hoo boy; this took some attention

(and I'm not used to paying THAT much attention), but I think the result is rather smart; in fact, it's going on a letter I'm writing Chris for his trip to summer camp. I've got to mail it tomorrow, or it will never reach him by this weekend.

rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

"the wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round..."
- the travelocity gnome

a bit more on roog

I chose the id roog after the first (maybe) published story by Philip K. Dick.

The story is charming and a bit loopy:

Aliens are scouring human neighborhoods and removing the humans, replacing them with alien lookalikes. The aliens, called ROOG, travel in trash trucks; the human remains are neatly carted off when a body-snatch takes place.

Now, and you dog lovers will enjoy this, dogs are aware of this alien plot, and, loyal to the end, they try to warn their masters by shouting, "ROOG! ROOG!"

The pet owners, naturally, interpret this as normal barking and ignore the repeated warnings, and in the end, we see one dog's family about to be carted off as the garbage-collector-disguised aliens come down the street.

:)

A Scanner Darkly

This is, without doubt, one of PKD's strongest novels, and the buzz about a film has been around for over a decade (it's one of those projects that is optioned and sits, like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.

For all my fan-dom-ness, I'm not going to bother seeing this. The various positive reviews describe it as a whacky head trip, a zany comedy, etc. The book is about control and paranoia, and although it's darkly :) humourous, it's not a "zany" comedy. Add to that the silly looking rotoscoping (or equiv. technique), and that's it--Netflix, maybe.

http://wip.warnerbros.com/ascannerdarkly/

pk dick fan

Finding that roog had already been taken, then eyeinthesky, then several other PKD titles, I lucked into Dick's The Galactic Pot Healer, from his rich middle period (this 1969 novel comes between his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Blade Runner) and Ubik.

The cover art here is from a Greek edition of the novel; it seems to have little if anything to do with the actual storyline, but it's certainly striking!