Just for the record, I would like to note that I am not a 53-year old homeless Florida would-be bank robber. I am also distinctly paler of hue.
Also, while I have never robbed a bank in the past, and have no plans to knock over a bank in the future, I assure you that if I did, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt it unarmed. After all, as Al Capone once noted: “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
According to this, a box set of all the MST3K Gamera films is in the works.
In celebration, here’s the Gamera Theme Song:
News that Venice is flooding (no, really), reminded me of something I sent around to all my friends before I put this blog up: The trailer for the totally cheestacular Sharks in Venice:
A movie that combines a bad Jaws rip-off with a bad Da Vinci Code/National Treasure ripoff, bad CGI, bad music, a bad Baldwin brother, and a bad Johansson sister. (Evidently Neil Connery was unavailable.) It checks it at an abysmal 3.0 on the IMDB; you almost have to try to get a ranking that low.
It actually looks worse than Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus:
Much less Sharktopus:
Got to admit that’s some groovy theme music, daddy-o. And before I started writing this blog post, I didn’t even know that Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus existed:
These are great times for bad shark movie aficionados…
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.
Still, I’d be willing to try this. Once.
(Hat tip: Fark.)
I’m not particularly a tattoo fan, but these Cthulhu tattoos are something to behold.
Sherry Black of B&W Books and Billards of Salt Lake City. She was also the mother-in-law of Utah Jazz owner Greg Miller.
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.)
Popular Mechanics sets out to find out, using boxes filled with sensors. There’s no clear winner.
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.)
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
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.
(Hat tip: Bill Crider. )
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…
From Doc Mars, whoever he might be. (Besides, of course, another insane Jack Vance collector, of which there are many, and who tend to make my own Vance bibliomania look relatively mild in comparison.) It includes a lot of covers and interior spot illustrations. And I must say, that the outfit in that Virgil Finley illustration for The Houses of Iszm is rather fetching…