January 12, 2008

A late blog entry today as I spent the afternoon at Rob Cooper’s place, watching football and eating prime rib. In attendance: Alex Levine, Ivon Bartok, and the co-owners of Vera’s Burger Shack, Gerald Tritt and Noah Cantor (try the drunk chicken sandwich!). NFL Playoffs Regular Carl Binder was greatly missed (he’s back on the picket line Monday from what I hear), and I paid tribute to him by keeping the front row seat beside me empty in his honor…for as long as it took the disrespectful Ivon to come over and claim it for himself. Cold.

Incidentally, the roast was MUCH better than the games. Rob is not only the barbecue king, but prince of the grill. And, I suppose, the, uh, Earl of the smoker.

Lou Anders, editor of February’s book of the month club selection (Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction From the Cutting Edge), left the following message at my back-up blogger site:

“Occurs to me, now that you’ve kindly featured the cover, that I should point out that the wonderful art and design is courtesy of award-winning illustrator John Picacio. John and I go back many years and he’s done all but one of my anthology covers. He has a website at www.johnpicacio.com and a blog at -

http://www.johnpicacio.com/blog.html

Both well worth checking out.

In this instance, he was very consciously trying to project forward the design of 21st century SF.”

I really look forward to checking out some short story collections for a change, and especially look forward to seeing which stories resonate with which regulars. At present, I’m halfway through Iain M. Banks’s Against A Dark Background (having recently finished Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes) and am enjoying it immensely. You can check out my last 10 reads as well as what I currently have on deck in my profile.

On the anime front, I’m four discs into Ergo Proxy. Beautiful series.

Again, for those of you keeping score -

“And the means of production is fully revealed.” = Spoils of War

Today’s pics: Prime Rib, Rob uses one of his countless in-house gadgets to carve the roast, my sandwich, Alex “Poindexter” Levine, Rob multi-tasks, Ivon Bartok chows down, I’m despondent after yet another Patriots win.