So I was just listening to episode 213 of Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and one of the hosts, Dr. Steven Novella, starts talking about caffeine. Wow, I had figured that caffeine probably wasn’t great for you, but I didn’t realize it was also so useless (apparently). I think some of my friends really ought to hear this (you know who you are):

What caffeine does is it binds to the receptor for a neurotransmitter called adenocine, and it is an antagonist, that means it binds and blocks a receptor that normally has a calming or inhibitory effect, so therefore it has a stimulatory effect. What happens though is that by blocking these receptors your body just makes more of them. That’s called “upregulation.” So your body will upregulate the adenocine receptors to compensate for the fact that caffeine is blocking some of them, and that then reestablishes the previous equilibrium. Then with the caffeine it just puts you into the normal range. If you upregulate those receptors and then you take away the caffeine, well then of course you’re going to have too much inhibition, that’s when you’ll be sleepy and have trouble thinking, and you will “crash,” and then you need to dose yourself with caffeine just to get yourself back up to normal. Even after a few weeks of using caffeine, all you’re really accomplishing from that point forward is using it just to put yourself into a normal state, so you’re not really getting much of a boost out of it, you’re just crashing when you’re not using it, so it’s actually not that advantageous as a long term strategy. [Edited for space]

A quick anecdote related to the current health care debate: When my friend Adam came to the US from the UK, his dad instructed him, “If you start feeling seriously ill, have someone drive you to the airport and buy a ticket on the next plane home. I don’t care how much it costs. Under no circumstances allow yourself to be admitted to an American hospital.”

The Geeks Are Sexy blog has an article titled Top 5 Places to Get Free Science Fiction Online, which lists a bunch of recommended stories, including my story “Save Me Plz.”

One of the other articles on Geeks Are Sexy brought to my attention the following music video, “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?,” featuring Felicia Day and the cast of her independent webshow The Guild, about online gamers. Apparently this video is #2 on YouTube, and Joss Whedon has put out a call to all geeks to watch it, in order to bump it up to #1 and depose Taylor Swift.

There’s now a website for the forthcoming anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, which features a mix of mystery stories and fantasy & science fiction stories. I’m listed as a “contributing editor” for this book, as I performed various miscellaneous editorial duties, including writing the cover copy and writing all the “color commentary” sections of the story intros. You can read all those intros by clicking on the individual story titles over on the Table of Contents page. Here are a few of the sections I wrote:

For H. Paul Jeffers’ “Adventure of the Mummy’s Curse”:

“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.” This inscription was supposedly found carved on a stone tablet by British explorers Howard Carter and George Herbert when they opened the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamun. It’s said that when the men entered the tomb, all the lights in Cairo went out and Herbert’s three-legged dog dropped dead. Herbert himself soon followed, felled by a mosquito bite. Carter’s pet canary was also killed, in a freak cobra accident, and before long two dozen members of the expedition had died under mysterious circumstances, victims of the mummy’s curse. Or that’s the story anyway. Numerous explanations have been advanced to explain the misfortune that befell the expedition. In 1986 Dr. Caroline Stenger-Phillip proposed the intriguing notion that the explorers had been sickened by exposure to mold and bacteria that had been preserved in the hermetically sealed tomb. However, a 2002 statistical analysis in the British Medical Journal concluded that members of the expedition had not in fact died significantly faster than the general population. The “curse” was a media myth, albeit one that’s inspired a lot of great entertainment, including our next tale.

For Dominic Green’s “Adventure of the Lost World”:

When Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty toppled to their deaths from Reichenbach Falls, the reading public was outraged. People loved Sherlock Holmes, and just didn’t want to accept that he was dead. People have had much the same feeling about dinosaurs, ever since the first dinosaur fossils were widely exhibited in the early nineteenth century. Dinosaurs were just so great, so awe-inspiring, so fun, that people didn’t want to believe that the dinosaurs were all dead, and novelists fed this hunger. Maybe there were dinosaurs in South America. Maybe at the North Pole. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, wrote one of the best-known of these dinosaur romps, called The Lost World. As exploration foreclosed these possibilities, dino-loving authors resorted to increasingly desperate ploys. Maybe there were dinosaurs inside the Earth. Maybe you could clone dinosaurs from dino blood found in amber-encrusted mosquitoes. Sadly, the Earth has turned out to be depressingly un-hollow, and there’s not much chance of genetic material hanging around for sixty-five million years. This next tale takes us back to a simpler, happier time, when one could more easily imagine gigantic, blood-crazed lizards haunting the forests of the night.

For Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery”:

If you were to ask readers what makes Sherlock Holmes such an intriguing character, many people would probably answer that it’s what he knows — his encyclopedic knowledge of mud stains, handwriting, postmarks, poisons, etc. Holmes’s intellect is certainly captivating, and often we can only gape in awe, as Watson does, at the great detective’s recall of some obscure fact. Who doesn’t fantasize about having a mind so well honed? But when you think about it, what really makes Holmes so fascinating is not just what he knows, but also what he doesn’t know. A character who always knows everything would be a bit dull and predictable. Holmes is such a genius that it sometimes seems that he knows everything, but we often forget that Holmes is able to recall so much information relating to detective work because he has purposely remained ignorant about so much else. In “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes claims not to know that the Earth orbits the sun, because that fact does not directly relate to solving crimes. Fascinating. Our next adventure, which involves a lady, a house, and a curse, takes Holmes deep into one of those territories about which he still has much to learn.

Ha. Here’s my cousin Teddy’s new LJ icon:

Today on the train I saw this sticker:

Terrific trailer for an upcoming film called Creation about Charles Darwin’s internal struggle over whether to publish On the Origin of Species.

I love Paul Bettany, who did a fantastic job in Master and Commander in a very Darwin-esque role. I’m looking forward to seeing Creation some time, though it looks like right now it only has UK distribution.

Are you at Confluence right now? If so, come watch me stage a guerrilla reading of my short story “The Skull-Faced City,” a sequel to my zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy.” 10:30 p.m. tonight (Friday) in Willow-LL.

I’ll be away from New York from the 15th through the 26th for Alpha and Confluence, so please postpone anything fun until after I get back. Thanks.

Here’s Roger Zelazny telling a few funny anecdotes about Philip K. Dick, from Zelazny’s essay “A Burnt-Out Case?,” which appears in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain:

On collaborating with Philip K. Dick on their novel Deus Irae:

    Before I had undertaken this entire collaboration with Phil, I decided I … would learn to write like Phil Dick … I felt that I achieved this; I believe that I can write exactly like Phil Dick if I want to.
    But I chose, for my sections of the book, not to use that style. I chose a kind of meta-style, halfway between that and my own style, so my sections would be different enough from Phil’s sections so the book would have a different tone to it.
    As I was writing like this over the years, I said to myself, “It’s a shame to be able to write just like Phil Dick … and not do it, at least just once.” So in one scene I plotted it just exactly the way I thought Phil would plot it. I wrote it in Phil’s style exactly, and then the other themes in that section I wrote in the other style. I sent the entire batch of manuscripts off to him, waited a while, and received a letter back, “Roger, that was very good material you sent along, but this one scene you’ve written is sheer genius.”

On missing a Philip K. Dick lecture at a convention in France:

    A little later another fellow came in and … said, “Well, in the lecture he said that there are many parallel time tracks and we are on the wrong one, because of the fact that God and the Devil are playing a game of chess, and every time one makes a move it reprograms us to a different time track, and that whenever Phil Dick writes a book it switches us back to the proper track. Could you care to comment on this?”
    I begged off. A little later, Phil came into the store to sign some books and sat down beside me at the table. When I had a free moment, I leaned over and said, “Phil, what the hell did you talk about this afternoon?”
    Phil said, “I don’t know. It was the strangest thing. You know, I don’t speak French, so I was asked to write out my talk. I provided a copy of my talk and then the fellow translated it into French. I was to read a paragraph and then he was to read a paragraph, and so on. Right before I was to go on, they told me that the talk had to be cut by twenty minutes. So I went through crossing out paragraphs, and so did the translator, but we got mixed up along the way, and he crossed out all the wrong paragraphs. So I don’t know what I said.”

On hanging out with Philip K. Dick at a party:

    Phil said, “I have this book, A Scanner Darkly. I have these characters who have been on hard drugs for a long time, and they’re burnt out cases. I wanted to choose a scene which exemplified the extent of their mental deterioration. I had them attempting to figure out the functioning of the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle.” (Phil always chooses good examples for things.)
    So he had written this up and indicated that they were wrong, because this is how the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle really works. His editor called him: “Phil … A funny thing in this manuscript of yours. I happen to own a ten-speed bicycle. I went out and looked at the gear shift, and — um … you’ve got it wrong yourself.”

The Daily Show‘s John Hodgman interrogates President Obama on his geek cred at the TV & Radio Correspondents’ Dinner.

My favorite line: “The Constitution is perhaps the most geeky document of all time. It is essentially the Frequently Asked Questions list of the United States, that was written by moneyed, sickly, bookish, bifocal-wearing nerds who believed that God was a distant, uncaring Dungeon Master.”

Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel on MSNBC:

Rachel Maddow: Are we likely to see the amount of video that we’re getting of what’s happening in Iran decline over the next few days as Western sources are kicked out?

Richard Engel: That will to some degree happen, but what the Iranian crackdown is — it’s very old-fashioned — they want to control the media so they’re cutting off phones and they’re kicking out established reporters and harassing reporters. That’s a very, if you will, 1980s, 1990s way of a media crackdown. It has not helped them control the information war. Already online if you look on sites like YouTube there’s more than 3,500 videos that have been posted by demonstrators — that’s videos — plus tens of thousands of pictures, in addition to all the information that they’re exchanging on sites like Twitter … And this is the class of people that are much more savvy. The Revolutionary Guards, and the establishment of the state, it’s not really a very technologically savvy group, versus the students, the intellectuals, the moderates, the … the geeks, if you will.

Rachel Maddow: Yay for the geeks! The revolutionary geeks.

Tonight I caught a screening of the new sci-fi flick Moon (which featured a Q&A with director Duncan Jones).

Moon stars Sam Rockwell as the lone inhabitant of a lunar station who’s just wrapping up an arduous three-year contract when weird stuff starts happening to him. The movie is well-done and enjoyable, but nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. I also had a lot of scientific/plausibility issues. On the other hand, Sam Rockwell gives a good performance and the visuals are nice, especially considering the budget was only five million.

Okay, here’s a pretty funny YouTube channel: The Irate Gamer.

I particularly recommend his videos about Ghosts & Goblins (the most outrageously, unfairly difficult game ever made; I think I spent about as much time hurling this cartridge against the wall in fury as I did actually playing it — and wait until you see how preposterously cheap the game becomes in its impossible-to-reach final levels), Super Mario Bros. 2 (turns out the reason this game is so different from other Mario titles is because Nintendo just took an existing Japanese game, changed the hero sprites to Mario & friends, and sold it in the US as a Mario game), and E.T. (legendary as the worst video game ever made — it single-handedly destroyed the company Atari, who was forced to bury five million unsold and returned copies of this game in the New Mexico desert).

Over on SciFiWire there’s an article 7 ‘Unfilmable’ Sci-Fi Books —- And the Filmmakers Who Could Adapt Them. In the comments thread, several people suggest a film version of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. I don’t know how many people know this story, but there was a Lord of Light film adaptation in the works at one point. From Wikipedia:

In 1979 it was announced that Lord of Light would be made into a 50 million dollar film. It was planned that the sets for the movie would be made permanent and become the core of a science fiction theme park to be built in Aurora, Colorado. Famed comic-book artist Jack Kirby was even contracted to produce artwork for set design. However, due to legal problems the project was never completed.

Parts of the unmade film project, the script and Kirby’s set designs, were subsequently acquired by the CIA as cover for an exfiltration team posing as Hollywood location scouts in Tehran in order to rescue six US diplomatic staff who escaped the Iranian hostage crisis by virtue of being outside the Embassy building at the time.

There’s an interview on YouTube with one of the CIA men who took part in the operation, and there’s a detailed article about it here.

Jack Kirby’s Concept Art for the Lord of Light Film

Here’s the (beautiful) cover of the first issue of the newly-relaunched Realms of Fantasy magazine.

This is the first issue for which my good buddy Doug Cohen is serving as art director.

So on Tuesday I went and saw China Mieville at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Mieville is one of my favorite writers currently working and also one of the most compelling public speakers I’ve ever seen. I first saw him at ICFA (International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) years ago, and I immediately went out and bought Perdido Street Station, which had just come out. He’s on tour promoting his new novel The City & The City, a surreal police procedural set in a pair of fictional Eastern European cities. Here’s my signed copy:

A year or so ago I started asking authors to use my full name when personalizing books. “David” is such a relentlessly common name that a book signed “For David” could have been signed to — literally — almost anyone, and feels about as personalized as if the author wrote “Dear Sir,” “Occupant,” or “To Whom It May Concern.” (I also harbor a secret hope that someday some author’s going to be like, “Wait, not the David Barr Kirtley?” This never happens though.)

This was the first I’d heard of it, but Union Square Barnes & Noble is doing a series called Upstairs at the Square, where they pair authors such as William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, and Eoin Colfer with musicians I’ve never heard of. The authors read, the musicians play, and then both answer questions. China Mieville was paired with a local band called Japanther. (Their song “The Dirge” is actually starting to grow on me.) You could pretty much tell who in the audience was there to see who. For example, I’m pretty sure that the girl in front of me who was headbanging and constantly giving the band the finger (apparently in an approving way) was there for Japanther.

One of my hobbies is to copy out books by hand into spiral notebooks in order to pay close attention to the word choice, sentence structure, etc. I find it relaxing (it’s a good way to pass time on planes or trains), and it helps get my brain into writer mode, and I often do a lot of productive thinking about my own writing while analyzing someone else’s. I started out with a few of my favorite books, though these days I mostly do “classics,” and I try to pick ones that have a style and voice as different from my own as possible. I just finished copying out Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which took me about two years. Writers sometimes think in terms of “scene” and “summary.” I tend to write almost entirely in “scene,” and One Hundred Years of Solitude is written almost entirely in “summary,” so it was interesting to contrast the two approaches and see what can be done with a more summary-based technique, though I’m forced to conclude that I still find a scene-based approach a lot more engaging. The novel also doesn’t vary much in terms of style, and the same sorts of incidents happen over and over again, so it maybe wasn’t the most exciting book to spend two years reading. (I really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so. After that I got a bit exhausted with it — I think I would’ve been content with a mere 35 years of solitude.) Still, the book does an amazing job of maintaining a mood and atmosphere throughout, and the ending was kinda cool.

Okay, so take a look at this guy:

No, this is not a character from Star Trek. This is an actual guy with a permanent, incurable condition called argyria, which he got from ingesting a substance called colloidal silver, which has no proven medical benefits but which is marketed as an “alternative medicine” treatment for all manner of common ailments. (This guy was taking it for arthritis.) This is all perfectly legal thanks to super-dumbass Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who wrote the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which basically states that as long as you label something a “dietary supplement” and not a “drug” (the majority of such “supplements” are manufactured in Utah), you can basically put anything you want in the bottle and there is no oversight whatsoever. It’s not even required that you accurately list the ingredients. So be very careful about taking dietary supplements. Many of them are scams, and some of them can be very, very dangerous.

For more on distinguishing science from bunk, check out my interview with Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast.

Here are the two latest John Joseph Adams anthologies from Night Shade Books, to be published in August and September respectively.

  

I helped out a bit with these (like, I helped come up with the title for the vampire book), and I’m listed on the title page of the Sherlock Holmes book, for which I wrote a good portion of the supplementary material that accompanies each story: