Tue - August 3, 2004
 John J. Miller Interviews Robert Ferrigno on NRO
Posted at 06:06 PM Read More
Wed - July 28, 2004
 Bad guys you want to spend time with
Robert Ferrigno's new book is due to hit the
shelves
soon...Praise
For The Wake-Up...
A mysterious
Specials Ops fixer makes the mistake of taking his job too
personally.
Frank Thorpe, an army vet who was booted from Delta Force for starting a civil
war in South America, knows how to get things done and doesn't mind bending the
rules. After Delta, Frank went to work for a "shop," a shadowy private task
force that did jobs the government couldn't afford to take on itself. The shops
don't exactly play by Marquess of Queensbury rules, but Frank was a loose cannon
even by their standards, and one of them let him go after he botched a
technology-smuggling sting and got one of his comrades killed. Shell-shocked and
unemployed, he wanders aimlessly about LA until one day he sees a Mexican
peddler manhandled at the airport by a pompous businessman.
Outraged,
he calls on his undercover contacts to track down the bully, who turns out to be
a Newport Beach art dealer named Doug Meachum. Frank then poses as a State
Department art-smuggling rep and tells one of Meachum's customers that the
priceless Mayan artifact Meachum sold her is a fake. The customer, a
social-climbing drug dealer named Missy Riddenhauser, goes ballistic and sends
her sociopathic brother Cecil off to whack the bitchy gossip columnist who
exposes the "fraud" in a local paper, and the whole affair kind of snowballs
from there. Frank, meanwhile, is still trying to track down the engineer who
blew his IT sting and killed his partner. All his friends in the shops tell him
the same thing: Revenge is bad for business, a waste of time, and too dangerous
for a smart guy to bother with. They're right. But Frank, who believes in
loyalty and justice, has some serious gaps in his
education.
Sharp, fast, and slick. Ferrigno can read like Raymond Chandler on speed, with
pages turning and adrenaline pretty high throughout.
--Kirkus
Reviews, July 2004
More info
on my friend Robert's book at his website
Posted at 12:49 AM
 the Yokohama four
Blogging will be light for the next few weeks, we
have family in town for an extended stay. Left to right is Papa, Mama, Emiri,
our niece, and wife Chizuko, waiting for our table at Ray's Boathouse, a
Seattle institution. More family members to come early next month (Emiri's mom
and dad are still in Yokohama) and more pictures to come, too.
Posted at 12:41 AM
Thu - July 15, 2004
 Forget poetry, forget fiction, read Graphic Novels!
Several friends have sent me this item, I just
haven't included it yet. This is the best article written about this medium so
far this year. This kind of recognition is a hopeful sign for the future of
graphic novels.
 From
last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (the cover story, no
less)You can't pinpoint it
exactly, but there was a moment when people more or less stopped reading poetry
and turned instead to novels, which just a few generations earlier had been
considered entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals. The
change had surely taken hold by the heyday of Dickens and Tennyson, which was
the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list.
Someday the novel, too, will go into decline -- if it hasn't already -- and will
become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This
won't happen in our lifetime, but it's not too soon to wonder what the next new
thing, the new literary form, might
be. It might be comic books.
Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular
form with mass appeal...
Posted at 02:30 PM Read More
Thu - July 1, 2004
R. Crumb: conversations
A 1991 interview I did with Robert Crumb has been
included in a collection of conversations with R. Crumb,
published by the University Press of Mississippi. I just got a
copy a few days ago. My interview with Crumb first appeared in the Rocket (a NW
music tabloid that I was associated with at the time) and I'd forgotten about it
until I got a call asking for permission to use it.
 I
recall being unsure about interviewing Crumb, assuming he'd rather draw comics
than talk about them, I also figured he also rather talk to a girl than a guy
(Crumb's taste being well-established) so I foolishly baited Crumb by signaling
in advance that we didn't have to talk about comics, we could talk about sex,
old records, France, or whatever he preferred, like, well, sex. The results are
entertaining.
Posted at 11:40 PM
Sun - June 27, 2004
Blogger Bill
#1 item in the Blogdex 100 today, from our Seattle Times:
Yes, the world's richest man
may start his own
blog...
Bill's blog won't be all business,
either. He's expected to share personal details such as tidbits from recent
vacations, according to tech pundit Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch newsletter.
Citing unnamed sources, she reported yesterday that Gates is about to start
blogging "real soon now."
Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray would not confirm the story, but left open the
possibility, saying, "Bill would love to do his own blog at some point in the
future, time permitting."
Murray noted that Gates talked up blogging at gathering of executives in Redmond
last month.
Posted at 09:57 AM
Fri - June 25, 2004
Wed - June 23, 2004
 Modern language
WASHINGTON -- Former
President Bill Clinton says he was "pretty wigged out" with stress when he and
Monica Lewinsky had an affair and said he thought he'd lose the office if he
acknowledged it publicly in a timely
fashion.
This is notable not
because of the stale scandal he's referring to, but because of the language used
to describe his state of mind. This hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. The
first time a former President of the United States publicly admits being "wigged
out".
Am I wrong? Did Nixon say it
first?
Posted at 06:24 PM
Tue - June 22, 2004
Mon - June 21, 2004
SPIDER-MAN in the STREETS OF BOMBAY
What's this about Spider
Man in
India?Bangalore,
India (June 14, 2004) — Marvel Comics & Gotham Entertainment Group
– Indian publishing licensee of Marvel Comics and the leading publisher
of international comic magazines in South Asia – announces the launch of
Spider-Man
India.
Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern
India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to
this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar
Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero
– a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr
leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian
streets...
Posted at 04:35 PM
 rocket booster
My good friend and fellow blogger Greg
Burch is on a mission:
to Save the Saturn. On display at the Space Center in Houston, this legendary
rocket has suffered decades of neglect. Seeing it preserved for future
generations has become a singular passion, since only a few million dollars are
needed, Greg's booster-rocket energy is largely responsible for the success of
the campaign to restore it getting off the ground.
Bravo Greg!
Having known Greg for 30 years, my admiration
for his participation in this mission is beyond words. The perfect convergence
of private passion and civic engagement, this will stand as a lasting
achievement, an enduring valentine to a unique historic
object....About
$700,000 has been raised so far with organizers hoping to bring in another
$540,000 to take full advantage of matching funds offered in a $1.25 million
grant. The grant is through a program called "Save America's Treasures," a
public-private partnership between the National Park Service and the National
Trust for Historic
Preservation...Restoration
of aging rocket underway at Johnson Space
Center ...and
the project has been making headlines. Check Greg's
site for more current media links and updates, but here's a quote I
like, pulled from an Associated Press story from a few days
ago:from USA
Today: "I
followed the space program the way a lot of kids follow professional football,"
said Burch, 47. "When you walk along that rocket and think three people strapped
themselves to that rocket, which is basically a controlled explosion, and went
to the moon — there is nothing like it. It is a quintessential expression
of a generation."
Posted at 08:36 AM
A chicken that drinks and smokes
 Headless
hen pictured in vertical roasting position. My first encounter with poultry that
drinks, smokes, and still sits up
straight.Along with the Texas-style
smoker that I've been enjoying for the last two summers, here's a new gadget; a
vertical chicken roaster. A cylinder in the middle of the pan supports the
chicken upright. Beer (or wine, or any liquid) is stored in the cylinder to keep
the hen from drying out during the smoking process.
I prefer apple or alder, but this
weekend I used hickory wood for the smoking. The bird is marinated and seasoned,
then grilled and smoked for an hour and a half. The outer tray holds additional
items to be roasted, I included red potatoes, carrots, onions, and mushrooms,
covered with olive oil, salt, and pepper. (it's shown above, nude and not yet
seasoned, and below, seasoned, smoked, with its legs ripped off and eaten) A few
hours later, the hen emerged pleasantly drunk and thoroughly smoked. Basted with
Carolina-style BBQ sauce, it tasted great.
Posted at 01:52 AM
Sat
- June 19, 2004
 Go East, young man
American publishers in search
of new markets are heading to
Asia, especially China, the
new land of opportunity. The women's books from Hearst went first:
Cosmopolitan
launched in 1984, Harper's
Bazaar in 1988 and
CosmoGirl!
in 2001. Now the men's magazines are following.
Esquire
settled in China in 1999,
Maxim
and Men's
Health launched editions
there this April and May, respectively.
Asia offers fertile territory
for print exports. The economy of the People's Republic of China is growing
rapidly (9.7 percent in the first quarter of
2004)... from
Folio Magazine:
Maxim
launched a Hong Kong version in April and will hit the mainland in Mandarin in a
few months. “In the states, we talk about
Maxim
as ‘a prime-time read for the young buck,’” says Kerin
O'Connor, international publishing director for Dennis Publishing,
Maxim's
parent. “In Mandarin, the literal translation of that is ‘a golden
time read for the new golden boy.’ This fits because this is the
generation of boys who've grown up in China as it's liberalized and become more
commercialized.”
Posted at 02:32 PM
Fri - June 18, 2004
Sci-Fi Museum
Paul Allen's
Science Fiction
Museum opens in Seattle today.
 From
the New York
Times:The
$20 million creation of Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the museum is
nestled inside another Allen museum, the Experience Music Project, in a twisted,
multihued building designed by Frank Gehry. The space originally housed a
hyperactive music ride called Artist's Journey, but that turned out to be too
expensive to operate and was removed a year and a half
ago. I've been to the original
EMP, and thought it was fabulous (it was known here for years, while in
development, as Paul Allen's Hendrix
Museum) but like most who visited this
monstrosity, concluded early on that it'll never draw enough visitors, members,
or money to survive in its current form. The "Experience Music Project" was an
unbelievably expensive, ambitious failure. I hope the
Sci-Fi
Museum that's replacing it will fare better.
 The
Seattle
Stranger covers this in more detail, in a series of articles this
week.The Experience Music
Project is a flop on all fronts--financial, musical, and intellectual. No wonder
they're turning a big chunk of it into a science-fiction museum. Is the Science
Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame a Hail-Mary pass or a shrewd left
turn?The NYT article is primarily a profile of the museum's
director, Donna L.
Shirley. Shirley used to run NASA's Mars
exploration program...When she
joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1966, she was the only woman with an
engineering degree, hired to work on a planned mission to Mars that was canceled
a few years later after budget cuts. She worked on NASA projects on solar
energy, the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury, an early version of a
Saturn mission that evolved into the Cassini spacecraft [Page 1 of this
section], the space station as proposed by President Ronald Reagan and proposals
for human missions to Mars...
Posted at 10:08 AM
Mon - June 14, 2004
A Nation Divided?
Blogging has been light. Between redesigning
and rebuilding our kitchen, illustration deadlines, and weeping day and night
over the passing of Ronald Reagan (okay, that last part is fiction) I've
neglected recreational reading. However, a few articles got my attention over
the weekend. Having fully internalized this notion that we're living in some of
the most divided times since the Viet Nam era, I found
this item from the New York Times to be a
refreshing contrary view. What if it just ain't true? What if we agree on more
stuff than they're giving us credit for? Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Bill
O'Rielly, are among the reigning (and overpaid) gladiators in the culture wars,
but for all the smoke and noise, no one's bothered to notice--they're shooting
blanks.
A Nation
Divided? Who Says?By
JOHN TIERNEY
If
you've been following the election coverage, you know how angry you're supposed
to be. This has been called the Armageddon election in the 50-50 nation, a civil
war between the Blue and the Red states, a clash between churchgoers and
secularists hopelessly separated by a values chasm and a culture
gap. But
do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have
Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald
Reagan's soothing message could carry 49 of 50
states? To some
scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic differences have actually
been shrinking over the past two decades, and that the polarized nation is
largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each another or,
more precisely, shouting at each other...
Posted at 12:20 AM
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Published On: Aug 03, 2004 06:07 PM
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