Ward Sutton (I think) on the 2008 US election’s campaign designs. Possibly only of interest to political-ephemera freaks like me and armchair semioticians like me.

Thank you, America, for giving me stories like this one:

The mayor of an Arkansas town resigned on Wednesday, claiming he was abducted and brainwashed by Satan worshippers nearly three decades ago.

Centerton Mayor Ken Williams said he has been living under an assumed name for nearly 30 years. He had been mayor since 2001.

Williams told authorities he was born Don LaRose and that in the mid-1970s, he was a preacher in Indiana. He said he was abducted and brainwashed into forgetting all about his life as Don LaRose. It was a double-life he had never acknowledged, Williams said, because he didn’t even realize it existed until he had recently taken a truth-serum injection…

Check the video, too. Mad as arseholes.

I was probably around ten years old. Rooting around on my dad’s bookshelves, or maybe in one of the boxes of books he had in the attic, looking for something to read. I had no idea who Tom Godwin was, had never heard of “The Cold Equations,” when I found the copy of SPACE PRISON. This is the cover of the edition my dad had:

Of course, if you’ve read “The Cold Equations,” you already know that Tom Godwin was a miserable bastard. According to his Wikipedia entry, he suffered from spinal problems and possibly also alcoholism — which one is tempted to fit with the man who wrote SPACE PRISON, as bleak and horrible a book as you’ll find in science fiction. Four thousand humans are dropped on a high-gravity planet, rejected by a slaving alien invasion force. One thousand one hundred of them die during the first night. And it really doesn’t get any more cheerful from there. Tom Godwin, on almost every page, says to the reader, “oh, you liked this character? He falls off a mountain now. That one? Dies of exposure. This one? Eaten by goats. That one? Stabbed into meaty chunks by psychotic unicorns.” And on and on. I must have read that book twenty times. It just rips along (in many senses of the word “rips”), as shamelessly gleeful as a short genre book should be.

It’s now free to read on Project Gutenberg.

Forbidden Planet: “…reads like a stand up comedy routine and historical lecture channelled through equal parts Simon Schama and Bill Hicks.”

Max More: “Damn, this slim graphic novel was amazingly good.” *

The Guardian: “Best new graphic novel… it’s really just a detailed history lesson about the 1346 Battle of Cr?cy, but about 300 times more entertaining than that sounds.”

AICN: “…just right… a grimly inspirational story.”

All of which is really just an excuse to remind people that Avatar/Apparat are keeping CRECY in print — it’s not a “one-shot,” it’s an original graphic novella, designed as a permanent-shelf-life item for comics stores. Find your local comics store here,, or, if you’re in the US, dial 1-888-COMIC-BOOK.

Art by Ivan Rodriguez, colours by Mark Sweeney:

Editor Lou Anders has here a round-up of everything that’s happened on the global blogotron since I posted Gardner Dozois’ sales numbers for the sf short-story magazines. And that necessarily misses out an awful lot of other posts on the subject.

These tend less to be conversations than call-and-response. Some of the comments threads were very active, but, aside from Gordon van Gelder (MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION), I saw no comments from anyone actually involved in the magazines discussed. Interestingly to me, van Gelder suggested in one place that a loss in circulation doesn’t necessarily equate to a loss of revenue — and, in another, that his magazine would have been on track for its best year in years if the US postal rates hadn’t been hiked.

Special attention should be paid to An Open Source Model for Online Magazines: I think it’s wrong in many particulars, but, as an Open Source model, it’s supposed to be. It’s a good starting point for thinking and conversation.

Let me point out one thing: people are not afraid of reading on screens.

You’re reading this, aren’t you?

CROOKED LITTLE VEIN is in the first round of books available for the Amazon Kindle:

“Mummifying my own voluntarily-amputated fingers and toes!”

An anonymous student posts a wonderfully vile idea to John Shirley’s eschatological site Signs Of Witness:

…something we call ?The Black Wind? may well be coming within ten or twenty years or even sooner. The Black Wind is somewhat speculative but we believe it?s 90% probable that a combination of fronts of high Co2 atmosphere?with very little oxygen?and synergistically created pockets of poisoned air, essentially vaporized mercury, sulfites, PCBs, and acid rain, will combine, due to temperature convections that organize them into contiguous areas, to create ?black winds? which are great fronts of toxified wind that will kill all organisms in their path.

(Something in the back of my head is associating this with the “impetus niger” occult theory… which I only dimly remember, and, weirdly, seems to have never made it to the net)

I’m not taking the blame for this one. Zo found this. Apparently it’s been doing the rounds for a few months, but today Zo made me look at it. “Shake That Bear” is not safe for those of a nervous disposition or basic human ethics.

The implications for the future of the human race are crushing.

Xmas is solved for everyone:

The LITTLE VOODOO MAN is having a very bad day:

“…well over two million kids – some younger even than one year old – are kidnapped and sold to prostitution, sexual slavery and sexual exploitation worldwide every year.”

She was bad enough pre-drugs, when she was just a mouthy nobody. And I thought her showing up to court with Pete Doherty as her back-up was a new low. But no — Chav Diva’s scrawny junkie husband is going to beat you up:

Amy Winehouse was booed by fans as she delivered a shambolic set on the first night of her UK tour in Birmingham. The singer also dedicated a song to her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who is being held on remand pending charges including GBH. During the show, the 24-year-old told the crowd: “To them people booing, wait ’til my husband gets out of incarceration. And I mean that.”

Coming January 2008.