Just sent out to regular customers last night, with lots of tasty first editions by Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Joe R. Lansdale, Stephen King, etc. Email me at lperson1@austin.rr.com if you would like to receive a copy.
And of course, there’s the main webpage, but I haven’t updated it with the new titles yet.
As opposed to John Joseph Adams, who suggested Gene Wolfe, John Klima, who thought it should go to Gene Wolfe, and Jess Nevins, who said “Hey, how about Gene Wolfe?”
There were also a few other choices bandied about…
Embrace the anachronism arachnoid mechanism.
Postscript: And as long as we’re linking to films about big-ass mechanical things attacking people, check this out.
Since I attended a family event in the Dallas Metroplex over the 1/15/10-1/17/10 weekend, I took the opportunity to do something I had long wanted to do: Visit Larry McMurtry’s Booked-Up book store (actually spread across four buildings) in Archer City.
The drive itself (a solid five hours) completely redefined my “ass end of nowhere” scale. It’s pretty far away from anything else, so only serious bibliophiles need apply.
As for the store itself, there’s a huge amount of stuff for a general book hunter to look for (especially in areas like pamphlets, foreign language books, Texana, literary criticism, and probably several others), but not a whole lot of SF/F/H. I found about $50 worth of stuff, most of it in the general fiction section.
Then I drove to Recycled Books in Denton, and bought $1,200+ worth of stuff (and that was after my dealer discount).
By contrast, I found very little of interest at the main Half Price Books just off 75 in Dallas; all they seemed to have were multiple copies of very common titles. (I did a lot better when they were in a smaller building just down the block, the one with the boat-shaped section in the middle of the store.) Maybe their non-fiction section is more worth browsing.
Below is the list of books I’m adding to my own library, including items from Recycled Books, Booked Up, and a three different Half Price Books. All of these are Fine/Fine first edition hardback copies, unless otherwise noted:
I also found a bunch more books that are going in this month’s Lame Excuse Books catalog.
So, if you’re going to be book shopping in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, by all means visit Recycled Books, which seems to be the best used bookstore in Texas. Visit Booked Up if you have the time to drive out that way, but the SF selection is fairly poor.
The news on this has been out a while, but the release is less than a month away. The album is called Scratch My Back.
I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I’m a huge Peter Gabriel fan. (Hell, I even bought Ovo, which is largely an overpriced bag of suck with a few bright spots.) Peter Gabriel III still ranks among my favorite albums of all time.
On the other hand, when artists I like came out with similar albums (Fish’s Songs from the Mirror and Tori Amos’ Strange Little Girls), they sucked pretty hard. Plus I think the “orchestral versions, no drums or guitars” idea sounds more like a lame gimmick than a wisely-considered choice.
Anyway, for an advanced taste, here’s Gabriel covering David Bowie’s “Heroes”. The orchestration is actually more interesting than Gabriel’s vocals here. It reminds me somewhat of John Adams’ “Phrygian Gates”.
And here’s his cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. Man, Gabriel’s voice sounds awful, much worse than Tom Waits, but without his pitch or power. I sure hope this isn’t the final version. And the original version of that song is great.
And those two (along with Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble”) were the covers I was most interested in hearing.
I hate to say it, but if Gabriel’s voice is really that blown, maybe he should stick to soundtracks. (His soundtracks for Birdy, The Last Temptation Of Christ and Rabbit-Proof Fence were all excellent.)
SF Signal has a Mind Meld up asking people to name their top five choices for anime. I wasn’t asked to participate in this one, but if I had been, my list would probably look like this:
My review of GitS:SAC can be found here. I also have a review of FLCL available, should I be able to find someone who’s willing to pay me for it…
I’ve got a big-ass post on my trip up to Archer City and the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex coming up, so I thought it was high time to engage in some preliminary bookgeeking by listing all the books I’ve picked up since my ginormous post on my library. This may be of very limited interest to people who aren’t book collectors or science fiction fans, but it it will help me document my library on an ongoing basis, making it much more likely that I’ll finally be able to compile a detailed, comprehensive list of what I actually have.
A couple of weeks ago, some friends got in a copy of Drunken Fist Boxing, the sequel to Jackie Chan’s breakthrough film Drunken Master. We thought: It’s a Jackie Chan film, how bad could it be?
The problem is, despite Jackie being featured prominently on the DVD cover, this is not a Jackie Chan film; the only footage of him in the film is flashbacks to Drunken Master, making it the cinematic equivalent of a clip-show. But that’s not the only thing that makes it a ripoff. I would say this is a crappy pan-and-scan video transfer, but there’s actually no scanning: they just chop off parts of the screen. There are times when there are obviously supposed to be two people talking to each other, but one of them is completely off the edge of the screen. Plus the dubbing is atrocious; sometimes you can’t even figure out what they’re trying to say.
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See this?
See Jackie Chan’s face It’s a dirty, rotten LIE! |
Occasionally you get some decent kung fu (when you can see it), and a generic plot about the teacher from Drunken Master training two students, one of which is the very hot Pan Pan Yeung, when an old enemy of the master shows up in town and…look, it’s a sub-Shaw Brothers kung fu flick from 1979. The plot only exists to string together the fight scenes. And the fight scenes aren’t good enough to make up for the general suckitude.
The cheesy rip-off nature of the DVD makes this one impossible to recommend even to serious kung fu aficionados. Avoid.
I got the Norelco Arcitec 1050 electric razor for myself a few days before Christmas.
My old Norelco still worked, but the blades had gotten pretty dull. So, buy new blades, right? A good theory, except:
I was toying with the idea of checking to see if Fry’s still had the $29.99 shaver bin and picking up one of those, but instead I tried my father’s Arcitec 1050x over Thanksgiving, and was pretty impressed with the way worked, especially on my neck (always a tricky area). Plus my parents found a newspaper* ad from Norelco with a $20 off coupon, along with a flyer from Target offering a $20 gift card for buying it (turns out, in the itty bitty tiny print at the bottom of the ad, you had to buy the Norelco Nose Hair Trimmer ($14.95) to get the $20 gift card, but I have been thinking about getting one of those off and on for a while, so I went ahead and got that too.) The heads seem well designed (though I couldn’t figure out how you open the head just by looking at it). And it has a sturdy hardcase for travel.
This is definitely a much better shaver than my last one, and even better than my last one was when it was brand spanking new. In addition to producing a lot closer shave overall, it does a lot better job shaving my neck without producing red chaffing the way my old one did (which was why I had to use disposable razors there). It’s much easier to submerge the head in hot water for wet shaving (and in fact they recommend it for cleaning the heads).
Drawbacks: The trimmer included on it is a little more awkward to use than the one on the old razor. (Then again, since I bought the separate nose hair trimmer (which works OK), I probably won’t be using it as much.) Also, once when I turned it on with the head underwater to clean it, it locked up for a minute. It worked after that, but it was a bit frustrating not knowing why. Though the induction charger works quite well, it’s much larger than just the old cord arrangement, which means it will be a bit more cumbersome to take on trips. Finally, while it does a better job on my neck, it isn’t quite close enough for me to dispense with the disposable razor for those spots.
Let’s call it 4 Stars out of 5
★ ★ ★ ★
*A “newspaper” was a series of large sheets of paper folded together upon which the “news stories” compiled by “journalists” (a sort of primitive blogger) of (usually) the preceding day had been printed as a carrier medium for print advertizing, and which were either delivered to the driveways of subscribers or sold in kiosks around town. Go ask your grandparents what they looked like.
