Zombie Lapdance

My daily bicycle commute takes me through the parking lot of Highland Mall, a shopping opportunity that has seen better days. One sign of the decline is the swarm of birds near the entrance to the parking lot.

At sunset today, I went to watch the thousands of birds circle in to land at their sleeping roost, and I captured this video.

In this closer video you clearly hear the swarm chirping and flapping wings.

In this enhanced night-shot, you can get an impression of how tightly the birds pack the trees.

All the little white spots are bird eyeballs.

I was certainly not the only gawker. It’s not as popular as the bats, but the swarm attracted about a dozen cars, all slewed haphazardly across white lines in the expansively empty parking lot, while in the distance, teenagers whooped and hollered near the mall entrance.

Old ladies and birding enthusiasts came over to where I sat with my tripod to see what I was doing. I asked the first one if the birds were swallows and she looked kinda shocked, as if I couldn’t remember the name of the president. She politely told me that the birds were purple martins. Which, she added, were also swallows.

You might be familiar with purple martins through the giant, multi-storied bird houses on poles that people build for them, which are invariably colonized by sparrows.

All afternoon I had been working on tricking out my digital camera so it would have longer battery life. What I did to it was too brutal, too ugly to qualify as modding.

Basically I drilled holes through the case and soldered wires directly to the battery leads. I realize that there is a power-supply plug for this camera, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t have anything that would fit the tiny little hole.

That poor camera is beginning to look as shot-out as my bicycle.

But longer battery life made it possible to shoot a time-lapse video of the purple martin swarm settling in for the night. None of which you can really see at youtube resolutions. Ask me to show it to you the next time you see me with my tablet PC.

The downside of this amazing spectacle of nature, which butts up against our culture’s greatest institution of consumerism, is all the poop.

I got tagged twice just taking this picture.

The first time it rained this summer the field of bird poop curdled and took on the odor of a wet dog. A dead wet dog. You can smell it for three blocks in every direction.

But that’s just part of the wonder of nature.

On the way to a coffeeshop last Sunday, I thought I would avoid the inflated prices of cafe pastries by buying lunch at a grocery store along the way.

I ended up blowing about $15 on various tastees at the MGM South Asian grocery, tucked into a hidden corner of a strip mall (Burnet&Richcreek).

Note the Virginia Brand Spice Soda at the lower right. The third ingredient is salt (after carbonated water and sugar). It tastes like a spicey masala explosion. It’s as close as ‘pop’ can get to being a savory meal. I couldn’t stop drinking it, despite it’s absolutely revolting taste.

A last-second impulse purchase, the "kulfi" bar hit the spot in the texas heat.

Real cream and milk with chunks of pistacios.

The bagged snack food tasted a lot like the "spice soda" only crunchy.


Which is to say they were delicious. What a difference being solid makes.

The two-minute noodles are exactly like the familiar ramen, only with a "masala tastemaker" instead of a soup-base packet.

It also brags on the cover "Taste Bhi, Health Bhi." Is that supposed to be a pun?

I had thought "Grandma’s Fish Pickle" would be a lot like the pickled herring of my own cultural background. I was wrong.

The fish bits were hard and stringy, like a good beef jerky. The taste is like a drywall screw in the eye, all salt and sesame oil and tumeric and vinegar.

I should make a diet scheme that is all Indian pickles. Two bites of this stuff will give you enough flavor to last the next twelve hours.

El Rincon Michoacan (@Airport&51st) used to be pretty run down and sketchy, but some young and ambitious management has cleaned it up. They make some truly delicious salsa from smoked peppers.

The tamale plate came with sauce-soaked pechuga (chicken breast) and tamales wrapped in banana leaves. The tamales were some sort of flat and rubbery bean and corn thing. In the absence of further instruction, we used it as we would a tortilla.

As we entered the restaurant, a couple of old ladies on their way out informed us that the gorditas (little fatties) were particularly tasty. And they were.

Just remember not to refer to the "gordita plate" as "mi gordito plate." Because the latter is pretty dirty.

A friend of mine told me that he realized, in a sudden flash, that early readers of Batman must have identified him with the Ku Klux Klan. This shocked me, because once he said it, the similarities of imagery became unavoidable. He’s a masked vigilante who wears a cowl, a word used in only two contexts in the English language: Batman and the KKK. They both use the term "knight." And they share the same MO with the same attitude toward those they punish ("Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts."). After all, is there that big a difference between dressing up as a bat and dressing up as the ghosts of confederate dead?

I first started this blog because I wanted to explore this topic. Then I did a little googling, and I decided that I didn’t want to be the first person on the web to open this particular can of worms. After all, it’s a serious thing to call someone a racist, even if they’re imaginary. But RevSF has got about a zillion articles about Batman right now, so I’ll just throw out one more.

So did readers look at Batman and see him through the lens of the Klan? 1939, Batman’s debut, came at a waning moment in the Klan’s political power. And the Klan’s big cultural apogee came more than a decade before with Birth of a Nation, a silent film that had probably not been in theaters for a while. A young reader of comics at the time may have had no more than a passing acquaintance with the KKK as something that their parents talked about.

If there’s a smoking gun linking Batman with the Klan, it lies in Batman’s roots in pulp detective fiction. Noirish Detectives and the Klan both see the world as a cesspit of declining values and predatory villains, and only a few brave men are angry enough and righteous enough to stand against it (the angry men can’t halt the tide of villainy, but it does justify whatever they want to do). Because of this dovetailing agenda, in 1923 the ground-breaking detective magazine Black Mask published an entire issue devoted to tales of the Klan, a series of stories that every independent observer agrees was a glorification of KKK exploits.

But that’s a pretty weak connection, and personally I’m not convinced.

And why dwell on perceptions that may or may not have occurred three generations ago? There have been a lot of writers and illustrators for Batman between then and now, and it’s unlikely if any in the modern era have drawn much inspiration from the KKK.

The problems the Batman franchise has with addressing race are the same as every other crime-fighting series from "CSI: Miami" to "Cops: Miami." This is America after all, and you can’t talk about crime without talking about class without talking about race. From a political standpoint there’s no question that "crime" is a code-word for race (look up The Southern Strategy for more on that).

If Batman has a rogues gallery that’s suspiciously free of non-whites (and Italians don’t count), to the point of being super-white (Mr.Frost, The Joker, The Penguin, etc.), it’s because you can’t have a rich white guy in a pointy cowl beating up folks of color at anywhere the rate of the police (in Austin the Police use force on blacks at a rate 7-times higher than white dudes) without it looking pretty bad. So we’ll just have to assume that Gotham, despite being a stand-in for Chicago, has essentially zero people of color. If you can believe that.

Sitting here thinking about Batman, the institution of crime-fighting super-heroes, and cop fiction in general, in my heart of hearts I can’t help but think they’re all racist. But it’s a vague semiotic racism, one that’s unlikely to do more than indulge some power fantasies, or at the very worst compel someone to vote Republican.

So it’s okay to like Batman.

I mean, c’mon, that movie kicked ass.

The local Austin weekly, The Austin Chronicle, just put out a "Science Fiction" issue.

Now, I’m not such a spring chicken that I take the publishing institution of so-called "alternative" weeklies seriously. After all, I have published in two of them, including The Austin Chronicle. They are not journalism, and they are not fertilizers of bohemian creativity. They are ad revenue wrapped around restaurant reviews and movie listings (which are also ads).

Perhaps this is some sort of re-hash issue, like a sitcom clip show, because they didn’t seem to do any actual research into the Austin Sci-fi scene. There’s only the usual suspects, an interview with the Alamo programmers, brief mention of Graham Reynolds (which seems obligatory in every issue), and a couple of inane essays about "why zombies don’t eat each other" and somesuch.

There was also the obligatory article on local theater’s take on classic sci-fi radio: Intergalactic Nemesis, written by our favorite buddy, Jessica Reisman, who has published right here in revSF, as well as a novel and other less important accomplishments. Reisman was only quoted twice, and the second time the writer inserted explanatory brackets four times. I’m guessing that Reisman used the term "FTL" and the powers that be over at the Chronicle thought that was too nerdy.

Now, I love Reisman’s work, and I enjoyed Intergalactic Nemesis the first two times I heard it, but as the most celebrated product of the Austin local theater scene it’s pretty pathetic. Beating this ninety-minute production into the ground with repeated performances and constant promotion completely misses the point of vintage radio drama, which is: YOU CAN MAKE NEW EPISODES VERY QUICKLY!!

They would come out with a new Buck Rogers episode five times a week, but Salvage Vanguard Theater has been trotting out Intergalactic Nemesis for TWELVE YEARS now?!?

Even now, Decoder Ring Theater in Canada is producing comparable product that is every bit as funny as Nemesis on a weekly basis, which puts the hullabaloo in perspective.

So basically I’m crabby about all the fuss and no sequel in the works. Could you get right on that, Jessica? Thanks.

But what really chaps my mighty thews about this Chronicle issue is the complete lack of local scene reporting in what is ostensibly a local paper. We’ll forget for a moment that they didn’t mention Space Squid or the win a Wii contest.

That’s because I keep forgetting to send the local media comp copies.

But where are the local writers? We must have, what, ten sci-fi novelists in town? Including first-time novelist Patrice Sarath, who deserves some breathless reporting from the local papers.

Then there’s the local Armadillocon which is coming up soon.

And this very website, a veritable powerhouse of geek culture, which is 50% based in Austin.

And the influential writers groups!

Ah, hell.

I wasn’t expecting much from the Chronicle anyways.

Here at Space Squid central headquarters, we constantly monitor the world media for any mention of Space Squid-related subjects. It’s exactly like that scene in Watchmen where Ozymandius watches his giant wall of TV montiors.

It’s the only way to keep our fingers on the pulse of everything squidly. For instance, here’s a video of an autopsy of a giant squid.

You should now consider yourself informed.

This week I was pleased to find that the closest grocery to my house sells this sort of thing:

There was a cheap bag of frozen beef dumplings and dipping sauce, so no longer would I have to limit myself to the paltry handful of dumplings in your average appetizer plate:

The best find was the tube of "Korean Brand Mini Chubb Cured Meat Product."

It tastes much like off-brand luncheon meat. Only with Korean spices. And kinda spongey. Look out SPAM, you have some competition in the weird nationalistic processed animal meat department.

I ate it with tortillas and some of the wasabi mayonnaise.

The wasabi mayo tasted like a creamy green dominatrix kicking me in the lungs with her stiletto heals. And then in the sinuses. And then in the lungs again.

I will never use another condiment again.

During an early morning search for a hangover cure, I indulged in the Texas kolache.

My relatives who are Czech know of kolaches from the home country, but the Texas version is unrecognizable to them. Basically it’s a mediocre dinner roll wrapped around some sausage or jelly.

A particularly Austin innovation has hybridized the breakfast taco with the kolache. You can now buy kolaches stuffed with scrambled eggs and chorizo.

Another visit to the local roach coach provided me with this lovely combination of a carne guisada taco (which just means stew meat as far as I can tell) and a chicharron taco (on the left) which means marinated pig skin:

All this for about $2.75. The chicharron was a little rubbery to the teeth, but it quickly dissolved into fatty goodness on the tongue.

At the Indian grocery I had bought a pack of instant noodles. It’s obviously ramen noodles, but these are made of lentils and the plentiful spice packets are a highly nuanced blend of Indian spices.

Delicious, but suspiciously healthy-tasting.

And when I want to get myself tweaked for doing work, there’s always the mate ("Too Much Coffee Man Magazine" says: "It’s like getting hit in the face with a bag of wet hay"). I’ve taken to drinking most of my beverages with jaggary these days.

Jaggary is an Indian sugar source, lightly processed, with a consistency halfway between honey and brown sugar. It has a musky, fermented odor, and when added to a beverage, imparts an extra depth of flavor, much like the difference one finds between whisky and scotch.

Somebody should remind me to make some wine from this stuff. You can buy it by the sackful.

We’re about halfway through the Mushroom Men fiction contest and the entries are already coming in. I anticipated that they would all pop into my inbox the night before the deadline, so it’s a relief to start work on slush reading now.

There’s been a lot of blog coverage of the contest, so thanks to everyone who pimped it.

But I don’t want anyone to think that their odds of winning have gone down. The field’s still wide open, people. I’m still waiting for that mysterious stranger to come riding into town, sweep away the competition, bed Miss Kitty, and ride off with a brand new Wii.

That could be you.

Near the intersection of Airport and Lamar and nestled into the side of karaoke studio parlor, the Austin International Market looks a little like an old-timey general store.

On the sign it advertises Asian, African, and Caribbean food.

The last time I was in this place was back in 1998, during my first exploration of Austin. I’m pretty sure that the stock of the International Market has not turned over since then. All the canned food is dusty and the price tags have faded to the point where they had to re-write the prices with ballpoint pen.

When you walk in, the place has that particular smell of an ethnic grocery, pungent and foreign. There’s a certain point as you walk the aisles when the retail stock merges into the stockroom and you realize that you’re in someone’s private space.

After some hunting I found some stuff I felt was interesting.

The chinese toffee came in a series of cubical boxes with dice-mimicking packaging. The primary ingredient was "millet gel" and it tasted hard and stale.

The videos were a buck each, and they were such a special find that they warrant their own entry. So stay tuned.

The jar of pickled melon was an adventure in and of itself. I bought this particular jar because it was the only one that wasn’t permanently bonded to the shelf by congealed schmutz.

There was a noticeable ring of dust on the ridge just underneath the cap. When I opened it up, the jet-black melon goop bubbled suspiciously.

The label said that the expiration date was "one year" but did not specify which one.

As brave as I am, I put only a small quantity of the pickled melon on my tongue before spitting it out.

It tasted much as I anticipated.

Like rotting melon.

With mushroom flavoring.

For those of you busy at your laptops. cranking out an entry for the Mushroom Men win a Wii contest, you’re probably thinking to yourself, "if only I had a video or something exciting like that to work from!"

Well, we got that. Here’s a MUSHROOM MEN TRAILER to wet your creative appetite.

Patrice Sarath will be reading and signing for her exciting new novel Gordath Wood this Saturday at the Austin Barnes and Noble, Arboretum location. You might want to get there a little before the 1pm start time to ensure that you get a good seat.

I shamelessly stole this pic from her blog. I hope she doesn’t sue me.