Saturday, August 11, 2012
Carlo Rambaldi, R. I. P.
NYTimes.com: Carlo Rambaldi, a special-effects virtuoso who won two Academy Awards for his work on Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and a special achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy for John Guillermin’s 1976 remake of “King Kong,” died Friday in southern Italy. He was 86.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
literary jukebox
literary jukebox: Daily quote from a favorite book, thematically matched with a song.
Peru Update
FRANCE 24: Archeologists in Peru plan to use a US-made drone to survey ancient Andean ruins, in the latest civilian application of the unmanned aerial vehicles used to hunt militants in the world's war zones.
The device, which can fit in a backpack, is due to be tested later this month at the ruins of the 16th-century Spanish colonial town Mawchu Llacta, some 13,450 feet (4,100 meters) above sea level.
The device, which can fit in a backpack, is due to be tested later this month at the ruins of the 16th-century Spanish colonial town Mawchu Llacta, some 13,450 feet (4,100 meters) above sea level.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Free Today for Kindle
Buck Fever (Blanco County Mysteries): Ben Rehder: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: Blanco County, Texas: It's the week before deer hunting season, as close to a statewide holiday as you get in Texas, and the locals are getting restless. Game Warden John Marlin has his hands full with poaching complaints coming in faster than he can write out-of-season tickets. Then a call of a different sort comes in. A man dressed up in some sort of deer costume has been shot at the Circle S ranch, and witnesses are reporting a massive wild-eyed buck prancing about the pasture in a lovesick frenzy. Marlin's seen a lot in his years, but this is wilder than he could have imagined: the man in the deer suit is a good friend, and the whacked-out whitetail isn't exactly a stranger either. It's the beginning of a mad, frantic weekend in Blanco County, one that will see a few more men shot, an invasion by Colombians with more than hunting on their minds, and damn near the end of Marlin's life. Ben Rehder serves it all up with a huge helping of humor in this debut comic mystery that will firmly establish him as the funniest crime writer in Texas.
PimPage: An Occasional Feature in Which I Call Attention to Books of Interest
Second Hand Goods (Nick Kepler): Jim Winter: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: Cleveland PI Nick Kepler returns, but he's trying to leave. A routine skip trace entangles Kepler in a stolen car ring and attracts the attention of a beautiful Russian woman, who may or may not be the mistress of one or more Russian crime lords. And all Nick wants to do is go on vacation.
Free Today for Kindle
Hot Wire: Gary Carson: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: Emma Martin jacks cars for an uneasy alliance of California rednecks and Mexican drug dealers who ship hot cars to South America, smuggling heroin and cocaine back into the country with the profits. Night after night, Emma cruises the Bay Area looking for cars on their target list.
Until one night, she steals the wrong car and plunges into the heart of an international conspiracy.
Emma's just a kid in over her head, but try telling that to the police, the feds, and the gang of vicious narco-traffickers who are all after a piece of her.
Once Again, Texas Leads the Way
Sideshow banner art show in Texas - Boing Boing: Waxahachie, Texas's excellent Webb Gallery is hosting an exhibition of more than a dozen vintage sideshow banners! Titled "The Greatest Show On Earth," it runs until September 9 and can be browsed online too.
Here's the Plot for Your Next Recycling Thriller
Now I Know Archives: One notable such crime spree involved three New Jersey men who, over the course of about four months, made off with over 900 tons of cardboard, as reported by Metro Philadephia.
Naturally Beautiful - The New Naturalist Series
AbeBooks: The New Naturalist Series is a collection of books published by Collins in the UK that focuses on natural history topics. Sure, there are plenty of books about nature, but what makes these books stand out from the pack is the gorgeous design of the covers. According to the New Naturalist website, the aim of the series at the start was, "to interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists."
Forgotten Books: Citizen in Space -- Robert Sheckley
If you haven't read Sheckley, you've missed out on some of the most entertaining short stories of the great era of the SF digests. Check him out.
Thursday, August 09, 2012
PimPage: An Occasional Feature in Which I Call Interesting Books to Your Attention
Nirvana Gates (The Fathomless Abyss): J.M. McDermott, Mats Minnhagen: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: She was born there, in the Smog, every day breathing more smoke than air. She was strange, even in a bottomless hell full of creatures from a million worlds. She was doomed to a life of servitude. She was lonely. She was worried about her dying father. She was suspicious of her lying mother. She was scared. She was getting angry. And she wanted answers.
The Fathomless Abyss can open any time and anywhere, and things fall in, or crawl in, from a million worlds across a million years. Deep in the bottomless expanse of this impossible world lies a doorway to truth, or an entrance to an even worse hell.
PimPage: An Occasional Feature in Which I Call Attention to Books of Interest
The Castro Directive: Stephen Mertz: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: The Castro Directive is an energetic thriller that will appeal to readers of Ken Follett and Jack Higgins.
Cuba. 1961. An armed force of 1500 Cubans—trained, equipped and supported covertly by the CIA under direct White House sanction—is about to launch a massive military strike with the objective of overthrowing Fidel Castro. In Vietnam, Sergeant Graveyard Morgan is yanked from a Special Forces firebase and sent straight into the Cuban action to identify and eliminate a Castro spy. It’s a race against time that stretches from the Oval Office of President John F. Kennedy to the bloody hell battlefield that was The Bay of Pigs.
First It Was the Thin Mints Melee . . .
Florida Police Arrest Worst Son In The World | The Smoking Gun: A Florida man yesterday rubbed dog feces in his mother’s face during an argument in the home they share, police report.
Here's Some Good News
Lifehacker: The Holy Trinity of Inactivity: How Boredom, Distraction, and Procrastination Are Vital to Healthy Living
First It Was the Thin Mints Melee . . .
Online Athens: A 49-year-old Athens man said Tuesday that dogs may have eaten his false teeth after his roommate threw them out the door in a fit of anger, according to an Athens-Clarke police report.
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Uh-Oh
'ALF' Movie Lands at Sony Animation: Jordan Kerner, who produced last year's Smurfs movie, has boarded the hybrid live-action/CGI feature, which is planning to retain actor Paul Fusco as the voice of the furry extraterrestrial.
Free for Kindle for a Limited Time
Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior): Lawrence Block, as John Warren Wells: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: In the early 1970s, with Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones rewriting film history, John Warren Wells hired on to write the script for a high-quality pornographic movie. Originally published by Dell, Different Strokes includes the remarkable script he delivered, the production diary he kept, an interview with the film's leading lady—and a 2012 afterword that puts it all into uncanny perspective. You'd better read the book; you'll probably never get to see the movie!
A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler, A Life -- Tom Williams
Did we really need another biography of Raymond Chander? Maybe not, but as a fan of his work, I'm always glad to see it being celebrated, and a new biography is as good a way as any to do it. And there is some new information included in this one. Not a lot, but enough to shed a little more light on Chandler as a person, and it's always fun to read someone's analysis of the fiction. Williams doesn't shy away from the unpleasant aspects of Chandler's personality and the more squalid parts of his life. The latter part of the book is pretty hard to take, as Chandler becomes a pathetic figure. His alcoholism takes over in a sense, though Williams makes it clear that Chandler had the drinking under at least some control for the best years of his career.
There's no question that Williams is a fan of Chandler's work. He says at one point, "Along with The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, it [The Big Sleep] has come to represent the high peak of the hardboiled genre. And of these three novels, it is by far the best." That's a comment that might draw some argument, but it tells you where Williams stands. I enjoyed his comments on the work, including the rather brief ones on Chandler's early poetry (which was pretty awful).
Williams quotes generously from Chandler's work and letters, and if people who read the book aren't already fans, they might find themselves converted. Check it out.
Brooklyn Leads the Way
Boing Boing: Singularity & Co is a new Brooklyn based science fiction bookstore with a mission: based on the Kickstarter project that provided its seed funding, the store is devoted to rescuing one customer-chosen, out-of-print sf book from obscurity by buying the rights to publish it online as a free ebook.
Top 100 Teen Novels
John Green is very, very popular.
Best Young Adult Novels, Best Teen Fiction, Top 100 Teen Novels : NPR
Best Young Adult Novels, Best Teen Fiction, Top 100 Teen Novels : NPR
Dan Roundfield, R. I. P.
Sporting News: Dan Roundfield, an NBA veteran who had three consecutive All-Star seasons, has drowned off the Caribbean island of Aruba while helping his wife as she struggled in rough water. He was 59.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Judith Crist, R. I. P.
NY Daily News: Judith Crist, a blunt and popular film critic for the “Today” show, TV Guide and the New York Herald Tribune whose reviews were at times so harsh that director Otto Preminger labeled her “Judas Crist,” has died. She was 90.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Free Today for Kindle
Behold the Child: Harry Shannon: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: This short novel first appeared in the Cemetery Dance anthology "Brimstone Turnpike." Each character was to be given a brief encounter with a wise old man named Johnny Divine, and one object that would affect the outcome of the story. In award-winning author Harry Shannon's entry, Sam Kenzie is an LAPD cop who can't escape his obsession with a serial killer due to demons of his own.
Mark O'Donnell, R. I. P.
BBC News: Tony Award-winning writer Mark O'Donnell, who co-wrote the musicals Hairspray and Cry-Baby, has died at the age of 58.
Gator Update
Tampa Bay Times: Wildlife officials say a 6- to 8-foot alligator swam up and bit Suzanne Barnes on the head. An incident report says the bite "appears to be a case of mistaken identity" because the alligator immediately let go and swam away.
Uh-Oh
The Rap Sheet: Can Banville Really Bring Back Marlowe?: Now, though, comes Booker Prize-winning Irish writer John Banville, who--under the pseudonym Benjamin Black--has composed five novels (so far) starring a hard-drinking Dublin pathologist known only as Quirke. (The latest of those, Vengeance, is out this month.) As publisher Henry Holt announced today, Banville will write an as-yet-untitled new Marlowe novel, to be released in 2013.
Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau -- Guy Adams
Marvin Hamlisch, R. I. P.
The Wrap Movies: Marvin Hamlisch, the composer and conductor best known for the torch song "The Way We Were," died in Los Angeles Monday. He was 68 years old.
Boared
They’re pigs — feral pigs. And they are, literally, out of control.
Skirting the Unknown
The Stories of Pioneer Women: Close your eyes for a minute and imagine being a women in the mid 1800s. Your family has decided to try their luck in the west, looking for free land. These journeys across the frontier were far from glamorous - it was a life of arduous toil. Women packed their lives into a wagon and traveled for hundreds of miles across the frontier in search of a better life.
Robert Hughes, R. I. P.
NYTimes.com: Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Overlooked Movies: Capricorn One
You see, the problem is that the Mars mission is going to fail, so the head of NASA sets up a fake landing that'll be filmed in the desert. The astronauts don't want to go along, but finally they agree. When the Mars rocket burns up on reentry, they realize they can't be allowed to live. Their lives depend on Elliot Gould, an intrepid investigative reporter.
I enjoyed this movie quite a bit when I saw it in the theater years ago. How long? Well, O. J. Simpson plays one of the astronauts, which should give you a clue. He's not bad in the part, either, though not up to Hal Holbrook, Gould, and Sam Waterston. One of the other astronauts is James Brolin. I don't know if Gould was still married to Barbra Streisand at the time this movie was made, but I do know that Brolin is married to her now. Not that it has anything to do with this movie, which is worth your time if it shows up on your cable channel.
Monday, August 06, 2012
Ugly Behavior -- Steve Rasnic Tem
Tacos!
The Seattle Times: As the binational foodie wars wage — who invented what and when, and why have the gringos annexed it (again)? — the curious eater is now blessed with not one but two new books about the rise of the taco as the international rock star of consumables.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
No Relation to the Arkansas Toe Suck Fairy
NY Daily News: A colege janitor offered a high school student “as much money as she wanted” to allow him to suck her toes — a perverse incident that led to his firing, city investigators said.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Jimmy Jones, R. I. P.
Local Obituary Feature Page 1: Deceased: James Jimmy Jones
(The famous singer, who sang Handy Man, "Jimmy Jones")
Presidential Update
All presidents bar one are directly descended from a medieval English king: 12-year-old girl created family tree linking 42 of 43 U.S. presidents to King John of England, who signed Magna Carta in 1215
Archaeology Update
World News: Timothy Harrison, professor of Near East archaeology at the University of Toronto, has seen the site and was awed.
“This excavation, in my book, is unparalleled. It is one of the premier discoveries made on the planet in … I don’t know how long.” He added, “It’s a thorough excavation on a scale we very rarely see.”
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