Friday Quicker Notes

Over at work, a new joint named Market on Market finally opened, after some typical delays. It's an upmarket grocery store featuring sausages at $11 a pound and the like, plus it serves $14 sandwiches, pizza, sushi and oysters, wine, chocolates and macarons, etc. Its main competitors in the area are the homeless-only Burger King, Walgreen's, and the now clearly terrified Lunch Geek. Don't worry though, you still have to step over heroin needles and piles of human shit to enter the mystical realm of Market on Market. There needs to be a word for this sort of instant gentrification, as the usual process of declassed whites with artsy pretensions moving in and making the area "safe" or the wealthy and their associated service businesses hasn't happened. It's more of an occupying force fueled by fine cheeses than anything else.

Early this week, the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award was announced, and I was pleased to see that "The Street of Fruiting Bodies" by Sayuri Ueda from Phantasm Japan was on it, in the short story category. I should have e-files for HWA members to read by this afternoon.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died. Good, though any king who dies of old age is a travesty. Luckily, Abdullah the Butcher is still alive.



Finally, Clerks III, are you fucking kidding me?