Zombie Lapdance

It’s been a hundred degrees here in Austin for about a week now, and there’s no end in sight. Hardly a moment has gone by that I wasn’t drenched in sweat.

At this time of year I always muse on sweat. People always talk about how special humans are because we have the upright body posture and the opposable thumbs and the symbolic language.

But hardly anyone mentions that only humans are capable of the full-body sweat.

I mean we’re mostly hairless because of the full-body sweat, and everyone seems to like that part.

Now full-body sweat is either because our big, fat brains add too much heat to the core body temperature, or because we used our temperature tolerance to run around killing things in the punishing African heat.

Either way, when all is said and done, I would prefer to live in the cold.

My food-frakking deputy, Julia, and I took a four-day road trip up to Portland last week. Sometimes I forget just how huge America is. Basically there’s absolutely nothing between here and there, and it just goes on forever.

For instance, there’s this giant rock in the middle of Utah.

Just one rock among many.

I also found out that Salt Lake City is actually a large metropolitan area. I had always assumed that there was something on the order of 20,000 Mormons out that way. It seems that there is a non-trivial quantity of Mormons, which is a disconcerting thought.

But I insisted that if we were going to head out west, then I needed to stop by the Roswell UFO Museum and International Research Center.

Here is an authentic, un-re-touched photo of me and Julia standing together in front of the museum. Notice that the street lamps have alien eyes on them.

Most of the museum was just newspaper clippings and crazy rants pinned up on the wall. I remember visiting the museum in 1998 and they had a clipping of Carl Sagan interviewing the guys who did all the crop-circles in England. That’s gone now, replaced by an exhibit that claims that crop circles always take place near holy sites, and that high-frequency rays can boil the stalks causing them to bend over (which is a completely different effect apparently than just crushing them with a board).

There was not the slightest hint of skepticism in the museum anymore. I guess everyone was too busy dissecting those aliens to brook any dissent.

I did break from the museum proper to take a look at the research center. The first section looked a lot like a normal library with video viewing rooms and hardback books.

And then there was the spooky hallway.

And then the room stacked with binders filled with newspaper clippings of the strange and the occult.

Here’s a binder labeled "cattle mutilation" that for some reason has an article about a dog-faced boy.

Is there a connection? I’ll never read enough of the UFO material to tell.

I pushed through last night and I read through about two months of slushpile backlog. So if you’ve sent in a submission before right now and you haven’t heard from me, then something’s wrong and you should give me a ping.

Maybe I should keep better tabs of these things, but it seems that of the 70 or so stories I read, about a third were of the "alien invasion/abduction/red-neck sodomy" variety. None of them made it past the first round of reading. And other than cartoons, nothing of that particular variety has made it into the zine since the first couple of issues.

I’m also coming to the conclusion that I don’t particularly like the whole "flash fiction ending in a zinger" variety either.

But I also don’t like flash fiction that doesn’t really go anywhere, so I don’t know where that leaves everyone.

I recently talked about Things to Come, a classic 1930s sci-fi film based on the H.G. Wells novel. It was so good that I then sought out The Shape of Things to Come, the 1970s sci-fi film that’s not so classic and not so obviously based on the H.G. Wells novel.

Maybe it’s supposed to be a sequel? However they justified giving it the name they did, it looks like what it is: a cheap attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars.

Like most Star Wars rip-offs, this movie fails to achieve the immersive production design that made Star Wars so awesome. But there’s some charm to The Shape of Things to Come, despite the obvious low budget (they have a "land-transporter" that is simply a jeep).

And by charm, I am mainly referring to the robots.

This robot is cruising with attitude.

This robot has Jack Palance’s back.

These robots are walking through a field of cattails. Or space cattails or something.

These robots are about to kick some hippie ass.

And this robot is putting the moves on a hottie.

So yes, nowhere will you find better role-models than robots.

I just wanted to point out that this blog has now surpassed one point five million "visits." That’s equivalent to everyone in the Greater Austin Metropolitan area looking at one of my blog entries. Which I am sure is exactly what happened.

I’ve been meaning to blog about the Austin artist known as Palfloat, but I’ve been putting it off because I can’t imagine doing him justice. He’s a friend of the Space Squid crew, and we’ve been meaning to publish some of his cartoons, like Worldsalad or Fargield, but we just haven’t made it happen yet.

I was going through his entirely user-perplexing website, making notes of the really funny bits to share with you (the readers of Zombie Lapdance), but after the list hit about twenty or so, I realized that you will have to explore the material yourself. I’m going to show you one example to spur you to visit the site and dive into the world of Palfloat.

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

There’s not just the paintings of course (many of which can be viewed free of charge at Lava Java and the attached subshop). The Palfloat experience stretches through guerilla gift bags, multimedia, and music.

There’s an over-arching theme and logic to this work. Cafeteria food, ET, coloring books, and He-Man all play a big role.

Palfloat is like an eight year old, constantly experimenting with epistimological boundaries. Does paint go with your sister? Does cereal go with Kenny Rogers?

Of course the answer is yes.

The author of the recent fiction piece on RevSF, Camille Alexa:

is going to have a reading at BookWoman on Thursday. This is a Space Squid-Endorsed event. Here’s the info:

A reading by Camille Alexa from her new collection, "Push of the Sky"
THURSDAY, JUNE 4th @ 7PM
Book Woman:
5501 N Lamar Blvd, #A105
Austin
(512) 472-2785
www.ebookwoman.com/

Let’s talk about my trip to the MT Asian Supermarket. That place is like nirvana. Walking in the door, first thing I see is a desert that looks like a bar of soap, "Soft Sweet Rice Cake."

Luckily it didn’t taste like soap. It just tasted like a sweet wad of gooey rice.

I took the opportunity to buy a pound of bacon pork, only two bucks at the butcher’s counter!

My attempt to stew it into a fatty pile of tender pork filaments went poorly. I’m guessing to get the proper texture I would have to stew it all day.

At a completely different Asian grocery I visited recently (yes I visit Asian groceries a lot), I bought a cheap dried pollack snack.

Imagine if melba-toast were made out of fish. The cat liked it. And heck, I liked it too, but after it sat out for a day and stopped being crispy it lost it’s edge.

I also found this "Squeez" ice cream bulb. The ice cream is a hard, frozen ball inside the foil packet, and then you melt it in your hands and suck out the mushy ice cream through the nozzle.

This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever had. I’m going to eat it every day. It’s like having a milkshake in space.

I had another cold-treat sucking experience at a Mexican grocery. This frozen treat was eggnog flavored!

If Christmas came in July, it would taste exactly like this.

These fried wheat pellets are duros, but by another name and shape.

That is to say that they are greesy and crisp. And what else would you want from a snack?

At a taco cart near Cameron and Capitol Plaza, I got this taco lengua. I’ve been putting off getting the tongue meat. I just didn’t want to be that guy who gets the weird organ-product. But considering that I’d been eating head meat this entire time, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Of course it was tender and delicious. And it did indeed have the distinctive tongue flavor.

There’s a Tex-Mex restaurant near the end of my block. It’s one of those places that charges ten bucks for nachos. And everything is deep-fried. I’m beginning to realize that Tex-Mex is to Mexican food as chow mein is to Chinese.

Here’s some of the leftovers. The nachos are wedge-cut tostadas that have been hand-smeared with refried beans and baked with cheese.

The cylinder is a "Mexican eggroll." What exactly makes it Mexican you might ask? Why it’s filled with taco meat instead of anything that could be construed as a vegetable.

And then it’s deep-fried.

With my food-frakking deputy Julia, we got some Vietnamese sandwiches from Tam Deli. It’s the sort of food you would get if you combined the technology of French bread with the vivid daring of South East Asia. Here my food frakker deputy displays her calimari sandwich.

I mentioned a little while ago that I did some re-decorating of my tropical fish tank, and I showed a picture of one of the two gouramis in the tank.

So you can imagine how excited I was to find cleaned and frozen gourami at the MT Asian supermarket.

Aside from being several times as large, and headless, they bore a striking resemblance to my pets. I’ve never eaten an animal that I’ve kept as a pet before.

And here’s how I did it:

I found a recipe online which I adapted (it’s as much a staple of food in SE Asia as it is a staple of aquarium stores here). I cut several angled slashes into the side of the fish, and rubbed in a marinating unguent of garlic, chili sesame oil, salt and pepper. Then I fried it on high heat.

It tasted extremely good. This might be my new favorite freshwater fish. Better even than walleye. My food-frakking deputy, Julia, agreed that it’s a wonderful-tasting fish.

I was worried that it would be tough to eat. As a kid I would sometimes eat sunnies that had been scaled and fried whole, but this had not been scaled and it was much smaller than anything I’ve eaten (other than smelt or sardines). If I had caught a fish this size I would have thrown it back.

But the flesh peeled away from the bones lickety-split, and the scaled skin was particularly delicious and crisp.

It’s left me wondering how some of my other pets might taste.

I think the cat is technically free-range organic.

As you may know, I have a number of google alerts running to keep me appraised of any occurrence of people talking about me. Which they don’t do nearly as much as I would like. So many of the google alert hits are not about me, but about things that only sound like the could be.

For instance, I’ve watched the devlopment of the Space Squid game (no relation to Space Squid zine) from simple wire-frame flash where points were scored in "cuteness" to the award-winning game it is today.

Google alerts also sent me links to videos about lapdancing zombies. I don’t particularly like music videos, but I can assure you that I watched every last minute of both of these, linked from Panchorama

and Zombieduck.