Click Tower blowup 1 or Tower blowup 2 for different views of the demolition of the Gettysburg National Tower, former home of the "BattleCam"©.

Tower Blowup 1 -- Distant Shot

Tower Blowup 2 -- Zoom Shot

These brief videos always remind me of the destruction of one of the Martian tripods in Wells's War Of The Worlds. Too bad all our wars can't be imaginary.

I'm originally from NJ and saw Springsteen in concert multiple times (perhaps the best rock shows I ever saw -- and I saw Hendrix, The Doors, etc.) so I found this interesting, not realizing that there was an actual flesh-and-blood Madam Marie, a character "The Boss" sings about in 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).

The Union Forever

"A Blonde for Onion", a story about graphic novels, writers, artists and the price of fame is up at Outsider Writers.

It is by up and comer Kristin Fouquet, a resident of The Big Easy whose writing has as much soul as her city.

A Blonde for Onion

"At a time like this you were fortunate if, like me, you had a brother named Malachy who owned a bar called the Bells of Hell. On my way to West 13th Street I passed other bars where grown men and women cried out piteously for a beer, a gin and tonic, anything, anything that splashes in a glass with a tinkle of ice. Oh, ice above all on this hot 13th of July, the 114th anniversary of the Draft Riots of 1863 when the Irish (my people) tried to burn the city to the ground.

Candles already flickered along the bar at the Bells of Hell and Malachy was praised for his foresight in having such a plentiful supply. He smiled and his regular customers smiled because they knew of Malachy's turbulent relationship with Con Edison, that from time to time he was a little tardy meeting the bill. He proved you can run a bar on candles and borrowed ice though you wouldn't want to make a habit of it. Newcomers to the bar that night remarked on how charming the place was and the regulars smiled and drank the beer that, sadly, was turning warm."

Frank McCourt NY Times Aug 15, 2003


#

From Novel With Working Title St. M. by J.D. Finch June 16 2008

St. M. and I walked into the bar that was candle-lit and a bit warm in that there was no air conditioning on this warm June day.

Yo, Mike! shouted St. M., you’ve neglected to pay the electric again have ya?

Oh, shite, M., said the bartender/owner. The only thing that worries anyone here is last call and closing time. Do you think they give a shite if the stout is a tad warm?

St. M. chuckled and allowed for how he guessed they didn’t give a shite and proceeded to take us through a curtain that separated the main bar from a private area, where there was a group of men listening to another man, who was reading something.

That’s Mick McCabe, said St M. I’ve brought ya here to show you how real writers get along.

But I get along, I told him. And I’m a real writer.

Bullshite, said St M. If you were the real thing, ya wood'na been reading that damn phony writin' book this morning.

I supposed he had me there: I should have been well past that sort of novice stuff. Still I did have my honor.

But they write about Joyce in it.

I didn’t say it loud, but the word Joyce was picked up by some sort of Irish writer sonar that all at the table possessed. The reader stopped; the listeners put down their Guinnesses. Their previously mellow sleepy eyes widened to the size of coasters.

Now boyos, take it easy. The kid here was just talkin’. Didn’t mean to lessen yerselves by mentioning “Himself”, said St. M.

They seemed to be satisfied with this explanation, and didn’t say hello to St. M., simply accepting his presence, while acting as if his companion -- the utterer of the name that was to them a self-contained, complete-unto-itself vow -- didn’t exist.

"All these people that you mention
Yes I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name."

Bob Dylan

If you take a look at the icon accompanying this post you will see where I live, in Brattleboro Vt. I live within the blue square, just off West River Rd, which you can see going north-south in the picture. I live on the west side. US Route 91 is viewable outside my kitchen window, though it's distant enough -- about a quarter mile -- that the traffic noise is not a bother.

About a half hour ago my dog Jasper, an Australian Shepherd went to the door at an uncharacteristic time. I was involved in work on my computer and wasn't paying attention to my environment outside of ten foot radius. And there are big evergreens between me and the road; so I didn't notice the police cars stopped out in from of my house. There were more vehicles under the Rt 91 overpass. I went down to the road where emergency vehicles and fire trucks whipped past me. Up on 91 I saw more police vehicles and police looking down at the river and I knew -- a jumper. It's happened before here, before my time here. But that time was in the winter.

I crossed the street to see if there was anything to see. There wasn't really -- the river bends slightly and I couldn't see what the police and rescue people might have been doing. Thankfully, I suppose.

And finally: I've had that icon above sitting in my "My Pictures" folder for a year or so and just added it about a week ago. Suddenly I feel like I'm in a Ray Bradbury story.

(Update: It was a man from New Hampshire in his early thirties. He died at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital about two hours after he was pulled from the river. Police had arrived on the scene after passing motorists had noticed him on the edge of the bridge. They tried to talk him down, but without success.)

Although he sometimes pours on the earnest sauce a bit too heavily for my taste, I found this part of his post-Hillary statement good.

"I personally leaned toward Obama in this contest fairly early on (I think Edwards was marginally closer to my own most perfect candidate this time around, but that was pretty much a non-starter), but as I also mentioned, as far as these leading candidates went on the Democratic side, there was no real downside for me. I would have quite happily voted for Clinton if it had gone her way, not only for her own policies and qualities, but also simply to watch conservative heads explode at the idea of the Clintons setting up shop at 1600 Pennsylvania again. There’s not enough Schadenfreude Pie in the world for that sort of event."

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=850

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you.

* Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.


1. Decapitator-O-Matic
2. Walking After Midnight -- Patsy Cline
3. Jessica Simpson -- It is better to look good than to fight good.


*Ripped off from any number of geeks you might find around here.

155 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

buymeaclue

Will Rogers, renowned sled dog racer Leonhard Seppala* and aviators Wiley Post and Joe Crosson, pictured just before Post and Rogers took off on the last flight either of them would make. (Postcard, privately produced by Seppala is from the Whirligigzine Collection.)





* When an outbreak of diphtheria occurred in Nome in January 1925, temperatures ranging down to -50F along with 80mph winds meant that the primitive air transport of that day would not be able to deliver the needed medicine. Instead, the serum was carried by rail from Anchorage to Nenana and relays of dog teams were sent the remainder of the way -- 674 miles. After only five and a half days, Gunnar Kaasen -- with a dog named Balto leading his team -- was the last relay driver into Nome. Kaasen and Balto captured most of the media attention at the time, and in the aftermath of the hoopla, a statue of Balto was erected in New York City's Central Park. However, Leonhard Seppala's team traveled 340 miles out from Nome and back through the most treacherous sections of Alaska's wilderness, including across the perilous ice of Norton Sound, and carried the serum over 91 miles of the relay route. (Seppala's lead dog was the famous racing champion, Togo.) In comparison, most other drivers in the Serum Run covered approximately 50 miles. Both Kaasen and Seppala used teams of Siberian Huskies. This emergency delivery, also known as the "Great Race of Mercy", is commemorated annually with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Wikipedia

Ok, I may be late to the party, but I'm here. As this is the type of publication I don't read in one sitting, I will not blog about it in one post.

This post is part of the "we'll send you a free copy if you blog about the mag" deal. I'm aware that this is an old ploy in the biz and was going on pre-blogs when publishers would send out freebies for fanzine attention and word of mouth buzz.

Funny, but I realized I hadn't picked up a copy of this mag off the newsstand in over ten years. So the mere fact that it arrived in my mailbox and conjured a nostalgic feeling about pulps past was good. It looks like it hasn't changed at all, except for the price, which I won't mention but seems high when slick mags like Entertainment Weekly are offering me a "We want you back" deal at $10/year. Whatever. The vicissitudes of publishing are mysterious to me and I'm sure F&SF has to charge the price it does which will prohibit me from ever ordering a subscription. It's a freakin' pulp, for the love of Ford! Even their sub deal for bloggers is more than I am willing to shell out.

Anyway, oddly enough I always read the nonfiction parts of these mags first, so I've thus far read the book review and film columns. The book column reviews the Vandermeer's New Weird antho., and what I took away from it is: it's pretty much the same old wine in new bottles. The other review in the column is dragon related and I'll admit that when it comes to the stuff in Fantasy & Science Fiction I am almost completely interested in only the SF.

The movie column by one Kathi Maio I found disappointing for the simple reason that it seemed a lot of space was wasted on a film (Jumper) that got pretty universally panned. Maio hates it too -- at a greater length than my interest could keep up with. It has always seemed to me that a simple warning that a movie is bad (with a few illustrative points) should suffice; then one can get on with describing good films that we should see, at a bit of length. But the writer here also brings a prudish quality to the review, tsking various sexual elements of the film and more or less bringing a spoilsport quality to things. (A few admonishments on the order of "he could have been saving the world but he was off drinking martinis and having sex!" turned me right off and made me wonder if the writer was grandmotherly.)

Still as one who has followed the SFF world with varying degrees of intensity over the years I find a tinge of prudishness interesting in a review in F&SF, as one of the things I recall about the mag in the old days was the lack of any forward thinking attitudes about sex or sexuality (I know, this is a criticism of a lot of older days' SF). But I'm sure I detected a musty smell here, that others who are part of this "read and blog deal" have complained extends to the fiction in the mag.

I'll let you know what my take is in a later entry here.

(UD: Editor Gordon Van Gelder notes the above at http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/forum/topic.php?id=25&page=2)

You know, I would sort of freak out if anybody in today's political sphere started looking like the evil mother of the vice presidential candidate's stepson in the Cold War political paranoia flick The Manchurian Candidate, from the novel by Richard Condon.

Played by Murder She Wrote and Sweeney Todd's Angela Lansbury, who made her debut a hundred years ago in Gaslight and soon thereafter The Picture Of Dorian Gray, (talk about being in dark entertainments!) Lansbury plays the mother who works for evil minions of a government that looks a hell of a lot like China's. (Oh yeah -- the title.) She grooms her son to be the assassin that will shoot the presidential candidate, so that her complicit puppet of a husband, the vice presidential candidate, can steal the presidential nomination, literally over the dead body of the man who was to be his running mate.

What a wacky fantasy...Luckily people don't even think about assassination in these days of increased security and rainbow colored alerts -- do they? And they surely don't bring the topic up as a talking point in the midst of the most important political race in the land. Right? No, of course they don't. And if they did it would be in incredibly bad taste, wouldn't it? Yes. Yes, it would be. Incredibly bad.

J.D. Finch (not verified) says:

Mr. Sicha is apparently in thrall to the spirit of Nathanael West. West presented the world of freakish journalism (Miss Lonelyhearts), as well as the all-consuming worship of celebrity (Day Of The Locust) that ultimately destroys. Unfortunately, while an earlier day's journalist could see the difference between the real importance of literary accomplishment, as opposed to writers as culty celebrity figures, Sicha conflates the two areas, with the result that a writer, not the work, becomes the commodity.

(As for his considerations of gender among modern and pomo scribes, he starts out strong, using proper female touchstones Adler, Malcolm, Didion, etc., though to weak effect, as his argument ultimately peters out (pun intended) with J.T. Leroy. This after he has even dragged Salinger in as a straw man. Presumably he sucks because he got all manny with female writer Joyce Maynard when she was THE chick in lit? (How about a little explanation of motivation Mr. Sicha?)

And although I think it unfair to criticize him for his gossip column roots, it is fair to point out how he gauges literary importance according to an elemental urge (a substitute for fucking), a sort of lit libido, rather than based on a considered act of creation and the commerce that ensues.

In short, this piece by Mr. Sicha misses the mark as the writer never realizes the simple fact that "It ain't the meat, it's the motion."

May 15, 2008 11:21 PM

Your Score: Othello

You scored 39% = Tragic, 55% = Comic, 27% = Romantic, 39% = Historic

You are the Tragedy of Othello: the Moor of Venice. Set in the beautiful "city on the sea", Othello tells the story of a Moorish general and the disastrous consequences that arise from jealousy and lies. What your score tells us about you is that you are most likely a very cunning person, who is able to get people to do what you want. People come to you for sage advice, and to confide in you their deepest secrets. Always the opportunist, you may, however, exploit this fact if an opportunity presents itself for your own personal gain. You're not all bad, though. Like Othello, you are probably very devoted to your friends and family and most likely very courageous. While a bit of an outsider, you are able to gain people's confidence and admiration. We certainly admire you!

mssrcrankypants

...I guess it's safe to declare the trend officially "5 minutes ago."



Click here to see the story.