Long after I made concrete plans to visit Tucson over Labor Day, I discovered that’s the weekend of Bumbershoot, Seattle’s massive annual festival of music, comedy, authors, all kinds of stuff.

Who’s performing this year? Garbage! Iggy Pop! Elvis Costello! The Donnas! Patton Oswalt! Mike Doughty! All kinds of acts I’d really like to see live. But no, I chose to fly to the middle of nowhere that weekend.

Sigh. It’s probably just as well — at least I’ll be able to avoid hearing the Decemberists. They’re a mildly-okay band, but the guy at work who controls the iTunes server played the same six songs of theirs over and over and over and over again, day after day, until I secretly deleted them from his playlist. If I hear their lead singer’s whiny fucking voice amplified during a live performance, I might snap, charge the stage, and shove my fist down his throat.

I don’t need the jail time for that, thanks.

I picked up James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency because his predictions sounded like a possibly interesting setting for dystopian science fiction stories. I came away more disturbed than inspired.

Kunstler is a novelist who dabbles in social and civic criticism. He wrote a pair of books arguing against catering to the suburban lifestyle, which he deems ugly and wasteful. In the decade since their publication, suburbs begat exurbs and America became even more dependent on cheap oil. In a sense, The Long Emergency is a natural extension of his earlier criticism.

The basic premise of the book: we’ve used one trillion of the world’s two trillion barrels of oil, demand is only increasing, alternative fuels won’t save us, and the world is headed for a painful contraction — possibly a new Dark Age, depending on mankind’s response.
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Go read Daniel C. Dennett’s lengthy but excellent analysis of what Intelligent Design is all about: namely, false equivalence. It’s an obvious point, but it’s stated in a nicely succinct way here — and explains why it’s gained so much popularity amongst politicians and the public.

[T]he proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

[...]

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Note that the Discovery Institute is Seattle-based. Not everything up here is perfect.

Over a year ago, I posted a question about the image of the rabbit smoking a pipe that appears in the David Mamet-scripted film The Edge. I’m not the only person wondering — every so often, a Googler would come across my entry and ask if I’d discovered the answer yet.

Finally, just last week, a commenter calling himself A.N. Mouse posted an answer, along with pointers for further research. Go Team Internet!

The recent lack of blog content is not related to any recent lack of life content. On the contrary, my social life has returned with a vengeance. I’ve been dating a short Korean girl, which fills up surprising amounts of time. And on Thursday I went out drinking for Dennis’s birthday party, which started at the Elysium brewery and moved to a gay bar called The Cuff. I got hit on by cute lesbians. It was fun.

No rest coming up, either: I’m spending Labor Day weekend in Tucson with Laurel, then throwing myself a 30th birthday party here in Seattle the following weekend.

I owe this blog (and Keith’s forum) a review of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, which I’ll try to finish today, between doing laundry and a trip to the gym. After that, the blog will probably get quiet again.

I’m prouder of my vote against John McCain last year than my vote against George W. Bush. The latter was a gimme. The former took real brains.

McCain plays the “maverick independent” role because it suits him. It makes him popular, even among those who otherwise self-identify as liberals, even though his stance on the issues is in opposition to them 90% of the time.

But deep down, McCain is still a Republican stooge. Despite his underhanded ass-fucking by the Bush/Rove machine in the 2000 primaries, McCain was Bush’s state campaign chairman in Arizona in 2004. Warmonger McCain also wants to send more troops to Iraq, apparently as a prelude to invading Iran.

And now there’s this. Ignore the Daily Star’s fawning headline and concentrate on the following:

On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.

McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

Just like Dubya and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, McCain wants to teach Intelligent Design — a.k.a. Politically-Correct Creationism — alongside evolution in our public schools, in opposition to every tenet of science and the separation of church and state.

Fuck McCain, and fuck all the Democrats who voted for him. You should’ve known what you were voting for.

(One last thing, while I’m on an anger kick: John Rogers posted a glorious rant against all Boomers, left and right, which is worth reading.)

I post this in the hope that some other small publisher will read it and learn from my mistakes.

In late 2003, having been rejected by the near-monopolistic Diamond Comics for comic store distribution, I signed on with Biblio to distribute Narbonic to mainstream bookstores. Biblio is a division of NBN supposedly geared to the needs of small, independent publishers like myself. I sent them 500 copies (out of a 1000 copy print run from Quebecor, the minimum) at a shipping cost of about $140 and a setup fee of $50.

In the time since then:

- I received a single payment for books sold in the summer of 2004 for a grand total of $62.

- The rest of the books compiled warehouse fees at a rate of 1.5 cents per book per month.

- I paid Biblio an extra $100 to be featured at a bookseller trade show, which apparently did nothing for sales.

- Biblio informed me in early 2005 that they were terminating their relationship with me due to low sales. Total copies sold in one year: 87. I heard nothing from them in the months that followed.

- Around the same time, Shaenon ran out of copies of Narbonic, vol. 1. She had sold out of the other 500 copies, via website and convention sales. Also, she starting getting some press, including Wired, NY Times, a WCCA award, and a Marvel book. She began to refund money via Paypal for orders she could not fulfill before removing the book from her swag page.

- I started trying to get my books back from Biblio. Contacting them by email was no use. So I called. Finally, last week, I heard from them. My books are being held ransom, thanks to the contract I signed. To get my 413 books delivered back to me, I have to pay $311 in warehouse and transfer fees, not including shipping.

The Biblio Saga isn’t over yet, but it’s drawing to a close. Net balance from my bookstore distribution adventure: -$650 or so. Granted, it’s up to the publisher to generate a market for their books, but I can’t afford advertising, and Shaenon can’t afford to travel around the country for bookstore signings. I can’t imagine any small publisher could pay for all of that.

Conclusion: Bookstore distributors, including Biblio, suck ass for publishers in my position. Even Amazon Advantage is at best a break-even proposition. Avoid them all.

Meanwhile, with Narbonic, vol. 2, I seem to have stumbled onto a business plan that works: print 500 copies through Dream Weaver Press, ignore traditional distribution, and offer them online only. Since Narbonic is an online phenomenon, it makes sense that most people would purchase the collections through her website. Within two months of publication, Shaenon had already sold enough copies that my investment paid for itself.

Two days ago, I sent her a contract for Narbonic, vol. 3, to be published in early 2006. And no, I won’t be looking for traditional distribution.

Photo courtesy of AP. More photos here, attached to a rather strange article that tries to drum up some controversy. More standard coverage comes from CBC:

Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes shot from cannon in final farewell

With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky amid fireworks late Saturday as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of “gonzo journalism.”

As the ashes erupted from a tower, red, white, blue and green fireworks lit up the sky over Thompson’s mountain home in Woody Creek near Aspen, Colorado.

The 15-story tower was modeled after Thompson’s personal logo: a clenched fist rising from the hilt of a dagger. It was built between his home and a tree-covered canyon wall, not far from a tent filled with merrymakers.

The $2.5 million bill for the funeral was covered by Johnny Depp.

Ron Blessing’s got a brand new bag. I mean, blog.

I don’t want this to become a journal of spiffy things Shaenon Garrity is doing, but she just keeps doing spiffy things. In this case, writing a holiday anthology for Marvel Comics. From Previews:

MARVEL HOLIDAY SPECIAL 2005

Written by Jeff Parker, Mike Carey and Shaenon Garrity, penciled by Reilly Brown, Mike Perkins and Roger Langridge, cover by Stuart Immonen.

It’s that time of year again (or at least it will be when these books come out), and we’ve thrown out the rulebook to deliver the wildest set of holiday stories you’ll find anywhere! It’s a party with the New Avengers as they battle Ultron – programmed to think he’s Santa!?! That’s courtesy Jeff Parker (Interman, Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four) and hot newcomer Reilly Brown! Then Mike Carey (Ultimate Fantastic Four, Hellblazer) joins Mike Perkins (Spellbinders, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) to take the Fantastic Four on a wild ride! Finally, webcomics superstar Shaenon Garrity (Narbonic) joins indy comics legend Roger Langridge (Fred the Clown, Marvel Monsters: Fin Fang Four) for just the sort of insanity they’re known for.

48 pages, $3.99, in stores on Nov. 30.

I’m going to need more copies of Narbonic vol. 1 and 2 in stock, aren’t I…

UPDATE: And yesterday the NY Times gave Shaenon a mention, albeit somewhat negatively, in its critical overview of the state of webcomics.