The Roller-coaster

I was told today that some excerpts of my review of Chris F. Holm's The Wrong Goodbye made the front page of the Angry Robot "Robot Round-up." If you're checking out my blog from that link, welcome! Make yourself at home! If you're not, then please check out Angry Robot Books and look at their fine selection of genre novels including the excellent first and second volume of the "Collector" series written by the talented crime noir writer Chris F. Holm.

I've felt I've been silent for the past month on this blog mostly because it's hard to talk when you're holding your breath. This election has got me wound up. I can't even watch the news any more. I can't listen to the radio. I have to be careful what websites I go to. I am a mess.

I guess I had gotten so used to the polls not making sense for Obama that I had assumed that the polls didn't need to make sense. Sure the economy is bad and will be bad for the conceivable future. Sure a solid half of the country hates the President with rabid foam-flecked ferocity. Sure the equivalent of the GDPs of small nations have been marshaled to defame and attack Obama. But, for September at least, what was up didn't seem to need to come down.

Gravity has a funny way of announcing itself.

Still, the RCP poll average nosed into positive territory for Obama for the first time in nearly three weeks today so maybe the second debate was a game-changer. I think, in all honesty, it merely stopped the bleeding. My sense is that this thing will be very, very close.

In other news, I put my name in a few hats for panels at 2013 Arisia, including a panel with my friend David Nuremberg on the Future of Schools. I am literally counting the days until the doors open.

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With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl

I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a

Stephen King's 2017

Despite the release of a single novel and a few short stories, 2017 has to rank up there as one of the more Stephen King ascendant years. No less than four movies based on his works appeared, including one of the most successful horror films of all time, the first part of IT. 'The Mist' (Stephen King) by Dementall.deviantart.com Of course, with King, for every high, there are plenty of lows and 2017 also provided a number of examples of how to do his works wrong. But let's start with the good stuff. The movie adaptation of IT, directed by Andres Muschietti and starring a number of talented young actors (including Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things" fame) really captured, for me, a lot of what I liked about the original novel. Being scary certainly helped, but with King, the horror slice is never really the whole cake. What makes King King, at least for me, is the combination of earthy, believable characters with lurid, "Tales from the Crypt&quo

Ancient Logic

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