So the other day as I was out on a walk, I noticed a car stopped at a green light after all the other cars had driven on. In the car were two well-dressed elderly women. The driver was talking on her cell phone. It appeared the car had broken down. I wandered over to stand beside the driver side window and waved, and the woman opened a door a bit, and I said, “What’s wrong with your car?” and she said, “It won’t start.” I said, “I could try pushing it around the corner there.” She gave me a blank look and closed the door almost entirely and kept talking on her phone. I couldn’t tell from this whether she wanted my help or not, and I really wasn’t sure what to do. I stood there baffled for a while, then started directing traffic while I tried to decide what to do next. (This intersection is three lanes wide in both directions, and the stopped car was in the middle lane, so it was creating an unbelievable mess as people tried to pull around it on either side.) A guy from the nearby P. F. Chang’s wandered over and called, “You want help pushing it?” (He thought it was my car.) I said, “Uh yeah, that’s what I was just suggesting, but…” He came over and waved at the passenger side window until the woman opened the door a bit. He said, “Hello, ma’am. If you’ll put the car in neutral we’ll push you out of the way here.” Apparently he got the same sort of non-response that I had, and the door closed again. We both stood there, perplexed, trying to figure out what to do. Five minutes passed. Ten. The women in the car still didn’t acknowledge us in any way. Finally the guy tried talking to them again. From where I was standing I couldn’t hear was said. Afterward I said to him, “So what’s the plan?” and he just shook his head and shrugged. He said, “They’re on the phone with AAA.” Finally, after about twenty minutes, some guys from the kitchen came out the first guy was somehow able to convince the women that we were going to push the car, and we pushed it through the intersection and onto the shoulder. As we were walking away I said to the first guy, “So what was going on that whole time?” He was fuming mad and muttered something about how the women had been trying to direct AAA to the intersection, but had been giving completely wrong street names, and he had tried to give them the correct information and then they had started arguing with him and telling him he was wrong, even though he was pointing at the street signs which were plainly visible from the intersection. I don’t know. The whole thing was really weird, and I think it did just sort of leave all of us good samaritans feeling like it was probably a good thing there was no cliff nearby or we might’ve been tempted to just push the car off of it.
Archives for January 2010
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Brian Dunning Interview
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast, Episode 5: Crystal Skulls! Alien Abductions! Bigfootology!
Brian Dunning of Skeptoid joins us as our guest this week. The Skeptoid podcast is one of the most popular science podcasts around, with over 50,000 listeners. Brian joins us to discuss critical thinking and its application in everything from alien abductions to medicine in the movies. Dave and John apply a little critical thinking of their own.
Family Tree Short Story Art Illustration Michael J. DiMotta
Here’s an illustration for my short story “Family Tree” (which will be appearing later this year in the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard):
This was a birthday/Christmas present from my parents. It was done by a staggeringly talented young artist named Michael J. DiMotta, who I picked out after randomly coming across his website. I came up with the basic (triptych) layout, but most of this was all him — the mammoth, baroque design of the tree, the sunset sky, the pyrotechnic magic. Obviously he put an insane amount of work into this thing, but I guess he’s not sick of it yet, because now he’s interested in adapting the story into a graphic novel, which we’re currently pitching to editors.
Here are some details:
Garrett, Elizabeth, Sebastian (baby), Bernard, Simon |
Malcolm, Meredith, Meredith’s mother, Nathan |
The Tree of Victor Archimagus |
A month later Simon stood and regarded the tree of Victor Archimagus.
It was gigantic, its trunk as wide around as a castle wall. A good way up, the trunk split into a great V — the two branches that had grown upon the births of Victor’s sons, Franklin and Atherton. From there the branches continued to climb and divide — one for each legitimate male heir — and now over a hundred descendants of the late wizard resided within the tree’s luxurious chambers. (Female children were married off and sent away — Victor had never been a terribly enlightened sort.) The tree was a virtuoso feat of spellcraft, the first of its kind, and upon its creation Victor had been so impressed with himself that he’d taken the surname Archimagus — master wizard. Simon was the only one to have successfully replicated the spell. Families that possessed the rare gift of magic seemed always to be afflicted with low fertility, but the fact that Victor’s tree grew larger and grander depending upon the number of offspring had ensured a frenetic effort to proliferate his adopted surname, and had also — perhaps inevitably — led to a rivalry between the descendants of Franklin and the descendants of Atherton over who could produce the greatest number of male heirs. At the moment it happened that the two halves of the tree were in perfect balance. Today’s presentation ceremony for Bernard’s infant son would change that.
Note: Firefox has a bug which causes it to display colors wrong, so for the full effect use other software to view these images.
Under The Influence: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
ZOMG WANT TO GO TO THIS SO BAD:
Unfortunately it’s in LA and I’m not, and I certainly won’t be visiting anytime in the next three days. Oh well. Fortunately quite a bit of the art can be viewed online.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Marjorie M. Liu Interview
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Episode 4: Superheroes! Romance! Sea Monsters!
Marjorie M. Liu—writer of comics NYX and Dark Wolverine (Marvel) and author of the novels in the Dirk and Steele and Hunter Kiss series—is our guest this week. She tells us about attending Clarion and writing for Marvel, and Dave and John discuss comics, then and now.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy PW Singer Interview
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Episode 3: Robots! War Machines! Robolobsters!
P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, joins us this week to talk about the subject of robots in the military and the intersection between video games and war. John and Dave consider some of the science fiction works that influenced the development of robots as we know them.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy on Twitter and Facebook
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast is now on Facebook and Twitter. Also, next week we’ll be interviewing Cherie Priest (author of the zombie steampunk Civil War novel Boneshaker) and Steve Eley (creator of the Escape Pod science fiction podcast), so if you have anything you want us to ask either of them, feel free to suggest it.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Paolo Bacigalupi Interview
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Episode 2: Bacigalupilooza!
Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the critically-acclaimed The Windup Girl (which was named one of Time Magazine’s top ten novels of the year) joins us this week to talk about global warming, the horrors of travel, the current state of literature for boys, and his own forthcoming YA novel, Ship Breaker. John and Dave discuss their own experiences with literature when they were growing up, and how they became science fiction fans.
Fan Art 1/7/10
Here’s a terrific piece of fan art for my story “The Skull-Faced Boy” by Allison Jamieson-Lucy, an Alpha grad. Also check out her profile on deviantART.
She writes, “I’d been meaning to listen to ‘The Skull-Faced Boy’ ever since listening to you read ‘The Skull-Faced City,’ but only got around to it lately, now that it’s cold outside and school is out. I drew while I listened, and it ended up being Ashley, freshly skull-faced.”
Fan Art 1/6/10
Here’s some more fan art from Blazeblackwing, for my short story “The Skull-Faced City.”
So here we have Dustin (the skull-faced boy), Jack (now a decapitated head), Ashley (Dustin’s bride), and Park (a former scout sniper who works as a sort of bounty hunter for Dustin and who goes masked when outside the city to hide his skull face):
And here’s Park without his mask:
In Search of Shakespeare Michael Wood
I just finished watching the 4-part PBS documentary In Search of Shakespeare. It’s really in-depth and well-done, as host Michael Wood scours England for every instance of Shakespeare’s name popping up in the historical record. (If you have Netflix, it’s an instant download.)
Here’s one story from the movie: The Earl of Essex was hoping to overthrow and replace Queen Elizabeth. Theater was the popular entertainment of the day, and was heavily censored because of its power to incite the mob to violence. Essex paid Shakespeare’s company a large sum of money to resurrect Richard II and to add in a key scene making explicit that a bad ruler should be deposed. The plan was that at the end of the play Essex would march out on stage and call for an uprising. Unfortunately, when the time came, he spent too much time trying decide which shirt to wear, and by the time he finally appeared and made his rabble-rousing speech, the crowd had mostly dispersed, and Essex was promptly arrested and executed. Shakespeare’s company was hauled before Elizabeth’s inquisitors, and the players all took the line that they were just simple actors who had been hired to put on a play and they didn’t know anything about any plot. Elizabeth knew they were lying, but by that point — elderly, unpopular, and without an heir — she didn’t much care, but just to send a message and scare them straight she commanded that they perform their seditious play again — just for her. Talk about stage fright.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast Chet Faliszek Interview
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast, Episode 1: Zombies, Video Games, and the End of the World!
Left 4 Dead 2 lead writer Chet Faliszek is the featured interview guest on the premiere episode of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, a new podcast talk show here on Tor.com. In this episode, your hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley take on zombies and the apocalypse in video games, popular culture, and literature. They discuss Valve Software’s history of story-focused video games and talk to Chet about zombies and video games and contingency plans, then discuss their own strategies for surviving the coming zombie apocalypse, and give their opinions of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.