Chances are, you’ve never totaled your dad’s $180,000 loaner Porsche by driving it through the garage door.
No matter how bad you’ve ever screwed up, take heart
June 11th, 2010New Page for Lame Excuse Books
June 10th, 2010Given TimeWarner’s continued incompetence, I’m slowly pulling all of my website from rr.com over to here. I now have the main Lame Excuse Books page at:
https://www.lawrenceperson.com/lame.html
If you’ve never bought anything from me before, Lame Excuse Books specializes in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and Slipstream first editions, with an emphasis on small press and signed editions. I have lots of books available by the like of Joe R. Lansdale, Howard Waldrop, Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, John Scalzi, etc.
So update your book marks! And it wouldn’t hurt for you to buy a book or ten…
Nebraska jumps to Big 10, the Conference Shuffle, and why not SuperConference America?
June 10th, 2010Numerous sources are reporting this morning that Nebraska is jumping from the Big 12 to the Big 10. (Nigel Tufnel: “Why do that? The Big 12 is two bigger!”) So now the Big 10 will have 12 members, and the Big 12 will have 11. Assuming, of course, that six of them don’t go off to the Pac-10, which would make it the PAC-16.
Of course the move is all about money. (Though I wonder how much having the Longhorns own the Cornhuskers in football contributed to the decision. Going back through the records, I was surprised to see that Nebraska has beaten Texas at football only once throughout the entire existence of the Big 12, and even that year (1999) they were only .500 against the Longhorns, having lost to them in the conference schedule before beating them in the Big 12 Championship game.)
But if it’s is all about money, why stop there? Every conference has its Little Sisters of the Poor for marquee programs to beat up on every year, be it Baylor or Vanderbilt. Why not create a real national power conference, consisting of all football powerhouses? Call it SuperConference America. (I was thinking about SuperConference USA, but that’s too close to Conference USA, about which there’s nothing super, and it’s best not to tarnish the brand before you’re even out of the gate.)
An eight team conference would look like this:
Alabama
Florida
LSU
Oklahoma
Ohio State
Penn State
Texas
USC
Every team there has a huge following and a strong football tradition, and every team there except Penn State has won a National Championship in the last decade.
Want to make it a sixteen team conference and add a Conference (and de facto National) Championship game? Add:
Florida State
Miami
Michigan
Nebraska
Notre Dame
Tennessee
Virginia Tech
one more team (BYU and Washington are two possibilities, if only for regional balance in the west)
Now you have a conference that includes every team that’s ever played for a National Championship in the BCS/BCA era, and every AP champion back to 1991.
Can you imagine the TV ratings of those powerhouse schools playing each other every week? I suspect SuperConference America would earn more than all the other football conferences combined; every week would feature multiple games between powerhouse teams. It would be great for fans and great for the schools included. (And schools left out? Well, no one is really worry about them in the current conference realignment, so why should we?)
Academics? Other sports? Rivalry games?
Yeah, let’s pretend those matter. This is all about money, and great football. But none of those schools are slouches in the academics department. As for other sports, just like Notre Dame plays in the Big East for everything else, the teams in SuperConference America could retain their existing conference affiliations for other sports. And 7 games against SuperConference America foes still leaves space on the schedule for the Longhorns to beat up on the Aggies, for Florida and Alabama to pretend Georgia matters, etc.
This scheme is a sure-fire money maker. No one is going to miss seeing Texas play Baylor when they can see them play Alabama every year. And the only thing anybody has to give up (except for a few wins every year from playing real football teams rather than conference patsies) is the pretense that college football conferences are about anything other than money.
Recent Book Auction Results of Note
June 9th, 2010You may already have noticed that I buy a lot of books. Many I buy direct from the publisher (many of which I also sell copies of through Lame Excuse Books), some I buy from other book dealers, either off the Internet or at cons, some I buy off eBay (although that’s a lot less common since they drove away a goodly portion of the most interesting items by hiking fees into the stratosphere in their effort to turn themselves into an inferior Amazon clone), and a few I buy through auction houses, like PBA Galleries or Heritage Auctions.
Heritage just completed their 2010 June Signature Rare Books Auction, which, while not focused on science fiction the way the The Ventura Collection auction back in 2007 was, still had a number of notable science fiction and fantasy books up for auction, including a few titles made of Unobtanium. The interesting thing is that the three most notable fantasy titles didn’t sell:
- A Fine/Fine (not really, if you read the description, but close enough for this title) first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit failed to attract the opening bid of $47,500.00.
- Likewise, a very nice set of The Lord of the Rings failed to garner an opening bid of $32,500.00.
- Finally, an Ex-Library first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone failed to sell.
I thought the price estimate on the Lord of the Rings set was unrealistically aggressive, as decent sets in dust jacket can be had in the $10,000-20,000 range. Nice firsts of The Hobbit in dust jacket are very rare, but I’m seeing a few copies of that available in the $20,000 range as well. (If memory serves, several years ago L. W. Currey had, I think, a signed Fine/Near Fine+ copy in dust jacket listed for $68,000.)
What does all this mean? Who know? Up at the very highest end of the book market, auction prices can be extremely volatile depending on who’s bidding. Maybe the prices were just too high. Or maybe the big money is sitting out in anticipation of prices dropping due to a double-dip recession.
Your Pricing Scheme is Full of Shaving Cream
June 8th, 2010From Slashdot comes the sad news that the Dr. Demento radio show is leaving the airwaves, at least for those outside the Greater Amarillo Area (it will continue there through the end of the summer). If you’re like me, you probably listened to a fair amount of Dr. Demento (real name: Barret Eugene Hansen) in high school, and occasionally thereafter, though the show has become impossible to find in most areas recently. The doctor’s own announcement only lists six radio stations that were still carrying it.
Happily for the true Dr. Demento fanatic (a description that excludes myself), you can continue to listen to his show on the Internet. That is, if you’re willing to pony $2 a show for low-quality MP3s, or $14.95 a month to join the Demento Online Club.
As a businessman, the good doctor seems to be a fine radio personality. Maybe the Dr. Demento Show has a sufficiently large and fanatic fanbase willing to pony up $15 to keep Mr. Hansen off the breadline (and after 40 years on the air, I’m sure he’s drawing Social Security), but that price point seems pretty aggressive. Given that there are more free podcasts floating around than anyone could listen to in a lifetime, and that for the $180 a yearly membership would run, I could buy pretty much every novelty tune I enjoy off iTunes and have plenty left over, it’s hard to see it as a good deal. Put another way: That’s three times the cost of TotalFark, and Drew seems to do pretty well with that model.
Methinks the good doctor should rethink his pricing structure…
Giant Mechnical Spider
June 6th, 2010I like to think of Futuramen as a “go to” blog for giant spider news. I mean, after all, if I’m not going to do it, who will?
So when two guys actually build a functioning mechanical spider to ride in for $15,000, you know I’m going to be all over that.
And here’s a video of it running around Burning Man at night:
Lots more video here.
(Hat tip: Fark.)
Crank Back Up Those Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories!
June 4th, 2010Of all the wacky modern-day conspiracy theories, I must admit that the one I’ve enjoyed most (next to the shape-shifting reptoids, with which it overlaps) is the one about aliens under the Denver airport. Weird-ass murals, Masonic symbols, out-of-control baggage handling systems, airport runways laid out in a swastika, and decapitated Indians, just for starters. And those are the parts that are all more or less real.
If you haven’t seen those murals (some of which have since been painted over), they really are something to behold. I mean, what air traveler wouldn’t want to be confronted with a giant gas-masked Skeletor standing in an arc of weeping women holding dead babies?
I had also forgotten that the designer of the giant blue demonic horse outside the airport had been killed when part of it fell on him.
But more entertaining than the real weirdness are the truly whacked-out conspiracy theories about the place. You know, the ones with the six underground levels with holding pens for the alien Grays to ship off people to their secret concentration camps on Mars. The great thing about it is the ease with which it’s tied into the other wacky conspiracies about underground alien bases, like the ones supposedly at Dulce, Roswell, etc. You know, the sort of mind-boggling, over-the-top theories that make Bob Lazar’s stories of alien technology at Area 51 and how Grays will use people as “containers for souls” look like models of plausibility by comparison.
Good times, good times.
Well, now comes word that they’ve erected a 26 tall statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, outside it. Supposedly they did this to promote a King Tut exhibit.
Personally, I think they’re just taunting Alex Jones…
If You’re a Science Fiction Writer, Watch This
June 2nd, 2010This is a video of a speech by game designer Jesse Schell called “Big Brother, Video Game Psychology & Obedient Humans living inside Skinner Boxes,” from the DICE 2010 gaming conference, and it’s awesome, scary, and awesomely scary. This guy is throwing off skiffy story ideas the way congress throws off wasteful spending.
Evidently Bruce has the whole thing up on his blog. I’m going to see if I can check out the rest of his talk when I get a chance.
Hat tip: Fark.
Rob Enderle Hits Bottom, Starts Digging
June 2nd, 2010After years of shilling for Microsoft and predicting Apple’s demise, only to see Apple pass Microsoft in market cap, Rob Enderle finally changes his mind and admits that Apple’s success is due to superior attention to detail and producing products people actually want to use.
Ha, just kidding. He says Apple’s success is due to spies at Microsoft deliberately sabotaging Steve Ballmer’s awesome genius. In truth, his column is actually stupider than it sounds, since some of the Microsoft technologies he holds up as being killed off by other Microsoft initiatives (like PlaysForSure) are among those that most consumers hated. It’s a veritable goulash of Microsoft-worship, Apple-bashing, paranoia, historical revisionism, and general cluelessness. In short: vintage Enderle.
In closing, I’ve often thought that companies could use an executive in charge of the “don’t do stupid stuff” department whose job is — wait for it — to make sure firms don’t do stupid stuff.
Like taking advice from Rob Enderle.
(Hat tip: Mike.)
