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Monthly Archives: August 2010

August 2010 Book Round-Up

31 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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146: SF: Star Trek: Mere Anarchy – Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Mike W. Barr, Dave Galanter, Christopher L. Bennett, Howard Weinstein, and Margaret Wander Bonanno

147: CR: The Eyes of Buddha – John Ball

148: CR: Deadly Edge – Richard Stark(Donald E. Westlake)

149: CR: Slayride – Richard Stark(Donald E. Westlake)

150: WE: War Cry – Charles G. West

151: SF: Quarter Share – Nathan Lowell

152: NF: Tied In(ebook) – edited by Lee Goldberg

153; MY: Unaccustomed As I Am To Public Dying(ebook) – Larry Maddock

154: WE: Slaughter of Eagles – William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

155: CR: Plunder Squad – Richard Stark(Donald E. Westlake)

156: SF: Space: 1999: Shepherd’s Moon – edited by Mateo Latosa

157: SF: Cap Kennedy: Earth Enslaved – Gregory Kern

158: SF: DC Universe: Trail Of Time – Jeff Mariotte

159: WE: Dance Back The Buffalo – Milton Lott

160: WE: Edge: The Loner(ebook) – George G. Gilman

161: WE: Shootout At Picture Rock – Joseph A. West

162: WE: Medicine Show(ebook) – Bill Crider

163: TH: Storm Surge(ebook) – J. D. Rhoades

164: SF: Space: 1999: Omega – William Latham

165: WE: The Dice of God – Hoffman Birney

August 2010 Movie Round-Up

31 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in movies

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Legend of The Lost(1957)

Harper(1966)

Cool Hand Luke(1967)

Avatar(2009)

Batman: Under The Red Hood(2010)

Lake Placid 3(2010)

Humor of The Day

30 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Humor

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When I first saw this, I thought it might be something Bill could have used or Charles now. Then I realized the students they dealt/deal with would be to old for this nonsense. At least I hope so.

Mailbox Monday

29 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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Mailbox Monday




1: Shootout At Picture Rock – Joseph A. West: recommended by James Reasoner. The author commented that it had begun life as the seventh novel in his Gunsmoke series and when an agreement couldn’t be reached, he rewrote it to be a standalone. Very good.

2: Storm Surge(ebook) – J. D. Rhoades: author of the Jack Keller bail bondsman series and Breaking Cover, a standalone. It’s Mr. Rhoades first ebook. Very good as well and reasonably priced.

3: Masterson(ebook) – Richard S. Wheeler: ebook release of one of the author’s better historical novels.

4: Under The Andes(ebook) – Rex Stout: by the creator of Nero Wolfe, though not a Wolfe novel.

5: The Nymph and The Satyr(ebook) – Larry Maddock: a humorous romantic fantasy tale. Two anthropologists meet, hate at first sight. Both touch a Polynesian idol at the same time and every time one is making love to someone, their minds switch bodies. Available only as an ebook.

6: Edge: The Loner(ebook) – George G. Gilman: ebook release of the first book of the western series by English author Gilman that was a sensation in the mid-seventies and on for sixty-one books.

7 & 8: The Unincorporated Man & The Unincorporated War – dani kollin & eytan kollin: SF reminiscent of Heinlein the blurbs read. The first book one the Prometheus Award for best novel of the year.

9: The Reformed Gun – Marvin Albert: recommended by Bill Crider. I was already an Albert fan. His review of this one made me track it down.

Storm Surge – J. D. Rhoades

28 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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J. D. Rhoades, thriller


Pass Island off the North Carolina coast was where the rich people lived and played. There were all kinds of services for them. Sharon Brennan was a waitress at the club and Max Chase was a handyman/dock worker. They didn’t live on the island, having to take a ferry ride to and from the island every day.

Max was an amiable fellow which was why Sharon accepted his offer of a ride(her car had been taken by a repo man that morning as she arrived for work). The island was in the process of being evacuated of residents because a category five hurricane was bearing down on the island, but the workers must keep the ones still there happy so they had to work up until the last moment. To top things off, payday was tomorrow and the boss was so hidebound they would have to return to the islands to get their checks. “That’s the way we’ve always done things!” Never mind that the checks would be on the same ferry upon which they were riding out to the island.

Max gives Sharon and her daughter a ride that morning and as they waited on their checks, the daughter, Glory, wanders off to look for her iPod she’d lost the day before. Then Sharon and Max go looking for her. The upshot is they get left behind. Alone on the island.

Only they are not alone!

A group of mercenaries had came on to the island the day before. They were after something in a Senator’s house. Only the leader knew what it was. The Senator’s office and apartment in Washington had been burgled looking for it. So it had to be in a safe on the island home. The plan was to break into the safe and then be picked up when the eye was over the island.

Things didn’t go as planned.

First Sharon and Glory were captured and it was left up to Max Chase to rescue them.

You see, Max Chase had only been Max Chase for a couple of years. Before that he was Kyle Mercer, which wasn’t his real name either. Working out of Chicago, he’d been a hit man/bodyguard type who had killed a man because he needed killing. That was a phrase that ran through Mercer’s brain often. When he’d killed someone sleazy, but a government informant, it set the FBI after him.

Time to retire.

He’d enjoyed Max Chase’s life, but Ray Mercer had come out of hibernation when the stone cold killers threatened Sharon and Glory. And like the proverbial grizzly, those mercs didn’t realize just what they’d awakened.

Nice little thriller from J. D. “Dusty” Rhoades, the author of the Jack Keller bail bondsman series, as well as the standalone thriller, Breaking Cover. STORM SURGE is his first ebook release available HERE at a very reasonable price.

Being a North Carolina boy like Mr. Rhoades, I like novels set in the state. Check it out. It’s very good.

My Adventures With Kindle, Part Three

27 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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Bill Crider


A TIME FOR HANGING

When fifteen year old Paco Morales stumbled over the body of the preacher’s daughter, all he could think to do was run. It was already to late as he runs into the folks out looking for the runaway daughter and they beat him within an inch of his life before they could be stopped. The lynching talk started immediately.

Sheriff Vincent hated trouble. he’d only taken the job years back because people had convinced him it would be easy. Nothing ever happened. He’d been stuck with it ever since. He remembered the last time that “nothing” had happened. Three years before Paco’s father robert had been killed in a poker game. The tinhorn claimed he’d caught the Mexican cheating and shot him when he went for a knife. The sheriff had let it slide. But he’d remembered Robert as an honest, hardworking man and had never seen him with a knife. it was just easier to go along.

As the lynch talk increased, fueled by liquor and one angry little man, the Sheriff began to uncover things he didn’t like. The preacher’s daughter liked men, a rebellion against her hell-fire-and-brimstone father. The doctor revealed she was pregnant.

More suspects piled up: Roger Benteen’s daughter was engaged to his foreman, the foreman was the father of the child, the town drunk turned out to be at the scene, but his memory was a bit hazy. Even his one-eyed deputy had seen the dead girl a few times.

A nice little mystery here. Can Vincent figure it all out and stop the mob from findng the boy and hanging him?

MEDICINE SHOW

Ray Storey, aka Kit Carson, was advance man, as well as performer, for Colonel Mahaffey’s medicine show. He performed trick shots to amaze the audience in advance of the salacious Indian healing Dance and the sale of Indian Miracle Oil to gullible men. He traveled with the show while hunting for a man named Sam Hawkins. Storey intended to kill him. Three years before, during a bank robbery, three men had rode down his kid brother on a dusty Kansas street while fleeing. One was recognized as Sam Hawkins. One of the other two was likely Ben Hawkins, the brother.

Storey had fixated on Sam though.

And then he found them on the show’s latest stop, terrorizing the small town, with a sheriff to lazy, or scared, to do anything about. When confronted with the man he had searched for for three years, doubt set in. While he gotten fast on the draw, his accuracy left a lot to be desired. His shells for the trick shooting were loaded with bird shot.

When the two brothers rob the show, killing one man and taking the preacher’s wife prisoner, both Storey and the preacher find courage from unexpected sources.

These are the first two westerns by Bill I’ve read and enjoyed them thoroughly.

FFB: Dance Back The Buffalo – Milton Lott

26 Thursday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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Forgotten Books, Milton Lott

Published in October, 1959 by Houghton Mifflin, Milton Lott’s second novel didn’t see paperback release until this January, 1968 edition. I reported on Lott’s first novel, THE LAST HUNT, here.

The title is somewhat of a misnomer as the Ghost Dance doesn’t appear until book three, the shortest and last section of the novel. What the book is about is life for the Sioux on a reservation. We see what the people are going through during the years of 1889 and 1890, the harsh life, so different from what they had lived before. The older men remembered the buffalo hunts and can only tell younger tribe members what the life was like.

Some of the participants are Turning Hawk, Eagle Voice, an interpreter, Little Wound, a small boy both blind and deaf, Westland, an artist studying and sympathizing with the Sioux, Reverend Martin, a missionary there to “civilize” the Sioux, and his wife, Lea, who feels the plight of her husband’s charges much more so than he does.

Martin really believes he’s there to help the Sioux, but in the course of the book, his real feelings keep slipping out. “Nasty savages, filthy lice-ridden.” When he witnesses a young Indian calm a recalcitrant horse , he ascribes it occult status. He collects medicine bags and other native implements to be destroyed. “They must live like white men. Anything else is sinful!”

When disease strikes both the reservation and whites servicing the area, Martin is incensed that she helps the doctor minister to the sick and when the Ghost Dance starts to spread through the western tribes, he wants it stopped. But even he doesn’t want what finally happens at the end. Reporters ramped up things for their stories. One in the book tripled the number of Sioux he actually saw dancing. His explanation: gt to give the people something to read. Probably that many all over the west doing the Ghost Dance anyway!”

I would say this book is not for everyone. If one expects a slam bang western, this isn’t it. Lott tells his story at a leisurely pace, building his characters toward their fates, which I already knew was coming, even as sketchy as I was on the Ghost Dance. After all, it’s one of the more famous events of that time period.

Forgotten Music: Quiet Riot: The Randy Rhoads Years

25 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in music

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Forgotten Music, Quiet Riot, Randy Rhoads

Guitarist Randy Rhoads rose to fame playing guitar for Ozzy Osbourne, joining the band in 1979 at the age of twenty-three. Crazy Train seems to be the song most people recognize. In 1983, Quiet Riot made a splash with their cover of Slade’s Cum On Feel The Noize. Somehow I missed over the years that Randy Rhoads was a founding member of Quiet Riot in the seventies, the band releasing two albums in Japan, but the record company never letting them out over here. The Quiet Riot that finally got an American recording contract and some success had only Kevin Dubrow left from those early days.

Rhino Records came out with this compilation in 1993 combining the best from those two albums, along with a live track highlighting a fierce guitar solo. A bit rough at times, it shows the early development of one of rock’s great guitar players, a man who influenced a lot of later players despite his death in March 1982 because of a plane crash.

Here’s a few clips that show the band back then:

and finally the live take:

You can find more Forgotten music at SCOTT D PARKER\"S BLOG.

DC Universe: Trail of Time – Jeff Mariotte

23 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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DC Comics, Jeff Mariotte

It wasn’t an idyllic life Clark Kent lived. Sure, he was married to Lois Lane, was a wordsmith at The Daily Planet with X number of words to get out every day. But there were the other things lacking: certain rights. That was the price of freedom, authorities assured everyone. But Clark found himself staring out at the red sun and daydreaming about being able to fly.

It was all a bit unsettling.

Until that night he was visited by two strange men who identified themselves as The Phantom Stranger and Jason Blood and had an odd tale to tell.

It seems three Mages, Vandal Savage, Felix Faust, and Dark Lord Mordru, during the time of Camelot had began a long range spell that split the world into two alternate Earths, one, this one, with a red sun and divided between the trio. The other is our Earth. The long range plan was for the two worlds to eventually merge(fifteen hundred years down the road) and become one, wholly owned and run secretly by the three magicians. They set up shop on the red sun Earth and made occasional forays into the real world in separate attempts to conquer it(not an expert on the DC universe, one presumes this was to cover the trio’s various appearances over the years in different comics). No heroes had developed here and Clark, because of the red sun, was just another boy adopted with no idea of his true origin.

Clark agrees to help and the three cross over into the original line where Clark becomes Superman with memories of the other Clark in his head. They know the three magicians will need a massive human sacrifice to finish the joining of the two lines and so begins the pursuit through time to all the major wars, disease, and pestilence. Making appearances along the way to help are Zatanna and Dr. Occult.

The real fun for me were the chapters labeled May, 1872. They detailed the gradual coming together of four DC western characters, Jonah Hex, Bat Lash, El Diablo, and the Scalphunter, along with an able assist from Johnny Thunder. Hex was the only character with which I had more than a passing familiarity. They all ended up in a small town in the American Southwest, Willson, and all realized it was no accident they’d showed up at the same time.

Superman, Blood(with his bonded demon, Etrigan), and the Phantom Stranger were all headed for the same time period as well.

Showdown time!

TRAIL OF TIME is not a new novel(2007), one I’ve had a while. But it’s just become available as an audiobook here. I decided it was time to read it.

I really enjoyed this one.

Mailbox Monday

22 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by Randy Johnson in Books

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Mailbox Monday

Nothing this week. There was one, but I’m waiting for the first book in the series to arrive. Will list them both then.

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