The Height of Impudence

   Hey, no wonder LJ has felt so quiet the last fews days!  Yes, the syndicated feeds are broken again, and apparently have been since the 22nd.

I didn't post all that often to Livejournal before, but now it seems I'm posting even less, as Twitter (I'm @mkcurry) and Facebook are getting most of the brief posts that I was putting here. Some of what I've posted about there in the last few weeks:

- I'm now reading slush for Fantasy Magazine.

- I've been to excellent concerts by Vienna Teng (with The Paper Raincoat) and brilliant fiddle player Brian Conway.

- The new album by The Paper Raincoat is awesome.

- The Yoshida Brothers are also awesome: http://is.gd/3HqHb



I think that's a representative assortment of the parts other than me gushing about new novels and short stories by various talented writers.

[Continued from here.]

Sunday: Started the day with an excellent warm cinnamon bun with apples at Steak Frites, plated as though it was a dinner entree. Given all of the great food I had over the long weekend, I don't know why something so simple impressed me, but it did. Attended the "Neil Gaiman and Gary K Wolfe in Conversation" panel, which ended up simply being a fascinating conversation between Neil and Gary which ranged over all sorts of interesting topics. I think it was probably the best of the four Neil events I attended. Later I went to a kaffeeklatsch with jaylake, which was actually the first kaffeeklatsch I'd ever attended. We had a full table with lots of interesting conversation, and I ended up learning things about Jay's writing that I actually hadn't known before. I could have just talked with Jay about some of the same topics, but having other people ask different questions, or ask the same questions different ways, worked out pretty well.

Next up was the string of Hugo events. I was at part of the rehearsal, which was an interesting look behind the scenes. Then I got to attend the pre-Hugo reception, where I met several people, including Neil Gaiman. Thanks again for introducing me, jaylake! I also carefully did not wish David Anthony Durham good luck, and thereby avoided jinxing him. As for the Hugo ceremony itself, it was the first time I'd ever actually gone to the Hugos (this was only my second Worldcon after all), and I think sitting in the second row with matociquala, stillsostrange, arcaedia, jaylake and calendula_witch was pretty much the best way to experience it. It was great to see David win the Campbell and have the diadem (it's not a tiara!) placed on his head by maryrobinette, and it was even better to be able to see matociquala's sort of stunned and overwhelmed expression when she won her Hugo. I would have liked to have a couple of the other Hugos go to different people, but all of winners were certainly worthy of the honor. When all of the excitement was over, it was time to trek down to the Delta for the Hugo Losers' party, and we took turns actually carrying matociquala's very heavy (but very lovely) award. While the booze at the party was, to say the least, horrible, I still got to see things like David Anthony Durham looking quite smashing in his new headgear, Scalzi putting his Hugo on his head, and Klages licking Bear's Hugo, so it was an entertaining time. Plus the whole thing died early enough for me to make it back to the IC bar in time for last call.

Monday: This was the day for driving back, but before I headed out there was time for a very tasty lunch in Chinatown with arcaedia and maryrobinette. Fortunately the drive home was a lot less of a hassle than the drive up had been, even if the mid-drive burger was made from cow rather than elk this time around.

Some of the people I was glad to have the chance to talk to but didn't mention yet:cristalia, curgoth, katfeete, icedrake, suricattus, as well as non-LJ people like Rani Graff (who I was not actually stalking, despite seeing him everywhere).

People I meant to mention but didn't: If I knew that, I'd have mentioned them.

Chances of me going to Worldcon 2010 in Melbourne? Slim to none.

Chances of me going to Worldcon 2011 in Reno? Even less.

Overall, I had a great time, and Montreal is definitely a great city. Hopefully it won't take me 10+ years to make it back there again this time.

This is the first half of my Worldcon wrap-up post where I inevitably forget to mention some person or event that I really intended to write about. The fact that I'm pretty wiped out from not getting nearly enough sleep isn't going to help any with that.

The short summary (in no particular order): Talked to a lot of great people; ate a lot of great food (usually with some of the aforementioned great people); drank a modest amount of excellent alcohol; attended a really moving wake for the late Charlie Brown; attended the Hugos for the first time, got to see matociquala's expression when they said she'd won, got to carry her Hugo for a bit (it was both ridiculously gorgeous and ridiculously heavy); attended some good panels, many of which involved Neil Gaiman; was introduced to Neil Gaiman by jaylake; bought nothing at all in the really pathetic dealers' room

The longer summary:

Wednesday: Hours of driving, including a stop in Vermont for a very tasty elk burger, followed by much construction in Quebec and arrival at the outskirts of Montreal just in time for rush hour. Doh.

Thursday: I got my badge and attended "Question Time with Neil Gaiman," which was both entertaining and interesting. It ended up being my only panel of the day, since "In Conversation: Paul Krugman and Charles Stross" got moved to the evening, when I was scheduled to meet up with arcaedia and the delightful maryrobinette for drinks. Later that night, I realized that the InterContinental bar seemed to have become "the" bar, which saved me some walks down to the Delta.

Friday: The day with the most panels, as I managed to make it to "The New Media," "From SF Reader to Economist" (Paul Krugman), and "The Campbell Awards (Not a Hugo, Honest!)." They were all well worth going to, but the Campbell Awards panel was the most entertaining, as jaylake, matociquala, maryrobinette and Wen Spencer were joined by surprise guests John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow for an in-depth discussion of the history and importance of the Campbell. I don't understand why the room wasn't packed. That evening I got together with jaylake, calendula_witch and arcaedia for a fabulous dinner at Aszu, followed by my one Delta party crawl of the weekend and a stop at the IC bar.

Saturday: I started the day eating excellent dim sum with matociquala, stillsostrange and arcaedia, then went to Neil Gaiman's reading, and then there was maryrobinette's puppetry panel. After that I had the privilege of attending a small wake for Charles Brown, which was filled with lots of moving and/or funny stories from his friends and plenty of toasts to his memory. Then it was dinner and catching the very end of "Gaiman Reads Doctorow" before attempting to get to sleep early, since that seemed unlikely to happen on Sunday night.

To be continued in part 2.....

In case the next KGB Fantastic Fiction reading happens before I actually get around to posting about the last one, here are a couple of photos from that evening:

Mary Robinette Kowal & her dinosaur:



Brian Francis Slattery & the band:

This weekend (meaning Fri-Sun) I'll be at Readercon 20. I'll be doing the usual attending of panels and readings, and, of course, hanging around the bar. I'm looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Tomorrow evening I'll be at a Vienna Teng concert.

That is all.

From viennateng.com:

19 Jun 09 (Fri) 7:30 pm Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York NY
Solo show. With Diane Birch. Part of the Live From Home benefit concert series for Housing Works, Inc.
http://www.housingworks.org/events/detail/live-from-home-with-vienna-teng1/

9 Jul 09 (Thu) 8:00 pm Infinity Hall in Norfolk, CT
Solo show. With Seth Adam.
http://www.infinityhall.com/events/vienna-teng

15 Jul 09 (Wed) 8:00 pm Watercolor Cafe in Larchmont, NY
Solo show. With Katie Herzig.
http://www.watercolorcafe.net/

19 Jul 09 (Sun) 8:00 pm Towne Crier Cafe in Pawling, NY
Solo show. With Ari Hest.
http://www.townecrier.com/acts/teng.htm

20 Aug 09 (Thu) 8:00 pm Highline Ballroom in New York NY
http://www.highlineballroom.com/bio.php?id=975


I've got tickets to the Infinity Hall show already, but I don't think I'm going to make either the Watercolor Cafe or Towne Crier shows. The Highline Ballroom show is a definite possibility, and the Housing Works show a slight one.

Anyone else on my friends list planning on being at these? woj? Meredith? Beuller?

There are two choices, President Obama.  Prosecute them or be complicit in their crimes.


Do your part.  Ask Attorney General Holder to appoint a special prosecutor by signing these petitions [ACLU -- FDL] and write to your Senator, your Congressman, and President Obama.

Originally published at Wake Up. Please leave any comments there.

The death of Furl.com, which is what I’d been using to provide the headlines that sit at the top of the left column, has finally motivated me to switch to something else. The headlines are now coming via my bookmarks at Delicious.com, with the added benefit of clippings when you hover over a headline, and the front page loading doesn’t crawl along anymore while Furl eventually gets around to working. I think it’s definitely a change for the better, especially since the headlines tend to be the most active part of this blog.

I have now registered for this year's Readercon, saving myself $5 in the process, since it's still early enough for the pre-reg price.

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

It’s been a stellar week for Obama on the economic front.

Start with his decision to tap Senator Judd Gregg as his new Secretary of Commerce, a guy who voted to abolish the Commerce Department back when Clinton was President.

So, Judd Gregg will become Commerce Secretary, and a Republican will keep Gregg’s seat in the Senate. Gregg’s lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00, and 6.91 “when the chips are down,” should make him a much needed right-wing champion for the Commerce Department. Gregg should also be a useful voice during cabinet meetings, making sure that President Obama and the other radical liberals there don’t over-reach.

Then there’s the stimulus bill, where, despite Obama’s willingness to give the Republicans all sorts of concessions, there apparently still aren’t enough votes to get it through the Senate. The likely solution? More concessions, because that’s the bipartisan way.

If that comes out of spending and not tax cuts - and since Republicans and moderate Democrats are driving the boat on this one I assume it will - then the bill will be completely unable to accomplish its goals on job creation. It may provide a temporary boost, but won’t do what’s needed to stop the bleeding. The recession will continue for years and maybe slip into depression.

Lastly, there’s news that Obama and his administration are working on a bailout plan that will attempt to keep the shambling corpses of the big banks moving around for a while longer by letting the taxpayers guarantee huge amounts of toxic paper. No pesky nationalization for him, despite the many studies that show that’s the way most likely to actually work.

The Obama Administration, if the Washington Post’s latest report is accurate, is about to embark on a hugely expensive “save the banking industry at all costs” experiment that:

1. Has nothing substantive in common with any of the “deemed as successful” financial crisis programs

2. Has key elements that studies of financial crises have recommended against

3. Consumes considerable resources, thus competing with other, in many cases better, uses of fiscal firepower.

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was. We have no new thinking, no willingness to take measures that are completely defensible (in fact not doing them takes some creative positioning) like wiping out shareholders at obviously dud banks (Citi is top of the list), forcing bondholder haircuts and/or equity swaps, replacing management, writing off and/or restructuring bad loans, and deciding whether and how to reorganize and restructure the company. Instead, the banks are now getting the AIG treatment: every demand is being met, no tough questions asked, no probing of the accounts (or more important, the accounting).

Oh, wait, there were also the newly-announced executive compensation restrictions, which couldn’t be more obvious an attempt to appease the proles even as billions more of their dollars are spent trying to save zombie banks.

I was hardly expecting Obama to govern from the left, given the fact that he’s a center-right technocrat and all, but this is getting ridiculous and it’s only February.

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

What happens when you make concessions to the Republicans so you can have “bipartisan” support for the stimulus bill? This:

The stimulus package just passed the House, with the billions in corporate tax cuts, without the money to re-sod the National Mall, without the money for family planning for poor people, and without one Republican vote. Without one. Final vote was 244-188 as 11 “Democrats” crossed over.

It’s the exact same result Obama (and Pelosi) could have gotten by pushing a better bill through without any concessions at all.

As the Rude Pundit put it:

We don’t know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it’s gonna go, and if you’ve paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they’re gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama has done good work so far when he’s been able to do things directly, like starting the process of closing Guantanamo, lifting the gag rule, and reviewing the idea of letting states set emissions standards that are tougher than the federal governmen’s. Apparently though, everything he learned about how to play things in Congress he learned from the same Democrats who failed to get much done for the past two years. Here’s hoping this episode teaches Obama that the Republicans have no interest in compromising, no matter how much the new President wants this to magically be a post-partisan world. He should do what’s right, rather than responding to Republican hissy fits with concessions.

The Cinematic Titanic gang (the original cast of MST3K) are doing their thing live!

http://cinematictitanic.com/wpmu/121/

UPCOMING SHOWS

FEB 13-14–MARINES MEMORIAL THEATRE - San Francisco, CA

FEB 20-21–SOMERVILLE THEATRE - Boston, MA

FEB 27-28- HANNA THEATRE - Cleveland, OH

MAR 7- PARAMOUNT THEATRE - Austin, TX

MAR 13-14- KING CAT THEATRE - Seattle, WA

1. PRE-SALE begins on MONDAY (1/19) at 10AM (local time to the venue)
2. The PRE-SALE CODE is: MST3K
3. We will be performing a different movie each night per city - titles TBA

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

From the L.A. Times [via Informed Comment]

Minutes away from a scheduled phone interview on Israeli TV 10 with newscaster Shlomi Eldar, Aboul Aish called Eldar’s cellphone, screaming and weeping in Arabic and Hebrew. The doctor’s home had been struck by a shell:

“Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They’ve killed my children. . . . Could somebody please come to us?”

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

Via Informed Commment:

CBS News broadcasts an interview with a Norwegian physician on the scene in Gaza.

He says he has seen one military casualty come into the hospital. Of 2500 wounded, 50% are women and children. Doing surgery around the clock. There are injuries you do not want to see– children coming in with open abdomens, with injured legs, we had to amputate both of them. This is a war on the civilian population of Gaza. It is a very young population. They cannot flee. They are fenced in. They are bombing one and a half million people in a cage.

[Warning: Disturbing images]

I am now registered for Worldcon 2009 in Montreal! The full membership rate of 215 CAD via Paypal was about 181 USD, but rates go up Jan 1st.

So, who else is going?

And who among you wants to buy me a drink? ;) [ETA: At Worldcon!]

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head yet again, reminding those who have apparently forgotten the Clinton years (and ignored the Democrats in Congress during the Bush years) that Obama’s whole post-partisan shtick is hardly new:

( Read the rest of this entry » )

At your party! http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/?p=7130

At your subway station! http://gawker.com/news/diary/bizarre-subway-encounters-with-bill-murray-12268.php

At your karaoke! http://drhastings.livejournal.com/58116.html

Bill Murray!

On Sunday, arcaedia and I went to see the incredible Bruce Campbell, who was doing a Q&A session after showings of his new movie, My Name is Bruce, at a theater in Hartford.

The basic premise of My Name is Bruce is that a desperate small town called Gold Lick kidnaps B-movie actor Bruce Campbell to save it from Guan-Di, the angry Chinese god of war (and protector of bean curd). As one might imagine, hilarity ensues, as the movie (directed by Bruce himself) pokes fun at both the actor and B-movies. This is not a piece of high cinema, but it's a lot of cheesy fun, especially if you're a Bruce Campbell fan.

The main reason I was there wasn't the movie though (which I would have otherwise waited to see on DVD), it was the chance to see Bruce himself in person. I wasn't disappointed. Bruce was funny and sarcastic as he answered questions about the movie and his career, with the occasional cutting retort for those in the audience who were trying to be witty at his expense. He was also appropriately horrified at the young women who had drawn pictures of him riding a unicorn. Yikes. It was a sold out show, and I think everyone went away happy, except maybe those people who apparently thought Bruce would be doing signings in addition to three Q&A sessions every night.

Bruce is heading down toward the Mid-Atlantic states next, then taking a swing through the upper Midwest before hitting the West Coast (full calender here). If you're a Bruce Campbell fan, buy your tickets in advance and go see him! You'll be glad you did.


(x-posted from Of Two Minds)

No, not that one! The one true Bruce, Bruce Campbell!

He's out doing a promo tour [see dates here] to promote his new movie, My Name is Bruce.

Barring union strikes, hurricanes, flat tires or diptheria, I will be personally appearing at each of these cities to introduce the film and do a spirited Q&A afterward. Please bear in mind, this isn't a "signing," so I recommend that the only thing you bring is your smiling face. I will be doing the 3 major show every day - roughly the 7:00, 9:30 and midnight screenings I look forward to seeing you all there!

Right now Bruce is in the Northeastern U.S., and then his tour will be moving through the Midwest before heading to the West Coast. If you're a Bruce Campbell fan, I'm pretty sure you don't want to miss this. I've got my tickets for one of the Hartford shows on Sunday!