The Mumpsimus

Usually the comment spam that comes in here is pretty boring. But this was too oddly lovely not to save: VIBRATION AND SOUND ARE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PARAMETERS FOR MONITORING THE MACHINE HEALTH. REGULAR LOGGING OF THESE TWO PARAMETERS PROVIDES EARLY WARNING OF BREAKDOWN

The only e-book device I have other than my laptop is an iPod Touch, and neither the laptop nor the iPod is anything I want to read an entire book on (reading on the iPod is only slightly more comfortable than reading the The Compact OED  through a magnifying glass), but I very much like the idea  of e-books, even if I don't read them, and one of these days perhaps I'll break down and get one of them there gadgets that's designed for the durn things. Anyway, as a public service announcement, here are some recent e-book announcements that piqued my interest: Minister Faust's new novel, The Alchemists of Kush , is now available for $2.99, and it broke the Amazon Top 1,000 on its first day, which moves it closer to reaching the goal of breaking the Top 100, at which time Minister Faust will donate $500 to send textbooks to university students in South Sudan . For more info, check out  this interview of Mr. Faust by Jeff VanderMeer . Speaking of Jeff VanderMeer, he...

Alas, March is shaping up to be a tremendously busy month, and so things here at The Mumpsimus are likely to continue to be light for a little bit, but part of the busy-ness comes from writing stuff for other places, including my latest Strange Horizons column , this one made up of meditations and hypotheses and, for all I know, wrongheaded foolishness about some intersections between the poetry and science fiction/fantasy communities. If, then, you have some bizarre and pathological need to read more of my words, and you haven't yet sought the clinical help you should seek for this, then click the link above. If, however, you are looking for a list of unusual deaths, that would be here .