…I have a scene set in there in my novel-in-progress.

(It’s one of the places where the underground dwellers can come up above ground.)

Sassy’s, for the uninitiated, is was a downtown-Brandon dive bar.  For a long time it was a strip club, and by all accounts not a classy one. It’s the only place I’ve ever actually gone to see the strippers—during my low-key bachelor party, when we set the drink special at a pizza joint, then drank multicoloured drinks at the bowling alley—but that’s a story for another day.

Sassy’s also played host to the local instance of the smalls’ “Goodbye Forever” tour, to which I scored free tickets by putting up posters around the university. The stripper pole was gone, but the ceiling mirrors hadn’t been torn down.  The smalls played on a stage that I presume had been thoroughly cleaned.

Snow for May Day.

Someone loves the Duke.

My favourite of all the false messiahs.

I think it’s gorgeous and amazing, and I feel quite honoured by it.

If it weren’t for Creative Commons licensing, something like this might not exist.

Pick a book at random (or not-so-random), check the total number of pages, and divide by φ (aka the Golden Ratio, aka 1.618…).  Now go to the page you get, count the number of sentences, and divide that number by φ.  Count the sentences till you get to that one.  That’s your Golden Sentence.

I’ve been making my slow, savouring way through Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight duology, and so here are the golden sentences for those two books:

I would have liked to have Hob there, too; and in a way he was, because he was what the rest of us were thinking about.

—The Knight

“We told her we had no subjects, that the Angrborn follow King Schildstarr, that though a queen we do not rule.”

—The Wizard

(Some context:  in The Knight, Hob wasn’t there because an ogre had eaten him, which was sort of why they were all thinking about him; in the snippet from The Wizard, Queen Idnn of Jotunland, newly-married to King Gilling, is speaking, using the royal “we”.)

What’s the Golden Sentence for your favourite book?  (Or even the one nearest you?)

Tickets are on sale now!

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Eating Everything There Ever Was

It started with a local hot-dog eating contest. Lou Verbain took first place, and moved on to the provincials, where he placed second. But the first-place contestant bowed out when his stomach ruptured, and Lou was on to the nationals. At internationals he placed a distant third to a whip-thin Japanese girl.

Lou wasn’t about to take that lying down, so he went into hard-core training. He ate all the hot dogs in town, then in the province, and eventually he caused a continent-wide shortage in meat-ish products.

He moved on. Hamburgers, pies, cookies, anything he could stuff down his gullet. He grew and grew, too, expanding like a weed, like a balloon. It was surreal.

The day he started eating cars was probably the point of no return. He started small, with a rusted-out Datsun, but by week’s end he was devouring Hummers and limos.

At some point hydrogen fusion started up in his stomach, but he didn’t notice.

Long story short, now he’s a black hole, Verbain X-1, and the Universe is slowly falling into him.

The Trick

“You want to see a trick?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What kind?”

“Like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he said, and took a swig straight from the bottle. Red wine stained his teeth. “Promise.”

“All right.” She leaned back in the chair as he stood up, crossed to the centre of the room, and did some kind of odd shoulder-shrugging warmup dance. He’d left the bottle on the table, and she took it, wrapped her lips around it, and chugged what remained of the wine. She had a buzz going and wasn’t about to lose it.

Without prelude, without screaming, without any warning whatsoever, he burst into flames. In perfect silence he burned, staring into her soul with those intense grey eyes he had.

She dropped the bottle. It shattered, green shards everywhere. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She stared as he was consumed.

There was a pile of ash and a black spot on the hardwood, and no other evidence he’d ever existed.

The door opened and he walked in. She leapt from the recliner, embraced him, and said, “How’d you do it?”

I’m just really busy. I’m still teaching judo, I’m trying to write an interesting WordPress plugin or three, and I’m mentoring two youths in writing.

So what’s new with you?

That reminds me — I have a crazy backlog of posts I need to write (WCTO, book review, &c).  Also I need to post more photos to Flickr.

“Who holds this celebration?”

“The chil­dren, who actu­ally rule the Blue Planet of Earth. They are more intel­li­gent than the older peo­ple and out­run them on bicycles.”

See the rest