in the Korean war? (Piece of cake for them.)
  
• Who was the doctor who helped Clarice Starling? (The Sailors are nothing if not perverted. They got it.)
  
• Julius M. Hibbert is personal physician to whom? (Not a clue. To be honest, I thought it was a gimme for them, but then again, I had had to look it up.)
  
• George Clooney was a doctor on what show? (Got it.)
  
• Doctor McCoy was the physician where? (Didn't have a clue.)
  
• Neil Patrick Harris played what doctor? (This was one of those questions everyone knew except the person who was supposed to know it. There was much discussion of NPH's hair on that show.)
  

A Lego Band

A little change of pace during our trivia extravaganza.