Mile wide UFO seen by British pilots

Neuromancer at 25: What William Gibson got right and what he got wrong

Via Wired

Novelist David Liss to write "The Phantom Reporter" for Marvel

Looks like Pulpy goodness. Click the headline to go to the article.

Captain America is back

Oh those shrewd tacticians at Marvel. I didn't see this coming.

Yawn.

Batwoman

I can do without the late 60s/early 70s psychedelics at the bottom, but the depiction of Batwoman is incredible. This is will be on an upcoming issue of Detective Comics.

Via Dreamer

"Deadworld" zombie movie in the works

Good news for Dreamer's game.
I guess.

25th Anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

New Terminator Movie Brings Author J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding

Depressed in the Depression, part 11

So there I was.
Sitting in Chicago Union Station, journaling away about how crushing the weight is of the obstacles in my life. Two homeless men sit diagonally from me, eating a fast food meal. Their voices are loud, but not obnoxious. In rhythmic urbanspeak, they debate whether the saying is "9th Heaven" or "on cloud 7."
Then for reasons that pass understanding, two police officers show up and force them from the station. The vagrants comply, but only after hurling expletives and complaining that the cops never chase out "the white folk." (It should be noted that the police and the homeless parties in question were all African American.)
"They do it to the white people, too," a voice next to me says.
I turn and see a man sitting two chairs down from me reading a newspaper. He is slender with a salt and pepper beard that is unkempt but still close to the jawline. There is a "doughnut ring" of gunmetal gray hair around his otherwise bald head. He wears glasses over his deep blue eyes and a coat over his blue Chicago Bears sweatshirt. His teeth are a mixed hue of red and yellow. One crooked canine juts out from his lips. I cannot tell if it is a top or bottom one, but it looks like it could fall out at any minute. He smells only of nicotine.
"They call us 'worthless bums,'" he says of the gendarmes. "Yeah, this was really my plan. Homeless and penniless at 60."
He asks what I'm doing for the day. I tell him I have an appointment with a former professor to discuss strategies as to how to get me into a college teaching position.
"Oh, my daughter used to teach," he tells me.
He goes on to relate a typical tale, how his daughter was let go from a school just as she was about to reach tenure and therefore a greater salary.
"I was working in the basement one day when she was a little girl. She found a bag of old fireworks down there," he says. "It was just a few 'sprinklers' and a couple of firecrackers with no fuses on them. Well, you would have thought she found the treasure of the Sierra Madre!
"When she was teaching, she called me to tell me one of her autistic kids just learned to write their name. Her voice was the same as the day she found the fireworks."
I ask if she still teaches. Dumb question in retrospect.
"She passed away March 17th, 2008," he tells me.
He elaborates on the year since that day. Once making $90,000 a year as a plant manager, his job was sent to Mexico in May. His wife had advanced cancer. As insurance companies are want to do, they dropped her from coverage upon learning this. They cleaned out their savings, their CDs, and even their IRAs to cover medical bills for both wife and daughter. Problem is, whenever you make an early withdrawal from an IRA, the IRS has to charge you taxes. In this man's case, it was to the tune of $42,000. His wife died in August. With no money and no family left, he hit the streets soon after.
"June 17th will be hard this year," he tells me. "We would have been married for 32 years. God I miss her.
"I can honestly say we never argued. She'd say 'I want to do this' and I'd say 'ok, give me your points' and then I'd try to counterbalance them."
He told me of when they were trying to decide what company to buy stocks from.
"We narrowed it down to either Coke or Pepsi," he confides.
At the time of their discussion, Coke was selling heavily to South Africa...and apartheid was in full swing there.
"Do we want to support a racist institution?" the man asked. "So we went with Pepsi."
I commended him for his social conscience.
This prompted another anecdote. When he was 17, he went to see Dr. Martin Luther King in Marquette Park. King was marching for better housing conditions for the black community. In the park, my new friend saw "a troop of Nazis in full regalia." They cornered an 8 year-old African American boy, shouting the n-word repeatedly.
My conversation partner grabbed one of the Nazis and threw him into the park's lagoon. He then did the same to another. The police arrived and arrested everybody involved in the fracas (this was the day of King Daly I after all.)
So the man's father shows up two hours later to post bail. On the way home, the normally cantankerous dad stops at a store. He comes back to the car with a brown paper bag and hands it to my friend. Inside the bag is a Coke.
"I thought, 'oh my God! Elizabeth! This is the big one!' " my friend says with a chuckle.
"You just don't like bullies do you?" his dad asked. "I'm going to be bailing you out of jail a lot if you're going to try to save everyone in the world who is being bullied. I can live with that."

I look at my cell phone and see it's time to go. I reach into my wallet and pull out every scrap of cash I have and give it to the man.
"God bless you!" he says. "I can eat today!"
I then ask him for something that is suddenly very important to me.
"What's your name?" I extend my hand and take his. The skin of his hand is tanned from exposure. "I'm Jon."
"I'm Howard," he tells me.
We shake and I give a feeble wish that things get better for him.
I take me and my broken, bleeding heart out into the rain. I forgot to wear a jacket so I look for a place to duck into for a while and dry off. First place I find is a Starbucks on Adams. Inside there is a line of business suits and trendy skirts, a few on cell phones pausing their conversations only to order lattes. All these people, including myself, think we have problems. And we may. We think we know what matters, and we might have an inkling. But not like Howard. It hits me then that were I Howard, this Starbucks or any other chain business would throw me out on my ass just for trying to get warm. Insult to injury in an already tragic story.
I know what you might be thinking. What Howard told me might have been just that: a story. A con. A swindle. That crossed my mind too. After all, good lies have many details. As a writer, I should know. And Howard's narrative was rich in detail.
But I defy such cynicism. He wasn't lying. How do I know? Not much more than a gut feeling, I suppose. The kind of sense of authenticity one gets when talking to nursing home resident as they reflect on their life and times, having no reason left to lie. Most importantly, Howard never asked me for the money...or for anything else for that matter.
I've thought of him often since that day earlier this week. It's caused me many a "Schindler's List" moment:
"This ring...I could have gotten him a down payment on an apartment! This watch...I could have bought him food to keep with him!"
Wherever Howard is, I pray that he is safe at the very least. He is a reminder to me that the line that separates me...or anyone really...from the homeless is tissue paper thin and that my troubles are not nearly as serious as those of others. It doesn't always work given that I'm a selfish prick, but well, you know. If nothing else, Howard keeps things in perspective.
And as Spinal Tap says, "A bit too much fucking perspective."

RIP David Eddings

Renowned fantasy author dies at 77.

Northern Ireland comics poised for success

Psylocke!

Didn't even read the article. Just saw that it had Psylocke! Homina homina!

Preparing to sell e-books, Google goes after Amazon

We live in a digital world. Deal with it.

The Last Dickens

Thriller gives a "what if" look at the ending of "Edwin Drood."

Lawsuit over Catcher in the Rye "sequel"

For reasons that pass understanding, Mr. Salinger apparently does not want someone writing a sequel to his book and then publishing it from a Swedish company that churns out joke books and erotica.

I hope everyone's sarcasm meters are flatlining.