Unfriendly Powers

I never judged a book by its cover. Back in the days when you could buy books in the quaint old mass-market paperback format at actual bookstores, I would go to the science fiction section and look for names and descriptions, recognizing that the publishers had to put certain kinds of pictures on the front to indicate what sort of book it was, but the words were the important part.

In retrospect, I now realize that I had to look at (or pretty much through) a number of covers that told us the future would be gaunt, misshapen, and just plain ugly. A few years ago I joined the Vintage Paperback mailing list, which sends us a picture of an old book every day, and I realized that the ugly-sci-fi covers were done by a man named Richard Powers (with perhaps a few by artists trying to imitate him).

Once again I am in the minority. He was the Discorporate Artist GoH at World Fantasy Con, where they had a video display of one of his covers after another (from which I learned that he didn’t have to draw like that), and now I learn that he has been inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

Thanx to Tor.com.

Apple-pie-eating surrender monkeys

John Scalzi says it with an Animal House reference.

Frightened, ignorant and cowardly is no way to go through life, son.

And the Rude Pundit notes that Cuban refugees did some terror bombing in the US. Ted Cruz and Mario Rubio, like former IRA pitchman Rep. Peter King, are selective antiterrorists.

Radical chic music

Punk rock was for the select few who could identify with the working class.

Thanx to Metafilter

All White Racists Look Alike

H.P. Lovecraft/Woodrow Wilson

Thanx to File 770

How dare I post stuff like this?

The Outrage Biz: A Case History

Thanx to andrewducker

RINO hunt

Driving the sane people out of the Republican Party. I have predicted it before: Eventually, the ones who think Obama is a Muslim from Kenya will be purged by the ones who think he is a reptile from space.