Keeping our Internet Free

If you wonder what all the big deal is about Net Neutrality -- or if you don't even know what it is, but you hear all the kidz talkin' about it -- here's a speech from Senator Al Franken that he gave last week at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.  These are smart words, and they ring with the true spirit of American freedom.  Too bad big business and their puppet politicians think that too much freedom is . . . unprofitable.

All the places where it's YOU VS. FOOD

I watch Man Vs. Food occasionally, and I usually enjoy it, especially when host Adam Richman goes somewhere I've never even heard about, such as Black Sheep here in Richmond, which looks just incredible.

My problem with the show is that every episode is 100% formulaic.  And it doesn't matter to me if he eats the whole giant dish at the end or not.  It's all just rote.  I know that, in every episode, he will come up against his "food wall," he'll drink milk to counter the spices in hot stuff, and then a couple of people will ask some banal questions about the challenge when it's over.

It's just a show, and a simple one, at that.  The thing is: I like seeing the food.  And sometimes, the amounts certainly get crazy.

 

I have absolutely no desire to rip away my stomach lining with nuclear-hot chicken wings, nor stuff myself until it hurts with a 3-6 lb. hamburger.  Hell, I already have acid reflux -- I don't need to bust my gut any worse in order to be a macho man.  But if you'd like to see who'd win in the challenge between YOU VS. FOOD, here's a list of 83 restaurants across America and their culinary challenges.  Man Vs. Food has been to some of them already, but there are a lot of places where the challenges still haven't been met.

Good luck . . . and, as Monsieur Creosote once said, "Bucket!"

A Tattoo for the Literate

Found this over on io9 today.  I'm not a tattoo kind of guy, but if I were, I'd get one like this, that merges text and art seamlessly.  Click the photo to see more...

Stargate Noir

i09 posted online a few sample chapters of Cowboy Angels, the new SF novel by Paul McAuley, and after engulfing them hungrily, I thought I'd finally found a science fiction writer comparable to the mainstream's James Lee Burke.

I wish.  Unfortunately, the quality seen in Paul McAuley's early chapters drops with each twist in the novel's convoluted plot, and what we have left in Cowboy Angels is the first novel in what I assume will be a thriller/SF trilogy about a special ops agent repeatedly chasing his best friend and former agent through "Turing gates" -- transporters/windows into parallel universes that were first created in the 1960s.  (This discovery was made in the novel's base reality, called The Real.  Parallel universes are called "sheaves" -- and this, perhaps, is the most interesting twist to me: the author does not use our reality as the Real or base universe.  Our world is known as the Nixon Sheaf, which amuses me greatly.)


The story begins with a cool murder mystery: someone is crossing into parallel worlds and killing the same woman in each sheaf, and our protagonist, Stone, must stop the killer.


Great premise -- but it goes downhill after a lot of universe-hopping that is just way too confusing. And there is one overall flaw: it's the idiot plot.  To keep the plot of the book moving forward, the protagonist has to be an idiot and keep playing his friend's mind games ("Just trust me," he keeps saying).  Add to this a semi-sentient time-traveling machine that comes out of nowhere, almost deus-ex-machina-like, and you have a muddle of a story that, frankly, I will not continue on to Book Two.


It was a great idea.  Too bad it got messed up in the storytelling.