Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4 is available for the Kindle and it is free until tomorrow (goes up to $3.99 after that). I’ll work on creating an ePub version in the summer.
Innsmouth Free Press writers continue to do good: Orrin Grey’s short story “Black Hill” was originally published in Historical Lovecraft and now gets to appear in The Book of Cthulhu 2. Orrin is my co-editor for Fungi and he deserves to be in a big, mass-market paperback format.
Talking about Fungi: We have a table of contents! We’re just waiting for a few contracts to come back.
Finally, I am on the long-list for this year’s Vanderbilt-Exile Short Fiction literary competition with a story featuring giant penguins, snow and insanity. Yes, I was inspired by you-know-who (hint: Mountains). However, big penguins are not far-fetched at all. We’ve found the remains of penguins taller and heavier than emperor penguins: the Kairuku lived in the Oligocene period and would have been super intimidating.
For more information on giant prehistoric penguins read this Guardian article.
Exile: The Literary Quarterly is a Canadian journal in print since 1972. Below is a nice YouTube video explaining what they’re about.
What does this contain? It may be up to Agatha Christie to figure it out.
Is that can of soup trying to murder you? Take it up with the food companies, says Canada. The federal government announced its 2012 budget. Among the items? Cutting 56.2 million from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s overall budget. One way to achieve this goal is by altering CFIA’s role in policing food labels. From now on “The CFIA will introduce a web-based label verification tool that encourages consumers to bring validated concerns directly to companies and associations for resolution.”
Essentially the federal government is abandoning the practice of policing nutrition claims on food labels, which means that next time you pick that low-sodium meal, it may not be as low-sodium as you expected.
Over at the Huffington Post “Bob Kingston, president of the Agriculture Union, which represents food inspectors at the CFIA, said the new policy amounts to ‘a total farce.’”
I can’t help but agree. There are many people who rely on accurate labeling of foods every day: people with diabetes for one, but also dialysis patients who must monitor their sodium ingestion or folks with allergies.
Next time you pick that can of soup from the shelve, be careful: it could have murder on its mind.
The open submissions period for Fungi (an anthology I am editing with Orrin Grey) is fast approaching (January 15-February 15) and I wanted to talk about mushrooms and size.
We generally think of mushrooms as small because we are used to seeing little white caps growing on the ground. We do not imagine them as large, but some of the largest organisms on earth are fungus. One species, Armillaria solidipes (formerly Armillaria ostoyae), known as the honey mushroom, was found in Oregon a few years ago. It has been growing for some 2,400 years and covers 3.4 square miles. Now let Alice chew on that!
To make things more difficult, some mushrooms don’t look like mushrooms at all. The Annulohypoxylon thouarsianum resembles a lump of coal. It’s inedible. Not that you’d like to sauté that thing.
Then there are the mushrooms that glow in the dark, members of the Mycena family. It doesn’t get any groovier than these babies.
In conclusion, when considering possible ideas for Fungi think of all the fungal variety surrounding us. Oh, and do check my list of things I’d like to see in the slush. Enjoy the mushrooms.
This is me with The Book of Cthulhu. It contains my story “Flash Frame”, which originally appeared in this anthology. I normally wouldn’t allow a snapshot of moi sans makeup on the Internet, but I was really happy to get this book. It weighed a lot! No wonder it took a little while to arrive.
When I was growing up I lived in Mexicali, in the north of Mexico, which is hot as hell and not as interesting. To survive in Mexicali you must have air conditioning. A fan will not cut it.
I remember one time when the power went out in the summer. It was night time and my parents knew it wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. They also knew we’d all be roasted alive if we didn’t do something about it. The solution was to go to the public place in town that would have air conditioning: the movie theatre.
I’m not talking about a multiplex because there was no such thing as a multiplex back then. But a movie theatre is a movie theatre and air conditioning is a good thing. So they packed me in the car and drove to the movie theatre. The movie playing was Aliens.
Well, since there were no multiplexes there were no multiple screens, and there were not multiple options to watch. Either we sat down, cooled a bit and watched Aliens, or there was nothing.
We sat at the front row and I guess the thought process was that since there was a kid in the film, it was good enough for me. My mother informed me that there would be monsters, like all responsible parents do.
On another occassion my parents took me to see The Fly, though by then we had moved to another city.
Sadly, we were turned back at one movie because I was too young for it. It was a Gene Wilder flick, which was deemed too much for a kid to stomach.
Ah, good old Mexico where body horror was perfectly OK for the children but a sexy joke meant the boot from the movie theatre.
I was also not allowed to see a movie which had a woman giving labour at the beginning of it because she was unmarried.
The clerks at the local video store were also very accomodating. There was a Roger Corman film which I believe opened with women being sexually assaulted by aliens on a spaceship, and I was able to rent that even though there was an under 18 policy about flicks. However, they didn’t let me take out My Left Foot.
I remember as a child being vividly fascinated by the gigantic artwork for Emmanuelle 5 covering the whole wall of a cinema. We were not supposed to talk about that cinema, but it had highly entertaining lobby cards outside. It was, of course, the Teresa, a porno cinema. It had “permanencia voluntaria” (voluntary stay), which meant with one ticket you could stay for the following shows. It was a great way for a homeless person to take a nap.
Sadly the Teresa has been demolished, like many others were. Modernity swept through Mexico sometime in the 90s and killed the movie palaces in favour of the multiplex. Keen business people figured they could make more money if they sold you expensive popcorn than if they let you stroll in with a damn basket full of food to munch during the show. They also took out the intermission. In an effort to sanitize and standarized the shows someone, finally, started cleaning the aisles. And the poor usher with the flashlight was given the boot. No longer can you yell “cacaro!” at the projectonist, and insult him in dozens of other colorful ways. Throwing stuff at the screen is now frowned upon.
One time we went to see Ghostbusters 2 and they had oversold the show so they had us seat on the stairs. The stairs! What a fire hazard!
Now watching a movie in Mexico city is the same as watching it in the States. You can even purchase sushi at a fancy multiplex. Though I suspect youths there don’t have nearly as much fun as we did.
To bad parents and the movie theatres that enabled them.