The June Ansible is Up
June 2nd, 2011Manos Two: Twice the Hands, Twice the Fate!
June 1st, 2011A 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?
Out of the Running for Principle of the Year
May 26th, 2011Bad: Smoking meth.
Much Worse: A teacher and a principle.
Get a Rope: In the principle’s office.
All Hail Our Aggie Cyborg Softball Overlords!
May 26th, 2011I 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:
Yugoslavian Communist Monuments from the Future
May 25th, 2011Dwight 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.
Roger Ebert Wasn’t Wild About Thor Either
May 24th, 2011“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.
Library Additions: January 16—May 24, 2011
May 24th, 2011Time 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.
Digital Camera Bleg
May 23rd, 2011So I have a Kodak Easyshare V803 camera that’s given up the ghost; the telescoping lens no longer retracts.
I like the quality of the photos it took; it was what I used to take convention photos (such as those here, here and here). I also like the Kodak interface, and need a camera that I can just slide into my pocket. However, I fear the pop-in/pop-out lens mechanism is one that is likely to fail over time.
Does anyone have any recommendation for a slim profile digital camera, at least eight megapixals, that’s not too expensive? (I think I paid around $100 for the Easyshare.)
Supper’s Ready (or, Music for an Apocalypse)
May 21st, 2011Everyone else is doing it, might as well hop aboard the “I Don’t Believe In the Rapture, But Here Are Some Snarky Blog Posts” bandwagon. Which brings up the question of what music is best for an apocalypse.
Putting aside the blindingly obvious choice of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I feel Fine),” my favorite apocalyptic song has always been Genesis’ 23-minute long art-rock epic “Supper’s Ready,” the ending of which is a pretty literal description of the rapture. Plus it lets me continue the recent Peter Gabriel trend.
So here’s not one, not two, but four full length complete lives versions of the song. Some of the videos are slideshows and the sound quality varies, but some of Steve Hackett’s swoops and slides still give me chills.
This one is a very rare live concert video of the entire song:
Finally, this is not the entire song, as it includes several different snippets of various songs, but it also features live concert footage and the end of the song:
As a bonus, here’s an animated Tony Banks describing how the song came together:
Crappy TV Movie Validated by Science
May 18th, 2011From Slashdot comes news that the local atmosphere heated up right before the Sendai earthquake, and that such heating can be detected (and presumably photographed) via infrared.
What struck me about this story was that it validates the deeply unlikely premise behind a mediocre 1974 TV movie called The Day the Earth Moved. In it, an aerial photographer takes pictures of desert landscapes using a flawed film that reveals where earthquakes will strike due to a red line running down the middle of the fault zone. Naturally, the pictures reveal that a quake will strike a local town, and the usual race against time ensues.
So congratulations to writers Jack Turley and Max Jack. You were one of those thousands of shotguns firing in the dark that actually hit something.