Zombie Lapdance

I’ve been trying to catch up on all the good podcasts, which means listening to the nearly 150 short stories and whatnot on Escapepod. Now what should I find as I get toward the end of the queue, not one, but two RevolutionSF fiction stories posted on Escapepod!

This is great, I thought We have both "Pressure" by Jeff Carlson and "Edward Bear’s Long Walk" by Ken Scholes. I thought the Escapepod version of "Edward Bear" was probably the better way to experience that story, just because it’s told from the point of view of a simplistic narrator and that goes over better verbally than as the written word. The Escapepod version of "Pressure" I didn’t feel converted as well, since there’s a long text-messaging segment and a good deal of technical explanation.

But then the stories ended and I realized that not once did Stephen Eley, the editor of Escapepod.org, mention RevolutionSF.com! Sure, they were reprints by the time we got them too, but considering that the stories appeared in successive episodes on escapepod.org, I have to say that I was more than a little hurt by Stephen Eley’s oversight.

Just a sec, I have to wipe away some bitter tears.

Okay, I’m back. So, I would like everyone on this site to join me in my self-righteous moral outrage and condemn Stephen Eley and the lax publishing-history-posting policy of escapepod.org.

Don’t stop listening to them or anything, they still rock, just be all huffy.

I went ahead and ordered some more LEDs off ebay. This little LED flashlight is made from an empty Italian spices container, and took me about an hour to put together:

It’s powered by a single 9v battery, so the two pairs of parallel-wired LEDs are getting about 4.5v each (I knew through previous experimentation that these LEDs can take about 7v before they blow becoming SEDs or Smoke Emitting Diodes).

It makes about as much light as an ordinary flashlight, and about as directed too.

The other project I put together recently (all while I had more pressing things I should have been doing) is a table/desk lamp that used half-watt LEDs of a design I have never used before.

These LEDs are so high-powered that they come embedded in their own steel heat sink.


The problem came trying to figure out how to mount them. They have notches in the side so you can bolt them to something metallic, thereby further dissipating the operational heat gain, but the solder points for the cathode and anode terminals are on the same side as the light element, which is the reverse of normal LEDs. So I couldn’t have the light element hanging out of the mounting material, leaving all the exposed electrical points safely inside the device, which had previously been my design strategy.

The solution I devised, was to mount three of the LEDs in series (to a 12v source, which maxes out the recommended 4v operating voltage). They’re bolted to a metal strip (spray-painted black for aesthetic reasons) with a transparent plastic strip bolted ontop to limit the amount of casual electrocution (although at 12v and presumably 1.5watts, we’re not talking lethal quantities of juice here).

The finished lamp puts out about as much light as all 80 LEDs of the previous chandelier project. The image below was taken without the camera flash, that’s about how much light you would see with the naked eye. It has the same cold blue glow as the chandelier, but with a little more musclely power behind it.

I have yet to get an LED lighting appliance that lights with the same force as an ordinary lightbulb fixture (although this comes close), but that would require messing with heretofore unmessed-with quantities of electricity.

It doesn’t come over well with these photos, but I wanted to make an LED design where the lighting element seemed impossibly thin for the amount of light emitted.

The base of the lamp is a "project enclosure" that I got from my dad in an Xmas carepackage filled with spare electronics doodads.

The power supply is a 12v transformer and rectifier assembly that I pulled out of a crappy old boombox a while back (the 12v converted from the power-outlet is equivalent to the 12v that you would get from the 8 D-cell batteries, which are always 1.5v each, follow me?). It’s rare to get an electrical appliance where the rectifier is separate from the main circuit board, so hoard ’em when you find ’em.

The transformer coupled with the fistful of spacing washers makes the project enclosure heavy enough to balance the long lighting arm.

You might notice in the previous image that the base has a red diode as a status light. As the GF said, "Even the status light on that thing is annoying. Why would you have a light to let you know that the light’s not on? That’s the stupidest thing ever."

Hey, the on-off switch is single-throw double-pole (STDP), why would I waste a perfectly good secondary circuit?

When most people think of Target, they think of the cheap underwear and the "slightly cleaner than Walmart" ambiance. Rarely do people think of the food stand at the front of the store and the hotdog-munching opportunity it represents.

The meat looks and tastes like your standard Oscar Mayer quarter pounder, fleshy, spongy and redolent with that smoked pork twang. The bun was slightly stale around the outside and the condiment rack was stunning in its sparse lackluster stock. Is there anything more depressing than squeezing anemic pustules of relish out of a miniature packet? Relish should be stored in brimming vats, it should be dolloped with a long-handled ladle. Pre-packed relish is a sure sign of apathetic laziness on the part of the hotdog proprietors.
Target Dog: Grade C minus

The sensation of getting a giant cardboard box in the mail, a box that you weren’t expecting, but which you are certain is filled with presents and goodies, that sensation is not unlike the feeling one gets when one notices a new hotdog stand. The proprietress said that she hadn’t given the stand a name yet, but the working title is "Mom’s Hotdog Express":


The stand, a trailer painted to look roughly like a hotdog, sits on cinderblocks on the eastside of I-35 on 38th and a half street. You have to shout to be heard over the upper and lower deck of the interstate and the four lanes of frontage road. But this is a friendly establishment, shouting is just a part of the informal ambiance. When you lean into the window of the trailer, next to the barstools, propane tank, and garbage can, the smell of charcoal wafting from the tin chimney, with the upper deck of I35 towering over you, it feels a little like a scene from Bladerunner.

The menu is cryptic, but the proprietress, "Mom", is happy to guide you through it. The only thing you need to know is written in magic marker on a paper taped to the side: "Mexican hotdogs." What we mean when we say "Mexian hotdog" is hotdog meat wrapped in a juicy, flexible spiral of bacon. Then it is topped with fried onions, raw onions, mustard, tomato, and relish. The bun is moist and pliant, quickly sopping up the juice of the condiments like a baguette mopping up a plate of wine-sauce.

"Mom" serves the Mexican hotdog with chips (my serving happened to be the bottom of the bag, "Mom" sent her son to go and get a new bag from the fiesta), and a Hillcountry Fare soda (which in blind taste tests in indistinguishable from the namebrands it immitates). All of this for only $3.50. It may very well be the last true cuisine and the last value for your buck on the planet.
Mom’s Mexican Hotdog: Grade A plus

Jodhaa Akbar

The big news is the release of "Jodhaa Akbar" the sweeping period-piece romance with Hrithik Roshan as the emperor of the Mughals. It came out here in Austin on the same day that it opened throughout India, and I dragged the GF down to the multiplex to suffer through it with me.

First off, we’re talking about a film that if it is to be seen, should be seen on the big screen. We’re talking about over three hours of eyecandy here. There’s lavish sets, giant battles with elephants, and plenty of processions with gaily-colored locals throwing flower petals. There’s also a fun scene where Hrithik fights an elephant with his bare hands.

The bad news is there is precious little in the way of singing and dancing. Throughout the excruciatingly-long running length of 205 minutes there’s only two real dance numbers. One is a soporific performance by some weird-looking whirling Dervishes, and the other is a surprisingly restrained spectacle celebrating the emperor gaining the honorific of "Akbar".

The director, Ashutosh Gowariker, is known best for another period piece, the cricket spectacle "Lagaan." Like it’s predecessor, "Jodhaa Akbar" has a surprising amount of commentary about the social and cultural state of India. It’s very hard to get a Bollywood movie made with any sort of a message. I presume this is because it’s very easy, politically speaking, to get a movie banned in India. Recently the film "Aaje Nachle" was banned in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh because it had a single line in a single song that briefly mentioned the Dalit caste.

Indeed, there has been some controversy and censorship of "Jodhaa Akbar", but nothing that seems to have greatly affected its overall distribution. Oddly enough, most of the anger seems to be over the representation of the historical record.

Perhaps the cushion of time and the overall "we can all get along message" of "Jodhaa Akbar" allows it to get away with its brief licks of the third rail of religious conflict. Notably there’s also a near-pornographic sequence celebrating Indian cuisine. For most other Bollywood flicks out there, if it weren’t for the language and some of the clothes, you would hardly notice that you’re watching a movie from a different culture.

Dhoom 2

Hrithik Roshan was quoted as being relieved that he didn’t have to do any dancing in "Jodhaa Akbar", which is a crying shame, because he’s one of the best male dancers in the world. Here he is in the opening dance sequence of Dhoom 2, just before the GF started chanting in amazement "I didn’t know they made humans that good looking."

Hrithik is one of the clearest examples of nepotism in Bollywood, he mainly stars in films produced by his father, Rakesh Roshan, yet Hrithik has more abundantly clear star assets than any other actor in Mumbai. And by "assets" I mean his six-pack.

In Dhoom2, Hrithik plays an international antiquities thief who is also a master of disguise and extreme sports. It is in Dhoom2 that we learn what becomes abundantly clear in "Jodhaa Akbar", Hrithik looks kinda silly in facial hair.

This is as stylish and flashy an action movie as you’re ever likely to see, which is to say that every scene has a wildly improbable stunt or plot twist. Whether it’s fellow nepotism-justified actor Abishek Bachchan flying out of a river on a jetski, or Hrithik snowboarding behind a train, you will quickly lose track of how many times you exclaim "what the hell?"

Luckily everything and everyone is beautiful, or it would be a lot harder to watch.

Naach

A brief exposure to the song lyrics in "Naach" will teach you the Hindu word for "dance." It’s "naach" apparently.

Abishek Bachchan co-stars in this surpisingly stylistic rise to stardom film. He plays an aspiring actor who takes dance lessons from an aspiring dance choreographer. It’s good that has the role of a guy who’s not particularly good at dancing, because Abishek really isn’t particularly good at dancing. Through most of the movie he’s just sitting and staring with brooding intensity at co-star Antara Mali as she performs jaw-dropping modernist routines.

Director Ram Gopal Varma might be the only Bollywood auteur who can actually make an atmospheric and moody film. It’s like Wong Kar Wai, but with plot and direction.

The GF was not allowed to watch this flick with me, because she couldn’t stop making comments about the heroine’s breasts.

Qayamat: City Under Threat

There’s a scene early in "Qayamat" where the villains are stabbing a rival arms dealer while singing in English "Happy Death Day to you! Happy Death Day to you!" I thought to myself, that’s as silly and overblown as a Hollywood actioner. It wasn’t until several scenes later when the realization dawned on me that this movie was actually a re-make of Jerry Bruckheimer’s "The Rock." It had those rockets with the little green balls of something deadly, it had the island prison, and it even had a brooding long-haired ex-convict who was the only person ever known to escape the island, only now he was pressed into service to break back into the prison!

The fight scenes are every bit as awkward as we’ve been lead to expect from a Bollywood flick, but what’s most interesting is the way that religion and politics play into this movie. Even though this is a film where Indian patriots are fighting Pakistani-Islamic terrorists, the film goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the Indian heroes are also Muslim.

The gruff police captain is played by Sunil Shetty, who you might remember from the movie "Dus" was the one who kissed a talisman and shouted "In the name of Allah!" just before blowing the crap out of a buncha terrorists. He does essentially the same thing here, talking about how Allah really prefers India. There’s a point where the gruff ex-convict berates the terrorists with "why don’t you go back to where everyone who has ever hurt India has a home? Pakistan!"

My favorite scene is where the evil Pakistani colonel has a pistachio-flavored cake baked in the shape of India. With his bare hands he scoops out the province of Kashmir, licking it with suggestive lasciviousness.

And no, I’m not making that last part up.

SPACE SQUID is proud to announce that we are the #1 google hit for the precise search phrase "anus lump". We couldn’t be prouder, although without the quotes we are merely a page two hit, so there’s obviously room for improvement.

Of the 50 or so visiters that spacesquid.com receives off the "anus lump" query, none have resulted in a zine sale. What’s wrong with these people? It’s as if they had something entirely different on their mind.

spacesquid.com now has a link from the front page to this blog category, so this is going to be our little way of keeping people informed of the state of the squid.

i happen to be caught up with the slushpile reading at this moment, and i’ve got the space squid email popping to my personal gmail account, so if you want to submit a story right now, you’re likely to get a rejection within hours.

just saying.

so i bought this ten dollar MP3/media player off ebay. actually it was ten bucks and another fourteen to get it on a plane going from hong kong to texas, but that’s not the point. the point is that it’s an amazing artifact of this half-assed global manufacturing culture that we live in. the player has about 40 different language options, including czech and togalog, but it doesn’t have a shuffle function.

let me take a moment to list all the things wrong with this player:
-no shuffle (as i mentioned)
-the "minesweeper" game has no button assigned to moving the cursor down
-no hint of a namebrand, a model name or number, or a manufacturer’s name anywhere on the device or in the instructions
-the least intuitive controls imaginable, what the buttons do depends on what "mode" the device is in, then you have to push tiny buttons on the side that are about half the size of my short, stumpy fingers. the big play button on the front does not appear to actually do anything other than make it play.
-the FM receiver is already broken, after about three weeks
-the battery lasts less than two hours
-the USB cord that came with it has already broken
-one of the earbuds on the earphones has already broken
-it came with sample media, an "ebook" and a video, both of which were named "Lord of the Rings II. The two towers." The "ebook" turned out to be a text file, with numerous junk characters, that told the story of a woman with terrifying facial scars. Here’s a sample: "¡¡¡¡As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a lot of her hair to fall out." I don’t remember Tolkien writing that, do you? The video "Two Towers" turned out to be a music video of a chick in a bikini. Which come to think of it, isn’t something wrong with this player at all.
-the "ebook" function doesn’t have wordwrap. it just wraps the characters in the middle of the word.

now, let’s talk about everything that’s worked out with the player.
-the voice recording function works astonishingly well
-it has a full two gigs of memory, which two years ago i would have happily paid 25 bucks to have in flash-drive form.
-it does indeed play MP3s

the plan was to get an MP3 player that would form the backdrop of my everyday drudgery. i could listen to podcasts while bicycling to work. then i could listen to podcasts at work. then i could listen to podcasts while lifting weights at the gym. then when i was at home, i could listen to podcasts while washing the dishes or doing tedious projects like soldering LEDs, carving busts of William Shatner, or drawing illustrations for SPACE SQUID and RevSF.

aside from the two-hour battery life, that plan has worked out pretty well, certainly better than my previous attempts to carry around a twenty-buck cassette walkman playing library books-on-tape.

here are some of the podcasts i’m listening to:

the mel and floyd summer replacement show — the GF hates these guys, but my co-workers love them. every week at WORT community radio in madison, wi, these two guys tape an hour of them reading news items, while making wisecracks and giggling. it’s pretty highbrow stuff, one of the few venues where you will hear people make jokes about james buchanan.

this american life — ira glass has a fascinating whiny voice. they post episodes for free on a weekly basis, so as long as i fire up the podcast downloader, i don’t have to pay for the damn things.

pseudopod — a weekly podcast reading of horror-genre short stories that runs the gamut from gore to high-falutin’ dark fantasy. pro-quality writing all around.

metamor city — i’ve only just started this. it’s a series of stories that take place in the fictional "metamor city", which is an extrapolation for a community writing project of a medieval magic-fantasy kingdom. this metamor city has twenty-first century technology on top of a couple magic systems. it also appears to have a lot of crime, and people being threatened in dark alleys. this is mainly readings with partial dramatization.

Drabblecast — a weekly reading of weird flash fiction. just now i was going through the media player’s folder to delete some files and clear up some space, and i could hardly bring myself to delete drabblecasts that i had already listened to. the "black and white animal saga" (parts 1, 2, and 3) is probably the best work of fiction since the Aeneid. my only complaint is that the drabblecast posts in a weird *.m4a format that required me to install a converter that makes my firewall freakout everytime it loads up.

Pinkwater Podcast — Daniel Pinkwater is the font of all wisdom.

Doctor Who Time Tales — these are full dramatizations of original doctor who stories. we can list this under the category of things i can’t play at work without getting laughed at. but it satisfies my doctor who fix, at least until the new season starts up.

Escape Pod — it’s hard to believe that escapepod pays its contributors as much as they say they do, until you listen to them read a couple of stories. this might be the best source for short sci-fi in the whole genre right now.

i have a bunch more on automatic download, but it’s taking a while for me to get through the backlog on these.

gotta go now. i’m off to do some tedious chores while wearing an earbud.

So the Nebula awards are coming to Austin this April and I’ve already bought my weeny membership-only pass. That’s right, no awards banquet for me. I’ll probably be down the street at Lovejoys, drinking their barley-wine homebrew, waiting for the post-banquet parties to start up.

For the first time ever, there’s going to be a sci-fi con that’s close enough to where I live that I can stumble home on foot at the end of the night if I’m to uncoordinated to ride my bicycle.

To celebrate the auspiciousness of such an auspicious institution coming to Austin, SPACE SQUID is going to release issue #5 at the awards con. There will be a party of course, and maybe other events and festivities. A new "Slacker Map of Austin" is in the works, this time with greatly expanded content including an in-depth guide to the "entertainment district."

Does it make me a poor citizen of Austin if I can’t use the term "entertainment district" without quotation marks?

We’re all looking forward to SPACE SQUID issue #5. There will be a funpage of course (always my favorite part), cartoons, and lots of fiction from the likes of Austin’s own Melissa Tyler.

SPACE SQUID officially congratulates former SPACE SQUID contributor Jennifer Pelland for her Nebula nomination. Her nominated story is online at Helix, and her story "Clone Barbecue" is in Space Squid #2.

So I went into the aquarium store to ask about the worms. When I walked in, I said to the folks behind the counter, "I have some strange worms in my tank. Just a sec, let me get out the pictures."

"Finally!" they exclaimed. "Somebody brings pictures!"

From which I concluded that weird worms in tanks are not something weird at all. The aquarium folks first suggested that it was planaria, flatworms, but when I said that I hadn’t seen any arrowhead-shaped heads, they jumped phylum and said they were probably leeches. But not necessarily bloodsucking leeches. I spent many summers in Northern Minnesota, so I am conversant in the difference between the bloodsucking leeches and the two-foot long sludge-eating leeches.

They agreed with KaosDevice’s assessment that the worms probably came in on the blackworms. To quote: "Blackworms are grown in some pretty disgusting places and a lot of things get in there." This isn’t terribly comforting considering that the first time we bought the blackworms they were sitting in a dish of water right next to the register and the counter-girl was inviting people to poke them.

Is this a good time to talk about my history with leeches? I had a pet leech as a kid. I lived on the Wisconsin River at the time, and I kept a five gallon tank where I threw buckets of sludge and algae that I found on the river. There’s some amazing things in that river, flatworms and bugs, and things that twitch and wriggle and slide.

When I found the leech it was stuck to the inside of an old clam shell. The leech had a pattern of red and blue spots down its back that went well with the opalescent sheen of the shell. So I scraped him/her into a bucket and took it home. It looked kinda like this:

Only in color of course.

Well, she disappeared for a month, and when she reappeared, she had this weird fur on her belly. Only on closer inspection it was actually thousands of baby leeches waving their mouthparts in the water.

So I freaked and dumped about four pounds of salt in the tank.

Then in college I used the martyrdom of the leeches as the basis for a cult. But that’s an entirely different story.

Just for fun, here’s a video of a giant leech eating an earthworm.

i’m openly soliciting expert opinions on this worm that just appeared in the GF’s ten-gallon freshwater aquarium. we spotted this worm and a nearly identical twin just this morning. what’s particularly upsetting is their size. they are about an inch and a half long.

One was thrashing in the aquarium vegetation about six inches from the bottom, and the other was poking around on a rock. by the afternoon they were both on the bottom, and appearing to make half-hearted attempts to burrow into the gravel. when poked they squirm something fierce.

this photo appears to show segments like a leech, but the worm didn’t display any leechlike behaviors, it didn’t move like a leech (it thrashed without body contraction), and it does not appear to have either anterior or posterior suckers. you can see that the head is pale white and the body is brownish gray. there is a slight flatness to the shape of the body.

the head:

the body:

i’m worried that these worms came out of one of our fish, some sort of roundworm intestinal parasite, but even our biggest fish (an elephant nose and an ancistrus) are only about three times longer than these worms.

we’ve been feeding the elephantnose and the african frog a combination of frozen blood worms and black worms. i suppose there could have been some different worms riding in on those, but where would they have been hiding all this time? they can’t move through the gravel and there isn’t much else to hide them.

i just hope they don’t represent a health risk to me personally, because that would totally freak me out. i’m freaking out just thinking about it.

the GF fished both worms out with the net and threw them out in the trash. i’m not going to let her touch me until she takes a shower.