Now At Popular Prices!

Implied Spaces is now available in mass-market paperback!

Y'all probably knew this already, but I didn't. I'm just the author.

And, because I haven't nagged you for a while, I'll mention that you can pick up a copy of This Is Not a Game at the same time.

Kicking George

This weekend features the anniversary of the day we officially decided to kick King George out of town. In a decision largely unrelated to King George, Kathy and I are going to secluded mountaintop retreat for three nights.

There may be internet. There may not be. There may be internet but I may not decide to make use of it.

Which is by way of saying, I'll probably check you all next week.

Them!

A giant ant colony has taken over the world!

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.
Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the 'Californian large', extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

Yikes! Time to stock up on flamethrowers!

Unique Opportunity

The writer Ian McDowell needs y'all's help. His father, who has just lost a leg, needs to move out of his apartment, where the manager refuses to install modifications to aid the handicapped. (This is legal, apparently.)

Ian is raising money by offering a unique item for sale on eBay, a one-of-a-kind hand-written collection featuring original, never-published stories by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Poppy Z. Brite, and others.

All details here.

Reviews Too Late: Legend of the Shadowless Sword

The lineage of this film is a little unusual: it's a 2005 Korean production with Korean actors, the stunt team is from Hong Kong, the movie was filmed in China, and the screenwriter is someone named Paul Sheen, who has no other credits that I can find.

It's no surprise, therefore, that the result is something of a mishmash. It's not bad, in fact the movie's a lot of fun in a no-holds-barred, makes-no-sense kind of way, but it doesn't have anything that I haven't seem somewhere else, done better.

The Kingdom of Balhae (one of those that eventually became Korea) has largely been overrun by the Khitan barbarians. They've sent their Killer Blade Army to murder the various members of the Balhae royal family. The Killer Blade Army is composed of outlawed or exiled Balhaeans, and is led by Gun Hwa-Pyung (Hyeon Jun-Shin), a moody young fellow with a personal grudge against the royals. He's assisted by his murderous girlfriend, who--- like everyone else in the Killer Blade Army--- possesses various superpowers, including gravity-optional martial arts, the ability to fight underwater, and flight.

It's not surprising that the Killer Blade Army goes through the royal family like a claymore through goat cheese. Eventually there's only one left, a prince named Daejeonghyun (Lee Sio-Jin), who has been exiled due to an unspecified scandal. The problem is that no one knows where the prince actually is, so wise old General Ju sends Balhae's best fighter, a young woman named Soha (Yoon So-Yi), to find the prince.

Naturally the Killer Blade Army's looking for him, too. Soha's problem is that the prince has got himself a nice, raffish life as a receiver of stolen goods, and is understandably reluctant to become the king of Balhae, a job that comes with a death sentence attached. So Soha has to drag the reluctant royal across the country, evading his escape attempts while fending off hordes of assassins.

Much fighting ensues. The film is more or less a string of set-piece combat scenes, all of them spectacular. There is a fight on the road, a fight in a tavern, a fight in a temple, a fight underwater, a fight in a graveyard, a fight in the air. The Hong Kong stunt team brought their entire arsenal with them--- we see acrobatics, flight, people being hurled through the air, villains stomping their foot to cause small but fierce earthquakes, Soha waving her sword underwater to create a whirlpool that sucks her enemies to their doom . . . I'm sure I'm leaving something out.

But there's a problem with the special effects, stated thus: "In a world in which everyone can fly, flight loses its wonder." Sometimes I just wanted them to do some plain old kung-fu, but no, the movie kept piling one wonder atop the next until I lost track, and then lost interest.

It should also be noted that Yoon So-Yi is really beautiful, but not much of an actress.

As for the ending, it can go one of two ways. Either the prince escapes his escort, returns briefly to his louche life until tracked down by the villains and is killed; or he discovers his inherently noble princely nature, unveils the martial skill he's kept hidden all these years, defeats the bad guys, and becomes a great king.

Which do you think?

Goldman Sucks

I admire a brilliant piece of invective as well as the next guy, and the best I've seen in a long time is Matt Taibi's evisceration of Goldman Sachs, which he blames for both the creation, and the collapse, of every financial bubble of the last century. (Wow! Talk about evil!)

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN.

Charlie, Dunked

Here is our cat Charlie shortly after the catastrophe.

It looks like he got totally immersed in water, or had a bucket of water thrown over him, or maybe got sprayed with a hose.

I don't know exactly what happened, I wasn't there. I only know that I came home and there he was, on the front porch, looking bedraggled.

I suspect that I, or more likely my personal property, will somehow pay for this.

Reviews Too Late: The Assassination of Jesse James

This may be one of a very few films ever to be doomed by excessive devotion to its literary source material. (Watchmen might be another.) The full title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn't the sort of name that Hollywood gives to its films: it's taken from the the Ron Hansen novel upon which the film is based.

I read the novel when it came out and it's terrific. Y'all should go out and read it right now.

Reading the novel will take a couple hours out of your life, and you'll have a good time. Watching the film will take two and a half hours, and it will be excruciating. The movie is like a much, much slower version of the book. About 45 minutes of the screen time is action, and the rest is composed of long, brooding, largely motionless shots of Western beauty, plus chunks of narration taken directly from the novel.

I'm completely down with the filmmakers being captivated by Ron Hansen's prose, but the voice-over narrative mostly tells us stuff that should, by all rights, have been dramatized. This is, after all, supposed to be a drama, not an audio book. The narratives make the movie seem even slower than it is; dramatizing the same scenes would make the movie seem to go faster even if they took up more screen time.

In a rather long narrative opening, the narrator/Hansen tells us a lot about Jesse James, including the fact that he had an eye condition that caused him to blink a lot. Someone should have read this to the director and/or star, because Brad Pitt, who plays Jesse, blinks maybe half a dozen times in the whole movie, and the rest of the time favors us with long, long, long intense blue-eyed stares.

The film also fails to tell us about a crucial plot point: the $5000 reward that the governor of Missouri had offered for Jesse's capture. This motivates much of the action, and provides the motive for Jesse to liquidate all his former associates before they can turn him in. A reward is mentioned at various points: we don't know how much the reward is, or that the $5000 would be a fortune on the frontier.

The cast is awesomely wonderful: besides Pitt as Jesse, we've got Sam Shepherd as Frank James and Casey Affleck, Ben's little brother, as Bob Ford. The minor roles are all extremely well played. Mary Louise Parker is wasted as Jesse's wife, Zee, who is absent for most of the movie, and silent for much of the rest.

But it's still maybe the slowest Western of all time. Read the novel instead. Here's how it starts:

He was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. He installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. His children knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks. They didn't know how their father made his living, or why they so often moved. They didn't even know their father's name. He was listed in the city directory as Thomas Howard. And he went everywhere unrecognized and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or a commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch. He had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. He was missing the nub of his left middle finger and was cautious, lest that mutilation be seen. He also had a condition that was referred to as "granulated eyelids" and it caused him to blink more than usual as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.

Standing By

The Iranian revolution has entered a grim and secret phase. Grim, because the news is of mass arrests, protests being smashed, demonstrators beaten. Secret, because the situation may be resolved--- or not--- by maneuvers within the Iranian power structure that are opaque to those of us in the West.

Still, the cries of "Allah o akbar" are louder than ever at night. Three weeks ago, Iranians still had residual faith in their regime. Now there is little to none. The regime can stay in power only through the continuous use of force.

The strategy now would be to co-opt the regime's security force.

Here's the video of "Stand By Me" recorded by Jon Bon Jovi and Iranian superstar Andy Madadian. The recording isn't for sale, it's a free gift to the Iranian people.

Keep on crying in the night, all.

Art Film

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Charlie Jane Anders reviews the Transformers movie.

Hostage Facility

All the thinking I've been doing about Iran in the last week has brought to mind something that I always thought was kind of obvious, which is that Iran talks big and swaggers rather a lot for a country that has a built-in on-off switch. By which I mean Kharg Island.

Kharg Island lies about 25 nautical miles off the coast of Iran, and is the facility from which it ships the vast majority of its oil to the outside world--- 950 million tons per year from the southern facility alone, according to one article.

Seize Kharg Island, and you can basically turn off the tap on the Iranian economy. The government can't pay the basij, so the basij go home. They can't pay for their expensive nuclear facilities. They can't pay for their military.

That's what happened to the Shah in 1979. The revolution dragged on for a year or so, but when the oil workers walked out, the King of Kings became plain old Mr. Pahlavi.

Kharg Island is a hostage facility. It's a shotgun permanently pointed at the head of the person who built it.

Not that I'm advocating any of this, mind you. I merely make the observation that if the Iranian government really piss off any country that could mount a large enough carrier task force--- uh, I guess that would be the USA--- that force needn't bomb Tehran, or nuclear facilities, or anything beyond the minimum amount of suppression necessary to secure the island. (And the island is a large naval base, so it wouldn't be a complete pushover.)

The disadvantage, from the point of view of the world economy, is that the world would have to do without a billion tons of oil per year for however long the crisis lasted. (I wonder if that's why all those bomb-bomb-bomb-iran guys never mention this option--- they're also committed to a petroleum-fuelled economy.) Still, Kharg Island was pretty much shut down during the Iran-Iraq war, thanks to Iraqi air raids, so the world has done without Iranian oil before.

I wonder how many other nations have on-off switches? Certainly Egypt is one--- they became a hostage the second they completed the Aswan High Dam. One sufficiently large bomb behind the dam, and a tsunami carries 99% of the population out to sea. It would be the greatest atrocity in history, but few Egyptians would survive to complain.

Mr. Putin has successfully demonstrated that he can hold Ukraine and much of Europe hostage, simply by turning off the taps that control oil and natural gas.

The US doesn't have any single switches that I can think of--- unless of course someone succeeds in switching off World of Warcraft, the dangers of which this video points out.

Any other hostage facilities you can think of?

Levy on Iran

Bernard-Henri Levy on Iran:

Whatever happens from this point on, nothing will ever be the same in Tehran.

Whatever happens, if the protest gains momentum or loses steam, if it ends up prevailing or if the regime succeeds in terrorizing it, he who should now only be called president-non-elect Ahmadinejad will only be an ersatz, illegitimate, weakened president.

Whatever happens, whatever the result of this crisis provoked two weeks ago by the enormity of a fraud that serious-minded people can no longer doubt, no Iranian leader can appear on the global scene, or in any negotiation with Obama, Sarkozy, or Merkel, without being haloed, not by the nimbus of light dreamed of by Ahmadinejad in his 2005 speech to the United Nations, but by the cloud of sulphur that crowns cheaters and butchers . . .

Whatever happens, the block of ayatollahs who had always succeeded in maintaining a united front, whatever their differences and divergent interests, will have put their ferocious divisions on display: the ones behind Khamenei, approving of the decision to crush the movement with blood; the others, like the ex-President Rafsanjani, leader of the very powerful Assembly of Experts, warning that if the wave of protests were not taken seriously, veritable "volcanoes" of anger would erupt. Others still like the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri who, since his house arrest in Qom, has been calling for a recount and for national mourning for the victims of the repression; and without mentioning the leading religious experts of the "Office of Theological Seminaries" who no longer fear proposing the possibility--what passed for heresy not long ago--of Khamenei's resignation and of his replacement by a "Guidance Council."

Whatever happens, and beyond these internal conflicts, the people will be dissociated from an anemic and fatally wounded regime.

Whatever happens, young people, who were believed to be enthralled by the principles of political Islam and who a month ago, upon Ahmadinejad's return from Geneva, had supposedly planned a triumphal reception for the president-non-elect, will have said, loud and proud, with an audacity matched only by their political intelligence, that this president shamed them . . .

Whatever happens, the people know, from this point on, that they are the people and that there is not a regime on earth that can remain in power against the people.
Whatever happens, a body politic has been formed in the heat of peaceful protests--and even if it gets winded and loses steam, even if the murderers think they can declare victory, there is a new actor onstage, without whom the rest of this country's story will not be written.

Whatever happens, the beautiful face of Neda Soltan, killed at point-blank range last Saturday by a Bassidj henchman, the images of kids beaten to death by the attack squadron and motorcycle infantry of the guardians of the revolution, the videos of the enormous protests, impressively calm and dignified, will have, via Twitter, circled both the cyberplanet and the planet.

Whatever happens, the emperor has no clothes.

Whatever happens, the regime of the ayatollahs is, in the greater or lesser long term, condemned to compromise or disappear.

We always forget that the other revolution--the first, which, 30 years ago, put this Iranian-style National Socialism into power--lasted almost a year: why would it be any different for this revolution, a democratic one concerned with what's right, which has also just taken the stage? The earth quakes in Tehran, and it is only, I'm willing to bet, the beginning.

Nothing like a French philosopher to sum things up in the grand manner.

Simple Ways

Simple ways to help Iranian free speech.

Another Long Day

Another long day trying to keep up with events in Iran.

For those who wish to help Iranians and dissidents in other nations evade surveillance, check out the Tor Project. Originally a project of the U.S. Navy and now spun off into a freeware company, Tor--- strangely sharing a name with the largest US science fiction publisher--- bounces messages around a distributed network to evade deep packet inspection and other tools of evil surveillance empires.

Be sure to read the fine print before you participate.

"A 19-year-old shot in the head and killed during the demonstrations... and Iranian officials asked his parents to "pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a 'bullet fee' -- a fee for the bullet used by security forces -- before taking the body back." One of the most tragic stories I've read in a long time, by the Wall Street Journal's exceptional Farnaz Fassihi."

Time to get rid of these bastards.

I close with a video showing the bastards running.

Battle w/ Police - Tehran, Iran - June 20th 2009
Uploaded by mightier-than. - News videos from around the world.

Outside Shot at an Oscar

The other day I found myself on the set of a low-budget film.

In recent years I've become interested in video technology for the masses, and how nowadays you can not only make a YouTube video for the change you vacuum up from behind the sofa cushions, but an entire movie.

I think the production budget of this feature was rather less than the cost of the single camera that was filming it. This wasn't a low-budget feature, it was a micro-budget feature. And it had a shooting schedule of something like sixteen days.

I was told to show up at 8:30am at a Central Avenue establishment called "Self Serve," which I naively assumed was a convenience store. I was delighted on arrival to discover that the store sold sexual aids.

Bingo! I thought. Mileage of anecdote now vastly increased!

I should have known. Staples of this kind of micro-budget movie are (1) zombies, (2) breasts, and (3) buckets of blood.

This movie does not have zombies. Therefore shelves bursting with sexual appliances are practically required.

Writer Devin and director Billy were welcoming, and I tried to stay out of the way as they went about their business.

Making a movie turned out to be just about as boring as I'd heard. Multiple retakes were necessary even when the takes went right. The writing was sharp, but even good lines fail to sizzle after you've heard them a dozen times. The fact that there was only one camera stretched things out, rather. And Billy kept coming up with new bits of business for the actors to do, so more takes were required.

That's when I was asked if I'd like to be an extra. Yes! I thought. Never turn down another shot at immortality!

I became a customer who wandered around in the background purchasing sex toys while the camera was actually focused on someone else. I was promptly equipped with a cheetah-spotted paddle and an environmentally-correct flogger, one made out of recycled auto tires. I received my direction, asked what I hoped were intelligent questions, and stood by waiting for my cue.

It's been nearly thirty years since I was last onstage, but I immediately began thinking like an actor. Is my hair okay? I thought. Can they see my bald spot? This is my absolute worst angle! I wish I'd worn something more flattering!

I began to work on my character. A cheetah-skin paddle and an environmentally-correct flogger--- isn't that a contradiction? One was recycled latex, but the other was made with the skin of an endangered animal. Obviously I was a character in conflict with myself! Possibly in psychological torment! Were the B&D appliances to be used to discipline my own unruly psyche, or to strike out at the world that so obviously baffled me? Maybe both! Maybe neither! O, the agony!

Breasts! I thought. Buckets of blood! Zombies!

No! No zombies in this picture! Don't even think about zombies!

Action! Carrying my props, I walked across the store to the cash register.

Action! Carrying my props, I walked across the store to the cash register.

Action! Carrying my props, I walked across the store to the cash register.

Action! Carrying my props, I walked across the store to the cash register.

(Repeat several more times.)

Eventually Billy decided that I had walked across the set so well that I was going to be given a little bit of business to do, plus a closeup. (Is my hair okay? Can they see my bald spot? Am I holding the paddle where the camera can see it?)

Action! Turn, look over my shoulder, turn back.

Action! Turn, look over my shoulder, turn back.

Action! Turn, look over my shoulder, turn back.

The sex shop scene was over. It was a wrap. The rest of the day would be spent driving all over town doing pickup shots, and even my curiosity did not extend to that.

The movie, called I [Heart] You, will be released later this year. Be sure to check out my Oscar-caliber performance, and--- if you're a member of the Academy--- vote as your conscience dictates.

For Billy Garbarina's previous epic--- which does feature zombies--- check out the Necroville Home Page.