Leeched off Scalzi's scrumptious Whatever blog, but it's an image that is just too good not to repost!



Article on the student protest here at the Chicago Maroon. What happened was about a hundred students taking to the streets as a reaction to a few Westboro Baptist wingnuts protesters. The Westboro Baptist Church seems to think Obama is some kind of devil, as they were deriding the University for employing him in their Law school. Duh.

Some other good quotes from the student signs: "God hates the New Facebook", "Jesus rebuked the fig as an evil abomination" and "God Promises Terrible Vengeance Upon Any Fig-Loving Nation" (both referring to the remarkable Fig Tree incident in the Bible, Mark 11:12–14, in which Jesus curses a fig tree because it is not bearing any fruits - outside the fig season), and of course my favorite "Cthulhu Hates Chordates".

It's nice to see University of Chicago students using christian fundies' tactics right back at them. With the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft no less! I'm quite into that at the moment. Got a box full of sixties, seventies and early eighties SF and horror paperbacks from my mom a few weeks ago and I'm currently exploring the Lovecraft volumes in there... Dagon was my latest read.

Once in a blue moon, you load the front page of the New York Times and you see a headline that makes you feel all happy and fuzzy inside. Perhaps this world will not go careering to its doom after all, mayhap our world leaders will in the end choose for the common good instead of for smallminded self-centred patriotic insanity.

Today was such a day, as the NY Times runs the following headline:
Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter

Read and enjoy. Thank God for a Democratic President with brains and basic human values. Let's hope Obama's plans come through and we don't end up in a new Cold War with Russia.

Finally, I think one can only be impressed by the speed and scale of Obama's first acts of government. After little more than a month, he has announced not only huge internal reforms that would have seemed improbable under any other president, but he's also made bold moves on the international diplomatic front.

As to the Rush Limbaughs of this world, who wish Obama to fail: there can be no apology for your stupidity. How can anyone who is half sane object to defusing the time bomb that was the Bush missile defense plan? How can anyone object to better education and health care?
As for Limbaugh, Scalzi has an excellent post on the danger professional mediabigots like Limbaugh pose for the GOP first, and the US democratic system second.
I am beginning to think that lobotomies are part of the GOP initiation rituals...

The SF Site is always a good source for news on the SFF publishing front: they spit out good and in-depth reviews on almost everything that is published in the SFF world, and they've now published their own "best of year" list for 2008.

Read the list here.

I'm sad to say that I have only read one of the ten novels listed on that page. I really must read more... I did read Neil Gaiman's the Graveyard Book. And I really, really loved that. I'm a big Gaiman fan. For me, he's perhaps the best SFF author around today.

As for the other books on the list, I'll have to check a few of those. Scalzi's Zoe's Tale is one I look forward to picking up - I really loved his Old Man's War, and I'm a regular on his blog as well.

Joe Abercrombie sounds interesting; I plan to put his work on my to-read list as well. I'm really enjoying the gritty world of George RR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, but I've taken a break on that series (don't want to get over-exposed because that would reduce my enjoying of the series; also he's still working on it so there's no hurry!). Perhaps Abercrombie would be a good fit for that hole in my fantasy reading slot :-)

On a more personal note, I need to finish some last edits on The Snow Fell Fast and Final, and then I'm going to officially call it finished and get on to something new. Something entirely different is playing around in my head, some with lots action, bushfires, and aboriginals. Yummy!