Zombie Lapdance

First day of the con is coming to a close. I always thought Apollocon was a particularly relaxed affair, so I’m taking extra care to stay stress-free and not peddle Space Squid too much.

I’m also not taking as many pictures as I ought for this blog, so try to forgive their sporadic incompleteness.

Patrice Sarath and Chris Roberson discuss how the semiotic qualities of recorded media imbue their subjects with a heightened appearance of reality. Don’t feel so real at 450 pixels across, do you?

Allen Steele sings for the crowd at the opening ceremonies. His velvety voice leaves women and men alike in tears.

Jayme Blaschke thinks he’s all smooth with the camera.

Let’s all take a moment to hate Space Squid nemesis Mikal Trimm.

I’m slated to moderate two panels at this con, and I’ve already guided the speculative swear words panel through the mire of cussing. Selina Rosen gave an impassioned argument for how those meddling upper-class folks have been foisting spec-fic fake swear words on us to interfere with our God-given right to say "fuck" in literature. Jessica Reisman used the "C" word in public. I kid you not. I blushed.

I just ordered my own personal copy of Gordath Woods by Patrice Sarath. You better get your own soon, because Amazon is nearly out of stock and it’s going fast.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, why would he go to all that trouble to buy a book that he has already read two-point-six times in critique session?

Because it proves the awesomeness of my critiquing abilities.

That’s right, it was my advice that transformed this book from a merely good adventure fantasy about a parallel world of war and magic into a throbbing-hard explosive projectile of literary nitroglycerin. And I have my name on the inside cover to prove it.

"Listen here, Sarath" I said. "What this story needs is more horse porn. Everybody who ever wanted a pony as a kid is going to want a free-based hit off your encyclopedic storehouse of equine expertise."

And she followed my advice, creating a novel of such beguiling grace that no publisher could turn it down.

Now, you could read Patrice’s blog to get a detailed rundown of the novel: the beautiful horse trainer trapped in a parallel world, an exiled Texan fighting to save the woman he loves, and a teenage vixen who must draw on all her skills of horsemanship to escape the desires of a merciless general. But seriously, Amazon is nearly out of stock so you have to buy it now!!!

I have nearly completed my greatest invention yet. It more practical than the Beyboard and more awesome than the bathroom radio or even the LED chandelier.

I have created a device that cools your beer as you drink it! I call it the pint-chiller, but for marketing purposes, let’s call it the Cryo-bev3000.


Here’s how it works. The bucket contains a sub-freezing fluid of ice and saltwater. A DC pump bought off ebay (it’s intended for use in water-cooled PCs) circulates through an umbilical which is attached to a copper coil that cools the pint glass of beer.

Here you can see the guts of the project enclosure, the detachable heart of the Cryo-bev3000.


The extra in-line values you see here are for the two auxiliary cooling coils I have yet to build. After all, beer does you no good if you have to drink it alone.

Here’s a photo from when I was laying out the tubing to see if it would fit in the project enclosure.

The tube that ends in a hose clamp is the siphon. Because the water pump is a centrifugal design (it spins the water to the outside of a cylinder which flings through the out-tube) it doesn’t work on air. Water has to be continuous through the inflow tube to the bucket of freezing solution, so to get the Cryo-bev3000 started, I have to suck on that tube.

As it happens, a mouthful of freezing saltwater is exceptionally unpleasant.

On Saturday I ran the full Cryo-bev3000 assembly through its paces.

The test-run was a success, it lowered the temperature of a pint of Pacifico by almost 20 degrees.

I had a "control group" beer that became unpleasantly lukewarm during the same timeframe.

I did learn though that vinyl tubing doesn’t work very well at extremly low temperatures. It becomes as stiff as Bob Dole and doesn’t actually keep a seal (like Bob Dole).

As I tinker and upgrade, I’m going to have to replace the umbilicals. I’m thinking that I may have to special order low-temperature silicone tubing, like they use in snowmobiles in Antarctic research facilities. Or maybe latex tubing will work well at those temps? I’ll welcome suggestions.

Headline from the Janesville Gazette, a town that is still under water from the midwest flooding: "Carp gathering to mate in United Way parking lot"

From News 3 in Madison:

A couple of enterprising Janesvillians have captured the terrestrial carp-mating on video (1, 2, 3).

I just lost two hours of my life browsing through the photo archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society (although as a wee lad in Wisconsin we always called it the "Hysterical Society"). What is remarkable is not just that they have literally thousands of vintage photos available online, but they’re all meticulously annotated.

I would like to show some thumbnails of the photos they have available, but the society has made it very clear that they don’t take kindly to that. In fact the website states quite plainly that they expect a hundred bucks for every photo that I reproduce.

But the motherfuckers didn’t say I couldn’t reproduce their descriptions of the photos.

They have a fun and weird gallery of some 82 photo-doctored postcards.

"A group of men on a lakeshore grapple with a giant pike. Two men pull on a rope hooked to the pike while two more stand ready with harpoon-like sticks. Another man pours out a bottle of water on his head. Red text in the upper portion of the image reads, "How we do things at Attica, Wis.""

"Photomontage of a dwarf wearing a top hat driving a cart, drawn by a mule, filled with giant eggs. The dwarf is wearing a suit and a top hat. The donkey is being confronted on the road by a giant chicken. A barn is visible in the background. The words, "Caught with the Goods," appear at the bottom of the image field."

There’s also 152 circus photos. Wisconsin, despite being the most banal place on earth, was where the Ringling Brothers wintered.

"Two men sit in a two-wheeled buggy hooked up to zebras, next to a fence near the Ring Barn on the left (which is still standing), with several male spectators. This was the Ringling brothers winter quarters on Water Street."

The images from the Wisconsin State Fair are surprisingly interesting. I had not known that the Wisconsin State Fair has an honorary queen by the title of "Alice in Dairy Land".

"Marjean Czerwinski, the 1951 Alice in Dairyland wearing her crown, takes a drink of milk while winking at the camera. "

Other galleries to check out:
Handdrawn maps of Wisconsin cities from a "birds-eye" view.
Victorian-era vacation photos from the Apostle Isles, which have to be the end of the earth.
And a rather sad photo gallery documenting Angora rabbit breeding in Nazi concentration camps.

Although a mere coffeeshop and therefore not as awesome as a hotdog stand, Texespresso does however have a number of hotdog and sausage related products, in the food case on the opposite side of the Tiramisu slices. Located near the Alamo Drafthouse Village, this is the coffeeshop that most slackers forget about. It is largely empty and quiet with a neighborhood feel which is completed by the signed photos of Playboy playmates.

The "pig in a blanket" variation on a hotdog has always been the meek little brother of a connoisseur’s dog experience, and the Texespresso pig in a blanket is no exception. After microwave warming the fluffy roll "blanket" takes on a cheery and comforting fluff. It’s like laying your head on a pillow with a dryer-fresh case.

But once through the bun, the sausage inside is a cruel disappointment. Hard and small, this tube of meat seems like a joke. Is this supposed to be a pig? More like a hamster.
Texespresso Pig in a Blanket: Grade C

Fiesta Snack Stand

The last thing you see when you leave the Fiesta supermarket on 38.5st is the snack stand. Most likely you are already loaded down with bags of Salvadoran snack chips and Japanese canned drinks. A boring old snack stand offering icecream cones, velveeta nachos, and hotdogs is probably the last thing on your mind.

On first taste the hotdog overwhelms with a surprising freshness. There is little flashy about the ingredients or the condiments, but everything seems like it has been cared for. The bun is warm and soft without a trace of stale. The jalepeno slices are crisp and wet. And the pork dog is perfectly heated, having reached the optimum balance between being cured on the heating carousel and being over-done. Biting into the plump pink firmness, there’s an almost virile mouth-feel. As an after shopping snack, you could do little better.
Fiesta Snack Stand Dog: Grade B

I realized just the other day that as an adult with an adult’s income, I can effectively make as many model airplanes as I want.

So here’s the step-by-step process for putting together a P-51 Mustang, the sexiest fighter plane that ever killed a nazi.

Step 1:
Lay out the instructions and the extruded plastic molds.

Step 2:
Glue together fuselage and wing segments after assembling the controls details of the cockpit. DO NOT PUT THE SUPERGLUE IN YOUR EYES!

Step 3:
Decide whether you want the model to incorporate the standard canopy or the Malcom Hood variation. Should the rear mechanics hatch be in the open or closed position?


Step 4:
Add racing stripes and ground effects.

In my web wanderings today I ran across this eco-utopian plan to create skyscraper farms.


I wanted to talk about this because, like most environmental schemes, this has been dreamed up by city-slickers who have no more idea of basic realities than Marie Antoinette.

Firstly, do you know why we grow our crops in fields instead of inside buildings? There are several reasons:
1.) Fields have dirt. Soil that can support crops is not free. To put it in skyscrapers you would have to get it from someplace else. That means transportation costs and the stripping of otherwise arable land. The alternatives are composting, which cannot be done at scale (you’d be lucky to poop out five square feet of compost in a year), or hydroponics, which cannot be done at scales exceeding a broom-closet pot plant.
2.) Fields are cheap. The cost for a square foot of building in New York is hundreds of dollars. The cost of a square foot of field in Nebraska is mere pennies. Building a skyscraper in an urban area for the express purpose of producing food crops is about as cost-effective as composting hundred dollar bills for a patch of beans.
3.)Fields are flat. Mother nature has built her good earth to the orientation that’s most effective for catching sunlight: Flat. Creating a vertical surface does not increase the amount of sunlight that plants receive. It divides the amount of sunlight and shadows the ground that would otherwise catch that light. There’s only so much light to go around, and crops need all of it to produce to capacity.
4.) People need a lot of food to survive. It’s hard to make accurate calculations about how much actual land space a person needs to get their annual nutritional needs met, but it’s probably on the order of 1.5 acres at a minimum. If you had a penthouse apartment that was 250 feet to a side, you tore off the roof, filled all the rooms with a foot of dirt, and planted a variety of cereal crops and green veggies, you might just survive off your urban skyscraper farm.

Now, that’s not to say that I discourage "victory gardening" or putting a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. Growing boutique or high-yield vegetables in small areas are generally worth the effort, although counting in labor and material costs there’s a pretty slim profit margin. It’s a rare balcony gardener who can get a potted plant to produce enough food to make a significant impact on the food budget, and certainly they could never scratch their daily caloric needs.

Here’s a graphic wheel that the vertical farming site drew up to make their impractical dreamy mooning seem scientific:

They couldn’t just say that an integration of urban areas and food-production would take pressure off our straining agricultural industry. They had to claim that it would empower women and cure AIDS.

Goddamn retard hippies.

(Unless stated otherwise, all links are podcast RSS feeds. If you want a particular homepage, then use google like everyone else.)

I had a little podcast crisis this past month. I moved on the first of June, so the entire month of May, not only was I burning through podcasts as usual at work, but I devoured them like mad at home as I worked on packing up all my stuff and cleaning the old place.

I got as low as just a few tens of megs of audio media.

This state of affairs came about partially because I had deleted some feeds. I decided that I couldn’t really stand Michael Feldman after all. BBC’s "Best of Natural History Radio" turned out to be far more boring than I was willing to tolerate. And it turns out that Physics and Economics lectures are just as incomprehensible in MP3 format as they are in person.

Luckily, there’s been some new avenues of audio entertainment that have opened up for me.

The Sonic Society (site) isn’t so much a single podcast as it is a glommed showcase of audio drama -slash- radio theater -slash- audio cinema. A significant part of the "interview" section is arguing over which term to use.

It took me a while to figure out the format, but Sonic Society is basically sample dramas from various audio theatrical groups. The Firefly fanfic productions are done by the Sonic Society crowd itself under the auspice of the "Sonic Cinema".

Each episode is between 60 and 90 minutes long. The first twenty minutes is Jack and Shannon, the hosts, bantering in an endearing manner that nevertheless always goes on way too long. Then there’s an episode of audio drama. Then there’s an interview with the creators of the preceding drama. Up until this point I had thought that nothing could be more boring than NPR interviews of jazz musicians, but I guess I was wrong. Then, if you’re lucky, there’s another drama or a soap opera from New Zealand.

The quality of the featured dramas varies widely. I can only tolerate this show if I allow myself to delete an episode the moment it starts to suck. But the back-library of episodes is vast, and a heck of a lot of it truly rocks. And I certainly respect them for being the central distribution point for this community.

Episodes featuring "Colonial Radio Theater (site)" are pure gold, but unless you have XM radio or you’re willing to pay actual money (gasp!) for the CDs, you’re probably not going to hear them anyplace else. It’s probably worth putting money down to hear Colonial Radio Theater more often. The production quality of this group is easily the equal of the old ZBS productions, which also has a podcast these days (including The Adventures of Ruby2, a sci-fi adventure drama that I bought as audio tape back in the 80s).

Decoder Ring Theater has consistently rocked my world. Their "Red Panda Adventures," featuring the eponymous Canadian superhero oscillate between sublime silliness and a tone-perfect imitation of the old Shadow radio series. It makes me painfully nostalgic for the 30s, an odd feeling for someone who is only in his 30s.

Shlock Audio Theater(site) doesn’t have an RSS right now, but they do have a webpage filled with audio-re-creations of trashy movies. I particularly like the way they narrated their version of "Robot Monster" with a Bela Lugosi accent. Now that’s just classy!

There’s actually too many great Sonic Society associate groups to talk about them all, and I’m only a third of the way through the podcast backlog.

The most amusing thing about Sonic Society is the way that Jack and Shannon maintain the conceit of broadcasting from a fictional state called "Nova Scotia." Naming a state after an exploding star, now that’s just silly!

Now I’ve gone a step even further into the podcast universe by getting a free membership with podiobooks.com(site). This is a vast warehouse of speculative fiction, generally novels read by the authors. A lot of the promoted product is by the same handful of names that show up with Escapepod and associated podcasts.

I’ve started listening to Mur Lafferty’s Playing for Keeps a down-and-out superhero novel. Ms.Lafferty is ubiquitious throughout the podsphere, so it’s good to see that she as the talent to back it up.

Scott Sigler (pronounced "Ziggler!") has promoted his book "Infected" with all the ferocity of a Tasmanian devil. It already automatically downloaded in PDF format on my Escapepod feed, and from what I hear, it’s the first podcast novel that’s got itself an honest-to-god publishing house publishing release. I’m about two sections into it, and have yet to be bowled over, but I was extremely impressed by Sigler’s BloodCast, an anthology of gruesome horror. Sigler is big into shouting, self-promotion, and non-subtlety, so I have no doubts that he will be a huge star.

And to follow up on some of the previous podcasts I’ve mentioned, I’ve been incredibly impressed with "Silver Street." Just to give an example of how awesome it is, just before I cancelled the feed to the other BBC daily soap "The Archers", both BBC soaps had a character with an at-risk pregnancy. In "The Archers" the baby got rescued at the last minute. In "Silver Street" the baby’s heart stopped beating and the woman had to carry a dead baby in her for several episodes before they forced a stillbirth.

Dude, that’s raw.

And then there are the "Silver Street" characters of Zak and Fatimah. About a month ago they got married in a rush ceremony that their families couldn’t attend. And then the British security services came for Zak. While they were pushing him into the van, Fatimah saw him and rushed across the street to be at his side, only to be struck by a car. While the feds grilled Zak on suspected terrorism links, Fatimah slipped into a coma and died.

I’m not too proud to say that I got choked up over it. Yeah, I cry when I listen to my stories, you want to make something of it?

Basically, I’ve been consistently impressed by "Silver Street"’s consistently powerful emotional content. The writing makes it worth a look.

The sign outside the "Weinerschnitzel" restaurant brags that it is "The World’s Largest Hotdog Chain." They’re certainly large enough to put an outpost all the way out at the ends of the earth on Braker Lane. I was biking and I was hungry, and there was no other sign of civilization in sight, so I stopped in.

For a restaurant that specializes in hotdogs, they have a surprisingly limited selection. But their four methods of preparing a hotdog are effectively doubled by giving the customer the choice of upgrading to all-beef for about fifty cents extra.

I opted for the most extravagant hotdog on the menu: All-beef deluxe.

At first glance it looks like a not-inaccurate facimile of a Chicago dog. There’s the giant pickle spear and some hefty slices of tomato. But even from that perspective there’s something wrong. Where’s the relish? On closer inspection it looks less like a Chicago dog and more like an alien entity mimicking a Chicago dog.

My first bite left me confused. There was such a void of taste that I thought my tongue had gone numb. So I washed out my mouth with Dr.Pepper and tried again. Once again, I completely failed to actually taste anything. The hotdog was dry and mealy. The skin was tough and callused, like the whole thing had been sitting on the bottom of a dry steam tray for days. Even the tomato was woody and the pickle wasn’t even sour.

The whole thing tasted exactly like biting into a cardboard tube that’s been stuffed with shredded newspaper.

Now I know how they got to be so big. They cut corners by selling wood-pulp.

Weinerschnitzel: Grade F