It's widely believed that after the Hindenburg crashed in 1937, use of zeppelins ground to a halt. However, while the Hindenburg disaster prompted a change from inflating zeppelins with hydrogen to nonflammable helium, both the Axis and the Allies deployed airships throughout World War II. And even after the war, companies saw a bright future for lighter-than-air travel.

Below is a two-page advertisement from in the May 7th, 1945 issue of LIFE Magazine. (BTW, did you know that all the old LIFE Magazines are available on Goggle Books? So awesome.) Fighting in Europe had just ended (Germany would formally surrender on May 8th), and Goodyear was touting the airship's role in America's victory while also talking up the peace-time future of "luxurious, hotel-like comfort in long sustained flight."

While the massive ocean liner-like airships Goodyear imagined never came to be, the passenger zeppelins that did exist were pretty swank. Airships.net has an article showing photos of the interior of the Hindenburg, including the dining room, observation desk, and smoking room.

My grandfather died two years ago after a long illness and decline. The afternoon he passed away, Nonna (er, my grandmother) was sitting in her kitchen. A cardinal landed on the windowsill and looked in at her. It watched her for a long time before flying away, and my Nonna took this as a sign that her husband was okay and finally at peace.

So, to mark the anniversary of my grandfather's passing, Nonna got a tattoo of a cardinal on her arm.

This is her third tattoo. She got her first one in her wild and reckless youth of 81. So this is just to say that I still my my grandfather. And my grandmother is a little bit crazy and a whole lot of awesome.

Originally published at Guys' Lit Wire

Ephiram Scott's life is in a rut when he discovers a dead boy who looks exactly like him--so much so that Ephiram's mother thought Ephiram was the one who got run over by a bus. What's more, Ephiram's twin came into the morgue with a strange coin: Make a wish and flip it. If the coin comes up heads, Ephiram's wish comes true. If it lands on tails, he still gets what he wished for, but with terrible results. Ephiram can try to set things right, but only by risking another wish.

E. C. Myers' Fair Coin is a book about hasty wishes and unintended consequences. It will call to mind--and even name-checks--W. W. Jacobs' short story "The Monkey's Paw." But while Jacobs' story is fairly straightforward, Fair Coin starts simply enough but slowly grows more and more complex as parallel worlds and parallel lives begin to pile up. In this way, it calls to mind some of the best, most mind-bending fiction of Philip K. Dick or Jorge Luis Borges.

Fair Coin is cerebral science fiction with enough romance and two-fisted action to keep it form getting too bogged down in its own ideas. A great read for just about anyone.

In 1878, Newfoundlander Joseph Martin caught a giant squid near Glover's Harbor. Not just any giant squid either; at 55 feet long, it was the giantest giant squid ever recorded.

In 2001, Glover's Harbor decided to build a statue commemorating Martin's record-making catch. The life-sized squid statue now overlooks the harbor as part of the Bayview Lookout Nature Trail. The metal and concrete monument was made by Canadian sculptor Don Foulds. Foulds' other outdoor sculptures include a giant turtle, giant moose, and life-sized wooly mammoth.

In 2011, the squid statue became part of a series of postage stamps showcasing roadside attractions throughout Canada. A Squid Festival was held in Glover's Harbor that featured the official unveiling of the stamp design with many of Joseph Martian's decedents taking part.


The squid statue and squid stamp. The man on the right is Fraser Ross, designer of the stamp.


A sampling from Canada Post's roadside attractions series
Seriously, if anybody in Canada has one of these stamps, I will commit all manner of sexual favors and/or moral atrocities for one.

Israeli gas mask + lens of an antique camera + caduceus = 21st century plague doctor mask





Since plague doctors are gentlemen, I also made a monocle and a pipe that attached to the mask's drinking port. Bu they looked more silly than awesome, so I left them off the final product.

The Silver Legion, nicknamed the Silver Shirts, were an American fascist organization active during the 30s. At their height, they claimed about 15,000 members led by writer and spiritualist William Dudley Pelly. The Nazis saw them as allies and even gave one member, heiress Jessie Murphy, 4 million dollars to build Hitler a bunker in the Santa Monica Mountains above Los Angeles.

The bunker was built on a 55-acre ranch Murphy had bought from Will Rogers. Designed to be self-sufficient as well as luxurious, it had a diesel power plant, a 375,000 gallon reservoir, libraries, a swimming pool, and several dining rooms.

The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the compound was raided by the FBI and about 50 Silver Shirts were arrested. The organization was officially disbanded after Hitler declared war on America, and the bunker was abandoned. It was briefly an artists' colony and the Hollywood home of Henry Miller. Currently, it is owned by California as part of the Will Rogers State Historic Park. Officially off limits, it has been left to the wilderness and graffiti artists.

This year, the bunker will be bulldozed to make a hiking trail and picnic area.

So after years of writing, I finally got around to printing up real business cards...

I figure there are two kinds of people in the world: those that chuckle at the tagline and those that are confused by it. The people that chuckle? Those are the ones I can sell books to.

Next on the agenda is getting a real, semi-decent author's photo. We'll see if I can manage it sometime this decade.

I have a story in the up-coming Fungi anthology. Focused on horror of a mycological variety, Fungi is edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey. They just released the contributor list a couple days ago:

Ann K. Schwader, “Cordyceps zombii”
A.C. Wise, “Where Dead Men Go to Dream”
Andrew Penn Romine, “Last Bloom on the Sage”
Camille Alexa, “His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”
Chadwick Ginther, “First They Came for the Pigs”
Daniel Mills, “Dust From a Dark Flower”
Ian Rogers, “Out of the Blue”
Jane Hertenstein, “Wild Mushrooms”
Jeff Vandermeer, “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”
John Langan, “Hyphae”
Julio Toro San Martin, “A Monster In The Midst”
Kris Reisz, “The Pilgrims of Parthen”
Laird Barron, “Gamma”
Lavie Tidhar, “The White Hands”
Lisa M. Bradley, “The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass”
Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington, “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”
Nick Mamatas, “The Shaft Through The Middle of It All”
Paul Tremblay, “Our Stories Will Live Forever”
Polenth Blake, “Letters to a Fungus”
Richard Gavin, “Goatsbride”
Simon Strantzas, “Go Home Again”
Steve Berman, “Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) – b. 1925, d. 1957”
W.H. Pugmire, “Midnight Mushrumps”

I know you're looking at that list and thinking, "Wow, what a bunch of fun guys!" (see what I did there?) But you get even more with the hardcover edition. It will include additional artwork plus three extra stories.

E. Catherine Tobler, “New Feet Within My Garden Go”
J.T. Glover, “The Flaming Exodus of the Greifswald Grimoire”
Claude Lalumière, “Big Guy and Little Guy’s Survivalist Adventure”

Fungi will be out this fall. In the meantime, the editors are assembling a database of fungal fiction--everything from poems to TV episodes--from the vilest mushroom monster to the humblest alien spore. You can help, or just see what's on the list so far, here.

Lynn Viehl may be my favorite person I've never actually met. Her Paperback Writer blog is chockablock with useful advice, links, and markets for writers. And while she has plenty of experience and know-how, she's happy to offer it to aspiring authors for free. In a recent post, she talked about why.

Over the years I've been approached by various colleagues and organizations to do pay-for online writing classes, and while I've been flattered I've always declined. . . . I'm a child of public education, and my university was the local library; I teach for free to honor the librarians and public school teachers who guided me in this direction, and to be there for all the writers like me who could never afford to pay for classes. Aka my little personal Crusade.

That quote made her my even favorite-er person I've never actually met. Anyway, Lynn Viehl is awesome. And if you're not reading her blog on a daily basis, you should.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation was created in 1989 by Scottish architect and sculptor Charles Jencks and his wife, Maggie Keswick Jencks. Inspired by Japanese Zen gardens, the sculptures and spaces in the garden are shaped into fractals, double helixes, and other structures encouraging visitors to contemplate of the universe.




A red bridge/pathway spirals around the center of the garden. Called Heaven-Hell, it represents the interrelationship between birth and life, good and evil. Charles Jencks has said, "this garden is part of a long historical tradition. Japanese Zen gardens, Persian paradise gardens, the English and French Renaissance gardens played out the story of the cosmos as it was understood then. So the idea of the garden as a microcosm of the universe is quite a familiar one. In fact, I feel it is the most compelling motive to create a garden. What is a garden if not a celebration of our place in the universe?"



Maggie Keswick Jencks passed away in 1995. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is closed to the public most of the year, but Charles Jencks opens it one day a year, with proceeds from the event going to support a network of cancer centers established in his wife's name.