WHAT IS THIS THING?

okay so i'm out for my walk today, and there's this old house i pass by on one of my routes. it looks abandoned, but very suspicious. i never paid attention before until today.

out front it had several newspapers stacked up and i noticed one that looked almost in perfect condition like it's been delivered recently. only problem is that it was the San Antonio Light. The Light hasn't been in existance since 1993. so i was curious about the house at that point.

so on my back i started paying more attention to the house. the windows are all covered with hanging sheets, and the one facing the street where i took these photos from has a reflective tint on it, so dark it's silver. the only window that is uncovered is blocked by what looks like thin strips of cardboard that folded over and tossed into a large pile.

what really caught my eye is that strange looking antenna in the photos. it looks like a boom mic or something similar. i've never seen one before and was wondering if anyone out there has, and knows what it is.

friends have said it's a radio scanner, a primitive television camera, and a ham radio antenna, anyone out there have ideas?

the Hollywoodization of Richard Stark's Parker

So Parker kinda sucked. Maybe I'm being biased, because i expected Donald Westlake. Instead I got Hollywood. Parker could have been any other action hero. What really sucked is they dedicated the film to Donald Westlake. I can't imagine him watching this and thinking this is representative of his work.
The best incarnations of Parker were Lee Marvin and Robert Duvall). Jason Statham has nothing on them. Oddly enough this is the first time the name Parker has been used for the character. Two of the others who played the role were Jim Brown and Mel Gibson

And that's just it, Parker is not a Parker film. that is to say, Jason Statham does not play the role of Parker, he's just another hollywood amalgam of a tough guy criminal. Even the character of Claire is all wrong. In the movie she begins as some weak, doe-eyed youngster but somehow toughens up near the end. Claire is a tough, willing, participant in Parker's life, and i can't imagine Parker hooking up with anyone as inconsistent as movie Claire.

I guess it's not a bad movie overall. But if you're a Parker fan, you'll be sorely disappointed, and maybe even heartbroken.

movie poster

Scatalogical dreaming

I don't often remember my dreams, but when I do they are doozies.  Yesterday I took a nap after the games, and had an exceptional one.

It took place right after some nameless job. I was in the basement of the place with several other coworkers. It was a coed dressing room, small with a bunch of lockers. The place was dingy and dark, and led to a single bathroom shared by both sexes. The door to the bathroom was missing. The bathroom itself was larger than the dressing room, but it only had one stall (also doorless) and a single handwashing sink. A large portion of the bathroom appeared to have been a communal shower at some point, with a huge drainage hole in the middle of that area. It had no grate.

The reason I saw all this is that I had to take a dump, so I got in line. While in line I started talking to the pretty girl behind me. My turn came and I took a particularly long dump. Actually I don't remember how long, I just remember thinking I needed to hurry because the pretty girl was waiting in line. Only when I tried to flush the damn thing wouldn't go down. Finally on the third flush I held down the lever so water kept spilling into the bowl.

Just when I thought I had it down, the turd came back up. It flew straight out of the toilet. I swerved left, and the turd jumped over my shoulder, the thing must have been about six feet long. It landed in the shower and slid down the open drain.

People laughed and I walked out not looking at anyone, deciding that was my last day of that crummy job.

Dream over, right? Not quite.

Next thing I know, I was being interrogated by the police. They told me my DNA was all over the victim, and that if I confessed they wouldn't give me the death penalty. Problem was I had a solid alibi, so they released me (if only life were like dreams).

When I left I found myself on the hood of a car being beaten by a cop while others watched. I explained that I had a solid alibi, I had beaten the rap. They tell me there's been a second murder, and again my DNA was all over the victim.

I'm guessing I had an alibi for that one too, because next I was at the store and bought the newspapers. The headlines called the killer “The Potty Mouth Murderer” and “#2 Executioner.” I don't remember reading the articles but apparently they were killed by suffocation; the victims throats stuffed with feces until they died.

So I decided I had to hunt down the giant turd I birthed a few days before.

I went back to the job site and the dingy bathroom. Straight for the toilet I went and wondered how I could get the turd back up. So I started flushing the bowl repeatedly and then noticed the water turning brown. Next thing I feel myself being crushed. The damn turd was wrapping itself around me, and it had grown!

It quickly wrapped around me and once immobilized, the end went straight into my mouth. I assumed this is how it killed its victims. Only it stopped and pulled back out of my mouth and stared at me (it didn't have eyes, but this was my impression. It let me go and slithered back down the drain. I pulled crap out of my mouth, and woke up from the disgust.

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I've already had one interesting interpretation of this dream.  if anyone has some ideas, i'd love to hear them.

Suggested readings from 2012

It's been an interesting year for the novel. I haven't read as much this year as I normally do, as I've been spending more time reading unpublished manuscripts, but what I have read has been astounding.

Despite the fears that Amazon will somehow wrestle control of the fiction market, the best is still coming out from the big six (well, five, another interesting thing that happened). If Amazon wants to continue competing for the mediocre market, so be it. They have plenty of competition. I won't mention names, because I have several friends who do business with these companies.

And so here's a short list of my favorite novels for the year. Though most were released this year, some may have been released later in the previous year. It's an unapologetic list. I don't pretend to read everything out there..

EDGE OF DARK WATER by Joe Lansdale

HOPE: A TRAGEDY by Shalom Auslander

OSAMA by Lavie Tidhar

SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE by Graham Joyce

THE UNINVITED GUESTS by Sadie Jones

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Joe Lansdale came across as a Texas-fried Robert Bloch. I didn't mind, I enjoy Bloch, and it was nice to see someone from Texas getting some props. Had I been making a list of my years favorites, Joe's novels might have made it only once or twice before. But know this he's always a contender. He can write, and EDGE is one of his best pieces up there with THE BARRENS, FREEZER BURN, and SUNSET AND SAWDUST.

I'd never read Auslander before, HOPE came as a recommendation. Someone said I'd enjoy it, so I took to reading it. I don't know how to describe HOPE, other than it reminds me of a modern, humorous version of Franz Kafka. It's a dark, foreboding world, how we choose to live in it is our choice.

OSAMA is easily my favorite read of this year. I was stunned by the descriptions and the visuals. The novel does require the reader to invest some intellect, so if you're not prepared for that put it away for another day. I wanted to call this an alternate history, but that wouldn't be quite right. Osama bin Laden: Vigilante is a series of pulp novels (think Mack Bolan) written my Mike Longshott in which Osama carries out attacks in various parts of the world. It's a mindbender. Read it.

Graham Joyce has been writing some of my favorite novels since I can remember. The thing is, he does what I don't expect him to do: he keeps getting better. I would go further than to just recommend FAIRY TALE, I would suggest you read anything he's written. The metaphysical FAIRY TALE is an astounding work, a story about telling stories. That alone is a bold move by any writer, but in the capable hands of Joyce, it's a joy to behold.

I like to laugh and Sadie Jones helped me do just that. UNINVITED is an inviting mixture of Chesterton and Christie, with some Coward thrown in for good measure. The book is well plotted and if you love your British comedies, you will definitely enjoy this book. 

the dawning of a new age and missed opportunities

I was sad today. I listened to all the doomsday talk, heard and read everyone discussing the end of the world. And when it didn't happen, everyone laughed, and cried “another foul.” People are still talking about it deep into the day.

While everyone chatted away they seemed to forget one thing: the Mayans never predicted the end of the world, they predicted the beginning of a new age.

So while everyone waited for our cities to crumble and our lands to burn, something magnificent happened that many of you missed.

Last night, I stood outside in the cold mesmerized by three lights that formed a triangle. I thought it was a plane at first because they would blink, and it was so far away it almost looked like it was moving. But upon further examination it turned out it wasn't moving at all. They were just three lights in the sky, configured to make a triangle. At times it turned into two lights or one, or a giant single flare. This morning I discovered that I was looking at Venus, and considering the planetary alignment of last night, I realized it was joined by Mercury and Saturn. They appeared to dance with one another, sometimes as a threesome, sometimes as a duet, and sometimes solo, but always fascinating

Today, when K'in (the Sun) was high and bright in the sky, I bet you cursed it for being too shiny. That is, if you payed any attention at all. The world didn't end, so it was just another day. What you probably didn't realize is that we were seeing the eclipse of the center of Sak Bih (the Milky Way). So here we were standing around millions of brand new stars, a huge cluster of dust, and the biggest black hole in our galaxy (Sagittarius A) burning behind our own K'in. You won't see that again for another 26,000 years.

Try to enjoy the new age for what it is, not for what they tell you it will be or what you wish it could be. Every age has mankind evolving into something greater, be a part of that.

None of the ages begin in turmoil, but they do end in turmoil. The Mayans never predicted how the ages would end, but if we look to their neighbors, the Aztecs were more specific. They predicted the fourth sun would end in flooding. It just so happens that every culture in ancient history has a flood myth and there is fossil record to prove that a worldwide flood happened over 5000 years ago. So the fourth sun did end in flooding. However the fifth sunt began with the rise of Egyptian kings, and the unification of Egypt and the first inklings of civilization in Crete. We stepped it up from from nomadic tribal communities and hunter/gatherer types to unified civilizations. We evolved.

Even now you see the global community become more socially conscious. People are attempting to take more control of their lives, and wrest that control from the few that consider themselves elite. We see it all over the world. We are evolving once again.

But if you want doomsday, I will say this. The Aztecs also predicted that the fifth sun would end in earthquakes. So I want you to consider what happened in the last 5 years of the fifth age. Understand I'm only including earthquakes where the loss of life was at least 100. It does not make other earthquakes less important, but rather I don't have that kind of time to spend on the USGS website.

Date Place Casualties

12 May 2008 Sichuan, China >69,197

28 October 2008 NW Pakistan >215

6 April 2009 Abruzzo, Italy 294

29 September 2009 Samoa 189

30 September 2009 Sumatra 1115

12 January 2010 Port-au-Prince, Haiti >230,000

27 February 2010 Maule, Chile 523

13 April 2010 Yushu, China 2698

25 October 2010 Sumatra 435

21 February 2011 Canterbury, NZ 181

11 March 2011 Northern Japan 15,870

24 March 2011 Shan, Burma 150

18 September 2011 Sikkim, India 111

23 October 2011 Van, Turkey 604

6 February 2012 Negros, Philippines 113

11 August 2012 Tabriz, Iraq 306

These are just the most devastating (in terms of human life) earthquakes. To include all the other and to include financial damages would be staggering. If you still want doomsday, it came and it went, and you did nothing about. You sat around stockpiling weapons and food and water, while people all over the world were dying and starving from the doomsday device of this age. We're not going out with a bang, we're leaving with a whimper, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you might get off your ass and help some true survivors.

If you still want your doomsday, be still, be patient. Earlier this year they found irradiated particles in the Texas air. They were able to trace the radiation back to the Japanese earthquake from a year before. The destruction this earthquake caused has yet to be fully determined, but it's already seeped into our oceans, eventually it will make its way to us.

In the meantime, stop and think for a minute. This is a wondrous time. Enjoy it.  And just in case you missed the eclipse of the center of the galaxy....