Recently on the public jakedog.org forums we have been discussing the recent arrest of Professor Gates of Harvard University. A longtime regular of the jakedog.org forums, even before it was jakedog.org, by the name of Bloom, accused me of being a racist, because I would not agree with his assertion that the arrest of Prof Gates was racially motivated. Also, more recently, I met my longtime friends Zilla and Arc at the Sierra Nevada Brewery. In fact, I just got back from this meeting. The Sierra Nevada Brewery is basically across the street from me so I walked there and when I arrived I ate nothing and just drank beer. About 6 big glasses of Kellerweis, on tap. Yum. The point of all this, I haven’t drank so much in quite some time and it all went to my head. (poor Arc lives further away and had to drive so he couldn’t indulge as Zilla and I did. Zilla rode his bike so he could also drink a bit)
All this is just to explain this post. I’m a bit drunk and I’m a bit annoyed at Bloom, so I respond here. Total revelation of facts, I did tell Bloom to fuck off before he copycatted me.
Anyways, this post is to proclaim my racist tendencies and to beg the forgiveness of all that read it. My defense is, I’m a product of my environment.
So, I was born in Germany in 1965 and pretty much lived there till I was 5 or so. For those of you not familair with West Germany in 1965, let me tell you, it was a pretty white place. Few people of color for a young lad to interact with. When my dad finished his duties in Southeast Asia, we lived in many other places, always on Army bases so there were always PoC around, but as a kid with pretty protective parents, I didn’t actually come into contact with them often. I mostly hung out with my books, my sister and my dog. Still not much contact with People of Color. In 1978 my dad retired from the U.S. Army and moved to the lily white town of Warsaw, Ind. The current population of Warsaw is 13K people. I’m assuming there were fewer in 1978 to 1983, when I moved away. African Americans currently make up .39% of the population of Warsaw. That’s probably higher than when I lived there. I remember two black dudes in my high school. Both of them were nearly my friends. I didn’t really have friends in high schools, so the fact that both black guys were on the list of guys that I sometimes hung out with should count for something, right?
And eventually I moved to Chico, a rainbow metropolis where 1.30% of the population is African American. And most of them are probably students at Chico State.
My point is, I have fairly limited experience with African Americans. And let me just say now, from this point on I am dropping that appellation and just saying Black, because that’s easier to type and what I’ve always and usually still say. If you find it offensive, sorry, just mark it down to my being a racist bastard.
Anyways, pretty much all my experiences with black people is fictional, namely interactions lived vicariously through television and movies. And if you are any sort of watcher of television and American cinema, then you know that black people are scary and usually criminals.
So, the honest truth. When I was bus driver, I often had to drive the late night shuttle. Mostly I drove around the college campus with an empty bus. One time though, a group of about 8 black dudes got on the shuttle to go down town. Them and I were the only ones on the bus. And they caused no trouble on my bus. They were just typical college guys on a weekend night. Just like every other group of white dudes I had picked up in the past. But we got downtown and they rang the bell for me to stop and there was no bus stop nearby. They asked me to stop at a corner that was not a bus stop. Had they been white frat boys I would have basically told them to fuck off, but the 8 large black guys frightened my subconscious and I pulled over and let them off.
I don’t know why I throw that out there. I guess my point is, while my logical and thoughtful portion of my brain is non-racist and all that, the subconscious part of my brain that has been trained by 43 years of popular culture to see black men as “scary” still has some control over my actions.
So, I’m blaming society for my racist tendencies. I try to be a good guy. But the lizard part of my brain has been programmed for pretty much my entire life to see black guys as the villains.
Anyways, I do try to “Do the Right Thing”. And I honestly don’t think that my subconscious racialist tendencies are coloring my opinions on this Gates things, but I might be wrong.
So, I’ll just keep puttering along, trying to be a good guy, and if that isn’t enough, well….fuck you. What do you want from me?
I’m really baffled by these ‘birthers’ that have sprung up all over the place. These are people that claim that our current President, Barack Obama, isn’t really an American. They say that all he has to do is produce his birth certificate and prove he’s an American.
But, he has produced it. Before they asked even. You can look at it here. There is even a notice in the Honolulu newspaper back in 1961 announcing his birth, in Hawaii (an American state, btw).
But these birther morons say that’s all fake. They demand he produce his birth certificate and prove he’s an American, but every bit of evidence produced is called a hoax.
What is wrong with you people? If somebody that buys into this shit, that Obama isn’t an American, actually reads this blog and feels like chiming in and explaining to me what is going on, please do so. I’ll probably mock you and call you names, but don’t let that stop you.
I’m way behind on writing about books so instead of writing individual posts I’m just gonna combine a buncha quickie ‘reviews’.
Saturn’s Children – Charles Stross A future where humans have become extinct but our sentient machines live on. An android originally designed as a companion for men is down on her luck and agrees to transport something for some shady characters. Things aren’t as they seem and it all gets complicated.
A fair amount of sex considering there aren’t any actual humans in it.
The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan – Ben Macintyre The story of Josiah Harlan, an American Quaker who went to Afghanistan, seeking his fortune, and had some pretty amazing adventures. If you like history and odd characters, check this one out.
The Blonde – Duane Swierczynski A fast paced action story about a guy who meets a woman in a bar who tells him she’s poisoned him and if he wants to live, he needs to go with her. Fun and quick read.
Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity – Neal Asher I’m surpised Neal Asher isn’t better known in America. All of his Polity Universe books that I’ve read I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. This one is set early in the timeline of his future history and concerns the first contact between the Polity and the nasty alien Prador. The Prador are classic science fiction space alien monsters. Lots of violence and action in this one. I dug it.
Hitler’s Peace – Phillip Kerr I read Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy a while back and really enjoyed it. This book didn’t hit me the same way, but it was still an enjoyable read. Basically an historical spy novel about a secret meeting during WWII between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran.
Brass Man – Neal Asher Another Polity book by Asher. A sequel of sorts to two previous Asher books, only one of which I’ve read. Features Polity super agent Ian Cormac, running around trying to save the Polity from some nastiness. Again, lots of action and violence. If you like SF, check out some of Asher’s books.
Legends -Robert Littell A mystery/spy novel about a retired CIA agent who was famous for his ability to get into cover identies (legends), to the point that he’s no longer sure which one is really him. He’s working as a private eye when the book starts and in traditional private eye fashion, a beatiful dame comes into his life and leads him into trouble when she wants him to find her sister’s missing husband. Not a bad book, but not really great either.
13 Bullets – David Wellington A U.S. Marshall killed the last vampire in America some 20 years earlier, but now they seem to be back. He gets help from a Pennsylvania State Trooper and they proceed to hunt down this new infestation of blood suckers. A decent vampire action book. Looks like he’s written a few more with the same characters that I will put on my ‘look for’ list.
Sahara – Clive Cussler Cussler is one of those guys that’s sold a gazillion books but I’ve never read anything of his. The movie based on this book was amusing so I picked the book up cheap. It’s not that good. If you like that CSI style of expository dialogue, then you might dig it. Seemed a lot different from what I remembered of the movie, too.
Drakon – S.M. Stirling One of several books in Stirling’s alternate history series based on an empire based out of South Africa that takes over the world. This book is set in a time after the Draka have superior technology than what we currently have and one of them is accidently sent through a worm hole or something into ‘earth prime’, a world based more on actual history, where the Draka never developed. The lone Draka agent proceeds to attempt to conquer the world so she can muster the resources to contact her version of reality. I don’t actually thing Stirling is that great of a writer, but he does have a knack for getting me to read a book.
Lemons Never Lie – Richard Stark Sort of a one off ‘Parker’ novel, in that it the main character is a guy that Parker works with sometimes, but Parker isn’t actually in it. It’s still a Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) novel so it’s a great read and you should check it out. I’ve heard that all the Parker novels are going to be reprinted soon, so hopefully I can read the rest of em eventually.
Dirty Money – Richard Stark I think this was the last Parker novel that Westlake wrote. Other reviews seem to indicate it’s not one of the better books in the series, but I think that’s like saying a .45 doesn’t have the stopping power of a .50 caliber Desert Eagle. They both still get the job done and this book is better than 90% of the crime/action books out there.
The Bookman’s Wake – John Dunning A mystery with an ex-cop turned book seller who gets involved with some old murders and new crimes involving an eccentric book creator/publisher. I liked it.
Valentine’s Rising – E.E. Knight The 4th book in The Vampire Earth series. Again, not great, but it’s something kinda fun to read. If you read the first in the series and liked it, you’ll probably like this one too.
The Strain – Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan The first book in a trilogy. A plane lands in New York and everybody on it is dead. Guess, what? Vampires, bitch! I liked it and look forward to the rest of the books in the trilogy.
I think that about catches me up. I might have missed a few though..
For whatever reason, I was thinking of how we embalm dead people and I decided I don’t want to be embalmed when I go. Really, just dig a shallow hole and drop me in it. A natural burial. I wanna compost. If everybody that is at my burial can unzip and pee on my body to get the compost started, that would be great. 😛
Westerns and magic. The Gunfight at the OK Corral with a fantasy twist. Wyatt Earp as a sorcerer.
This was a fun book with cool characters. I’m constantly juggling several books at once and sometimes one book captures my attention and I read it exclusively until I’m done. Territory was one of those books.
It was also a finalist for some awards in 2008, so it’s not just me that thought it was pretty good.
On May 18th and 19th the Butte County Supervisors will have a meeting. At that meeting they will vote on how much money to give to the Butte County Library.
Right now the library has already lost Sunday and evening hours, the reference desk, new book purchases and most of the children’s story times (a favorite of my niece).
In July the library could lose:
All but two 6 hour days.
All but 5 staff members
book requests
community meeting room
interlibrary loan
many online databases
A library for a city of over 100,000 people that is only open twice a week for 6 hours each day? That is unbelievable.
Contact info for the Butte County Supervisors is here.
If you’re a local and give a crap about libraries, let em know.
This book got a lot of hype. General hype from everywhere and more personal hype on my message boards where Bloom gushed about it quite a bit.
I was a little late coming to read it and I think it suffered a bit from being overhyped to me. I was expecting something grander than this.
Not that it’s a bad book. I liked it plenty. It’s a fun read and I burned through it pretty fast.
One thing that sort of threw me off my feed while reading it was that the author seemed to go a little over board in name dropping odd things that the character was into in order to make him seem hip. At least that’s the way it seemed to me.
If I knew an intelligent teenager that liked to read I’d get em a copy of this book. It’s pretty good for adults too.
Anthologies like this are about the only place to find horror short stories these days, which is unfortunate because I think scary short stories are pretty awesome. The perfect length to read before turning off the light at night. And reading one right before bed is like dropping a little bit of mental lsd into your dreams.
Ellen Datlow has been doing the horror thing for a couple of decades now. She’s edited over 50 anthologies and won a ton of awards for doing so. The point is, if you are gonna pick somebody to take you by the hand and show you what’s good in horror short fiction these days, she’s the one you wanna pick.
This anthology doesn’t have a theme. It’s 20 stories that Datlow chose “to showcase the range of subjects imagined by a number of my favorite writers inside and outside the horror field”. When I looked through the contents I saw only half a dozen or so authors whose names were familiar to me.
The stories range all over the place. Laird Barron’s The Forest had a Lovecraftian vibe to it that was cool. Christopher Fowler’s The Uninvited is a freaky little story set in Hollywood that slowly sets it’s hook and on the last page jerks the line and had me doing a mental WTF! and rereading the story 🙂 But that’s a good thing. John Grant’s Lives could totally be an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Mark Samuels’ Ghorla is some wierd ass shit and ends with an image you might not actually want in your head right before turning off the light for the night. But I liked it 🙂 Joyce Carol Oates’ Face is the shortest story in the anthology I think and is pretty straightforward. P.D. Cacek’s The Keeper is a post WWII slice of life that is rather sad.
Paul Finch’s Bethany’s Wood planted some creepy images in my head, I could totally see some of these scenes in my head, like a movie. Lucius Shepard’s The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast had my favorite title. The story itself was good enough that I’m going to have to read it again a time or two, I think.
Simon Bestwick’s Hushabye is another straightforward horror story about a monster and a man trying to destroy it. Glen Hirshberg’s The Janus Tree is one of the longer stories in this book but it hooked me early and kept up a steady pressure throughout. An odd story with odd characters in a strange little town in Montana.
I don’t usually remember my dreams but sometimes I’ll be woken up by something while very deeply asleep and for a few minutes I’ll be totally disoriented as reality and my dream slowly seperate and my waking mind gathers up all the dream elements and puts them away. Jefferey Ford’s The Bedroom Light is like one of those dreams. While I’m reading it seems fairly normal but there is a part of my brain saying “Wait, wait, wait, this shit ain’t right man. This was all supposed to be put back in the dream closet when you woke up!” There isn’t really a lot to the story, it’s mostly a couple talking to each other about their lives, but their lives are tweaked in a fashion that I seem to recall from my own vague rememberances of my dreams.
I didn’t cover all the stories in the book above. Not all of them really appealed to me and some I didn’t know what to say that might not ruin the story if you decide to read them. But that is a good thing about a short story, you don’t have a huge investment in it. If you finish reading it and it didn’t really hit you, you’re not really out all that much time.
Another YA book. I must be regressing or something. Back in the 90’s Kathe Koja wrote several ‘horror’ novels that were pretty dark and disturbing (to me, anyways) and when I read that she was writing Young Adult novels I pretty much said “what the fuck?” and I wanted to try one of them. And when I saw the cover for this one I wanted to check it out even more.
I liked it. It’s not what I expected. For some reason I was thinking a YA novel would have more of a bunnies and butterflies vibe or something but this book is a bit more than that.
It’s a very short book. Basically about a young girl who feels misunderstood by everybody and volunteers at the local animal shelter where she bonds with a stray dog that is very feral and pretty much beyond hope and her attempts to save the dog from it’s fate.
I think this book is considered a YA book but I liked it. Basically this kid that just graduated from High School inherits his uncle’s farm and in the barn he finds a gate to another world. A world just like ours but without people (apparently) He gets a few of his buddies from school and they attempt to make a little money by going through the gate and doing some gold mining.
Not everything goes as smoothly as they would like though and adventures are had.
Recently on the public jakedog.org forums we have been discussing the recent arrest of Professor Gates of Harvard University. A longtime regular of the jakedog.org forums, even before it was jakedog.org, by the name of Bloom, accused me of being a racist, because I would not agree with his assertion that the arrest of Prof Gates was racially motivated. Also, more recently, I met my longtime friends Zilla and Arc at the Sierra Nevada Brewery. In fact, I just got back from this meeting. The Sierra Nevada Brewery is basically across the street from me so I walked there and when I arrived I ate nothing and just drank beer. About 6 big glasses of Kellerweis, on tap. Yum. The point of all this, I haven’t drank so much in quite some time and it all went to my head. (poor Arc lives further away and had to drive so he couldn’t indulge as Zilla and I did. Zilla rode his bike so he could also drink a bit)
Westerns and magic. The Gunfight at the OK Corral with a fantasy twist. Wyatt Earp as a sorcerer.
This book got a lot of hype. General hype from everywhere and more personal hype on my message boards where Bloom gushed about it quite a bit.
Anthologies like this are about the only place to find horror short stories these days, which is unfortunate because I think scary short stories are pretty awesome. The perfect length to read before turning off the light at night. And reading one right before bed is like dropping a little bit of mental lsd into your dreams.
Another YA book. I must be regressing or something. Back in the 90’s Kathe Koja wrote several ‘horror’ novels that were pretty dark and disturbing (to me, anyways) and when I read that she was writing Young Adult novels I pretty much said “what the fuck?” and I wanted to try one of them. And when I saw the cover for this one I wanted to check it out even more.
I think this book is considered a YA book but I liked it. Basically this kid that just graduated from High School inherits his uncle’s farm and in the barn he finds a gate to another world. A world just like ours but without people (apparently) He gets a few of his buddies from school and they attempt to make a little money by going through the gate and doing some gold mining.