Editor Rick Klaw has been previewing one story a day from the forthcoming Rayguns Over Texas anthology due out at LoneStarCon3, and today he’s previewing my story, “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids.”
First hit’s on me…
Preview of My Story in Rayguns Over Texas
August 11th, 2013Shoegazer Sunday: Highspire’s “Glacier”
August 11th, 2013After meaning to for a while, I finally picked up Highspire’s Aquatic, which is definitely a strong Shoegaze album. Here’s “Glacier,” my favorite track off it.
Library Additions: Three Interesting Ray Bradbury Chapbooks
August 5th, 2013I recently picked up three Ray Bradbury chapbooks, two signed stapled chapbooks from Heritage Auctions, one bound in decorated boards from Half Price Books. One is pretty well documented as a first edition. However, the other two, being for the scholastic market, are not.
I’m not aware of a comprehensive Ray Bradbury bibliography out that, or I would no doubt own it. Does anyone know if The Veldt and Collected Short Stories are indeed first editions of those works or not, or how I would tell?
Shoegazer Sunday: Alcian Blue’s “Carousel”
August 4th, 2013Better late than never, here’s the now-defunct Alcian Blue with “Carousel”:
Can’t Sleep, The Clown Will Eat Me
August 1st, 2013Via Gardner Dozois’ Facebook comes news that it’s International Clown Week. I don’t suffer from Clownophobia, but I’ve known people who do.
So let’s take this moment to remember Bart Simpson’s awesome bed:
Alice Cooper even did a song:
And speaking of bed:
Maybe International Clown Week exists to remind us it’s just three months until Halloween…
Ode to Joy Played on a Theremin in a Matryoshka Doll
July 31st, 2013“The players here are using devices called Matryomins. They’re single-oscillator theremins that happen to be contained inside a matryoshka doll.”
167 of them.
Shoegazer Sunday: Belle and Sebastian’s “Sleep Around the Clock”
July 28th, 2013Here’s another “Is it Shoegaze or not” entry, with Belle and Sebastian’s “Sleep Around the Clock,” which is more bouncy retro low-fi pop, but there’s enough of a shoegaze tinge to it (a little like Black Tambourine) that I’m throwing it in here.
Plus I like the sciency theme of the video. So there.
Restaurant Review: July 27, 2013: Prima Pizza Pasta
July 27th, 2013(Here’s a restaurant review in route to its place on http://www.sdclog.net/.)
Prima Pizza Pasta
6001 W Parmer Ln (the same corner as the HEB)
258-5700
Once upon a time, this space was a CiCi’s pizza. And it closed. How hard can it be to make a profit at a pizza place when your primary ingredient is cardboard?
So I was somewhat skeptical when new pizza place went in there. Though situated at a semi-major intersection at Parmer and McNeil, it’s as far as you can get from the center’s anchor store (HEB) and still be in the same center. So how good could their chances be?
After more than a year: So far, so good. It really helps when you serve excellent pizza.
Things started off right with the garlic cheese bread, which was excellent; a fellow diner said it was better than that served at Reale’s, which is high praise indeed. Also good were the free rolls. (Alas, the calimari remains nothing to write home about.)
The pizza itself remains excellent, an exemplary example of the new York style soft thin-crust pizza; I’d have to compare it back-to-back with Reale’s to see which I prefer. In fact, I like the pizza so much that I frequently pick up a slice or two on Fridays. At some point I also want to try some of the non-pizza dishes, which have received a fair amount of praise from fellow diners. And the service from our waitress was also excellent, with many an preemptive soft-drink refill.
If you like pizza and live anywhere north, you should definitely make an effort to check out Prima. So far they seem to have remained undiscovered, and have plenty of uncrowded seating to enjoy some delicious Italian food.
Hollywood Auction Alert
July 27th, 2013Hollywood auction house is having another big auction of film memorabilia, including a few interesting SF-related items:
Plus Bruce Lee’s nun-chucks, Conan’s sword, the Terminator’s gun, Jason’s machete, Maximus’ axe, Legalos’ arrow, Indiana Jones’ whip, Jack Sparrow’s sword, Captain Kirk’s phaser, a Ghostbusters proton pack, The Comedian’s pistols, Freddy Kreuger’s fingernails, Rambo’s knife, James Bond’s gun, and Scarface’s “little friend.”
The auction is online in a “Flipbook” format, evidently invented because HTML was insufficiently annoying.
Alice and the Lizard People
July 23rd, 2013You’ve probably heard of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and the fringe SF book The Temple of My Familiar.
What you may not have heard is that she’s a fan of David icke, he of the shape-shifting lizard people.
And Ms. Walker is evidently a believer:
Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem cold, actually, though we know he wasn’t really. All that love of us that kept driving him to improve our lot; often into quite the wrong direction, but I need not go into that. What I was remembering was how he called our oppressors “blue eyed devils.” Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke’s book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we’re space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. And they were.
They wanted gold and they wanted slaves to mine it for them. Now gosh, who does this remind us of? I only am asking. You do the work. Apparently their own planet needed this metal to continue its, apparently, long life. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman – and I am on my knees here in gratitude that he held on long enough to tell us about this – calls them the Chitauri, which has become my favorite word of all time (well, of this time that I’m learning all this): my partner and I go around saying Oh, Chitauri, whenever we get a glimpse of one or two of the Chitauri offspring, aka Illuminati bloodline families and their puppets, on the telly. It’s quite the stress reliever, just knowing what we’re looking at. And I like saying “telly” too, because it sounds so English and David Icke-esque.
It’s an amazing book, HUMAN RACE GET OFF YOUR KNEES, and reading it was the ultimate reading adventure. I felt it was the first time I was able to observe, and mostly imagine and comprehend, the root of the incredible evil that has engulfed our planet. A lot of it is how shall we say: shocking, beyond belief (but not really, if you don’t get too scared), stunning, profound. The deconstruction of language is breathtaking, the interrogation of symbols startling. Magical, in a way. I kept going: Oh, so that’s why…. You will too.
The Reptilian space beings whose hybrid (part human, part reptile) descendants make our lives hell in Paradise were blue eyed devils to Malcolm X, the devil himself to my Christian parents, who never talked about eye color, which I think was not only prudent but wise, although they seemed clear enough about his sex, and as demons in many other religions, including the non-religion, Buddhism, where the advice is often to invite them in until they go away. But maybe these were other kinds of demons. Not the ones controlling not just you, but everything.
Sorry, I’m still in the “beyond belief” camp.
In a more recent post, Walker expresses enthusiasm for Icke’s new 24-hour international news network.
(In the video Icke says he’s crowdsourcing his new network, called The People’s Voice, and, in fact, he’s raised over £300,000.)
Well, we all have our flaws. I enjoy truly crappy Sci-Fi original movies like Sharknado. Alice Walker believes in shape-shifting lizard people who rule the world and oppress black people.
It’s always something…