So, this is a hella catchy song that I really love—

—but it also super-duper creeps me out, because it sorta seems like

  1. the speaker is a sociopath who
  2. is confessing to a crime in song.  Like, I think the narrator of this song is maybe that realtor who had that woman chained up “like a dog” in a shipping container on his property in North Carolina.  And finally, I’m a little worried that
  3. maybe this is Rick Springfield confessing in song—has anyone heard from Jessie’s girl lately?  I mean, shit, do any of us even know her name‽

Anyway, still a catchy tune—apart from the weird little record-skip repeat at around 1:30, prior to diving into the B-section.  I love the B-section and breakdown—especially because it then leads into, like, a “C” section(?) with a weird momentary Truck Driver’s Gear Shift and serviceable guitar solo—but that repeated bar near 1:30 has always sorta driven me nuts.

Anyway, enjoy!

Pseudopod: Year 10–Support this Lil Engine that Can and Does

In celebration of their 10th anniversary Pseudopod—a consistently solid horror fiction podcast—is running a kickstarter:


Pseudopod has an excellent track record—both in terms of delivering the goods and doing right by their contributors—and impressive longevity (10 years of weekly operation publishing fiction for free is hard going; I know from experience).  Their goal is to raise funds to increase what they pay artists and ensure their longevity.  These are Good Things™

Kick in a few bucks; the 21st Century is nuts, and perhaps the nutsiest thing is the jaw-dropping array of free arts & letters we each enjoy every day—but it can only be free on the daily if we all kick in now and again.  This is one of those moments.


Add bonus: there are some really nifty backer premiums, including this rad-as-hell mug and their first ever anthology, For Mortal Things Unsung—which features both reprints of pieces they

Pseudopod Horror in Clay limited-edition tiki mug
a mug of unspeakable horror

bought for the podcast (including mine), as well as new work A.C. Wise, Jim Bihyeh, and others.

Free Fiction Friday: Halloween Edition

For your seasonally appropriate reading:

Enjoy!

It’s Rigged, I Tells Ya! *Rigged*!!!

Seeing lots of concerns about a “stolen election,” not just from the Nativist Right (e.g.,  Trump himself speaking in Novi, MI last month and repeating at basically every whistle-stop since, it his inability at the third debate to commit to honoring any election outcome other than his own unlikely victory), but also from broad swaths of the Progressive Left (e.g., That viral image showing #TrumpWon starting in Russia is fake, #TrumpWon? trend vs. reality, Troll armies rig polls to deceive you into believing Trump won first debate, Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution, concerns of voter suppression via Trumpian “poll watchers,” etc.) and the Rational Center (largely around the possibility of Ruskie agitators: FBI Says It Has Detected More Attempts to Hack Voter Registration Systems, Newsweek Website Attacked After Report On Trump, Cuban Embargo, The Russian Hack of U.S. Election Systems is About Delegitimizing, Not Changing, the Result, and It Feeds Trump Vote-Rigging Claim)

Here’s the thing: at the national level the U.S. election system—being a bass-akward county-by-county patchwork with little network connectivity and lots of different paper trails—is broadly unriggable. Yes, many pockets are vulnerable to manipulation, but that can only tip a close election—and this once hasn’t really been close for a year or so.

What this latest paranoid politico-cultural tulip mania really puts me in the mind of is the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street“—minus the last 2 minutes are so.  Just watch this video, stop at ~22:40 seconds, and you’ve got our current predicament (of course, keep going and SPOILER ALERT!!! you’ll discover that the episode’s Big Bad Alien looks distressingly like a young Vladimir Putin—but I’m positive that’s just a coincidence).

Twilight Zone – The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street from Kevin on Vimeo.

Good News, Everybody! Looks like we won’t all have to die from MRSA and C diff

…I mean, yes, we’ll all still be swept away by the ruinstorms powered by our collapsing climate—but that’s a helluva lot less agonizing then succumbing to c diff or a septic staph infection. 

human neutrophil ingesting MRSA (source)
A human white blood cell battling MRSA (source)

All that aside, the science here is really cool: instead of a new traditional antibiotic (which is basically the equivalent of bug spray), this 25yo (!!!) researcher has designed and grown little nano-caltrops that tear apart the cell walls—and, just as hundreds of generations of deer have failed to grow immune to bullets, it likewise appears that bacteria cannot grow immune to these targeted lil anti-pathogenic death spikes. 

Rather than poisoning the bad bacteria like antibiotics do, the molecules, called peptide polymers, destroy the bacteria’s cell walls. And unlike antibiotics, which also poison surrounding healthy cells, the polymers “are quite non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body,” Lam says. That’s because they’re much too big (about 10 nanometers in diameter) to enter healthy cells—”the difference in scale between a mouse and an elephant,” Lam’s supervisor told the Sydney Morning Herald. What’s more, in Lam’s experiments, generation after generation of bacteria don’t seem to become resistant to the polymers.

Read more: This 25-Year-Old May Have Saved You From Super-Gonorrhea