It’s snowing on Mars.
Month: September 2008
That’s one way of putting it
Paul Newman on doing publicity:
“It’s kind of an . . . well, not an ordeal, exactly, but doing so many interviews is like double parking in front of a whorehouse; scant satisfaction to both parties.”
The man will be missed.
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror
Hey neat! In their summation of 2007 fantasy, in the terrific-looking Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (newly available from St. Martin’s Press), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant mention Kaleidotrope by name:
Kaleidotrope, edited by Fred Coppersmith, is a new zine of similar ilk. Two issues came out in 2007 and we hope to see it going along the same steadily rising path of EV, Flytrap, etc.
I can hardly blame Ellen Datlow for not mentioning the zine, as Kaleidotrope hasn’t featured much, if any, real horror. (Although that’s something I’d genuinely like to change going forward.)
In all, it’s not quite as nice as seeing a story from Kaleidotrope in the book’s table of contents, or even in the honorable mentions — where a few past contributors do get singled out for quality work elsewhere — but it’s still pretty keen. The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is essential reading every year, and it’s a thrill to see Kaleidotrope acknowledged, however briefly, in its pages.
Cross-posted to the Kaleidotrope weblog.
#5 is alive
I guess this means I have to start working on issue #6? Copies of #5 are available now. Despite my printer woes, it’s a really solid issue — 76 pages of great stories and poems. Check it out, won’t you?
It’s a rich man’s world
“And the rich man in his summer home, singing just leave well enough alone…” – the Grateful Dead
On the imminent sale of Wachovia’s operations to Citigroup, the New York Times reports:
Given their size and reach, the institutions would probably come under greater scrutiny from federal regulators.
Yeah, because that’s worked so well in the past. Even now, when the government should be addressing the problems that arose when they didn’t regulate — and with $700 billion on the line — they’re still essentially handing Wall Street a blank check:
Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.
Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.
At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.
Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.
The bill coming up for a vote now is better than the Bush administration’s original “let’s think up a big number and give them that, no questions asked” plan, but not by much. Not by enough.
So make no mistake, you financial fat cats, you barons of Wall Street: if you screw over the American people, if you throw our financial institutions into disarray, our representatives will find you. They will hunt you down. And they will throw lots and lots of money at you.