Friday Goggles

funny how everything can work on friday and nothing work on monday, yet nothing changed!

friday goggles!

World Weary Avengers

potentially my next little book, a thing entitled 'world-weary avengers', based loosely on myself and my good friend 'chopper'. We will (fictionally) form the world weary avengers club (WWAC).

We set out to change the world by wanting the world to change.

How do we do this?

By expressing our (correct and proper) opinions on anything and everything. But not just expressing them; expressing them in the right ways in the right places at the right times through the right spokespersons in order to catch the attention of those who do actually make decisions which do affect people, and so reflecting onto them our own brilliance we will illuminate the heavens and, who knows, perhaps even cause a new product to be delivered to a supermarket near you! Or something even bigger and better and shinier. Who can tell? But though this notion starts out small (and well-contained) it will expand to fill its entire potential space (like a gas, like entropy itself) with unknowable and unforeseeable (if not calamitous or momentous) ramifications.

we might have to enlist the help of a network of "comms" (communicators), especially some nice-looking ladies (like the woman in the movie 'Frost/Nixon', who was there apparently for no other reason than to make you think that she would eventually take her top off), who are most likely to draw the attention of those powerful moguls we are targeting. So ... off to entice the ladies ... um. to do that, we will probably need to enlist the help of some manly young men who can be persuaded (or bribed) to further our cause. and so on. et cetera

a cast of thousands is sucked into the vast conspiracy - or maybe a handful of people who go around sitting at outdoor cafes pontificating at large in the hopes that someone will hear something and perk up their ears (you get that reference, I am certain) ...

believe it or not, i knew some people like this when i worked at a bookstore called Printers Inc in Palo Alto. At least two of those people are now well-known best-selling authors of high-tech prophecy (whose names shall remain -less in this entry)

"summing up the spirit of the age": ... is a game for fools, idiots and other assorted writers. (the spirit of the age 2009 - talking loudly in the vain hope of being overheard by someone more important)

"It all began with Chris and Tom on a San Francisco sidewalk"

whether it goes any further than that ... well, from my keyboard to God's inbox, I suppose ..

Milvina Dean, Titanic Survivor

Out Of Print

Seems a damned shame that a book like Grace Paley's "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" could be out of print. When all this other crap is in. Great writing at least should be eternal.

Like Lermontov's "A Hero Of Our Time" - just read that and can hardly believe it was written 170 years ago. Reads like now. One of the interesting things about it is how the "savage tribes" with their "chiefs" that he writes about, are Georgians and Chechens and Armenians! An exceptional book.

This week in Auto-Tune News

Dead Ball

the idea for this one-act or comedy sketch is a deceased father (or grandfather) in heaven who is forced (by a persistent, cloying, michael-jacksonesque christ) to watch all of his professional baseball star son's (or grandson's) games - where the youth will point to the sky in a gesture towards those two. now the dead man was himself a baseball player, albeit not a star (perhaps a minor league career) and was hoping, being dead and all, to put that behind him once and for all. But no, the christ makes him go watch every single game against his will. meanwhile, his friends in heaven laugh at him while they get to go and do what they want because their offspring are nobodies and failures.

Madam Sylvia

(an excerpt from Freak City)

Madam Sylvia had been in business at the same location for many, many years, and yet it seemed she never aged. She could hardly have been more than thirty. Old-timers were convinced she was actually over a hundred, but kept her youthful appearance due to some very evil magic. They were convinced that babies' blood had been involved at some point. Sylvia herself chalked it up to genetics. After all, her mother had lived to be ninety and even until the end never looked any older than sixty, sixty one. In fact, she had inherited the business from her mother, who was also named Madam Sylvia, so it was natural for people to think she had been there forever.

The little shop was exactly as you imagine it to be, for precisely that reason. When you go to a psychic, you expect certain things. Crystal balls, tarot cards, incense, red velvet drapes, and so on. The Madams Sylvia lair was not lacking in any of these finishing touches. Sylvia herself would have preferred something more like a psychiatrist's office, with prints of famous paintings and understated wallpaper, but she understood her market and her clientele. If it's hokey they want, it's hokey they'll get, she sighed.

Business was never slow, another fact that continually surprised her. It was understandable that people are afraid of the unknown, and the future is by definition - or at least by our common experience - unknown, although she understood that from the vantage point of the general theory of relativity, the future might be perceived to be simultaneous with all other points in time depending on your location and velocity within the space time continuum. Science, and especially quantum mechanics, had helped her understand her own particular talents.

She even had a master's degree in astrophysics from the University of Leeds. The truth of the matter was that she was indeed psychic. The future was not an unknown to her eyes. It was instead a rather dreadful bore. Just as you or I can predict the destination of one ant moving along in a trail of ants, even though the ant itself might have no idea where it's going, so it was with Sylvia and the vast majority of her customers. They presented their futures to her as plainly as the noses on their faces. She had never been married. She had considered it once.

She had let herself feel that she had fallen in love with a cashier from a neighborhood bookstore. He had visions of a soft and gentle future, settling down as the owner of a cozy little store in a small touristy town, living on postcards, trinkets and mysteries, while she had her own little office in a little back room if only to keep her occupied and content. She had to admit that she almost went through with it, but there was always the problem of her mom.

Dead as she was, the old Madam Sylvia would not go away, appearing to her daughter practically daily, butting right into her business. She was liable to show up any time, day or night, and start right in with complaining. There was way too much noise. It was too quiet. Too cold or too hot. The dead are never comfy it seemed. She always wore that old blue dress. The one she was married in. The one she was buried in too. She would stand in the corner by the potted palm, and talk louder and louder until she was sure she was heard.

Mama Sylvia made such a fuss over the quiet cashier, pestering her daughter about his dirty little habits, describing the horrible children they would certainly have, and generally making such a nuisance of herself that the only way the younger one could get her to stop bothering her was to make a deal. For her part she promised she would not marry the boy. In return her mother was only allowed to badger her on weekends, Saturdays between seven and nine in the morning, to be precise. Sylvia never regretted the deal, and she didn't bother to tell her mother that she was never going to go through with it anyway. She also never told her that the dead are lousy fortune tellers.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Reading the prologue to this book by Henry Miller astonishes me. Written 70 years ago, it could have been written today. Some excerpts:


It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful ... Whatever does not lend itself to being bought or sold ... is debarred

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

Things To Do In Wasilla When You're Dead

as in dead fish, going with the flow, as opposed to lame ducks, which apparently limp around for a year or so. dead fish? lame duck? not our plucky barracuda gal. She's gonna be around for awhile, cashin' in and callin' people names. Glenda Beck? Shawna Hannity? This bitch woll be on Fox so fast it'll make even a dead fish's head spin. It'll be like shooting wolves from the safety of an airplane. We've seen her act before. She's a coward, a loser and a quitter with a knack for gettin' in, cashin' in, and gettin' out. Hard to believe she was even a decent point guard with all those unforced turnovers. She's sloppy, messy, temperamental, secessionist, narcissistic, egotistical, mean and a flat out ignorant liar and kook. mmm'bye ...

post-haste

now publishing some oldies but goodies @ lulu, including - my 'Survivor' stories, the sci-fi 'Rampant Pheromonix', a'personal apocalypse in subway-surface style', 'Phantom of the Mall', and my very first "novel" The Endless Adventures of Infoman

It's odd re-reading things that I wrote in my mid-twenties (half my life ago). How did I come up with so many words? I think my brain was a lot busier then, and I just had "so much things to say" back then. It's the way of it. I don't really like these writings all that much anymore, but it's nostalgic to see them and I do have some residual fondness for them, of course.

Statues of Horses

Lately it isn't enough for people in Woodside, CA, to own several horses. Now they must also have statues of horses out in their fields!

Elvis vs Michael

Someone is bound to write the definitive comparison someday, but there are certainly a lot of parallels

the crossover (Elvis brought black music to white people, Michael brought black music video to white people)

the phases (Elvis young v old, Michael black v. white)

the dancing (Elvis the pelvis, Michael the moonwalk)

the outfits (gaudy with royal pretensions)

the 'perversions' (Elvis and young girls' panties, Michael and young boys)

the dying (pills pills pills, with one bloated out and the other one wasted away)

the reach (world wide, both of them as famous as anyone can be)

the estates (graceland v neverland)

the afterlife (the perpetual industry of biography)

Freak City

Freak City
It's hard to control your destiny while you're waiting for the bus. The trouble for Argus Kirkham began when a stranger pushed his way through a crowd at a bus stop and pressed a package into his hands. Inside the package were various random items - photos and toys and newspaper clippings. None of it seemed to make any sense, but as Argus and his friends unraveled the clues, very strange things began to occur in this novel of mystery and ghosts.

So I finished the first draft of the novel, Freak City, begun on June 5th and completed on June 27th. Of course there will be revising and all, but I think it's actually pretty darn good. More cinematic than my usual fare. It stays with one story and builds to one of them there 'dramatic conclusions' that everyone likes in their fiction :}

What I enjoyed especially about this one is that I started out with a pretty random set of clues, and had to think about how to make them all come together. Most of them did. It wasn't until Chapter Five that I really had a sense of where it was going. And it wasn't until Chapter Fourteen that I knew how it was all going to end. After that, it just wrote itself, which probably means there are continuity issues - as usual, I will have to go back and mop those up. It's also within my usual range of around 20-25,000 words.

For now, the final little epilogue, Chapter Twenty, sets up the stage for a trilogy of sorts. The first two are definitely related (Snapdragon Alley being the first), but the third, if there is one, will just take a character from the first (who was not in the second) and give her a novel all to herself. Other than the character, Sapphire, there will probably be no connection at all to the others.

Freak City is available from Pigeon Weather Press via Lulu for pdf download and paperback. In the meantime, as always, it's for free on the blog.

Anne Elk on Brontosaureses

one of my all time favorites

The Amazing Transformative Power of the Internets

Television coverage of Iran's turmoil has fallen since [Michael] Jackson's death Thursday; on the Twitter micro-blogging site, Iran remained among the most discussed topics, but fell below Jackson and comments about the movie "Transformers 2.

Internet Kidnapper

by Alison Bennett

Interactive Story

sitting around the kitchen table, the wife, the kid and I took turns writing the sentences in the following story (disclaimer: obscenity provided courtesy of wife and seven-year-old)

It was a cold and clammy day, and Scooteroop the clam was eating his normal meal of ferocious pirhanas. Just then a cockatoo swooped down and swiped a bite of fish.

"Come back here, you little fish-eating f***ing asshole", said Scooteroop.

"Oh, I'll come back", the bird replied, "that's some good fish you got there and I am going to get me some more"

This kind of thing had never happened before to Scooteroop, and he wasn't sure what to do. He wanted a thing that would prevent this type of dumb stuff from happening forever in any place in the universe. He realized that the best possible solution would be a cockatoo-proof piranha-meal-protection-chamber made of heavy metal with lots of locks. But where oh where could he get such a device? He googled it and no luck. He looked it up in his encyclopedia. Nothing. He decided to ask his wise old friend Jack who worked at the bookstore down the street. Jack was an elephant who knew everything there is to know.

"For a clam", Jack told him, "you really are pretty stupid. All you have to do is eat faster!"

"Have you ever tried eating a piranha fast? It's not easy. You have to distract the fish so he doesn't whip around and eat your face. It's a tricky business indeed"

"Have you ever thought of eating simpler fare?" asked Jack.

"O.K.", Scooteroop replied. "I'll eat a harmless ten million pound whale"

"Count me in" said the cockatoo.

"Oh no, not you again! What a little f*** budget! Why are you following me?"

"It's you again?" said the cockatoo. "I'm outta here".

Well, it was a cold and whaley day, and Huey the whale was rolling around in the sea, minding his own business. He saw an elephant, a clam and a cockatoo heading straight for him, their jaws gaping and their eyes bugged out. Huey casually opened his gargantuan maw, welcomed the visitors and GULP. Goodbye.

Don't Say Ayatollah So

Read somewhere that the British had frozen the bank account of Ayatollah Khamenei's son, worth something in the vicinity of one and a half billion (dollars, euros, pounds, or petrodollars, I'm not sure). Billion with a B.

What's happened is that the "Islamic Revolution" was hijacked by a gang of mobsters, hoodlums and thugs in priest's clothing, not unlike many other revolutions through the ages.

The "opposition" is bankrolled by billionaire Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, so there's this Godfather theme going on.

In the meantime, brave people are lining up to be crushed by monsters. Pretty sad.

The Hero in the Dark

This is a nice title that Johnny came up with, and although it is suitable for Freak City, I've come to like that title, so I might have to save this one for another time. }

rant of the day

Some members of my Kiva Atheist's group are upset with this article attacking us. My rant of the day is in response to their calls to flood the media with angry emails about it:

Sending angry mail to the LA Times about Charlotte Allen's article would only reinforce several of her main points - that atheists are angry, self-centered, bitter whiners!

I didn't read her article as bigoted or hate-speech - I've found it a common reaction for religious people to get sick and tired of being ridiculed and put down as "stupid, idiots and morons" by such seemingly arrogant figureheads as Dawkins et al.

As a lifelong (fifty plus years) atheist, I'm of several minds about "the new atheism". Part of me is glad that atheism is beginning to be heard, another part of me is not always so pleased with its messengers, and yet another part of me is wondering, 'how can I cash in on atheism the way these guys are'?

by the way, that last bit is a joke. is it me, or is just there a serious lack of a sense of humor among these so-called 'new atheists'?

my own atheism is simply my personal perception that the world was probably not built like a doll house by some creature intent on using it as a testing ground to determine which of its inhabitants can love it enough to be rewarded with eternal happiness, and which of them should be tortured indefinitely.

others may have a different opinion. :}

but seriously, i know how tempting it is to mock fundamentalists of all stripes. I do it myself all the time. But I can also empathize with their frustration of having nothing at all to back up their claims except the scribblings of some ancient old men. It's a lot easier to fall back on the same old simple notions than to try to really comprehend the extraordinary vastness and complexity of reality.