Zombie Lapdance

Despite months of listening to Silver Street, the BBC soap, I still couldn’t figure out who all the characters were. Luckily there’s extensive online documentation, with character bios, pictures of the actors, and a map of the silver street area.

As one could have guessed from listening to the Bollywood fusion rock episodes, the hottest of the bunch is Roopa:

The woman of my dreams has a new accent.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the pre-colonial African empire of Benin, their flag has got to be the most honest representation of a sovereign state I have ever seen:

This dude I know, Larry Kincaid, he’s got a website up that is filled with absolutely the most disgusting and foul fiction I have ever read. Let me be plain. I have in my time consumed some of the vilest profanity masquerading as art, and this is much worse than any of that. It’s an insult to fiction, and indeed anything created by humans, to even put this in the category of art.

Which is to say it’s hilarious. You should read Hot Fudge Frontal when nobody you know is likely to look over your shoulder to see why you’re laughing.

I’ve got a story out this week with the final issue of Dred Tales. You can read the entirety of Windigo Farm online, so you should get right on it right away.

I would like to make a shout-out to the illustrator (and Dred artistic director) Leo Vasilevskiy. The images of the windigo towering over the barn are amazing Halloween nighmare stuff.

Windigo Farm was one of the first stories I wrote when I began to take short story writing seriously, and it’s taken a long to get it in print. The location is more or less real, and lies about a mile from where I grew up. The main character is an homage to all the old farmers who were the backdrop to my rural upbringing. I’ve always thought that those old dairy farmers could handle anything you threw at them.

While at a party at Lawrence Person’s house, I was surprised to hear him say that the reason the Democrats lost the 2006 midterm elections was because liberals had been calling religious conservatives stupid. Now, I’ve had more interaction with Person since then, and he’s said any number of things that I have given little heed, but this particular comment has stuck with me. I just like the idea that conservatives have had their feelings hurt, and that has altered the political makeup of this country in some measurable way.

So I’ve been making a special effort to not use words like "retarded" or "bag of doorknobs" when referring to creationists or the Bush administration’s foreign policy. (I have however continued to use those words when referring to vegans or people who believe in acupuncture)

It’s been hard. When hundreds of thousands of people have been killed for no discernible reason other than the profit of Halliburton, or when the U.S. economy has been tanked and the budget deficit exploded into surreal realms of debt, you feel like you have the right to throw around some hurtful words.

And sometimes, those words are completely redundant.

This is a photo of a house in the ultra-smarmy-liberal Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin. Word on the street is that the Confederate flag went up shortly after the international food market across the street put up some foreign flags. Although there are many things about Texas I would change if I could, its flag doesn’t have the immediate association with an oppressive slave state, so I don’t have much sympathy with the "My Confederate flag means I’m proud of where I come from" argument.

In the next photo, it’s important to note that the occupants of this house are an old white couple. Every night they take in their signs and their racist flag, perhaps so that vandals can’t run their signs through MS-Word’s spellchecker while they’re sleeping.

I mean, one guy working alone I can see, but how can two people working together not have access to a dictionary or the entire damn internet?

Or perhaps I have it completely wrong, and the reason they’re voting for McCain is that he’s merely a social kinda guy, instead of the most horrifyingly sociable candidate.

As you may recall from an earlier post, I put together a bunch of Space Squid distribution racks.


There were quite a number of these pieces of wood in the back yard, so to thank my housemate for letting me steal some of her scrap lumber, I decided to use some of that material to make a birdhouse.

But how to put that birdhouse up in a tree at 10pm? Which is the proper time for compulsive project construction.

I could either wait until morning and pay a reasonable amount of money to rent a ladder from Home Depot, or I could throw together a haphazard birdhouse erection mechanism.

In the following helpful diagrams, which took longer to put together than the birdhouse hanging contraption, you can see that there’s a length of spring steel (you always pick up the streetcleaner bristles you find broken in the gutters, right? they’re pretty damn useful)…

A loop of rope, prethreaded through the springsteel,is thrown over the tree branch. Then as it’s pulled taught, it pulls the birdhouse into the tree and threads the springsteel through the eyelet at the same time. Then when the rope is pulled from one end, it extracts itself from the springsteel, which is pulled crossways against the eyelet.

It’s not a perfect frictionless world (yet, I’m working on it) so I needed to help the birdhouse rise into the tree with the help of a long stick, but other than that it worked on the first try.

Viola!

The Pronto gasstation broke their hotdog carousel this week. Something to do with the prongs getting wedged between the baskets and the side and breaking the motor. While the get the Pronto corporate technicians working on the problem, this would be a good time to look at some of the other convenience store hotdogs out there.

Tigermart Dog
It’s only a block from where I live, conveniently located to the highway, and open 24hrs. My only complaint is that contrary to their name, you cannot buy tigers there. Not even on order. I asked.

The first time I bought a dog at the Tigermart, it was late at night and the steamer had long since burned the buns to a melba-toast class of stale. The hotdogs had been spinning on the rollers for so long that they looked like scabby and crisp, like George Hamilton’s face. I thought that this would make them much richer in taste, like good beef jerky. They weren’t. They were just hard to chew.

I went again, when the dogs were fresher, and they tasted solidly mediocre. At least Tigermart has those chili and queso dispensing machines. I bet that the Indians of Chihuahua are kicking themselves right now, for not inventing dispensing machines to serve the rest of the Tex/Mex repertoire.
Tigermart Dog: Grade – C plus

C-Mart Hotdog
When I first came to Austin, lo those many years ago, I was scared, lonely, and confused most of the time. My only respite from this impersonal metropolis was my weekly trip to the laundromat. I would carry my entirely earthly wardrobe down to the laundry, and for an hour I wouldn’t have to think or worry. Right next door to the laundry the C-mart convenience store would sell two "Decker" hotdogs for 99 cents. Those dogs would be the best meal I would have all week.

I went by there again, and you know what? THEY STILL SELL TWO HOTDOGS FOR 99 CENTS!

I mean, is there any better food deal in town? I can’t imagine.

The "Decker" brand hotdogs are a little more al dente, they have a little more character than most of the dogs you see out there, so they were a nice change of pace. There’s no steamer for the buns, there’s just a plastic grocery bag of hotdog buns under a sneeze guard. The condiments were pretty minimal; three squeeze bottles for the ketchup, mustard, and mayo (I know what your mother told you, it’s actually okay to not refrigerate mayonnaise. The vinegar gives it a low-enough PH that it retards microbial growth, and the rest of it is oil which doesn’t spoil anyways. So your mother was wrong. Deal with it.)
C-Mart Decker Dogs – Grade A

Seven Eleven Big Bite
Have you noticed how everything they sell at 7-11 is a verb? "Big Bite Hotdog" or "Double Gulp". I think it’s some sort of crude neural-linguistic programming. I just want a hotdog, and I want it fast. Don’t corrupt my mind while you’re at it, please.

7-11 is the Microsoft of convenience store dogs. They were the ones who pioneered the whole chili and queso dispensing machines. Including those reassuring glowing-red temperature readout on the front so those of us with a modicum of a microbiology background know we’re not necessarily going to spend the next three days spouting from both ends of our alimentary canal.

I used to work with this guy who was on the cusp of homelessness, and he used to go to 7-11, buy a hotdog, and then fill up both halves of the box with chili. Keep that in mind the next time you go on an 8-year bender. Also remember that the first spooge from the nozzles, whether it be chili or queso, is going to be a crusty plug of leftovers. So have a napkin ready to catch those chili/queso boogers.

But here’s why 7-11 hotdogs are so awesome. At some point, the convenience store engineers were looking at that huge hotdog rolling machine on the counter, and they thought to themselves, "You know, we don’t have to put only hotdogs in these machines. The food just has to be kinda tubular." And that’s when the great rush for hotdog-esque foods began.

I clearly remember the first time I saw one of the 7-11 hamburger-dogs. It was along a highway somewhere in North Carolina. My first reaction was: "My God, that looks exactly like a turd." Followed by my lasting impression: "My God, that’s genius." It actually tastes as much like a hamburger as anything you’re likely to find along a highway.

I was told by friends that the "Go-Go Taquitos" aren’t necessarily a completely fanciful food. The Chihuahua Indians apparently made taquitos (without the Go-Go verbage). Personally I have my doubts. I think that "Taquitos" have as much cultural validity as the "Pizza Rolls."
Seven Eleven Big Bite and related dogs – Grade A

Since I recently took the time to make fun of my early writing efforts, I thought I would extend that courtesy to my very first non-fiction writing sale.

Back in 2000, I sold a short blurb about a local tech company (which entirely by coincidence happened to be owned by a good friend of mine) to the weekly newspaper of Madison. I won’t make you read the whole thing, but here’s the introductory paragraphs:

I can’t believe that sold. The intro is like an eighth grade social-studies paper. Toward the climax to the article, I added the developers’ pie-in-the-sky dreaming:

This article went to print about a week before Paypal put the kibosh on all that online-currency talk.

I bring this all up now, because BYOND is still chugging away, eight years later, and seems to have a thriving online community of users. I’m told that most of the success can be credited to DragonBallZ fans who have a related game for the BYOND engine.

If I had time to play games, I would totally check it out.

So PBS Now has this poll that asks if Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President and as of this writing, the ‘yes’s are at 62%.

To be perfectly fair, your average dog is qualified to be Vice President. It’s being qualified to be the Pres should the situation arise that’s a bit tougher.

I just dropped off a bunch of Space Squid at Fantastic Fest at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse. They’re in their own periodical rack, which I constructed from recycled materials.

And when I say recycled, I mean that they’re some boards I found rotting the back yard. But you’d be amazed at what a couple of cabinet screws and some spray paint can do.

I’m not sure how the conversation started, but my co-workers and I were talking about how the noseflute is the second worst instrument in the world. After the saxophone of course.

And then I thought, why not have a little noseflute symphony? It could be a fast and easy way to kill an afternoon.

After a little googling, two things stayed my hand. First, even if you buy in bulk, you can’t really get a noseflute for cheaper than 80 cents, which honestly is a bit steep.

And second, there’s already people who have taken the whole noseflute as performance instrument thing way too far already. In particular, the Vancouver Noseflute Ensemble, and the Slappy Feather Whistle Noseflute Ensemble. Both groups have a flashy flash-intensive webpage.

Looking at the Slappy Feather Whistle site in particular gave me a queasy sort of feeling. The entire group appears to be made up of people with the exact sense of humor of my mother. It’s a Garrison Keiller sort of whimsy, filled with deadpan earnest goofiness.

I worked long and hard to get away from the midwest and those sorts of people.

I swear I’m kicking myself for not catching Singh is King in theaters, because apparently I missed this collaboration between two great cultural traditions.

Back when I was buying random CDs from the Indian grocery, I noticed that there were typically two kinds of music available. The bulk of course was soundtrack music, but there were also quite a lot of Bollywood remixes, incorporating drum and bass dancetracks, or electronic bhangra beats, as often as it used samples from Bollywood songs.

Invariably these remixes totally rocked. I interpreted the occasional hip-hop sound samples as a cultural novelty. In the same way that American hip-hop sometimes uses "world music" samples because they seem weird and exotic, I thought that Indian DJs added western samples because they seemed weird and exotic.

Now, I’m not so sure. From listening to the BBC Asian Network, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s an incredibly rich culture of Indian hip-hop that jet-sets between London and Mumbai. Take a look at this music festival page on the BBC Asian Network.

These aren’t provincial imitators of American culture. These are people who are cooler than us, who are merging the classic elements of Indian music with a global culture.

Once again, Snoop Dogg shows that he knows what side of the bread his awesome is on.