So we’re in the home stretch of the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot now, nearly halfway through season 4. And by “we” I mean “me”, as my wife has more or less tuned “BSG” out at this point, except for some of the scenes where Al from “Quantum Leap”* (AKA Dean Stockwell) shows up, and the occasional conversation like this that ensues if she happens to be awake when I start an episode:
Continue reading “Still Not A Review Of “Battlestar Galactica””
So this week I’m about halfway through Hallowed Ground, and at this point authors Steven Savile and David Niall Wilson have sufficiently muddied the waters that I’m not entirely sure who the bad guys are. Is it The Deacon and his band of revival/freak show misfits? Is it the mysterious traveling snake oil purveyor Balthazar? Is it both? Hmm, I bet it’s both. Oh, and there seem to be people around who can turn into crows.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 8/26/14: We’re Still On “Hallowed Ground””
So I recently watched “28 Weeks Later“, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s classic “28 Days Later“, the film that helped to usher in the “fast zombie”* boomlet of the early 2000s. Like its predecessor, “28 Weeks Later” boasts a very strong cast (including Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Harold Perrineau, and Jeremy Renner) and it delivers the apocalyptic mayhem, but unfortunately it suffers from the fact that the characters behave in incredibly stupid ways. If you imagine that they took Season 3 Andrea from “The Walking Dead” and put her in charge of a military operation to repopulate Britain after it was devastated by the rage virus from the first film, you’re not far off.
Because my wife studiously ignored the presence of this movie in the house, I can’t use the usual rating system of how long it took her to fall asleep. Therefore, I’m going to dust off the “badmovies.org” style of bullet-pointed summary, which I think was last used in my infamous pan of “August Rush“, to illustrate some of the important things “28 Weeks Later” taught us. Needless to say, there will be …
So this week I’m reading Hallowed Ground by Steven Savile and David Niall Wilson, in which a questionable (is there any other kind?) old West preacher called the Deacon sets up a revival tent in a gulch outside the little town of Rookwood.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 8/12/2014: “Hallowed Ground””
So, it’s been a while since I posted a “movie review”. The reason for the dearth of recent writeups is not that we haven’t been watching movies, but that she hasn’t really been paying attention to them lately, for various reasons, including that none of them is “Breaking Bad“. Anyway, here’s a sample of some of the selections that have arrived and departed unremarked. (Longtime readers will recall that the ratings system I use is, “How many minutes did it take for this movie to put my wife to sleep?” By that standard, none of these did very well.)
Continue reading “Freezing Bad; Or, Not A Review Of “Frozen River””
So this week I’m reading the second book in the “Arisen” series, Mogadishu of the Dead (aka “Chicago”), in which some of Our Surviving Heroes from Fortress Britain make a run to the New World in search of a cure for the zombie plague, and possibly for a nice deep dish pizza.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 7/22/14: “Arisen, Book Two: Mogadishu of the Dead””
So this week I reached into my big folder full of rejections (and the occasional acceptance) and pulled out something new: A contract! Arriving as it did in November of 1997, this was, if I remember correctly, my first-ever contract, for a story called “The Short Route” (AKA “My Cousin Susan’s Favorite Story Of Mine Ever”), in which a tenderfoot from Back East discovers that there’s more than just cattle on his first cattle drive. The story appeared in “Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium” a tiny regional magazine published in Syracuse that ran from 1997 to 2001.
Continue reading “Random Contract: Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium, “The Short Route””
So at the moment I’m reading (unusually for me) a couple of books: And Another Thing by Douglas Adams Eoin Colfer, which is book six in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” trilogy, and Once Upon A Curse, a short story collection that contains retellings of various famous fairy tale scenarios, including back to back revisions of “Sleeping Beauty”, from different points of view than the originals (no Maleficent so far though). I picked it up over a year ago because it was on sale for $0.99, plus it has a Peter S. Beagle story in it. You may have heard of him.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 7/1/2014: “Once Upon A Curse””
So this week I’m reading Fortress Britain, by Glynn James and Michael Stephen Fuchs, which mostly follows the activities of an elite military strike force in Britain as they attempt to deal with the aftermath of a (you guessed it) zombie apocalypse.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “Arisen, Book One: Fortress Britain””
Viscosity 