13 things that are gettin' old
Bald heads with full beards
Rain in the summer of aught-nine
Dodge Calibers
Not winning the lottery
Binary logic outside of computers
Text-messaging shorthand English anywhere but in a text message
Curmudgeonly lists
3000 extra people in my way
Quentin Tarantino's insistence on not editing
Firefox updates
Internet message boards
Ironic quotemarks
Microsoft FrontPage
But which books? See if you can guess… (Hint: They're mostly SF.)
The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen, and no one knows why.
Forcing grunts to swear at their superior officers is a stupid way to build morale.
If everything is infinitely improbable, then everything is equally probable.
If the Fast Burn is [...]
Ok, so here's the second half of the William Gibson Weekend story. Told as a Thursday Thirteen, because that way I can kill two birds with one stone.
That same night, there was a multi-author reading, titled "Encounters", on the Mainstage. Six authors were on the docket, though one couldn't make it.
Quoting from the [...]
I love to read. But sometimes, I start a book, and it simply does not captivate me. If it's still a slog by page 100 or so, I'm done with it.
The Lord of the Rings—I know it's the definitive heroic fantasy trilogy, the one that everyone in the Universe cribs from, but somewhere [...]
It was a Dodge Caliber, and it looked pretty much exactly like this:
It was orange.
Its speakers were woefully inadequate. I like my music on the loud side, and I enjoy the bass. This would let me do neither, tragically, without sounding like all four speakers in the car were blown. Everything from [...]
To quote Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame): "Verbing weirds language".
Impact is not a verb, no matter how often people say "the plane impacted into the mountainside".
Irregardless is not a word. Regardless of what you I might think. (However, I still think it's a pointless word meaningless verbal bastard. (Thanks, Doug!))
Unthawed means [...]
Since I should be writing tonight (I got 6,000 words while we were in Edmonton, and not a letter since), I'm going to dip into my works-in-progress file for tonight's 13, and present:
13 snippets from works in progress
Hopefully each and every one of these bite-sized morsels from short fiction or novels-in-gestation will make you slaver [...]
EDMONTON—Everytime I say "I've never seen Big Trouble in Little China" I get an astonished gasp from my brother-in-law or from my friend the Space Cowboy. I tell people I've never read Lord of the Rings* or The Hobbit and they give me that sideways look like a quizzical dog, as if to say [...]
Man, it's been awhile.
I present: 13 basslines that strike me as wicked cool. Enjoy!
First off, here's the aptly-named Canadian bank 13 Engines with the intro to their tune "Bred in the Bone". There was a video for this one, which I happened to see a time or two on MuchMusic, and I [...]
Eat 'em with a little salt and pepper.
Make a sandwich.
Make salsa.
Make soup.
Make salad.
Make pasta sauce.
Take photos of 'em.
Fail to come up with something clever for #8.
Throw 'em at people you don't like.
Perform divination based on the patterns of their seeds.
Dye cotton.
Make ketchup.
Repeat list, because you planted a dozen plants and they're all doing incredibly, stupidly [...]