Google Search: street and smith's shadow magazine
My dayjob usually involves shuffling medical journals and news magazines that we receive each day, making some notes about them in our database and shelving them to be put on microfilm at the end of the year or end of the volume. When I started here about 7 years ago, I eagerly looked up comics and pulp magazine titles and found a few really old ones in our database. Nothing new, but at least it was cool to think that people could buy microfilm of old pulps and comics through our company.

Today I'm processing a "product change" on "Street and Smith's Shadow Magazine" and "Street and Smith's Shadow Comics." Whoever currently owns the rights decided they don't want us offering microfilm of it anymore. What a disappointment.

At least we still film Playboy and Penthouse, so I can still list my profession as "MICROPORNOGRAPHER." Oh, and we still sell Devil Dogs Comics and Doc Savage Comics, so not a total loss.

Books I've been digging lately:
Doctor Dogbody's Leg by James Norman Hall. Co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty writes about a British Naval surgeon in the age of sail telling tall tales about how he lost his leg.

The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle. BBC Radio "Book at Bedtime" ran an adaptation of this story read by David Soul. A white liberal California guy hits an undocumented Mexican immigrant with his car. Their paths cross off and on as the white guy wrestles with his community become a gated community, then walled community, and the immigrant tries to find work and feed his pregnant wife. It could have turned out really trite, and some people might say that it did, but I sympathized with the characters. I read it within a few days, so it pulled me along. As polemics go, I'd say it's at least better than Carl Hiassen novels, which read like environmentalist Batman revenge fantasies. Put it this way, Tortilla Curtain was good enough that I'm going to try some other TC Boyle novels from the library.

Vogelein: Clockwork Faerie a graphic novel by Jane Irwin, who rode my schoolbus for years! I am totally jealous. I checked it out from the library for the novelty of having known Jane, but it's a great story about a clockwork faerie who can't wind herself up each day. Having lived 300 years, Vogelein has to find new human caretakers every so often to keep her wound, or else she'll lose her memory. It left me wanting more (in the best possible way), and I assume there will be more because it's billed as a collection of the first five issues of a comic series. Hopefully more collections will be issued in years to come. Dammit! Envy!

Banana nut flavor Nature's Valley crunchy granola bars will rock your fucking world, in as far as your world can be rocked by granola bars.

Amazing clash of two different fanboy cultures:
Star Wars nerds in line at the Chinese theater, depicted in Legos.

Partners in genocide
Bush Administration Allied With Sudan Despite Role in Darfur Genocide
Ready for a new round of rationalization for supporting state terrorism, how it's necessary to sometimes work with corrupt regimes to help our security or national interests. Remember how well that worked when we supported Saddam, the Mujaheddin, Pinochet, Noriega, Suharto, Musharraf, that dude who boils people in Uzbekistan, plenty of other examples we could talk about. (At first I was starting to list only the dictators or groups who later fought against the US, as if the only injustices in the world are the ones that affect us. Ugh.) This time it's the govt of Sudan, which the US Sec of State daintily applied the word genocide to, then made sure that we did nothing about it.

So if the US was right to bomb Afghanistan for their support of Al Qaeda, would it be right for survivors of genocide in Sudan to bomb the US for our support of a govt we acknowledge committed genocide? Why does one rule apply to the US and a different rule apply to all other countries?

If the Taleban had tried to distance themselves from Al Qaeda by saying they had only supported and interacted with Bin Laden because it was necessary to their security or national interests, would we have let them off the hook? Lesser of two evils and all the excuses that Conservatives use to explain away Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam?

My Terrifying, Dry Warrior

"I've been sober three weeks now. I'm pretty sure I've hit my lowest low and I don't want to go there ever again. It helped me refocus my life. The event was I missed eleven out of eleven on the fractions quiz. You might get to the third or fourth degree in the Junior Order of the Free and Accepted Millwrights of Fowlerville with Cs and Ds, but you aren't gonna get to the thirty-third degree. The way you move up in this organization is by getting good grades, doing what you're told, getting your job done. Plus a little volunteer work when you hit middle school. Looks good on your college applications."

A friend suggested that we both write pulp stories based on the same elements, then compare notes to see how we interpreted things differently. Unfortunately I took more than six months to write five chapters. So here it is.