Jazzmoose

Will Penny Nickelback Allan Quatermain

Emma Peel B. F. Skinner Husker Du

Marilu Henner Nestor Patou Ladybird Johnson

Okay, what we need now is a walk out by every NFL player. Come on, boys; end the season now!

The Bears will never go deep into the playoffs until they visit the wizard and get a brain for their quarterback.

Your team is one trade away from being great. Unfortunately, trading the owner is a tough sell...

B. F. Skinner Fred Dryer Chuck Tanner

Farmer Brown Dennis Miller Jamie Baker

I needed a break from my PKD runthrough (just finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) and decided to visit an old friend:

I've never heard them, but a quick search tells me that they're available on the net. Thanks for the tip!

Wilson Pickett Hurricane Carter Wallace Wattles

Sure outlived Bogart by a stretch.

I started watching these on Amazon a few months ago, and for me it was the first time since the original viewing (how old was I; four or five?), so yeah, much better. And it was hilarious then, with nothing sinking into my head but the slapstick. At least I thought that was all that was sinking in; Dick Van Dyke seems to have had more influence on my idea of humor than I would have ever suspected.

A cat scan is always recommended for optimum performance.

On the other hand, if you can save money in spite of the $20, what do you do? Righteous indignation doesn't pay the rent...

Columbia Magenta Riff Raff

After a week of high 90's and worse, I finally broke down and got an air conditioner for the bedroom. Obviously, since it has arrived, it hasn't cracked 80, and I even had to use the heater this morning as it dipped into the mid-forties. You can't ask more from a product than that...

Been continuing my Philip K. Dick revisit, with A Scanner Darkly (probably my favorite of his books), The Crack in Space (a little too 'out there' for me; I mean come on, a Black president?), Ubik (missed this the first time around; this may be the ultimate Dick novel) and now The Zap Gun. It's nice to finally be able to find his books easily and not have to pay through the nose for a beat up paperback...

The thing about Heinlein, is he definitely went through this crochety phase where he was just sure that engineers and the military would end up running societies (esp. Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though I generally like the latter one). But then he went all 70s with the pansexual books he wrote after that (I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love, Number of the Beast, To Sail Beyond the Sunset). Friday is probably the least creepy of these late books, but it is still a bit odd to see a male author "Mary-Janeing." I'm sure I would be a lot less impressed with Heinlein's wisdom today than I was as a teenager. Personally, I thought Starship Troopers was just as good as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I didn't mind that part of his career at all (although Stranger was just too much); it was the later phase (won't bother naming the offenders as you already have). Though I Will Fear No Evil certainly deserves special mention as particularly pathetic. I know Number of the Beast is often held up as his worst, but I'd much rather read that the the embarrassingly bad Fear No Evil. But even then, I thought Friday and Job: a Comedy of Justice were worth reading. In the long run, I'm afraid Heinlein will be remembered for his hand in creating the conventions of the genre rather than for his actual writing. Except for All You Zombies; criticize that one and I'll turn back into a teenaged fanboy and go batshit!

No, it was a short story in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies. Stand on Zanzibar was the chess one, wasn't it? I never managed to finish it or Shockwave Rider, unfortunately. I should probably give that one another try.

Greenmantle by John Buchan. I kept thinking I ought to stop and read The 39 Steps first, but I just couldn't stop...

Fifi Rover Rex, the Wonder Dog

I haven't tried Banks yet, so no. Today I've been reading Dick's Time Out of Joint. Pretty good stuff; it's one I missed in my PKD obsession phase. I've been slowly rebuilding my collection of his books, which is a heck of a lot easier today than it ever was in the past. Don't know how far I'll go with it, though; do I really need to read The Man Who Japed again? It's funny how Dick has gone from being tragically underrated to overrated in the last decade or so. I mean, surely even the most ardent Dick fan can admit that some of his work is just not that good.

I've been having a lot of problems like this with sf in recent years. 100 or 150 pp. into the book, the writer's imagination is dazzling but somehow it all runs together, whatever is or was at stake got lost in the phantasmagoria. It seemed like the only reason for the story's momentum was that the author had a contract to write a 600-page book. This has happened to me with China Mieville, CJ Cherryh, Neil Gaimon, Connie Willis, a.o. writers, plus I preferred a William Gibson short stories book to the novel I read. Although Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is now a favorite. For a few years late in the sf Golden Era I loved to read Astounding every month, until a barrage of Robert Silverberg cured me. Nearly all of my favorites date from the 1940s and '50s. Delaney, Zelazny, and the other stuff that true sf fans considered high literature bored me. Interestingly, in the late 1960s when I tried to order a book by my hero JG Ballard from an sf specialist store, the owner, a big SF FAN, angrily refused to sell such stuff. Since the 2 novels I wrote are at heart science fiction, please don't tell my opinions to any of today's true sf fans. That brings back memories of searching for The Atrocity Exhibition and getting a puzzled "why?" in return. Some of the authors you mention (Gaiman and Cherryh) I enjoy. Connie Willis I can't handle, due to my inability to suspend disbelief for time travel stories, but I can relate to your complaint. The only thing worse is trilogies. I try not to blame Tolkien, but it's difficult... I can relate to the Silverberg comments as well. Great editor, but as a writer, I'll pass. I think the stuff I enjoy the most is from the fifties. William Tenn and Robert Sheckley, the Kornbluth/Pohl pair ups, stuff like that. And I promise I'll pull Sundidos off the shelf soon!

Agreed. Well, except for Ellison; I think he's pretty much a waste of space, a man who's schtick became tiresome long ago. There was a lot of silliness involved in the "new wave". I'd compare it to the Sex Pistols in rock, as an interesting, if embarrassing, necessary step to get to what was next, but overrated on it's own. (Except for Effinger's What Entropy Means to Me; for some reason I love that book!) I remember a story by someone (I think it was Spinrad, another author I like) riffing on John Dos Passos (forgive if I'm spelling wrong) being praised as something amazing, and I just didn't get it. I might have been more impressed if Heinlein hadn't already done the same thing in Stranger in a Strange Land, but I guess he was too old guard to count. Silly, silly, silly...