As widely reported, the president was not amused. Links to the clip are here: Crooks and Liars.
Update: Actually Colbert’s routine is pretty boring, there are a few gems, but a lot of it drags, to be fair, maybe that has as much to do with the current president not smiling as anything that was said. Still, have to give Colbert props for not softballing at the event.
Is You Is / Is You Ain’t? is now up on Escape Pod!
It’s been a good week in reprint new for me so far. Besides the Escape Pod story mentioned a couple entries down, I just heard today that my novelette Super-Villains will appear in Rich Horton’s, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006 Edition from Prime Books which is slated for June release.
One of the most pressing issues of out time, discussed by Sam Anderson.
Who is running that news division — Ali G?
AOL News:
NASCAR Furious With NBC Over ‘Dateline’ Segment
Story Targeted Martinsville Track to Gauge Levels of Anti-Muslim Sentiment.
Incidentally, no one in the crowds cared. So much for network race-baiting.
Escape Pod, The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine, will soon adapt my story "Is You Is/Is You Ain’t" (published originally and still available at Futurismic.) Details to follow. Psyched.
Any job posting that begins "Become Part of a Winning Team!" pays minimum wage …
Salon.com | The deception Bush can’t spin.
If we are to believe the grand jury testimony of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby — as reported by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in court papers (PDF) — then the president of the United States has been deceiving the country ever since the CIA leaks investigation began in 2003.
Compared with other deceptions that George W. Bush has perpetrated in the years since he promised to restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office, this one cannot be spun away as a misunderstanding, a "misunderestimate" or a mistake. From the moment that the Justice Department opened its probe of the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity to the press, Bush insisted that he wanted to find and punish the culprits, especially if any of them were among his White House staff. He claimed to consider the leaking of classified information to be a matter of the utmost seriousness.
Horror Writers Association – Stoker:
ANTHOLOGY NOMINEES:
CORPSE BLOSSOMS by Julia and RJ Sevin (Creeping Hemlock Press)
DARK DELICACIES: ORIGINAL TALES OF TERROR AND THE MACABRE by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Carroll & Graf)
OUTSIDERS by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick (Roc)
WEIRD SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH by Stephen Jones (Fedogan and Bremer)
Very quickly, two authors of a pseudo-history sued Dan Brown for copywrite voliate for using concepts for his historical novel. As Cohen explains below, the historical assertions of the first book have been refuted by susequent scholarship – and are hare-brained to be sure. These authors seem to want it both ways: first the wanted the cred of nonfiction labeling for shit they pulled out of their asses, and then the wanted protection for ideas they claimed to be original. Didn’t work out that way.
In the Guardian: NIck Cohen says,
Dan Brown has been called many things, but never ‘my hero’. Until now.
If there has been a worse book published in the past 25 years, then Holy Blood, Holy Grail could well be it. Its three authors present as plausible historical speculation their theory that Jesus did not die on the cross, but had a child with Mary Magdalene. Like so many expats, they moved to France, and their descendants became Merovingian kings in the Dark Ages. The heirs of Jesus survive to this day, feared by the Vatican and protected by an enigmatic institution, the Priory of Sion.
The authors did not withdraw the book when journalists found that their claims about the Priory of Sion came from documents forged on a cheap stencil by a French neofascist conman called Pierre Planchard, who said he was the rightful Merovingian king of France. There was no need to. Exposure of the hoax did not dent their sales, which now stand at around two million.
Link: Guardian Unlimited | Science | Discovered: missing link that solves a mystery of evolution.
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.
The walls of the Top Pot Donut Palace and Coffee Shop are lined with a species of books that are, for one reason or another, suited for little else but ambiance today: Off-brand encyclopedia volumes, misc feet of the Harvard 5 ft shelf of Classics, stray volumes of uniform editions of the novels of Frank Yerby and Lloyd C. Douglas, inxexpensive hardback editions of poety gardens and speaker’s treasuries predating the invention of the packer. It forms, in fact, a kind of realspace analogue to what centuries frpm now my be data reliqueries of 99.999 % of everything being, keyboard, scanned, recorded, or otherwise digitized today.
There used to be a joke webpage (probably) more than one) which read “Youy have reached the end of the internet, now turn off your computer and go outside already.” But like Borges’ Babylonian Library, the vasteness of human production in the sphere of ideas is traversable in any one human’s lifetime, but stretches out in all dimensions at once, toward infinity.
…and I’m here enjoying my second cup of coffee at Cafe Ladro at 8th and Pine. I’m caught up on my email, and realizing that all of the sudden, technology seems to be really easy on convenient (when did that happen?)
My Blackberry is already crammed with taks that pop up as reminders when I need them, as well a story ideas and notes that pop into my head. ….much handier than my old system of illegible index cards and torn ends of legal pad pages.
NEW YORK – Apple Computer Inc., the maker of the Macintosh computer and iPod music device, on Wednesday rolled out a first-ever software patch to run Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system on its PCs, a move that could draw millions of new buyers.
