• 10:50 Just saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. #

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And since I'm terribly impious:



He makes a way better baby Krishna than most of the baby Krishna pictures, anyway.

An original Frank Frazetta painting originally used as the cover to the Lancer paperback edition of Conan the Conqueror sold last week for $1,000,000.

I may not own a Frazetta painting, but I do have his autograph, as you can see below, obtained back in the early '70s when I was an annoying kid with a sketchpad. The sheet below was signed either at the 1971 or 1972 July 4th weekend Phil Seuling Comic-Con. It couldn't have been any earlier because I didn't start doing this until after my first con, and it couldn't have been later because Syd Shores passed away before the '73 convention.

In addition to Shores and Frazetta, you can also see Bruce Jones, Harvey Kurtzman, Jeff Jones, John Putnam, and Jerry DeFuccio below. [Click if you'd like to see the scan at a larger size.]



I know that without a painting attached, the Frazetta signature alone isn't worth $1,000,000, so I'll tell you what—feel free to knock off a zero. Heck, I'll even knock off two.

So who wants to start the bidding?

I discovered that tomorrow is the Michigan vs. Ohio State game. Oops. That means all Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti residents who aren't football freaks will be hostages in our own homes. You can't go anywhere on MvOS day. The highways, streets, stores, and restaurants are clogged all day long. It's good for the local service economy, I suppose, but it's a pain in the neck for the rest of us.

For instance, it meant that I had to go do some grocery shopping tonight. Now. Because it would be impossible on Saturday.

Thanksgiving this year is at my brother's house, and I'm bringing the pies and the piragis (Latvian stuffed rolls). I'm doing all the baking this weekend so it'll be ready to go on Thursday. Headed out to the store to pick up various ingredients and get weekend stuff before the football freaks took over the town.

It turned out a good thing. First, unsalted butter was on huge sale, so I stocked up on that for the holidays. And then I discovered the canned pumpkin shelf was bare.

Uh oh. I remember reading that this year was a bad one for the pumpkin harvest--too much rain--and that pumpkin was in short supply. I asked a clerk, who said an endcap still might have some. I made a beeline for it and found a few cans left, but not many. I snagged what I needed. Whew! If I'd come on Sunday, there'd've been none, I'm sure.

Close call, that.

Budget cuts were finalized yesterday evening.

We're losing $600 per student this year. The school board announced last night that:

--five teachers have lost their jobs effective January 25
--all high school librarian positions have been eliminated
--all info tech positions at the schools have been eliminated (which means at Nameless we'll have 5 computer labs and over 350 computers in the building, but no one who can fix them when something goes wrong)
--many, many secretaries have lost their jobs (including one woman who is one year away from retirement and whose husband is dying of cancer--all medical benefits cease)

In addition to the personnel cuts:

--all but ten computers will be eliminated from the high school libraries
--all subscriptions to research databases (magazines, newspapers, journals, etc.) have been eliminated

And this was just the first round.

Meanwhile, the legislature in Lansing, who is supposed to be figuring out how to fix these problems, has decided to go on vacation for two weeks.

Didn't think I'd be posting another one of these so soon, but I've been on vacation this week, and I've been shopping! :) And look--the covers are color-coordinated! :)



McMann, Lisa: Wake (Borders): I blame this one on Tricia from Damsels in Regress. She's a friend of mine from grad school, and when I saw she was reading this book, I asked her to tell me about it, since I'd seen it before and the cover got my attention. Well, she loved it. So much that I had to pick it up at the store and I read it the same day I got it. The review's coming very, very soon. :)

Lo, Malinda: Ash (Borders): this got my attention when John Scalzi featured it on his "The Big Idea" at Whatever. First off, the cover absolutely grabbed my attention with it's elegant simplicity, but the premise grabbed me too: a re-telling of Cinderella, and it's not your usual love story: Ash falls in love with another woman instead of Prince Charming. Oh yeah, I'm looking forward to this one. :)

Huntley, Amy: The Everafter (Borders): stories from the dead seem to be the popular thing these days (perhaps we have The Lovely Bones to thank for that?), so while the premise alone isn't the most original thing in the world, something about it (the literal shiny objects) coupled with the very lovely cover grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. So I gave in. Because it's pretty.

Armstrong, Kelley: Dime Store Magic (Borders): I wasn't even going to get this, especially since Borders didn't have it on the shelves. But so many of you kept praising Paige Winterborne as a narrator that I decided to give it a shot, and I accidentally found this copy while browsing the SF/F section of the store. I found it, obviously, but in the WRONG part of the alphabet. Guess it was meant to be! Don't know how long it'll take me to read this one (I've got a stack full of UF I'd rather read first), but I'll get there, I promise. :)

Three culinary lessons of the day:

* You can make good pesto out of practically any combination of nuts, greenery and cheese, plus olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. (Okay, I probably wouldn't recommend, e.g., pistachios, beet greens and chipotle cheddar, but nevertheless.) This one? Pecans, parsley, soft cheese from the farmer's market. Mmm. (It's going over pre-prepared butternut squash ravioli.)

* Golden beets are a godsend. They may not have quite as assertively beet-y a taste as regular red beets, but they also don't make me look like I just survived a knife fight.

* Beets and apples roasting in the oven smell awesome.

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Check out this hilarious review of the Twilight Saga's NEW MOON opening night theatrical experience. Holy shit!

Okay, I'm just exaggerating, but it's been brought to my attention that some people prefer "ebooks" to be used to denote books or short stories that are published in electronic form first. Therefore, a digital version of Dan Brown's Same Old Story, Take Five shouldn't be called "ebook", it should be called "digital version" of the dead tree book. Some of these folks who came up with this actually get annoyed when you use "ebook" and "digital version" interchangeably.

Sigh. Is all this even necessary in the first place? It's like vanity versus self publishing. Authors can argue all they want which is which, but in the end, the end result is still the same: books that authors have to sell on their own. Then we have Lulu and Createspace, which fits neither definition as they shove the cost to the reader. Why not just say in clear but simple terms, "Don't pay to play if the self-publisher insists on keeping a cut of the profits even after you have paid them to create and bind your books for you, because that is like buying a car and then being charged for the monthly use of the car?"

It's the same with the endless arguing over what makes an indie writer (or why self-published authors can't call themselves that according to some people) - what is wrong with self-published authors calling themselves indie authors? By telling them what they can or cannot do, these people, most of whom claim to be watchdogs of the publishing community, are just alienating the audience they want to reach out to with their patronizing tone. Why not just say, "Hey, call yourself whatever you want, just let us tell you how to spot a dodgy person wanting to cheat you instead?"

My personal opinion is this: all this wrangling over semantics tend to make a situation even more murky.

Still in progress, but this is far more what Nilu's actually like already:
Happy! Working, and since it's another layer I still have what I did before :)



Also, being able to draw (being able to make anything) is a very good sign. I seem to be pulling out of the scary no-creative-brain slump I had post-WFC. *hoping*

ETA: Here's my final version:




(Gotta be final, though I'm going to play with color balance and try to do a baby-krishna version too, since I managed to accidentally scale down the file I was working on to this size! Oops.)

• 18:54 @neutronjockey And you can make the pointy-toed boot to do it with. #
• 20:55 This will drive your cats insane. RT @BoingBoing Meow Mix bit.ly/3lBL9E #
• 11:58 RT @FakeAPStylebook "Awesome" implies feelings of reverence or fear. Great Cthulhu is awesome, as is the latest Taylor Swift single. #

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Headlines are:
Fantasy or science fiction stories on the theme of music.
£80 per acceptance
Deadline 30 April

Very specific requirements, so check out the guidelines which can be found at www.music-strange-fiction-submissions.info/


Hope to hear from you

Mark

http://walterjonwilliams.blogspot.com/2009/11/so-i-watched-this-week-with-appalled.html

So I watched this week with appalled fascination as Britain's government brought in its Digital Economy Bill, another giant leap forward in the Labour Party's ever-evolving "soft fascism." (And which will probably become law just in time for the Tories to step into office. What joy.) As a blinkered and baffled American, I can't hope to equal the level of anger and vitriol flooding across the

Bad shoulder. Ouchie in a bad way.

Hot chilli noodles (for Chazian values of hot). Ouchie in a good way.

Hot bath (for Chazian etc etc). Also ouchie in a good way.

Two out of three ain't bad.

In other news, wrap your astonished heads around this: a whole evening, a whole literary evening about barnacles, and nobody mentioned the goose. I almost squawked. What were they thinking?

...I seem to have ONCE AGAIN selected a plot which requires writing an epic. Did I learn nothing from last year's story which involved ten duels and an orgy, or the story the year before which required a six-page sex scene featuring bondage, blindfolding, psychoactive drugs, Tiger's Balm, erotic asphyxiation, and spirit possession?

Click here and then click through for the story (on the pictures)

...This is an experiment! But I keep seeing links I'd like to share, and then I don't do it, because I can't write a whole post around them. So instead, linkspam, with comments.

( Linkspam includes: medieval marginalia, publishers behaving badly, race at the movies, Choose Your Own Adventure books, a requiem for the history channel, feminism and the late show industry, sexual assault prevention, adults and children, three Liquid Story Binder tutorials, and recipes )

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