Tag: Dogs

Not A Not A Review Of “Le Week-End”

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

So recently we watched the film Le Week-End, in which a very English and very bickering couple played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan decide the take the train down to Paris for the weekend, as one is able to do when one lives in Europe, apparently.

Partway through the film they bump into Ian Malcolm Jeff Goldblum—forever known to my wife as “The Jurassic Park Guy“—who plays an old college friend of Jim Broadbent’s character who has now become a successful author. Jeff Goldblum invites the other two to a book launch party, or something, at his apartment, various things happen, and then, as Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan were leaving the apartment at the end of the evening, I suddenly had to pause the video and back it up a little.

Wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I think I spotted something.”

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Teaser Tuesday: “Summerland”

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So recently I was reading Summerland, a fantasy novel by Michael Chabon, who you may remember from such books as Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which has never appeared as a Teaser Tuesday because I read it way back when Teaser Tuesday was just Tuesday.

Yes, that’s a station wagon suspended from a zeppelin. No, Clark Griswold is not driving it.
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“It’s A Very, Very Bad Thing To Have Happen To You.”

~ James Viscosi ~ 8 Comments

So those who have been hanging around here for at least a year may remember The Event, my six-part writeup of what happened when I had a small (~3mm), undetected (as they usually are) cerebral aneurysm rupture (as they usually don’t). A few days after the rupture I underwent an emergency coiling procedure to basically stuff the aneurysm with tiny platinum steel wool, thus making my noggin slightly more valuable than it had been previously.

Since The Event, I periodically find myself searching the Internet for information about aneurysms. Sometimes this is triggered by aneurysms in the news, as with the recent hospitalization of the famous rapper Dr. Dre, and sometimes it’s triggered by, say, looking up information about the author of a book I’m reading and discovering that she suffered a fatal head injury after collapsing in her driveway due to a stroke. This being the Internet, which, although it has a long memory, very much favors the short term, usually what you find when doing a search will be recent; but sometimes I find old news, an example of which is this piece from The New York Times, which ran nearly 20 years ago:

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Cross-Post: The Liebster Award

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

As I’m sure most readers are aware, I also run The Oceanside Animals blog (formerly Dennis’s Diary of Destruction). Proving the truth of the admonition never to work with children or animals, because they will steal all the scenes in which they appear, their blog has always been much more popular than this one, but every once in awhile, they share their fame with me. This week, I got to tag along with them on their Sunday Awards and Meme Show, when they were given the Liebster Award and I got tagged for it as well. Naturally most of the space in the post is devoted to Charlee, Chaplin, and Lulu, but I got to answer a few questions too. The show is reproduced here in its entirety with the kind permission of their agent.

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Subtitles

~ James Viscosi ~ 9 Comments

Over the past several years, after Dennis the Vizsla Dog became a little old man dog, he got in the habit of being noisy in the evenings, loudly complaining via barks and whines that he wanted everyone to stop watching television and go to bed at, oh, 8pm* or so. To an extent, this could be managed with things like the Treat & Train or simply by the occasional tossing of treats (which Hipster Chaplin thought was wonderful, because he was faster than Dennis at that point, with a better nose). Another way this was managed: Putting on subtitles for everything we watched. Because if you can’t listen, you can always read.

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Teaser Tuesday 3/19/2019: “The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

Recently I upgraded my eReader to one with a larger screen and, like other eReaders I’ve owned, this one came with a selection of public domain works. In this case, one of the works was The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, by some guy nobody has ever heard of.

poe
Nevermore

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Teaser Tuesday: “Range of Ghosts”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So this week I was reading Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy by Elizabeth Bear, which — unlike most epic fantasies I’ve read — is set in what appears to be an analogue of the Mongolian steppes rather than an analogue of Western Europe, which is enough all on its own to make it interesting. Fortunately I also enjoyed the story.

rangeofghosts

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Not a Review of “Preacher”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So those who are familiar with the sorts of other things I’ve done “not a review” entries on, not to mention the sorts of things I write, and who also are familiar with the show Preacher* on AMC, will likely not be surprised to learn that I’ve never missed a single episode of that unhinged horror/comedy/fantasy/bizarro-land production.

preacher_cassidy
This is not the main character of Preacher, but it is my favorite character. So you get to see Cassidy instead of the Preacher himself.

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Random Contract: “Night Watchman”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

It’s been quite a while since I reached into my giant pile of rejection (and some acceptance) letters, so this week I spun up random.org to have it tell me which folder I should reach into. It selected folder I-J, from which I pulled an old contract from Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press, home of some oddly specific genre categorizations), for the eBook rights to Night Watchman. “Hard Shell Word Factory” doesn’t belong in the I-J folder, of course, but, you know, sometimes things get misfiled. But anyway, I picked it, so here it is. Rather than reproducing all umpteen pages of the eBook contract, I thought I would just pull a few selected sections from it, which may serve as an interesting illumination of how the eBook world has changed since the year 2000 (or, as we called it back in those panic-stricken days, “Y2K”).

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Do You Have A Liebster For Your Monkey?

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

I don’t often do awards on this blog, because Dennis gets them all reasons, but recently my friend Sharkbytes of My Quality Day gave Dennis me a Liebster award. Also known as Joan D. Young, She is the author of the Dead Mule Swamp series of small-town mysteries, and her late vizsla, Maggie, was Dennis’s longtime blog friend. Naturally Dennis snagged the award and proceeded to put on a Sunday Awards and Meme Show in his inimitable style, and while I can’t compete with his showmanship, I thought I would go ahead and post the award and answer the questions.

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