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© 1999-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved |
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October 6, 2008 |
October 6, 2008: 3 Movie Reviews ● Confessions of a Superhero ● Hallelujah! ● Three Ages One of the pleasures of living maybe a mile and a half from Grauman’s Chinese Theater is that we get to drive by that two-block tourist stretch quite often. There’s always something going on; in fact, that street is closed off about as much as it’s open, for one thing or another, for as much as 10 days at Oscar time. One of the things that is always happening is the costumed characters that haunt the place, to the despair of the Grauman’s owners. More reviews...
September 29, 2008: Paul and Me A few days ago we lost a great American. Entrepreneur—seller of salad dressing, pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine among many other things—philanthropist, devoted husband, father, and grandfather, race car driver, owner, and sponsor, founder of a dozen camps for severely ill children … and, oh yes, he acted a bit.
September 25, 2008: The Gaean Trilogy is now available at Audible.com Just got an email from Allyson Johnson that she'd finished recording DEMON. Also available at Audible.com: The Persistence of Vision and Press Enter, narrated by Peter Ganim; and The Ophiuchi Hotline, narrated by Gabra Zackman.
September 17, 2008: SF Signal asked Varley (and others) two questions: What makes a successful sf/f book adaptation? Why do adaptations sometimes fail? Varley's answer follows Jennifer Pelland's.
September 15, 2008: Movie Reviews ● In Bruges ● Mad Hot Ballroom ● El Padrecito Try to remember what you were like in the 5th grade. You’d passed through that brief period when it didn’t much matter which sex you were; boys and girls played together, sometimes, though the boys were rougher. Then the segregation began, some regimented, and some self-enforced. All through elementary school girls stuck with girls and boys stuck with boys.
September 10, 2008: Kiss Your Ass Goodbye The first time I went to see the end of the world was June 14, 1968. The asteroid Icarus was going to come within four million miles of the Earth … or so they would have us believe. Four million miles is a gnat’s whisker in cosmic terms. There were those who said it was actually going to collide with our planet, and “they” were keeping that information from us to avoid panic.
September 6, 2008: St. Francis Dam William Mulholland was a colorful character. He was responsible for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, opened in 1913, which stole water from the Owens Valley, 233 miles to the north. It flows downhill all the way so it takes no power to operate.
September 6, 2008: Movie Review - Woodstock I was there. I didn’t get to hear much live music, other than that made by the people around me. In fact I made it to the stage only once, and didn’t stay long. I had other responsibilities, to my wife, who was on crutches and couldn’t make it through the mud, and my 18-month-old son.
September 2, 2008: New Hollyweird - Rudolph ValentinoAugust 23 was the 81st anniversary of the death of Rudolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Piero Filibert Guglielmi De Valentina D’Antonguolla, in New York City, of peritonitis following a perforated ulcer.
September 2, 2008: Movie Reviews ● Fosse ● Judgement at Nuremberg ● The Crusades
August 4, 2008: At the Drive In ● Hellboy II: The Golden Army ● Wanted
August 4, 2008: Photos More Murals
July 18, 2008: VarleyYarn - Hillside CemeteryIt’s been a while since we went on a celebrity body hunt, so when other business called us down to the lower reaches of Culver City, we decided to visit this graveyard, which is rich in famous bones. It’s also a Jewish cemetery, like Mount Sinai, which always affords a few surprises.
June 6, 2008: John and Lee’s Guild to Disneyland - Part 8: Walt Disney TreasuresIn 2001 the Disney company released four sets of DVDs in metal boxes, called Walt Disney Treasures, and has been bringing them out yearly ever since, in what they refer to as “waves.” There are now seven waves.
June 2-3, 2008: VarleyYarn: Land of 10,000 Plates - Part 1 & Part 2A few days ago we were driving around and I stopped at a red light behind a car with a South Carolina plate. In case you haven’t seen one, it is mostly light blue with a palmetto tree in the center (South Carolina is the Palmetto State). Across the top is this legend: “Smiling Faces. Beautiful Places.”
July 2, 2008 - RECORDING HAS BEGUN - Last week Audible.com began the recording of the books they bought from me. Titan, Wizard, and Demon will be read by Allyson Johnson. Read more
May 26, 2008 - I'm a Martian Citizen! About an hour ago as I write this, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander successfully delivered my novella, "In the Hall of the Martian King," to a soft landing near the Martian north pole.
May 16, 2008 - Diary of a Male Fashion Model Friday, May 2nd, 2008, 6 AM: Up early for the Americana shoot. Spend a hour in the shower. Does the beard need a trim? Nah.
April 28, 2008 - The BCAM at the LACMA If the above acronym soup is confusing to you, let me translate: BCAM is the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (We Angelenos say it as “The Bee-cam at the Lackma.”) BCAM is a new building at LACMA, the first part of a three-phase expansion plan. It opened in February.
April 14, 2008 - The Shrub That Ate a House The sleepy little town of Sierra Madre is off the beaten trail, wedged as it is between Arcadia, Monrovia, and Pasadena, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. But not so very long ago it was at the center of a struggle for the very survival of humanity.
March 30, 2008 - ROLLING THUNDER now available at Diesel eBooks!
March 19, 2008: Hollyweird - St. Pat's Day at the Egyptian with the Rutles They had the 30th reunion of the Rutles at the Egyptian Theater on St. Patrick's Day. All four of the lads from Liverpool, together again for the first time. You remember the Rutles, don’t you? The Pre-Fab Four? Dirk McQuickly, Barry Wom, Stig O’Hara, and Ron Nasty? Ring any bells?
March 11, 2008 - io9 Talks to John Varley about Climate Disaster and Space Opera
March 4, 2008 - ROLLING THUNDER in books stores!
February 27, 2008 - Oh, Shit! He's Running Again! Will somebody please stuff Ralph Nadir into a stout box, nail the box shut, ship it to Borneo, and let him cavort amongst the orangutans until November 5, the day after the elections?
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Below the fold
“... this Podkayne's story is not a Shavian-Voltairean satire but a nicely traditional combination of bildungsroman, alien contact, planetary adventure, and disaster scenario featuring a smart, mouthy young person as narrator and stirrer-up-of-plotpoints. ” Russell Letson, Locus
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Born This Day Britt Ekland (1942); Elisabeth Shue (1963) Left The Planet Charles the Bald (877); Alfred Lord Tennyson (1890); Moshe Weinberg (1972); Yossef Romano (1972); Ze'ev Friedman (1972); David Berger (1972); Yakov Springer (1972); Eliezer Halfin (1972); Yossef Gutfreund (1972); Kehat Shorr (1972); Mark Slavin (1972); Andre Spitzer (1972); Amitzur Shapira (1972); Anton Fliegerbauer (1972); Anwar Sadat (1981); Bette Davis (1989); Buck O'Neil (2006); Wilson Tucker (2006) I’m Glad You’re Dead, You Rascal, You Luttif Afif (1972); Yusuf Nazzal (1972); Afif Ahmed Hamid (1972); Khalid Jawad (1972); Ahmed Chic Thaa (1972) |
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I was reading about the fact that they are now putting an end to something called short selling, which is when you borrow stock that you don’t own and sell it hoping that it will go down so you can buy it back at a profit. This was legal, but pot smoking isn’t? |
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Keeping faces clean |
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Thanks to Melodie Silverwolf |
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And nobody knows |
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A businessman boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him, an elegant woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond ring he had ever seen. He asked her about it. "This is the Klotschtein diamond," she said. "It is beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it." "What's the curse?" the man asked. "Mr. Klotschtein." |
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De stubble |
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The New American Century: Cut Short By 92 Years The era of Superpower America is coming to an end. The financial crisis was the last straw. Whatever good faith was left, after the invasion of Iraq and the shrugging off of international treaties, is now gone. The United States has polluted the global economic system with worthless mortgage-backed securities and, by doing so, has pushed 6 billion people closer to a long and painful recession. That's not something that's easy to forgive. Mike Whitney |
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