Yes, it’s the middle of Passover and we’re having 17 people for our Seder tomorrow night, and it’s Good Friday and I’m in the office and I’m supposed to be catching up on work, but I’ve got a new weakness that I wanted to share before I get into editing my 18 page Federal Complaint that’s being sent to the adjuster today with a nasty demand letter.
John Scalzi is a professional writer. Apparently he writes all kinds of stuff and gets paid for it. in 1998 he started writing a public journal called a blog. I hear these are very popular now. At some point, he wrote a very intelligent and engaging sci-fi book called Old Man’s War. It owes a lot to Robert Heinlein and Jon Halderman, but even without having read any of their works, I loved the Scalzi. The thing about Old Man’s War was that he published it on his blog, basically giving it away to whoever wanted to read it. A publisher caught wind of it and BANG – Scalzi got his first novel published and distributed. Since that fortunate occurrance in 2005, he’s been cranking out great sci-fi and maintaining his blog.
While I’ve really enjoyed reading all the novels, I only just started to get into the blog. How great is it to have a professional, high-quality writer cranking out tasty tidmits for you to enjoy every other day or so? So you get the picture – Scalzi’s a cool dude.
A few days ago, he refrred readers of the blog to a paid gig he has with American Movie Classics (AMC). Ever since Mad Men, AMC has been enjoying a nice little bit of success. They’re even producing a ‘re-imagining‘ (when is that term going to go out of style?) of my all-time favorite TV show of all time ‘The Prisoner‘. So Scalzi has hooked up with AMC to make occassional contributions to one of their columns, prticularly dealing with sci-fi. Good choice! He’s now helping them promote a new on-demand catalog of B-movies. This means that you can simply head over to AMCtv.com and watch any number of low budget favorites from the days of yore.
This got me thinking about the handsome gent from the picture which accompanies this entry. He’s the subject of The Creeping Flesh, a 70’s horror flick that caused me more than a few nightmares when I was 6. I didn’t see it in the movies, but rather on glorious UFH – WKBS48 back in the late 70’s. They had a series that originated in Boston called Creature Double Feature where folks like that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (both of whom star in The Creeping Flesh!) were beamed into my brain on a regular basis. A little more sheepnis please!
