Christmas Aftermath

Again, we catered dinner for my parents.  I palmed off this gingerbread house on them.

I’ve never made one before, but it seems pretty rock solid.  It traveled better than I expected.  Nobody said these things have to be decorated all in candy, so I made liberal use of pretzels in addition to the starlight mints and gum drops.  I also left a batch of spritz cookies and a bunch of peppermint bark that I made earlier in the week.  They’re pure butter, and pure sugar, respectively; what’s not to like?

We’re working our way through the leftover ham, heading into New Year’s Eve, for which we always roast a duck.  Between the ham and cheese sandwiches, omelettes, split pea soup, linguini carbonara, pot pie and quiche, I think we’ve got the remaining pig covered.

I’m sick of orange sauce to go with the duck, so I think I’ll make apricot sauce instead this time.  Leftover shredded duck goes really well with plum sauce, julienned carrots, and fresh ginger in crepes; it’s one of my favorite ways to use leftover duck.  Of course, the carcass makes great stock. 

Although I missed out on wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, given all the pre-holiday preparations, I do want to wish everyone a Happy New Year’s.

The Dagster’s Christmas

Daggy’s latest blog entry is about Christmas presents, and, of course, himself and his phenomenal achievements.  Call it a retrospective, if you wish.

For the 2009 holiday season, I decided to update my blog homepage and fill my fans and followers in on some of my gifts and achievements of the last twelve months . . .

It’s a missive from the cult leader to his members and groupies!

. . . 2009 still managed to be my best year in the “earning” department, where I doubt I will ever be able to rival 2007 in the quantity and material department.

No doubt he’s counting his inflated revenue figures of used magazines and comics from his Coney Island booth among his earnings.  It’s clear that he made more in 2009 from selling other people’s material than he did in 2007 from selling his own stories.  Note that 2007 saw the one and only issue of his failed attempt at publishing:  The Literary Bone.  Note also that Daggy, like Pacione, places a premium on quantity over, say, quality.

Some of these achievements . . .  minor proofreading . . . resumes . . . making over 2000 friends and followers on Facebook, and just a lot revolving around . . . The Spirit of Christmas.

Is The Spirit of Christmas a new story title?  It appears so.  The rest of the entry is devoted to showing all the toys he’s going to give his son for Christmas.

As for the achievements, let’s just say that proofreading, writing other people’s resumes (instead of his own), and accepting over 2000 “friends” on Facebook is less than impressive.

I realized that, money-wise, it doesn’t pay to release a second short story collection.  I can earn more individually.

Or by hawking used comics and magazines at Coney Island?

One of the items I searched the UK high and low for was The Cybermen Age of Steel 4-figure collection.  Collect them all, open up the packages, and you can build a fifth figure.  The Cyber Controller.

Wait.  Did he actually attend that con in Brighton?  More likely, he means that he scoured UK-based websites looking for these toys.  His son may end up playing with these action figures dolls, but it’s pretty obvious that Lorenzo really bought them for himself.  It’s akin to an aging playboy who buys his trophy wife a red sports car and lets her drive it once in a while.

Some of the other gifts, which are already wrapped, consist of model kits with glues and paints from my old man, though they say ages 8+ and 12+ on the packages.  So I guess the little one will have to hold on to them until he’s old enough to understand them.

Assuming Lorenzo doesn’t sniff all the glue and paint fumes first . . .

. . . I also treated myself to a few early-season gifts.  First, notice the non-fiction book above on Pompeii.  You got it.  It’s research time.  Lawrence Dagstine will be coming your way sometime in 2010 with a story set in Pompeii.

Whatever happened to that story set in ancient Egypt that he was going to write?  After all, he spent a whole afternoon visiting a museum exhibit to do his research for that story.

And if you look up above, I finally have a new computer desk.  Nice to have shelving and a drawer, but still unsure of what to fill it up with yet.  Now that the little one has gotten older, the bookcase units pretty much belong to him and his toys.

Pro tip:  fill the shelves with all the Dr. Who and superhero dolls you bought, and buy the kid a toy chest.

Stay with me in 2010.  We have many adventures to go on together, and much awaits.  Won’t you join me? To all my fans and readers…

*barf*

Pacione on MonDaily

I received a Google alert right before I was ready to catch some shuteye last night.  Too tired to do any digging at the time, I decided to let it wait until this morning.

It appears that some artsy-fartsy Romanian site is running a reprint of Pacione’s “Library of Bones” in its most recent “weekly” edition.  Weekly is in quotes for several reasons.  Let’s just say that sixteen issues since September 2008 doesn’t qualify as weekly.  The following was posted December 7, 2009:

For the literature section of our Gothic issue we have selected the works of two rather unknown writers, Jim Roberts and Nickolaus A. Pacione as well as three of the works of the so well regarded Edgar Allen Poe.

[. . .]

Below, you will see the download links for the six writings chosen for this issue in our Literature section. Enjoy your read.

[Note that all these writings have been downloaded from www.HorrorMasters.com]

I wonder if Pacione knows about this.  It’s almost a shame that he’s rarely online anymore.  Surely he would post a rant about how his copyright was molested.

Poking around the MonDaily site a little bit gave hints that the site isn’t run by a buddy of Pacione’s.  Never mind that Pacione was described as “rather unknown.”  The person running the site made a reference to attending a photography show in Bucharest, and consistently treats the word “news” as plural (as in “the bad news are . . .”).  The grammatical errors aren’t the sloppy conversational type often made by people whose first language is English.

The reference to Bucharest isn’t enough to confirm Romania by itself, but a check on the IP address of the site leads to a host that has registered over 100 sites in Romania, and runs off a server bank in The Netherlands.  Alexa had no information on the site’s registration date, but tracking back through three pages worth of blog entries on the site, produced an entry from Sept. 9, 2009, announcing its one year anniversary.

It’s rather odd that the link to MonDaily’s “About” page leads nowhere, but not altogether unexpected for a site from a formerly communist bloc country.  It’s funny enough that the entire online magazine issue is comprised of stuff swiped from Horrormasters.com.  It’s even funnier that MonDaily didn’t just link to the stories there, but rehosted the .pdfs itself.  I just can’t see Nicky giving the site owner permission to do that, given that he has a cow every time someone quotes a sentence of his, with attribution, under Fair Use.

Well folks, that was my source of amusement for the day.

*snerk*

Happy Thanksgiving

Time to prep the bird and get it in the oven.  We’ll be catering for my parents again this year, even though it’s quite a drive.  Gentlemen, start your coolers . . .

Funzies from Mikkake

It seems too many people are ignoring Mikkake, so he started another thread at SL.  The yawns in response are deafening.

I have a feeling this thread will fade into obscurity, but just in case it gets good, I’ll check it from time to time for screen-grab-worthiness.