As I write this the DOW is up a little from its 700 point loss. My stocks are down around 5% and I expect they’ll keep sliding about 20%, 40% or more. I wanted to sell, but we didn’t see the edge of the precipice until it was too late. I still want to sell. I had a few thousand dollars worth of an insurance company stock that I sold a few months ago, thank goodness.

The price of oil and the lack of oversight in the financial industry has resulted in synchronicity that will force things down and down. Banks all over the world are failing and I just read that congress has voted against the bail out. I have no doubt the bailout would have not have done anything but line the pockets of financial executives, though.

My own losses might be about $300k in stock and $300k in the value of my house, before this is over. I would say that I would get off easy except that the county government is going to have to do some cost cutting and that usually means getting rid of contractors. One way or the other, I may be retired in the coming year.

But, in spite of the bad news, I am a little happy that the economic policies of the Republicans has failed so dramatically. Bush will be remembered as the president, like Coolidge and Hoover 80 years ago, who presided over the conditions that led to this crash. The republicans were kept out of the white house for 20 years as a result of the 1929 crash. The fault was not entirely with the republicans, but the blame certainly fell on them, as it will this time. I once said that the only good thing about Bush was that after he left office few would vote for a republican president for a long time. It looks like this may be true.

The republican policies of regulation and less government oversight have resulted in their logical conclusion. We are in for a world wide monetary collapse. I expect to stand in line to get free bread as my grandfather would have done. I imagine that soon my neighbors and I will not be able to pay our property taxes and local governments will go bankrupt.

If it gets too much worse, I may have to cut back on cats. If Ollie throws up on the rug one more time… Watch out cats!

Ram Island, Saco Bay, Maine. I found this house on an island off the coast of Maine for $555,000. I figure that in six months I can pick it up for $350K. I would add solar and a windmill and renovate it to be livable all year round. I would make a trip to the mainland (about a mile) every two weeks for food and supplies and other than that would not have to worry who was president.

I’d have to find out if I could get water and heating oil delivered. I might have to buy a used lobster boat to get the big stuff onto the island.

The cats would like it, although I might have to stock it with chipmunks and plant a few trees.

Any visitors would have to swim about a mile, unless they could rent a boat. I’d have to set up satellite internet service. I wonder if I could steal wifi with a good dish antenna at that distance.

There is a web page devoted to Ram Island with some great history and pictures

SACO, Maine Property for Sale

My grandfather was often asked the secret to his long life. He lived well into his nineties.

His answer was "Toadstools". He would smile a little and there would be a glint in his eye. "Toadstools," he would say, "I never ate a one of them."

There were toadstools in my back woods after the rain. These, if I am not mistaken, are the deadly kind.

 

Ice Cream for Crow – Captain Beefheart. I can’t stop watching this.

42blips.com seems to be a social networking site for Spec-Fic geeks. It is a delicious.com/slashdot/digg type of link site, but narrowed down to spec-fic.

The main page shows latest hot stories and you vote on them. All of the stories are tv/film Sci-Fi and not literary SF.

(Note to J. Erwine – you should join and use this to announce new SamsDot releases; you might get a few new readers.)

I have put it in my “good morning” list until I figure out if it useful to me. I read none of the popular stories because I don’t care what is going on in the private lives of SciFi TV actors.

42Blips – Top Science Fiction News, Videos, and Blogs

I like programming and I am especially good at working on large sets of data. I’ve always had a job where I have to work on fuzzy information and distill it down to a few essential nuggets. One of my first programming jobs was for the old Western Union (the original one that sent telegraphs, not the current “send money to Nigeria” one). I was on the SWAT team for making special reports. I had to learn a half dozen odd computer languages in order to extract weird information from their huge databases. I used tools like Snobol, Maxis and Ramis, which are long forgotten, to sort through data and summarize it.

The Netflix Prize is an award of $1,000,000 to the person who can improve on their algorithm to predict which movies a person will like based on their previous purchases.

I have some ideas that might or might not work. I’m going to give it a try.

A bad thing is that I have been given 5 new projects in the last week and each one is due yesterday. Screw that, I am badly in need of nice crunchy programming problem.

Netflix Prize: Home

The Underpeople is actually the second half of a much longer novel called Norstrilia that editors broke up into two shorter novels. In the 1960s a paperback was about 160 pages plus or minus 10. Font size and line spacing was tweaked to arrive at this number, or failing that, they chopped the book up. As a result, I am reading the second half of a great novel without any idea of what came before. I imagine I’ll find the first half in the same box where I found this.

My first contact with Cordwainer Smith was in the pages of old pulp magazines. I only knew that he wrote wrenchingly intense poetic short stories and that you could only find him in magazines. This was because he didn’t write that much and died at the age of 53. The Underpeople was published after his death by his wife. His real name was Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. He worked for the army during WWII and wrote a book called Psychological Warfare, which is considered a standard text on the subject. I am trying to find it, but the cheapest copy around is $200.

Smith doesn’t write fiction as we know it. I like to think of it as hallucinogenic poetry, but that doesn’t really describe it either. Smith was raised in China and his God-father was Sun Yat-Sen and and later was a close friend of Chiang Kai-sheck. He spoke 6 languages fluently and his stories have been compared in structure to the Chinese stories, which is why they sound so strange when you read them.

If you read Samuel R. Delaney, J.G. Ballard or R.A. Lafferty, you can see what I mean by hallucinogenic poetry. His stories are more metaphysical metaphors than linear narratives. The constant use of metaphor reminds one of Jurgen by James Branch Cabell. The stories are sharp, crystal clear, and intensely poetic. This works well with his stories.

I find that the flashing cuts of image works less well as a novel. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate this book. I am reading it slowly and sometimes rereading a paragraph several times to savor the language, but the plot and characters are not very real to me. It is like a prismatic dream that jumps from element to element before the glow can die down. It is intricate and surreal, but it is not necessarily good story telling. I don’t think that you could read Smith the same way you would read a thriller or a mystery. You would not be engrossed in the events or characters, just the emotional impact of beautiful imagery.

I am hoping that there is more Cordwainer Smith in the box. It doesn’t really matter if I read the two halves of this novel out of order. I am reading it for the exquisite element of Cordwainer-ness in the book.

The Republican Party adopted 3 weeks ago explicitly opposes government bailouts of private companies. Here is the exact quote (from the section “Rebuilding Homeownership”):

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all.

I wonder how this affects things. No one is too happy about bailing out wall street the Dems seem to want to punish evil doers as as they bail them out. The GOP side seems to want to avoid doing anything at all. My own opinion is that we should let the economy crash and see if anything valuable survives, but I realize that this is just my own nihilistic attitude towards institutions. This crisis is a very Darwinian test of our economic system and I am not sure that helping the unfit survive is a good idea. I am, however, worried about my own retirement accounts, of which about 2/3 is in stock or stock funds.

This was an awful book, just awful. I remember liking Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, so I was looking forward to this. After the first day of reading I was of the opinion that I should move on, but I had only about 80 pages to go so I stuck with it for another day. It was a big mistake.

Planet in Peril wanders about with nothing much happening. The characters are very polite to each other, even the villains. There seems to be very little motivation for any of the action. The main  character (I hesitate to call him a protagonist as he never actually does anything), who is a failed researcher is assigned to do research and seems to make no progress. He is continually fooled by competing powers in a 21st century stagnant society, but easily wanders out of one well guarded place into another well guarded place. There is a comet coming and a religious group called The Cometeers, but they don’t really have much to do with the plot. This future state is composed of economic management units rather than political units. It turns out that the project that the researcher is supposed to be working on has already been finished by the only capitalist political group on earth, which is going to take over the world. Ho-Hum. By the end of the book, you are just glad that it is over and that the endless wandering around is over with. They guy gets the girl, but you don’t really care.

This was first published in 1955 as The Year of the Comet. My copy of Planet in Peril has a copyright of 1959.

My craigslist search had problems that it returned lots of jobs for that were a month old and no longer listed. I added an option search the last month week or day to keep the results fresh.

Search Craigslist with Google

Thank goodness for Turner Classic Movies. TV is very very bad and Erica and I watch TCM almost every night now. Last night was “Portrait of Jennie” from 1948. It is the story of an artist (Joseph Cotton) who is haunted by the ghost of a beautiful woman (Jennifer Jones). The woman first appears to Cotton as a girl and then reappears as she grows up, usually during some great change in her life. The artist’s friends think he’s crazy. Naturally the artist and the ghost fall in love. He traces who she is/was and then discovers that she was killed in a storm at a lighthouse in Cape Code. (It’s always good to have a at least one spooky scene in New England.) It turns out that the Artist and Ghost are destined for love, but have been separated by an accident of time.

The move is in black and white, but at the end it explodes into eerie colors during the storm. I was afraid the ending would be bad, but it turned out just right – romantic but sad.

I added it to my 13 great ghost movies lens. I now have 14 movies, but I am not changing the title.

13 Great Ghost Movies

Mark A. Rayner created a photoshopping contest to see who could make vintage ads for classic SF. Unfortunately, most everyone there considers modern movies and TV to be classic SF. There where two that I liked, though.

One is based on the hired girl robot from Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer, which is my all time favorite SF novel. The other is from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which ain’t bad neither. The F451 one should have had a salamander on the badge.

Mark A. Rayner ..> Vintage ads of ficitonal futures (gallery page)

I found this webcam of the Large Hadron Collider so you can watch in real time the progress towards discovering the secrets of the universe.

lhc

The history of the novel is traced back to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the 12th century ancestor of some of England’s greatest kings. (Aquitane was part of England until a series of incompetent kings lost it.) In Eleanor’s court there were written the tales of the Matter of Britain or the Arthurian Cycle. There were, however, three “matters” that have contributed to modern literature. There was the Matter of Rome, which concerned itself with the ancient Greek and Roman legends, the Matter of Britain, which concerned itself with Arthur and the knights of the round table, and the Matter of France or the Carolingian Cycle, which is concerned with the legends of Charlemagne and his Paladins, especially Roland, and Oliver. The Carolingian Cycle springs from the ancient chansons de geste.

We are probably much more familiar with the Matters of Rome and the Matters of Britain. We all know the Arthur legends and Arthur has appeared in many modern Spec-Fic and Fantasy novels. The Matter of France, however, has had less coverage. The only one that I can think of is Andre Norton’s first novel Huon of the Horn.

Poul Anderson wrote several historical novels. Some were concerned with his own Scandinavian heritage, and some of these have no speculative element. They are all good.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is a modern telling of the fate of the Carolingian Paladin Oliver. Like Arthur, Oliver did not die, but was taken away by Morgan Le Fay to be cured and he would return again to save France. The hero, here, is a Danish American who returns to Denmark to fight the Germans at the outset of World War II. He is wounded and wakes up in the land between the world of Men and the world of Faerie. He has adventures, meets a beautiful maiden who can change into a swan, and has encounters with Morgan Le Fay. He discovers his relationship to the legendary Oliver and saves the universe of law from the forces of chaos.

There are other similar novels that involve a modern man being transported to a magical past, such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. Poul’s novel is probably the best of them and has had a great influence on modern Fantasy.

The theme of Three Hearts and Three Lions, conflict between the powers of Law and Chaos, was used by the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, and is directly due to this book. D&D also includes several characters from the book.

Poul Anderson is a Golden Age of Science Fiction Writer, but he is of a later generation. His style is more literary and the characters more modern. He has real women characters that stand out, such as the old witch, the Swan May and Morgan Le Fay. His heroes are complex and seek to work out internal as well as external conflicts. The quality of writing is way beyond that of John W. Campbell, Jr. who published the original version of Three Hearts and Three Lions in Astounding Magazine.

Three Hearts and Three Lions reads much like a Harry Potter book and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed those books and is looking for a similar title.

I have the original paperback version pictured above, but it has not stood up well in its 47 year life. The spine was dried out and the binding came apart leaving me with loose pages separated from the cover. I am going to glue it back together, but I will not be able to sell it as anything more than a reader copy.

This is a nice house on the St. Croix river in Calais – way the hell out east in Maine. It has 3.3 acres and a cozy apartment over the garage for in-laws. It is currently leased until 2009 so it would be essentially a no-cash transaction until we decide to move in.

It’s probably too far out. I’d like a house further down the coast. It is the kind of place that I am looking for, though. I would set up a rough desk on the hill overlooking the water, but still within wifi range. I could do a little programming and a lot of writing in the company of cats and clear land, water and sky.

I don’t want to work until I die or I am too sick to enjoy life. I want to retire now. Unfortunately, my retirement fund lost about $25,000 last week, with more losses to come. It will be more life wasted sitting in a cubicle for me for a while.

Calais, Washington County, Maine land for sale – 3.3 acres at LandWatch.com

We went up to Connecticut to the flea market today. Last year we went up at least ten times and in previous years we have gone as far as Pennsylvania to shop flea markets. Because of the price of gas, this trip costs about $50, so we may not make it up again this year.

The Elephant’s Trunk Flea was quite full. Here are some shots from the north side up on the hill.

I did very well. At one table a nice couple sold me some Weird Tales Magazines and a vintage 1948 JT-30 microphone. Since I collect both vintage microphones and vintage pulp SF magazines this was an incredible coincidence. I bought a J.J. Cale album for poker for a quarter – it would have been too weird if I had found it at the same table.

The Weird Tales pulps were from 1951 ad 1952, which is not Weird Tale’s best period. The stories are mostly, if not all, reprints. Weird Tales was digging into their contracts and finding stories that had been purchase with All Serial Rights or First and Second Serial Rights. This means that the authors gave Weird Tales or one of her sister publications the right to print their story again and in some instances as often as they wanted.

The magazines were OK quality, but would not be rated good or fine if I wanted to sell them. I thought that I was getting a bargain, but I probably paid just what they were worth. They are the same age as I am, but they are too fragile to take the bus with me.

The JT-30 is a military version called a model 80.  It came with a long cable (missing) and had a rising response element. The element, of course, has been dead for 25 years. Some day I’ll find a 60 year old microphone that works. I made up for not getting a bargain on the magazines and got the JT-30 for $10, which is a very good deal.

Erica had some good luck and found some vintage quilts, which she was able to get for a very good price. They are all in need of a good cleaning, but there are not that many bad stains. The binding on the pink quilt is shot, but there are only a few small spots on the quilts themselves that need repair.

The first is a Basket Quilt top, made with Cranberry red cloth and muslin. Erica dated it from the patterns of the pieces as 1880 to 1910.

The next is an Indigo Quilt in a "9 patch" pattern (I think that this was called flying geese, but Erica isn’t sure). This was about 1890 from what Erica can tell from her pattern references. It has feed sack, Victorian shirting, and several kinds of Indigo.

Ollie and Gracie were helping us photograph the quilts.

The next quilt is an "Around the World" which Erica dates it possibly the 1920s, although some of the patterns are much earlier. There is cheddar type material and some double pink from 1880s. It also has Indigo and Victorian shirting.

 

I don’t make it easy to contact me. My email is often hidden, missing or obfuscated. I still get about 300 spam messages a day in my gmail spam folder, which I have to check just in case.

I just checked my spam and found a message from someone who likes my Craigslist telecommute job search at my site Gthread.com.

Marianne wrote:

I love you Keith P Graham! Ok not literally, but this search form rules!!! If I get the job I want from this experience I’ll name something of importance (to me) after you. :-) You get good karma points.

http://www.gthread.com/craigslist_search/

Programmers don’t get that much respect. Mostly because there is always something wrong with out code. It is nice to hear something nice for a change.

John moved up to Nyack from the city. He’s down on lower Depew ave. Here is his new apartment. $1,000 a month – ouch. That’s Robert on the porch. Robert is growing a Santa Clause beard.

John is often confused with a hung over David Duchovny.

He has two very fat cats named Bogey and Mingus, who were not interested in posing for the camera.

Mingus jumped on the table to see what Poker was all about. I caught John with a weird expression on his face.

After poker Jim rode back to Birchwood Avenue on his Vespa.

I lost money at Poker. I did not have a good hand all night.

Space Vikings was serialized in Analog in 1962-63. Piper committed suicide not long afterwards. Piper, as far as I can tell, was not considered to be more than a hack writer in his own time, but has recently risen to the ranks of a truly unique and respected writer from the golden age. He wrote stories an novels from 1947 to 1963.

Piper wrote a series of future history novels, which could be classified as military SF. Space Vikings is one of these. It reads like an historical novel and is probably similar to the mainstream historical novels of the time. Although it is Science Fiction, there is nothing in the story that would prevent it from being set as a real Viking novel or even reset in any time or place. The plot is a good one where a man is nearly killed and his wife murdered by a madman who is insanely jealous. The man joins with free-booting space Vikings, a loosely organized group of planets that survive by trade as well as raiding weaker systems.

The story is the rise of the Space Viking from an educated nobleman to a ruthless Leader of men and his search for the man who killed his true love. Along the way there is plenty of politics, action and a love affair with a beautiful princess.

Piper’s writing is energetic and clear. He is easy to read and understand and yet his plots are full of unexpected twists and turns with rich characterizations. The story is a swashbuckler with lots of blood running down the scuppers. I enjoyed it much more than the endless and plodding Honor Harrington Books, even though they have much in common.

More interesting is Beam’s philosophy, which he includes from time to time. Beam was a gun enthusiast (he killed himself with one of his own weapons), and he would be characterized as a conservative today. He might have belonged to the John Birch society, as far as I can tell from his writings, but it is never obnoxious, strident or even illogical.

Here is an example from the book (page 151):

Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don’t understand civilization and wouldn’t understand if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don’t appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is a something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what the can understand of it – luxuries, a high standard of living, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?

In spite of the run-on sentence, you have to tend to agree with Piper on this. Piper has some valid points. It is a central theme of the book that Piper doesn’t much like Democracy. He says that it is full of bugs and we need to spend more time getting the bugs out before we put our faith in it. He points out that Hitler rose to power by using a democracy, but got rid of it as soon as possible.

My poker buddy’s daughter, the actress Stella Maeve, has been cast on a TV show. This is NOT a show I’ll be watching soon, but it is a great thing for her.

Stella has been doing commercials, episodes of Law and Order, and lately a bunch of movies. I’ve known her since she was knee high to a grasshopper.

Gossip Girl is about a mysterious blogger who seems to know all about a group of women and their loves, lives and secrets. I guess the blogger is a kind of narrator to a soap opera who moves the plot along by dropping information on her blog, and is secretly one of the characters.

Four or five times a year one of my friends will contract a computer virus and ask me about virus protection. I’ve tried the open source virus scans, but I much prefer Symantec or McAfee. You can usually pick up either of these very cheaply because they make their money by selling a subscription. The package is good for three months and then you have to pay.

Here is one of those opportunities to get a virus scanner for cheap ($7), even if it runs out in a few months.

The problem now is that these friends are busy surfing porn sites and acquiring various fleas, bugs and viri, and they aren’t reading my blog.

McAfee VirusScan Plus – PC – VSF08EMB1RAA – Buy.com

Baron Phillipe Rothschild once said that the time to buy was “when there is blood in the streets.”

Well, then it is time to buy.

Jim was asking about investing in small quantities of stock.

DRIPS, or direct reinvestment plans, are plans run by companies that allow their stockholders to invest in stock directly without having to have a brokerage account or pay fees. You don’t have to buy a position or a round lot. Some of these let you buy fractional shares, so you can add $10 to your drip at any time. Every DRIP has a different set of rules. Some of them require that you already own at least one share of stock.

Not all companies offer DRIPs, but there are thousands of them that do, and many of the large cap stocks can be purchased through a DRIP.

You can’t time things as well and it seems impossible to buy in the dip or sell at a peak, but that is made up for by not having to pay any brokerage fees.

The link to DirectInvesting.com is a good one. They don’t sell or even recommend stocks. They just maintain a list of the companies that offer DRIPs with good instructions on how to get into the plans.

Now that Bush has officially pushed the US economy into a toilet, there will be good chances to buy stock in the next year or so. Keep a tabs on the stocks you like and remember to buy when you are at least knee deep in blood.

I don’t use the new Blogger templates because I have worked hard creating my own templates and I host them on my own domains and not blogspot.com. Blogger has some interesting widgets that are not available to me. One of them, Blogger Following, is an interesting social sort of device that allows readers to follow a blog. By following a blog you can get some interesting benefits, such as having your picture displayed (it is, after all, a social feature). You can integrate your followed blogs into iGoogle and google feeds so you can read blogs without actually having to click all of the different urls.

I thought that it was a shame that this functionality was denied me, so I decided to do a little reverse engineering. I discovered that I could add a "Follow My Blog" link and a "Show Followers" link quite easily. Counting the actual number of followers and displaying their pictures on my blog was a little further than I wanted to go, although it would be doable. I am just not interested in staring at you silly faces every time I check my blog.

Here is the (very) simple html links to add anywhere on your blog. The blog id is mine, so make sure that you go to blogger.com and check your blog id before adding these links to your web page.

<a href="http://www.blogger.com/follow-blog.g?blogID=5695891" target="_blank" style="font-size:x-small">follow this blog</a>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/followers.g?blogID=5695891&amp;blogTitle=Wandering" style="font-size:x-small">see followers</a>

Copy the two lines above and paste them into your html. Change 5695891 to your blog id and "Bob’s your Uncle".

---

Now, if you have a blogger blog, please follow my blog by clicking the link on my menu line. You can un-follow me later, but I’d like to see how it works. I’ll click on your blog and follow you for a bit. It is also nice to see if people actually read these techno-geek posts of mine.

---

The Internet is quiet – too quite. No sales, no email, no blog entries, no twittering, no interesting news other than Lehman’s demise and Patricia N-H’s heart attack. This is a little frightening.

Speaking of Lehman’s bankruptcy. This is a major disaster and marks yet another drop in the economy. All my stocks are down and the DJIA is down nearly 300 as I write. This should have been no surprise to traders, yet they act like it is news. (I have been intending to sell my IBM stock for a couple of months. I even filled out the form. I should have mailed it in three weeks ago. Now I have to take a hit if I sell it.)

The stock market is tanking, but, as I read recently in the Marlowe book, The economy is like the climate, the stock market is like the weather. Dips in the market are only fronts moving across the terrain. The general climate of the economy, however, is more like an ice age approaching.

I have interviewed for jobs several times at Merrill Lynch, but I always wanted more money than they were willing to pay. I don’t prostitute my programming talents cheaply. I am glad now that I didn’t take the jobs as they have been bought out by Bank America. Soon all of the Merrill Lynch programming, network and other support jobs will be moved to Raleigh Durham (the land of my birth). That means that probably by January, several thousand desperate unemployed programmers will be competing for the handful of programming jobs left in New York that didn’t go to India or China. (Right now, I bet, they are being told that their jobs are safe – yeah right.)

The job market for programmers looks bleak in the near future. Retirement may be sooner than I thought, whether I like it or not.

I bought The Psychology of Murder last Saturday for 50¢ at an Estate Sale. It was published in translation from the original Swedish in 1927 and the book first appeared in 1907. It is a discussion of the psychology of several criminals who have been sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden for murder. I bought it because of the provocative title. (I have an older blue binding. The version in the image is a later printing.)

I’ve done a little research and found that in general Bjerre was not taken very seriously by psychology. His method of extensively interviewing inmates and inferring basic motivations does not seem to merit any real consideration. The results are heavily filtered through Bjerre’s own prejudices and sensibilities. Freudians, especially, seem to have a hard time with him.

Since controversies in psychology are a little beyond my own interests, I have approached the book as a work of fiction. The characters in the book are Bjerre’s own personality, constantly recording, evaluating and judging the murderers and the murders themselves who are sad cases in their own way, pitiable, but extremely narcissistic. There is endless grist for the novelistic mill here.

The Psychology of Murder is divided into three sections: Self Deception, Anguished Fear, and Shamming. I’ve only read through about 60 pages, but I think that each of these sections is devoted to a single criminal. Bjerre discusses the background of the cases and then goes on to reveal the criminal’s perceptions of the crimes. He spends much time in the criminal’s reaction to imprisonment and how the criminal perceives his own guilt of innocence. Particularly interesting was the first criminal’s adoption of religion while in solitary confinement and his immediate rejection of religion when integrated with the general prison population. This says reams more about Bjerre’s opinion on religion than the inmate’s.

The translation is stiff and sometimes difficult to read and heavily formal, as are many translations. I feel that is loses some of the personality of the author, but not being able to read the original Swedish, I can’t say for sure. There is practically no separating of text into paragraphs. Page after page goes on with smoothly justified words and no break. This forces me to read every word, and not every word needs reading in this. I will read some more on the way home tonight, but tomorrow I may decide that I’ve had enough.

I can see this a film – The Psychology of Murder, three short films on the secret lives of the criminally insane. Any one of the three profiles of murderers would form a good basis for a screenplay. Treated as fiction, these episodes and analysis seem to take on a more interesting life. Treated as just documentation of depravity, they are just depressing.

Here is an example from page 64 about the criminal chosen to represent Anguished Fear:

The individual who seems to me most typical of this group of criminals first attempted to poison his fiancée when she became pregnant as a consequence of their connection, and subsequently murdered her immediately after intercourse.

A steal at about $500k. I don’t think we can swing the deal, but it is tempting. It has a summer income of $2,500 a week. I’ve been to this beach and rode around. I’ve probably seen the house.

As an investment, the thing pays for itself, so there would be no cash outlay beyond the down payment. The real estate slump should be over by summer 2010 and then I could consider flipping it to a more permanent home. In the mean time, I would have a place to spend the month of May and October – the rest of the year I would just collect rent.

Southern Maine Seaside Retreat – eBay (item 110283829914 end time Sep-26-08 04:53:12 PDT)

The Ultimate Weapon (1936) is a very short novel, originally from Amazing Stories Magazine. I don’t think it makes 40,000 words. I read most of it on the way into work this morning.

At the time that this was written, writers like Doc Smith, Fletcher Pratt and John W. Campbell, jr. were trying to break Science Fiction out of gadget fiction and make it something more. SF for a long time was included in amateur science and electronics magazines as an extra entertaining feature and was written to appeal to the readers of those magazines. They were fiction about gadgets and not fiction about people. Hugo Gernsback made his living bring SF to a new audience, but in 1936, Amazing Stories still specialized in gadget fiction. Either that was what people read, what Gernsback liked, or the only thing that writers then were writing.

The Ultimate Weapon, however, is just a gadget story. A young, handsome, incredibly rich, genius slacker manages to survive an attack by aliens and in a matter of weeks single handedly invents the ultimate power source, the ultimate weapon, and the ultimate space ship. At least a quarter of the text is technical jargon. He beats the aliens by simply doing what any super genius American would do. End of story.

Campbell wrote this kind of story all through the 1930s. They are short, easy to read and mildly enjoyable. I find his sentence level style annoying. It is full of all kinds of structures that force me to read them twice to get the meaning. There are no women and no three dimensional characters. It’s all technology. There are never any real problems to overcome, just the defeat of the aliens. I find myself feeling sorry for the aliens. The deck is heavily stacked against them.

My Favorite Author. Red Blooded Americans fighting Brain-Stealing alien slugs. No moral ambiguity. No Social Significance. Yankee ingenuity and a good strong right to the jaw is all that is needed to defeat the evil aliens.

This is my kind of science fiction. I could read a book like this every day for the rest of my life.

The Brain-Stealers: About 60,000 words. 1947.

Finished in one day. Lately I’ve been reading about 80 pages an hour.  I have to slow down, I think, and enjoy the experience more.

The Crotchety Old Fan: No, Not me. I found his blog. He documents pulp and golden age SF. He spends much more time on it than I.

Today’s post was about flags as a motif on pulp covers. There are some good ones!

The Crotchety Old Fan

I just received an email from my friend Kochumman Geevarghese wishing me a Happy Onam.

Onam Festival
Onam is the biggest festival in the Indian state of Kerala. Onam Festival falls during the Malayali month of Chingam (Aug – Sep) and marks the homecoming of legendary King Mahabali. Carnival of Onam lasts for ten days and brings out the best of Kerala culture and tradition. Intricately decorated Pookalam, ambrosial Onasadya, breathtaking Snake Boat Race and exotic Kaikottikali dance are some of the most remarkable features of Onam – the harvest festival in Kerala.