Archive for June, 2010

The Latest Literary Abomination Mashup

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Ben H. Winters and Leo Tolstoy’s Android Karenina

My powers of prophecy are unparalleled, even when I’m joking…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Drug Lords

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Here are some pretty interesting pictures from a bust at a Mexican drug lord’s house. The giant piles of cash and the tacky gold-plated guns are pretty much par for the course, but the rest of the house is, believe it or not, more tasteful and restrained than the average drug lord lair. But the non-gold plated arsenal starts out at interesting, moves on to impressive, and ends up at “oh my God, he really could have equipped his own army.” (Though the pictures at the bottom are evidently from another bust.)

(Hat tip: Mike.)

Books Read: Naomi Novik’s Temeraire: Throne of Jade

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Naomi Novik
Temeraire: Throne of Jade

This is a solid follow-up to the first Temeraire book. In this one Lawrence and his Celestial dragon are forced to take a slow boat to China to see the Emperor, who is evidently most upset that his dragon (a gift to Napoleon) is now enrolled in the English aerial corps. Some have said they found their attention flagging through the long sea voyage (which takes up a bit more than half the book); actually, I didn’t find my attention flagging until right after they first make landfall in China. So I think the book could be trimmed a little (maybe 10%), but it still engaged me.

No matter how bad you’ve ever screwed up, take heart

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Chances are, you’ve never totaled your dad’s $180,000 loaner Porsche by driving it through the garage door.

New Page for Lame Excuse Books

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Given TimeWarner’s continued incompetence, I’m slowly pulling all of my website from rr.com over to here. I now have the main Lame Excuse Books page at:

https://www.lawrenceperson.com/lame.html

If you’ve never bought anything from me before, Lame Excuse Books specializes in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and Slipstream first editions, with an emphasis on small press and signed editions. I have lots of books available by the like of Joe R. Lansdale, Howard Waldrop, Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, John Scalzi, etc.

So update your book marks! And it wouldn’t hurt for you to buy a book or ten…

Nebraska jumps to Big 10, the Conference Shuffle, and why not SuperConference America?

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Numerous sources are reporting this morning that Nebraska is jumping from the Big 12 to the Big 10. (Nigel Tufnel: “Why do that? The Big 12 is two bigger!”) So now the Big 10 will have 12 members, and the Big 12 will have 11. Assuming, of course, that six of them don’t go off to the Pac-10, which would make it the PAC-16.

Of course the move is all about money. (Though I wonder how much having the Longhorns own the Cornhuskers in football contributed to the decision. Going back through the records, I was surprised to see that Nebraska has beaten Texas at football only once throughout the entire existence of the Big 12, and even that year (1999) they were only .500 against the Longhorns, having lost to them in the conference schedule before beating them in the Big 12 Championship game.)

But if it’s is all about money, why stop there? Every conference has its Little Sisters of the Poor for marquee programs to beat up on every year, be it Baylor or Vanderbilt. Why not create a real national power conference, consisting of all football powerhouses? Call it SuperConference America. (I was thinking about SuperConference USA, but that’s too close to Conference USA, about which there’s nothing super, and it’s best not to tarnish the brand before you’re even out of the gate.)

An eight team conference would look like this:

Alabama
Florida
LSU
Oklahoma
Ohio State
Penn State
Texas
USC

Every team there has a huge following and a strong football tradition, and every team there except Penn State has won a National Championship in the last decade.

Want to make it a sixteen team conference and add a Conference (and de facto National) Championship game? Add:

Florida State
Miami
Michigan
Nebraska
Notre Dame
Tennessee
Virginia Tech
one more team (BYU and Washington are two possibilities, if only for regional balance in the west)

Now you have a conference that includes every team that’s ever played for a National Championship in the BCS/BCA era, and every AP champion back to 1991.

Can you imagine the TV ratings of those powerhouse schools playing each other every week? I suspect SuperConference America would earn more than all the other football conferences combined; every week would feature multiple games between powerhouse teams. It would be great for fans and great for the schools included. (And schools left out? Well, no one is really worry about them in the current conference realignment, so why should we?)

Academics? Other sports? Rivalry games?

Yeah, let’s pretend those matter. This is all about money, and great football. But none of those schools are slouches in the academics department. As for other sports, just like Notre Dame plays in the Big East for everything else, the teams in SuperConference America could retain their existing conference affiliations for other sports. And 7 games against SuperConference America foes still leaves space on the schedule for the Longhorns to beat up on the Aggies, for Florida and Alabama to pretend Georgia matters, etc.

This scheme is a sure-fire money maker. No one is going to miss seeing Texas play Baylor when they can see them play Alabama every year. And the only thing anybody has to give up (except for a few wins every year from playing real football teams rather than conference patsies) is the pretense that college football conferences are about anything other than money.

Recent Book Auction Results of Note

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

You may already have noticed that I buy a lot of books. Many I buy direct from the publisher (many of which I also sell copies of through Lame Excuse Books), some I buy from other book dealers, either off the Internet or at cons, some I buy off eBay (although that’s a lot less common since they drove away a goodly portion of the most interesting items by hiking fees into the stratosphere in their effort to turn themselves into an inferior Amazon clone), and a few I buy through auction houses, like PBA Galleries or Heritage Auctions.

Heritage just completed their 2010 June Signature Rare Books Auction, which, while not focused on science fiction the way the The Ventura Collection auction back in 2007 was, still had a number of notable science fiction and fantasy books up for auction, including a few titles made of Unobtanium. The interesting thing is that the three most notable fantasy titles didn’t sell:

I thought the price estimate on the Lord of the Rings set was unrealistically aggressive, as decent sets in dust jacket can be had in the $10,000-20,000 range. Nice firsts of The Hobbit in dust jacket are very rare, but I’m seeing a few copies of that available in the $20,000 range as well. (If memory serves, several years ago L. W. Currey had, I think, a signed Fine/Near Fine+ copy in dust jacket listed for $68,000.)

What does all this mean? Who know? Up at the very highest end of the book market, auction prices can be extremely volatile depending on who’s bidding. Maybe the prices were just too high. Or maybe the big money is sitting out in anticipation of prices dropping due to a double-dip recession.

Two More Movie Lists

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Andrew “Armed and Dangerous” Wimsatt sent me a list of Empire’s 500 Greatest Films of All Time. Since that list is broken up into lots of sub-pages, here it is in a more convenient “all on one page” format. (It also avoids the annoying smart quote artifacts that infest every page of the main Empire listings; are these people incapable of downloading a copy of Firefox?)

In many ways this is the mirror image of the Sight and Sound poll I had previously mentioned: Long on crowd-pleasers and cult films and short on European art house fair. While it’s hard to take seriously any “Best of” list that includes Transformers, it was gratifying to see under-rated gems like Hot Fuzz and The Prestige there. And you have to give a list that ranks Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back higher than Citizen Kane props for having the courage of its convictions.

Also, here’s Roger Ebert’s 250 Great Movies, which is sort of in-between the two.

Your Pricing Scheme is Full of Shaving Cream

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

From Slashdot comes the sad news that the Dr. Demento radio show is leaving the airwaves, at least for those outside the Greater Amarillo Area (it will continue there through the end of the summer). If you’re like me, you probably listened to a fair amount of Dr. Demento (real name: Barret Eugene Hansen) in high school, and occasionally thereafter, though the show has become impossible to find in most areas recently. The doctor’s own announcement only lists six radio stations that were still carrying it.

Happily for the true Dr. Demento fanatic (a description that excludes myself), you can continue to listen to his show on the Internet. That is, if you’re willing to pony $2 a show for low-quality MP3s, or $14.95 a month to join the Demento Online Club.

As a businessman, the good doctor seems to be a fine radio personality. Maybe the Dr. Demento Show has a sufficiently large and fanatic fanbase willing to pony up $15 to keep Mr. Hansen off the breadline (and after 40 years on the air, I’m sure he’s drawing Social Security), but that price point seems pretty aggressive. Given that there are more free podcasts floating around than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, and that for the $180 a yearly membership would run, I could buy pretty much every novelty tune I enjoy off iTunes and have plenty left over, it’s hard to see it as a good deal. Put another way: That’s three times the cost of TotalFark, and Drew seems to do pretty well with that model.

Methinks the good doctor should rethink his pricing structure…

Giant Mechnical Spider

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

I like to think of Futuramen as a “go to” blog for giant spider news. I mean, after all, if I’m not going to do it, who will?

So when two guys actually build a functioning mechanical spider to ride in for $15,000, you know I’m going to be all over that.

And here’s a video of it running around Burning Man at night:

Lots more video here.

(Hat tip: Fark.)