I’ve read everything Cordwainer Smith ever published now. That is somewhat disappointing because I like him and his tenacious stories quite a bit. Norstrilia is one of the classic science fiction books I bought for 10 cents apiece while antique shopping last week.
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I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick and while this novel is supposedly his breakthrough work, The Man in the High Castle is my least favorite of his works. The basic premise is that the United States of America and Britain lost World War II and now the USA is split between Imperial Japan and the Third Reich.
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I honestly don’t know why this book was in the Top 50 Science Fiction books list. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison is a collection of short stories that wrestle with gods and worshippers, both new and old, and from different angles.
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I went home Friday and had a busy weekend stomping around the old stomping grounds, going to Mass for 2.5 hours, snagging a Pizza King pizza, watching a rugby game and antiquing. Not in that order
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This sort of feels like a Livejournal viral quiz thing, but I don’t have much else to blog about, so this will do. Ten Things That I Have Done That Most Other People Have Not Done.
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Flint on steel today from a random babble on making a eunuch out of Vin Diesel. A fellow friend fellow teaches an English course to college frosh, they’re doing poetry and now think everything is a symbol. I’ve been there.
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The last few months I’ve had a growing sense of horror stemming from the crumtasticness of current events. It isn’t fist-in-the-mouth screaming horror, but more like being slowly covered in slimy ice water. It isn’t fear, this horror is something different. I guess fear is when you give something power over you and horror is when you know you have power over nothing.
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Wilmar Shiras’s Children of the Atom is a hard book to come by. It had been out of print for quite some time until relatively recently. I now only have four books left to read on this list. Thankfully, I can find them all in the Cleveland library system.
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I went to the Cleveland Film Festival on Friday for a showing of six short films. Short reviews of each, and spoilers of course, past the jump.
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The combined blogger/podcasting meetup last night was the best yet. There were so many people there that we broke up into three small groups: one for podcasters, one for bloggers and one for people to discuss with Denise Polverine [who paid for the beer!] how cleveland.com can incorporate more blog content into their site. I didn’t get a chance to browse the Cleveland.com or the podcasting groups because the blogger discussion was so lively. Hopefully others from the other groups will blog about their stuff. I know I’d like to know.

Updates:

Collision Bend and Sardonic Views on the cleveland.com group.
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These are a few of the fine folks that were at the rather huge blogger/podcasting meetup. The list is incomplete, as some people might’ve signed up after I left. If I misspelled your name I apologize.

Mike Baker @ Cleveland Yucks
Tim Bakke @ Geek Zen
Will Kessel @ Collision Bend
Bruce Kratofil @ Bugblog
Chas Rich @ Sardonic Views
Tim Russo @ Democracy Guy
Lori Kozey @ Virtual Lori
Jim Fisher @ Wazopia
Rob Walch @ Podcast 411
Kurtiss Hare @ Kurtiss.org
Martha Lattie @ Your Daily Art
Jerry Ritcey @ Red Wheelbarrow
Bill Callahan @ Cleveland Diary
John Ettorre @ Working with Words
George Nemeth @ Brewed Fresh Daily
Adam Harvey @ Organic Mechanic
Daniella @ American Pink Collar
Nate Paige @ Pop Life
Steve Fitzgerald @ Lakewood Life & Lakewood Buzz
Bob Rhubart @ Bob Rhubart’s Weblog

If you were there and I missed you, let me know and I’ll add you to the list. I’ll post a recap of our small group discussion tomorrow.

I hesitated in regard to writing about this, for fear of shame or embarassment, but since I was about ten or twelve and I had a long conversation with my parents about “naming my feelings” I’ve had this voice telling me to do so whenever there is something that I am afraid of in myself. So why not talk about sexual urges? I’ll put it past the jump so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to. I’m sure there is going to be TMI for some of you.

And no, I’m not gay.
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In high school, senior English introduced me to the codified world of fallacious reasoning. Throughout college I learned a bit more about it, but it seems the only people who really understand logical fallacies thoroughly are philosophes and rhetoricists. They’ve always been considered bad things, and in strict terms of argument-in-order-to-win, I suppose they are. But I think they can do some good too.
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Robots is an entertaining movie, quite worth taking the kids to see. It is a bit light on plot, but that’s okay. The humor was right up my alley, visual and verbal puns were the main course, cracked me up. For instance, at one point all the Robots do The Robot; expected but hilarious nonetheless. The cast and soundtrack were a bit predictably all-star, I could’ve done with less Robin Williams [I think he's jumped the shark] and more Tom Waits.
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I’ve got contacts again after a three year hiatus. So now I’m even more stunningly handsome than I was while wearing spectacles. The contacts are pretty expensive—about $200 for a six month supply.
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One of the characters in Stand on Zanzibar is a synthesist. Everyone else refers to him as a dilletante, and even the government agency he works for is colloquially called the Dilletante Dept. Don Hogan’s job is to browse through this giant encyclopedic computer archive [sort of prefiguring the internet] and learn about whatever he wants, and report on the interdisciplinary associations he makes. In a sense he is a spy.
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My first dog was a beagle that I named Rosie. She was the best dog ever; even if she wasn’t trained all that well. She used to roam around downtown Connersville when we lived in town, and she got knocked up by some deadbeat dad of a terrier. So she was a rough kind of girl, but always loyal to me.
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I just got back from the March Professor/Thurman/Valley View block club meeting. Councilman Cimperman was present to listen to our concerns and to tell us a bit about what is going on with Steelyard Commons and other items of Tremont interest.
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The Cleveland Art Museum is slated for a $258M expansion in the coming year. I’m glad that they’ll have a chance to get more of their large collection on display, but I can’t help but think that $258M dollars [and the $8M chipped in by the state] could do a lot more good elsewhere. Yes, private donors can donate wherever the hell they want to, but what’ll it take to make ‘em donate to the economic development of the region? Hopefully the $80M/yr estimate will hold true by attracting more visitors to the area, and I’m glad to see that they say admission will still be free, but we’ll see what six years of construction does to that tune. I wish they’d gotten a Cleveland architect for the design instead of Rafael Viñoly. A friend of mine also took exception to this:

Apparently norteamericanos don’t get really excited about stuff? Welcome to Cleveland, bub.

Hey, I’m grouchy today; I’m complaining about good things. I’m also ignorant and not rich so I’m sure by tomorrow I’ll have changed my mind somewhat. I’m still glad it is happening. Shaddup Adam.

I’m currently reading John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. I managed to get my hands on a first edition in fair condition. Paper wasn’t acid-free in those days, so the paper is getting a little soft, but it is still very readable. First off it reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.
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A few weeks ago I finished reading The Rediscovery of Man, a collection of short stories by Cordwainer Smith. His real name is Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger and he was the godson of Sun Yat Sen, a professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins, spoke several languages, wrote the seminal work Psychological Warfare and was a spy [more here].
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I linked to a long list of sites to ping when you update your blog a few days ago. Well, now that I’ve finally used it I found that a bunch are borked. The functioning list is past the jump.
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Press Release: West Lafayette, Indiana. David Ledman, recently of the Prozak Kittens, releases Burn Through Me [2.7Mb mp3], and the world was never the same.

I went to the optometrist yesterday and am trying out contacts. It has been about three years since I last wore contacts. I stopped because of weighting problems. They’d always spin around and not fit correctly. So far these new guys are working well. We’ll see how they stand up to a day in front of the computer though. The doc also put dialator in my eyes, making me look like some sort of whacked out David Bowie or marmoset. That stuff makes your eyes really really tired.
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I finally watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. I’ve been wanting to see it pretty much since it came out, but it was one of those things that I never really got around to doing. In any case, while I want to watch it at least one more time before I codify my thoughts on the thing. The best time to spit it out should be now, while it is fresh in my mind. If you’ve not seen the movie, please don’t go past the jump.
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So I’m in this room-slash-hall with some friends and a few satellite personages who are really nothing more than technically proficient warm bodies. They are technically proficient at whatever I need them to be techinically proficient at. My friends are around because what we are doing in this room-slash-hall is going through it to reach the other end. We are doing this because it will either save our souls, raise us to a new plane of human consciousness or just because we have to.
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If you’ve noticed the appearance of a couple of mp3 links up top, it is because my new host provides me with 3Gb of transfers per month. I don’t come anywhere near to using this much, so I figured I might as well share some of my bandwidth.

“Guzzle Greed” is a live track recorded at the Barking Spider and is an original work by Clevelander Maura Rogers, a rising star in the local open mic scene.

“Our Love is Weak” comes to you from the very heart of Manhattan by the ever versatile Bård Edlund.

I’ve heard other offerings by these two, and they do good stuff. So DL ‘em and give ‘em a listen. I’ve room for one more. Phil.

Today is the first day that people in the Midwest [including Ohio!] can take advantage of The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003. You can now get a free credit report on yourself once a year. Just make sure you print it out right away, at least from Equifax. They only give you once chance to do it and the site doesn’t have the best usability.

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It seems my friends and I, though we don’t ever admit it, have contests to see who can be the lamest. We never say who wins because we don’t admit the contest exists. We all have different tactics.
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