Zombie Lapdance

The winners of the Mushroom Men story contest are getting one last flurry of swag. Aaron DaMommio, author of "The Reply of Margarita Amanita," just blogged about the Mushroom Men figurine that arrived.

The whole whirlwind of media tie-ins that was SPACE SQUID #6 is just about over, so I’d like to thank Gamecock Media, Red Fly Studios, and especially SouthPeak Interactive for all their kind consideration in working with us.

So we’re hoping to go to print with SPACE SQUID issue #7 at the end of the month, to coincide with the Staple! zine expo. Once again we waited until the last minute to buy a table, and once again they sold out before we got our act together. I mean, geez, they’re in an old movie theater and there still isn’t enough room to squeeze in little old Space Squid.

But the issue is coming together. We’ve got the content and quite a lot more comics than we usually do, which I’m pleased with.

Ad prices are going up after this issue, so now is the time to buy ads for this and future issues. The current price is $20 per quarter inside page. If you consider that you’re buying a quarter page of paper real estate that’s guaranteed to pass in front of the eyes of at least 1200 of the most elite human beings on Earth, then it’s the best bargain you’re ever likely to see.

So if you’ve got a book or a blog or a business or a personal vendetta that you want advertised, send me an email: squishy ((aht)) spacesquid ((dot)) com.

The closest grocery to me is a Korean market, so I don’t know why I don’t go by there more often.

In the last run I got these roasted chestnut snacks:

When I first picked one out of the bag, I thought it had a chocolate coating. I was surprised to find that it was actually the stiff chestnut shell. The meat inside is a nasty dry paste. I bet it was much better when it was hot and fresh.

The chocolate wafer cookies however, were exactly like I would have expected.

They tasted like chocolate-dipped waffle cones. I ate them pretty quick.

The "Soda" candies also tasted pretty mundane. Not like soda at all. Just a regular old hard candy.

Whenever I go into an Asian grocery, I always check for Chef Chow’s Hot and Spicy oil, and then I check for bulk boxes of Hello Boss canned coffee.

Well, I almost never find them, but in the drink section I found a beverage called "Pocari Sweat."

It’s an ion supply drink, for those of you who don’t think you have enough ions in your body. At first I thought, "Ha! What an odd translation error! They have no idea how unappetizing sweat is, do they?" Actually, it does taste like sweat. And grapefruit.

Moving briefly to South Asia, here’s a snack that’s some sort of fried cookie/cracker thing. Sort of like a rosette, and sort of like fried chow mein noodles.

And now for the third culinary tradition, I present to you Goya brand ham croquettes. When God made pigs, he meant for them to be diced and breaded.

I like to think that the Goya food company is named after the painter.

In the ever-expanding search for Austin breakfast tacos, I visited La Casita, a Mexican restaurant on Anderson. I say Mexican, because from what I have gleaned, it serves food largely in the Monterrey style.

My food frakking partner chose a breakfast plate called the divorciado or something like that. Presumably because the fried eggs are served on either side of a heaping pile of carne guisada.

Behaving precisely the way one would expect, I ordered the dish with the name I had never seen before. Machacado de huevos.

According to the internet, machacado is strips of dried beef. It’s made in the region around Monterrey because if you hang a cow out in the air around there it automatically desicates to the point of permanent preservation.

And now the fourth and final culinary tradition, possibly the richest and most rewarding of all the gastonomic arts: food courts.

Here’s a food court steak wrap:

The "Great Wraps" place and the cheesesteak place are right next to each other at the foodcourt. Management and workers shuttle back and forth between the two counters, creating food at either counter that’s identical except for the bread product surrounding the meat.

At the food court sushi counter, they offer a "fruit ice."

You can see from this photo that there’s watermelon cubes, banana, and diced pineapple. If you’re particularly learned in the ways of Japanese cuisine, you will notice that it’s all topped by red beans and tapioca pearls.

What is less clear from the photo, is that all that fruit is piled on top of a heap of shaved ice. Not icecream, as the lady behind the counter stressed to me, just plain ice. I was instructed to stir it all together. This made a soupy, icey mess that was too chunky to be a fruit smoothy and too fruity to be a snowcone.

Devouring that pound of slush and fruit dropped my core body temperature several degrees.

So my birthday was yesterday, making me almost a decade older than my teenage self ever really thought I would be.

I spent the day largely in bed, eating popcorn and drinking beer. My Netflix instant viewing option started working just this week (either because I started using my auxiliary laptop or because the DSL got fixed when the phone company came by), so I gleaned Netflix for the best, most cathartic birthday movies I could find.

Klaw, in his blog, has compared the Netflix instant viewing selection with the dollar DVD bin at Walmart, but there’s some good stuff if you’re willing to dig.

Last Boyscout
Although technically released in the 90s, this is a great example of 80s action flicks. Bruce Willis’ plays the "rumpled private dick with a storied past" character to the point of parody. Because it’s a Tony Scott film, every indoor space is packed solid with artificial fog. And the dialog is just plain silly. But there’s gruesome violence and macho posturing, which is all I really wanted.

Dragon Wars
When this came out, everyone competed to be the most insulting about how stupid this was. Sure, it has plot, dialog, and acting one would expect from a made for the sci-fi channel movie, but the giant snake eating L.A. scenes are awesome. The plot is particularly confusing because the evil monster is trying to eat some white chick in order to become a dragon, but to Western audiences the monster already looks a hell of a lot like a dragon. Hint: real dragons have legs.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
A dumb but funny parody of all those tedious music biopics. If only it wasn’t as long as the subject of its parody. There’s a great scene where the hero is tempted to use pot, but his friend warns him against it, telling him that it’s non-habit forming, perfectly safe, and relatively cheap. A chilling lesson indeed.

Sukiyaki Western Django
I pity the poor Netflix copywriter who had to compose the summary for this movie. They did a horrible job. They should have just said "Takeshi Miike’s Western Movie." If the reader doesn’t know what that means, then they probably shouldn’t be watching.

Basically, it’s a standard western, with gunfighters and opposing gangs in a lawless town. But the setting is entirely in Japan and all the actors are Japanese nationals speaking English dialog phonetically. Except of course for Quentin Tarantino, who appears in a knowing wink to the arthouse trash cinema crowd. A salute both to Spaghetti Westerns and the classic cowboy flicks that inspired countless kung fu and samurai movies both. It’s an exercise in cultural synthesis and breaking the fourth wall.

Paprika
It’s disturbing that if you type "paprika" into the google image search, 75% of the returns are about this movie, instead of the spice. Paprika is an anime that trods the same ground as Dreamscape, but with all the surrealism that the latter never could have afforded. The title character is a perky redhead who everyone loves, but she’s actually just the dream alter-ego for a button-upped and serious woman scientist who scares the people around her. As a latent feminist I find much of this movie’s subtext appalling.

Street Trash
This movie was recommended to me by my co-worker Johnny Motard. Ostensibly this movie is about a production-recalled bum hooch called "Viper" that causes the bums who drink it to melt into techni-color goo. This is actually a small part of the movie. Most of it centers around a community of truly vile junkyard bums and the horrible things they do. Some of the scenes are just so appalling that I can’t help but love it. Like the scene where a cop beats the crap out of a mobster, dumps him in a urinal, and then sticks his finger in his own mouth to vomit on his defeated foe. Truly a jewel of a movie.

Le Jetee
The only movie that I watched on actual physical Netflix DVD. Yeah, it’s a classic. I should have watched it years ago when I was a "film student." To fluff out the DVD there’s an incredibly long and boring travelogue film by the same director.

I just got an email with the sender listed as "President Barack Obama." I had a little moment of awe, because I have been getting emails from "Barack Obama" and "Joe Biden" and "Michelle Obama" and some doofuses from the Texas Democratic party, but there’s obviously been a transformation somewhere down the line, a change from SPAM sent by people who want something from me, and SPAM sent by someone who already got it.

I thought about how this was a new moment in history, where the President of the United States could reach out and communicate with millions of constituents on an intimate level, virtually instantaneously.

And then I deleted the email without reading it.

I can only hope that when the President needs to reach me personally that he has my non-SPAM email address. Or that he at least personalizes the subject line a little.

I’ve come to decide that no foodstuff is more versatile than stewed salt pork. Here we see the tender wads of fatty pig tissue slathered inside a taco, with chipotle mayo and cheese.

Here’s a couple of more professionally prepared tacos. From the new taco cart near my place, al pastor and chicharron tacos. The al pastor is the bright red seasoned pork meat at the front, and the chicharron is the glistening pork skin at the back.

From the La Canaria taco cart near 51st and Airport.

These are "sopes" which are neither soap nor soup. They are in fact thick fried patties of corn dough which the cooks flatten with their hands and place on the grill as you order. They are then topped with the standard taco fillings (carne guisada in back and al pastor in front). Sort of like miniature pizzas without sauce.

From the Red River Cafe, chopped steak. The Red River Cafe is the downtown diner that nobody has ever heard of. For one thing it’s not actually located on Red River, but a block away. Plus it closes at the ridiculous hour of 8pm.

I always order chopped steak expecting some sort of amazing pile of stir-fry meat and onions, and then I’m always surprised to find that it’s essentially just a hamburger patty without the bun.

At home I happened to have some hard boiled eggs lying around, so I decided to make some egg salad with that wasabi mayo I’ve had in my fridge for months.

Egg salad has never been so edgy or so cruel.

There’s been a host of technical hurdles overcome, but I’m now back to being a fully-engaged podcast listener. With the old Inspiron 1150 laptop back in operation, I was able to install the Juice podcatcher application and go back and pick up the back broadcasts of many RSS feeds that the jPodder application on my tablet never was able to parse.

I know that makes no sense, but basically it means that after a lot more trouble than it should have been, I now have about 8GB of material to listen through, all the Drabblecast and Decoder Ring Theater and Pseudopod that my life has been missing all this time.

Which brings me to the issue of the 8GB media player that wasn’t.

So when the first super-cheap media player broke down, I immediately ordered a new one off ebay, and I was shocked to discover that I could get four times the memory for about the same price. I was really quite pleased at my cleverness for finding such a good deal.

Then it arrived and it didn’t work. If I filled it up with data, the flash memory would start copying to nothing, creating ghost directories and chopped sound files.

I figured this was just what happens if you buy super-cheap Chinese products over ebay, sometimes they don’t work. So I contacted the seller, who was very polite about it, and arranged to return it to Guangzhou, China, then waited for it to come back.

After a month and a half I checked the ebay listing again to find that the seller had been removed from ebay. So I tried it again, and again I got a 8GB media player that would copy ghost files after a quarter of the way through, destroying a large number of the podcast episodes that I foolishly copied over without backing up.

This time, instead of talking to the seller, I googled the issue. Because if it happened to me twice, then it must have happened to thousands of people already.

Lo and behold, it’s quite the thing. For years now, China has been selling media players to the rest of the world with a hack in the flash memory that makes it look like you have a much larger player than you actually have. Two times in a row I was sold an MP3 player that only had flash chips a quarter of the size that’s advertised.

I suppose I should be happy that they didn’t put melamine in the player, but seriously, China should change its national motto to "caveat emptor." How do you say that in Mandarin?

But here’s the clincher, after removing the hack by destroying the partition and reformatting, it’s actually a nice little player.

It uses all the standard firmware (which I’ve complained about in the past), and all the other functions work just fine (although the minesweeper game still doesn’t have all the buttons needed).

So why go to the extra trouble to create a memory hack just to screw me over by 6GB? Perhaps it’s just part of the Ferengi ethics which is the emerging PRC capitalism. I mean why deal with the paper-tiger of Western Imperialism (which is a real paper-tiger remember) if you’re going to be totally trustworthy?

But I think the answer is in the ebay feedback system. The ebay sellers who sold me the hacked systems are expecting that people will put in their positive feedback before filling up their players with greater than 2GB of data. And if they do, then there’s going to be a month or more of wheedling and finagling before a negative feedback will be registered. And you only have two months to put in a negative review.

That’s why both rip-off sellers had 98% positive reviews and over a thousand feedbacks. Which is impressive until you consider that their feedback is similar to the guy who’s selling the secret to invisibility for $50.

Considering that rip-off seller #2 has sent me word-for-word identical email responses to rip-off seller #1, I don’t feel bad about tarnishing the seller’s reputation.

Previous entry I related the effects that the passing presidential administrations had on my life. In this entry I want to talk about another chain of succession that had an even greater impact on my lifestyle: personal computers.

Recently I managed to blow the motherboard (MOBO as the cool kids say) of my tablet PC. The fix involved dragging out the beyboard and ordering a new computer bottom off ebay.


If you will remember my friend who had the OLPC, she was so impressed by the beyboard, that she made a bunch as Xmas presents for her father and brothers. Of course she emphasized that it was called a "beyboard." Now that it’s receiving some of the acclaim it deserves, I’ll have to start cracking on the second generation beyboard I’ve been thinking about.

But while I was using my backup computer, a Dell Inspiron 7000, Windows 98 machine, I thought that I might was well get my other broken MOBO laptop working. This was a Dell Inspiron 1150, Windows XP machine that has managed to blow out the IDE bus on two different MOBOs. This model has such a notoriously crappy MOBO, that the Canadian government decided to sue Dell. Working motherboards for the 1150 are so hard to find that they cost about as much as the entire machine. That’s why it took me years to put the money down for repair parts. Why throw good money after bad, when I could get a kick-ass tablet?

All this laptop drama put me in a nostalgic mood about all the computers that have come and gone through my life. A nostalgia heightened by a trip to the Goodwill Computerworks store and the attached Computer Museum.

I think this is most awesome museum in Austin. The Blanton can kiss my ass.

Here’s an Asteroid tabletop machine that may have been hand-fabricated.

Here’s a Cray supercomputer:

If you look closely at its stats, you will notice that it’s slightly less powerful than my TabletPC.

The story I heard, is that the computer museum started out as something of a joke. The guy who ran the computer department of Goodwill just started collecting the crappy pieces of donated computers that were too old and low-powered to have resale value, and rather than just throw them away, put them on display.

And then Michael Dell gave the "museum" a big donation, money drawn from all those corners he cut on the Inspiron 1150, and the next thing you know, there’s volunteers, pretty stands, free cookies, and those laminated fact signs you see in real musuems.

Personally I was thrilled to see some models that I used to use.

The Kaypro and the Osbourne were two "portable" computers that my family got as hand-me-downs from my Grandfather. They were portable because the keyboard locked onto the case and they had a handle on the backside. About the size and weight of a commercial microwave.

With the Kaypro I used to play this game "Ladders" that was kinda like DonkeyKong, but it was entirely text-based. Your player image was a ‘P’ ascii character and you had to jump all the rolling lower-case ‘o’s. It totally rocked. The Kaypro was the primary feature of my ‘office,’ a basement closet underneath the stairs. I would write absolutely horrible sci-fi stories in WordStar. I am so glad that those 5.25" diskettes have all degraded.

It was about the Osbourne that my grandfather told me if he ever caught me writing on the floppy disks with a ballpoint pen he would disown me. Nope, never pushed him on that rule.

Although they didn’t have the exact model of TRS-80 that I used to play "Space Assault" and "Megabug", they had an entire wall of the "Trash-Eighties."

So, yeah, stop by if you have the chance. It’s up near the Walmart on 183, and you’ve never seen museum docents so talkative and excited about anachronistic data-crunching.

At this point there’s a break in the narrative for a brief salute to the custom-built 486 that took me through college. Not sure what happened to it. I mainly used it for playing Doom and X-wing Simulator. Yup, Doom is responsible for most of the missed opportunities in my life.

Now, here’s some glamour shots of the four working laptops I now have sitting around.

The little Texas Instruments in the back there, it’s really on its last legs.

Essentially nothing works anymore. None of the ports, even the printer ports. The 3.5" diskette drive only works sometimes. But it turns on, which is pretty good for a twelve-year-old laptop. I wrote 2.5 books on this machine and it’s covered in nostalgic stickers from various Madison coffeshops from the late 20th century.

The laptop on the far left here, is the Inspiron 7000, the one that a girlfriend gave me in the early part of the 21st century.

I lent it back to her for a while as I used the Inspiron 1150. She loaded it with a game called "Marble Madness." During my recent stint with it, I completely failed to break any of her high scores.

Here’s the four laptops kissing.

So, I’m going to divest myself of some of these computers. The Texas Instruments is definitely going to get dropped in a donation/recycling box somewhere. I’m still fond of the Inspiron 7000, if only because it does everything that’s important and absolutely nothing else. While I was using that, I was surprisingly productive. I wrote an entire screenplay in about two days. It’s all the magic of not having access to the internet.

There I was yesterday, standing in the bakery, sheeting Obama cookies and listening to the NPR coverage of the inauguration. The Obama cookies were selling as fast as the cookie decorators could slather on the frosting. After the news program Tuesday night, with my cheerful cookie spiel, we sold out. Then the night decorator freaked out and made several hundred more. Then those sold out. And then in the morning people bought the Obama cookies out of the case with the frosting still wet. Literally hundreds and hundreds of cookies were imbued with that symbolic Obama essence.

As the time for the big change came closer, the bakery became very dead. The boss brought in a TV to play in the seating area, which the four customers in the store gathered around to watch.

At 11AM central time, right after the Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman concert, NPR announced that the Bush administration had come to an end.

I actually felt like a weight had left me. I’ve been skeptical about how wonderful the Obama administration will be, I mean, everyone is thrilled that we finally have a president who condemns torture. How low do our standards have to be to think that makes Obama a perfect president?

As I cracked eggs for pastry creme and listened to the inauguration speeches, I mused about all the other presidents I have known.

I was born in the last few months of the Nixon regime, although my parents always told me that I was born during the Ford administration for some reason. They probably just don’t want to revisit that era.

But the first president I remember with any clarity is Carter. Mainly he was the sad and tired old man who lived inside the TV.

Reagan made quite the impression on my youthful mind. My parents hated him with a passion, and even though I lived in rural Wisconsin, the heart of Reagan country, I distinctly remember their perplexed annoyance with those few people we knew who actually supported the president. Some friends of the family who owned a small farm would name their beef calves after various members of the Reagan administration. We would dig our forks into a steak and gleefully ask dinner guests if they liked how Casper Weinberger tasted.

Bush the senior reigned during my high school days. He meshed well with my adolescent sense of eschatonic melodrama. All through high school I was certain that the world would end before I would have to worry about college.

But the world didn’t end, and we moved on to the Clinton years, which coincided almost exactly with my term in college and the years of bumming around afterward. It’s hard to articulate how different those years felt compared to the Bush eras that preceded and succeeded. It felt like wonderful things would happen without us expecting it. The rise of the computer age, the blossoming of coffeeshop culture, and the explosion of independent film and music was certainly a part of that, but there was also a lot of free money floating around. On numerous occasions I personally prospered from imaginary tech money (read: got very drunk).

But there was quite a lot on the Clinton agenda that I could not condone. The dismantling of the welfare system, the solidification of corporate power, and neo-liberal trade. So even though I voted in every Clinton election, I never voted for the man.

If I had reservations about Clinton, then Bush the younger managed to do everything wrong. It was so incredibly frustrating to sit in Texas and watch the White House deliberately make exactly the wrong decision every single day. They’re like an Aspergers kid told not to put their hand on the stove, but who does it anyway just to show that they don’t have to do what you say. Bush’s insistence on flaunting international law, morality, common human decency, and simple competency contributed to a malaise that drowned this country and my own personal life. I feel like I’ve been dead these past eight years, like I’ve been holding my breath underwater, waiting for this period of darkness to pass over. His policies made me a criminal and a radical in my own country. I committed an act of civil disobedience to protest the war and the Bush administration, and I joined a movement of activists who committed futilely symbolic acts of resistance. And meanwhile the Democratic leadership crawled all over themselves to facilitate Bush’s idiocy and to avoid causing a fuss.

In retrospect I can appreciate the strategic decision on the part of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership not to seek an impeachment or serious investigations into torture or the outing of undercover CIA agents. They were handing the Bush administration foot after foot of rope to hang themselves with. Towards the end, radical politics seemed irrelevant, because everyone in America agreed that Bush was a total fuckup. The ship of public opinion turned in incremental stages until we came to this moment, the first day of the Obama age.

So far nothing has gone wrong. But I’m keeping an eye out.

Everyone I work with at the bakery is a weenie, so whenever a news crew comes in to do a story about whatever Obama cookie we have on hand, I’m the guy who gets to talk to them. But I guess I’m a public figure and all (um, sure I am) so I’ve got the media savvy.

I don’t know how long these links will last, but here’s the news segment posted by KVUE this evening. You only have to watch the first minute or so, the part with me in it. Whenever I see media of myself, I’m always shocked by how much I sound like Grover.

Also, note that I’m wearing my "You may be a zombie if…" T-Shirt.

If this extended text article works, Ms.Tuma obligingly quotes my delirious ramblings about the semiotic transgressions of decorated cookies:

"I think that there’s a special relationship between cookies and what they represent, or the symbolic appreciation of how a sugar cookie can take on the aspects of the things it has printed on it," he says. "Like a Valentine’s cookie in a certain way represents love, and an Obama cookie in a certain way takes on attributes of Obama."

In related news, I’m already sick and tired of the Obama administration.