Which is to say that so far they’ve found none. Which hasn’t kept other people from jumping the gun. You might want to wait on reporting that until you find, you know, actual bodies. Especially since the tip was reported to come from a “psychic.” This would keep distant outlets like The Sydney Morning Herald from reporting it as fact.
Is “police investigating report of mass grave” just not sexy enough for the news cycle these days?
Don Webb alerted me to this long interview with legendary musician/ composer/innovator Brian Eno on (of all places) Al Jazeera:
Lots of fascinating information on his background, such as collecting music from American airbases near his childhood home (and only later realizing that almost all the music he collected was from black musicians), having a grandfather who lived in a converted church repairing early mechanical musical instruments (“they were the synthesizers of 1910”), and the birth of ambient music coming from listening to a too-quiet record of harp music while he was convalescing in the hospital.
At one point he talks about trying to figure out what an Arab song he heard on short wave was, and it turns out to be Farid Al-Atrache’ “Hebeena Hebeena.” Since it was slightly hard to figure out what he was saying (Ferry De La Trash?), I tracked down a YouTube version of the track:
So about a year after I really needed to, I’ve finally got around to reorganizing my office. And by “reorganizing,” I mean “putting away a bunch of crap so I can actually put the books I’ve already bought in their proper places on my shelves.”
One obstacle to this is all the Nova Express review copies that have piled up around the place. It hasn’t (quite) been a decade since The Fanzine That Walks Like a Semiprozine published its last issue in 2002. In 2003 I was unemployed most of the year, in 2004 I bought a house, and in 2005 I took a 10 day trip to the UK to see London and the Glasgow Worldcon, all things that ate up both time and money required to publish something that lost a good $1,000-2,000 an issue. (I contend that Nova Express is not in fact dead, but merely resting and pining for the fjords. It’s been my intention to resurrect the beast as some sort of online zine, but life has continued to get in the way.) Despite its non-published status, Nova Express has continued to receive review copies of books (proofs, ARCS, hardbacks, paperbacks, you name it), the more interesting of which I’ve put aside until I had time to bring the zine back to life, though I have reviewed something here every now and then.
But rather than let all these review copies continue taking up valuable bookshelf space, I’ve decided to do two things:
Rather than spend time listing each and every copy (there are a lot), I’m just going to list the authors. If you’d like to review something by them, let me know. Keep in mind some of these are almost a decade old, but what the hell, better late than never.
If you want to review any of these, drop me a line.
A certain Rupert Talbot Munch Sr. of Falls City, OR is working on a sequel to the classically bad Manos: The Hands of Fate called Manos: The Search for Valley Lodge.
They’re going to be filming in El Paso, just like the original.
Wait, it gets better: The film stars Jackey Raye Jones, who played the little girl in the original Manos: The Hands of Fate. Plus a character played by Joe Warren, the son of original Manos director Harold Warren.
The kicker? Tom Neyman is back as The Master.
And yes, there’s a poster:
You could say that making a sequel to one of the worst films ever made is a bad idea, but frankly, the entire enterprise is beyond your puny mortal concepts of “good” and “bad”…
And speaking of Manos, did you know that there was a puppet theater adaptation, Manos: The Hands of Felt?
Bad: Smoking meth.
Much Worse: A teacher and a principle.
Get a Rope: In the principle’s office.
I root for the Texas Longhorns over interstate rival Texas A&M, but man, you can’t help but be inspired by this story about Aggie softball slugger Meagan May’s recovery from a near-fatal car accident to play again in less than a year. Especially given this awesome Borg-queen photo of her:
Dwight sent me this link to Yugoslavian communist monuments. Almost all of them look to be taken from a book by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers called Spomenik (“Monument”).
While some are awful crap, others have this cool science fictional “decaying monuments from some long-vanished race of Intergalactic Overlords” feel to them. This one looks like it’s the control bunker for the Doomsday Beam:
Of course, don’t forget that Tito, being a Communist, killed plenty of his own countrymen, though several orders of magnitude less than his fellow communists in other countries.
“Thor is failure as a movie, but a success as marketing.”
It’s comforting to know that Howard and I weren’t the only ones disappointed in it.
Time for another roundup on my serious mental illness the latest acquisitions for my professional science fiction library since the last time I listed them. All these are first edition hardbacks in Fine condition, with Fine dust jackets, unless otherwise listed.
Books that I have available for sale through Lame Excuse Books are marked LEB (though a few of those titles won’t appear on the stock page until after I send out my next book catalog).
I’ve included scans of a few of the more uncommon titles.
