Zombie Lapdance

The good folks over at Jersey Devil Press were kind enough to make my story "The Monster at Baggage Carousel #3" the flagship story of issue seventeen.

This originally appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine way back in 2005, making it one of my first published, and first written stories. I’m sure that if you were in Australia, you could find a copy of that issue of ASIM in any corner market (or as they call them in Australia "wallabies"), but it was hard to come by in America until now.

With this publication, there are now 14 of my stories posted online. A serious Matthew Bey fan could spend the better part of an afternoon reading freely available Matthew Bey fiction.

If you have something better to do with your time I would like to hear it.

Here’s some more fishing photos. They’re from a trip I took down to Barton Creek a few weeks ago. It took me this long to post them because the fish were so disappointing. Take these panfish for instance.


They’re small even by panfish standards.

The worst part about fishing around Barton Creek is that the water is crystal clear, so you can see all these monster bass, and yet none of them pay you the slightest mind. I heard of one guy who claims to have bounced lures off their heads without a reaction.

The best I’ve done has been to hook dumb little juveniles. I got this tiny largemouth using the same lure that caught that trout last month.

And ten minutes later I hung the lure in a tree. That’s fishing for you.

I put up my official Campbell profile, which I think adequately describes my thought processes involving the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This is also the nomination period for the Hugo’s, so you ought to put your nominations in for that too (if you’re a member of Worldcon, so basically I am only talking to me and Superdave right now).

I’m not saying you should make your nominations exactly like this, but here’s some suggestions for you:
Campbell for Best New Writer — Matthew Bey
Best Fanzine — RevolutionSF
Best Semiprozine — Space Squid and Drabblecast (you can nominate up to five I think)

If you have suggestions for any of the other categories, then I’m open to them.

Two weeks ago I was in Belize. This last weekend I was in Minneapolis. There are many similarities between the two places. For instance, both locations predominantly speak English.

Much like Belize, Minneapolis is filled with tropical flowers. Unfortunately the flowers have to grow in ice.

Did you know that I am the king of the hill?

Worship me, peasants.

A local delicacy, swaddled in gravy. Swedish meatballs.

I really like Vietnamese sandwiches. Unfortunately, it turns out that curried mock duck is, as the name implies, not duck at all. It is wheat gluten.

But the Vietnamese deli had this truly awesome picture by Ayota.

It’s like this Krishna-He-Man fighting a Hanuman-Beast Man in the age of dinosaurs. What could possibly be more awesome?

Actually, this is pretty awesome.

KING OF THE HILL!!!!

Also awesome, this collection of prison shivs in Donny Dirk’s Zombie Den, a zombie-themed bar smack dab in the middle of an industrial neighborhood.

It’s above the urinal in the mens’ room. The ladies might get couches in half their restrooms, but this totally makes up for that.

My story "Snuggle the Dead" is now up on Drabblecast B-sides. There’s slow zombies, and then there’s slow and cuddly zombies.

I read this story at the last Armadillocon, but Norm Sherman does a much more impressive job. There’s all this happy music while Dr. Franz turns the zombies into snuggle-flesh.

As I mentioned at Dillocon, I wrote this story in the space of a couple of days, submitted it to Drabblecast and had it accepted almost immediately (this was long before I was the assistant editor). The whole thing happened really fast. You know, like a car accident.

So it was a pleasure to hear it performed. It was almost like hearing a story that someone else had written.

You should note, at the end of the performance, Norm does me the favor of plugging my bid for the least-deserved Campbell Award in history. The ballots are up, and I have my official contest profile up on the site!

Now is the time to get those associate memberships at Worldcon, just so you can vote for me.

It’s the only way I’ll know you care.

I spent last week bumming around in Belize with Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and some family. Rather than bore you with my vacation photos, I will tell the story of the holiday through the Zombie Lapdance lens. In other words, picture of fish, weird animals, and strange food.

I can’t take much credit for the bonitos that were caught, it was someone else’s gear, but I was perfectly happy to reel in the little fish and take some photos.

Dolphins? Yeah, there were stinking dolphins.

All the locals were amazed that turtles hatched this late in the year. It’s something that folks in Belize pay attention to.

I would like to introduce you to the biggest and ugliest hermit crab in the world.

If you jostled it, the crab would retract into the shell so fast that the sudden jerk would almost knock it out of your hands.

There are a bunch of osprey in Belize.

When we had dinner at the Secret Garden restaurant in Placencia, a starfruit tree hung over the table. This fruitbat only liked the over-ripe starfruit.

It was directly over my head when I took this picture.

The food in Belize was disappointingly normal. The grocery stores contained a lot of American foods, with a few digressions into Salvadoran snacks that I’ve bought here in Austin, like these Carnavalitos and Cheetos-esque snacks.

The Carnavalitos were just colored popcorn with a sugary coating.

The Valentones were also fairly standard, flour chicharrones with lime and chile flavoring.

Don’t worry, they cost $2 of Belizian currency, which in USD is closer to $1.

These lemon wafers came all the way from Sri Lanka.

Julia found these fried plantain chips at the Belize City international airport.

They tasted much like potato chips, in the sense that they were crispy, salty and oily, but they had a hint of fruity flavor that potato chips only wished they had.

At the restaurant off the Placencia main drag I had a seaweed shake.

It tasted almost exactly like a frozen eggnog.

This is all I can show you of the Intenso.

An image of the cookies themselves would be too much for you to handle.

This week I cooked some of the compulsory ethnic food of my people. This years batch of lefse was the best I ever made. It formed into a clean ball of dough.

It cooked on the pan without getting stiff.

And the final product had a supple and flexible texture.

And I couldn’t tell you why this batch was better, because I did several things different. I think it was either the cast iron frying pan (which I had bought for making tortillas) or the shortening that I substituted for the cream. Using trans fats always gives baked goods that professional touch.

When one has a lot of lefse on hand, it’s hard not to create the cultural bastardization of a Norwegian breakfast taco.

The krumkaka iron made its yearly foray out of the closet.

I forced my food-frakking deputy Julia to run to the Walmart and buy some whipped cream.

A Christmas without whipped cream-filled krumkaka would be unthinkable.

The spritz cookie press also made an appearance.

I colored the dough with both yellow and blue food colorings before I noticed that the set actually had a green color. I hope that wasn’t the tipping point of artificial additives that cause cancer. But I guess it’s worth the risk.

When you have plans to fish on the weekend, it gives the weekdays a feeling of purpose. At least the purpose of coming between you and fishing. This last weekend some fishing buddies and I made plans to drive out to Blanco State Park and capitalize on the trout fishing.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, isn’t Texas too hot for trout? Yes it is. That’s why they only stock the trout during the winter, because if it were the summer, they would all die in the bath-temperature waters of your average Texas river. Makes sense, right?

So the day before we went fishing, we took a little side trip to the Cabela’s outlet store to get some tackle. The best part about the store was the aquarium.

It was almost worth the trip, all by itself.

Blanco State Park runs alongside the Blanco River, which is about four blocks from downtown metropolitan Blanco, Texas. A pair of dams make the river deep enough for fishing and swimming. I spent the first part of the day fishing near a dam overflow. A few tiny and skittish sunfish hid beneath a limestone overhang, taking my mealworm bait with only the greatest reluctance.

The water had a mucusy film that clung to my bobber and line. The fish themselves had a similar phlegmy look to them.

One of the sunfish had a dark purple coloration that I’ve never seen before. It almost looked like a cichlid.

After a delicious picnic lunch, we moved a little further downstream to see if we could get better luck. Supposedly the State of Texas had released over a thousand trout in these tiny dam reservoirs, but I hadn’t seen more than a couple of glimpses of skittish little fish.

Fishing for stocked trout in Texas bears little resemblance to the prestige sport of fly-fishing in a pristine mountain stream. After their brief and sheltered life in a crowded stock pond, they have little of the wiliness of their wild counterparts. They are said to bite on pieces of corn, colored marshmellows, and anything that bears a resemblance to the food pellets they have been eating all this time.

There were signs that many anglers had swarmed the area over the weekend, so we were a little worried there were no trout left.

And then the fly-fisherman of our group caught one.

But he had been using an inline spinner.

So I switched to casting a spinning lure, and within a couple of minutes I caught a trout too.

Have you ever seen a dorkier expression?

This is the first fish I’ve caught off a cast lure in a long time.

Not the biggest fish in the world, but certainly pretty.

And then they stopped biting. We talked to a guy who caught his limit of trout the day before, and he said they only bit for a one-hour period in the afternoon that corresponded to our period of success. He speculated that the trout are still on their stock pond feeding schedule. They’ve been conditioned to be hungry at 2pm.

I was hungry by the time I got the trout back to civilization. After some internet research, I decided that I didn’t have to scale it. So it got plopped in a frying pan with a bit of oil and salt.

The skin peeled off in the oil, leaving a surprising amount of delicious trout meat. I’ve had trout in restaurants, but it never tasted as tender and flavorful as this specimen, yanked out of the Blanco River before it even had a chance to enjoy its freedom.

Here’s a totally ridiculous project that I finished last night. It’s been sitting in the corner of my room in an ugly half-finished mess for months, and now it will sit in the corner in an ugly finished mess.

Basically, this is a super-cheap video projector that I made from those optical bits that I pulled out of a discarded projection TV. Plus a broken portable DVD player I bought off ebay for ten bucks, plus a lightbulb.

The crux of the project is the LCD display that I pulled out of the portable DVD player. I bought one that didn’t have a working backlight, because that’s the part that will be replaced by the lightbulb.

I decided to use a plastic bucket for the project frame, because I have a zillion of them lying around the house. First step was cutting a hole in the lid that was roughly the same shape as the LCD panel, and also cutting a piece of safety glass that will insulate the LCD screen from the fearsome heat of a 90watt incandescent bulb (I can’t believe we used to use those things, do you have any idea how hot they get?).

The bolts sticking up are to hold the projection optics. By adjusting the height of the lenses from the LCD panel, the focus of the projected image changes.

Actually, this next image doesn’t show you anything new.

Not sure why I took it.

The finished device actually projects a recognizable, yet dim image.

I could increase the amount of light, or make an LED array that worked off a portable power source, but really, I don’t want to put any more work into this. It will be something neat yet useless in the corner of the next Space Squid party.

I’ve blogged about Tam Deli on North Lamar before, mainly about the Vietnamese sandwiches, but as it happens, the Vietnamese also make a damn fine breakfast.

The ham slice and the fried egg are fairly mainstream, but the pate and the fresh grated vegetables give it that Vietnamese twist.

Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I found ourselves in Lockhart and had breakfast at the Mr. Taco. I ordered the machacado plate, which is dried, shredded beef scrambled with eggs.

Quite the manly breakfast, I thought.

Another Mexican dried beef situation cropped up when Julia and I ate at one of the hip new food trailers, El Naranjo. The place has had a lot of buzz as being one of the best interior Mexican restaurants in town (as opposed to Tex-Mex which is exterior Mexican). The special of the day was a re-hydrated Oaxacan dried-beef taco, which I believe they called tasajo.

It was about twice as expensive as I would expect to pay for a taco cart taco, but it was pretty good nonetheless. The best part about the venue was the cat who hung around the patio, begging for scraps.

It ate everything we offered it, including lettuce and tortilla chips.

Awww!

Last week I had lunch at a diner attached to a Motel on the frontage road. The sign called it "Kettle", and there was no definite article, which should have been a portent of the food to come. The catfish fillet sandwich I ordered came on a ludicrously small bun. It wasn’t a sandwich so much as it was a scale model of a sandwich.

As I left, the only other patron in the restaurant asked if I had been in Austin for long, because she had memories of "Kettle" being a nice place and she wanted to know if anyone else was as shocked by the current lack of nice as she was.

The one positive aspect of "Kettle" was the love tester machine, which confirmed all my suspicions.

I had some weird fish in the back of my freezer for some time, so I figured I should probably eat it.

After a bit of googling, I decided that "River Bard Fish" was a typo and that this fish was actually a "River Barb" or a "Tinfoil Barb," Barbonymus schwanenfeldii. A lot of people keep tinfoil barbs in their cichlid tanks because they grow quite large and can co-exist with potentially aggressive aquarium fish like oscars (so yes, once again, I have eaten an animal that people consider a pet). The Clove Garden has an entry on it, and he talks about eating around the "spines." You see, I bought this fish before I did a lot of research into fishing, so I didn’t recognize at the time the slashing technique that scored the sides of these fish.

That’s the same way those crazy carp fisherman clean their catch. The river barb is somewhat related to carp, so it has the same proliferation of bones that make every mouthful a disgusting mass of so-called spines. The slashes, in theory, allow hot oil to seep into the fish-flesh and dissolve the boniness. So I took measures to cook these fish in plenty of hot oil.

And you know, it worked. I didn’t notice any bones that weren’t in the expected fish skeleton places.

The tinfoil barb tastes pretty good. The flesh strikes a nice balance between flavorful and fishy.

For Thanksgiving I baked a whole bunch of pies, because it’s much more fun if you don’t have to do it. I made a version of a Tex-Mex pie that I’ve been working on, that involves chili, cayenne, and lime.

People seemed to like it. I posted the recipe up at Austinpost.