My Thoughts Exactly

Trying out the “Good Reads” site. Here's a review I wrote t'other day.

, , , ,

Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) Gerald’s Party by Robert Coover

My review


rating: 2 of 5 stars
Coover takes a minimally interesting premise–a cocktail party right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting as the setting for a send up of the classic Agatha Christie “closed room” mystery–and beats it to death. I guess the meta-joke is that just as the hellish party is inescapable and goes on forever, the book is inescapable and goes on forever. Fortunately, however, the book is escapable– you have only to stop reading.

Certainly Coover deserves some style points for verbal skill and unrestrained imagination. The book is finely crafted, in the sense of the interlocking stories & themes, the literary allusions & wordplay, etc, etc.

But it’s pointless and ugly. Why would I want to read a thirty page “joke” about a stopped toilet and skating over a vomit-covered floor? How much necrophilia is “enough” for one avante-guard novel?
It might have been an interesting and perhaps disturbing story at 50 pages. But at more than 300 pages, it’s just a bore.
View all my reviews.

Firefighter Porn

,

The work of the fire teams on the scene is very damn impressive. Especially gratifying to see how fast Tower 1 gets deployed (my truck is also called Tower 1). But it’s the work of the dispatchers that makes this video so extraordinary. Holy cow, that is some phenomenal work under pressure. Scary video, happy ending. About 7 minutes long.

When I talk about the WASP threat, I'm not talking about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I'm talking about wasps!

, , , , ,

First we find out the government is training wasps for ‘the war on terror’. Now we find out about radioactive wasps at “defunct” plutonium-enrichment facilities. (‘Defunct’. As if.)

How long before TERRORISTS hijack and marry these two technologies and we find ourselves ATTACKED by swarms of GIANT RADIOACTIVE WASPS possibly with toxin that predisposes us to CONVERT TO ISLAM???

I can see only one solution: put all wasps under administrative control of the Department of Homeland Security, and instruct the NSA to monitor all of their communications.

(P.S. Attentive long-time readers of Wetmachine may wonder why I, and not Gary Gray, posted this story. I can only respond that I don’t know. However, I did suggest it to him, and he did not pick it up. Does that strike anybody else as suspicious?)

A glimpse of The Eagle in flight

,

In my little illustrated novella The Pains, there’s an enigmatic character named Horatio Norton, better known by his nickname The Eagle. This character is partially based on the late Chris McKinstry, creator of the Mindpixel project. I never met McKinstry in meatspace, but had interacted with him a little on Kuro5hin, where we both used to hang out. He was just another bozo on the bus then, albeit one with a bit of a notorious history stemming from things he had done when delusional or upset–he had a history of mental illness.

In the time since he took his own life several years ago, his legend has grown somewhat. He’s been the subject of a story on PBS, there was a big article about him in Wired, and now some students at the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida are making a documentary film about him. It’s called The Man Behind the Curtain. The trailer is below.

My character The Eagle is not a pure cipher for McKinstry. The Eagle was also partially inspired by Christopher John Boyce (aka “The Falcon”), and of course I hope that I added some unique personality of his own. He isn’t a mere pastiche of these two fascinating, complicated men.

However, when I saw clips of the actual McKinstry talking, when I saw his actual notebooks, I was astounded to see how much the real McKinstry resembled the fictional character he had inspired. Have a look:

The Man Behind the Curtain – Preview from michael nichols on Vimeo.

Do it yourself publlishing — R.W. Ridley style

, , , , ,

Last week this fellow R.W. Ridley started following me on twitter after I tweeted about kindlizing The Pains. He’s a writer with a horror series called The Takers aimed at young adults. Turns out that like me, he’s a self-publisher. Like me, he’s won the Self-Published Book Award from Writer’s Digest magazine. Like me, he’s got a blog & is experimenting with kindle and various other ways of getting the word out. Unlike me, he seems to have good portions of his act together. For example his blog is streamed to his author page on Amazon. (How do he do that?) And he has a couple of other neat things, like a youtube video for his books. I have never met the fellow and haven’t read his books & so have no idea of how well he’s doing sales-wise and whether the books are any good. But I was impressed by this little audio book sample. It’s well read and well written and creepy, with nice sound effects. Check it out. And check out his website, there’s some other cool stuff there.

I also note with interest his blog posting about how this year print-on-demand titles outnumbered traditionally published titles. Wow. And then consider, there are lots of self-published books, like mine, that are not POD. (Mine are traditional offset books.) Things sure are changing in the publishing world. And so it goes and so it goes and so it goes, as the man said, but where it’s going, no one knows. . .

Painful Kindlization

, ,

Well, with the help of my esteemed collaborator and amanuensis the bon vivant man-about-town Gary Gray, I’ve put up a kindle book version of The Pains over on the website of the borg Amazon.com. IMHO the kindle version is not as cool as the paper version–among other lossage, the illustrations are all gray scale, not luminous color (or colour, as Sir Cheeseburge Brown, the illustrator, would have it) but on the other hand, at $4 a pop it’s not a bad deal.

If you have a kindle and are feeling flush, why not buy a copy? You’ll help a struggling (and I do mean struggling) genius, and also get a fun book, for less than the price of whatever you can get for $4.01.

Check it out here.

Leg Locked

,

At the age of 55 I decided to become a volunteer firefighter. I’m 56 now. So I’m taking training along with guys from all over the island who are young enough to be my sons–or grandsons, I suppose. A few weeks ago on a crisp Sunday morning I had to pass my practicum in ladders. How to: carry, set up and take down ladders of various sizes in one man, two man, three man teams; place & climb a roof ladder; carry a 105 lb. dummy down a ladder. And, demonstrate a leg lock:

Per the internets, the Vancouver fire department defines a leg lock thusly:

A leg lock is a way of hooking a leg onto the ladder so that a firefighter can work safely from the ladder with his/her hands free while eliminating the danger of falling.
If a leg lock is not used, a firefighter must have at least one hand free to hold on to the ladder beam. No exceptions.

To perform, say, a right leg lock, you:

  1. step your left leg up one rung higher than you want to be
  2. put your right foot through the opening
  3. bend your right leg back and through the opening below and
  4. hook your right foot around the right rail
  5. step down one rung with your left leg

and Bob’s your uncle.

From another fire department on the internets, we get this explanation of the ladder climb evaluation:

Ladder Climb
Purpose: to assess the applicant for fear of heights.
A 40 firefighting PFRS ladder will be erected in a safe and secure location. A department member will demonstrate a climb to a point half way up the ladder, do a leg lock and return to ground level.
Each applicant will be warned to stop if they experience difficulty when doing the exercise. Each applicant will then don a department turnout coat and SCBA (no face piece), climb the ladder to the same point as in the demonstration, do a leg lock and return to ground level.
The applicant will be rated “pass/fail”. PFRS evaluators will note any hesitation or difficulty of the applicant in performing the task.

Our test was a little different. We had to climb with an axe, do a leg lock, and pantomime using the axe to smash a window.

During my evaluation, I got into a scary situation.

Continue reading

What they're reading in the Snowboarding Hall of Fame

,

(Second in a series.)

Jake Burton Carpenter, also known as Jake Burton, is the founder of Burton Snowboards and, by all accounts, one of the two or three most significant people in the history of the sport of snowboarding. I know the guy. (How I know him is a story for another time.) The last time I saw Jake, I told him about my plan to ride my bicycle all over New England & interview famous people, and/or interesting people, about a topic of great import to everybody on the planet. (That bike trip, which I *will* do, is another story for another time). Anyway, I asked Jake if I could interview him for my bike/video project. “I don’t want to interview you because I care what you have to say,” I told him. “I want to interview you because you’re famous.” “Not all that famous,” Jake replied. “Oh yeah?” I said. “So, how much did Hewlett Packard pay you to be in that commercial you did for them? How much did American Express pay you?”

If I remember right, it was Peter Krygowski who added, “Jake, for Christ’s sake. Your face is plastered on the side of every public bus in Chicago.” Jake said, “It is? I wonder if I’m getting paid for that.”

(Although the only IMDB link I could find for Peter was related to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Peter was also, before getting fired, the Art Director on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2. Or one of those early seasons. So when you meet him, prostrate yourself.) (Forgive me if I don’t recall the conversations precisely; the three of us were pretty drunk by the time this exchange happened, and for good reason.) (I believe Peter K. currently has something to do with “Guitar Hero”, although Google was pretty unhelpful on this topic.)

Anyway, whatever Hewlett Packard and American Express paid Burton to be in their ads is guaranteed to be a fucktonne more than I paid him to be in the advert below, since I didn’t pay him a thing. The production values of this vid are not exactly up to HP/AMEX standards, but what the hey. I certainly got my money’s worth. My only problem with the bit is that I expressly asked Jake to push the “buy the books” meme over the “download the free books” meme. Oh well. So thanks, Jake, and I look forward to interviewing you for real sometime this summer.

The rest of you, please imagine Jake saying “buy John’s books”, and act accordingly.