YouTube: A lazy blogger's best friend.
Give this Star Wars/Lord of the Rings hybrid a chance... from 2:10 to the end it is a simply brilliant mashup:
I was first introduced to acid jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood about 4 years ago when a bass player in my old group who knew that I liked Emerson Lake & Palmer loaned me his Uninvisible CD. John Medeski, the organist, is one of the best (if not *the* best) Hammond organ players working these days. Check out this super trippy video of the song Uninvisible:
RP came up with a great nom de blog today that could equally apply to me: Sporadicus.
It's not that I don't have anything to write about. I'm just having trouble doing the actual writing. I think my blogging has hit some sort of existentialist crisis: is this all there is?
Aside from that, the wonderful wife and kids got me the complete First Season of 24 for Fathers' Day and I have already devoured the first four episodes (I've never watched the show before). For the next several days I will be spending prime blogging time in front of the TV instead.
So endeth another lame "why I'm not blogging" post. More later.
Check out this great Brit-pop video (first found via Beautiful Atrocities):
Instead of a Sci Fi babes poll, let's have us a "Girls Aloud" poll. Watch the video and vote Green (my favorite), Blue, Pink, Yellow, or White.
I first discovered Robert Sawyer in the pages of Analog magazine 12 years ago. Regular readers may recall that I wrote about his novel Calculating God a little over a year ago. Now, thanks to SFSignal, I was able to find this recent interview with him. I found this exchange quite challenging:
MemeTherapy: It was once said that Science Fiction is the only pill for Future Shock. Do you think the predictions of Future Shock that were made back in the 70s have now or ever will materialize?
Sawyer: ... We talk about starships, but no human has left Earth orbit for thirty-four years now; we talk about AI, but Deep Blue is not one whit more self aware or intelligent in the sense that you and I mean "intelligent" when we use that word in daily conversation, than Eniac, the very first digital computer. Does reading science fiction inoculate us against future shock, or does it distract us with what are essentially fantasy visions? It's a good question; I don't have a solid answer, but I tend to think the value of SF is much more in its sociological thought experiments than it is as any sort of predictive science.
I'm not sure if I totally agree with his point about SF not inoculating us against future shock. But I'm not ready to argue the point, either, yet. Maybe later.
Go read the whole thing. Sawyer is one of the better recent SF authors out there.
One of the benefits of moving from time to time is the opportunity to go through old boxes of stuff. Last year's move unearthed an old box of pictures that I took with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 44. I had great fun going through the old pictures with my kids, including showing them some pictures of places that still exist (the Dinosaur statues in Glen Rose, for example, which they have seen in person several times).
Tonight I scanned the first few of what I expect to be many. I'll do a bigger post on the camera itself someday (I also have pictures taken with a Kodak Disc camera -- a film disc, not a digital disc and my mom's old Kodak Retina).
Your humble author, making himself the center of attention even then:
A successful fishing trip at Lake Lavon:
Colorful Colorado:
The local paper's Travel section had a couple of nice bits of Texana this past Sunday.
First, a selection of great burger joints easily accessible from the I-35 corridor, recorded here so that I can easily find their addresses in the future (I haven't tried any of these, but invite comments from my readers who have):
(For an alternative take with much more detail on some different burger joints, check out the TexasBurgerGuy).
Second, a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin. I haven't had a chance to visit, but my wife did last year and raved about it. One of the museum's original exhibits was It Ain't Braggin' if It's True, which highlighted six prime Texas traits:
What do you think? Would you add or subtract any?
In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape is never to let them find out.
- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.