I just finished George Murray‘s Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, and it’s so good I’m going to back and read it again. Each aphorism is a fortune cookie of apocalypse. Here’s the full review I posted over at Goodreads:

“George Murray’s Glimpse is an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object in your mind. Forget five stars — this book deserves its own constellation.”

Here’s the aphorism I could have easily dropped into The Warhol Gang:

“When we die we are finally impersonating no one.”

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Good news! We’re hiring again!

I’ve already got an iTunes account, so I joined Ping. Just search for me by name.

I’ll be making an appearance at Vancouver’s Word on the Street, Sunday, Sept. 26, at 3:40. I’ll be at the Authors Tent, in between readings by Susan Juby and Lee Henderson, who are both great writers and awesome people. It’s going to be an interesting hour!

The WOTS readings are longer than most literary readings — 20 minutes — so I’m planning on talking a bit about the writing of The Warhol Gang, and some of the things that influenced it. But I’m also game for questions from the audience.

As always, I’ll bring some special prizes for people who come to the event and buy a book. At previous readings I’ve given away a couple hundred postcard comics and even some lottery tickets. We’ll see what I show up with this time.

And hey, if you want to post/tweet/update about this, the offer of a free unpublished story still stands.

Hope to see you there!

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I took this photo in Hawaii. I thought I was capturing the sunset, but it turns out it was just a U.S. military experiment.

The New York Times has an interesting article about ads that stalk you online. I had to change my cookies and login to get away!

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

We’ve tracked the ad — it’s coming from inside your computer! Get away from your computer!

For those readers who like The Warhol Gang, you may also enjoy this selection of quotes by Jean Baudrillard. One of my favourite bits:

“Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”

Another nice review, this time from Shelf Monkey, who calls The Warhol Gang “a rallying point for a new generation of young fans crying out for a satire to call their own.” Hear, hear.

You can now read The Warhol Gang e-book on the Kobo service, as well as on Apple’s iBookstore. A Kindle version is in the works, I think, and should be available soon. Soon we will have taken over every digital service, and then the revolution will truly begin. (Thanks to Monica Murphy for the tip.)

I’ve scanned my two books into the StickyBits service and attached a few bits. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, go over to StickyBits and check it out. In short, it’s a social sharing service of sorts that allows you to attach files to bar codes entered into the system. I’ve attached a few freebies to the bar codes for my books — a “behind the scenes” PDF guide for Please, some images, a new short story and a clip from an interview for The Warhol Gang. Just little bonuses for anyone who’s bought the books and wants some added value. But anyone else can add a file to the bar code, or the bar code of any product for that matter. All you need to do to view the bits attached to bar codes is download the StickyBits app to your smartphone and start scanning.

Above is the bar code for The Warhol Gang. You can scan it directly off the screen with the StickyBits app. And if you don’t want to view the attached files on your phone, the app syncs everything with the StickyBits website, so you can view the bits on your computer or whatever device you’re using.

I know, I know, if you can view the bar code for The Warhol Gang here, then you don’t need to buy the book to get the freebies. But I figure if you’re already visiting here….