Sense of Adventure

Giving him a blow job, evidently.

Gadfly UK nerdsite The Register (whose motto is, “Biting the hand that feeds IT”) er, blows the whistle on a Microsoft service that allows - or allowed - kids to chat online with an AI Santa Claus.

The problem arose when, in a chat with the 11 and 13 year old nieces of an El Reg reader, the cyber-Santa ended an exchange about eating pizza - perhaps too much pizza - by saying, “You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else…”

Whoa!

Does that constitute passing the Turing Test? Or the Tourette’s Test?

Lest you think the whole thing an impudent hoax, the Register duplicated the exchange. With the marvelous addition that this conversation concluded with the Register guy and Santa calling each other a “dirty bastard.”

These are hard times indeed for parodists, when such things happen in reality. What’s left for lampoonists to poon?

Sadly, you can’t conduct your own inquiry into whether the horny old elf is being neglected by Mrs. Claus and his little helpers in the oral pleasure department, because Micro$oft not surprisingly yanked the plug on this hapless Cybernetic Santa. “Stop, Dave. Stop, Dave. ‘Here … comes … Santa’ … arrgh!”

And no, that will not be the name of the sequel to The Cybernetic Shogun. Don’t even ask.

But wait. There’s more. Oh, very much yes.

Updated, 12/10/07

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By sheerest happenstance I just found out the sort of tattoo Annja sports on the cover of Secret of the Slaves is commonly called a “tramp stamp.” That can’t be what the Gold Eagle marketing people had in mind…

How did we get by before the advent of Urban Dictionary?

Boy howdy, they sure do hit on emo pretty hard.

On another random tangent, it turns out Bruce Hornsby’s sure a lot more interesting and listenable doing fast jazz than he was as a sententious, received-wisdom-affirming message-rocker in the 1980’s. (And droning. Did I mention droning?) At least to judge by the cut “Celia,” from his 2007 CD Camp Meeting, which they just played on the Jazz station on my cable.

And yes, I did; I did go there. I pimped the CD through my Amazon Associates link, complete with the cute hover-over feature so you can see a bitty product preview. Same as I did with the Rogue Angel book. Think of it as my thoughtfully offering my readers a chance to express approval of me or this blog or just utterly unearned (and unlikely) beneficent impulses by buying through this site so’s I get a cut. You know you wanna!

Shame? I am a writer. I cannot afford ze shame!

I love this kind of stuff: in 1999, a 16-year old kid named Tyler Lyson found a fossilized hadrosaur of the kind called Edmontosaurus in Hell Creek, North Dakota. (How great a name is Hell Creek, anyway?)

To start with, you go, Tyler! But it gets better. Turns out the fossil includes not just bones but what scientists somewhat creepily call its skin envelope. Which in turn means science can derive a pretty good idea of the actual size of its hindquarters and tail.

In the past they’ve had to “[infer] from skeleton structure,” which seems to be academic-speak for, “make a scientific wild-ass guess.”

It turns out that Big Eddie’s scientific name should probably be something like E. steatopygous, or whatever the appropriate word-ending would be - “steatopygous” being a fancy way of saying fat-assed.

Turns out this duckbill had a big ol’ butt. What is additionally incredibly cool is that one of the researchers “has now reconstructed its gait and bio-mechanics, concluding that it had a top speed of about 28mph (45km/h), making it swifter than one of its most fearsome predators, Tyrannosaurus rex.”

Ahem.

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Again.

I’m sitting here at the dining room table doing email and trying not to get sucked in for a long and joyless session of Net-surfing. The back door’s open to allow very pleasant (and much-needed) fresh air in. It’s not a warm day but neither is it particularly cool.

Anyway, a little while ago, about 1:45 PM, I heard the cranes again and went out to check. This time about 20 were milling in the sky southwest of the house, obviously looking to touch down, probably to forage for food before heading down to the river for the night.

It’s beautiful out: sky clear and very blue, calm.

Got to do a bunch on Annja and also get together bio info on myself and certain of my Wild Cards characters to send in for a new website in the making. When break time comes I’ll probably put up some Christmas lights in the front window. I also need to figure out how to fix the rain gutter over the front porch so’s I can string me some icicle lights…

Here’s a little something for the woman or man who really … does … have everything.

It’d also make an ideal stocking stuffer to ensure those tiny tots have more than just their eyes aglow.

Thanks and a tip of the MOPP-4 lid to Radley Balko’s invaluable The Agitator blog.

Let them know it’s Christmas!

Reviews are coming in for the next Wild Cards volume, Inside Straight. Publishers Weekly, the big enchilada, gives us a good notice (scroll down. And down.) Jeremy at FantasyBookSpot rates it an 11 out of 10 (shades of Spinal Tap!), and Harriet Klausner’s Genre Go Round Reviews likes it too.

Meanwhile Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist out of Québec offers you a chance to win one of two autographed advance reading copies of Inside Straight, signed by George R. R. Martin, Daniel Abraham, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Carrie Vaughn, Michael Cassutt, Caroline Spector, John Joseph Miller, Ian Tregillis, and S. L. Farrell. Which is, well, everybody.

That’s right. I’m not in it. I chose to sit this one out. Don’t let that dissuade you from checking it out. You’ll enjoy Busted Flush a whole lot better if you read this first!

Anyway, congrats to the kids in the first book, and hooray for the triumphant return of Wild Cards! Look for it January 22, 2008.

At Emma’s request I just put her out in the backyard - sorry, that’s her whole contribution to this post. Please try to enjoy it anyway.

When I stepped out to set down her water dish my heart shot straight into my throat. Climbing up the western night sky was a gaggle of small glowing spheroids, intertwining and jostling each other.

Twice before in my life I’ve seen something close by in the sky that made me think, Well, that question’s answered: aliens exist, they’re here, and the little buggers have got me.

(Full disclosure: my first thought, especially in the first instance, was actually, Oh, shit. But I thought the other thing really soon thereafter. Really.)

This was the third time. It was also the one I most quickly realized had a conventional explanation.

First I thought they were flares. Then I realized climbing was not a flare-like activity.

But pretty quick I recognized them as a string of balloons - just regular party-type balloons, obviously filled with helium. Probably they escaped or were released from the used car lot over across Fourth Street. The city lights below were bright enough to make them seem self-luminous.

They got up into a wind current and blew east overhead. They streamed out into a more linear formation. They were actually quite pretty.

I’ve seen some striking aerial phenomena, from meteors and the Northern Lights to high-altitude balloons to the F-117 and the YF-12A (interceptor version of the SR-71 Blackbird.) I’ve seen a couple of things which I could identify but not readily account for. And, yes, I’ve several times seen something for which I can find no conventional explanation.

… And it’s all good.

First, we got a review of the new Wild Cards book, Inside Straight, and it’s glowing. Thanks, FantasyBookSpot!

In other news, my pal Melinda has jpegs of her new cover for The Edge of Reason up at her blog. Complete with a nifty blurb from that dang American Tolkien dude. He’s everywhere these days!

Check it out. It does have a rather … best-sellerish … look to it, methinks.

Fingers crossed.

Also Steve (S.M.) Stirling’s got two books in the top five sellers for both Borders/Walden and Barnes & Noble/Dalton, one in hardcover, one soft.

And Los Alamos Boy Scientist Ian Tregillis (who looks like a very young Errol Flynn) (Okay, 14. But, I mean, Errol Flynn!) just sold the splendidly-named Milkweed Triptych to Tor. As the name indicates it’s a trilogy.

So things continue to shake, rattle, and roll here in the Science Fiction Capital of the Known Universe. Woo-hoo!

According to his blog, my pal Scott Phillips’ latest indie classic Gimme Skelter just won Best of the Fest Feature Film at the Halloween Horror Picture Show Film Fest in Tampa, Florida.

It’s high time his uniquely twisted genius started to gain widespread recognition. Financial success in his case is inevitable. It should happen sooner rather than later. He’s put in his time.

And I’d pay to see it!

No, not this video of a computer-simulated race. Who cares about that?

What I’d pay to see is a video of a T. rex actually running down and devouring an overpaid, has-been Brit soccer star. And I’d like the screen to then switch to his wife, Ubiquitous Spice or whatever the hell her name is, sitting in the stands watching and showing no more emotion than she did when hubby finally scored a goal for American “major league” soccer. Is that so much to ask, in this age of CGI?

Interestingly, the Telegraph article I got that from claims a top speed of 18 mph for the Big T, seven miles an hour less than claimed by the piece that so evoked my ire a couple of months ago. But whereas the Times Online sniffishly dismissed T. rex as a “slow, clumsy beast” for running 25 mph, the Telegraph calls it “no slouch” for doing 18.

Go figure.