An awesome one.
BIRDY NAM NAM – THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.
Thank you Steve Scott, whoever you are.
Month: July 2009
…is a pigeon. Used to smuggle cellphones into a prison in São Paolo. Link.
I am friends with a couple who just had their sixth and seventh children, premature twin boys that they just got to bring home. Preemies are tough, two of them are tougher, and the five kids they already had, ranging in age from 13 to 2, are a bit of a handful as well. So they already had a lot on their plate when, a couple of days ago, the two-year-old accidentally nearly blinded his twelve-year-old sister with toilet bowl cleaner. She’s healing nicely, but the commonest way for their family to spend evenings during the summer is to watch movies together, and she can’t easily do that now. So another friend and I had the idea to get her some audiobooks. She isn’t much of a reader, but we got her the audiobook of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and she loved it. I have since given her Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I’m trying to find other good, recent YA–focusing on that with an SF bent–that she and her older sister might enjoy, especially that is available as an audiobook. Suggestions are welcome.
So I’m paying hosting costs for this site, right? I bought a domain name and everything. I should do something with it. Here’s what I’m doing right now:
I’m in a bar, lurking in corners with my laptop and munching tiny hamburgers. Creepy and delicious! Even more exciting than what I’m doing right now: things on the internet that I have recently enjoyed.
First up, Leonard Richardson’s story “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” just went live on Strange Horizons. The story is precisely what it says on the tin, and the world is a better place for it. I haven’t met Leonard, but he was one of the editors of Thoughtcrime Experiments, which has been pretty awesome every time I’ve dipped into it. I should note that this is a story written in the infernokrusher idiom, the description and discussion of which at the link are supremely entertaining reading in their own right.
Next, a review of Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Nicholas Whyte. He is one of my favorite sources of thoughtful writing about science fiction, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has been one of my favorite SF novels for years. It’s one of those books I buy copies of to give away. Nicholas’s review almost perfectly reflects my own thoughts about the book, except if I were writing it there would probably have been a little gleeful gushing about the awesomeness of people hurtling between planets in jury rigged tin cans. But then I think I’m more of a gusher than he is.
Just got word that there is a birthday party I need to be at.
Exuent.
For the last few days I’ve been playing DVDs of House M.D. as background noise while I work, and just heard the following, from the season 3 episode “Top Secret.”
HOUSE: I haven’t peed in three days!
WILSON:Â You’d be dead.
HOUSE: I’m not counting intermittent drips.
WILSON: You’d be in agony.
HOUSE: I passed agony yesterday around 4:00.
In 2003, September through November, I experienced a frequently misdiagnosed condition that eventually turned out to be Strattera shutting down my parasympathetic nervous system. As a result, I went about 45 days without peeing, except what came out due to over-pressure. And I wasn’t taking a dozen Vicodin every day. So I probably have a little less sympathy for House than the writers intended.
It has since been given new life under new ownership, but earlier this year it looked for a while like the magazine Realms of Fantasy was going to go under. I was sad to learn that SF was losing a short fiction market, in this case one that I had never read. I decided to rectify that.
There was a lot of good stuff in this magazine, but by far my favorite was the story “The Radio Magician” by James Van Pelt, an author I had never heard of. I got online, found his LiveJournal, and started following. He recently announced that his latest collection, titled The Radio Magician and Other Stories was forthcoming from Fairwood Press, and as publicity he would send out several ARCs to anyone who asked, on the condition that the recipients review the book on their personal web space. I jumped on this offer.
It arrived in the mail yesterday, and I’m excited to start reviewing (though I probably won’t get to for at least another week). This is the first time I’ve gotten an ARC to review since I was in high school, and the first ARC I’ve ever gotten for a piece of fiction. Also, this was an excellent way to indulge my bibliophilia without violating my book-buying moratorium. A definite win-win. More on this collection forthcoming.