The Bader is Awesome

Mini Blue?
One thing about North Carolina, we got the best car dealership commercials down here. The badger is freakin' hilarious.

C-Dog's 2007 Faves

Albums

Dropkick Murphys - "The Meanest of Times": I can't imagine any Battle of the Bands format the Murphys wouldn't win ... and I'm not only imagining formats where the band members have to do shots of whiskey chased with Guinness between songs, where success is measured by the vivacity of the mosh pit, where the bands play in front of a soused crowd of laborers in the sweaty basement of a union hall, etc...

Tim Armstrong - "A Poet's Life" : I don't know if Armstrong is more than thirty years old but, even if not, he might want to take Mencken's quip to heart. As much as I like this album, the title makes me cringe. Once you get past his "I'm a poet and a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-rolling party man" posing, there's no denying the wickedly danceable ska-inflected groovealiciousness.

Books (Read for the First Time Regardless of Year Published)

Kim Stanley Robinson - "Sixty Days and Counting"

Nolan Dalla - "One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey 'The Kid' Ungar, The World's Greatest Poker Player"

Max Brooks - "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War"

Richard Dawkins - "The God Delusion"

Richard McEwan - "Atonement: A Novel"

Richard Harris - "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason": Did we need both "The God Delusion" and "The End of Faith"? Evidently, yes.

China Mieville - "Perdido Street Station"

Richard K. Morgan - "Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel"

Movies

The Bourne Ultimatum

Michael Clayton

Live Free or Die Hard

Eastern Promises

A more macho list of manly-men movies would be hard to imagine. I'm really not trying to exclude female filmmakers (nor authors, nor musicians) ... but, wow, take the Y chromosone out and you're not left with much here. Although, I actually thought China Mieville was a woman until I saw his picture in the back of "Perdido Street Station".

Heinlein's Star Fading?

I keep rereading Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and some of the "juveniles" (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy & Podkayne of Mars) every year or two and I still think he's miles better than Asimov or Clarke. Still, I haven't even thought of going back to Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (any of the Lazarus Long novels, actually) and -- long separated from the wild libertarian to fascist swings of my teenage years -- I don't have much stomach for his "hairy-chested" prose, as this LA Times piece dubs it. (Nice synchronicity, btw, with Mark over at Cheek nominating R.A.H. for membership in the Manly Writers Corps.)

Also in the LA Times is a list of fave sci-fi novels of 2007 that'll make it's way to my library hold list.

Update: Heinlein's (manly) optimism in an essay on thisibelieve.org -- he's popping up everywhere these days as his Centenary year winds down.

(via SF Signal)

Dude

Chimps beat college students in memory test. Not really fair in as much as the chimps probably weren't stoned.