Zombie Lapdance

Two of my stories came out on the web this month, which means you can read them in the privacy of your own home without anyone knowing you’re one of those reader people.

The first story, Pioneers and Indians, came out in Fusion Fragment #4. It’s the beginning of a sprawling near-future epic, a roughly-planned anthology-slash-novel in the same vein as Accelerando or the Martian Chronicles.

The world that this describes grows out of my experience with radical groups in Austin. I was trying to imagine a scenario where the hippies actually won. There’s a lot of criticism of American consumerism and the culture of speed, loneliness, and overwork. But there’s not that many fleshed-out images of how an alternative lifestyle and a parallel economy might actually work. But then if you remove the bullshit from society, it’s just human nature to try and put a lot of it back.

Oh, and the location that’s described in this story actually exists. I camped there when I was canoeing the Mississippi.

When I emailed out the publication announcement for Pioneers and Indians(sort of like a birth announcement, but there’s less money involved), one of my writing colleagues was surprised that Asimov’s hadn’t published it. Well, Asimov’s had the chance, as did ten other markets. It took five years to bring this story to market. And I’m glad that Fusion Fragment took it. Hopefully it will stay up for years, bringing in the eyeballs.

The second story, that just came out today, has no particular meaning or context. It’s just sci-fi flash that’s kinda funny. Gimpbomb Enters Room follows our protagonist through an ordinary evening in a chilling futurist dystopia of online chat.

My original draft had the most depressing ending that I could imagine, so I’m glad that Mr.Marschalk had me re-write it as something a little more upbeat. I don’t know why I always try to make the endings bummers. Maybe it’s because my parents loved me, thereby leaving me desperate for angst and enui.

There’s different content going up on the fiction page in a couple of days, so I want to take this opportunity to pimp Derek Goodman while "The All-night, One-Stop, Apocalypse Shop" is at the top of the queue.

First of all, I want to make the claim that I discovered Derek. There, I said it. It’s now part of the permanent record.

I was going through the Space Squid slush one day, and it’s some pretty hairy slush as these things go, because on the contributor guidelines page I rather rashly told people not to send in their best work.

But that’s not the point. I read a slush story called "Power Pastry," about a convenience store clerk named Caleb who fights evil on the night shift, and it was everything that I had been looking for when I first formulated the concept of Space Squid. It leapt from the pile of vulgar alien-abduction flash fiction. It was fun and it was funny.

Now Space Squid is a pretty skeezy zine. It is exactly seven legal-sized sheets of paper, photocopied on a free-cycled copier, folded in half, and stapled on the fold. Most of what we publish is flash-fiction just because of the relatively high real-estate value of every square inch of paper. "Power Pastry" was long, longer than what we even said we would accept on the guidelines, but we went with it anyways, publishing it in Space Squid #3.

Derek Goodman went on to give us another story that we couldn’t turn down. We ran it in Space Squid #4, and he became the first author to publish in two successive issues (not counting the rantings of Mikal Trimm, Space Squid’s sworn nemesis, who will never get any official accolades from us). "Crossover Event" departs from the world of the One-Stop convenience store, taking us to a world of over-powered superheroes. For those who have been keeping track of common Derek J. Goodman motifs, there’s some familiar material. There’s genre tropes portrayed as part of a daily routine, there’s an ordinary schmo who works in the service sector, and there’s the immanent end of the world.

Some people might look at this collection of work (this brilliant collection of work that I helped usher into the brilliant limelight of the public consciousness) and see a synthesis of the aesthetics of Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon. I see a Midwestern sense of irony that echoes the blue-collar sensibilities of The Onion writing staff, a troupe of Wisconsin dishwashers and liquor-store clerks who became the greatest comedic institution of their generation.

Some other links to Derek’s work
The Voices in my Head Don’t Like You – an anthology of his work
Gods and Monsters – an anthology with one story by Derek
Time for Bedlam – another anthology with a Derek J. Goodman story

One of the best things about co-editing a zine called Space Squid is that everyone sends you squid stuff. I was never terribly into squid, mind you, the zine is named in honor of the Atwood quote, it doesn’t reflect any sort of squid obsession of mine or any of the other co-editors.

Nevertheless, squids are neat.

This grinning fellow is a promachoteuthis sulcus. Whatever that might be.

Here’s a squid sent from Germany by my friend Antje.

And here’s a contraption that my friend Sue sent. It’s a normal hand soap dispensor, except that it has weird rubber tentacle skirt. It also has a device on top that makes it impossible to dispense soap without getting a red ink mark on your hand.

The idea is to teach kids to wash their hands for a proper length of time in order to remove the Lady Macbethian spot on their palms. It will also teach kids to never trust adults or their sneaky tricks.

Would you wiki for me?

So, when Steve Wilson and I weren’t slacking off as the fiction co-editors for this site, we were writing a mid-grade children’s book. It’s about a couple of kids in Beloit, WI who become friends while fighting monsters. The trick is, they fight monsters by getting advice from a wiki site.

On the advice of our agent, we have made fiction reality, and there now actually is a wiki site that will help you WHEN MONSTERS ATTACK!!!

If you should have any unique information on monsters, not currently included in the wiki, please update that entry. I’m actually pretty curious how this will turn out. Are people actually more creative than they are destructive? Generally they are I guess, or at least the ones who take the time to browse through a wiki.

the times of india posted a summary of the 30 most-anticipated film titles for the coming year. nevermind all that nonsense that’s happening next door in pakistan, i want to know what projects SRK has up his sleeve!

the best thing about this article is the trivia footnotes for every story, and by that i mean gossip.

it looks like 2008 will have a buncha remakes and sequels. the remakes are split between remakes of films from the south (tamil?) and hollywood fare. expect a remake of "bruce almighty" called "God Tussi Great Ho" which stars Amitabh Bachchan as Morgan Freeman (the only man in the world who could fill mr.freeman’s shoes), and in the role of bruce we have salman khan, a man who had to drive over homeless people to be as obnoxious as jim carrey.

sanjay dutt, fresh out of the klinker, will play the role of the robber in a remake of aladin and the lamp, with A.Bachchan (again) playing the genie.

coming out soon is "Hanuman Returns" an animated sequel to a story about the legendary monkey warrior.

there’s also a disney-co-produced animated film about a dog called roadside romeo. don’t know what’s up with that. since an indian company is doing a lot of the legwork, it probably won’t have the foreign taint of "saawariya." and who doesn’t love disney?

"Jodhaa Akbar" is a lavish period piece starring the fantastic hairdo known as Hrithik Roshan. It takes place in the mughul dynasty, during a period of bloody conflict, but it’s going to be a stupid romance.

also expect a film called "heroes" about a buncha film students on a roadtrip across India that’s actually a remake of the motorcycle diaries. yeah. without Che, is there really much point in that movie?

the GF saw this article about an MIT physics professor on the front page of the NYtimes, and spend 30 minutes trying to find the video of the guy demonstrating the principle of a constant period of oscillation for a pendulum, just because it was an old guy swinging on a pendulum.

yawn. every university has the obligatory wacky "science as performance art" physicist.

but here was a demonstration i hadn’t seen before. electricity extracted as if by magic from a drop of water!! why, it’s virtually unprecedented!

it took a little while to figure out how it works, but this guy seems to have a good handle on the concept.

if i can summarize the important points, the waterdrops from the two spigots start off with near equal charge, but the charge on the two rings they pass through are not quite equal, somewhere on a subatomic level they have slightly different quantities of electrons. this miniscule original charge on the rings draws charge off the water as it drops (the force of gravity impelling the change in charge). then the imbalanced charge in the waterdrop is added to the opposite charge of the opposite ring.

The trick is, the water has to be dripping, so that each drop is insulated from every other, otherwise they would short out and re-balance the charge.

on a side note, you know what’s really silly? my blog post from earlier this week is now the highest hit for a google search on my grandfather, a man who has spent his life in the service of the less fortunate. also, it’s the third hit for a canadian mayor with a similar name.

google ain’t fair.

Before I tell you that I’m writing a review about a novelization of the biblical Book of Judges, you should know that the sea-god Dagon makes an appearance. I’m not kidding. The bible is the original Lovecraftian tome.

This article is about my grandfather, Gordon C. Krantz, and his book: Judges, Rulers, and One Angry Levite. He’s just published it at Lulu.com.

I read this book several years ago while it had the title "Judges, Generals, and One Angry Levite." At the time I knew the author’s work through his memoir "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?", a surprisingly light-hearted look at his service in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Most of the anecdotes seemed to involve the whimsical mis-use of explosive ordinance.

His historical fiction based on the Book of Judges breaks from that mold. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular part of the bible, it’s a recounting of the leaders and political turbulence affecting the Hebrew community from 1400 BC to 1050 BC. Anyone with even a passing understanding of the history of the Middle East knows the area has fostered bewilderingly complex politics and cultural shifting from the dawn of civilization to the present. The Hebrews lived side-by-side with a diverse array of cultures and military powers, with nobody needing to travel more than a few miles to engage in some healthy genetic cleansing.

For a scattered community of Hebrew tribes with no clear leadership hierarchy and a weird monotheistic religion, this period was a constant struggle against assimilation.

Some highlights of "Judges, Rulers, and One Angry Levite":

-history’s first recorded use of the name "Barak."

-Samson going to town on the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

-The revelation that the Jews, unlike Crom, didn’t know the secret of steel.

I was reading this Howard Waldrop story this week called "Mr.Goober’s Show." As appears to be the formula for much of Mr.Waldrop’s work, it’s a showcase for a neat, meticulously researched tidbit of history. In this case it centered around mechanical television, ironically shortened to MTV. This is an early, pre-war format for broadcasting and displaying moving images that uses the spinning of a perforated plate to convert the image into a sequence of about 30 scan lines. The resulting image would be analog, not pixelized (actually it would be striped), and about two or three inches square.

Like any red-blooded American male, my first impulse was to make one. After all, the electrical concepts are breathtakingly simple. All you need is a photoreceptor, some transistors, a drill, and a motor. But like any hobby that can be obsessed over, there’s already a bunch of dudes escaping from their wives and making complex, archaic televisions. The organization is called the Narrow-bandwidth Television Association.

Daniel Pinkwater has started a podcast reading of his book Lizard Music which is probably my favorite most book in the whole world. It’s all about a kid who’s left alone in the house when his parent’s go on vacation and his older sister runs off. Of course he spends a lot of time watching TV. Now this is back in the days when TV was something magical, when Walter Kronkite was a respected icon, and when there was a strange midnight no-man’s land of television, when the screen actually went to a static fuzz. It’s during this magic period of forbidden late-night television that the lizards make their transmissions.

So is that writer’s strike still going on or what? With no new television coming on, now might be a good time to look over the online television viewers offered by the networks. It’s like tivo, but without all the tedious forethought.

NBC videohas very crisp image quality that takes an ethernet broadband connection to maintain without stalling. It only has about six-weeks of Heroes or Chuck or My Name is Earl or Scrubs, so you have to keep up. There are some commerial interuptions which generally take the form of ear-splitting promos for 30 Rock.

ABC’s Full Episode Player. Medium-quality picture, with limited back episodes and short commercial breaks. Um, I guess you can watch back-episodes of Cavemen or something.

If CBS has any programming other than Jericho, you should let me know. Their are commercial interuptions for actual products, but usually only one commercial per break. The resolution is sub-youtube cruddy, but it appears to have the entirety of the Jericho series, right there for catching up whenever it strikes your fancy.

Fox isn’t what it used to be, but good golly they have a fancy video player selector. The actual viewer though doesn’t seem to get to fullscreen size. The resolution is perfectly adequate for the three cartoon series that you’re going to bother watching. It only keeps in stock the last four (or so) episodes.

CW video. Huh. There’s a network called CW. You learn something new every day.

The jerks at Comedy Central don’t appear to have any full episodes available. Just because they have shows that people would actually want to buy on DVD. It’s not fair!

The main thing you need to know about the Cartoon Network is that it’s not actually —

Adult Swim. This has a particularly awkward indexing system that leads to a particularly awkward viewer, but once I found out that typing "Robot Chicken" in the search line would give me the entire series in reverse order, commercial free, I ended up loosing about four days of my life to 30-second clips of action-figure hilarity. Seth Green, I salute you.

The NY Times reported this morning that Dutt was already out, but it looks like the bail formalities will stretch out just a little longer.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the news of Sanju Baba, he’s served 19 months for buying guns from mafiosos who were themselves involved in the devastating 1993 Mumbai bombings.

I saw Dutt just recently in Om Shanti Om,

a Shah Rukh Khan vehicle that came to the local multiplex. It was a brief cameo, in this scene where virtually all the surviving Bollywood superstars (with the noticeable exception of the Bachchans) dance happily with Shah Rukh Khan and sing. Here we see Sanjay Dutt dancing on the bar on the far left:

Considering that Om Shanti Om is this year’s big Bollywood hit, the scene must have been shot just before Sanju Baba was duck-walked to prison.

Just to the right of Sanjay, is Saif Ali Khan, called Saifu to his friends. I’ve seen him in Parneeta, where he plays the leading man in a beautifully shot 50s period piece romance.

Next is Salmon Khan:

who also has the reputation of being the bad boy of Bollywood (there’s so many of them, it’s hard to keep track). He might edge out the others because he’s got two significant arrests under his belt: first he was shooting endangered black antelope with controlled firearms, and second, he was out drunk driving and he ran over some homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. But that sort of thing happens all the time in India, so it’s not as bad as it sounds. Right?

At the far right is Shah Rukh Khan, the only man in Bollywood who can make me buy his biscuits . Also called the SRK and King Khan. He’s the star of Om Shanti Om, and he has the political and box-office clout to call every one else in Bollywood onto his set and dance for him:

In case people have stopped making comparisons between Bollywood and Hollywood, King Khan plays a man in Om Shanti Om who is twelve years younger than Khan’s actual age. But the movie rocked, and in good Bollywood style, just when you think it’s over, the main character gets reincarnated and you realize that you’re not even halfway. Reincarnation is like a narrative re-set button.

no good news on the cheap, effective jetpacks we were promised. the commercial ones are still only good for about 30 seconds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEcWrznicY

and the homemade ones are either buggy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0v-la8L5yo&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mjUZEsduIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvM8Cp7wnXQ

or involve tossing yourself out of an airplane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXxkWXncuo