[img_assist|nid=4439|title=Soupbone and Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=250|height=250]Click here to listen to Baby It's Cold Outside

Merry Christmas Junkies! Phil Rossi and Starla Huchton put together a little holiday project that was in jeopardy when Phil got the stomach flu earlier this week. Phil's a long time friend of the Siglerverse (and wrote my favorite CRYPT character sketch) so he called Scott for an assist. Scott was unable to help, but luckily his cousins Soupbone and Frankie were in town for the holiday, so it all worked out in the end.

I'm adding Soupbone's clip here, but you can hear both Soupbone and Frankie over at Phil's site or Starla's site. Enjoy!

What a fine-looking bunuch of lads! Tony Jones sent this pic of his "Psychotronic Bookclub" reading a highly prized piece of literature, a.k.a. ANCESTOR. These London high schoolers clearly know what's up. I particularly enjoy the thematic element of the gents tie on the right, carefully selected and aligned to echo the book cover's claw marks. Now THAT is fashion!

Click here to read John Scalzi's take
on the best SciFi films of 2010

Some of you may remember my totally bitchin' column for AMC called "Laughing in the Face of Death." When AMC wanted to move that over to FilmCritic.com, ARealGirl and I decided to let it cease so that I could buckle down on writing and podcasting. I loved the column, but we were in crunch time with STARTER and ANCESTOR, and I was letting deadlines slip, so we had to re-calibrate the gunsights.

But science fiction author John Scalzi did make the jump from AMC to FilmCritic.com, and I think y'all would really dig his weekly take on scifi flicks. Scalzi is clever, has a categorical knowledge of all things scifi, and has a 11-5 record in MMA fights. How can you go wrong with that? Home-slice also has a huge audience, courtesy of his books and his Whatever blog (I invented the Internet, but Scalzi invented blogging).

Swing over and give him a read, and if you leave a comment tell him I sent ya.

NOTE: I couldn't agree less with him on INCEPTION, but other than that he's solid. And? Mean as hell with the triangle choke.

Click here to read the full article

News submitted by: Tom Merritt

Yes, that's the blood-red field of the To Pirates (read also, Eastern Washington University) are in the finals of the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) thanks to a 41-31 win over Villanova.

You don't see any Ki linemen in this picture, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

[img_assist|nid=4414|title=Austin digs his Christmas present|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=250|height=339]Who says we shouldn't listen to the youth? I defy you, sir -- yes, defy -- you to do so when they spout off pearls of wisom like these from Austin when he received his Christmas present of THE ROOKIE a few days early. 

"Awesome. This is the best gift ever. This is my first autographed book, from the best author in existence."

Tht's right. "Best author in existence." Suck it, Bill Shakespeare.

I know not who these "Wildcats" are on the sweatshirt worn by this literary gourmet. Perhaps a Tier Three team from the Madhava Web Colony in the League of Planets, I think.  

Don't Ask / Don't Tell (DADT) has basically been repealed. Here's to our gay and lesbian countrymen & countrywomen who currently serve in the armed forces, or will choose to serve in the future. It's not a done deal yet, but seems to be in process.

Click here to see CNN's coverage on it.

Click here to send Holiday Stank

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you. Actually, I'm from a future where there is no government, just my beady-eyed stare of døøm, and I actually am here to help you.

Run out of time for your gift shopping? Busy actually going to work so you ain't got time to find presents? We got you covered!

Dark Øverlord Media will not only sell you our books (because we're money-hungry like dat), we'll wrap them for free and ship them to your gift recipient for free (only US addresses). If you order by midnight, December 20, 2010, the presents will be under your buddy's tree on Christmas Morning!

Why is this a good gift? Because it's a limited-edition, first-edition, signed and numbered hardcover. Book I & II of a series, and THE ROOKIE is just about gone. You are giving a present they won't be able to get anywhere else, and won't be able to get again in hardcover once THE ROOKIE is out of stock. It's like, all rare and unique and stuff.

Click. Order. Done. Drink. That's my suggestion.

Click here to see Hutch's ... app

Long-time fans know that I do not like JC Hutchinsssss. He is a novelist with considerable writing talent, true. I buy his books and read them, also true. Other than that, screw the guy. He's constantly crashing my site with his Mecha Hacking skillz. All that trouble we had with THE STARTER pre-order and the GFL eBook launches? Yeah. Him.

Still, he has a new iPhone/iTouch app out, and I had to tell you about it. To warn you away? Perhaps. First of all, this app is 99 cents. I admit, that's a compelling price. You have that in your front-left pants pocket right now. Not that I make a habit of knowing what's in your pants, mind you, but I have my sources.

What do you get for your 99 cents? You get "Killroy: The App," based on a character from his novels. And by "character," I mean a thinly veiled personification of his Hutch's pervy internet-gnome tendencies. The app is cool, JC can "sign" it, so you have a one-of-a-kind digital signature, it's got ID badges and wallpapers from JC's books 7th SON, and — most important — you can listen to the full, three-book series of 7th SON or read the whole thing. For 99 cents? That has a chalupa beat hands-down.

So, what's to warn you about? An additional "feature" of this device is the ability to "Shake Killroy." And if you shake him, your phone makes happy noises and says some sexual innuendo. That's just wrong. "Shake" Killroy, and he makes noise. Kind of like when you tickle Elmo in the wrong place, perhaps.

At right is a picture of Killroy being "shaken." I wouldn't exactly let this guy babysit my kids, but hey, it's your life — touch and shake and tickle whatever you like.

For 99 freakin' cents, you can find out yourself and get an unabridged scifi/thriller series spanning three books. That's like 33 cents a book. All the shaking is just a ... let's call it a "bonus" and leave it at that.

So last night, the Evil Queen™ was supposed to go out to see a movie with her friend, while I stayed home and studied particle physics (read also: play FIFA on the XBox360). Her friend's kid got sick and cancelled.

So, the Evil Queen says to me "hey, will you go see Black Swan with me?"

"I am improving my knowledge of the universe tonight," I said. "What's it about?"

"It's that movie with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis."

Well, shit, pardner, you had me at Natalie Portman. Then I get to the movie, and EQ is very happy and says "It's so nice of you to come to a ballet movie with me, because I know you'd rather catch an intestinal parasite and shit blood for a week than watch ballet." She didn't say exactly that, but it's what she meant.

And I thought: "Oh, fuck me running, ninety minutes of fucking ballet?"

I went looking for some unclean water that might contain said intestinal parasites, but couldn't find any. Damn.

But I watched it, and holy shitballs packed with the sawdust from the Tree of Aweseome, it was one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. It's gross. It's got so much cringe-worthy that much of the movie was spent with my eyes wide, my hands over my mouth, and my knees up in the air. I was fucking exhausted when this bitch rolled credits.

For the first (and last, goddamit) time in my life, I will say that ballet is balls-out bad-ass. Portman should just stay home in her pajamas on oscar night and they can mail her the trophy.

Normally, I check out with the excuse for creativity known as "hey, is this really happening, or is it just imagined! I'm so clever by showing you something and not telling you if it's real or not!" But not this time. I was in for a pound and gave back the penny because I was so fucking entertained.

I highly recommend it. Best ballet/horror flick you will see this month, I promise.

This may sound crazy, but if you liked the cringiness of INFECTED, you will love this flick.

Click here to read the article

ARealGirl sent me this one with the headline "Eeek! Kill it!" but I think we can all see the cuteness of this little sweetie. This article about the Mahoenui giant weta supports my theory that most tree-huggers only want to save the cute animals. Rats and other nasties that have as much right to survival of the fittest tend to get less ink than, say, spotted owls and pretty mammals. I hope the Kiwis can save this booger, because, come on, just look at it!

A great quote from the article talk addresses a truism of life -- no matter what you want to achieve, if you want people to act, you have to be compelling.

"You have to tell a story. You have to appeal to something else. Then often you get engagement."

This is a video by Toby Turner. He is frickin' funny as frick'. I stumbled onto this guy via a long chain of this link to that video to this link to that video, started watching his stuff and was mightily entertained. It wasn't until I was on his site and saw his 2-minute screen demo -- the last, like, 5 seconds of his demo reel -- that I realized he starred in Earl Newton's adaptation of my short story SACRED COW.

That's right, I watched like a half-hour of Toby's vids before I realized that he was the star of the only movie-adaptation of one of my stories. How many times have I watched SACRED COW? Hard to count. If it's more than I have fingers, it's hard to count. Clearly, I'm not that sharp. 

Toby has like 500,000 subscribers for his bitchin vids, and there's a reason for it -- home-slice is really funny.

Personally? I take full credit for his success. That's just what I do. Guy acts in an adaptation of my story, he becomes super-mecha YouTube star. He's got a crapload of these vids: click here to see his YouTube page.

Back in the day I was always a Marvel fan, and thought DC kind of sucked ass. It wasn't until the Dark Knight that DC stopped being the sappy, "heroism is just dandy!" house that it was. Conan O'Brien sat down to go over a couple of the really, really bad DC characters. If you're a comic-book fan, this is hilarious.

Now that the first wave of DØM flash drives have been shipped, I thought I'd post a few shots of the Siglerific goodness:

We have them all loaded up with GFL books ready for the hand-off. Get 'em while they're hot by clicking either photo above!

Click here to see all the Sigler books available on Nook

Awwwwwww yeah, the Nook Store is now locked and loaded with all five Sigler eBook titles. And yeah, that includes a properly formatted CONTAGIOUS. A few Junkies bought CONTAGIOUS to Stankify their Nook(ie), only to find that the eBook was f-ing out of order.

So thanks to Junkies letting us know the book was shifty (like your brother-in-law), Crown Publishing pulled the title so they could fix the issue. Issue = fixed. Enjoy

And how about ARealGirl getting THE ROOKIE and THE STARTER all up in the Nook(ie) store? Boom! If you like playing with your Nook(ie), enjoy all my bits.

Yes, I am seven years old.

Here's a litle video I did to reach out to German readers. I had fun with it, fo 'sho. Kind of fun to see sub-titled in another language. Enjoy!

Sometimes Scott swipes my FridayFix™ for something he thinks is pretty cool.  Today, to celebrate his birthday, I'm sneaking into the Blog of F**K YEAH!  to share this:

There's tons more well-wishing over on Facebook, and feel free to add your thoughts below if you'd like.  Thanks to all the Junkies who sent in videos, and also to everyone who kept the secret plan … secret.

And to the FDØ™: Lá breithe shona, my friend, (that's Gaelic) and may you have many happy returns of the day.

This was too good not to share. It is no reflection on my opinion of religion to say it irks me when players thank God for a win. It's the same thing as saying "God thinks it's important to reach down and impact the result of my game, and, by the way, God likes me and my team way better than yours -- in fact, God kind of hates you, and that's why you lost."

It's one of those "my religion is the chosen religion" things that drives me nutty. So, when someone blames God for a loss? That's just too interesting not to share.

This comes from the Shudown Corner blog on Yahoo, this post written by Chris Case.

Click here to read the full post.

By the way, I feel awful for Steve Johnson, the talented wide receiver who dropped a pass in overtime against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Johnson ran a great route, got open and did everything right, he just dropped it.

If you are a child of the 80s and you enjoy slapstick, you probably grew up waiting for the next Leslie Nielsen movie. From AIRPLANE to THE NAKED GUN, to POLICE SQUAD, this guy delivered the funny time and time again. He is one of my all-time favorite comedic actors, and made my life better with thousands of laughs. To celebrate his life in a particularly Siglerism way, here's a short clip of him incorporating his bits into a Monday Night Football promo. I'm sure that if there is an afterlife, Leslie is rooting for the Krakens.

Since he died, what's been awesome to see is all the Tweets and blog posts of people quoting his famous lines. There isn't a sea of sadness, but rather a collective recollection of "shit, that dude was awesome." As an entertainer, I think that's one of the best legacies I can hope for -- when I croak, sure, some people will be sad, but if they spend their time remembering the things I did that entertained them, then that's a life worth living.

Leslie, I'll pour some on the curb for ya. Thanks for all the happiness you created.