The Sudden Curve

Ricardo Montalban R.I.P.

What a great career. And this is the clip we just have to watch in memorium. From Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan ::

posted by Tom Novak, who knows wrath ... and that is it, baby. Right there!

You never see The Sudden Curve until it's way too late :: R.I.P. 2008

posted by Tom Novak, who really didn't want to post this at all.

The Sudden Curve's 2008 year in review list

Yeah, right. Lists - HA!

posted by Tom Novak, who says the worst sites have the most lists.

Scott Sigler's "Contagious" ~ on sale now!

TSC old timers will recall how we helped launch the now famous Mr. Sigler's first audio-novel, the incredibly good, Pellucidarian, Earthcore, right here at The Sudden Curve. Well now he is an established author publishing hardbacks and they are flying off the shelves - Zooomg!

Here's the trailer for Contagious ::

Contagious is the sequel to Infection which is about how an alien life form(s) gets into a likeable ex-football player turned computer nerd .... and goes bad. So does he and a lot of other people.

Like all of Sigler's work, the result is fascinating, genre-bending, sci-horror stuff that's waay better than all the typical horror-schlock out there.

YOU can even listen to Contagious and Infection and a lot of other Sigler audio *free* and *easy* and *now* from Podiobooks and you can get Contagious from Amazon even though they are selling out of them in lame book stores where clueless, dweeb managers didn't order enough copies::

posted by Tom Novak, who is a Rocktopi

MV Babes in Danger on You Tube

Uh - oh gang. No more music videos on You Tube next year? Warner Music Group and Google are no longer playing nice. Obviously, Warners wants more money to license it's videos and obviously Google is losing money on them.  So this seems like an impasse considering that BIG Recording still has no understanding of how the internet works. So Warners' music videos are now coming down from You Tube.

More significantly - Google's musical label contracts with not only Warner Music Group, but it's deals with Sony, BMG, BMI and Universal Music Group ALL will expire in March 2009.

Which means we ought to post a bunch more of them while we still can. Woooooo!

posted by Tom Novak, who says President Heston was right about Time Warner.

Beverly Garland R.I.P.

posted by Tom Novak, who says Hail and Farewell to another of TSC's first and favorite sidebar babes (sigh).

Star Wars Multiple Kill Vehicle Explained and Tested.

This is the anti-multiple warhead 21st century Star Wars technology under development explained:

... and here is the 2008 hover test mentioned above (this is real!)

"Holy crap!"

posted by Tom Novak who remembers when they had Woody Woodpecker explain these sorts of things.

We got interactive commenting

Okay, hell hath frozen for the 3rd time in one week here (and it's only tuesday). We got news, mobile posting and now Interactive Commenting.  Which means the comments are threaded. Something I told Six Apart to do years ago.  They ignored me then ... natch.

posted by Tom Novak who now, iconically, is a Sidebar Babe when he comments and is pondering the ramifications of this ... 

We got news

Well, we have a news service anyway.  

Curtesy of the SF Crowsnest Site, news is now posted over there on the right sidebar below the Tweets O' Mars and way down on the left sidebar.  

After years of deliberately not doing this it seems that Resistance is Futile.  There is just so much constant buzz to wade through now that we may as well let it crawl itself down the page.  It's interesting but most of it is ... meh.  It's hollywood stuff,  "new" media, book publishing and assorted PR things.  

We'll scrape out the interesting things and eventually do something about them - like we've been doing now for more than FIVE years.  Gee. 

Posted by Tom Novak, who feels like it was five years in hyperdrive.

Charlton Heston, R.I.P.

Most people don't know it, but Charlton Heston's birth name was...John Carter!!   

Posted by Bob Wallace, who knows these things because he's highly evolved.

Al Gore and his energy-efficient office

Posted by Wally Conger, who wishes he knew what the heck Al's working on in there!

Thanks, Stupid Coppers

Believe it or not, I still put together models.

Not long ago, I put together one of Ben Grimm, the Thing. A woman I know thought he was funny, because he had blue underwear instead of running around naked, just the way the Hulk always wore purple cut-off jeans.

So I send him to her to where she now lives, in Alaska.

He takes forever to show up, so long in fact I thought he was lost.

He wasn't.

Apparently the postal coppers thought there was drugs in him, so they rip the package open, tear the Thing apart, thinking he was hollow, I suppose, then crudely tape the package up with all the Thing's parts just lying loose in the box. No note, no explanation, nothing.

That's why superheroes have always been so popular, to fight crime and corruption, whether, as the Constitution says, "foreign or domestic."

Posted by Bob Wallace, who is going, GRRR GRRR GRRR.

45,000 Hits in One Day

Two years ago I wrote an article, "How Propaganda Works," for The Libertarian Enterprise. I posted it on my site, The Bob Circus, and have probably gotten about 500 hits on it.

Someone found the article and posted it at Digg.com and Reddit.com. Next thing I know, within one day the counter on my site had shot up to 45,000, and right now stands at a little less than 50,000. I've received several emails, including ones from Greece and Australia.

I have no idea what caused this. An article I wrote two years ago -- and now it's all over the Internet.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who sez, this is as weird as when I wrote the Urban Legend about the grandma beating up six airport security guards/

Masters of Science Fiction ~ on TV

Now when's the last time I watched TV? About eight years ago, maybe?

But I'll watch tonight, Saturday. I was listening to NPR Friday, and a critic said a new program, "Masters of Science Fiction," was equal to the best of the original "Outer Limits" and "Twilight Zone." That's all I need to hear.

I quit watching when "X-Files" and "Futurama" went off the air. So far, for this new program, there are four episodes, so at least I'll be watching until September!

Posted by Bob Wallace, who misses Beaver and Dobie and Gilligan, but has never seen any reality show.

Ron Paul @ Google

Here's the video of republican candidate for president of the USA, Ron Paul giving a Q&A deep inside the bowels of the Googleplex.

posted by Tom Novak who's thinking that the Huge Ass Beers Party will have to endorse Ron Paul ...  unless Milla Jovovich decides to get into the race.  Then it's NO contest, yea, go - Milla.

now entering ... Meximerica

posted by Tom Novak, who is toolin' up Amnesty Avenue

Al Beaverda, Terrorist Mastermind

Authorities today said they had arrested two young members of Al Qaeda who had been planning what they claimed was "the worst terror plot we have ever encountered."

Arrested at the Mayfield (Ohio) Grammar School were two eight-year-olds, Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, and Lawrence "Larry" Mondello. Also confiscated were what government authorities said were detailed plans and blueprints to attack the United States with Little Green Army Men ordered from the backs of comic books,  Aurora/Revell/Monogram tanks, airplanes, and spaceships, dirt-clod meteorites and what appeared to be an army of highly intelligent and exceptionally unpleasant alien chickens from Venus.

"If this plot had gone though, hundreds of millions of Americans would have been killed," said Generalissimo Barney Fife, head of Homeland Security. "It was the worst terror plot in the history of the universe! In all of time and space!

"We think Cleaver's real name is Al Beaverda" he continued, "and he's as purely dangerous and more clever than Artemis Fowl, who to this day we still can't seem to catch."

"This is really dumb," said Beaver Cleaver. "Larry and I were drawing pictures on sheets of paper when we were in class, and that snitch Judy called the police and said we were involved in a terror plot. 'Mister Fife, Mister Fife, Beaver and Larry are plotting a terror attack!' Speed-dialed Homeland Security right from her cellphone when she was in class."

"That's right," echoed Larry Mondello. "We were just drawing spaceships and other stuff, and also some aliens that maybe looked like chickens, I guess. Next thing I know a SWAT team comes in and throws us on the floor and beats on our heads with rifle butts. I'm still dizzy. We didn't do nuthin'. Is it against the law to draw pictures anymore?"

Also arrested was Gus the Fireman, who yelled at police and called them "a bunch of darn morons who couldn't find their butts with both hands and someone directing them with a pointer."

"They shot me in the forehead with one of those Tazers," said the 85-year-old Gus. "My ticker just about stopped right there. It was worse than when I was in the Gulag back in '42, and those Russkie Bolsheviks wired my 'nads up to one of those Westinghouse telephone generators and called home a bunch of times. Nazis my butt. Those Bolsheviks were ten times as bad.

"Damn, and looks like I'm heading back to the Gulag again, only time it's in Guantanamo Bay."

A local newspaper columnist, H.L. Mencken, had this is say about the accusations against the two boys: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

"I don't exactly understand what he means, being that I'm a bureaucrat and have never had an original thought in my life" said Generalissimo Fife, "but I know a serious terror plot when I see it, and this was the most serious one I have ever run across. Admittedly all the rest of those terror plots were entrapments in which we sent in people to get those morons to run their mouths, and there was no way some numbnuts baggage handler could  blow up pipelines or some pizza deliverer shoot up an Army base, but by heck, now we're got a real live terror plot! And a couple of terrorists who make Osama bin Laden look like an amatuer!

"It's a good thing we nipped it in the bud."

Both boys were transferred to Guantanamo Bay while strapped to dollies like Hannibal Lecter. No charges are expected to be filed, ever. Both are considered to be illegal enemy combatants, since they were not in uniform.

"They'll be released when the war is over," said Fife. "It should in about 20 years, once we make the Middle East safe for Israel, secure our oil supplies, impose the American hegemon on them,  and lose about 20,000 American dead with 100,000 wounded. Did say that? I mean impose freedom and democracy on them."

Posted by Bob Wallace, who is more Gilligan than anyone else.

That cop on the billboard

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posted by Tom Novak who swears he didn't spraypaint that on that sign ... or  drive past it at 95 mph ... without a seatbelt on  ... smoking an unfiltered lucky ... pouring a dirty martini ...  shooting holes in roadsigns with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot ... from an unregistered, chopped, 1955 DeSoto lowrider ... with limo'd windows ...  a hula-girl on the dash...  a glasspack muffler ... and a dogleash dangling from the right rear bumper dragging choker-chain sparks along the roadbed. Nope none of that, in fact he was home in bed with the flu all week.

Massive Recall Of '07 Pugs

Bob, what model year pug do you have?

Full Onion Story

Posted by Tom Ender, who has a cat. However, that cat has so many problems he makes the '07 Pug sound like a good deal.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett, R.I.P.

I learned a few days ago that Bobby "Boris" Pickett, he of Monster Mash fame, died last month of cancer.

The first time I remember hearing that song was in 7th grade, long after the song had been a hit.

The strangest girl in the class brought it for everyone to listen to. I don't remember if it was anyway near Halloween or not, but I do remember that girl bouncing around in her seat and obviously getting a big kick out of listening to it.

I kinda liked it, too, but certainly not enough to dance to.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who's a graveyard smash.