For one last time The Magnificent Genre Seven will be signing books at the Waldenbooks in Binghamton, NY. This is something of a last hurrah for the store, which will be closing in January. So, if you live anywhere near, please come by. Great merriment guaranteed, whether you buy a book or not!
Waldenbooks @ The Oakdale Mall
Reynolds Rd., Binghamton, NY
December 5th, 2009
Noon-4pm
Gift-wrapping available!
Featuring:
Patricia Bray; S.C. Butler
Barbara Campbell; Laura Anne Gilman
Jackie Kessler; Joshua Palmatier
Anton Strout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsawq3PBMms
Starring Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris, no less.
No, not the old cigarette brand. My 19 year old Volvo 240. One of the last indestructlible Volvo’s, before the brand became fancy Fords. It died on Van Dam St underneath the BQE. It’s an easy fix, but insuring this car that I rarely use in Brooklyn is not worth the expense. So I have donated it to Kars4Kids and have an assignation with the two truck this afternoon.
A classic Paul Krugman column in the NYTimes today. He complains that the mismanagement of the AIG bailout is contributing to the continued downturn in the economy because it means the country has lost trust in its financial officials. This is complete hogwash. The continued economic downturn has nothing to do with a lack of confidence in the government and everything to do with an eight year orgy of debt and consumerism that has to be gotten through before things can get better, like losing the ten pounds you gain over the holidays before you feel like yourself again. Krugman is simply using this to bash the administration into doing what he wants them to do - which is more fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about more fiscal stimulus for months.
This is the trouble with Krugman. He may have been a good economist once, but now he’s a columnist with a big ego who wants to be right all the time. He’ll twist anything to fit his opinion du jour. He may well be right about the need for fiscal stimulus, though he knows as well as any economist that fiscal stimulus has a twelve to eighteen month drag before it starts to have an effect (which means we’re only starting to feel the effects of the stimulus now). And he’s right about the mismanagement of the AIG bailout, where AIG’s creditors inexcusably got one hundred cents on the dollar at taxpayer expense. But the two have nothing to do with one another. Krugman knows that. But he’d much rather play stern schoolmarm than be honest.
I could have watched Charlie Stross interview Krugman at WFC this summer, be decided to eat Duck-In-A-Can instead. An excellent decision.
And I didn’t even have to watch it.
From The Atlantic:
“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty,” said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. “And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.”
My latest post at SFNovelists discusses just that.
See? I do like some things. I even like a few things everybody else likes.
But I have a question. Apparently the movie is based on a series of five books called The Crane-Iron Pentology by Wuxia novelist Wang Dulu. Why have these books never been translated into English? Are they written in Manchu or Cantonese?
Anyone out there know?
I must have these books.
