jackvance.com

 

If you said “Jack who?” you might want to know George R.R. Martin once called him the greatest living science fiction writer and a master of fantasy “right up there with Tolkien.” That’s right, buddy, Tolkien. Unfortunately, as of Sunday, May 26, 2013, he no longer qualifies as living and will have to settle for merely being the greatest.

Carlo Rotella’s overview of Vance’s significance as a writer in The New York Times Magazine is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about him. I suggest you read it too. “The Eyes of the Overworld” (from the second Dying Earth book) is a prescient and deeply ironic metaphor for this avatar-obsessed virtual non-life we’re cultivating as a race of touchscreen and phone addicts. And this, 40 years before FaceBook. It’s also hilarious. Thank you, Jack Vance, for just being you.

• Vance sounds rad. (Samantha) [ Fri May 31 2013 10:43 PM ]
  

 

So what does that say about Albuquerque? Promiscuous yet hygienic? Faithful yet forgiving? Free-thinking yet conservative? Who the hell knows? I’m just glad you’re all out there keeping things sexy for the rest of us. Let’s do it again sometime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a related note, when the term “Burqueños” is used, we really mean “the 1,405 people who took all or part of our survey, 486 of whom are 22-30 years old and most of whom (969) are under 40.” In case that wasn’t obvious, I mean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main take-aways here? Alibi readers do it frequently, probably more often than they floss their teeth. They do it together and they do it alone. They have no fear of employing power tools or other prosthetic devices, and they “sometimes” like to mix it up with booze and illicit substances. In other words, this town is one big sex party. Here’s the proof:

Let’s hear it for “multiple times a week!”

And again!

The great tragedy is that we didn’t ask WHICH sex toys.

Dear survey-taker, just because you did it ONE TIME without booze or pot, that does not qualify you to answer “sometimes.”

 

Here’s the truth: We used the WRONG NUMBERS for the virginity/age graph. They were actually the numbers from the “how old are you” demographic question, hence the failure of the graph to “correlate with the discussion.” So in the end, it’s not a question of missing intervals and histowhatsits, it is instead a question of being a fuckup.

In the interest of both science and setting the record straight, here now is the RIGHT GRAPH—both a legible one with low-scoring answers omitted (a practice applied to pretty much all the graphs we ran) and an ALMOST ILLEGIBLE one with ALL THE DATA (including such spurious answers as “0” and “1”). Happy? I hope so. More sexy graphs to come. Stay tuned.

Correctamundo

Completamundo

“Winter Was Warm.” So sad.

The first made-for-television Christmas cartoon aired on December 18, 1962, broadcast through the ether to rabbit ears and flickering tubes and glassy-eyed cherubs around the country. It had been a busy year: Ringo Starr joined the Beatles, somebody tried to off Charles de Gaulle, John Glenn orbited the earth, Spider-Man was invented, the Vietnam War raged, and the world teetered on (and off) the brink of nuclear war during the the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I suppose it’s not too shocking that “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol” has become the show that time forgot. But it deserves more love than that.

Done in the on-the-cheap UPA “limited” animation style that has been endlessly ripped off by modern animation stylists (e.g., Genndy Tartakovsky), this inspired speed-run through “A Christmas Carol”—featuring, implausibly, Jim Backus as Mr.-Magoo-as-Ebeneezer-Scrooge—manages to transcend its Flintstones-in-Outer-Space gimmickry and deliver a goddamn amazing TV watershed. No, seriously.

The bangin’ show-stopper “The Lord’s Bright Blessing” starts at 1:16.

1. The songs sound like A-list Broadway material because they are: Jule Styne (music) and Bob Merrill (lyrics) went on to write Funny Girl for Barbra Streisand. Tell me “Winter Was Warm” (play clip) isn’t honestly lovely.

2. The dialogue is literary. Actual lines spoken by Mr. Magoo: “You are about to show me shadows of things that will happen in the time before us. Is that so, spirit? Ghost of the future, I fear you more than any spectre I have yet seen. Will you not speak to me?"

3. The ghosts are genuinely creepy, especially the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who invokes sonorous timpani percussion with every silent nod.

4. The story takes place within a frame narrative: Magoo is an actor making his big comeback in “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway. One of his fellow actors is UPA contract star Gerald McBoing-Boing. There’s even intermission and a curtain call.

5. The whole Magoo-can’t-see gimmick is dropped as soon as he becomes Scrooge. Whew. That was never funny.

Where can you see this minor masterpiece? There’s a not-yet-out-of-print DVD out there, but right now it’s on YouTube posted by various contributors and in clips of varying quality. It’s not the same as having it blaring in the background while you trim the tree, but it’ll have to do. My 4-year-old gives it thumbs up.

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• Mr. Magoo's Christmas (robertmcat) [ Fri Dec 26 2008 11:26 PM ]
  

I love to hate this song.

We’ve played it two ways with Christmas music here at the Alibi: as haters and as lovers. This week’s decidedly un-schmaltzy Xmas playlist is one example. Below are a few more from Christmases gone by.

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• yay! non sticky, rockin xmas songs! (pleiades) [ Fri Dec 23 2011 12:27 PM ]
  

 

Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, who self-identifies as “the Margaret Mead of the weapons labs” has written a thorough debunking of the myth that the disk-misplacing “cowboys and buttheads” (i.e., scientists) at Los Alamos National Labs live in a rarified “culture of arrogance.” (Either that, or he’s their sock puppet, as some have suggested.) What’s interesting is that he mostly blames the ham-fisted interference of the Bush administration. If you remember the series of embarrassing security-breach headlines that started with Wen Ho Lee and ended with a takeover of the lab’s management by a for-profit consortium, Gusterson’s brief three-act revisionist history is totally worth reading. (A tip of the hat to Slashdot for blogging this story in the first place.)

• Time Magazine (Carl Petersen) [ Fri Nov 11 2011 2:43 PM ]