I’m not the greatest fan of the Hugos, but the Hugo Awards got it right in 07 giving Vernor Vinge the Best Novel Hugo for Rainbow’s End, one of the few genuinely important SF novels of the 21st century so far, and giving Robert Reed best Novella for A Billion Eves. While this year we can safely expect the 2008 Hugos to be a complete embarrassment with Michael Chabon, Scalzi (WTF?), Robert J. Sawyer and Charlie Stross up for best Novel and Nancy Kress, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Lucius Shepard up for Best Novella; it’s worth taking a look and a read back at A Billion Eves, especially in light of the FLDS mess now brewing, which is up on the Asimov’s site. Robert Reed’s evocation of Mormon patriarchal theocracy, seemingly gentle, and yet ultimately destructive, in a Science Fiction setting with multiple universes is the Must Read SF Story of the Day or Must Reread.

AKA Miss Seltzer. Looking at the former almost authoress, the well off suburban girl from a prosperous family going through her gangsta routine, the obvious question is why Margaret Seltzer went this route. With people like James Frey the answer is fairly obvious, ego and greed to be famous. With Margaret Seltzer you almost want to think that it was some sort of misguided idealism or blighted sense of self-worth. And in the end what Margaret Seltzer did as Margaret B. Jones is exactly what any number of rappers have done, to transform a conventional suburban life into an imaginary hard core criminal record. But Margaret Seltzer wasn’t trying to be the next Eminem, she was playing with biography and memoir, areas that have lost a lot of credibility but that still place some premium at least on elementary truth.

“This announcement was paid for by Epocrates.”

Knowledge is power and in medicine, knowledge is the gateway to healing. The more you know, the more you can help patients and now what Hippocrates, ancient Greek founder of the physicians’ art was to ancient medicine, Epocrates mobile medical software products are to modern medicine. With Epocrates, you don’t need to carry around dusty reference tomes with you because with an Epocrates PDA medical dictionary, a drug reference guide and other software, your medical reference library can be smaller than the palm of your hand and still contain enough information to weight down even the heftiest of office bookshelves. Epocrates prepares doctors for the realities of the modern mobile world with mobile medical information programs and guides that go with them on a variety of devices and whatever operating system your mobile device runs and whether you have a PalmPilot, a Blackberry, an iPhone or any one of a wide variety of devices, Epocrates has guides and programs for you. So discover how mobile medicine can be with Epocrates, medicine gone mobile.

It doesn’t take a long look at Microsoft to realize that the former Beast from Redmond isn’t looking nearly as healthy anymore. With Bill Gates and Paul Allen departed, Steve Ballmer has inherited the big flagging empire and while it might have been Netscape which used the Captain’s Wheel, it’s Microsoft that could use the navigation because the company is drifting and slowly sinking with Ballmer at the helm. Ballmer’s lack of grounding in technology, not to mention his attitude, can’t help but be contributing to Microsoft’s problems. But right now it seems like no one at Microsoft can get anything right. Even the release of Windows XP SP3 turned out to be botched. This follows the botched release of Windows Vista SP1, which itself needed an update. Considering that all this attention centered around XP and Vista comes because of Vista’s dysfunctionality, Ballmer’s mixed messages about retaining XP and Dell’s downgrades, strongly suggest that Microsoft may need to compromise and preserve XP and then get in the game fast with Windows 7, before it’s all gone faster than you can say Atari.

Outside the hothouse fictional gangster world of GTA IV, Take Two was in the middle of its own hostile takeover drama, not to be resolved with guns or bombs but with sales and a strong showing for GTA IV was its best bet. EA, the Mafia of game companies knew that GTA VI’s release was its deadline. If Take Two could stand off a hostile takeover until GTA IV’s release, it might survive. If Electronic Arts could snap up Take Two early, it could feed off the lush rich GTA IV profits and crush Take Two. Take Two’s board, despite its lack of credibility, managed to hold off EA long enough to make the release, employ poison measures and are now busy breaking sales records. Will that save Take Two from EA and turn the EA proposed takeover into the third broken merger dream, after Blockbuster’s failed merger with Circuit City and Microsoft’s increasingly failed takeover of Yahoo? In the short term GTA IV’s release has sent Take Two’s stock price all over the place, rising and now falling. But the game isn’t done yet.

When you’ve tried everything you could to lose weight but nothing at all seems to work, your options can seem very limited and gastric bypass surgery can begin to seem like a good option. Whether you are looking for gastric bypass surgery San Antonio Texas or Los Angeles California or Jersey City, New Jersey, what it comes down to is that gastric bypass surgery, much like its name sounds, is a very serious medical procedure with potentially serious side effects. Like any form of surgery, gastric bypass surgery is something that requires grave and serious consideration and an exploration of the alternatives, including the gastric band or LAP-BAND system. The Lap-Band system has a major advantage over gastric bypass surgery in that it is far less difficult to undergo, is much easier to recover from and is much less riskier to the patient. So if you have tried everything else and are considering a surgical weight loss procedure, take a look at the LAP-BAND system first.

I must have been sleeping when Aleksey Vayner returned to the world with a blog. Normally when you’ve become best known for well… the sort of thing Aleksey Vayner became known for, namely being an insane fantasizer who coins entire phony biographies, a blog with your name on it would be the last thing to do. But Aleksey Vayner is indeed back and self-important as ever. Plenty of joke blogs have been created in Aleksey Vayner’s name, some of them pretty funny, but a Whois search via Dnsstuff would suggest that this is the actual Aleksey Vayner. The blog is about the sort of egotistical success oriented stuff you would expect. There’s even a link to Lifehacker. And of course tips on beating stronger tennis players, his Tibet related foundation for helping children supposedly approved by the Dalai Llama. In other words Aleksey Vayner really has not learned a single thing. Except of course to have a guy from India screen his comments.

If you would like to post a comment on a particular entry, great! The comments will not appear instantly however, so please be patient. When you enter a comment, your name, I.P. address, email and the comment will be automatically forwarded to a friendly representative somewhere in India; he will check it for objectivity, relevancy, and against profanity. Then he or she will either approve or delete the comment.

Outsourcing moderation of comments to India? Is this the future of blogging?

After going in four directions at the same time, Barack Obama finally took the plunge and disavowed his ties with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. On the surface this historic breach seemed to have less to do with the radicalism of Wright’s statements, all stuff which despite his weak denials Obama would have surely known about long before now, but with Wright’s betrayal of Obama by willfully embarrassing him when he was supposed to have been banished from sight. Wright’s real crime wasn’t in what he said, but when and where he said it. Obama clearly thought that he had reached a tactic agreement with Wright, an agreement that was undone when a Hillaryette sponsored Wright for the National Press Club meeting, giving Wright a national podium that unlike the softball forum of ideological ally Bill Moyers allowed the worst of Wright to shine through. And so Obama jettisoned Wright out of political interest, not moral objection. It’s what pragmatic politicians do and Obama is nothing if not an agent of pragmatism.

GTA IV is out, which of course means the cultural critics and ole Jack Thompson are out and about sniping away at the game and its culture of violence. Now obviously no video game can make someone steal a car or shoot anyone in real life. That’s common sense and it should be the main point of defense. And that should be it without trying to follow the lead of some Rockstar Games people by trying to whitewash the actual game content of GTA VI.

For example this Cnet article Critics slam ‘GTA IV’ without test drive rehashes an old defense of GTA3, the sandbox defense. Now anyone who’s actually played Grand Theft Auto knows the sandbox defense is a joke. Yes you can spend time in the game riding around in a taxi or just walking around. You could also spend it passed out on the ground. Neither of those are the object of the game.

Part of the problem, said Aaron Muszalski, a visual effects artist formerly with Industrial Light & Magic who teaches at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, is that critics of games like those in the GTA series pass judgment on a very small sample of the whole game.

“When it was reported that, in earlier GTA games, it was possible to have sex with prostitutes and then beat them to death,” Muszalski said, “people who lacked a grasp of ’sandbox’ gameplay were likely to have interpreted that news to have meant that to ‘win’ at GTA, one had to perform such tasks, perhaps even that they were a recurring stage in the gameplay.

Now I’ll grant you that I don’t remember any GTA mission that requires you to have sex with prostitutes and beat them to death, it’s not only possible in the game but it’s rewarded. But let’s take the whole, “kill a hooker, get her money” thing off the table. To win at GTA you do have to beat people to death, kill a few women and at least transport hookers. There was at least once GTA Vice City mission that involved killing someone’s ex wife.

“Of course, such a perception is grossly flawed, as anyone who has actually played GTA…will quickly tell you,” Muszalski continued. “Many of the aspects of GTA that were most covered in the press were things that, in the actual course of gameplay, many people would never need nor choose to do.”

Let’s face it random violence was always part of GTA, not only because the game design made it possible, but because it actually made Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas into randomly violent places. And back to the beating hookers to death thing, killing a random NPC yields money. That’s the game design. That means the game comes with an incentive for killing NPC’s. GTA specifically doesn’t contain children because the game designers did not want players running around killings kids. That’s where they drew the line. They certainly knew and expected that players would beat and kill NPC’s, including the hookers to death, and created a reward mechanism for it.

Does this mean that GTA encourages players to go and kill real life hookers? No, it just means that we should be honest about the actual game content, because not every critic is as stupid as Jack Thompson.

It’s safe to say that the one thing Obama did not want in the lead in to North Carolina was the return of Jeremiah Wright in a big way with a national bullhorn, but neither is Obama the innocent being tried on the charge of guilt by association that his defenders would like us to believe.

Obama’s rapid political climb from the Illinois State Senate to the United States Senate to a strong shot at the Presidency wasn’t fired purely by charisma, let alone some sort of record of accomplishment that doesn’t exist, but by favors, deals and political alliances and while most Senators have had enough time in national office to leave behind when they run for President, Obama has gone through the revolving door too fast to shed his Chicago dirty deals in time for his run on D.C. And that leaves Wright and Rezko and Ayers and many more dogging his heels.

The real problem for Obama isn’t Wright’s radicalism, it’s Obama’s inability to be a man and honestly face up to the problem, instead turning the whole thing into a teach in about race complete with half the American flags in the country standing behind him. Americans, black and white, aren’t interested in lectures about race from politicians, they want candidates who can tackle the big policy problems from the war to health care to the economy, and Obama is showing anything but grace under fire. If we can see Bill Clinton sweat, we can see Obama sweat too and it isn’t pretty.

With the release of War Inc, we’re given yet another reminder of why Stanley Kubrick was such a brilliant director. Not because Kubrick did War Inc, but because Strangelove actually worked. When you consider how many movies have tried to ape Strangelove and how many have tried to satirize the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex and you can’t help but moan in agony.

War Inc is the latest terrible entry. It’s Syriana, if Syriana had tried to work in a plot about a pop star and gone for comedy instead of preachy lectures taken straight from Newsweek and New York Times articles. But War Inc’s worst crimes is that it was already made and that it failed. American Dreamz was written, directed and acted in by far more talented people than those involved in War Inc and it was a disaster and it featured much of the same plot, complete with a pop star playing a pop star and the intermingling of war and politics.

War Inc’s is an attempt to somehow paste 70’s storytelling onto 00’s current events in the clumsiest way possible and it demonstrates once again that anti-war satire isn’t easy, no matter how easy it might look to the average Hollywood player blogging on Huffington Post. There’s a long list of movies that have done anti-war satire badly, that alone should serve as a warning. War Inc didn’t have to be made and it didn’t have to be made so badly. American Dreamz existed as a living example of what to avoid, the uneasy over the top mixture of drama and comedy, the lack of direction and perspective and the self-indulgent premise that entertainment has taken over war, when in reality these days Hollywood and the military are so detached that they don’t even meet on odd sundays.

Spring is here and summer is coming close behind on its tail and all around in the woods and streams, the forests and the lakes, nature wakes from its long slumber, trout splash, deer race and the best hunting or fishing story you ever told is out there just waiting for you. All you need is the right equipment and at H&R Business Mall, you can get the Hunting Blinds and game and fish feeders that insures the kill comes to you. The difference between a great trophy and a sore back and sore legs with not much to show for it is preparation and at H&R Business Mall, you can be prepared for that trophy with high quality and high endurance outdoor sports products. H&R Business Mall’s feeders and blinds are the best around and shipped factory direct to you, so you know you have the competitive edge with the best of what’s available on your side. H&R Business Mall isn’t just an outlet run by people who have never held a rifle, it’s run by Larry Jones who built his own blinds the hard way and who’s probably been hunting for longer than you’ve been around. He knows what works and what doesn’t and H&R Business Mall specializes in selling outdoor equipment for the real world and the real hunter. Don’t buy second hand, worn out and used up junk just to save a little money. H&R Business Mall has competitive prices on brand new equipment that you know won’t let you down.

See it while it’s up. This might be enough to take back the comic book movie hype for Batman from Iron Man. We see some complex themes emerging and the continuation of the rise of a superhero class, the better criminal represented by the Joker and the kind of man Bruce Wayne has to become to defeat him.

Written by Buffy writer Jane Espenson and directed by Olmos himself, with Battlestar Galactica s4e06 Escape Velocity, Baltar makes him inevitable transition to Jesus, being martyred with a few blows from a guard’s rifle, after the President does her usual overreaction and bans assemblies, turning Baltar’s group into martyrs. Apollo manages to save Baltar a second time, earning him a spot right after Baltar on the list of people on Battlestar Galactica who should be shot if anyone on there had any common sense. But of course they don’t.

Meanwhile, true to BSG fashion, Chief deals with Callie’s death by going on a bender and staging a confrontation with Admiral Adama that gets him demoted. Tory teaches Baltar a creepy ideology about the perfection of man that doesn’t require any actual self-improvement. At this point she’s the only Cylon around who’s actually menacing anyone and she’s doing it in classic soap opera style. All the while Six delivers long speeches about her love for Baltar and smacks the good Cylon Colonel Tigh around before making out with him.

Once upon a time Battlestar Galactica used to involve the Cylons. Once upon a time they used to be menacing enemies. That was then. These days half the crew are Cylons and no one much cares and the actual Cylons are busy fighting among themselves. The show dedicates itself to the screwed up behavior of its crew, much of which is self-destructive. Unaccountably, despite all that Baltar has done, the Quorum, Apollo and all the gang are perfectly willing to let Baltar return to power and only the President seems to care. Admiral Adama, who we are reminded in this episode was willing to line Callie up against the wall and shoot her to force refueling, lets it all go.

Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for best novel of the year? Seriously does anyone actually think that’s the best SF&F novel of the year or the best bid for popular attention with a touch of pretentiousness that will let genre writers claim to be mainstream? Again the answer is pretty obvious. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is interesting, but it’s no Accidental Time Machine. Once again the SFWA sells out SF to mainstream literary pretensions. Why even bother keeping the SF in the SFWA?

Favorites like Nancy Kress, Ted Chiang and Karen Joy Fowler get their expected pats on the back. All three are vastly overrated but they come with a hell of a pedigree of connections. Bruce Sterling or Gene Wolfe were the rightful winners for Novella and Geoff Ryman deserved it for Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter. Meanwhile it’s downright baffling that Nancy Kress not only continues to write but that she was nominated in two categories. What a joke.

Children of Men got shortchanged too in favor of the ever trendy and artsy Pan’s Labyrinth. And to top things off Michael Moorcock got the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, which I’m sure means Damon Knight is centrifugally rotating in his grave, after all Moorcock represents everything that Damon Knight hated. And for yet another bit of mainstream selling out, the Andre Norton for J.K. Rowling. What Bill Gates wasn’t available?

In building a real world storefront, you would research the neighborhood, learn about your prospective landlord, find out about the costs, the security, the rates and talk to former tenants if you could. It’s all part of the advance research before making an investment in a real estate location. Well virtual real estate is no different and before you commit to a web host, it only makes sense to research that host first with ServerPronto End-user Reviews. Doing your research on your prospective web host is all part of hooking your business into the great rolling ball of energy and money that is the internet and since so much of your business depends on the internet and since your site depends so much on your web host, ServerPronto reviews is the equivalent of taking a walk around the neighborhood, talking to tenants current and former. With a database of reviews from former and current users of web hosts, you can find out all you can really expect from a web host, both the good and the bad, make your decision and contribute your own reviews too. With Server Pronto reviews, you don’t have to blindly commit to a web host without doing your research. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth and don’t go with a web host you will later regret doing business with.

April’s just about over and so we get the debut of WHEN CRAPPY MOVIES RULED THE BOX OFFICE

Baby Mama, boosted by countless promotions on NBC, debuts with 18 million dollars in the number one spot. Harold and Kumar Make Another Pointless Sequel, I mean Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay makes 14 million in the number two spot, proving that, forget the Christian demographic you can’t neglect the stoner demographic.

The Forbidden Kingdom falls from first to third with 11 million dollars for a 40 million dollar total. In accord, Forgetting Sarah Marshall falls from 2nd to 4th with 11 million dollars for a 35 million dollar total. Nim’s Island holds steady at 5th place for Walden Media with 4.5 million dollars for a 39 million dollar total.

Prom Night fell to 6th from 3rd with 4.5 million for its own 38 million dollar total, despite the torrent of negativity, still ahead of critically praised movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. 21 took in another 4 million in 7th place to 75 million.

I’m guessing someone at New Line or Warner Bros is rushing around by now to try and get Guillermo del Toro to deal with his 2006 Cannes quote

“I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”

Probably not that surprising, since as Andrew O’Hehir over at Salon points out, Guillermo del Toro’s movies have not exactly been heroic movies. That said the Harry Potter franchise proves you can plug in even completely inappropriate directors and still come up with a mass produced product. The question is, how far is Guillermo del Toro on the inappropriate scale.

For one thing The Hobbit is not really heroic fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, the actual original Lord of the Rings, not Peter Jackson’s cinematic bastardization, is in many ways anti-heroic, it’s rooted in legends and the “heroes” are small Hobbits whom everyone overlooks and who win not through heroics but by being small, inconspicuous and brave. It’s not quite The Labyrinth, but it’s a long way from the basic perception of the genre that people have.

And The Hobbit is more anti-heroic than Lord of the Rings. It isn’t epic, the main character is cowardly, he comes on the quest half by accident, his complicated choices don’t involve killing the dragon but do involve betraying most of his companions in order to preserve a limited kind of peace and prevent a bloodbath. It’s a complicated story and Guillermo del Toro may well be the director to handle it.

Smallville just doesn’t have enough dysfunctional relationships. Between Clark and Lana, Lana and Lex, Chloe and Clark, things weren’t quite dysfunctional enough, so the producers really feel the need to do Jimmy - Chloe episodes that usually proceed and end on the same dysfunctional note, in which neither of them trust each other, Jimmy uses passive aggressive tactics, Chloe feels guilty and it all ends unhappily ever after. That’s Smallville Sleeper s7e17 in a nutshell. Also throw in Jimmy getting to play James Bond and Lex finally getting his hands on the big secret weapon, which turns out to be some sort of weird Kryptonian Hallmark card.

The basics have Clark resuming his search for Braniac after neglecting it all last episode, despite last episode ending with Lex murdering his father and stealing his key, the sort of thing that Clark now decided no longer to care about. Instead he discovers that Brainiac and Kara have apparently gone to Krypton, and Kara is sending him messages from Krypton circa 1989 when Krypton is run under Reaganomics and the Kryptonian Cold War is well under way, since Braianic’s extremely convoluted plan for killing Clark apparently involves going back to Krypton’s past and killing him as a baby.

This is the most convoluted plan ever and really underestimates how easy it would be to just walk up to Clark or fly up to Clark with a handful of the green stuff, tap him on the shoulder and stick it down his throat. But so be it. Meanwhile the least plausible government agent ever recruits Jimmy, provides him with James Bond gear for no real sane reason, in order to spy on Chloe, which he halfway does until Chloe catches him and the agents turn out to be the sort of psychos they tend to be depicted as on Smallville and in DC comic books. Jimmy winds up in hock to Lex and everything ends unhappily ever after.

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