Dispatches from the Flying M

Arlen comes over

Sen. Arlen Specter has announced that he's switching party allegiance and becoming a Democrat.  For him, it's a matter of political survival--so many Pennsylvanians re-registered as Democrats last year to vote for Hillary or Obama in the primaries that the Republicans left there are increasingly conservative and unlikely to vote for him.  As a Democrat there, he might survive the 2010 election.

Now the question is, will this cause Norm Coleman to dig in his heels even deeper (if that's even possible)?  Once Al Franken, the obvious winner of the Minnesota Senate race last November, is seated, the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority.

Norm, do the right thing...for once!

Free Comic Book Day

Saturday, May 2 is Free Comic Book Day.  All across the country, comic book stores will be giving away selected comics for free.  The goal is to show non-comics readers how much fun there is to be had in the world of comics.  Lots of the freebies are family friendly, and the ones that aren't are usually clearly marked and segregated from the others, so don't be afraid to take your kids. 

The "free" comics are free to you, but not to the stores, which do have to pay a small cost for them.  So try  to spend a little money while you're there, in order to help offset the cost of the giveaways.  If you can't imagine ever walking into a comic book store, you're exactly the kind of person this event is made for, so give it a try!

Not every store participates, because of the cost to the stores, but many do, and they'll have signs and banners up.

I'll be signing on FCBD at a store called Spazdog Comics, in Phoenix, AZ, from noon to 3 pm.  My comics won't be free, but the store should have a good selection available.

Here's the store's info:
21610 N. 35th Avenue Suite 162
Phoenix, AZ 85308
(623) 582-3240

Also, blogger Randy Johnson has reviewed the Desperadoes Omnibus.  Find his review at the link.

LA Times Update

I'm told the Festival was lots of fun, and sorry to have missed it.  The LA Times Festival book prizes were announced, and here are the winners:

Fiction: Marilynne Robinson, HOME
First Fiction: Zoe Ferraris, FINDING NOUF
Young Adult: Terry Pratchett, NATION
Current Interest: Barton Gellman, ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Sideshow

Saturday on the way home from Sabino Canyon (which was beautiful) we stopped off briefly at the Pima County Fair.  It had all the attractions of most big fairs--lots of fried food and sweet food (sometimes both at once), rides, pig races, a demolition derby, elephants...and a sideshow.

Now, I've been around long enough to know that most sideshow attractions (except for some of the freakishly mutated animals, which just make me feel sad) are fake--constructed especially for that purpose.  But that's okay.  The point isn't their reality, it's the thought that went into them, and the slice of Americana that goes along with the idea that people did--and do--pay good American dollars to see the world's smallest horse and the albino turtle and the dog-faced boy.

I took a few pictures in the sideshow tent, although the light was terrible and I was shooting through glass.  They're not technically perfect, but in some ways I think that enhances their charm, and gives the viewer a sense of walking through the tent making these same discoveries.

Devil Baby

It all made me want to come home and listen to Tom Russell's brilliant CD Hotwalker (which is on now, as I write this), particularly the parts with the probably fictional Little Jack Horton.  As Russell says,  "Little Jack Horton was the king of the carnival, the voice of the great American midway, a voice that sounds like Ukulele Ike on laughing gas, the real thing. He's been shot out of cannons, he did the pass of death on a Shetland pony, he rode the Four Walls of Eternity on a motorcycle. He appeared in movies like The Terror of Tiny Town and One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando. And he wrote poetry. This is a true American voice from the sawdust back lots of the Old World."

                                                                                                                        Chupacabra

L.A. Times

Maryelizabeth and most of the staff of Mysterious Galaxy are off to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend.  I won't be there, but plenty of other people will be--more than a hundred thousand of them, spread out over the beautiful UCLA campus.  There'll be authors galore--from Bob Barker to Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury to Barton Gellman, Michael J. Fox, Hip Hop Harry, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlee Matlin, Gore Vidal, and many, many more.  No, I don't know who Hip Hop Harry is, either.  But if I was going, I could find out.  If you're in SoCA, you'll want to be there.

Earth/Space

It seems odd to commemorate Earth Day by standing on it and looking away.  But a little before 5 am today, the moon and Venus were in such close conjunction that the planet looked like a diamond chip that had flaked away from the moon's crescent (the whole of the moon vaguely outlined against the sky).  Jupiter floated up and to the right.  Theoretically Mars should have been visible beneath the moon and Venus, but I guess by the time it cleared the mountains east of us, the rising sun obliterated it.

It was a beautiful sight.

Today is Earth Day, though, not planet day.  And until we colonize Mars, we've only got the one.  Do something nice for it today.

Desperadoes Omnibus

Here's another review of the new Desperadoes Omnibus, in Scoop.  Give it a read!

FYI...

...if you can read this, then you're better off than me.  For reasons yet unknown, since I got onto Hughes satellite I've been unable to view my own blog.  I'm working on it, though...

More Changes

Recently I wrote that there would be changes coming to the blog.  The first was the reply function in comments, and the ability to put your picture in.  One I ultimately decided against (again) was blog ads, which I figured might help cover the cost of the site, but would probably wind up being just as annoying as most ads, since they're not all as good as Jack in the Box's mini sirloin burgers ad.  So that ain't happening.

There will probably be more stuff on the way, but the big news now is that, as of yesterday, we're on satellite internet instead of dial-up.  It's way more expensive than the other options, and not nearly as fast as cable (and much slower on upload than download), but the other options just aren't options out here.  We literally had a guy come out to see if he could install a wireless high speed service and he didn't bother to turn off his truck after he pulled in the driveway.  So it's satellite or nothing.  We've been living with dial-up, at 26,400 bps, for a long, long time.

My goal is not to spend more time online, but to make my time online more efficient.  However, because of my new capability, I might do things like embedding the occasional video on here, for those who can watch it.  I remain sensitive to those who don't have any high-speed options--our country, for all our high standard of living, is woefully behind the curve on broadband access.  So I promise not to take high speed for granted.

Tea parties

Tomorrow, apparently, many Republicans who don't understand contemporary slang are planning to spend the day teabagging.  I'll leave the double entendres for Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox.  The real point is, these people are planning to collect tea bags to send to President Obama, in protest.

In protest, though, of what?

The Boston Tea Party we all learned about in grade school was in protest of taxation without representation.  We have a representative government now.  Those people in Congress, good or bad, Gabrielle Giffords or Michelle Bachman, were elected to represent us.  So are they protesting their own elected representatives in Congress?

Most of the ire seems to be directed at President Obama, though.  Why?  He hasn't raised anybody's taxes.  The only bit of tax policy he has enacted so far has been a tax cut for 95% of Americans.  A couple of years off, he'll let Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire on schedule, which will be a tax increase--to a top rate about 10% lower than it was under their hero, President Reagan.

Other than that tax cut for most of us, the taxes that the tea partiers are protesting were established by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress.  There would have been plenty of reason to protest that gang, but they're out of office now, for the most part.

Are they really protesting the stimulus?  Maybe they're in favor of the GOP's proposed spending freeze.  Because that's a good way to perk up an economy in which the crux of the problem is that no one is spending any money.  Anyone who thinks a spending freeze will do anything except turn a recession into a depression hasn't studied economics, or history, or spent more than ten seconds considering reality.

So really, it's like Paul Krugman says: this whole thing is nonsense, a few right wingers and Fox News stirring up the know-nothings who still pay attention to them, in order to boost Fox's ratings for the day and to make those behind it feel important, when history and America have passed them by.

If anything worthwhile comes of it, it'll be a temporary profit center for the tea industry. If you want to share in it, buy Lipton stock, quick!  But then sell on Friday morning.