Dwight mentioned this but didn’t blog about it: Former 1968 Palyboy Playmate of the Year Angela Dorian (AKA Victoria Rathgeb, AKA Victoria Vetri) has been charged with attempted murder for shooting her boyfriend during an argument.
What he didn’t mention was that she also appeared on an episode of Star Trek, among other shows. (She even appeared in Rosemary’s Baby.)
Hat tip: Ace of Spades‘s newsfeed.
I try to avoid political topics in this blog (and Facebook, for that matter), because, as someone once pointed out, “Telling someone their political ideas are wrong is like telling a 14-year old girl that the boy band she like sucks. She won’t believe you and she’ll instantly hate you for your efforts.”
But since WisCon’s cowardly decision to disinvite Elizabeth Moon as Guest of Honor over her very mild comments about Islam is so essentially a political story, I covered it over on my political blog BattleSwarm.
I also have some signed Elizabeth Moon books for sale through Lame Excuse Books is you’re interested.
I know it’s already been linked from Slashdot, but this interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley over on Cult of Mac is fascinating reading. It talks about Steve Jobs design-centric perspective, and how it’s lead to every important Apple product. Required reading for anyone interested in high tech, design, or business.
If you haven’t heard, Terry Gilliam is making a NASCAR-themed short film that will premiere on Halloween and then be available free online. Sounds like a ghost story/Sleepy Hollow sort of thing.
A few random observations:
While I do have the Vance integral edition, which he doesn’t, I still don’t have a lot of the stuff shown here. Vance collectors are so fanatical that they make my bibliomania look relatively sane by comparison…
(Hat Tip: Mike Berro)
I can’t believe I linked this before Dwight. Sadly, it appears to be a parody.
Then again, I suspect that a board-game version of The Wire might sell really well. Hell, for all I know, it already exists…
You may have heard about science fiction fanzine Space Squid printing one of their issues on the ultimate form of Dead Media: inscribed in cuneiform on a baked clay tablet. Of these, I think they auctioned off five at Armadillocon.
Being one of the few people in the world with a complete collection of Space Squid issues (they actually told me that Nova Express was one of their sources of inspiration, the poor deluded fools), naturally I had to pick one up, which I did for the munificent sum of $11. (Bidding seemed more brisk for the usual cats-with-wings and dragon-related art items.)
My tablet. Let me show it to you.
Click to gallery-ize, the click again to embiggen. The first picture is of it sitting in its resting place on my mantelpiece, and the other two pics are close-ups of the front and back. (And here’s another Wired story with pics.)
In truth, the tablet (which contains the Kevin Brown story “Hunting Bigfoot”) is actually pretty hard to read, and I’m not sure how permanent the medium is; the clay has a tendency to flake off. Still, I’m sure that some 50 years hence an insane fanzine collector will be paying big bucks for one…
Here’s Matthew Bey’s step by step tutorial on how he created them.
The Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick, Volume 2: Second Variety
Underwood/Miller, 1987
People think I’ve read every damn SF book in the world, but this isn’t even remotely true. For example, I’m still trying to catch up to the works the previous generation of SF readers read when they were growing up. So while I’ve generally read the highlights of their work, I’m still trying to catch up on authors like Henry Kuttner, C, L. Moore, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick.
In this second volume of Dick’s collected short stories, the themes of “what is reality” and “who is human” that would dominate so many of his novels crops up again and again. The title novella (the longest here) is set during a third world war after a U.S./Soviet nuclear exchange, where U.S. forces are only able to hold off the Soviets thanks to the development of semi autonomous “claw” robots assembled in automated underground factories. A U.S. soldier goes out under truce to a small band of Soviet survivors, only to have a little boy tag along behind him, a boy that’s shot on sight approaching the bunker, as he’s one of two known “impostor” claws varieties in human form. In the bunker, our protagonist is told that there’s a “second variety” of impostor, who’s form is unknown. Paranoia ensues, especially when he returns to his own bunker to find out they’ve been overrun by claw impostors. “Human Is” and “Impostor” also question what it means to be human, and how can you tell if you’re really human?
“Adjustment Team” is another Dick story where the protagonist finds out that Reality Is Not What he Thought it Was, being given an accidental glimpse of something adjusting the world. Believe it or not, they’re making it into a romantic comedy starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Because “romantic comedy” is the first thing you think of when talking about the work of Philip K. Dick. (Although “The World She Wanted,” in which absolutely everything goes exactly right for the woman the protagonist meets (because, after all, it is her world) could also be considered one.)
By this point, Dick was already a technically proficient author capable of moving a story swiftly along with a minimum of wordage. The overwhelming majority of stories in this volume come in at 10-20 pages long, and finish long before they wear out their welcome. As with all Dick’s work, none is perfect, but all have their points of interest. Amazingly, every story in this book (according to the notes at the end) was turned out between August 27, 1952 and April 20, 1953, a rate of productivity that was probably only surpassed by Robert Silverberg at the highpoint of his robotic pulpy period. I can only imagine what sort of effect these stories had on the field when they were originally published, and they’re still well worth reading today.
Lovely acoustic version of Devo’s “Jocko Homo”:
This might be a good time to alert you to the new Devo album that came out earlier this year, Something for Everybody, which I quite enjoyed. It sounds like Devo is trying very hard to recapture their classic sound. For other bands this would be cheesy, but given their devolutionary shtick, for them it works perfectly.
I would also provide an iTunes link for that, except Apple’s LinkShare partner is evidently too stupid to work with Firefox…
This entry, here. Evidently publishing some dozen-odd books doesn’t make you “notable” enough.
The deletion discussion page is here.
At this point I would rant about the deletion of my own entry from Wikipedia a year ago by some wrestling fan who objected to the review Howard Waldrop and I did of the Watchmen movie, but that would mean actually caring what the usual Wikipedia idiot zealots think. It’s simply wiser and easier to ignore them entirely.
