May a Nissan Leaf fall on your head

Anyone buying a word of what BP has to say? How about Toyota? Me neither.

Let us recap the Toyota Incident, for those of us whose memories are very short and hazy. Several of Toyota's models of vehicles have been speeding up on their own and taking drivers on joy rides of doom. How many deaths isn't too clear, but it's over a dozen. As for the models, it's gone from just one to the entire line including Lexus. Toyota started the crisis by claiming that the spontaneous speed ups were caused by good old fashioned STUPID AMERICANS being unable to operate their finely crafted auto-sophistication-a-tron rice burning death boxes. Then Steve Jobs looked into it and told them "It looks like you have a software problem." Hil-Gle's speculations that the sudden speed up and die problem was actually caused by Toyota having made many of their cars essentially radio controlled has more or less been confirmed. They are relying on fly by wire technology to stop the cars and make them speed up. UHF signals from those things at your feet that make the car go or stop are being messed up by UHF signals being spat out by cell phones and other sources. Toyota shouldn't feel too bad. This is essentially what killed the Stealth Fighter, too. If you don't shield or somehow deal with the UHF thing, it really messes you up. The problem is that if the signals get screwed up, the little box that controls the car's go stuff will continue with the last signal--and send you speeding into an early grave.

Part Two of the story: Toyota knuckled under and recalled all of their cars. Other than over-riding the fly by wire system, they really have no fix. They got on the TV and said how sorry they were and pledged to make everyone feel much, much better about Toyota. In the mean time, they've thrown all sorts of little fits because they've figured out that fixing the problem will doom them to having no profits for the foreseeable future. Not only do you have to retrofit all of the fly by wire cars currently on the road, but you basically have to scrap all of your new car designs which were based on the same technology. With Arch Rival Nissan set to release the first of many functional all electric cars, Toyota is facing oblivion.

Part Three: So today they went back to their original story. There is nothing wrong with their cars at all. The brain boxes they have examined universally disclose that all of the speed up and die accidents were caused by good old fashioned STUPID AMERICANS. STUPID AMERICANS have been getting their feet caught in the floor mats or otherwise mistaking the stop thing for the go thing. Why only Americans who buy Toyotas seem to have this problem is not quite clearly explained. As for Steve Jobs, he's just wrong. As for the fly by wire issue, they've checked and that's wrong too.

All I can say is: best of luck with that.

Toyota is over in the United States. Roll credits. May a Nissan Leaf fall on your head.

All of that said, I am not sure that Nissan is going to get the lion's share of the electro car market. There are three other manufacturers besides Nissan and GM which are fielding new vehicles shortly. Again, I don't think that any of these guys are going to have the biggest slice. My prediction is that Ford will take it. And they don't have an electric car. What they have is a nice strategy of sitting out the origin of the species phase and then slogging in after such time as they can see what works and what doesn't.

I think the stars, however, are aligned for the electro car. People think 'oil' and they think oil spills on beaches, Iran with the bomb and dirty air. No matter how crapulent the first electro cars turn out being, the public will will it into acceptance. I'm not much of a predictor (don't buy any Ford stock), but this one is a Cubs season was over in June no brainer.

Speaking of which, it has now dawned on the Cubs that their season is over. The next sound you hear will be veteran Cub players dropping like Nissan Leafs (Leaves) on other team's heads. Farewell Golden Age of Cubs Baseball. Thanks for the zero championships and really unlikeable players. Perhaps the next time I pony up $400.00 to watch a team lose, they will have nice players. That, at this point, is all Cubs fans may look forward to.

In baseball as in life, sometimes something has got to give. With the Cubs, we have to face the fact that it's never going to be cheap again and that they are unlikely to be competitive again (unless you just trade brain trusts with the White Sox), so a time spent in a pleasant ballyard with happy but not top talent players is the best one can do. I have similarly had to face some facts and allocate my time accordingly. Something in my writing career is going to have to give--and it's not going to be this website. Previously I have been working on novels, games, this website and various short story projects. In the past I have had a number of short stories published, which was ego strokes and fair publicity, if not wildly lucrative.

It has come to my attention that the short story market, like the five dollar lunch, has gone extinct. The markets that remain have been taking a year to get back to me--and are not all that well paying to start with. Not to express too many sour grapes, but it also seems that quite a few of them are less than open to outside submissions. The better markets, the big slicks, seem entirely unreachable.

Mostly I have been rewarded with spam. It's one thing to make me use your automated submission system (and charge me for it), not get back to me for a year and when you do get back to me say nothing of note whatsoever, but it is quite another thing to send me weekly appeals for cash dressed up in your Lit Clique Newsletter. I am sooo happy all of you trust fund babies have found each other and would so very much like to attend your readings in SoHo or Austin, but sadly I work for a living. (By the way, about half of these publications are being funded by the NEA in the first place, so I don't know what they need my money for.) Secondly, all of these people write about the same things in the same way. Ditto some of the remaining sci fi rags.

I'm not saying I'm giving up entirely. I'm saying I'm mostly giving up. As the year long waits for rejects come in, I will start offering the stories here. In truth, Hil-Gle has a higher readership than many of these magazines. It had been my intention to keep Hil-Gle focused on just games and Pulp history and I hope that this broadening will not cause it to lose traction. It may be silly, but I'm going with Hil-Gle because it is working.

I'm on a silliness streak of late. Yesterday I did a silly thing and bought something on ebay. Ebay is a great source for pulp cover scans and research, but I try to limit my purchases. I will be moving in April and taking on more things is just counterproductive at this point. Also, there was a time in the past when I loved having an abode filled with rotting magazines, but that time had long since passed. Today I rarely collect anything.

But sometimes I spot an auction item with a low bid--and before I know it--I am the proud owner of yet another thing I don't have a place for. Somewhere in the mail there is a copy of Intimate Story from 1956 wending its way to me. My interest in Intimate Story was spawned by my starting research on our next Pulp Publisher Biography, which will be on the late wave Ideal Magazines. I am still in the prelim stages and I didn't have any Ideal Magazines at all. Oh, what could ONE hurt?

I have been very good with these research projects. I only bought one Hillman Publication after the last one. Of course, I already had dozens. But I only bought one and it wasn't a comic book or pulps, so it doesn't count, right? And there's nothing really wrong with buying the trophy before the research, so ONE copy of AN Ideal Magazine cannot hurt. These are the thoughts I was thinking. And then I remembered the box.

The box was spawned by internet research also, for the UFO Cults piece. It too was bought on ebay. I won the bid, It wasn't much. It came here. And here it has sat unopened for two years.

I fear the box. When I first got it I put it in my freezing car for a week to kill the bugs that might have been inside it. Other than to kill its possible bugs, there is not much I can do for what is inside the box.

It contains a dozen or so copies of the early supermarket tabloid Midnight, still in their subscription mailing containers from 1964. Each issue will have to be unrolled and flattened for a prolonged period in a dry, dark place. After that I will need oversized Mylar and acid free backing boards in order to preserve them. AND THEN WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO WITH THEM!

It's 46 year old newsprint. It's not like it stores well.

With Intimate Story now on its way to nowhere man me, I broke down and opened the box. Good news. No bugs. I had been assured that these had spent the last few decades in someone's basement. And yet no bugs or water damage. Actually quite cool. For bonus points there was a 1960 issue of Confidential Flash, apparently Midnight's sister publication. There is also a partial of a 1956 issue of Midnight which I may scan and present to you next time.

It occurs to me that I made a promise to share some of Ballyhoo from the 1920s here. Now that I have located those issues, I think my scanner and can do a little sharing. That sounds like a plan for the next few days.

As with the short stories, the scans will appear here in the blog first and then migrate to actual web pages. I don't have an actual ETA for the posting on Ideal Magazines, but I think its going to be a lot shorter than the others. After that, I intend to do THE BIG ONE: Slendorama--A History of the Romance Pulps. No one has done it yet. It's time.

(Pictured: Another copy of The Flapper, which I am told went on to rename itself as Experience The Best Teacher of All. Words of wisdom indeed, if perhaps not the most pithy magazine title of all time.)