catsforgold.com: Sell your old gold and jewels and get cats delivered right to your front door. An internet riff on the troubled online pawn shop Cash for Gold. (via Calpernia Addams)

The Huffington Post is collecting blatant lies (and arguable mistruths) from Palin's new memoir, "Going Rouge." Here are a couple for feel:

"Palin boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations and turned back large checks over conflicts of interest. In fact, she relied heavily on large donations and political action committees and took $1,000 each from a couple whose offices were raided by the FBI,"

and,

"Palin says her team overseeing a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process. An AP investigation found they crafted terms that favored only a few companies and ultimately benefited one with ties to her administration."

Send Us Your Palin Falsehoods! (via Memex 1.1)

(Image: DIY Sarah Palin Mask, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Billypalooza's Flickr stream)

As Drawn! says: "Before you watch this insane music video by Jérémie Perin, note that is totally not safe for work. Its video-game inspired animation contains pixellated 8-bit depictions of both sex and pooping. The YouTube description reads "Think Spielberg's Duel + Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! and Marc Dorcel's wildest fantasies."

Flairs' "Trucker's Delight" (Not safe for work! Not for kids!)

I met with a bunch of YouTube folks in the Bay Area recently, and learned of new features and services they'll be launching. One of those is a new anaglyph 3D channel, where you can find lots of videos, amateur and pro, to view wearing those funny blue-and-red glasses. The blooming rose, above, looks kinda cool even without the glasses.

YouTube: 3D Channel

In 1990, MTV aired a groundbreaking TV documentary series called Buzz. Created and directed by Mark Pellington (Mothman Prophecies, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video), Jon Klein, and Mark Neale in partnership with MTV Europe, Buzz was a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from -- and presented -- avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature. Experientially, it feels like what Mondo 2000 would have looked like as a television show, and in fact Mondo founder RU Sirius was interviewed on the first episode. Other notable contributors/subjects included William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Genesis P-Orridge, Syd Mead, and many other happy mutants. This was the future of television, circa 1988. Too bad it didn't quite pan out this way. I'm delighted that YouTube user BlackFlagParty has posted the first episode online. I wish the full 13-episode series would be issued on DVD! Above is segment 1 from episode 1. The rest of the segments are after the jump.

This weekend, I'll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I'll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!

Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they're for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.

Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ

US/Canada Tour

This is a great idea -- a show about useful DIY skills, set in a zombie apocalypse context. It reminds me a bit of Max Brooks marvelously deadpan Zombie Survival Guide.

Guns 'n Gardens

Two workers at a Lexington, Kentucky public library were fired after it was discovered that they had teamed up to keep a copy of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier out of circulation.

According to the story, Sharon Cook, 57 and Barbara Boisvert, 62, basically colluded to keep the book out of circulation -- Cook, who had become disturbed by the book's imagery, checked it out for a year, meaning no one else could check it out. However, when an 11-year-old girl put it on hold, Cook was unable to continue her delaying tactic -- and Boisvert stepped in, removing the hold, and keeping the book out of circulation.

Both were fired for their actions. The Jessamine County Public Library has not commented on what they call a personnel matter.

Cook seems to have some kind of obsession with the book -- she's still carrying it around in her knapsack, the dirty parts marked with Post-Its. This, despite what she describes as her mortal danger when reading the book:


"People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head," she says.

Alan Moore, destroyer of library workers

Technorati Tags: Comics

Uitgeverij De Vliegende Hollander is the Dutch publisher for Little Brother, and they've really put a big push behind it. Unfortunately, they're also locked into distributing their catalog as DRM-crippled ebooks through an online retailer that is the only major ebook vendor in the Netherlands.

But they're good folks at my publisher, and they're not fond of DRM either. When I asked them if there was some way we could sell the ebook without DRM, they told me that it was impossible (only one major ebook vendor, remember?), but would I mind if they just gave away the ebook in DRM-free ePub form?

Would I mind? That's a dandy solution! Here's a link to the free, DRM-free Dutch ePub version of Little Brother. Tell your (Dutch) friends, and be sure to stay clear of that infected DRM copy that's being sold.

Little Brother ePub (DRM-free) (Thanks, Rienk!)

Travis Pitts's awesome Scooby Doo/Zombie mashup design is now a (limited time) Threadless tee!

We've Got Some Work To Do Now by Travis Pitts

I've just started podcasting a new story: MARTIAN CHRONICLES is a story I'm working on for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming LIFE ON MARS young adult anthology. It's a story about the colonization of Mars by free-market absolutists and the video-games they play.

They say you can't smell anything through a launch-hood, but I still smelled the pove in the next seat as the space-attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn't explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the *Eagle* and the long, long trip to Mars.

He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn't get teased at school. He was kind of pot-bellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being *born* brown.

He gave me a holy-crap-I'm-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn't bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the arm-rest so that I didn't accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we "clawed our way out of the gravity well" (this was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it).

The pove smelled like garbage. There, I said it. No nice way of saying it. Like the smell out of the trash-chute at the end of our property line. It had been my job to haul our monster-sized tie-and-toss bags to the curb every day and toss them down that chute and into the tunnel-system that took them out to the Spruce Sunset Meadows recycling center, which was actually *outside* the Spruce Sunset Meadows wall, all the way in Springville, where there was a gigantic mega-prison. The prisoners sorted all our trash for us, which was good for the environment, since they sorted it into about 400 different categories for recycling; and good for us because it meant we didn't have to do all that separating in our kitchen. On the other hand, it did mean that we had to have a double cross-cut shredder for anything like a bill or a legal document so that some crim didn't use it to steal our identities when he got out of jail. I always wondered how they handled the confetti that came out of the shredder, if they had to pick up each little dot of it with their fingernails and drop it into a big hopper labelled "paper."

Martian Chronicles, Part 01

MP3 Link

Podcast feed

Video link. From James and Peter Serafinowicz.

David Moles, a wonderful, up-and-coming sf writer, did me the honor of writing a story called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (this is, of course, the title of my first novel) -- inspired, in part, by my ongoing experiment of writing stories with the same titles as famous sf books (so far: "Anda's Game," "I, Robot," "True Names" -- and, in progress, "Martian Chronicles" -- "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is on the drawing board).

What's more, David's story is superb, a spectacular and weird and smart story about theme parks, singularity, and humanity. Originally published in Nightshade Books's Eclipse Two, it is also now available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download.

The twinks fell into Dragontown

The twinks fell into Dragontown out of the noonday sun, a constellation of spiky-black shapes each with its own trail of shadow like the tail of a cartoon meteor, darkening the tropical-blue sky, scattering frightened critters from the scaled rooftops. They were every race in the Legion: mandrill-faced bavians, jackal-headed anubit and anubim, black-beaked corven and leathery-winged gaunts, fiery clowns and scaled salamanders, goblins, mechanists, satyrs, araneae, orcas and cuttlemen. They were, every one of them, extravagantly mounted, every one level-capped, every one gaudily equipped and maximally buffed.

And not one of them belonged in Dragontown.

Dragontown was a neutral town, a sleepy town deep in the mid-levels. A stopping-point, once, for guests on their way to the Outlands or the Newlands or the Deathlands; but these days even the Newlands were old news. There were only a handful of guests in Dragontown to bear witness to the Legion's invasion, to applaud or run for cover or (like the old perroquet airmaster Valerius Redbeak, who had given up battlegrounds and quests alike in the long-ago days of the seventh expansion, and now spent his days fishing off Bonetalon Pier) simply roll their eyes, according to each guest's faction and sophistication.

Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

The forthcoming DVD release of Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 3 includes a pilot episode previously only available on the bootleg circuit. Apparently a German film collector found a print of this alternate version of the second Star Trek pilot, titled "Where No One Has Gone Before," and brought it to Paramount. Above are some clips from that alternate version of the pilot, which has never officially been released until now. From The Live Feed:

The alternate version is in three parts with 1970s-style act breaks, an entirely different version of Captain James T. Kirk's opening monologue ("But now a new task. A probe out into where no man has gone before") and music that contrasts from the famous opening theme and an extended action sequence.

From the (press) release:

This version of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was completed in 1965 and features archived footage that was not included in the pilot episode ultimately broadcasted.  Never-before-aired, this newly recovered version is believed to be what was originally screened for NBC, and the basis for their decision to broadcast STAR TREK.

Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 3, Blu-ray (Amazon, thanks Jason Weisberger!)

UPDATE: From Memory Alpha, more background on this alternative version of the pilot episode:

There is a different, pre-broadcast cut of ("Where No One Has Gone Before") in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. This unique cut includes a few brief scenes trimmed from the aired cut of the episode, different opening titles, and a unique closing theme. The alternate closing theme can be heard on the GNP Crescendo CD Star Trek: Original Series (Volume 1) "The Cage" / "Where No Man Has Gone Before". The pre-broadcast cut is commercially available only in bootleg form, although it has been screened at numerous conventions. Paul Carr was credited as "Navigator" in the end credits of the original cut. The version on the first season box set may contain the alternate ending theme, but does have the changed credits. This cut will be finally be available commercially on the Season 3 Blu-Ray set.

Welcome to the fifth serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' human cloning thriller 7th Son: Descent. A recent review in Publishers Weekly said, "(T)hriller readers seeking edge-of-your-seat action flavored with conspiracy and futuristic tech will love every page."

If this is your first exposure to our free serialization of 7th Son, you can easily catch up by reading part one, part two, part three and part four. If you're enjoying this serialized experience, support the book by purchasing a copy.

Part 5

The last of this year's excellent "SF in SF" reading series is coming up on Nov 14, at 7PM:

Jeff VanderMeer, recent Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention 2009, is touring for his final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, "Finch," published by Underland Books, and for his writers' guide "Booklife," published by Tachyon Publications. His associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity, and is a unique writing guide to sustainable careers and sustainable creativity - the first to fully integrate discussion of the role of new media into topics that have always been of interest to writers.. With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he's edited the charity anthology "Last Drink Bird Head," "New Weird," and "Steampunk." His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others.

S. G. Browne, is the author of "Breathers: A Zombie's Lament," a dark comedy about life after undeath told from the perspective of a zombie. His second novel, "Fated," is a dark, irreverent comedy about fate, destiny, and the consequences of getting involved in the lives of humans. His take on zombies, "So what happened to make them so popular today? I'll tell you what happened. Zombies were taken out of their proverbial archetypal box. No longer are they just the shambling, mindless, flesh-eating ghouls we've known and loved for most of the part four decades. They've expanded their range, become more versatile. More well-rounded. And who doesn't enjoy a well-rounded zombie?" Introduce the modern complications of a zombie trying to find himself in this mad, mad world, and how best to bring your undead girlfriend home to meet mom, and you've got yourself a story!! Check out the blog on http://www.sgbrowne.com, and ask him your own zombie apocalypse questions.

Seating is limited - first come first seated

The Variety Preview Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor - entrance is between Quiznos & Citibank 582 Market St. @ 2nd and Montgomery, San Francisco
phone, night of event - 415-225-7445

SF in SF Reading/Event (San Francisco, CA) (Thanks, Rina!)

I always celebrate when a new Terry Pratchett novel hits the stands -- doubly so now that health problems are slowing him down from his normal superhuman output to a merely impressive one. But I confess I was a little less excited to learn that the newest Pratchett Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, was about football (AKA soccer). I'm not a sports fan. I wasn't a hockey fan when I lived in Canada. I wasn't a baseball fan when I lived in the US. I'm not a footie fan now that I live in the UK. But I gave it a whirl: this is Terry Pratchett, after all. I'd read his grocery lists.

A word about Pratchett for the uninitiated. Terry Pratchett is an incredibly funny, warmly human British fantasy (mostly) novelist. He writes at an impossible rate. Most of his books are part of a sprawling, infinitely varied fantasy series called Discworld, about a flat, disc-shaped planet that is carried on the backs of four gigantic elephants who tramp in slow circles around the back of a vast, interstellar turtle called A'Tuin. On Discworld, everything happens. There are imperial battles and barbarians; witches and trolls and dwarves in the hills; animist spirits on lost continents; and there is a vast and wonderful and terrible city called Ankh-Morpork. Ankh-Morpork is presided over by a tyrant called Lord Vetinari, who is quite progressive as tyrants go. For one thing, he's let the trolls, vampires, medusae, dwarves, werewolves, zombies, and assorted other nonhumans into the city. For another, he's organized the thieves into a guild to whom one can pay an annual license and be guaranteed a life free from official thieving (freelance thieves are dealt with most firmly by the guild).

You can read the Discworld books in almost any order. Some of them run in little trilogies that follow the same characters, but even if you picked up the second or third volume of these, you'd probably get along OK -- Pratchett is quite good at getting newcomers to Discworld up to speed on its basics.

Back to Unseen Academicals. Here's the setup: the wizards of Unseen University have discovered that a key grant from a former Archchancellor requires them to keep a football team that plays regular matches. It's been decades since the last UU team was fielded, and they're in imminent danger of losing a substantial source of funding. Meanwhile, football itself -- as played on the streets of Ankh-Morpork -- is a vicious game that is more riot than sport, and the wizards of UU have no intention of getting involved in that mess.

So they cook up a plan to reform football -- and to field a team of their own, coached by Nutt, a mysterious (and erudite) goblin who has been heretofore employed as a candle-dribbler (no self-respecting wizard wants to do magic by the light of a pristine, unmarked candle) in the cellars of UU.

That's the setup. Here's the payoff: it's brilliant. The novelist's best trick is to make you care about stuff you don't care about. It's what Fever Pitch does. And it's what Unseen Academicals does, too. Pratchett shows us how sport is part of the emotional life of a city, and how its significance resonates across generations, across regional parochialism, across social strata, uniting us behind something that transcends the mere game.

What's more, Pratchett shows us how fragile a thing this is, how vulnerable it is to greed and thuggishness and venality, and how those who defend the game do so for the best reasons imaginable. As Pratchett says, "The thing about football is, it's not about football."

I wouldn't call this the best Discworld novel ever (I think my vote for that honor would go to Monstrous Regiment, which, incidentally, can be read without having read any of the other Pratchett novels). But it's in the top five.

A word of warning: it's also one of the most inside-baseball (you should forgive the expression) of the Discworld books, requiring a fair bit of familiarity with the previous books in the series to be fully appreciated. It's a real gift from Pratchett to his fans, in other words, and I, for one, am grateful for it.

Unseen Academicals (Amazon US)

Unseen Academicals (Amazon UK)

Monsters and Rockets sez, "Sesame Street is 40 years old today! In this early clip, Grover and a little boy named Jesse define marriage. It's a cute bit, but the remarkable thing is that given recent headlines this actually plays a lot like a PSA about gay marriage. At no point do Grover and Jesse say that a married couple has to be a man and a woman, and the things they say make up a marriage - kissing, hugging, being friends, helping each other - would apply to any married couple, straight or gay."

Sesame Street: Grover discusses What Is Marriage? (Thanks, Monsters and Rockets!)

Found on Sean Bonner's tumblog.

Last week, I stumbled into a jam session with Frank Fairfield and other musicians by accident, and blogged a quick iPhone video snapshot. The next day, I started googling and YouTubing and Myspacing to find out more about each of the musicians, and found this. A stunning video of Fairfield performing "Nine Pound Hammer." Give me chills. Shot and directed by Keith Musil (I'm dying to know what he shot with, doesn't it look great?).

There are a few more YT clips in this series, they're all gorgeous. I missed Fairfield's live show last night at the Redwood in LA with Blind Boy Paxton, but I hope to catch them, together or separately, soon.

Robin from the Fleet Foxes described him like this, in Rolling Stone:

"He's like 26 years old and he sounds like Mississippi John Hurt," says Robin. Fairfield plays fiddle and banjo player and strums back-porch bluegrass, complete with shaky jug-band vocals reminiscent of The Foggy Mountain Boys from way back in the '40s (think O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

"He's kinda crazy," says Robin. "He has his own radio show where he just plays these old gramophones. He just puts a mic up and plays all these field recordings from the 1900s; it's insane. He dresses like it's the early 1900s. He's born out of time, and his voice is amazing."

Buy his music: His self-titled album Frank Fairfield, and the EP I've Always Been a Rambler (Amazon MP3s).

He's playing a bunch of West Coast US tour dates from now through January: San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and other ports of call.

Videos:
• Frank Fairfield - "Nine Pound Hammer"
• Frank Fairfield - "Short Life of Trouble"
• Frank Fairfield - "Tim Brooks"

Some blog posts about Fairfield: LA Record, naturalismo, passionweiss. And here's an LA Weekly profile.

This is surely one of the most adorable animal YouTubes in the history of all internets. (via @maggiekb1 via this blog).

Dentistry in depth in Barcelona

Jeffrey sez, "Nico Roig created this fantastic visualization of a mouth at the dentist. The image of the dentist is a real photo, and the mouth is Nico's creation. If you ever wanted to see what it's like sitting on the tongue like a piece of candy... here you go."

Dentistry in depth (Thanks, Jeffrey!)