My little essay on Panpsychism in the Annual Edge Question page is bringing in some interesting email.

Today I heard from Steve Lehar, who agrees with me that any object in the world has a certain amount of consciousness. Lehar has a very cool cartoon essay on epistemology, that is, on the nature of our immediate experiences of ourselves in the world.

My wife and I went to King Kong yesterday afternoon, it was good, a bit overlong, but some amazing effects. Best scene: a super-gross giant worm with a pink, toothy feeding tube swallowing an Australian guy's head. “G'day, mate! Coo-eee!” A penile vagina dentata swallowing a man with a beard — uuuurp! So nasty.

Today Bruce Sterling sends me a picture by Warwick Goble of a woman holding up a jellyfish. A suitable symbol for augury at the start of this new year.

And John Brockman's webzine Edge has posted responses to the annual Edge question; the 2006 question being “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I'm honored to appear among the assembled answerers, arguing that everything is conscious and that therefore death is in some measure inconsequential — perhaps causing some to ponder, “Who let that guy in?”

Audio files for some of our podcasts are gone, due to bit rot and unreliable hosts…
But you can look over the existing stash in the Rudy Rucker Podcasts Archive.

And…there’s always the videos on Rudy’s YouTube Channel! Not that these have anything to do with the missing podcasts. But they’re fun.

In 1982 I was the singer for a short-lived Lynchburg, Va, punk band called The Dead Pigs. We did some covers, and I wrote a couple of songs for the band. One of my songs was inspired by seeing an 1897 Jean-Paul Aube sculpture of Dante.

I ran across a copy of this sculpture in the Stanford Cantor Arts Center the other day. The thing about this work that caught my fancy is that there’s a head — perhaps that of a damned soul — attached to the Dante’s foot or ankle. Here’s the picture and some of the words to the song I wrote.

I’m a man who’s been crazy,

There’s a head stuck to my foot.

I kick and the room gets hazy,

There’s a head stuck to my foot.

I don’t know where to put it,

And it’s really gettin’ hard.

Nobody wants to touch me,

For the head is my body, the head is my body,

The head is my bodyguard.

And do your folks think you are a stranger?

Do your friends say you be too weird?

It’s hard to live with much danger, baby,

Year after year after year after year.

***

Speaking of Lynchburg, I have a new “Killeville” science-fiction story online in the possibly final issue of Eileen Gunn's way-hip Infinite Matrix webzine, with an illo by A Fluffy Bunny (shown above). The story is “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club“; it's something I dreamed for years of writing, kind of blend of Phil Dick's “The Father Thing,” American Graffiti, the Book of Revelations, Linklater's Dazed and Confused, teen horror movies, door-to-door religious tract pamphleteers, my long-term concern over the evil of Pig Chefs, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and memories of some men who played cards all day in the men's locker room of a Lynchburg country club.

I wrote the story in 2003, and it's very tight and clear and funny, but some might find it — disturbing. None of the usual magazines would run it. So it's nice to see it in print at last. To make this the sweeter, one of Robert Sheckley's very last stories is in the same issue of Infinite Matrix! Rude Boy says check it out.

And as you party tonight, keep in mind the closing lines of “The Men In The Back Room at the Country Club”:

…pay close attention to the fluid dynamics of coffee, juice and alcoholic beverages. Any undue rotation could be a sign of smeel.

The end is near.

Happy New Year!