Black Christmas Director Dead

On a sad note, Canadian director Bob Clark and his 22-year-old son Ariel died in a car crash in California early Wednesday morning, according to imdb.com’s daily Movie/TV News column.

Clark directed a few genre films familiar to Club Jade movie fans, including 1974’s Black Christmas (recently remade), the Sherlock Holmes/Jack the Ripper pastiche Murder By Decree, and the low-budget zombie movie Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. His most famous films include A Christmas Story, Porky’s, and Turk 182. He was 67.

Things To Give Us Pause

This summer’s must-buy gift for the deranged has to be actor Bruce Campbell’s next book, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way. On his web site, the lantern-jawed horror film icon says, “I had originally pitched a travel book, but the publishers thought it’d be a good idea for me to write a book about relationships instead. And so, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way was born. The only problem is that I don’t know the slightest thing about relationships.” The terror arrives in bookstores this summer.

But here’s something you can cringe at now. It has nothing to do with science fiction, fantasy, or horror, but anyone who has experienced the way fans can be manipulated by button-pushing advertisements can appreciate that it happens in other hobbies as well. Plus, this site sets off the Pretensionometer more strongly than any site I’ve run across in recent weeks — watch out for phrases such as “paracord safety tethering hole” and “covert deanimation activities” for a real linguistic treat. (It is to be noted that the knives shown on this site are identical to a few models offered by a legitimate Italian knifemaking company, but cost more.)

Thanks to BobQ for the heads-up on the Dark Ops knife site.

Random Strangeness

Here are some random URLs for fun. Mostly offensive fun.

This piece from cnn.com answers the musical question and answer, “Bad sex? You’re soaking in it!”

Here, you can experience the classic movie It’s A Wonderful Life being reenacted in thirty seconds by cartoon bunnies. No, really.

And here, Foamy, the extremely foul-mouthed squirrel from the online cartoon series Neurotically Yours, goes off on an extremly foul-mouthed squirrel diatribe about the true meaning of Christmas.

Random URLS

Three things potentially worth wasting a few minutes on…

A CNN.com columnist’s essay about movie spoilers. It does contain some movie spoilers; the most recent movies spoiled are The Others and Jet Li’s Hero. So read at your own risk.

Just as Chewbacca finally got his medal, Dr. Bunson Honeydew and his assistant Beaker finally receive the accolades they deserve.

And, in the tradition of really lame online quizzes, the BBC web site offers “Buffy Dream Date: Which Character Is Your Valentine?” Mine is Willow, which I already knew, but it does presuppose she’s at least bi rather than full-up lesbian.

What’s Next? Balsa Beanie Babies?

If you have too much paper, too much time on your hands, and too much affection for the old Transformers cartoon to consider yourself entirely sane, take a look at this site:

Paperformers

It’s a site where you can download .PDF files, print them out, and cut, fold and glue the printouts to make Transformers robots. Around 50 are available, plus another dozen or so fan-created robots on a separate page.

The Universe link at the top of the page takes you to the master list of .PDFs.

Note, if you pass the URL on to anyone else, that the “P” in “Paperformers” has to be capitalized — the site is case-sensitive.

It’s Absolutely Amazing

The science fiction magazine Amazing Stories initially debuted in 1926 or so and was for decades a source of science fiction and fantasy short stories. It faded away in the ’90s, but has been revived by the good folk over at Paizo Publishing.

Amazing‘s “first issue of the 21st century” (as the cover proclaims) showed up at San Diego Comic-Con a week or so ago. Now edited by Dave Gross, former editor of Star Wars Insider, it adds media coverage, including book/movie/computer game reviews, to the standard mix of short stories, columns, and letters to the editor. It also bumps the format up to 8″x11″ from the digest size that has been standard for SF&F short story publications.

The first issue features Spider-Man on the cover and fiction by Timothy Zahn, Bruce Sterling, and Gene Wolfe, among others, inside. The URL to Paizo’s Amazing Stories page is http://www.paizo.com/amazing.