Zombie Lapdance

Don’t forget about the picture contest. This is your chance to get neat prizes and win the respect you deserve.

Now, for some more random internet stuff.

Japanese inventor improves on women.

Don’t worry, they found the 100,000 breasts.

They also found water on an extra-solar planet. Of course this planet is a hot Jupiter, which means that it’s about as conducive to life as a smoking-hot meat grinder, but it’s a start.

Japanese zoo workers stage an extremely unconvincing rhino attack.

And across the sea in China, there’s an extremely unconvincing rickshaw driver.

It’s been a month and a half since I last looked at the slushpile (I know, less frequently than I promise in the guidelines), but all the correspondence and all the submissions have been properly attended.

Right now this issue is running an acceptance rate of 1 for every 70 submissions. I anticipate that number falling significantly, because there are several promising stories awaiting the scrutiny of the other editors.

Plus I’m advocating getting more content than usual. At the moment we have four cases of legal paper in my closet at home, and I’ve just ordered some immensely cheap toner for our beloved copier Sanjay2. I feel that warrants adding another couple pages to our skanky zine.

In this last pile of slush there were only a couple of stories that involved abduction of rednecks, down from the usual rate.

I also noticed that when a story bored me in the first couple of paragraphs (SPACE SQUID is a publication that must never publish anything boring) and I skipped to the end, there was invariably a climactic sentence that used the word "matter". As in "and nothing else mattered" or "and that was all that mattered." I noticed that happened about eight times this evening.

SPACE SQUID prefers climactic sentences with much more specificity.

Now would be a great time to submit to the squid. I’ll probably be bored through the end of the year, with nothing better to do than read.

How many of you think you really know Austin? If you’ve never been to Austin, the answer is probably not so much. If you’ve lived in Austin for any period, you’re probably insufferable about your expertise.

I was cleaning some unwanted files off my harddrive the other day, and I came across all these photos I took of the Austin area right after I got my digital camera. There was still a bit of novelty about free instant pictures, so I snapped a shot whenever my wanderings about town brought me to someplace weird.

I’m making them into a contest. The winner will be whoever most accurately names the most locations corresponding to these images. Since some of these are gimmies, and some are pretty obscure, there will be a sliding scale of precision (should only one person enter, then the answer "Austin" would be sufficient basis for winning).

I’ll give out several prizes, to multiple winners. You will have your choice of one of these violent Mexican videos:

Or the Derek J. Goodman novel, Beliel Rose:

To enter, you will have to be a registered RevSF user. So go to the registration page, fill out the form and wait for the moderator to approve you. Then send me a Personal Message(PM) with your photo quiz answers.

1.)

2.)

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8.)

9.)

10.)

This friend of mine was telling me that there was an animatronic LBJ down at the LBJ museum and library, and I was all like "You’re totally high, there’s no animatronic LBJ," and she was all like "I ain’t high. And he tells jokes."

Well, we went down there yesterday (it’s a free museum, no reason not to go) and it turns out that there is indeed a robotic LBJ.

And he does indeed tell jokes. We decided that if he suddenly started climbing the fence to get at us, we would completely freak out.

The museum had surprisingly little biographical content about LBJ. Most displays focused on things that happened about the same time as LBJ lived, but not actually in proximity. Like Dustin Hoffman or Twiggy, who probably never had a significant influence on the Johnson administration, but they have an entire wall to themselves at the museum.

There was also a lot of space program content, like this moon rock:

I was a bit starstruck, even though it was just a rock it was the first definitive alien artifact I’ve seen up close.

They also had this model of the Mercury 7 astronauts:

It’s like a photograph, but more rubbery.

I would also recommend the laser lightshow spectacular. It’s ostensibly about the quest for space, but mainly it’s a darkened room with swirling laser patterns while the speakers blare 60s psychedelia music like "Age of Aquarius." The show is hands down the most amazing museum exhibit I’ve ever seen, and also probably the least educational.

So my super-cheap MP3 player went out of commission a while ago. Towards the end it was held together with a rubberband. Then, one day, mid-MP3, it just stopped working.

This may have been connected to the time I dropped it in the bucket of bleach water and then shook it out until it worked again. Or maybe ten months of constant use in a bakery was too much for it. Or maybe it was just cheaply made.

So I ordered another ebay super-cheap Chinese media player, one which had four-times the capacity for slightly less money (my co-worker Johnny Motard predicted that in another five years they’ll be a hundred times as powerful, hook up directly to your brain, and they’ll be mandatory).

But it didn’t work, so I had to send it back. So I’m without my podcasts at the moment. I went to Target to see if I could get a cheap interim player, but they were all about eight times less value than the cheap ebay alternative (presuming that the cheap ebay alternative ever actually works).

I had no idea how sucky my life was without podcasts. Over Thanksgiving here at the bakery I peeled and cored about two-hundred pounds of apples, all in excruciating non-entertainment. With the media player my mind was engaged, pink and vibrant. Without it, I was like one of those super-max prisoners who slowly eat their own hands.

Radio hasn’t been much use. Public radio in Austin is dominated by the super-sucky John Aeilli. Listening to his morning radio show is like listening to marshmallows on a chalkboard. He makes me want to eat his hands. But that wouldn’t shut up his inane pot-choked ramblings that he does between every single song, even though they’re probably two different versions of the same song.

God, John Aeilli sucks so bad.

But then a miracle happened. As I was swinging the dial between KUT and KMFA (the classical station), somewhere around 89.9 FM there popped up this micro station.

There were never any call letters, it just announced that it’s the Genesis Communications Network (GCN). Every show is a symphony of crazy. It’s the ideal programming lineup for every Ron Paul bumper-sticker loving, pot-smoking, chem-trail spotting, libertarian survivalist hippie with a gun.

This morning we listened to a show where a "doctor" warned everyone of the dangers of breathing gas. His website is GassingAmerica.com.

The shift before there was a show that sounded like the world’s longest crazy answering machine message. It sounded like he had simply called up a tape player somewhere and didn’t stop talking about the "Obama fascist corporate state" for an entire hour!

There was a guy from AnotherUntoldStory.com who did a five-minute monologue about how gun sales are up in America post Obama election because everyone knows that there’s a Muslim-communist-socialist-pogrom on the horizon.

But the best thing about this station is the commercials. They advertise gold of course. And then there’s also the Alex Jones site PrisonPlanet.com, and PepperSpray.com (apparently pepper spray is the perfect Christmas gift!), and a company that sells heirloom non-GMO seeds in five-year supply bundles so you can be self-sufficient after the complete collapse of civic infra-structure, and an ozone machine that cleans the impurities from everything you own, and survivalist gear suppliers who actually use the phrase "survivalist gear" in describing their product, and what has got to be the worst-designed website in history: "LearnTheSecretToYouth.com".

Yeah, it’s all sheer schizophrenia.

But it’s better than John Aeilli.

I’ve been talking about it for a while, and the parts have been sitting there on my desk for months, but last night I finally did it.

I put a permanent 12v LED lighting system on my bicycle.

I realize that this puts me at the far edge of what is considered socially acceptable eccentricity, even by Austin standards. But I figure that in this crazy world, where 70,000 Americans die every year because of automobiles, that a little bit of extra nighttime visibility can’t hurt.

And neither can ground-effects. Man alive, I love me my ground-effects.

One of the things that was slowing me down was putting together a blinker circuit that would make the lights flash and thereby conserve a bit of battery power. But the amp draw of just the blue-LEDs was enough to blow out the transistors in the circuit, and rather than lay down the cash for a power-relay, I thought I would just go with the steady light for a while.

The circuit enclosure is in an old sandwich meat container and fits up underneath the seat.

Here’s the front light cluster. It’s a couple pieces of Lexan with white LEDs in between and sealed with aquarium silicone.

The back lights are much the same, but the red LEDs are an automotive cluster that I bought off ebay.

And of course those wonderful ground effects. Another purchase from a Chinese ebay retailer. Intended for use on much cooler vehicles than the one I have.

I ran one of these strips at Maker Faire off 8 AA batteries for ten hours and it was still pretty bright, so I figure that with normal use I might not have to recharge the system more than every other week.

I’ve already biked down to the Office Depot with the lights on, and nobody’s shouted any comments. I’ll let you know how the world reacts.

When my mom visited, she asked if I, like other folks my age, spent time just surfing the web. So as not to seem uncool, I did just that.

Here’s a link to some Japanese guy who’s working very hard to keep Japan’s title as weirdest place on earth.

Here’s a cute animal from Indonesia, and finally, an article for everyone who complains that there’s never any happy news.

Happy now?

Back when I was visiting Chicago, I had some modestly interesting food experiences. From a Thai restaurant I ordered some tastefully arranged strips of duck:

Those ducks are as tender and delicious as they are cute.

The restaurant was apparently famous for their charred beef salad, which is like a normal salad, but with beef and spices.

We ate the meat by wrapping it in the lettuce like a taco.

Nearby where I was staying was a Lebanese grocery and bakery. I asked the lady behind the counter for one of every kind of baclava they had in stock.

Notice that there are no duplicates. I would not be so crass as to pick one that was better than the others however. They were all flaky and sticky with a variety of stuffings of nuts and sugars.

From the same grocery, Vimto:

Proving that other cultures and countries do indeed have a pretty good handle on the concept of "Orange Crush."

Back in Austin I was exploring the freezer section of the Fiesta, and I noticed that not only did they stock the cuisine of the non-English speaking world, they also had the weird foods from Britain. Here’s what was labelled "Irish Breakfast Bacon:"


They tasted like a cross between bacon, a pork chop, and a salt lick.

I also bought at the Fiesta a bag of Carnavalitos. This is probably the only time in the Spanish language when a food beginning with the letters "carn" does not contain meat.

The Miller High Life is in the photo expressly to demonstrate scale.

Speaking of bacon, from the candy store on South Congress I bought this tin of bacon-flavored gum.


Yup. Tastes like bacon.

A few months ago I attended the Austin Asian American Film Festival. Yeah, I know, I’m a jerk for not writing about it sooner. It was an intriguingly curated little festival (I used to put in several film festivals a year, but this one will do me for a while). Basically there were two standout films, Still Life by Jia Zhang Ke, and No Smoking by Anurag Kashyap.

Still Life was highly reminiscent of the films of Robert Bresson, filled with slow, beautiful images and a highly controlled and contrived soundscape of silences and clamorous machinery. It takes place in the monumental landscape of the three gorges dam and the human turmoil that follows the slowly rising waters. The little guy who thinks he sounds like Chow Yun Fat is a must for any film buff.

No Smoking was the biggest eye-opener, because it was another compelling piece of evidence for the existence of the Bollywood auteur. As an ex-film-student I’m always on the lookout for those tantalizing tidbits of personal expression within a standardized film industry.

This movie is a stunning exercise in surrealism and quirk. Our hero is John Abraham, giving the best performance of his career as a hyper-cocky chain-smoking scruff-faced executive. When he decides to quit smoking to save his marriage, he’s led into an underground world of gurus, magic, and midgets.

Anurag Kashyap also wrote the screenplay for Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (which I have reviewed previously).

When my mother was in town this month I rented it again so I could show her what a truly jaw-dropping Bollywood production really was. Watching it again I could see the similarities it shared with No Smoking, the touches of surrealism with the waxworks and Princess Diana.

To get the full Kashyap experience, I also netflixed his film Black Friday. Because this film is about the 1993 Mumbai bombings (which Sanjay Dutt was implicated in), the subject matter is particularly relevant considering this week’s tragic Mumbai hotel seige.

It’s hard to imagine a film farther from Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and No Smoking. To summarize this docudrama, a bunch of angry and not terribly bright men kill a lot of innocent people in revenge for an anti-muslim riot. Then the Indian police hunt them down, primarily by putting their mothers and sisters and daughters in jail and doing brutal, unspeakable things to the screaming women. Usually in front of a bunch of people.

Kinda similar to American anti-terrorist policy, but less subtle.

From what I’ve gathered, this is in the new "realistic" trend of Bollywood movies. You can tell the word "realistic" is an in-joke, because in the recent Priyanka vehicle Fashion, the characters use that word ironically several times.

Fashion manages to take the Hollywood rags-to-riches formula and de-distill it out to three hours of fashion-model strutting and secondary character narrative. It’s realistic because there aren’t any obvious dance-sequences. Instead there’s super-dynamic runway walking/turning/posing to throbbing fashion-model techno-beats.

Although a beautiful and engaging movie, what makes Fashion remarkable is the straightforward tackling of homosexuality (apparently fashion designers are sometimes gay), as well as particularly prolific use of the English language, approaching 60% of the actual dialogue.

The main complaint I have with Fashion is the suggestion that modelling is somehow hard. At one point Priyanka is on the catwalk and her coach shouts at her through the bullhorn "You forgot to turn! Put your mind back into it!"

Also it suggested that fashion shows were somehow very important. There’s no attempt to actually explain the purpose behind looking like you have attitude in front of a buncha strangers with cameras. But then beauty is its own reward.

The Austin Chronicle wrote a couple of articles about the forthcoming Mushroom Men video game that we’ve been promoting here at Space Squid for months. They have an article about the creative team at Red Fly Studios and about the music within the game.

Mushroom Men is coming out next week, available to all you out there in Wii land, and already the grand-prize winner of the Space Squid-sponsored Mushroom Men writing contest, Christopher Oatis, is having fun with his prize:



Christopher is relaxing and having fun playing video games so YOU don’t have to.

The prize of the video-game itself and related schwag go out post-game-release.