Ravenweb Blog

I had an opportunity to see Kathy Griffin live last week (on February 12th, actually) at Shea's Performing Arts Center in Buffalo. I must say, her stand up is even more snarky and irreverent as her television routines. Maybe it's a guilty pleasure, but I enjoyed her riffs at Paula Abdul, Donald Trump, Star Jones, and others and succumbed to many delightful paroxysms of laughter. I also liked when she showed her serious social political side, and skewered George Bush and Mel Gibson. All proceeds from the show went to a local Buffalo AIDS clinic. Say what you want about Kathy Griffin's style and celebrity-baiting humor, but that was a very cool move on her part.

Though released after Jhereg , Yendi is a actually a prequel and recalls a younger Vlad in a turf war with a rival crime boss. Like its predecessor, Yendi is a lot of fun, with rich characters, witty dialogue, and an enthralling fantasy world.

Jhereg is an entertaining, fast-paced fantasy that introduces Vlad Taltos and his constant companion, a leathery-winged jhereg. I recently reread Jhereg , and though I hardly read any fantasy anymore, I was pleased that I still enjoy Brust, and his humorous, anti-epic, wry blend of fantasy. I'm looking forward to finally reading the rest of the series.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a superb, captivating novel about Christopher Boone, an autistic boy, and his quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog. What makes this novel so amazing is its narration. Told completely from the point of view of Christopher, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time illuminates and makes real a complex mind that knows geography, math, and science exceptionally well but that cannot relate well to people or understand human emotions. If you haven't read this yet, go read it right now.

Rainbows End is a near future SF novel about a dawning virtual age and the threat of a deadly biological weapon. I had mixed reactions to the book. While I liked the main character Robert Gu (a former Alzheimer's patient now cured and younger thanks to breakthroughs in medicine) and his attempts to assimilate to a new world where people interface directly with computers and silent message each other, I found myself wondering at times if the novel's setting, circa 2025, was far enough in the future for the kind of deep medical and software innovation present in the book. I also thought Vinge's use of markup to denote silent messaging was awkward. I know what he was trying to do, but markup is for web geeks and programs to process it, not prose! Still, you could do far worse than reading this novel. The story is engaging and the technological extrapolation is always interesting though unlikely to happen in the next twenty years.

I recently saw The Last Kiss . I'd wanted to see this when it was released, mostly because I like Zach Braff in Scrubs and enjoyed his performance in Garden State but also because I knew Paul Haggis wrote the screenplay, and his work in Crash speaks for itself. Mostly, I feel lukewarm about the film. On the one hand, while I appreciated the honest look at issues of relationships and commitment, I thought most of the characters were too unlikeable, with little to contrast or balance out the negativity and emptiness they felt in their lives and relationships.

I'd wanted to check out some of Cory Doctorow's fiction for a while and finally did so, picking up and reading Overclocked last week. It's a good collection. I liked the stories and Doctorow's hipster-meets-techno-nerd style that's a lot of fun and really energetic. The stories in Overclocked recall old SF tropes and current and near-future technology concerns. "When Sysadmins Ruled the World" pivots around the traditional SF apocalyptic story and focuses on two sysadmins and their efforts to keep the servers online as the world goes dark. "Anda's Game" deftly shows how a shrinking, flat world will likely extend to computer game virtual sweatshops, and "I, Robot" and "I, Row-Boat" are interesting Asimov-inspired robot stories.

Congratulations to former Bills running back Thurman Thomas for being elected today to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Thomas was a consummate Bill and the linchpin of the great Buffalo teams from the late 80s and early 90s that won four straight AFC titles before losing in each Super Bowl. Though Thomas had some tough moments in big games, including when he misplaced his helmet in Super Bowl XXVI and when he fumbled in Super Bowl XXVIII, he had a great career, amassing 12,074 yards rushing and 16,532 yards from scrimmage. He always played hard and gave everything he had. The Pro Football Hall of Fame is richer for his inclusion.

Ravenweb visitors know that I have been a fan of U.S. tennis pro Serena Williams for years. With all of her past accomplishments, though, it was nice to see her rise up from the unseeded ranks this year to beat Sharapova to win the Australian Open . This -- an eighth Grand Slam tennis title -- after she recently announced that she is planning to make a movie about the life of trailblazing black tennis player Althea Gibson . Very cool. Congratulations to Serena Williams.

Big props to Scrubs for going with a musical episode ( "My Musical" ) last night. The episode was hilarious and provided an irreverent pastiche of Broadway musicals while staying within the familiar tone of the show. "Guy Love" and "Everything Comes Down to Poo" were the best songs, with the latter number going to show that fart and crap jokes are always funny if done right. Let's hope this musical episode is a sign of better things to come for Scrubs this year. Season six prior to this episode has been a disappointment with too much focus on the baby story lines and not enough crazy stuff like this. See also: Scrubs' takes a turn for the better with musical by Matthew Gilbert (The Boston Globe) Why You Must "Tune" In to the Scrubs Musical! by Matt Mitovich (TV Guide)

Ted Chiang is one of those writers who's so good and whose stories are so well-crafted and compelling that you find trying yourself to prolong and savor the reading experience. As a speculative fiction writer, Chiang is particularly effective at melding accessible and cogent scientific extrapolation with seamless prose. But you don't need to be an SF fan to enjoy Chiang's fiction. Anyone who enjoys good writing and thoughtful stories should find something in Chiang's fiction to satisfy. All of the stories in Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others are good, and some are great. I especially enjoyed "Hell Is the Absence of God", a fantasy novella about a world where angels and God exist and intervene in the mortal world; "Understand", a fun SF story about heightened intelligence in the tradition of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon"; "Story of Your Life", a poignant story about a linguist trying to learn an al...

Well, actually (and fortunately), no -- but I have finally gotten around to playing Oblivion , after having received it as a Christmas gift from my wife. For those of you who don't play computer games, Oblivion is a popular fantasy-themed role playing game that was developed last year by Bethesda Softworks . It is the fourth installment in Bethesda's continuing Elder Scrolls series of games, and its predecessors include Daggerfall and Morrowind . Before I detail my observations of Oblivion, I should point out that of the previous Elder Scrolls games, I've only played Morrowind, which I loaded up shortly after it was released in May 2002. I remember being initially thrilled and very impressed with Morrowind for many days and weeks, perhaps too many of both as it turned out. I was struck by the spectacular visuals and the then state of the art character facial animations, draw distance, and water rendering. I also liked the game's first person view that was reminiscent ...

Adverbs is a series of interconnected short stories or vignettes all of which are titled after an adverb. It becomes pretty clear soon after beginning the novel that love is intended to be the overarching theme. The problems here are the prose and plot devices the author uses to keep his notion of love in the subtext. For example, many of the stories feature characters with similar names, but it's not often apparent whether these characters are supposed to be the same people or different people with the same names. Similarly, though intentionally done I'm sure, the character dialogue is purposely exaggerated and full of strange connections and phrasing, and hard to follow at times. The use of adverbs themselves is tightly controlled and reserved for specific instances of important characters development. Now, Adverbs as a complete text may work well for some readers who will enjoy that the characters, pieces, and themes introduced in the novel never come together, paralleling...

The Android's Dream is a light and fun SF novel by John Scalzi. A departure from the serious military SF in Scalzi's Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades , this book is more in the vein of SF satire, and, in this fashion, is reminiscent at different points of early Neil Stephenson ( Snow Crash ) and Douglas Adams. As an example, the novel begins with an extended fart joke that runs through the entire first chapter. That's the kind of book this is. Though not a perfect or substantive SF novel -- see Ranting Nerd's nice review of the book for a flushing out of some of the parts of the novel that may grate some readers -- it is a funny and entertaining novel and, in this sense, definitely succeeds.

The Brief History of the Dead is a highly original novel that alternates between chapters about a female wildlife specialist in Antarctica who may be the last person alive on the planet following a viral pandemic and chapters featuring a city where the dead continue to live as long as someone on Earth remembers them. The book's author Kevin Brockmeier is a very gifted writer and his skill is evident throughout the narrative. The conceit of the necropolis, though, doesn't hold up through the length of the text, and as the link between the two storylines becomes clear, the plot drags toward its inevitable terminus. I also struggled a bit with the book's apocalyptic setup of a virus that kills everyone on the planet. Even assuming the most virulent strain of a mutagenic virus, it seems incredibly unlikely that a virus would kill off an entire host population. Perhaps if Brockmeier had offered up explanations as to why the virus didn't mutate into less virulent forms or wh...

As 2006 is closing down, I thought I would highlight some of the major Ravenweb posts from the past year. 2006 was really the first full year I maintained a blog, so I'm pleased (and a little surprised) I posted regularly throughout the entire year. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed the past twelve months of Ravenweb, and I look forward to posting more in 2007. Ravenweb 2006 Year in Review I was introduced to the fabulous SF of Iain M. Banks and read Consider Phlebas , The Player of Games , and Use of Weapons . Author James Frey admits that he fabricated and falsified information in his memoir A Million Little Pieces . Nick Hornby's new novel A Long Way Down comes out. Cecily and I visited Santa Fe, New Mexico. The visit inspired a slideshow and a column . I discovered rising SF star John Scalzi and his breakout novels Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades , as well as his long-running blog, Whatever . I reread Elie Wiesel's Night . I started using Ebay to sell some ...

Rubyfruit Jungle is Rita Mae Brown's milestone novel about growing up lesbian in America. I first read this over fifteen years ago and remember feeling a strong connection with the Molly Bolt character, who never apologized for who she was and refused to buckle to the world's sexism and judgements. Reading the text again so many years later, I was pleased to discover just how well the book held up and that my initial impression was unchanged. I found that Molly was still a great, feisty character, and that the novel was fairly timeless. This is because, ultimately, Rubyfruit Jungle is a simple and honest story about self-acceptance and coming to terms with one's sexuality that's just as true now as it was twenty or thirty years ago.

I'm thrilled to report that we now have a new 2007 Volkswagen GTI ! We picked it up a few weeks ago, and it has proven to be a wonderfully designed, feisty vehicle. The GTI is equipped with a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine featuring direct injection and a single turbocharger. This translates to 197 horsepower at 5100 rpm and 207 pound-feet of torque at just 1800. So we can now get to 60 mph in about seven seconds. The only problem with the new ride is that both Cecily and I want to drive it all the time!

I'm not sure how old this is or how it hit the net, but here's a link to a great YouTube video featuring the cast of Scrubs voicing and re-imagining the classic "A Charlie Brown Christmas". According to some blogs, the cast made this video for a Christmas party and it has since found it’s way onto the net. Lucky for us!

Don't Get Too Comfortable is a funny and sharp collection of essays that skewer current bourgeoisie cultural excess. The essays include inventories of Hooters Air and a cryogenics storage facility, critiques of Paris couture and Beverly Hills "re-facing" salons, the author's observations while working as a cabana boy at a plush South Beach hotel, and more.