Or so they claim. It comes in at a hefty 1,359,000 Scoville units, or about 7 times hotter than the average Habanero.
I am something of a chilihead, and am renowned near and fa-, well, actually, only near, for making a very hot salsa. (It earned Honorable Mention in the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Contest a couple of years.) However, having tasted Melinda’s Naga Jolokia Hot Sauce, made from the previous hottest pepper (also known as the “ghost pepper”), I’m not sure I’m up to the task. It’s not that my taste buds aren’t up to it; rather the problem lies at, ah, the other end. My body has let me know in no uncertain terms that if I want to eat something that hot, it’s going to pass it through my gastrointestinal tract as fast as it possibly can. This, needless to say, has its downside.
As far as I know, I never bought any books from (or sold any to) her, but I’ve bought so many books over the years that you never know. Robberies of book stores are pretty rare, since would-be robbers tend to concentrate on businesses that actually have money. (Q: How can you make a small fortune in the bookselling business? A: Start with a large fortune.)
Since I ship and receive a lot of books during the year, this is a topic of some interest. Since I’ve had many books shipped to me damaged in transit over the years, I always pack the books I send out on the assumption that they’ll be treated with the same gentle care the gorilla gave that American Tourister suitcase:
So everything I mail usually has at least bubblewrap around the book in a bed of packing peanuts inside a sturdy cardboard box.
However, the test seems to have concentrated on overnight and express service. I would like to see if trhere are any differences with the way Media Mail or FedEx Ground. (Remember that FedEx Ground used to be Roadway Package Systems, one of the most incompetent shipping companies ever. They’re improved a lot since the RPS days, but as far as I can tell, they’re still not up to the level of regular FedEx. (And DHL no longer serves the American domestic market.)
Supposedly one with the long lost “spider pit” footage. I’ll believe it when I see it, but that’s probably the second-most-famous missing footage from an existent film, behind only the missing reel of The Magnificent Ambersons.
You may remember this post on how a lot of science fiction was showing up in the public domain at Project Gutenberg (which was picked up by SF Signal, Io9, etc.).
Well, Greg Bear and Astrid Anderson Bear, his wife and daughter of Poul Anderson (whose works were among those put up by Project Gutenberg), are saying that Project Gutenberg screwed up:
After conducting legal research on the LEXIS database of legal cases, decisions, and precedents, we have demonstrated conclusively that PG was making incorrect determinations regarding public domain status in many, many works that originally appeared in magazine form. The Poul Anderson estate has been able to get one work, “The Escape”, that PG had firmly declared to be public domain, removed from their site. PG’s original reasoning was that since the magazine it appeared in had never actually filed for copyright, the work was unprotected. “The Escape”, printed in 1953, was the first half of Anderson’s well-known novel BRAINWAVE, which was published and properly copyrighted the following year.
However, even if ‘The Escape” had not been published as a novel, it would have remained under copyright protection until 1981 (28 years) and been eligible for copyright renewal. Authors of that era, and Anderson in particular, were very aware of the need to renew copyrights, and typically meticulously kept their copyright protections up to date. Copyright law for works created more recently is much easier: life plus 70 years. (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 1998).
(snip)
In general, Project Gutenberg is doing a tremendous service by making available texts that have truly long since fallen out of copyright, but they are clearly overstepping their original mandate. They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection. Authors and estates need to aggressively take back what belongs to them.
I would imagine that Project Gutenberg may very well be hearing not only from the estates of Philip K. Dick and Leigh Brackett, but from lawyers for the still-very-much alive Frederik Pohl, Norman Spinrad and Jack Vance…
Winter’s Bone
Directed by Debra Granik
Written by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini (based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell)
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Lauren Sweetser, Shelley Waggener, Ashlee Thompson, Isaiah Stone, Garret Dillahunt, Tate Taylor, Ronnie Hall
It’s interesting that the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit (which was a very good Charles Portis novel before it was a John Wayne film) is coming out in December, since Winter’s Bone is, in many ways, much the same story. Except instead of tracking down the man who killed her paw with Rooster Cogburn, Ree has to track down her paw Jessup herself, and instead of her paw farming he cooks meth, and instead of justice she needs to bring him back because he put their house up for bond and skipped bail, and instead of 19th century Indian territory, she’s traveling deeper into the 21st century rural Ozarks. But the heroine in each case is just as strong, smart, determined, stubborn, and winning.
The movie has been getting enthusiastic reviews across the country, and deserves them all; it’s astonishingly good. It’s also set very far away indeed from the places and people that Hollywood loves to focus on. I’ve never been through the Ozarks, but I have relatives who live in the sticks, and the details I do recognize (the trampoline, the dogs) make the rest ring true. The poverty on display here is very different from that of the urban poor, but seems just as bleak and grinding. “He’s cooking meth now,” Ree says to a friend. “They all are” she replies.
Jennifer Lawrence’s turn as Ree is at least as good as Ellen Page’s turn as the title role in Juno, and maybe a little bit better. Not only does she have to find her father, but she has to take care of her crazy, helpless mother, her two younger siblings, cook the food, cut the lumber, and do everything else to keep her family scraping by. She needs every bit of that determination when she goes asking her daddy’s no-good friends where he is, going ever deeper into the back country to question ever-more-hostile members of her own extended family, and she knows when she’s being lied to. The deeper she goes, the darker it gets, as it begins to look likely that not only are they going to lose the house, but that her father is probably dead, and the people that killed him might be just as willing to kill her too. And yet she still keeps going, too desperate and stubborn to quit. Or just too strong. If there’s any justice in Hollywood (I knew, foolish idea), Lawrence will be an Oscar nominee.
Another exceptionally strong performance is that of John Hawkes as Jessup’s brother Teardrop, who starts out as a frightening, scuzzy drug abuser, but by the end of the movie is…well, still a frightening, scuzzy drug abuser, but one with a strong sense of family. “To tell the truth, you always scared the hell out of me,” Ree tells him late in the film. “That’s because you’re smart,” he replies. Hawkes has been in about a hundred things, but this is a career-making turn, and another Oscar-worthy performance.
Director Debra Granik (who co-wrote the excellent script, and of who I was completely unaware before this film came out) turns in direction worthy of her main character: strong, direct, and deeply unsentimental. There was much made of Kathryn Bigelow being the first woman to take home the Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker. That Oscar was, I think, well-deserved. Winter’s Bone is a better film. I’d be astonished if it wasn’t an Oscar finalist this year, as I’m pretty sure that (sight unseen) there can’t be ten better films out this year.
There may not be one.
Here’s the trailer:
And, since I mentioned it, here’s the trailer for the Coen brother’s True Grit:
I’m a big fan of Charlie Stross’ Laundry books. As Geek Cthulhu Mythos British Bureaucracy Spy Thrillers, they hit a lot of my personal pleasure centers, and the latest installment is no exception. Our Network Admin/Computational Demonologist Bob Howard starts off enjoying, for the first time in his career, a competent boss he likes. However, he’s soon sent out to a bit of fieldwork for his ancient, inscrutable “real” boss Angleton, whereupon he promptly bollocks things up, resulting in the death of a bystander and some mandatory leave. Meanwhile, Bob’s wife Mo (with her deadly Erich Zann violin) comes back from a particularly gruesome mission a mental wreck, and that’s before a possessed Russian agent shows up trying to kill them, Angleton disappears, and a top secret document goes missing. And if all that weren’t enough, not only is the clock ticking ever-faster on Nightmare Case Green (i.e., when the Old Ones come down from the stars to eat our brains), but cultists are actually trying to hasten the event.
In short: The usual.
If you liked the previous Laundry novels, you’ll like this one. The plot is compelling, the supernatural elements are darker and more disturbing, and this may have the best ending of any of the laundry novels. (Important Safety Tip: If you’re going to try to sacrifice a Computational Demonologist to powerful, malevolent, otherworldly entity, you better make sure you have your binding spell right…) But the reason The Fuller Memorandum isn’t any better than the The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue is that it suffers from flaws not found in those novels. For one thing, Bob acting like an idiot once is OK, but him acting like an idiot again, in exactly the same way, strains credibility given that he’s a pretty smart cookie. For another, if you’ve read “The Concrete Jungle” and “Pimpf,” you’ll figure out who the villain is entirely too easily.
Still, well worth reading and remembering come award time.