Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair

It's been a pretty shitty day.

I want to blog, but have no time, and, really, no subject to blog on. I am, for the moment, tapped and tired and discouraged and uninspired. But Bruce is singing "Thunder Road" to me, and that always helps. Plus, Superwife is out in the kitchen making dinner, and two of the three SuperKids are around and about somewhere, and Nate is over, and all that helps more.

Still, I'm feeling pretty useless right now, for reasons I won't bore any of you with.

For lack of anything better to post, here's the latest piece of drivel I've sent off to ASTONISHING ADVENTURES.

I advise you to bail...

THE DROWNED SCROLL
By Happy Little Me

It is sometimes unwise to trust overmuch in the words of wizards, this is true. But only a fool disregards them entirely.
- Gavedor, Court Recorder, reign of King Jerrane of Aquilia

* * *

Somewhere it sits, loosely rolled, all but forgotten within a dry and dusty drawer in some nameless scholar’s cluttered study. He found it in an odd little shop, one full of shadows and cobwebs, its gloomy corners bristling with dingy relics from half forgotten yesteryears. Curled into a loose brown cylinder of heavy parchment, casually thrown down on a table full of brick-a-brack, like everything else there priced at a coin or two. Liking the way the rough, grainy, thick paper felt between fingers and thumb as he unrolled it, and enjoying the neat pen strokes that delineated the details of some sunken, secretive valley holding an unknown, exotic city nestled at its narrow end, an intricate network of winding narrow streets and scrabbling alleyways, lavishly illustrated with wonderfully sketched miniature buildings, fountains, walls and gateways, and the beautifully drawn compass rose superimposed over a strangely serpentine, triple sailed ship, and the deft copperplate of the hand lettered labels – “Street of the Seafloor Grotto”, “Temple of Drowned Skulls”, “Sea Urchin’s Venom Fountain”, and “Looted Hulk Tavern”, among many others – he purchased it, took it home, showed it to a few friends, who nodded and agreed that it was indeed a beautifully drawn thing, and a lovely curio, and a fine work of art..

And, eventually, he tossed it absently into a desk drawer already three quarters full of other oddments and curios, and gave it not a further thought in the world.

And there it has rested, ever since…

Someday something he reads, or that someone else says to him, may remind him of the scroll’s existence, and he may go seeking it again, and after a few minutes or few hour’s rummaging, if he doesn’t give up first, or become distracted, he may unearth it from the depths of its drawer and unroll it once more, holding it up to the light of a flickering lamp or torch, and the scroll with its finely etched depiction of a distant, danger-filled, perhaps imaginary metropolis may once more feel the movement of air and avid eyes across its finely crafted vellum. But for now, it simply sits there, loosely rolled, within a dry and dusty drawer in a nameless scholar’s cluttered study…

* * *

The heat was like a gut-punch hitting every square inch of the human body all at once – not one impact and over, no, but something constant, unending, smothering a person like a wet blanket on a cook fire, sucking the very breath from the lungs, even in the deep gloom beneath the hellish poison green of the overhead foliage. The air was sodden as a steam room towel; the effort of moving it in and out of one’s chest was all but exhausting.

Had Markior’s mother’s mother not been a decadent southerner (a source of shame Markior’s family disliked speaking of) he would have died of the heat long ago. As it was, as long as he kept mainly to the shady areas, he survived, but he suffered.

“Ye’re a decoration, y’know,” the old lady sweeping out the street gutter gnashed at Markior through toothless gums, cackling with obscure delight at the pronouncement. “A gold button, a bit o’ fancy braid. ‘e don’t need no bodyguard; everyone in Yat-Latan is so a’feared o’ ‘is spells they’d never dare draw steel on ‘im.” She paused to draw breath; Markior earnestly, but unfortunately vainly, hoped she would choke on it. “Not ‘is spells so much,” she nattered on, after a second, “but that map o’ ‘is.”

Markior had heard this all before from many different sources, but it was displeasing to have the wrinkled old thrall who swept out the gutters on Seafloor Grotto Street – no doubt in exchange for a few coppers every ten-day from the shop owners there, and the right to sleep in one or another of their basement entryways after nightfall – state it so plainly.

“You never know,” Markior said, his young, well favored face flushing. “There could be a danger his spells won’t cope with. Pirates, or zuthang, or perhaps another wizard… something not afraid of this famous map of his.”

The old woman spat in the dust at Markior’s feet. “Fleh,” she retorted. “Pirates come here to sell, not steal; wizards have better things to do than haunt the Isthmus… well, all the wizards besides ‘imself, I mean… and as to the zuthang, well, if a race o’ magic resistant lizards that walks on they hind legs and carries odd curved blades and spits poison as far as a street thief can throws a knife really exists, they certainly don’t waste they time ‘ere at the bottom o’th’ world.” She fixed Markior with her one eye that seemed to have grown to three times normal size, perhaps to compensate for the ruined socket where her other had once sat. “And it’s not ‘s’if the likes of ye could deal with any o’em if they did appear in quest o’ y’r master’s head. Pretty northern sword or no pretty northern sword. Ye’d shit y’r trews and run off screamin’, if ye didn’t die instantly o’ a heart seizure.” She nodded wisely and spat again, this time with the edges of her gob sprattling Markior’s fur and leather boots.

Markior took his anger in hand; there was nothing to be gained from arguing with this harping hag, and while he doubted anyone would miss her much if he ran her through, the Seafloor Grotto Street merchants would complain to his master and demand compensation, and then master would most likely take it out of his hide. He couldn’t take it out of Markior’s wages, because Markior had none. Food and lodging for the next three cycles were Markior’s due… that, and the ‘pretty northern sword’ Markior wore at his side, that had been the price of his hire to this southern dirt hole.

Two seasons and another cycle – then Markior’s bond debt would be paid, and he and his fine Aquilian steel sword could get on a serpent ship and sail north. A ten-day or so sleeping on deck and working the rigging or, if necessary, the oars, for his passage, and he would be in Lesser Ra Tanis. Caravans left Lesser Ra Tanis going northward every cursed day of the thrice accursed southern cycle. He would hire on as a guard and, eventually, one fine season not too far forward of that, he would be back in Aquilia, a seasoned warrior armed with a sword finer than any that most knights or lords could boast. Branelle might well be married by then, or at least, sworn to someone else, but that was for the gods to say. And even if it were so, well, she’d had younger sisters…

Markior was snapped forcibly out of his pleasant daydream by a small but weighty leather bag bouncing off his sleeveless fur vest, causing the two finger-length wide brass buttons set on either side of its chest thongs to jangle discordantly.

“Pick that up and come along,” Markior’s master, the mage Aphaltholios said flatly. “And at least try to look like you’re paying attention.”

Flushing again, Markior bent and snatched up the fist-sized wash leather bag. It would contain material components for whatever spells Aphaltholios had been commissioned to cast over the last ten days or so; today was Kemtos Noi, “Sacrifice Day”, the one day out of each ten when metaphysical powers were strongest in the world. In Aquilia people would gather in family shrines and pass the day praying together for protection from roaming shades and malefic spirits; in the decadent south, though, folks made a single sacrifice at whichever temple they favored, or that they passed first when out and about their business… and here in the far southernmost pest hole that was the Isthmus, in its only city of Yat-Latan, they did no more than wear an extra protective amulet or two. Only Aphaltholios cared much for Kemtos Noi at all.

He did all his spell casting on this day, which made it a day Markior generally looked forward to. After the morning market run, they would return to Aphaltholios’ richly appointed manor – a three room dwelling built of expensive imported stone with a thatched roof that an Aquilian serf would have sneered at, but, well, there you were – and Aphaltholios would lock himself inside and Markior would have the whole day to idle away in the courtyard without. He could practice with his sword, or train in footwork, or, if a vendor happened to wander by, purchase a few honeyed dates, assuming the overweight wife of the merchant who lived down the street was willing to give him a few coppers, which she usually was…

“I realize this isn’t at all what you expected when you accepted my offer in Lesser Ra Tanis,” Aphaltholios said as he began to walk towards Sharkfin Circle. “It isn’t what I expected, either. But you chose to accompany me here, and you’ve chosen to remain in my service, and I expect you to at least make an effort to pay some attention to your surroundings.”

Markior knew better than to respond. Certainly, this wasn’t what he’d expected – in Lesser Ra Tanis, he’d been one of two dozen applicants for the position of Aphaltholios’ bodyguard, and had felt honored when Aphaltholios had chosen him. And he’d been more gratified than otherwise when he’d learned that the station was all for show; Aphaltholios had been wooing a highborn lady, and a highborn gentleman simply was not seen in society, or even in public, without an armed retainer. Markior had looked forward to an easy three cycles of being an ornament to his master’s social status, although he had found Lesser Ra Tanis terribly hot and humid compared with his native north.

But then things had gone spectacularly pear shaped – Markior was still dim on the actual details, all he really knew was, Aphaltholios had fallen out of favor with astonishing swiftness, and if the mage hadn’t been able to cast a fast teleport spell, the two of them would most likely have ended up burnt at a common stake by the howling mob that had condensed like dew outside Aphaltholios’ lovely mansion.

As Aphaltholios had explained, there must have been more than just a mob at work, as a powerful spell to block teleportation had been put in place all around his mansion as well. But one place any mage could always teleport to was the place of his birth, and so, Aphaltholios had returned to Yat-Latan… and when Markior had been forced to quickly choose between accompanying his master or returning the sword he’d already invested nearly a season of his life in, well, he’d found himself here, as well.

He’d never in his life imagined there could be any place on the mortal plane hotter and more humid than Lesser Ra Tanis, and now, he didn’t have to.

“And there you are, daydreaming again,” Aphaltholios commented dryly as Markior tripped on a low curbstone and nearly went sprawling in the muck. “I should trade you to Zarthane for his draft mule, I really should. I’d get more use out of the draft mule, and you’d get to learn to do something useful.”

Markior paled at that. Zarthane was a boylover, the sort of loathsome deviant that would be hounded out of any Aquilian village by a stone throwing mob, but whose perversions were tolerated or often even encouraged in the decadent south. And Markior had seen how Zarthane looked at him, even though, at the age of sixteen, Markior was a man grown by any civilized standard. Zarthane made his living training prettyboys to serve in brothels, or as concubines to rich masters in Lesser Ra Tanis, and he enjoyed his work enormously. If Markior somehow wound up as Zarthane’s bond servant, Markior would have to kill the worthless wretch… which would inevitably end with Markior tied to a millstone and tossed from Executioner’s Rock into the deeps of the Gulf of Tanis… perhaps with a judicious slash or two across the back of his legs, to attract the kreelok.

“I’m sorry, Master,” Markior said, quite sincerely. “I’ll pay more attention, I swear it.”

Aphaltholios merely grunted. They had reached his house. “Stay out here, useless,” Aphaltholios said flatly. “Turn all visitors away until the morrow.”

“Aye, master,” Markior said, bobbing his head. He knew the Kemtos Noi routine very well.

I* * *

Inside, Belrok the Black was stuffing a leather sack with gold and jewels. Belrok knew well that all wizards were rich; for some reason he neither knew nor much cared about, wizards preferred gold above all other metals (well, who didn’t?) and always kept a large supply of well cut gems about, too. Of course, few thieves were brave enough to beard a sorcerer in his own lair, and Belrok was no exception. But he’d carefully scrutinized his chosen target the last four days, and knew the mage’s routine well. Up with the dawn, a few hours chanting muffled by the stone walls of his keep, then off to the Looted Hulk to drink for the rest of the day while studying some volume of lore he’d have his tame Aquilian prettyboy tote along for him. Not much of a life for a wizard, but he seemed to have the local populace thoroughly cowed, judging from the ridiculous stories they all told of the mage’s prowess…

Belrok froze as he heard a key in the lock of the front door, which was at the foot of a flight of stone stairs he himself was barely five feet down an upstairs hall from. Today of all days the gods-damned magus chose to come back from the inn early…

Well, in Belrok’s native Votaria there was a saying about wizards – their sorcerous powers diminished in proportion to the size of the blade you sank through their black hearts. Belrok hadn’t intended to test that this day, but the gods sent men trials, and a warrior could only do his best with them. Belrok reached for the much used, well honed shortsword hanging at his belt…

Aphaltholios sniffed as he stepped into his front hall. Grand for the Raised City, certainly, but little enough compared to the manse he had owned in Ra-Tanis, and nothing compared to what he had aspired to… well, those embers were well burnt down. Still, give the fools a hundred years or so and they’d forget him, as they always had. He could alter his appearance slightly, change his name, and start in again. He'd yet rule all his hated brothers' lands...

He sniffed again. Was that… sweat? Votarian sweat? Like most mages, Aphaltholios spent an hour each morning meditating, attuning his own metabolism to its peak. His senses were not superhuman, merely the best any human’s could be. His brain, though, was nearly two thousand years old and perfectly organized; he could sort one scent out of ten thousand, and this one was definitely the distinctive odor of Votarian perspiration. Something about trace chemicals in the soil of that particularly volcanic valley; it got into the bones in childhood and never fully departed.

Now an unfamiliar creak – Aphaltholios knew every peg in every board, beam and joist within the stone shell of his ancient home; he had overseen the original carpentry there, 1900 years agone, and made a point of dwelling here for a few years at a time at least once in every generation since, to keep the locals appropriately in awe of him. There was someone at the top of his stairs… a Votarian, attempting to be still. Not a bad attempt; the intruder had some skill at stealth, and would most likely have avoided notice from anyone other than Aphaltholios.

Aphaltholios extended his perceptions into the upper hall, seeking an appropriate surrogate… there. A small trapper-spider had spun a web in the east corner of the main hallway. That would be fine; the arachnoid form was well adapted to sudden changes in mass, unlike most endoskeletal mammals. Aphaltholios fixed his attention there and muttered a quick spell under his breath, of a sort few mages would ever have heard of, and perhaps only two others in existence could have successfully cast.

Above, Belrok heard a sudden thumping in the hallway behind him, and then, a horrendous clacking. He turned, and felt the blood run cold in his arteries. A spider the size of a timber wolf was scuttling down the stones of the inner wall at the end of the hallway, its glittering ring of eyes fixed malevolently on Belrok –

Another thief might have died of fright on the spot, or stood there frozen in terror with piss dribbling into his boots, or screamed and bolted down the stairs, and any of those reactions would have led almost instantly to death, as two human legs are little match in a sprint for 8 arachnid ones. But Belrok had robbed the halls of wizards before and had faced their hellish guardians on two other occasions. Once a vaporous air elemental, which would have undone him entirely if not for the protective amulet he’d had the forethought to bring with him. Another time, a giant scorpion… which had taught him that protective amulets were useless against more solid, if still unnatural, horrors. No, against oversized vermin, only cold steel would suffice. Belrok drew his sword and shifted his weight to his left foot. He would get one good stroke as the spider scuttled towards him. He would aim for the eyes –

Too late, Belrok’s own senses, undulled by civilized influence, detected soft footfalls behind him. Borados curse him, he’d known the wizard was in the house and had let the spider distract him regardless. He deserved –

An explosion of pain at the back of his head, just behind his ear.

Darkness…

Belrok awoke. His head ached, and his arms felt heavy. He cracked an eye open and saw why… he was bound at wrists and ankles with heavy iron fetters whose steel chains ran through a black iron ring set in a flagstone floor. Flickering torchlight fell on him, and the air was cool and musty. The wizard’s basement, then…

There was a grating sound of something heavy being set down nearby, and a grunt of relief. Belrok turned his head. The wizard’s Aquilian prettyboy had just put a large anvil down on the stone floor a few paces from where Belrok was chained. He had a deal of strength to carry that. Belrok might have managed it, but wouldn’t have wanted to try unless his life depended on it.

“Is he going to sacrifice me?” Belrok croaked, through a dry throat.

The Aquilian shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, his voice deeper than Belrok had expected. “I don’t know wizard stuff.” He looked petulant. “This is supposed to be the day I rest; he usually spends all day inside, casting spells.”

“Sorry,” Belrok rasped. “I don’t suppose you could…” He raised his arms a few inches – all the slack he had – and rattled the chains suggestively.

Markior shook his head. “You’re stupid enough to try and steal from a wizard, that’s on you,” he said.

“He’s more powerful than I expected,” Belrok admitted.

Markior laughed, a short, almost humorless bark. “Didn’t you ask around?” he said. “Don’t you know who he is?”

Belrok looked down. “Everybody says things about wizards,” he said. “Everybody is scared of them.”

“Except you,” Markior jeered. “You’re fearless. See where that got you.” It occurred to Markior at that moment that exactly what he had predicted to the old hag that morning had occurred -- someone not afraid of his master had indeed arrived on the scene. And Markior, as predicted, had been useless. But only because he'd been shut outside. Surely if he'd been in a position to protect his master, he would have proved his worth, once and for all... it was a pleasant fancy.

“He’s more powerful than I expected,” Belrok repeated, interrupting Markior's daydreams of praise and glory. “But even you have to admit most of what the people here say about him is nonsense. I mean, it must be. People don’t live two thousand years. And all this about how this whole isthmus was once undersea, and 1500 years ago a wizard cast a powerful spell to raise it from the ocean depths, and should that wizard ever die, the isthmus will sink once more…”

“Heh,” came a voice from behind Belrok. “Well, it’s not that simple.”

Aphaltholios came into view, walking slowly, drawing kid skin gloves on, wriggling his fingers to seat them more fully on his hands. “For one thing, it was nearer 2000 years ago, not 1500 years,” he said, his tone reminiscent. “I was my father’s fourth son. My three older brothers got all the choice lands… what you would call now Mandaria, Votaria, and Lesser Ra-Tanis. I got a small chain of islands… rocks, really, fit only for goats and gulls… stretching out into the southern sea.” He smiled coldly. “How they laughed at that. They called me The Island Prince, when they were feeling mellow. The King of the Seagulls, other times.”

He shook his head, going over to a workbench, picking up various tools, holding them up to the torch light, putting them down again with muted clicks of metal on wood. “But I was the only one of our family born with the Gift,” he said. “I went to the Mages’ Academy and spent years there studying. And then I returned to my rocks, and I cast a mighty spell.” He looked back over at Belrok and raised an eyebrow. “Well, several spells, really.”

Aphaltholios picked up a large copper knife with several odd runes inscribed in its triangular blade. “First I needed to scan the floor of the ocean beneath and around my island chain. I needed to know exactly what was there. Once I did, I drew a map, showing the ocean floor around my islands. I infused that map with my will… my life force, if you will… and wrought a mighty working, lifting the ocean floor several hundred feet, until it was above sea level. Which created the Isthmus, a new land rich in precious ores and extremely fertile soil, stretching several hundred miles out into the Bay.”

The sorcerer smiled nostalgically to himself as he began to move around Belrok, etching runes on the cellar flagstones. “My brothers were considerably less amused when I suddenly became Prince of the Isthmus. But there were three of them, and none wanted the other to have the Isthmus, either. They knew if they allied against me, then they would only have to go to war against each other once I was removed. And they couldn’t have me assassinated, because, of course, the map I had drawn was now a living thing.”

Belrok the Black frowned. “Aye,” he said, “so they all say in this city. That this map changes with each change to the Isthmus, and to the Raised City of Yat-Latan itself, to reflect those changes, like a looking glass made of vellum. And that if anything should happen to the wizard who created the map, then the spells keeping the Isthmus and Yat-Latan above the water would vanish, and it would all sink back into the deeps again.” He laughed contemptuously. “Ah, you’ve sold them a bill of goods and no mistake,” he said. “But you can’t fool me. You’re a powerful wizard, but you’re not two thousand years old, and this map? Hmph. Show it to me.”

Aphaltholios scowled. “The map was lost long ago,” he said. “A demon summoning got away from me… the pentacle holding the creature was fraying; I had to banish it from this dimension in a hurry, and a brief vortex came into being. The map, and all the other papers and tools that were not well secured, was sucked in… I have no idea where it wound up, in this world or some other. But I can feel it; it’s still out there somewhere. And should I die, then the forces that keep this land above the ocean waves will die with me, and the Isthmus will indeed once more return to the depths from which I raised it.”

“That’s a great pity,” Belrok the Black said, grinning evilly. “Or would be, if I believed a word of it.” He held up his chained hands. “You should have chained me so I couldn’t get at my belt, wizard.”

Aphaltholios squinted. What was the barbarian holding…? Something small, carved of wood, with a metal tip… no, there was a hole in the end of it, surrounded by metal, projecting out of the wood --

Belrok gripped the small device and squeezed, his knuckles going white. Aphaltholios saw a small flicker of flame bloom, heard a sound like a thick branch breaking, felt an invisible fist punch him in the center of his chest.

Lying flat on his back on the hard cobblestones, the wizard felt his two thousand year old heart laboring heavily in his chest. There was an acrid smell in his nostrils… odd, he thought, that’s salt peter, and the black dust Mandarians put in their firecrackers. Did he shoot a firecracker at me…?

Aphaltholios closed his eyes, attempted to sink into a healing trance. He was damaged, badly damaged, but if he could slow his respiration, calm his thundering pulse, he could locate the wound and rejuven –

The last of his heart’s blood rushed out through the gaping hole in his chest and began to spread sluggishly on the cellar cobbles, cooling as it flowed. Two thousands years of life, and still, when the Pale Rider beckoned to him, he found he did not wish to go. He yet had hopes unrealized, schemes half-finished, much yet to do…

Markior stared in horror as the wound on his master’s chest… his former master’s chest… stopped spouting blood. He heard a long, dragging gurgle rattle up out of Aphaltholios chest, a chest which then settled, and was still.

The threat which was unafraid of his master had come, and had killed his master, and Markior had stood by uselessly and let it happen.

Shocked, disbelieving, but beginning to feel the first ratlike gnawing of absolute terror in the depths of his stomach, the Aquilian boy gasped, through numb lips: “You… you killed him!” He stared at the strange nurled knob of wood and metal in Belrok’s hands. A small wisp of acrid smelling smoke was curling up from the hole in the end. “What is that thing?”

“It’s Imperial,” Belrok grunted. “From the Empire of Man, across the Finger Sea… they call it a pistoloon. One shot only, but it hits like a thunderclap.” He grinned, showing yellow, jagged stumps of teeth. “I never rob a wizard without it, these days.”

“But he… but…” Markior looked around the room frantically. “Gods, the entire Isthmus is going to sink beneath the sea –“

“Don’t be a fool,” Belrok said gruffly. “That’s a tall tale to end all tall tales. Find the keys to these chains and I’ll split the wizard’s swag with y –“

The flagstones trembled beneath both of their boots. There was an ominous rumbling, and dust sifted down from the ceiling. The heavy beams supporting the house across the cellar visibly shifted, then sagged. The earth began to shake beneath their boots…

* * *

“Dutch? DUTCH!!”

The imperative voice coming up the stairs brought Edgar Howard “Dutch” Phillips out of his creative fog. He looked up from his typewriter, momentarily confused. Belrok the Black had just fatally shot Aphaltholios the mage with the small pistoloon he had hidden beneath his belt buckle, and the Aquilian kid was nerving himself up to search the wizard’s body for a key. And there had been some other detail nagging at him –

“DUTCH!” his wife screamed again. “There’s WATER coming down the STAIRS, what are you DOING, is the tub overflowing, it’s a MESS --!”

Water? Dutch looked around in bewilderment. Yes, that was the sound of running water but nobody was in the bathtub and –

His eyes widened. Water was pouring in sheets and rivers down the left side of his other desk, the antique rolltop writing desk he never used for typing, running across the floor of his study in a wide, swiftly flowing sheet. Erasers, pencils, pens, pages of various letters and manuscripts were bobbing along merrily in the bizarre floodtide. He noticed for the first time that water was pooling around his feet; his slippers were soaking through and his socks were wet… Where in the name of everything holy could it be coming from –

The desk drawer. The top drawer on the left. Water was just pouring out of it, through the keyhole and the cracks on either side and along the top of it. It was as if someone had bored a hole in the back of the desk, hooked up a hose, and was currently pumping hundreds of gallons of water into the drawer, and it was all flowing out onto his floor and out of his study and down the stairs –

Dutch rushed across his study, fumbling in his pockets. He pulled out his keychain, ticked through the keys on it quickly, found and fitted a small shiny key into the keyhole, forcing it in against the steady flow of water gushing through it. He turned the key and yanked the drawer open. It was heavy, full of water. The keyring jangled as it hung from the hole in the sodden wooden drawer.

Various papers and scraps immediately floated out the top of the drawer as a fresh volume spilled onto the floor. Dutch squinted, then turned on a gooseneck lamp clamped to the top of the writing desk and pulled it over to shine down into the water overflowing the drawer.

There, pinned to the bottom by water pressure – what was that? A map?

Right, right… it was the map he’d bought at that second hand bookstore the previous summer and tossed in the drawer. Hmmm… come to think of it, the streets and inn names depicted on that map must have lodged in his subconscious, as he now realized he’d been using them as he typed the story he was working on. What the hell –

Afterwards, Dutch could never adequately explain the impulse that seized him. Without conscious thought, he reached in, grabbed the map – water seemed to be flowing out of it at a pretty good, constant clip, he had to use nearly his full strength to force his hand to the bottom against the strong current flowing upward off the scroll’s surface. The whole thing was physically impossible, but Dutch didn’t think about it, simply held the map up in his left hand, grabbed up a four inch letter opener with his right, and with a savage grunt, thrust it through the vellum of the map itself, impaling it like one of his 17th century musketeer heroes might impale an evil cardinal’s minion.

The map seemed to shudder and flap in his hand, almost like a living thing going through its death throes – and then it went limp, no more than a scrap of vellum with a hole punched in it, hanging from his clenched fingers.

Dutch prodded it with his other finger. It wasn’t even wet.

“Dutch, what in the world?”

Dutch turned, and saw his wife, looking rather irate, standing in his doorway. The water on the floor was still gurgling between her feet, running down the stairs.

Dutch brandished the map and grinned. “Not in this world, Martha,” he said, enigmatically. “Not in this world, at all…”

Litotes

There's a scene in one of the Modesty Blaise books where...

No, wait, what am I doing? None of you people care about Modesty Blaise.

Never mind.

For those who think I write pretty fly for a white guy, I once again mention this webpage here, where for the past week or so I've been posting some political yimmer-yammer. One of my recent entries actually made it into the daily round up of recommended reader posts, with a link and a pull quote from the front page of the site. That particular entry wound up getting 26 comments, which is a considerable better showing than anything I've ever posted here has made for itself. So go there and read some new stuff from me, if you've a mind to.

Okay. Spider-man 3: I deliberately avoided this film on the big screen, due to my utter disillusionment with its immediate predecessor in the franchise. Had Spider-man 2 not stunk up the joint so thoroughly, I probably would have swallowed my initial distaste at all the black costume-leading-inevitably-to-Venom horseshit and seen it anyway, but as it was, I decided to wait until I could rent it cheaply or see it on cable or something.

So last night SuperWife and I decided to have a date night. This is one of those summer weekends when the movies debuting in the theaters are crap-crap-crap (You Don't Mess With The Zohan? Please. In this house, the rule is more like You Don't Go See Adam Sandler Movies Unless Doing So Helps To Free A Hostage Or Something), and we'd seen all the stuff we'd wanted to to date, so we decided to use two of our free Blockbuster rentals (my fabulously generous younger brother Pat has given me and the fam a six month membership in a movie club; every month we get a bucket of movie snacks that has a card good for a free rental in it, and we've been so busy lately that they've been kind of piling up). So we got Spider-man 3 and Charlie Wilson's War, although last night we only managed to watch the first one before having to head off to bed, 'cuz we're old now.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised -- shocked and stunned, really -- to find out just how much Spider-man 3 doesn't suck. Oh, it ain't no Iron Man, certainly, and it's only about half as good as the first Spidey movie, but, still, given how wretched the intervening chapter of the franchise was, it was a real pleasure to watch this one and realize that Sam Raimi still had some directing chops in him after all.

How was this one better than S2? Well, aside from the fact that it had a plot all its own, instead of a retread of the basic storyline of S1, it also had --

* a Mary Jane who didn't act like a crackhead
* more lines for Curt Conners (although, alas, it seems a Lizard he'll never be)
* Captain Stacy and his lovely daughter Gwen
* more lines for Betty Brant (although this seems to be the Ultimates Betty Brant, or something; the Silver Age Betty Brant never acted like that)
* a spot on depiction of the Sandman
* an acting job by Topher Grace that was much much better than anything I'd expected from him
* fucking AMAZING special effects.

Okay, S2 had fucking amazing special effects as well; the Spidey/Doc Ock fight scenes are the only reason to ever watch any three consecutive minutes of that bullshit. But amazing as Doc Ock's tentacles were, there were nothing compared to Sandman. I mean, WOW. I soooooooo wish I'd seen it on the big screen.

I also enjoyed Theresa Russell's brief cameo as Flint Marko's wife, and was especially charmed by Harry's brief lapse into trauma-induced amnesia, which wore off exactly at the moment the plot most needed him to start being a dick again. I can understand how some noobs might find this kind of thing overly contrived, but those of us who've been with Petey since the beginning recognize the mechanism from Pete's running series of conflicts with the first Green Goblin in the original comics.

Back in the day, Norman Osborne was forever discovering Spidey's secret identity and then using the info to try and kill him in some horrible way; Spidey would somehow defeat the pumpkin throwing asswipe one more time, and then something would happen that would give good ol' Norman amnesia for a while. Then, when the writers wanted to bring the Goblin back for more, Norm's amnesia would clear up and he'd start ranting, raving, and guh-nashing his teeth all over again. Rinse and repeat all through the early to mid Silver Age. As a dramatic device it was hackishly convenient, but despite that, the simultaneous feelings of genuine pity and sheer, unrelenting terror that both Pete and his readers would feel as Norman started to recover his memory one more time were always compelling.

Peter Parker With 'Tude in this film didn't bother me anywhere near as much as Wimpy Peter Parker Who Doesn't Want To Have Powers did in S2 -- at least in this movie, his bizarre behavior was explained by him being under the mental and emotional influence of an alien symbiote, instead of, you know, him just being a dipshit. (I will note, though, that Pete cannot hide entirely behind the "oh, I was mind controlled by a black goo costume from beyond" excuse for all his moral failings in S3, and he still needs to do some groveling to MJ for (a) kissing Gwen like that and (b) never once mentioning that Gwen existed prior to that, or that Gwen was his lab partner at college... both acts of skulking scurviness which were committed before Pete ever came into contact with the alien brain-bender.)

Much of the movie was pretty directly poured out from old Lee/Ditko/Romita Spidey stories, and I loved watching that stuff. The odd team up between Spidey and Harry at the end certainly wasn't taken from the source material -- no Goblin derived villain would ever have allied with Spider-Man for even seconds, for any reason at all -- but it worked well within the structure of the film and I enjoyed watching the results.

Stuff I didn't like? Well, the decision to make Flint Marko into Uncle Ben's triggerman was loathsomely stupid. I held out hope all through the film that in the end, it would turn out to be a case of mistaken identity or something, but, no, no, Marko really did it. That final revelation, along with Parker's wimpy ass forgiveness of the man who murdered his Uncle Ben, made my stomach hurt a little. But it's about the only really truly wrong note in the whole film, and given how good the rest of it was, I can roll with the blow.

Introducing Gwen and her father into the film franchise so late, in such essentially inessential roles, seemed very jarring and almost irreverent to me, but what the hell -- in a universe where both the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus are dead, maybe Gwendy and her dad have long happy lives to lead still before them.

And, as I mentioned before, it makes me sad that we'll never get to see Curt Conners transform into the Lizard. Plus, it would be nice to see some easter egg scene tucked in after the credits where Samuel L. Jackson shows up and wants to talk to Spider-Man about the Avengers Initiative, and Spidey invites him to have lunch down at the dangling diner. But these are quibbles. Overall, this is a much, much better movie than I thought it ever could be, and I'm very pleased about that.

Props

A while back, my brother Paul sent me a couple of CDs in the mail as a gift for some occasion or another -- HOT FUSS and SAM'S TOWN, by some band I'd only vaguely heard of known as The Killers. Paul's taste in music and mine don't overlap in many areas, so I tossed them somewhere and largely forgot about them, although the two older Super Kids got some use out of them.

At my current job, we're allowed to listen to CDs on our PC's D drive if we bring in headphones, so I did, and looking through the CDs that I had in my little travelcase, I was bemused to see one I didn't recognize. There was no writing on it to identify it, just a picture of a ram's head. Having gone through all the other CDs in the case in a day or so, I decided, what the hell, I'd throw it in and see what it was.

Turns out it was SAM'S TOWN, and, more than that, it was really, really awesome.

Not that I fully appreciated it the first time I listened to it; the odd melodies and goddam weird lyrics are something of an acquired taste. I'd already learned to like "When You Were Young" due to Super Drama Teen and Super Dependable Teen playing it over and over again while playing GUITAR HERO on our Wii, so I enjoyed that when it came up, but the first time through, I just found the rest of the tracks on the CD... strange. But haunting.

I listened again, and found myself enjoying a few other tracks quite a bit -- "For Reasons Unknown", I think, and "This River Is Wild". I wasn't sure I really liked much else on the CD, but...

...I listened to it again...

Okay, well, "Sam's Town" was definitely pretty cool, and "Bones" (a song I originally mistakenly believed must be titled "Come With Me", which, given its subject matter, was a pretty filthy double entendre) just blew the goddam doors off when all those horns came in like howitzers during the chorus, but some of the rest of it still seemed a bit dodgy to me.

But I listened to it again...

And it's all just fucking great. It's just fucking GREAT.

I've tried HOT FUSS a few times since then, and it's not hooking me the way SAM'S TOWN did. I like the first four songs okay. After that it kinda tapers off for me.

Still, I owe my baby brother Paul a big vote of thanks. So, thanks, Paul.

I still don't understand why Rob Thomas and Matchbox Twenty are bullshit stupid pop garbage and Counting Crows is transcendent, though. And I'm never going to understand what you hear in Ben Fold's Five.

Over there

...at Talking Points Memo, I've set up a blog and hung a few posts.

I'm not exactly rocking anyone's world over there or anything, but, hey, 2 or 3 comments a post is more than I'm averaging here, and a post that gets SEVEN comments is pretty much unheard of around these parts.

Which isn't to say I'm abandoning this page. I can't do pop culture related nonsense over there, after all. There's just, you know, MORE stuff you haven't read yet, over there.

Be off with you.

I meant to do that

For years I've been laboring under the crushing burden, the sheer oppressive spiritual weight of hellish guilt that is the lot of a person who, while living in Florida in the year 2000, cast a vote in the presidential election for Ralph Nader.

It's been an ordeal. Truly.

But earlier today, it abruptly occurred to me, that maybe, just maybe, I'm a hero rather than a goat.

Perhaps... perhaps, in the long run, I did a magnificent and noble thing.

After all, did I not spare the world the sheer unrelenting horror of... a Joe Lieberman Presidency in 2008?

Think about it.

Indiana Jones, in 1-D!

(If spoilers be buggin' ye, proceed at your own risk, fedora fans.)

Remember RAIDERS? That great scene (ah, but they're all great scenes) where Indy and Marian are trying to steal that cool looking Nazi flying wing so they can abscond from the desert with the Ark, and everything that can possibly go wrong does, and Indy ends up having to fight this gigantic bald Nazi airplane mechanic, and after getting the worst of several punch and kick exchanges, he eventually triumphs when his foe is too stupid to avoid the plane's propeller?

Good times. Good times.

Now flash forward 27 years to 2008 (excuse me, I'll be out in the kitchen with my head in the oven, jesus CHRIST, TWENTY SEVEN YEARS, somebody please give me my life back) or 21 years to 1957, the actual setting of the newest Indy movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Indy is forced to do bare-knuckles battle with another oversized antagonist, this time in the middle of a swarm of flesh-eating army ants devouring everything in existence all around them. The two exchange blows savagely, pummeling each other back and forth across the small clear area they occupy within the sea of evil omnivorous insects.

Now, unlike the giant bald Nazi from the similar scene I've already cited from the first film, this particular opponent of Indy's has been in the movie from the very start. He's had probably an order of magnitude more screen time than that first guy Indy fought. He most likely has even been given a name at some point, although I couldn't tell you what it is. And yet, for the entirety of the fight, I found it difficult to muster up much if any interest in it. I didn't know anything about this guy. He wasn't cool or menacing or in any way engaging or emotionally interesting to me. I honestly just didn't give a fuck.

Thinking back on it now, I'm not even sure why he and Indy were having an unarmed brawl at that point in the movie... there seems little purpose in stopping to mash someone's face flat with your fist, when you're actually sprinting for a river just ahead of an unrelenting army of flesh eating ants intent on stripping the flesh off your very bones.

Here lies the essential difference between previous Indy films and CRYSTAL SKULL, the essential reason why RAIDERS and LAST CRUSADE excel, and CRYSTAL SKULL is a lame, pointless crapapalooza... because in the latest installment of the Indiana Jones franchise there is no characterization at all. None. Not a jot, not a tittle, not the merest subatomic iota of characterization, no matter how high or low you search or hard you hunt, not one single character ever displays anything even remotely beyond the merest rote rituals of stock personality for the entire film.

In RAIDERS, in LAST CRUSADE, even in the much (and justly) reviled TEMPLE OF DOOM, the various villains and supporting characters have actual personalities, at least, to a limited extent. They seem like real people, or, at least, real three dimensional adventure fiction icons, even if, as in TEMPLE, those personalities make us hate them and want them to be immediately smashed to a pulp between the gears of some gigantic ancient occult temple mechanism.

There is more life, more personality, more real depth and breadth, in nearly any of Indy's fictional opponents from RAIDERS, even the minor ones -- the eye-patched, monkey directing Arab on a motorcycle, the cool Nazi with a bald spot Indy battles on the Ark truck, the Nazis in street clothes who walk into a shadowy room in Cairo and nod to the various knife wielding Arabic street thugs, the nasty little monkey spy itself -- than there is in any or all of the various Commie KGB thugs who chase Indy & Crew from one end of this film to the other. Even the central villainess has barely enough substance to qualify as a cardboard cut out.

See, in 1980, Lucas and Spielberg still understood a basic truth about fiction, especially pop culture fiction, most especially open ended serial pop culture fiction like the STAR WARS or INDIANA JONES franchises -- it succeeds or fails on the basis of its characters. The first STAR WARS movie had spectacular special effects for its time period and so, for that matter, did RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK -- but those movies would have sunk without a trace had they not had living, breathing, interesting, fascinating characters. In STAR WARS, the fact that its central crew of stock SF/fantasy archetypes attained something like real life is a happy accident attributable more to unanticipated chemistry between the cast of little known actors than Lucas' story or direction. In RAIDERS, Spielberg's direction probably contributed somewhat to the palpable sense of real life personality audiences could easily perceive in its characters, and, certainly, a very talented cast of actors helped enormously, too.

CRYSTAL SKULL has no essential characterization at all; other than its temporal setting and copyrighted central characters, it could just as easily be a TOMB RAIDER movie. All Lucas cares about is the special effects, and yes, everything in this movie that's done with CGI looks spectacular, but that's nowhere near enough. There isn't a single character in the film that engages the audience's emotions. You don't much like the heroes, you don't much hate the villains. Minor supporting characters you've never seen before come and go leaving little emotional impression behind them, something one certainly can't attribute to the minor supporting characters in RAIDERS, like the two government agents who recruit Indy from his college classroom towards the start, or the ancient Arabic scholar who translates the writing on the headpiece of the Staff of Ra. When the various villains meet horrible dooms at the end of CRYSTAL SKULL, you can't really care, because they've never really been brought to life in the first place. Even the big Arabic swordsman with the gigantic scimitar who cackles in a sinister fashion right before Indy shoots him dead in RAIDERS has more personality than any of these mooks.

Just as Lucas' primary concern seems to be the special effects, Spielberg seems to be mainly motivated by cramming as many 1950s pop culture cliches into this film as possible. So we have the KGB menace, and FBI agents suspecting Indy of Red sympathies, and a sidekick dressed up as a greaser, and a malt shop battle between greasers and letter jacket wearing college jock types, and an A-bomb test blast, and little grey men from mars, and a genuine flying saucer that doesn't actually fly anywhere, and I didn't care about any of it, because at no point were any of the characters in the movie more than one dimensional to me.

Characters are our entry point into spectator entertainment. If we care about a character, if our emotions are engaged, then we will be drawn into the film or TV show and find ourselves responding to it on a visceral level. As all forms of entertainment are designed to simply artificially create and then release tension in a satisfactory manner, and as most forms of entertainment aren't interactive, this kind of visceral involvement with the artform is absolutely necessary if the audience is going to enjoy the experience. Otherwise, all we're doing is watching at a distance.

That's what happens with CRYSTAL SKULL. As with either of the TOMB RAIDER movies, the spectacular special effects ladled heavily on top of no characterization whatsoever simply left me feeling that I was watching a very long, not particularly interesting video game that I wasn't given a controller for.

Other people evidently hate this movie for the undeniable plot stupidities in it, and I admit, such stupidities are legion. Yet I don't mind Indy surviving an A bomb blast by jumping into a refrigerator, even when that refrigerator gets blown out of the bomb site at what must be several hundred miles per hour, smashes hard into the desert what must be several miles away and rolls and skids another hundred yards before Indy hauls himself back out again, battered but unbowed. Indy should and certainly would be a baked smear of sediments inside the icebox after riding out a point blank nuclear blast, but what the hell, it's pulp adventure. Similarly, when Indy's sidekick Mutt swings on vines like Tarzan and somehow manages to overtake two all terrain vehicles hurtling at what must be at least 45 miles per hour along a cliffside several miles away from his starting point, arriving just in time to vanquish the villainess, it doesn't bother me. Yeah, this stuff is physically impossible, but, again, what the hell, this is pulp adventure.

The plot of CRYSTAL SKULL is rife with belief straining stuff like this. However, let's remember that the events depicted in RAIDERS are even more ridiculous -- Indy gets shot, thrown through a windshield, dragged under a speeding truck with a bullet in his shoulder, climbs back up from the bottom of said speeding truck, crawls along the top of it, swings back down into its cab, punches out its driver, throws said driver out onto the hood with one good arm, and then manages to knock another truck full of Nazis off the road into a suddenly appearing mountain abyss while driving on a caravan route through a desert that is 'three weeks in every direction', which abyss then vanishes just as quickly as it appeared, and I'm not even going to talk about how Indy gets hauled through hundreds of miles of the Atlantic Ocean while lashed to a periscope after which he takes on an entire island full of Nazis, punching people out and stealing uniforms and running around with rocket launchers and what have you displaying little or no ill effects from being shot, beat on, blown up, exposed to the elements, and sleep deprived for the past several days at the very least.

If you can slug down all that without a chaser, you really shouldn't have too much trouble with any of the plot excesses in CRYSTAL SKULL. However, the reason audiences can accept all that nonsense without a quiver in RAIDERS is not that movie audiences are uniformly stupid (although I admit, it often seems that way) it's just that RAIDERS is full of interesting three dimensional characters who interact with each other in ways we find fascinating and believable. CRYSTAL SKULL has, comparatively, very few moments throughout its running time where we are really forced to suppress any knowledge we may have of how things actually function in the real world, but, on the other hand, it also has no characterization to it whatsoever, so when we are confronted with a "no fucking WAY" moment, we are much less likely to forgive it and move on.

All told, INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL is not a movie I feel any compulsion to own a copy of. Should the Indiana Jones franchise continue in the future, I sincerely hope Lucas and Spielberg turn it over to somebody who can actually make the audience care about what is happening on screen.

The dead yet plagiarize

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I did a search over at technorati.com and found somebody I didn't know had linked to this blog. I went over there, expecting I know not what, and, well, I got a big surprise.

Here's a comment I just posted:

Just so people know -- the bulk of this article is lifted DIRECTLY from my blog entry of April 11, 2008, which can be found at http://miserableannalsoftheearth.blogspot.com/2008/04/dead-yet-live.html .

I appreciate the 'tip of the hat' at the bottom of the article, but at the same time, a 'tip of the hat' is completely inadequate when someone has ripped off your work without permission and placed it on their own site in an attempt to pass it off as their own. We writers have a technical term for that sort of thing -- plagiarism. It's highly immoral, and I object to it entirely.

Not all of this article is stolen directly from my site. The second paragraph is an uncredited reproduction of a comment my wife left on my site in response to my entry above. And some of it is apparently original to the blogger here. But 95% of this entry is my work, or my wife's work, and neither of us is credited, and our permission was not solicited before our work was re-used without credit.

That's deeply, deeply wrong. I find it highly offensive, utterly unacceptable, and I am hereby requesting and requiring that every word of this article that was originally authored by anyone besides the blogger here be pulled off this page immediately.

I don't expect this comment to accomplish anything, and in fact, I don't even expect it to show up, or if it does, to stay up very long. But I'm sure the blogger here will read it, so be advised -- I will be linking to this entry from my blog, and reproducing this comment there.

So, there's that.

It makes me wonder how many people out there are passing my work off as theirs without my knowledge. If this idiot hadn't been so idiotic as to link back to the guy he was stealing from, I'd never have known what he was doing.

It also makes me wonder just how morally bankrupt we've become as a culture, when somebody will blatantly steal someone else's work, pass it off as their own, and apparently be so unaware that this is an immoral and unethical act that they actually give a 'hat tip' to the guy they're ripping off, as if that somehow makes the act of literary theft acceptable.

Update, Sunday morning, 5/26/08 :

To their credit, the staff of Fourth Wall has responded quickly to this situation. Yesterday I found the comment you'll see below, from 'Art', apologizing and advising that the article would be taken down. I hit the link in my entry and found that, indeed, the article is gone. So that's something.

This morning I got the following email, from 'Jesse':



Dear D

First let me say we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. I understand how you feel when some one takes your work and claims it as their own. I did not post the article in question but fourth wall was created by me so I should deal with it.

Out of respect to your original work we have taken the post down and the one who posted it has been talked to.

Once again we apologize for this. And we do not take stealing, plagiarism or taking credit for some one esle's work lightly at all and would find it highly offensive if other people would think this.

Once again we can't apologize enough,

Fourth Wall Staff

In response to this, I just sent the following:

As the article is down, I'll consider this matter resolved for the
time being. I sincerely hope it doesn't happen again.

If your webzine wants to use my work, I'm generally pretty reasonable about such requests. I'm always happy to see my work get more exposure. I just want full credit and a link to my blog, and, obviously, if anyone makes any money off my work, I want fair participation.

It troubles me that both you and Art, who left an apology similar to yours on my blog itself, seem to be at pains to hide the identity of the plagiarist on your staff. Also, that the plagiarist "has been talked to" is not satisfactory to me, especially combined with this obvious effort on your magazine's part to keep his or her identity unknown. If I were publishing the work of others and discovered that one of my contributors was a plagiarist, I would pull his or her work, publish an apology where that work had originally appeared that included the name of the plagiarist, and make a solemn promise that not only would the act of plagiarism not be repeated, but that the plagiarist would never work for me again. Plagiarism is a dreadful and unacceptable act, and your response to it should be absolutely zero tolerance, if you want to have any credibility with any writer anywhere again.

As it is, I'll be checking back to your magazine from time to time to see what's going on there, as, for all I know, what you 'talked to' the Mystery Plagiarist about was "hey, dude, if you're going to rip off someone, don't link back to them, you idiot". It seems obvious that whoever 'wrote' that article has no clue as to the actual immorality of plagiarism, and given the inadequacy of your response, I have to wonder if your magazine as a whole shares that generally apathetic attitude.

Thanks for what you've done.

D.

I think that about says it all. I have a dark suspicion that what FOURTH WALL did to me is something that's more a policy there than otherwise, and that all this incident is going to resolve is their foolish tendency to link back to the people they're ripping off. Well, and I doubt they'll be stupid enough to steal from ME again. Still, despite their protestations otherwise, I am getting the very distinct impression that they really do not understand what plagiarism is, or how such a charge could possibly apply to them. After all, it's not like they're copying something out of a real book; they're just finding stuff on the Internet and passing it off as their own work. They may believe that anything they find on the Internet (where, of course, everything is free) is in the public domain, and can be used by anyone else in any way without credit, links, or attribution, especially if they aren't charging anyone any money for it.

However, regardless of where I publish my work, it is still MY work. My original work, something I created and brought into being. It is my intellectual property and they have no right to it at all, other than quoting brief excerpts for purposes of review... and if they do that, they have to credit me fully, and link back to my work's original publication site, if possible.

It doesn't matter that I'm 'just a blogger' and I put my work out there in a public space where anyone can view it for free. I still own that work, and no one gets to use it for any purposes without my permission. And no one EVER has any legal right to pass off my original work, or anyone else's, as their own, under any circumstances, unless we enter into a very specific contract where I agree to
effectively act as a ghost writer... which, obviously, has not happened here.

Stealing is wrong. I know some people may find it hard to get that in these circumstances, but just as I cannot spend a week typing SALEM'S LOT into my computer word for word and then post it to my website as an original novel I've been writing for months, so too are all others prohibited from stealing my blog entries and trying to pass them off as their own original work.

It's deeply, profoundly, innately, and irrefutably wrong. Anyone who does not understand that has no business publishing anything anywhere for any reason.

Everything old is new again

Rarely has any work of period fiction so successfully evoked the historical era in which it is set:

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russian Communist Party members condemned the new "Indiana Jones" film on Friday as crude, anti-Soviet propaganda that distorts history and called for it to be banned from Russian screens.
ADVERTISEMENT

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" stars Harrison Ford as an archeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers...

..."What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame," said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg...

"Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate actors, serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the right of entering the country," said another party member, Andrei Gindos.

Though the ranks of the once all-powerful Communist Party have dwindled since Soviet times, its members see themselves as the defenders of the achievements of the old Soviet Union.

Other communists said the generation born after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union were being fed revisionist, Hollywood history. They advocated banning the Indiana Jones outright to prevent "ideological sabotage."

"Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware of what happened in 1957," St Peterburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters.

"They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war."

"It's rubbish ... In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the U.S. Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?"

Vladimir Mukhin, another member of the local Communist Party, said in comments posted on the Internet site that he would ask Russia's Culture Ministry to ban the film for its "anti-Soviet propaganda."

Wow. Did they really use the phrase 'running dogs'? Retro, dudes! I totally got Cold War shivers. I think I'll get under my desk and tuck my head between my knees. Those were the days, huh?

I can't wait for the next movie in the series, when Speilberg decides to give the Commies equal time -- INDIANA JONES RECANTS HIS FILTHY IMPERIALIST BOURGEOISIE LIES AND EMBRACES THE CAUSE OF THE PROLETARIAT. That one will be a barn burner.

But he talks like a gentleman, like you imagined him

Before Thomas Harris succumbed to the unfathomable moral idiocy of his most famous creation, he had some pretty serious game. Regard this passage from the perhaps only slightly overpraised SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (a book so much better than the movie derived from it that even Harris at his peak could not adequately describe the unbridgeable qualitative gulf between them):

Starling heard a lot of the Arkansas hills in the man's voice. She could speak that with anybody when she wanted to, and her time was short.

"Yessir, if you could help me out I'd be much obliged. I'm trying to get ahold of Mr. Lomax Bardwell? This is Clarice Starling?"

"It's Starling somebody," the man yelled to the rest of his household. "What do you want with Bardwell?"

"This is the Mid-South regional office of the Ford recall division? He's entitled to some warranty work on his LTD free of charge?"

"I'm Bardwell. I thought you was trying to sell me something on that cheap long distance. It's way too late for any adjustment, I need the whole thing. Me and the wife was in Little Rock, pulling out of the Southland Mall there?"

"Yessir."

"Durn rod come out through the oil pan. Oil all over everywhere and that Orkin truck that's got the big bug on top of it? He hit that oil and got sideways."

"Lord have mercy."

"Knocked the Fotomat booth slap off the blocks and the glass fell out. Fotomat fella come wandering out addled. Had to keep him out of the road."

There's a compact, elegant precision to Harris' prose that I find deeply satisfying. Said elegance, precision, and, alas, sly authorial cruelty is equally evident in this shorter passage from further along:
When she was far enough away, one of the younger deputies, a newlywed, scratched beneath his jaw and said, "She don't look half as good as she thinks she does."

"Well, if she just thinks she looks pretty god-damned good,I'd have to agree with her, myself," the other young deputy said. "I'd put her on like a Mark Five gas mask."

"I'd just as soon have a big watermelon, if it was cold," the older deputy said, half to himself.

Harris is, to me, much of a much with Stephen King as a writer; his earlier books are tremendous artifacts I can reread over and over again (and have, often) while the product of his later career is severely marred by the excesses of his own success -- which is to say, he's become so commercial that, like King, he can demand to have his every word published entirely unedited, and, also like King (and Heinlein, and most other writers, including, I'm sure, myself) this is an indulgence he cannot well afford.

Few artists have the disciplined detachment to successfully critique their own work, and Harris certainly does not number among that select number. Not only does he badly require an editor for more mundane editorial tasks like pointing out passages that desperately cry out for at least one more draft before publication, but he also needs someone to slap him hard two or three times just prior to advising him that one's hero is the character trying to stop the sociopathic cannibalistic mind controlling serial killer-rapist. Further, serial murder, cannibalism, mind control, and recreational rape are not in any way justified or made acceptable by describing said cannibal serial killer/rapist's unpleasant childhood, or attributing to him a lengthy list of evil Nazis he has killed and eaten during his young adulthood in occupied Europe.

I suppose Harris could still redeem himself; in his next novel, he could have Clarice Starling come to her senses and flee to Florida. When the evil doctor inevitably pursues her, a surprisingly sober Will Graham could spring up from behind a palm tree and thoroughly air condition Lecter's small, sleek torso with eight or nine well placed Glaser rounds. True, it might make for an exceedingly short narrative, but it would be one I myself would find enormously satisfactory.

Until then, though, I'll just have to keep rereading BLACK SUNDAY, RED DRAGON, and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. And you really should, too.

You can't get here from there

In a parallel universe just a few quantum fractals away from our own, Carolyne Mas owns a good sized island a few miles off the coast of Brazil. The local mariners all know to avoid it because a very expensive private security force patrols the surrounding waters in a fleet of extremely fast, heavily armed speedboats. The island has a sheltered lagoon like a blue-green jewel that porpoises cavort in, and the tropical flowers are lush and lovely. Ms. Mas goes there maybe 30 days out of the year. The rest of her time is spent touring, playing a seemingly endless parade of sold out shows in the world's largest arenas, the proceeds for which go entirely to charity, because God knows she doesn't need any more money. (Occasionally she'll sneak into a little town or city with no fanfare to play some tiny, smoky club or bar, just for the fun of it. People dream of stumbling into one of those shows. They are legendary among music fans.)

She's just been inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, and you have a copy of all 16 of her CDs, although more often than not you can't find the one you want to listen to right now, because one of your kids has it in their stereo or Discman.

Her music is on Ipods all over the world. She's had parts in four different movies and has appeared on each of the different CSI franchises and two of the LAW & ORDERS. Martin Scorcese is filming her next big concert in Bolivia. Her celebrity fans include Paul McCartney, Elton John, Carole King and Carlos Santana. Fox keeps trying to get her to be a mentor on AMERICAN IDOL, but she doesn't have time, plus, she worries she might stick a pair of scissors in Simon Cowell.

At the age of 53, she's one of the most successful and highly respected singer/songwriter celebrities in the history of pop music.

That's in a different world... what Walter Hill might describe as 'another time, another place'. A sub-continuum just a few vibrational chords out of pitch with this one.

In that same parallel universe, Daniel Keyes Moran is checking his bank account on his custom made I phone. There's a pending deposit from Paramount Studios for $3.2 million; the results of his profit participation on the smash hit movie adaptation of his best selling SF novel EMERALD EYES. The money's nice although he has no pressing need for it; with THE LONG RUN, THE LAST DANCER, THE AI WARS, and THE HOUSE OF NOVEMBER all optioned for film production at a cool 3 million each, he's already got more than enough to build that hilltop mansion in the Canyon he's been idly daydreaming about since his early 20s, and by that Lambourghini he's always lusted after. If he weren't a very happily married man he might be getting more enjoyment from the casting sessions for the TRENT THE UNCATCHABLE TV series he insists on sitting in on. There's an old Hollywood adage about the wannabe starlet who was so stupid she slept with the writer, but Moran is an exception to that cliche; as a writer/producer, he's made PREMIERE magazine's Hundred Most Powerful Movie Magnates list for the last four years in a row... this year he's number 7.

(Tangentially, this is also the world where Gerry Conway was never Editor In Chief at Marvel Comics, and Steve Englehart stayed on AVENGERS and CAPTAIN AMERICA, and Steve Gerber kept writing DEFENDERS and HOWARD THE DUCK, until the late 1980s. Also, Jack Kirby is still alive there, and Season Six of BUFFY was actually really good, and Al Gore won by eight points with Chris Dodd as his running mate, and Ralph Nader runs the Consumer Protection Agency.)

This is the world that we should all be living in, if talent meant much of anything. Apparently, in the world we all have to live in, it doesn't. (Or perhaps there is a God, and He/She hates us.)

Early September of 1979; I can't remember the exact date. I'd been at Syracuse University for a total of two days. I didn't know a soul besides my computer assigned roommate, a guy named Jim Commentucci, whom it was already obvious I wasn't ever going to be anything remotely like best buddies with. (Our loathing was immediate, mutual and fairly comprehensive but nonetheless for the most part amiable; we were fortunate in sharing a split double, so we could and did largely ignore each other for the two semesters we cohabited the same dorm room together.) Around seven in the evening I wandered up the hill to the SU quad, drawn by strains of unfamiliar but excellent rock n roll music that got steadily louder the closer I approached.

I didn't know any of the songs, nor was I familiar with any of the musicians, but the woman singing had an amazing voice and the songs themselves were fast moving, hard rocking, and deeply engaging. I plopped down on an empty stretch of grass amidst a sea of teenage strangers about forty feet from the stage and listened, enjoying myself enormously.

I was listening to a woman named Carolyne Mas, although I did not know it at the time. Later on, when I found out who she was, I bought her debut album, and a few years after that, what turned out to be her third album. (It will, perhaps, bring home to you just how long ago this all was when I advise you that I bought these albums on vinyl.)

That first, self titled debut album became a constant, haunting refrain playing in the background throughout much of my college experience; that music will, to me, always be associated with various Syracuse University locations -- the quad, various dorm rooms and off campus houses and apartments I lived in briefly or otherwise -- and various people I associate strongly with Syracuse University -- Jim Commentucci, another guy named Steve Shapiro whom I met at that outdoor concert and was briefly very good friends with, and my first girlfriend Laurie, who Steve introduced me to a few days (weeks?) after he and I became acquainted. (You've all met Laurie in passing; she hangs out here occasionally under her nom de plume Opus P. Penguin.)

It was sometime in the mid 1980s when I first came across a copy of EMERALD EYES by Daniel Keys Moran. I was living off campus in a house I shared with roomates Mike Schechter and Dilip Wad, a house that the Late Great Jeff Webb had dubbed The House Which Must Not Be Named because it had a few very bizarre interior architectural features. (All the places I lived in in college had weird names. My first off campus house, shared with Andy Gillespie, Rob Morrison, Jeff Webb, and Kurt Busiek, was eventually called Stately Wayne Manor, although there were several other suggestions made first and Jeff and I had a tough time holding off Andy, who desperately wanted to call the place 'Valhalla' instead. The apartment Jeff Webb shared for a time with Janice Westlake and Brent Burford was called The Arcade. I got out of the habit of naming my living space sometime in the late 80s, when I moved away from campus, but now I seem to have come back to it again, as the apartment I currently share with my beautiful wife and lovely stepdaughters rejoices in the nickname 'Castle Anthrax'. And you're probably hoping that this is the last pointless digression you'll encounter during this entry, and what can I say? It's good to want things. It is.)

Anyway, EMERALD EYES blew me away. It's a tremendous, astonishing book, full of diehard American rebels against the evil French dominated United Nations and genetically engineered telepathic supermen and nasty cyborg soldiers and dueling time travelers from the distant future and flying cars hurtling through the sky at high velocity and lots of stuff blowing up real good and if you're any kind of science fiction fan, or you simply enjoy a fabulous story beautifully told, I recommend it wholeheartedly. Its two sequels, or, rather, further installments in the series to which EMERALD EYES is merely the opening, are excellent, as well, but in all honesty, neither of them really has the same impact for me as EMERALD EYES does.

I really thought, when I read EMERALD EYES, that its author was on an express train to inevitable literary greatness. Here was an enormously talented guy who could tell one hell of an exciting story. His prose was solid all the way through; terrific plotting, great characters, witty, funny, resonant dialogue, and a tremendous ability to build exciting, intriguing, internally believable futurescapes. I had no doubt that this guy was goin' to all the pretty places, and when he got there he was going to settle in and build himself a bunker, too.

And yet, if you go here, you can read all about the many occasions on which fame and fortune passed within millimeters of enormously talented singer/songwriter Carolyne Mas over the course of a very checkered career. She got close enough to wave to it; hell, she got close enough to run her fingers through its hair. But she doesn't own any private islands. She has given up playing music and is currently running an animal sanctuary. Which does not seem merited, fair, or just by any sane standards I am aware of or can imagine, but, hopefully, she's happy doing it.

And if you go here, you will find one of my favorite authors, blogging along in relative obscurity like any of the rest of us. He apparently sells and installs software for a living now, is happily married, and is self publishing the newest Continuing Time installment one chapter at a time, on his blog.

It amazes me, and it saddens me, and to some extent, it grounds me. These two had every imaginable break. Mas put out a dozen albums over the course of her career, had the esteem of professionals throughout the music industry, was frequently touted by reviewers and others of influence as one of the finest singer/songwriters the field of music had to offer. She should have been one of the biggest stars of the 80s, the 90s, the 00s. She should have been Sarah McLachlan and Faith Hill and Fergie and Kelly Clarkson all rolled up in one. She should have platinum albums and Grammies and an entire underground garage to house her collection of vintage limousines and expensive sports cars.

And Moran should have Hugos and Nebulas and movie deals and hit TV shows based on his work. He should have millions of avid fans and three or four different houses and there should be Trent the Uncatchable and Daniel Castanaveras action figures and an EMERALD EYES video game for the XBox, Playstation, and the Wii. (And I'll bet it would kick ass, too.)

Me, I always figured that if I could ever sell even one of my novels, merely one, if I could just get one out there into the bookstores where people would have a chance to buy it, that would be it... I would walk through that big doorway to success and I'd never look back again. All my other novels would sell well, I'd get movie offers, there'd be a UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE TV series on FX or SHOWTIME and kids all over America would want to be just like Dean Nydecker when they grew up. I'd have a nice big house with five or six bedrooms and a beautiful downstairs den with a fireplace and a big screen TV and a leather couch and a huge old oak desk and built in walnut bookshelves. And my wife would have a huge kitchen and there would be a big playroom upstairs for the kids and we'd have a hot tub and a heated in-ground pool and a nice big outdoor grill and a gorgeous game room down in the basement.

But it doesn't necessarily work that way. Apparently you can beat the odds, get your work published, get a record deal, sell some product,gain the respect and admiration of your peers and build a following of thousands of devoted fans... and still end up right back on the treadmill with the rest of the run of the mill. You hit the big number, sign the contracts, cash the checks, see your work out there on the rack at the big chain bookstore or the big chain music store in the mall, you do the signings and play the concerts and still, you, wake up one day and you're broke and you have to schlep back out and find a 9 to 5 grindstone to press your nose to again.

It's depressing. But I guess that's just the way it is.

Although, you know, George R.R. Martin seems to have it pretty good these days, especially for a guy who can't finish anything.

It's okay, I understand, this ain't no Never Never Land

No particular order --

***IRON MAN rocks hard. (The movie, I mean. The various incarnations of IM's comic have mostly been mediocre.) I agree with Jim Henley's assessment; where most action/superhero movies have character bits you kind of drum your fingers through while you wait for the next really cool fight scene, IRON MAN has really cool fight scenes that you pretty much suffer through so you can get to the next cool character bit. I don't know how much of how good this movie is comes straight out of Robert Downey Jr's laser accurate depiction of Tony Stark, but between that, some pretty good supporting cast performances, a decent script, much more competent direction than I'd ever have expected from Jon Favreau, some KICKass special effects, and a cubic parsec of sly, cutesie little in references for the diehard IRON MAN fan, I was in geek heaven from start to finish.

Well, until the very finish. The sight of Samuel L. Jackson coming out of the shadows with an eyepatch on his face nearly sent me into conniptions, as the presence of the goddam Ultimates Nick Fury would seem to indicate that the IRON MAN movie at least takes place in the Ultimates universe, and the very thought of THAT was enough to curdle every last subatomic particle of enjoyment the film had given me up to that point.

But then I thought about it for a minute, and realized that even if from this point forward the Marvel movie studio does make more of an effort to establish a common, shared universe amongst all their film projects, well, it won't be the original Marvel Universe I once loved so much, but it won't be the Ultimates universe, either. It won't be anything we've seen in the comics. It will be... the movie universe. Where, alas, Nick Fury looks a great deal like Samuel L. Jackson instead of, say, David Hasselhoff. But I can get behind that, I guess. Although it makes me wonder if in this universe, Gabe Wilson was the only white member of the Howling Commandoes...

***It was kind of a kick in the head to me earlier today to stumble across the rather startling information that Larry Niven and Steve Barnes' DREAM PARK series (DREAM PARK, THE BARSOOM PROJECT, THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME) are all out of print. To me, this is like finding out that we're not going to be using nickels any more, or the government has outlawed sneakers. DREAM PARK and its two sequels were significant parts of that Must Read List for SF/Fantasy Geeks I mentioned a few entries ago, back in the 80s and early 90s. I honestly do not know at what point it fell off the radar; it seems to me that every time I've visited a bookstore since, like, 1985, there's been a copy of DREAM PARK in some edition or another in the SF section.

If you haven't read DREAM PARK or its sequels, well, I guess you're shit out of luck... okay, not really, you can still get a secondhand copy of any or all of them pretty cheap from various dealers through Amazon.com. I like all of them, although of the three, BARSOOM PROJECT is about the slowest and least interesting, while CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME is probably the best... although that's tricky, since you won't get the full impact of the third book without reading the previous two first. It's kinda like John Varley's fabulous GAEA trilogy; DEMON is the best one, but you gotta read the first two to really appreciate it.

Strange that you can't walk into a BORDERS and take a copy of DREAM PARK down off the shelf, though.

I was relieved to discover, however, that all Robert A. Heinlein's books are still in print. I mean, I haven't fallen completely into Bizarro-Land, or something.

* * * THE STAND is a very strange book. I was thinking about this earlier today, as I was musing on the story of mine that just appeared in ASTONISHING ADVENTURES #3. It's one of my least favorite stories, because, in all honesty, I don't think the main character accomplishes much of any real significance in it... yeah, he goes up against some stuff and emerges, in the end, triumphant, but he really doesn't work all that hard to do it. It seems to me like good fiction requires many things, but an interesting and important central conflict that presents a mortal challenge to the protagonist, which said protagonist must somehow overcome or resolve is definitely essential, and it seems to me that with that particular story, I didn't bring this off very well.

But I started thinking about THE STAND, and realized that, while this is one of my favorite books (the original version that came out back in 1978, not that monstrous unexpurgated abomination), its protagonists (all seventy or eighty of them) never do a single goddam thing to successfully resolve the central conflict.

No, really. Not one frickin' thing.

A few of them have some minor accomplishments. Stu tricks Elder and escapes from a locked room. Fran manages to bury her father. Larry... it... I... okay, well, Larry picks Lucy over Nadine; that's about as heroic as he ever gets. Nick fails to save anyone from the superflu, fucks a teenage slut, and rides a bike with Tom Cullen. Ralph gets the electricity turned back on, Dana kills herself before Flagg can make her spill the beans on Tom Cullen, Tom Cullen manages to evade pursuit and save Stu's life. Nadine seduces Harold, keeping him on the Dark Side, and then she tricks Flagg into throwing her off a balcony so she won't have to have his kid. The Judge gets shot in the face by numb nuts Bobby Terry... Bobby Terry, for the love of christ. Fabulous victories and amazing accomplishments, every one.

Hell, in the entire nearly endless saga, about the only person who sets out to something difficult and succeeds s Harold; he blows up Nick and Sue. Even that's mostly a failure, though, as he was trying to get the entire Ad Hoc Committee and was thwarted by the return of Mother Abigail.

And Mother Abigail herself? She's God's representative on Earth, wise beyond all mortal ken, goodness and mercy personified, and what's her act? Hobble up the road, kill some chickens, hobble back down the road, slaughter a hog, cook a lot of food, and keep weasels from stealing her chicken, before wandering off into the wilderness to nearly die of starvation and exposure. Then she comes doddering back, maunders some bullshit about people walking to Las Vegas in the clothes they stand up in, and croaks. Not even ONE lousy light-sabre duel with the Walkin' Dude, or anything.

The villains aren't much better at getting shit done. Lloyd stands around watching while Poke kills a whole bunch of people, then has to be rescued from a locked jail cell, then stands around watching while Flagg and Trashcan Man kill a whole bunch of people, prior to being outsmarted by a mentally retarded guy. Trashcan Man burns down and blows up a whole LOT of shit; his greatest accomplishment is not killing himself doing it, and eventually he can't even do that right. Harold kills a few people before Flagg punts him off a cliff; Nadine has a lot of kinky sex with Harold before getting impregnated by Flagg. The Rat Man... c'mon, you're kidding me, right? Who cares about The Rat Man?

And then there's Our Man Flagg his mean self. He's one scary hombre, or at least, he was, before most of the human race died and he supposedly gained magic powers. I mean, before all that happened he was helping kidnap Patty Hearst and killing cops with the Panthers and lynching folks with the Klan and doing all kinds of bad ass shit. But after he got all mojoed up, what did he do? Um... well... er... he levitated a lot. Yep. He sure did that. And he sent out his great big Eye of Mordor to spy on people he didn't like. He got Loyd out of jail, and he passed out a few rocks on chains, and he apparently turned into a crow and flew around a few times, and he sure gave that dipshit Bobby Terry a hard way to go, yes indeed. But, really, all he actually did once he got his Voldemort on was... make a lot of people piss their pants. And you know what? He was doing that before. And it was more impressive when he didn't have magic powers.

So King sets up this fantastic conflict between good and evil, gives us all these really cool heroes and villains, and... nothing. Most of them never even run into each other. The ones that do don't do a goddam thing except yammer at each other. Flagg threatens a lot of people and has Loyd shoot one of them; Glen eats a bullet, and Larry and Ralph get blown up (along with everyone else in Vegas) by the Hand of God smacking the crap out of a nuclear warhead that crazy man Trash has just driven back out of the desert with.

Nobody does a single goddam thing that means a single goddam thing in the entire book. Big hero Stu, Cowboy Stu, "Old Time Tough" Stu, breaks his friggin leg on the way to Vegas and has to be rescued by feebleminded Tom Cullen. And he's one of the very few people who actually confronts and in some way, however minor, triumphs over evil, in the entire extremely lengthy epic fantasy.

And yet, this is a great book, a wonderful book, a classic piece of science fiction/occult fantasy. Populated with fabulous heroes and riveting villains, with a tremendous plot and wonderful dialogue and a fantastic resolution, a book that has thrilled entire generations and inspired dozens of rip offs. One of my all time favorite books.

So, I don't know. Maybe having your heroes do heroic stuff really isn't all that important, after all... at least, if you can write as well as a young Stephen King.

Which actually really doesn't help my lousy stories, since I can't. But, still.

Wish Sandwich

Two slices of bread, and you wish you had some meat:

***Or a Democratic Presidential nominee.

***Or the ability to send the astral selves of every adult American citizen who didn't vote for Al Gore back in time to possess their 2000 era bodies and vote all over again. Imagine no War on Terror, no Gitmo, no Abu Ghraib, no illegal Federal wiretapping, no outing of Valerie Plame, no invasion/endless occupation of Iraq. Imagine we got started on sensible energy and economic policies 8 years ago. Imagine.

***Or a job designing games.

***Or a reasonably lucrative career as a writer.

***Or a successful job as an online cartoonist.

***Or super-intelligence.

***Or a cool musical playlist in my blog border, like Mike Norton has... oh, wait, I gots one o' dose. Neat.

***Or an XBox 360 I could play MASS EFFECT on.

***Or a functional light-sabre. Or a phaser (Old school, please, not those stupid things that look like TV remote controls.) I'll take either.

***Or KOTOR 3. (Or a finished version of KOTOR 2, for that matter.)

***Or the check I've been promised for my story in ASTONISHING ADVENTURES #3. Or the slightest hint when I can expect it.

***Or a flying car.

***Or a few more computers in this house with Internet access.

***Or a big screen high density TV with a satellite dish so I could watch Bucs games at home during football season.

***Or a secret satellite headquarters from which I could teleport anything on Earth from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth.

***Or the ability to draw like Jack Kirby.

***Or a good singing voice.

***Or a great deal of natural talent at playing musical instruments.

***Or a robot duplicate Doc Nebula that could go to work and do my job for me while I stay home and blog.

***Or a blog that more than 6 people read.

That last is no doubt very unenlightened of me, but I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.

It's... Astonishing!

The new issue of ASTONISHING ADVENTURES (number 3) is available online. You can read it online here, or download your very own copy here. And soon, we are told, it will be available in hard copy from Amazon.com, just like issue #2 is now. Hurray!

All three issues contain short stories by yours truly, and issue 2 has a story by Nate Clark, too, making it an exceptionally wise investment on nearly anyone's part. (Of the three stories I've had published at AA, the one in issue 2 is my personal favorite, as well.) The latest issue, however, is the best looking of the run so far, sporting a truly stunning cover by magazine publisher John Carlucci and some very polished layouts inside. And, as this is the first issue where authors are actually being offered a word rate, Editor in Chief Tim Gallagher was very choosy as to which submissions made the final cut (other than the piece of crap by yours truly, which made it into the book due to pity on his part, or something).

All told, ASTONISHING ADVENTURES #3 is a helluva high quality package, which will richly reward any time you may wish to invest in perusing it, especially given that you can do so for the low low price of Not-A-Red-Cent. If you love old fashioned pulp style textual thrills, strap on your jet pack, unholster your .45s, and rocket through the ozone into -- ASTONISHING ADVENTURES!!!

Oh, and yes, Tony, this is the issue with the Doc Nebula story in it.

Loosie-goosie

Yes, I do just frickin love Married To The Sea.

You should, too.

In other news, some batshit nutjob says the Constitution does not prohibit torture, because, you know, torture isn't punishment, so it can't be cruel and unusual punishment:

"I don't like torture," Scalia says. "Although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But who's in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the - everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution," he says.

"If someone's in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression 'cruel and unusual punishment,' doesn't that apply?" Stahl asks.

"No, No," Scalia replies.

"Cruel and unusual punishment?" Stahl asks.

"To the contrary," Scalia says. "Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don't think so."

"Well, I think if you are in custody, and you have a policeman who's taken you into custody…," Stahl says.

"And you say he's punishing you?" Scalia asks.

"Sure," Stahl replies.

"What's he punishing you for? You punish somebody…," Scalia says.

"Well because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime…or that you know something that he wants to know," Stahl says.

"It's the latter. And when he's hurting you in order to get information from you…you don’t say he's punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He's trying to extract…," Scalia says.

"Because he thinks you are a terrorist and he's going to beat the you-know-what out of you…," Stahl replies.

"Anyway, that’s my view," Scalia says. "And it happens to be correct."

What a loon! Good thing he isn't a Supreme Court Justice or anything... oh, wait... ah, shit...

As to all this "What is Obama going to do about Reverend Wright" stuff, I personally feel the question is best answered with another question, such as, "What is John McCain going to do about John Hagee?" Whoops, hold up... we don't live in that world. You know. The one where everybody is held to the same standard. I forgot.

Then there's the thing where a 15 year old girl lets someone from VANITY FAIR take a picture of her naked back and everyone goes completely fucking bonkers about it!!! I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen any naked teenage girl backs on the Disney Channel or anything, like, you know, when various teenage girl stars are wearing swim suits and halter tops and what have you. Maybe I have. Maybe I've seen a few thousand. But only because I have an 8 year old stepdaughter; I didn't know the Disney Channel existed before I moved to River City. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Yeah-baby.)

Still, I think I'm trying to make one of my little points here, somehow. I'm not sure, though. I could just be arguing in my spare time.

Also, bastion of progressive liberal blogging Kevin Drum doesn't see a single goddam thing wrong with forcing everyone to get a National ID card. My response, from his comment threads:

Heh. Shorter Kevin Drum: "Fuck it, we're already living in a police state, let's for the love of christ make it an efficient one!"

For what it's worth (nothing to you, most likely) I think one of the greatest intrusions on personal civil liberties that has ever happened has been the courts upholding a cop's 'right' to demand ID from anyone, at any time, for any reason. I should not have to have a card in my wallet to walk freely down the street if I'm not doing anything criminal or anti-social. When a cop can demand I produce an ID, and if I do not, arrest me (and if I resist or attempt to flee, use force, up to and including lethal force, to enforce his arrest powers), I am basically being put in a position where I may have to prove my innocence whenever I leave my home. That's fascist crap and has no place in a free society.

I know, I know. It's much more efficient to just show the Man our papers when he asks for them. It's a dangerous world. Don't I want our children to be safe? What am I, some kind of anarchist? Do I want our valiant forces of law and order to have to operate with a blindfold on? Don't I understand how quickly criminals and terrorists would abuse actual freedom to wander around in public without being harassed, if they actually had it?

I'd like to say I remember when this was a free country, but I suppose I'd be kidding myself. The last eight years sure have done a lot of structural damage to the facade, though, if a constantly self proclaiming lib/prog like Kevin Drum can actually come out in support of national ID cards and get something like 25 comments from fellow 'liberals' agreeing with him.

Bruce Schneir does a lovely run down of all the pragmatic problems with the idea here, and that's all very convincing to me, too, but mostly, I'm just opposed to the idea on entirely philosophical grounds.

And that's all you get tonight. Unless, of course, you want to check out some of those links and see what else might be over there, in which case, lucky you.