This is a two-pack of Hompavo LED Flame Light Bulbs. It simulates having a flickering firelight instead of your outdoor lights for the Halloween season. I’ve been using them since 2021 and they still work fine. If you like that sort of thing for Halloween, I recommend them.
See this?
It’s “Red Light Bulb 9W (60W Equivalent) E26 Base, LED Colored Light Bulbs for Halloween Christmas Party Holiday Lighting 2-Pack.” They’re absolute worthless garbage. Both bulbs stopped working within minutes of screwing them in and turning them on. No wonder there’s page after page of one-star reviews.
All around the world, people hear strange things from the sky. Here’s a roundup of the various “sky trumpets,” booming noises, hums and other things people have no explanation for.
Another purchase from that same private collector, and another case of “I already have this book, but not in this state.”
Simmons, Dan. Entropy’s Bed at Midnight. Lord John Press, 1990. First edition hardback, #93 of 100 signed, limited copies, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued, in a Fine slipcase. Reginald, Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991 33966 (but not this state). Supplements a signed, non-slipcased 1/300 edition.
Lord John Press is an interesting press. They started out as primarily a literary small press (John Updike was a particular favorite), but did several science fiction, horror and mystery firsts along the way, including Stephen King’s Dolan’s Cadillac, which (of course) sold out almost instantly.
About the time Carrion Comfort and Hyperion came out so close together, Simmons (like Clive Barker before him) got tagged as “The Next Stephen King,” and there was briefly a small press frenzy for publishing his work. I think Lord John did fine on this one, but some of the other Simmons titles they did (Children of the Night and The Hollow Man in particular) helped burst the small press bubble in the early 90s. They did too many copies in too many different states at too high price points, with the result that they sat on dealer’s shelves for decades. That, the wild overproduction of Pulphouse, and the unwise shift of Dark Harvest to mysteries, along with the founders of Phantasia Press and Underwood-Miller stepping away, helped dampen the small press boom in the early 1990s.
I will have one copy of the 1/300 signed limited edition of Entropy’s Bed at Midnight in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog, currently in progress.
Stephen R. Donaldson was someone I read back before I collected first editions, and the Thomas Covenant books were ones I read despite disliking the central character.
But I had a chance to grab signed firsts of the second Thomas Covenant trilogy from the same collector culling his collection as the previous Vance, Blaylock, etc. entries. All of these replaced unsigned book club copies.
Donaldson, Stephen R. The Wounded Land. Del Rey, 1980. First edition hardback (“First Edition: June 1980/1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10”), a Fine copy in a Near Fine dust jacket with faint crease down spine, small closed tear at top frotn, and wear at heel and points, signed and dated (“4/15/82”) by Donaldson, with bookmark for the trilogy laid in.
Donaldson, Stephen R. The One Tree. Del Rey, 1982. First edition hardback (“First Edition: April 1982”), a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, signed and dated (“4/15/82”) by Donaldson, with bookmark for the trilogy laid in. Note: While the other two first editions in the trilogy feature numberlines, this one does not. I know that this is not the book club edition (which I also have in hand), there are no pictures of a copyright page with a numberline for this title I can locate, and consensus is that they apparently just left it off.
Donaldson, Stephen R. White Gold Wielder. Del Rey, 1983. First edition hardback (“First Edition: April 1983/1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10”), a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, signed and dated (“5/6/89”) by Donaldson, with bookmark for the trilogy laid in.
The story I’ve heard from a couple of places is that Lester Del Rey’s boss at Del Rey/Ballantine (I’m assuming Ian Ballantine) walked by Lester’s office and asked “Shouldn’t we be getting in the new Donald Covenant manuscript soon?”
Del Rey: “Oh, I rejected it.”
Long pause. “You what?” Keep in mind that at this point, Donaldson was the biggest selling author in all of Ballantine Books.
Del Rey: “Yeah, it was told from a woman’s viewpoint. Books told from a woman’s viewpoint don’t sell to fantasy readers.”
The publisher stood there for a few seconds, then walked out without another word and called Donaldson from his office.
“Stephen, what are you doing right now?”
“I’m looking at the rejection letter Lester sent me.”
“OK, from now on, I’m your editor. Send me the manuscript.”
My relationship to Great Northern is weird. I liked what I heard off Remind Me Where The Light Is enough to buy it, listened to it a lot for a while, and then just…stopped. I can’t even explain why I stopped. It’s a mystery, like the waning of a pestilence. That album is superbly crafted Shoegaze-tinged pop that sounds bit like Tamaryn.
“Radio,” an earlier effort off Sleepy Eepee, is a different sort of beast, like Mazzy Starr crossed with some buzzy low-fi band. Singer Rachel Stolte has a compelling voice.
Despite not listening to them for years, YouTube occasionally offers them up in my feed. A good thing, too.
They evidently toured with Smashing Pumpkins this year, and are supposedly working on a new album.
I saw the Peter Gabriel concert at the Moody Center in Austin on October 18. It was the third time I’d seen Gabriel perform live, and he put on a good show. We had tickets facing center stage in the mezzanine section, and they were quite pricey.
About half the songs are off the forthcoming I/O album, while the other half are from other parts of his career (“Sledgehammer,” “Solsbury Hill,” etc.). His tour ensemble was a mixture of old familiar faces (the always excellent Tony Levin, Manu Katche and David Rhodes) and new (cellist/vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who was very good).
They had an interesting multimedia setup with projection surfaces on different stage elements that they could move, as well as close-up cameras for projecting on either wing (and occasionally the giant circular moveable hanging surface that was the centerpiece of the set).
I think the best song of the concert was an absolutely killer version of “Digging in the Dirt,” which had a nasty, funky, bass-heavy sound to it. There’s not a version with great sound on YouTube, so this will have to do:
They also did an extremely good version of “Biko” as the final encore.
Here’s the set list, which seems to be constant across venues.
I think the last two shows of the tour are in Dallas tonight and Houston Saturday, and overall prices are a bit cheaper than the Austin show. It’s well worth catching if you’re a Gabriel fan.
As for the Moody Center, the sightlines are very good, the concession prices are exorbitant, and the seats are too small and not particularly comfortable.
