Cats in Snow

I was testing Erica's new camera. It is a very nice Kodak that Justine gave her. The cats were scampering in the snow. Of course, the only photogenic cat is Gracie. The other cats disappeared into the jungle, but Gracie chased snow mice and had a good time. The temperature is above freezing in these pictures so the snow is coming down in clumps as big as golf balls. The pictures with a blue border have a larger image, so click on them.

Snow pictures:


Cute cat pictures:

Static Movement Online is online

Chris Bartholomew has brought out the first edition of Static Movement Online. This is much more difficult that you might imagine and Chris deserves a few weeks of deep sleep to recover. I will raise a glass of champagne this evening and toast her.
I have a couple of stories in the zine, as does Arthur and a bunch of the AstoundingTales crowd. It has a few of the AnotheRealm.com people so in the ezine taxonomy, Static Movement falls under the classification of Another Realm type zines.
I did the flash banner at the top. I found a swf file from a free templates place and managed to hack it. I think one of my new years resolutions will be to become a flash guru. I did the image at left by taking an image that Chris already had and applying a few filters in Paint Shop Pro, not really creative, but still pretty good for the site. I did the home page template, but Chris has recreated it in a variety of modes and styles throughout the site so not much of the original remains. The mistake in the page titles is mine and she never caught it. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Chesley Bonestell part 2

The rest of Mr. Smith Goes to Venus.

Tales of Talisman Magazine

Tales of the Talisman 1.3 is available at Project Pulp. It has my story The Last Big Herd. I have not yet received my contributor copies, but I will report on it when I get them.

Poker Tonight

After weeks of cancellations, tonight I will be playing poker at Jim's house in Nyack. If anyone hits this blog because they are looking for poker in Nyack, be forewarned that we play a very strange game, evolved by Jim and I over 30 years of playing. You can read about the Game of Games, Hot Tuna at AstoundingTales.com.

If you want a game with the complexity of bridge, the intellectual challenge of chess, and the danger of bull fighting then try Hot Tuna!

Buy-in is $6. If you loose more than $10, then you've had too much of Jim's vodka. Warning: we play music by the group Hot Tuna and we only play Vinyl records so if you want to listen to something else, then bring your old records along.

Stories, tapes and rejects.

I wrote most of chapter 14 of Fumets. It is not coming easy. This and the next chapter are fighting back. I need an extra chapter to separate them and I am not sure how to do it.

I got back a reject from OSG IGMS 62 days. They are getting way behind in slush.

Baen on the other hand has a two day or even less turn around, so I re-wrote the rejected story, adding a spare character to the action mix to make it more interesting, and I shipped it off to Baen. It's hard SF with military action so there if they reject it, this story goes into the trunk. There ain't no other markets for it.

I finished three books on tape by Richard Marcinko. I wish I could cuss like that man. The plots were so heavily abridged that I had no idea what was going on in any of the books, but I still like them. I am about half way through writing a SEALS in space story inspired by the Rogue Warrior books, but without the profanity. I know better than to even try to emulate such an artist.

I am currently listening to Arthur C. Clark's 2061 on tape. It is so abridged that I can't follow the plot. I did not read any of the previous books, so I am mostly lost. I always get these Clark tapes, heavily abridged, and always third of fourth in a series. I didn't like the Rama book, or the Childhood's End sequel, and I don't like this. I liked Clark when I read him back in the 1960s. I wish I could find an audio version of Tales of the White Hart.

The interesting thing about the 2001 series of books is that the name of character Heywood Floyd, is the same name as a character in of one of the H. Rider Haggard novels, although I can't remember which one. Heywood Floyd was also used as a dime novel hero emulated in the long dead TV show The Gold Monkey.

One Billion Internet Users

Some time in 2005 the internet exceded one billion people online. Jakob Nielson discussed this in his Alert Box blog. If you read the article, the majority of internet users are not from the US, but from Asia, followed by European users. The USA is falling further and further behind in getting hooked into the networks. You can view the slides of a talk on Global Technology/Internet Trends from Morgan Stanley.
Why do I care? I want to retire on revenue from the internet and all I need is support from 0.000025% of these people checking out my websites. My website stats are at about 25,000 page views a day, lately. I need that to go up an order of magnitude or so in order to retire. Any ideas? Anyone?

Sand Storm in Iraq: April 26, 2005

Check out this sandstorm. It makes Frank Herbert's Dune a little more real.

Chesley Bonestell

I was checking through old magazines at an antique store in Cold Springs, NY, looking for old SF magazines, when a cover caught my eye. It read Mr. Smith Goes to Venus. The date was March, 1950. It was Coronet Magazine, which was a cheaper simpler version of the Saturday Evening Post or Readers Digest. Later, I think, Coronet would become a sleazy sex magazine.
My curiousity piqued, I opened up and found some marvelous pictures by the famous space artist Chesly Bonestell. Bonestell did art for dozens of Hollywood movies, including Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and Conquest of Space. After 15 mintues of Googling, though, I couldn't find any reference to the Coronet spread.
I am wondering if the text is by Bonestell in this article. It describes a family's trip to Venus. Bonestell did the art work for the movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, hence the title of the piece.
I managed to scan about half the pages before I pooped out. I will try to get the rest of the pages in the next few days.
Click on a picture to see the (very) large version.

There are 10 or so more color images and will get those soon.

More Christmas Cats

I thought that I might show you some of the cat pictures that I took this year. I did not want this blog to degrade into a cute cat pictures gallery, but that ship has sailed. Click on images to get a larger version.

This is Blue. He is a stray that hung around all spring and summer. He was half starved so Erica started feeding him. He now lives in the unfinished room off the kitchen. He is a beautiful blue longhair, but he is feril and will not let anyone touch him. He has his own box and feeding place and has recently learned that the house has windows.


No blog entry would be complete without a shot of Gracie. Here she discovers that Christmas trees have water at the base. Oh Boy!


Gracie isn't so sure about this tree thing!


Max keeps an eye on Fafhrd.


Another picture of beautiful Blue.

Christmas Day

I spent this afternoon with my sister-in-law, Justine. THANKS JUSTINE! We went out for dinner at the New York Athletic Club down on Central Park South. Since Justine is one of the three people who read my blog, I have to get the pictures up so she could see. Click on each image to see a larger version.)

This is our tree.


I don't know who these people are!


Very nice wine!


This is how the pumpkin pie was served


This was Justine's dessert.


A view off the balcony


Another, it was raining rather heavily.


That's the Dakota (I think) in the distance.

Central Park in the rain from the 12th floor.


This was the view of Central Park from our table.


And one more cute cat picture of Gracie and Ollie looking for turkey scraps.

Amazing Heroes III

Amazing Heroes III is now available through LuLu.com. It has one of my stories in it. I am worried that the price, $15 plus shipping, is prohibitive. POD publishing will not be really successful until the prices come down.

Lionel Fanthorpe

When I google, I often come across the totally unexpected. This is the page of a British writer, Lionel Fanthorpe. He wrote over 180 very bad novels in the 50s and 60s. During one period he averaged a novel every twelve days!

I was looking for artwork to extend my Christmas Card program, and I thought that lurid pulp covers might be available on the internet. The covers on these pages fit the bill, but most of them were ripped off from american Ace covers for books by P. K. Dick and others.

Space themed Christmas Cards

I am testing a little script that I wrote that sends out Christmas Cards based on some soviet era holiday cards. It works for me, but I am not sure that it is bug free. Please give it a try:
http://www.cthreepo.com/xmas/
This is good for Scienc Fiction Buffs. There are dozens of more cards, but the labor is in cleaning up the soviet symbols and lettering and figuring where to place the message.
If this is popular, I'll start working now on the valentine's day cards!

Too late for Christmas

Here's a CD coming out in January that I think I might buy.

Songs:
1. Flying Saucer Boogie
2. Rocket Boogie
3. Trail Of Haley's Comet
4. Two Little Men In A Flying Saucer
5. Honeymoon On A Rocket Ship
6. Jet Propelled Papa
7. Space Guitar
8. Rocket 88
9. Flip
10. Rockin' With The Rockets
11. Nagasaki
12. Rocket 69
13. Radar Blues
14. Death Ray Boogie
15. Golden Rocket
16. Rocket 88
17. Baby Doll
18. Skyliner

Illo for "Note to Self"

Chris has been working. I was shown my story at Static Movement and it has an illustration by Kevin James Hurtack. My only objection is that is suffers from a pixel resize by the browser. It needs some work in resizing it. I have smoothed the image and then resized it here. It is 1/5 the size and loads much faster and is much clearer. I will send it to Chris.
Chris fixed it!

Friday Reject

The Telling bounced from Tales of Talisman - only 4 days. They wrote:

This was actually quite a strong contender. I felt the science and the concept were interesting.

I have a feeling that when I changed the sex of the protagonist, the sexual dynamics between the characters turned off the editor. I should change the character back to a man so as not to confuse the reader. I thought confusion would go over big at SH, Ideomancer, and A&A, but none of them bought into it.
I still think that this is strong story. It's back to www.ralan.com - I'm not ready to send it Space Squid just yet. It may be strong enough to get a "nice writing, but" from JJA, but I don't like going to the post office and waiting in line.
On the plus side, I wrote a 4k cyberpunk-ish story yesterday. I have to go back and make the tech understandable to average readers. I hate dumbing down my stories so that goofy editors can understand them. There should be a zine exclusively for readers who have finished at least some college, passed calculus, and can program in at least one language. What is that Heinlein quote about math?

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.

I mostly agree, although my non-math friends do have endearing qualities.

---

As long as I am blogging I can complain about my bad foot. I am in much pain. In addition, favoring my foot has thrown my knee out again and I have trouble walking. I was in the mall across from where I work at lunch time trying to Christmas shop. A fight broke out between some older teenagers and I could not hobble out of the way fast enough. A large kid stepped hard on my bad foot. He was wrestling with another kid at the time and we all went down. I have a large bruise on one side of my foot and the original damage is on the other side. I have to climb 8 flights of stairs in the parking garage to get to the truck when I knock off tonight and I hope that I can make it without calling a taxi.

blonde Joke (through incurable hippie's musings and rants)

You have to follow quite a few links, but the blonde joke is good.

Keep The Coffee Coming

Get some great Folk and Christmas MP3 files here. I've listened to the Bill Staines song twice now. I like folk quite a bit and I've never heard this guy before.
Keep The Coffee Coming
There are alot of old Christmas carols at falalalalala.com.

Static Movement Online

Chris Bartholomew and some of her friends is starting up a new zine called Static Movement. They've had some radical personnel changes and she got stuck without a webmaster. Since they bought one of my stories, I thought it best to insure that the zine gets out on by January 1. I spent a little time to redesign the site so that it will be easy for them to modify. I added a little css, ssi, and a flash banner. You can see the results at http://www.staticmovementonline.com/.
I hope to get them self sufficient soon and they can have fun with the zine without worrying about the techy stuff too much. If they ever find a permanent webmaster I am sure that he will tear my html out and do it himself.
I am afraid that the site is a little simplistic, but simple is good. It is a jumping off site. The original site was done with frames and worked well enough, but it was a little complex for what the site needed to do. I dumbed it down to nice simple pages and provided a template for growth.

Abyss and Apex

The last time I submitted to A&A I got no response from them and eventually withdrew the story. I waited over a year before submitting another story to A&A, but it happened again. I queried and got nothing. I used Aleta's email and she said she'd look into it. I had my hopes up because 35 days is good news when everyone else is rejected inside of a week. Now it looks like another big R for my subscription matrix and I'll have to look for another place to send The Telling. Hard SF anyone? Reader must be aware that almost every planet out there will have higher or lower gravity than earth. Reader must know what a Red Giant star is. Reader must not be thrown when I use the term tidal lock. Reader must be aware that an alternative mode of intelligence could be a hive mind.
Update: It's final - a reject. The usual at A&A and other "soft" sites - too much talk about the science. I tell stories from a masculine left brain viewpoint. I tried a trick to get around it by changing the gender of the protagonist, but I couldn't slip it by them.

Christmas Tree time

Erica and I went upstate to the Battenkill tree farm up near Red Hook, New York. It's about 75 miles from the house, but it's a different world. I did this five years in a row with my Dad. Two years ago he was so sick with cancer that he couldn't get out of the car, but he never complained. I love going up and cutting the tree and I think it's great getting a tree that you know wasn't harvested a month ago. The tree is guaranteed to be fresh. It's a sad time, though, because of the memories of my Dad.

Erica took this video of me cutting down the tree. The day was so bright that you could not see the image in the little LCD display so the image is shaky.
Here are some of the pictures of the tree farm. Click on a picture to get a large size image (suitable for descktop wallpaper).

Philly Trip

I went to Philly today, but I left late and decided not to stop by Philcon.

I went down to South Street and did some Christmas shopping. The line out of Jim's Steaks was so long that I never did get any cheese steaks. South Street has changed a little since the last time I was there. Zipper Head is gone. The Used book store with all the cats is gone and the retired surfer bar is no more. I did stop at Bluebond guitars and Society Hill Pawn, as well as The Record Exhange.

I explored the Indigo Gallery. I always want to buy something, but it doesn't really go with my house, no matter how eclectic my decore is, Indigo is a little too much. I love exploring. I took some pictures with the crappy little pocket camera. The colors are really much more vivid.

Mark Hecker

My old friend Mark Hecker died last Wednesday. Mark was an artist who worked with me at Lockheed. He did web design and if you remember seeing banner ads from the late 1990s then you remember Mark. He produced thousands of them. Mark was also the art director for National Lampoon Magazine and Hustler Magazine. He had an incredible collection of images that wound up on the cutting room floor at Hustler.
Mark was one of smartest, wittiest and nicest guys that I ever worked with. In recent years we have grown apart.
The last time I saw him, he showed me pictures of the little girl that he and his wife had adopted from China. She was beautiful and smart and Mark loved her very much. I hate wakes and funerals. It will be painful to go to this one.
Click on the link above and check out his portfolio.

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley passed away this morning.

Charles Dickens, Mr. Micawber and Spam

I have been receiving spam with something like the following:

In due time, Mr. Micawber's petition was ripe for hearing; and that gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act, to my great joy. His creditors were not implacable; and Mrs. Micawber informed me that even the revengeful boot-maker had declared in open court that he bore him no malice, but that when money was owing to him he liked to be paid. He said he thought it was human nature.

Why spammers should think that Dickens should make good spam text is beyond me. I've had at least 50 like this over the last month or so. Each has the text and each has an image that my spam guard kindly blocks.
Things like this is why I sometimes think that I will never understand anything. All I can do is watch the world go by in wonderment.

Man plunges to his death from Galleria garage

Last year a woman was murdered 30 feet from where I park my truck at work. This year someone jumps. He might have used the bumper on the truck to climb up on the wall, it was that close. I didn't see it happen, but all of a sudden there were many police and a dead kid on the sidewalk right outside my office window.
The holiday season is tough on some people. It will be worse for this poor soul's friends and relatives. I use the Galleria garage to park because, as a consultant, I am not allowed to use the employee parking lot. I will park on the other side of the lot for a while and try not to look over in that direction.
Man plunges to his death from Galleria garage

The Atomic Genie

My story is up at Fifth Di... They have this early 1990s approach to HTML. Their site needs a makeover to get into the 21st century before it's over. This is the Young Adult version of the story God in a Bottle that was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's story The Bottle Imp.
I mailed off submissions to Static Movement and Book of Dark Wisdom, the later story was Speed Trap and I expect a rejection some time in May. BODW is a very slow market, but I've run out of fast markets for this story. Speed Trap is now my favorite story and it is still homeless after too many tries. On the other hand, I expect a reply from Static Movement any minute now, as they are a new market and have set a fairly restrictive theme for their first issue. They got Note to Self, which is yet-another-time-travel-paradox story. (A reader from ASIM actually called it that.)

Snowy Sunday Afternoon

I walked around the yard this morning and took a few pictures. We had about an inch and a half of snow here in West Nyack. Just enough to annoy cats. West Nyack Snow Pictures.

The Ghost of Nyack

I use MyBlogLog.com to watch who's hitting my blogs and I found someone searching for Nyack Ghosts. I don't know how they hit my page, but I did a little digging and found that there is a web page about the Nyack Haunted House.
The funny thing is that my friend Eric lives 4 houses up the street on Laveta Place and that Erica and I lived behind the house for a couple of years on Tallman Place. Erica and I used to walk the cats through this house's back yard.
All victorian houses are haunted. I have pictures somewhere of the cats on a leash.

AstoundMe.com : CafePress.com

I am writing a story about a mousepad that communicates with dead spirits. Stupid idea that's probably been done a few times, but I made a Ouija Board Mouse Pad at Cafe Press just for the story.

I have a P.K. Dick T-shirt on the page also.