Excellent birthday weekend. Tripp's for chicken cordon bleu on Saturday night, The Melting Pot for fondue on Sunday night. I think I gained five pounds this weekend, but man, was it worth it. Some really great books from my parents related to my new job (which starts on Wednesday), one on copyediting and one on public relations, along with the Clue DVD, one of my favorite all-time movies when I was younger. From Janet, I got Cthulhu slippers(!), Nightmare Before Christmas bookends, and two DVDs: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Dark Crystal.

I'd never seen The Dark Crystal before for some reason, and I loved it. Jim Henson and Brian Froud created such a rich world with that movie with attention to detail that I usually only see in Miyazaki films. I looked through Janet's book The World of The Dark Crystal and was astonished to see that even the characters who went unnamed in the movie had whole histories; it made me wonder if there was ever an effort to do another film in the Dark Crystal universe, or some kind of prose antho or something. And I totally want Fizzgig (pictured left) as a pet now, though now that I think about it, he might eat our hamsters.

I found out today that due to some reshuffling with the schedule at the Strange Horizons articles department, my interview with Daniel Wallace will be published next Monday, alongside "The Trail of My Father's Blood," a new story from the very excellent Christopher Barzak. I was surprised, especially since I wasn't expecting the interview to go up until sometime Decemberish, but I was very happy to hear the news. Wallace is a terribly interesting guy, and I think this comes across in the interview.

In music news, A Perfect Circle will be releasing an album of anti-war cover tunes called eMOTIVe on November 2, aka Election Day. The first single of that album, John Lennon's "Imagine" is now on iTunes, and you can listen to it for free at their website; it's an interesting re-imagining (pardon the pun), much darker, more hopeless. Janet brought up the good point that the album might serve better as an anti-war statement if they would release it earlier, and I would tend to agree. Maybe the band is hoping that their fans will go out first thing in the morning and buy the album, listen to it, then vote. Whatever the reasoning, I'll be getting the album that day, although I already know who I'm voting for.

Along those lines, from the Associated Press last Thursday: "The FBI must turn over the remaining secret files on Beatle John Lennon to a professor who has waged a more than 20-year legal battle to get the documents, a judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi rejected government arguments Tuesday that releasing the last 10 pages would pose a national security risk because a foreign government secretly provided the information. The government was not publicly identified."

And this scan of the Michigan absentee ballot for the 2004 election makes me want to vomit in rage. Pay close attention to the arrows in the Presidential section, and you'll see they've all been shifted down, so that an apparent vote for Kerry/Edwards is actually a vote for Bush/Cheney. Ah voter fraud, it comes earlier every year.

Now Reading:
Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

Stories Out to Publishers:
10

Books Read This Year:
55

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
30