Zombie Lapdance

it was back in 2004 or so when i checked out this "news" stand on south lamar. now, for those of you who live outside of texas, there are a whole bunch of these "news" shops around austin. before actually looking inside one i had assumed (correctly as it turns out) that these businesses were largely venues for porno and XXX DVD rental. but as it turned out, they actually contain news. and regular magazines. they even had a sci-fi magazine section with more than the usual suspects of analog and asimov’s and whatever TV show companion rag is currently popular.

so i bought a copy of WEIRD TALES and, because i thought the title was hilarious, CTHULHU SEX MAGAZINE.

then i put the magazines on my shelf and completely forgot about them.

fast forward to a month ago. i was browsing through the "adult section" of ralan.com for the first time, and i noticed a listing for CTHULHU SEX, which surprised me, because i couldn’t imagine that a magazine with such a bizarre title could have lasted this long.

it took me a little while, but i was able to find that three-year-old issue of CTHULHU SEX on my shelf that i have mentally categorized as "stuff i’m going to eventually get around to reading." CTHULHU SEX knocked my socks off. it was filled with a surprising amount of artwork by people who want to be HRgiger, some of it actually good.

it had a photo from the HRgiger museum bar.

goddamn, i want to go there, and i want to get drunk out of my fucking mind!

the magazine also had little tidbits like gag ads for http://www.vampiresagainstwar.com .

and CTHULHU SEX had a lot of fiction. one story was pretty excretal. most were very good. the standout story was "the house on cutter lane" by arthur cullipher. it was about 2am when i got to that one. it inspired in me all the visceral dread and horrific disgust that lovecraft would have inspired if lovecraft had been comfortable with writing about a character with the accurately descriptive name of "pussyface." i could feel the muscles of my eyelids strain as my face clenched my eyeballs as open and as round as humanly possible. when i had to turn the pages i turned them so fast they were hardly visible as they fluttered across my panicked vision. i can’t remember the last time a story made me feel like that.

i gave my copy of CTHULHU SEX to my coworker johnny motard and he was also enthralled. he said it would be awesome to get a subscription to it and get CTHULHU SEX in the mail every couple of months.

but it’s gone now.

i saw the dead market listing on ralan, and the magazine’s website announced the closure at the end of june. there’s one more issue coming out, available at http://www.cthulhusex.com/ and then it’s all over.

sigh.

the world has become a little less horrific.

if the internet is to be believed, air rifles were contemporary to black-powder muskets, far superior in rate of fire, and nearly comparable in actual stopping power.

here’s a link to a site discussing early nineteenth century austrian airguns. it also discusses the airgun that lewis and clark took on their expedition, and a WW2 anti-nazi airgun made by a rogue bicycle mechanic.

a picture of a japanese air rifle:

i’m a bad boyfriend. i whined, i weedled, i nagged, until i convinced my girlfriend to spend saturday, our traditional datenight, watching a bollywood movie on the big screen.

there’s been a bollywood movie playing down at the local multiplex every week for a while now, but this is the first time that i managed to catch it. it’s significant that a commercial-mainstream theater is showing these. austin has a highly developed system of alternative, indie, and underground film venues. bollywood isn’t showing at any of these, because it’s not the hipster film style of the moment (south korean revenge films are). it’s showing at the local cinemark because there’s an actual market for it in the community at large. the tickets cost a quarter more than a normal film ticket, but then the movie’s a third longer than a normal film.

"i would like two for ‘jhoom barabar jhoom’," i told the ticket guy. until i actually saw the film card in the slot on the kiosk (a card that looked as slickly printed and designed as the title card for the "knocked up" movie) i had worried that we had driven way down the interstate to end up at the wrong venue.

"i think you said it wrong," the GF scolded me as we walked into the startlingly cold lobby (i speculated that multi-plex’s keep their airconditioner set so low for the same reason that jails do, i.e.: to retard the spread of disease among the closely packed inmates). "That’s not what it said on the sign."

"no, look." we passed through the theater entrance which was labelled with the same slick title card. "it says, ‘jhoom barabar jhoom’."

"jhoom barabar jhoom!" said the indian man behind me with a much better indian accent.

"see? i TOLD you. ‘jhoom barabar jhoom’!" i shared a quick grin with the man behind me who appeared to be taking his daughter to the movie. i could tell that we shared a similar excitement, an anticipation of a magical cinematic experience. as a kid i always felt this way before a movie. i knew that soon i would see han solo fighting for his life against evil, or something equivalent. but that feeling is very rare now, drowned in cinematic commercialism and the cynical understanding that i’m getting fleeced at the box office for a second-rate michael bay flick that’s been carefully crafted to give me the same-old-same-old.

(i’ve determined that the next time i’m at one of these venues, or at the indian market, to start a conversation with someone about bollywood. hell, i’ve considered having this conversation with indian call-center women. right now i know exactly ZERO people who know ANYTHING about bollywood. i’m living in a bollywood vacuum, sucking what little i know about it off wikipedia and the imdb. you don’t know how lonely it is.)

the theater’s auditorium seating was about a third filled, with a mix of 80% indians (families with kids as well as groups of friends out on the town) with the remainders whities. this breakdown is important, because the movie has a scene where the heroine flashbacks to when she was a little girl. she’s standing in the middle of a monumental anglican church and she’s making a vow to god that she would never "marry a dark-skinned man who was either indian or pakistani, but instead marry a 100% british man who was white like Yourself." am i supposed to laugh at that?, i wondered as knowing/scandalized titters criss-crossed the theater.

the movie started off with an honest-to-gosh trailer, an ad for a movie about a women’s field hockey team. using a rhyming street-wise hinglish rap, shahrukh khan introduces every single member of the 12-woman team. yes, it’s a long trailer. the rap’s chorus had the women shaking their sticks at the camera and shouting "get out of my way, get out of my way, get out of my way!"

at this point, the GF admitted that this was "pretty cool".

i don’t want to go into too much detail about the movie itself, it’s a romantic comedy (with a surprising amount of racy sex-talk for a bollywood movie as well as TWO actual kisses) that’s filmed largely in london and paris. it starts off with an indian man and a pakistani-english woman meeting at a london train station. as they wait for a delayed train, they tell stories about the respective fiances they’re waiting for. these stories involve giant dance-numbers in front of recognizable london and paris landmarks. a bollywood chorus-line in front of the louvre, itself worth the price of admission.

amitabh bachchan has the role of "cabaret MC". dressed like a gypsy stevie-ray vaughn his only function is to lead the chorus-lines of lithe londoners inbetween his son’s scenes of romantic farce. abishek bachchan has taken a lot of criticism as being a pale imitation of his father, but he acquits himself well in this movie, playing the part of a rake-ish and irrepressable street-con. mostly he plays the uber-macho cop in bollywood action movies, so it was impressive to see actual acting come out of him.

"jhoom barabar jhoom" is the technical and stylistic peak of the bollywood form. it’s as complete in and of itself as "hard boiled" was, just before hong kong action films hit the american market. and to see it on the big screen (as they say in india) "you have got to be kidding me." bollywood on a 14" monitor is interesting. in the theater it is a maelstrom. the crescendoing chorus of the signature/title song is designed to uplift and thrill the heart like a john williams symphony. the color. the glitz. the dancing. the —

you people totally don’t know what i’m talking about, do you?

dammit.

just tonight i got sent links to the purchase pages for two different anthologies that are publishing my work.

the BEST OF ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS INFLIGHT MAGAZINE: HORROR reprinted my spoof-horror story "the elves hate you." this was essentially my first sale. about the time i wrote this story (and it’s not going to spoil anything to tell you that it’s about a gang of vampires and a gang of elves that have a rumble in an abandoned sock factory) i had wrote about 1.5 stories a month for about a year. consequently i had about 60 rejections. my ego (which is otherwise quite huge) reeled from the continued bombardment of form-letter humilations. i hated everyone. so i crafted a story to take revenge on all the genres which had devalued my worth as a writer and as a human being.

and the story sold to the first market it went to. i hope that the gods of con programming see fit to give me a lengthy reading slot at apollocon or armadillocon, so i can present the story in its entirety. "the elves hate you" got a partial reading at wiscon a couple years ago and it had the audience rolling in the aisles (comedic pause) both of them.

but if you can’t make it to the currently unscheduled and hypothetical readings, then the only way you can experience what is most likely the funniest story you will ever read with both elves and vampires, then you need to go to the ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS BEST OFS page and buy this affordable and highly downloadable PDF horror anthology.

the other purchase page is to pre-order the UNDEAD 3: FLESH FEAST anthology. now, where "the elves hate you" was mentioned in the introduction to the ASIM best-of collection and in fact leads off the entire anthology, i have yet to see any material for FLESH FEAST that mentions my story "deadtown taxi." i suppose that it’s hard to describe a story that’s about a zombie cabbie going on a killing spree in a strip club and still do justice to the nuanced stuff and, um, subtleties and shit that’s totally in that story. the story is based on my experiences as a cabbie in madison, wi, except for most of the zombie bits.

shoot, who am i trying to fool? there ain’t no subtlety in "deadtown taxi"! it’s just an excuse for hot zombie-on-zombie-on-lich action and various puns for "live" strip acts.

hey, i’m a simple man with simple needs.

i just got word that i’m a winner in the pinkwater neddiad contest! i should be the first entry on the page.

i can’t tell you how great it is to be finally recognized by one of my personal heroes (although i’m sure that d.m.pinkwater had a legion of minions reading the slushpile while he dined on kielbasa and orange soda). it’s an especially heady victory considering that pinkwater is a children’s writer and i was competing mainly against people under 12. i think i’ll drink a bottle of chef chow’s hot and spicy oil to celebrate.

as i recall, the prize is original artwork from the book, which is now available for purchase instead of just online. i will blog about the prize when it arrives.

there’s this online discussion that i saw a long time ago that’s still bugging me. it asked the question:
"Could a typical young man, armed only with a knife, (say, six or eight inches long) be trained to consistently "win" fights with a grizzly bear? Assume no element of surprise."

the consensus seemed to be, after almost a hundred posts, that bears are just too tough and people aren’t good enough with knives. well, i think exactly the opposite, and i have compiled evidence to support my belief.

1.) the subject of vernor herzog’s movie grizzly man takes approximately ten minutes to die at the claws of a grizzly. what sort of a wussy animal can’t kill a damn hippie in under a minute? even i can kill a hippie in under a minute.

2.) a cursory google search finds two (1, 2) news stories about senior citizens killing bears with knives. granted, both bears were mere black bears and both bear slayers were canadians, and therefore preternaturally savage.

3.) finnish samis would routinely kill bears with spears. because pound for pound, nothing is tougher than the finns.

4.) this footage from the documentary mondo cane shows nepalese soldiers slicing the heads off oxen with the ease of a ginza knife slicing through lead pipes filled with tomatoes. although the knife they are using looks longer than the six to eight inches allowed in the question, it is not that the khukuri knives are very large, just that the gurkhas are only four feet tall.

i just finished watching DUS, which is hindi for "ten". and just so you know, it’s not DUS as in "goose," but DUS as in "bus." this is one of those movies that’s all about people swaggering in slow motion while wearing black. in fact, there is more glitz and tailored suits than actual coherence.

consider for instance this bollywood interpretation of canadian night clubs. i must have watched that musical number six times.

plot synopsis: avuncular anti-terrorist agent sanjay dutt sends his top agents, as played by abishek bachchan and zayed khan to canada where they have TEN DAYS (hence the title) to stop a terrorist attack. meanwhile, celebrity big-brother champion shilpa shetty stands around in mid-riff-baring tops, quietly smirking.

things to watch for:
-tough indian-canadian cop by the name of "danish" (suneil shetty, no relation to shilpa or the pastry) dramatically proclaiming "in the name of allah!" right before shotgunning a buncha terrorists. that’s the kind of muslim role-models hollywood is missing.
-everyone in canada speaking hinglish.

apparently a canadian newspaper published an article calling sanjay dutt a terrorist, compelling him to leave the country in a snit. hey, just because you’re implicated in a devasting urban bombing, doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist, guys! i mean, they wouldn’t let a terrorist play an anti-terrorist agent in the movies, right?

(note: don’t misinterpret this movie with DUS(1997) which has largely the same cast and plot, although with the ravishing raveena tandon as the villian. it has not been released due to the death of the director)

last month the SPACE SQUID team presented at the austin dorkbot event. dorkbot describes itself as people doing weird things with technology. i like to think of them as wannabe technomages, or like the digital circus of ZBS’s "the adventures of ruby" (for the three geeks reading this who know what that is).

i would say that nearly everone at the event had either
A: attended the flipside/burningman gatherings
B: subscribed to MAKE magazine
C: or owned a digital multimeter and a soldering iron

the month SPACE SQUID attended there was a guy presenting a screaming robotic baby head (not as cool as you might imagine), a presentation of tele-robotics where a guy used a webbrowser to make a robot bump around the office of some guy in MIT(about as cool as you imagine), and a propane-powered ruben’s tube that made flame dance to 80s music.

i would bother to explain what a ruben’s tube is and how it works, but i’m not that charitable a human being. the above picture links to a youtube video i made, and that links to way too many ruben’s tube science demonstration videos.

the SPACE SQUID presentation itself had a number of technical issues. ranging from a complete MS powerpoint failure to david’s KKK squid costume.

actually, i egged him into wearing the thing. i think it put the entire presentation over the top.

of course, we could not have failed to entertain. not only did we read the jaw-droppingly brilliant story by ryan thomas "cookies have no souls", but we also had our squid grrl teal, the covermodel for issue three, helping with the reading. how could anyone be disappointed?

i’m still reading the neddiad by daniel pinkwater. one of the joys of reading his books are the many interesting factoids he throws in. for instance, you should never have more than two bottles of CHEF CHOWS HOT AND SPICY OIl in your home at any one time. safety first. although actually finding this most deliciously burning oil is another issue entirely. pinkwater also revealed that LOS ANGELES DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST, a fact that few people are brave enough to admit.

in the chapter of the neddiad before last, pinkwater mentioned the great cats of britain. at first glance, it seems like a not unreasonable claim that there are a small and reclusive population of big cats running around england and scotland. the british isles have a fair amount of wild land even now and there are several thousand reported sightings a year. then you dig a little deeper in the google hits and you find the quotes comparing the british big cats (BBC) to bigfoot. and then you discover that the best photographic evidence for them is super-incredibly wildly unconvincing:

i think i may have mentioned that i live on the eastside of austin now, which is the BAD side of town. i was biking around, exploring, and i found this branching intersection . . .

. . . which emptied out into an aquaduct. outside of the ghetto, people don’t stand for their roads dead-ending in small streams.

my dad had a birthday recently, so as is my habit, i carved him a small present. i’ve been into the local "cedar" for a while now. it usually has a good grain, and takes a polish without the application of polyurethane or other chemicals. the piece of wood i used unfortunately had weird gray discolorations which ended up across the face of this little bust.


i can’t really justify making a bust of shatner. neither my father nor myself are particularly enthusiastic about the man, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

late at night, my GF and i did a raid on the local fiesta supermarket, a store that mainly specializes in mexican food, but there are several aisles dedicated to non-perishables from a gamut of cultures.

el salvador for instance produces a drink mix called super cebada that bears a more than passing resemblance to pepto bismal:

it tastes exactly how you would expect pink powdered barley to taste.

for those of you who are connoisseurs of fine "extruded snack product" then you should check out cheesteens, which in my opinion are actually superior to cheetos due to the marginally cheaper price and the significantly more pronounced cheese taste.

since it was the birthday of our friend toto, i also picked up some gifts for him in the multi-cultural section.

the red tooth powder is indian, and i suspect, but cannot prove, that it’s used as a toothpaste and does not literally turn your teeth red. the bagged columbian mayo turned out to be a hit at toto’s b-day party in the way that only a bag of columbian mayo can be.