steve boyett | January 29, 2010
Dear Mr. Jobs:
Congratulations on your recent launch of the new iPad device! I know that many pundits were more whelmed than overwhelmed (having fallen for the hype they themselves created; I recall no hyperbole out of Cupertino), but I think it is important to point out the acidic combination of bad memory and lack of [...]
steve boyett | January 28, 2010
So this human male not only supports the oppression and subjugation of the alien creatures right in his own backyard, he even contributes to it. But through a miraculous process he ends up smack dab in the middle of the aliens themselves. Because he is brave and his heart is good, the Earth Mother Spiritual [...]
steve boyett | January 26, 2010
I fear this post places me firmly in the Land of Mawkish Sentimentality, a porous-bordered, perfumey territory rife with poodle fur, diamondcollared kittycats, waifs with giant brown eyes, and the pervasive music of Counting Crows. The very embodiment of the Tarot Fool, I proceed regardless.
When I leave Los Angeles this weekend I am going to [...]
steve boyett | January 22, 2010
Among the few things I know I’ll miss when I leave Los Angeles is Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (The Mann Corporation took it over some years back, but only cads with no sense of history call it Mann’s Chinese Theater.) It’s a venerable old warhorse of oldtime palatial theaters, among the last such in Los Angeles. [...]
steve boyett | January 22, 2010
Getting my own ballot for the 2009 Hugo Award Nominations made me realize that it would probably be all wise and PR-like of me to mention that
Elegy Beach, by Steven R. Boyett (Nov. 2009, Ace/Penguin)
is eligible for nomination in the Novel category this year.
Not that you have to vote for it, you undertand. I mean, [...]
steve boyett | January 18, 2010
Some years ago while auditioning samples for compositions, I was listening to pieces of Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech and was astonished to realize that that the speech is — from start to finish and without variation — 125 beats per minute for over 15 minutes.
I have always thought that the [...]
steve boyett | January 14, 2010
This is a quirk of mine I haven’t run across in anyone else: I won’t go see movies based on books I really love. Maybe the movie version is great; I don’t care. It won’t be a gnat fart next to the movie in my head. And whether they get it right or get it [...]
steve boyett | January 10, 2010
My Webster’s lists the verb form of “parrot” as “to repeat by rote.” That was pretty much my impression of what a parrot does, too. Then I met Alexander.
Alexander is a Vosmaerai eclectus, a species notable for sexual dimorphism more extreme than any other in the bird world; the females look so unlike the males [...]
steve boyett | January 9, 2010
I don’t think you have to read me much to figure out that I’m not a very schmaltzy, widdle fwuffy bunny kinda guy, and I definitely deliberated before blogging about the birds (“The boys,” as we call them). But if John Friggin Scalzi can keep posting pictures of his christalmighty cats — a species of [...]
steve boyett | January 3, 2010
Apart from the holiday traffic and wallblind idiocy of drivers whose ears go flat to their head as they stop in the middle of the road in utter hawkshadowed panic, this tends to be my favorite time of year. Besides the meridian at which I look back on the previous year and look forward to [...]
