Lots O Links!

If you hooked me up to a brain activity monitor right this moment, all you'd see are nice flat lines.  I don't know why, but I'm just spent.  There's not a clever thought or catchy phrase anywhere near my noggin now.

But a lack of anything significant to say has never left me silent before, and I'll be darned if I'll start now.

So -- links!

Passing the Narrows.  This is one of mine.  If you've got a Kindle e-reader or you have the Kindle app on your phone or other device, you can grab this for less than a buck.  It's a quick read, about a crew of desperate Confederate war vets taking their steamboat down a haunted stretch of the Yazoo River.  It first appeared in Weird Tales a few years back, and it's always been one of my favorites.  Guess who the character Swain is based on!

World War Z.  Yeah, this is zombie fiction -- but hang on a minute.  That's just the backdrop.  The book is nothing short of brilliant, in both its depiction of a world mauled nearly to death and the tiny acts of heroism and sacrifice that always go largely unnoticed in any massive catastrophe.  Read it, and I promise you'll never hear wind in the trees at night quite then same way ever again.

Living Ghosts.  This is music; specifically, the Amazon MP3 album by band Absinthe Junk.  If you want the iTunes version, well, search iTunes for Absinthe Junk -- if there's a way to link to an album in the iTunes store it's unknown to me.  But it's worth the effort!  Junk is sort of the angry love child of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

The Black Company.  This is an old-fashioned paper book.  It's fantasy, but unlike any fantasy you're likely to have read before.  Gritty, unflinching, brutally honest -- this is war in the trenches.  Not for the faint of heart.

Fark.  We're painfully aware that the world is a chaotic, dangerous place ruled only by the laws of Whim and Caprice.  Fark is a weird news website that collects the freakish best and random worst of Planet Earth and lays it all out in a neat column for your perusal.  With snarky one-line descriptions, and a weekly Friday game of 'Match the Mugshots With the Crimes.'  If you don't Fark, you should...

Regretsy.  You've probably never heard of a website called 'Etsy.'  I hadn't.  Etsy dot com is a marketplace for hand-made items of all sorts.  Think about that for a moment.  Yeah.  Exactly.  Etsy may have started out as a showplace for folk art, but wide swaths of it quickly devolved into a hilarious free-for-all of hilariously mis-shapen pieces of 'found art' which appear to have not been crafted by hand but rather with foot.  I know, I know, it's not nice to mock the clumsy and the inept, but man is it fun.


Enjoy!