Malediction

I am not a nice person. I don’t just want Trump’s effort to grab the electorate by the pussy to lose. I want him to lose so badly that Barry Goldwater and George McGovern high-five each other in Heaven. I want him to face prosecution for enough of his many crimes to spend a thousand years in jail. I want him to face a revelation that he fears even more than a picture showing that the short-finger thing is true: an indecent exposure of his finances.

BS Detection

Training the young to refute* fraudulent health claims

*Refute does not mean “deny.”

“They Told Us to Tell You Hello”

What we built

Thanx to Tor.com.

They don’t make nostalgia like they used to

Burning Man has been ruined 27 out of 30 times.

Thanx to Metafilter

Sam, you made the pence too long

“The irony is that Trump appears to be the extremist when he is a hollow grifter with a personality disorder. Mike Pence is the real deal.”

Thanx to Follow Me Here

Forest of Incandescent Bliss

Walter Jon Williams remembers Cordwainer Smith.

Thanx to Tor.com.

Critic

Remembering Thomas Clareson

Thanx to sartorias

Recidivist Voter (Highlights)

1952: My parents take me along to my elementary school’s gym to watch them vote. It’s fun: the mysterious curtain, the clanking machinery with the big handle…There are lots of parties: not just the Big Two, but also several flavors of Socialist, the Vegetarian Party, and the Prohibitionist Party, whose candidate is Stuart Hamblen, a country singer best known for “This Old House.”*

1964: I finally get to do it myself. I will always feel like something of an Abused Voter because I thought I was voting against sending half a million troops to Vietnam, but basically I’m happy with the result, and I will persevere and vote every time.

1968: I am introduced to the great American custom of pulling the lever with one hand and holding the nose with the other. I vote for the Hump. The Dick wins.

1972: I cheerfully vote for the acid, amnesty, and abortion candidate. The American people prefer Nixon, validating my opinion of the American people.

1980: Subconsciously realizing that it’s time to start Jimmy Carter on his extremely successful career as ex-president, I deviate from Yellow Dog purity and cast a ballot for the generic white guy on the Libertarian ticket (Clark, if memory serves). Reagan wins. I concede that third-party votes help the candidate I like less and never do it again.

1992. Though the Experts assured us last year that Bush had sewed it up with his glorious victory in Iraq, the short memory of the American people saves us again.

2000. I vote against Bush, but Florida is stolen.

2004. I vote against Bush, but Ohio is stolen.

2012. A local gas crisis causes me to walk two miles over and two miles back to vote for Obama and against Romney. It’s worth it.

2016. Having been reminded by Brexit of the dangers of underestimating the power of the Stupid White People vote, I prepare to vote for Hillary Clinton.

* Having escaped from the historical present by superhuman means, I note that we could use a party like the Prohibitionists today, to help the Religious Right from endangering their immortal souls by voting for imperfect Republicans. It should probably be rebranded as something like the Barefoot ’n’ Pregnant Party. Their showbiz candidate could be Pat Boone, whom I just saw an article about. He looks like the picture in Dorian Gray’s attic, and he had just delivered an antigay rant that I assume was done first and better by a Black performer.

Revenant

Ray Russell has returned from the dead, which is not inappropriate. Penguin Classics (!) has published Haunted Castles, a collection of seven of his Gothic novellas, with an intro by Guillermo del Toro. I’m in favor, but I’ve got to say that for me, treating Ray Russell as a Gothic writer is like saying Babe Ruth was a great dude to party with and didn’t he play some sort of sport?

Russell was an editor and writer at Playboy, where he wrote and published lots of science fiction. In 1961 he published Sardonicus and Other Stories. I thoroughly enjoyed the other stories: 50s social sf, skillfully done. He followed it with The Case against Satan (also now revived as a Penguin Classic), a brilliant novel about possession and exorcism, with much more theological pondering than one would expect from a Playboy editor, excellent characterization, and bits like the idea that age is a caricaturist (a concept I fear I am exemplifying) and my introduction to the classic dirty joke in which a dying priest tells a young lad, “I lied to you, son. I’m not your father. I’m your mother; the archbishop is your father,”* It sold like science fiction. Ten years later William Peter Blatty added showbiz and bestseller details and made millions. (Cf. Harry Harrison’s Plague from Space and The Andromeda Strain.)

Then there was The Colony, a funny showbiz novel with bits like “Tamburlaine, in two parts, like my ass” and “practicing the manly art of self-abuse.” I fear that the Suck Fairy may have gotten at it. I know that the Suck Fairy found another story Russell set in the same milieu, sodomized it to death, and continued to work on its corpse. “Xanadu” was a jolly little romp about a good guy who hypnotizes women into having sex with him and does no harm thereby.

He also did an enjoyable horror novel called Incubus. I don’t know if that’s coming back.

* That story turns out to be a classical theme. It can be traced back to the Norse Eddas, and Ezra Pound put a version of it in The Cantos. I still say it would be perfect as the last words of Anakin Skywalker.