Once Again, Texas Leads the Way

AP Wire | 11/04/2006 | Some Texas schools switching from textbooks to e-books: "DALLAS - If voters approve school bond packages in Lancaster and Forney, those districts will become the latest Texas schools to begin replacing traditional hardbound textbooks with electronic versions.

The Plano and Irving school districts have already introduced e-books into some of their classrooms, and the Midland school district is moving away from old-fashioned textbooks entirely, said Anita Givens of the Texas Education Agency.

'In some classrooms, teachers give students traditional textbooks to keep at home, and they use online books or other resources at school,' Givens said.

Forney schools are planning the most complete overhaul, with a school bond package that would provide $11.8 million for laptops for students. The plan is to have most students using only electronic textbooks within two years, school officials said.

If that happens, Forney would probably be the first school district in Texas to use e-books in every classroom from fifth grade on up, Givens said."

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Cameras Show Army Recruiters Misleading Students - AOL News: "An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist."

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Cameras Show Army Recruiters Misleading Students - AOL News: "An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist."

New York, New York

Typo in state's drunken driving law changes its meaning - Newsday.com: "ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ Drinking a shot of beer in New York could get you arrested for drunken driving. At least that's the way the New York law reads.

Lawmakers this year approved a bill that sets the standard for driving while intoxicated at 0.18 grams of alcohol in a person's blood.

A person's body might produce that much alcohol naturally, said Ed Fiandach, a DWI lawyer in Rochester.

Instead of using grams, the law should have used blood alcohol content as a measure.

'It was a typo,' said Assemblyman David Gantt, D-Rochester, who heads the Assembly Transportation Committee that approved the bill before it went to the Legislature. 'If you go through our laws, mistakes are made all the time. We're human beings.'"

I'm Cautiously Optimistic

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | 'Brilliant' Bond seduces critics: "Daniel Craig's performance as James Bond has been hailed as 'terrific' and 'simply brilliant' in early reviews of his 007 debut in Casino Royale.

The first verdicts on Craig - who was a controversial choice to play the spy - have been gushing.

The Daily Mirror said he was seen 'oozing the kind of edgy menace that recalls Sean Connery at his best'.

And the Daily Telegraph wrote that he 'steps with full assuredness into Sean Connery's old handmade shoes'."

Want to be Minuteman?

Texas Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program: "As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images. The last stage of the test is to stress the system by providing public access to numerous surveillance cameras.

Thank you for helping test this important capability."

World Fantasy Con Update

So far, the video uploads aren't working out. I have no idea why, but I don't have but a couple anyway.

My biggest surprise of the con came yesterday when I was talking to Neal Barrett, Jayme Blaschke, and Peter Beagle. Beagle's the author of The Last Unicorn, one of the finest fantasy novels of the last century, and not exactly the person I'd think would be interested in some of the stuff that I like. So when he started talking about how much he loved Gold Medal Books and how his youthful reading was of guys like David Goodis and John D. MacDonald, I was a little taken aback. But of course it was great to meet another fan of the Good Old Stuff.

Last night was the mass signing, and all the contributors to Cross Plains Universe sat in a group. I've never signed so many books before. One contributor said, "I hope I get to have one more signing like that before I die." Of course all Joe Lansdale's signings are like that, so he took it in stride.

Set the TiVo

Kirstie Alley Gets Bikini-Ready for Oprah | Kirstie Alley : People.com: "Kirstie Alley is due to pose in her bikini on Monday's Oprah Winfrey Show, almost a year to the day after she first promised Winfrey she would. "

Hooray for Hollywood

IGN: When De Niro Met Fiddy: "November 2, 2006 - Robert De Niro and 50 Cent? It's a match seemingly made in heaven, right? The pair are getting set to star together in a new police thriller called New Orleans."

A Year Without Harry Potter Is Like a Year Without Money

CBC NEWS: There was no Harry Potter book this year — and that cost Indigo Books & Music Inc. dearly.

Total sales for Canada's largest bookstore chain fell 2.4 per cent to $182.2 million in the fiscal second quarter, largely because there was no Harry Potter book to sell. And a quarterly profit last year turned into a $1-million loss.

Happy Birthday, Daniel Boone!

American West - DANIEL BOONE: "More than any other man, Daniel Boone was responsible for the exploration and settlement of Kentucky. His grandfather came from England to America in 1717. His father was a weaver and blacksmith, and he raised livestock in the country near Reading, Pennsylvania. Daniel was born there on November 2, 1734.

If Daniel Boone was destined to become a man of the wild, an explorer of unmapped spaces, his boyhood was the perfect preparation. He came to know the friendly Indians in the forests, and early he was marking the habits of wild things and bringing them down with a crude whittled spear. When he was twelve his father gave him a rifle, and his career as a huntsman began."

I Was Going to Comment on This, but I Forgot What I Wanted to Say

News in Science - Forgetful? Virus may be eating your brain - 24/10/2006: "Forget where you left your glasses? Did those keys go missing again? A virus may be to blame.

Viruses that cause a range of ills from the common cold to polio may be able to infect the brain and cause steady damage, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota reports.

'Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits,' says Dr Charles Howe, who reports the findings in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease. "

Anna Nicole Smith Update

Thanks to Jeff Meyerson, always on the ball.

iWon News - Anna Nicole Smith Had Pain in Her Side: "NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) - Anna Nicole Smith was suffering from pain in her side when she checked into the hospital where doctors diagnosed a case of pneumonia, her attorney said Wednesday.

The 38-year-old former Playboy Playmate arrived Monday at Doctors Hospital, the same medical center where she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern, on Sept. 7. Her 20-year-old son died three days later while visiting his mother and sister.

'The impression I got is they took her in because her ribs were hurting, and then they discovered she had pneumonia,' attorney Wayne Munroe told The Associated Press.

Smith's companion, Howard K. Stern, said in a statement to the TV show 'Entertainment Tonight' that Smith underwent a procedure Tuesday to drain fluid from a lung that had partially collapsed."

William Styron, R. I. P.

One of the very first books I read in grad school, in a contemporary novels course, was Lie Down in Darkness. (That it was actually sort of contemporary tells you how long ago I was in grad school.) That title has stuck with me through the years as appropriate to Styron's life, for some reason.

Novelist William Styron Dead at 81 - Forbes.com: "William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose explorations of the darkest corners of the human mind and experience were charged by his own near-suicidal demons, died Wednesday in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He was 81."

Top 10 Lesbian Vampire Flicks

AfterEllen.com - Top 10 Lesbian Vampire Flicks: "According to Andrea Weiss, author of Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film, “outside of male pornography, the lesbian vampire is the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema.” So turn down the lights, ladies, and settle in for some Gothic gloom this Halloween season. It's time to pay homage to our fair forebear (and the lesbian vampire is always irresistibly hot) by running down 10 of the best lesbian vampire flicks out there."

Is This Asinine or What?

There's no evidence on these guys, but you still have to trash your bottle of water before you go through security.

UK 'air plot:' Brothers released - CNN.com: "LONDON, England (CNN) -- Two brothers charged in an alleged plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners have been released after a British court ruled there was insufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

Westminster Magistrate's Court confirmed that the case of Umair Hussain, 25, and Mehran Hussain 23, was discharged due to 'insufficient information evidence.'

The two faced charges of failing to disclose information about the suspected role of their brother Nabeel Hussain, 22, one of 11 people charged with conspiracy to murder and preparing acts of terrorism in the plot."

We're Here

Judy and I arrived in Austin around 1:00 this afternoon. We had lunch with our son, Allen, and spent some time at his house. We're now ensconced in the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum on Highway 183. Programming for the convention doesn't begin until tomorrow, so we'll sit around and read the paper and the books we brought along. Maybe we'll visit a restaurant later for dinner. I'll probably call my sister and see if she wants to drive out to join us.

This is the same hotel where the Bouchercon was held a few years ago when I was Fan Guest of Honor. I was hoping I'd get the same nice suite I had then. No such luck.

World Fantasy Convention

Judy and I are about to toddle off to Austin for the World Fantasy Convention. This year, Robert E. Howard will be honored. All the attendees will be receiving a copy of Cross Plains Universe. If the book eventually sells to mass market paperback, then everyone can read some of the great stories between the covers, but for now you'll have to be content with looking at the cover here or checking out the table of contents here.

I'll probably do a little blogging at the convention, but I don't know many fantasy writers, so there might not be video. Except that, for you Dirty Old Men (and you know who you are), I'll try to have a video of Kasey Lansdale, who, I believe is the opening act for Ray Price this weekend. Soon she'll be a chart-topper, but I'll always remember her as the kid who lost out to a ferret in the Miss AggieCon contest.

Gator Update

PensacolaNewsJournal.com: "FREDERIC, Mich. (AP) -- Your money or your ... alligator? Police say an armed man went to the home of a drug dealer to collect on a debt. When the dealer couldn't pay, the collector made off with the dealer's 18-inch-long pet alligator.

'I think he was going to hold (the gator) for ransom, or something,' Crawford County Sheriff Kirk Wakefield told the Traverse City Record-Eagle for a story Tuesday. 'It's really weird.'

The alleged gator-napping arose from a Sept. 25 drug bust at a house west of Frederic, a rural village 200 miles north of Detroit, Wakefield said.

Police confiscated a cache of drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine and Ecstasy pills, plus $900 in cash and two handguns.



'Apparently the guys we took this from owed somebody for what we took,' Wakefield said. 'That somebody hired this guy to go get that money.'"

Grave Descend -- John Lange

Twenty years ago I wrote a short essay on John Lange's Easy Go for 1001 Midnights. I said something like "The critics don't like Lange much, but this is a very entertaining book."

When I wrote that, I also mentioned that Lange was actually a pen name. That's not mentioned anywhere on the Hard Case Crime book I just read, however, so I won't mention it, either.

So what's Grave Descend like? It's like those great old paperbacks they don't write any more. Short (my guess: 50K words), and it gets the job done. The setting's Jamaica. MacGregor is a diver living more or less hand-to-mouth. He's hired to do a seemingly straightforward job, except that everybody who talks to him has a different story, and there are all sorts of little things that bother him. He's right to be bothered. There's more plot in this book than in most of the doorstop-sized thrillers published today. Not much character development. Hardly any, in fact, but there's action, color, movement to spare. Sharks. Femme fatales. Smart cops. Spear guns. And crocodiles, a huge plus here at Chez Crider. Pure paperback storytelling and fine local color, too. There's even this quotation from Samuel Johnson: "Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young." What's not to like? Check it out.