michael favia

Tim Doyle

It's 1930 something. After brassy reporter Molly Sloane and her sidekick Timmy Mendez escape death at the hands of shadowy assassins in Eastern Europe, they investigate an exhibition at the castle of the world-class mesmerist, Mysterion the Magnificent. When Mysterion enslaves the minds of his audience, a librarian from Flagstaff saves Molly and Timmy. Slowly, our heroes uncover a plot between Mysterion and the goopy inhabitants of the planet Zygon to conquer the human race.

You already love The Intergalactic Nemesis. So did we.

Last Friday and Saturday, the Long Center hosted Jason Neulander’s pitch-perfect homage to sci-fi pulp and Weird Tales-inspired radio dramas. In 1996, Neulander and Ray Colgan assembled a small team of writers to slap together short radio serial drama scripts to be performed and recorded at Little City coffeehouse over a number of weeks. The show officially became a bona fide serialized radio drama when KUT started airing recordings of the show on Sunday mornings. Then in 2000, the Nemesis crew crammed the full plot into one evening and started running the show at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. In 2004, the show did a national tour, and in 2010 Neulander’s friend, Cliff Redd, encouraged him to blow up the show to Dell Hall-size. We’re glad they did, it was totally nuts and a ton of fun.

Nemesis calls itself a live-action graphic novel, which isn’t exactly right. There exists a graphic novel of the show, illustrated by artist Tim Doyle, but the live show is a radio drama with projected pictures instead of narration. This caused some dizziness on stage, because the excellent voice actors started competing (and winning) with the wonderful and hilarious artwork from the graphic novel. Previous incarnations of Nemesis had a narrator, but that wasn't going to fill this space.

Actors Shana Merlin and Mical Trejo deftly handled the challenge of occasionally talking to themselves as different characters. And although the scipt's primary weapon is camp (and plenty of it), Chris Gibson somehow still managed to nail the emotional arc of a widower librarian from the future. The show’s foley artist, Buzz Moran, and score composer Graham Reynolds lent the show some real radio drama authenticity and had their share of punchlines.

If you missed the too-short engagement at Dell Hall, don’t worry! Before the show began, Neulander announced that The Intergalactic Nemesis has become an official selection for Fantastic Fest, so there should be a chance to catch another performance (although the details will apparently be in the next wave of Fantastic Fest announcements). Do not miss it; considering that there really isn’t a roadmap for this kind of performance, the crew for Nemesis is pulling it all off insanely well.

itwbennett writes "If Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stuck with the first name for their search engine, we'd be 'BackRubbing' instead of Googling. But the fun doesn't stop there. The unforgettable Go Daddy was first saddled with the eminently Seussian moniker 'Jomax Technologies.' And as for Yahoo!... its original name just rolled off the tongue: 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MexiCali59 writes "Four of California's largest school districts will be trying something new on eighth-grade algebra students this year: giving them iPads instead of textbooks. The devices come pre-loaded with a digital version of the text, allowing students to view teaching videos, receive homework assistance and input assignment all without picking up a pen or paper. If the students with iPads turn out to do improve at a faster pace than their peers as expected, the program could soon spread throughout the Golden State."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nathanborror/Flickr In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy...

-Bobby McFerrin

Austin ranks fifth in a study by Portfolio.com on low-stress cities in the nation. Stress factors used in their study included quality of life, unemployment rates, pollution, weather, and crime rates. Austin's stress rating is -5.183 on their scale.

Of the 50 cities examined, Detroit came in as most stressed due to its 14+ percent unemployment rate, high crime (murders and robberies) and poverty rates, and low sunshine levels. Also making the high-stressed list were L.A. (#2) and New York (#6).

Salt Lake City took the low stress top spot for their low crime levels, easy commutes, high employment and good health. Coming ahead of Austin were Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.; and Raleigh, N.C.

Portfolio.com's stress methodology can be found here.

When it came to resurrecting the MIA videogame, Randy Pitchford faced a task that was part suicide run, part debt of honor. The Gearbox Software CEO serves up the inside story on the improbable rescue of one of gaming's most beloved (and most obnoxious) franchises.

The federal agency in charge of protecting other agencies from computer intruders was found riddled with hundreds of high-risk security holes on its own systems, according to the results of an audit released Wednesday.

Our maiden voyage in Hyundai's 17-foot long luxe sedan is impressive if not a tad banal.

Image from Doug Dorst Doug Dorst Reading at BookPeople
Wednesday, September 8
BookPeople (603 N. Lamar)
7pm, Free
[info]

Riding a wave of critical adulation, current Austin resident and St. Edward’s creative writing teacher Doug Dorst comes to BookPeople tonight to read from The Surf Guru, his new collection of short stories. Dorst’s follow up to his highly praised debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, The Surf Guru is earning similar acclaim, including an Editors’ Choice selection in the New York Times Book Review and a starred review in Kirkus. In the collection, Dorst writes about a wide range of situations and characters, from the aging surfing entrepreneur of the title story to a disgruntled botanist in “Splitters”.

Winner of the 2009 Emperor Norton Award, honoring “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason,” and runner-up for the 2009 PEN/Hemingway award, Dorst is not only an acclaimed writer but a three-time Jeopardy champion as well. So, there’s always the possibility that in addition to a reading unhindered by paltry reason, he might wow you with his mad trivia skills. Come see this critically acclaimed, local writer tonight at BookPeople at 7 p.m.

-Ryan Rutherford

maclizard writes "The town's name is real. But when Josh Moore tried to tell Seattle-based Microsoft and the enforcement team at Xbox Live that Fort gay was a real place, they wouldn't take his word for it. Or Google it. Or check the U.S. Postal Service website for a ZIP code. I personally feel for those of you from Big Bone Lick, KY"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from Screaming Females Screaming Females, The Crack Pipes and YellowFever
Wednesday, September 8
Mohawk (912 Red River Street)
10pm, tickets at the door
[info]Though she is, in fact, only one female (and a petite one at that), Screaming Females' lead singer Marissa Paternoster packs quite a vocal wallop. Her throat-shredder of a voice is front and center in this New Jersey trio's bombastic punk rock sound, backed by a chugging rhythm section and wailing guitar lines that are heavy on the wah-wah.

Screaming Females, who along with Paternoster are Jarrett Dougherty on drums and King Mike on bass, got their start in 2006 with the self-released Baby Teeth album. The scorching punk aesthetic placed them firmly in New Brunswick's D.I.Y. basement punk scene, alongside such bands as The Bouncing Souls, Thursday and The Ergs!. It also earned them some famous fans, including Jack White and the like-minds in Dinosaur Jr. In 2009, they made the move to a label (Don Giovanni Records) for their third album, Power Move, which garnered critical acclaim from the New York Times, amongst other places.

The summer of 2010 sees the band touring in support of their upcoming fourth album, Castle Talk. You can catch their fervid, honed blasts of punk tonight at the Mohawk.

Two local groups with very different sounds will also grace the stage. The first is The Crack Pipes, who traffic in scuzzy, slapdashed garage rock with a side of hellish blues. They've released three full-lengths and an EP, the last of which came out in 2007. Sadly, the band's guitarist, Billy Steve Korpi, has been fighting leukemia for the past few years. They have been playing many benefit shows in order to raise money for the treatment.

Austin favorites YellowFever open tonight's bill. The C-86-inspired duo, comprised of Jennifer Moore and Adam Jones, follow up last year's breakthrough debut full-length with a new EP entitled Bermuda Triangle. Our own Adam Schragin recently spoke with the band about the EP, their plans for their second full-length, and the influence of the Vivian Girls. You can check that out here.

Screaming Females: [MySpace] [Official]
The Crack Pipes: [MySpace] [Official]
YellowFever: [MySpace]

Citing the Obama administration's evocation of the state secrets privilege, a divided federal appeals court is dismissing a lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary accused of helping the CIA transport detainees to secret foreign prisons where they allegedly were tortured.

After several months, the grassroots campaign at Ole Miss to install Return of the Jedi's Admiral Ackbar, that esteemed squid-like war hero who led the Rebel Alliance to victory at the Battle of Endor, as the university's official sports mascot has fizzled.

bossanovalithium writes "Back in 1936 — 74 years ago — boffins accepted that about 3.3Khz was the accepted frequency that telephone calls are going to run on and it's been like that, generally, ever since. Call quality is reasonable but leaves a lot to be desired. Think calls from Skype to Skype where quality is often crystal clear." It's crazy to me that (for people with decent mics at least) Ventrillo sounds better than corporate conference calls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Felix Baumgartner steps into the void, 18 cameras will take us along for the ride with him.

Maybe you always remember where you parked. Maybe you never get parking tickets either. For the rest of us, some tools to alert us when our parking meter is about to expire or give us directions back to our car would be mighty handy.

jsuda writes "You've got to have a lot of confidence and nerve to write and try to sell a nearly 400 page book on cooking to the take-out pizza and cola set. No cookbook is likely to turn many geeks into chefs or take them away from their computer screens. However, even though Cooking for Geeks contains a large number of recipes, it is not a conventional cookbook but a scientific explanation of the how and why of cooking which will certainly appeal to that group, as well as to cooking professionals and intellectually curious others." Read on for the rest of jsuda's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When asteroid 2010 RX30 zipped past Earth early Wednesday, observers at the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy were ready. At 12:45 am local Italian time, amateur astronomers Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero remotely controlled a 0.25-meter telescope in Mayhill, New Mexico through the Global Remote Astronomy Telescope Network. They got four separate exposures of 30 seconds each and stitched them together to make this animation.

The Rumble/ Beerland The Rumble at Beerland
Wednesday, September 8
Beerland (711-1/2 Red River)
Free!
[info]It’s that time again - The Rumble is rocking Beerland this Wednesday night. This free monthly indie show highlights Austin musicians, curated by local folks in the know, brought to you by Future Sounds, The A.V. Club, Waterloo Records, Austinist, and more. The lineup tonight includes Pure Ecstasy, Soft Healer and Sleep ∞ Over.

Earlier this year, Pitchfork named Pure Ecstasy as a rising band, comparing their sound to “the long comedown after an all-night beach party. “ Loads of reverb, a dollop of distortion and simple driving bass lines keep songs such as “Easy” floating along in your head long after the night is over. For more info about Pure Ecstasy, check out the Austinist interview with the band.

Soft Healer is not your mom’s easy listening. The psychedelic guitar licks intermingle with saxophone grooves while Marie Butcher’s vocals weave through the mix unobtrusively. Their 7” release “Gentle One” is available on Captured Tracks.

Rounding out this edition of The Rumble bill is Sleep ∞ Over. The trio of ladies in this talented dream pop group is making waves with their latest 7” release on Forest Family, easily selling out the limited edition clear vinyl. Downloads of “La Rose” and “Outer Limits” are thankfully still available. So get yourself on down to Beerland tonight for an evening full of delightfully ethereal tunes, all for the bargain price of free.

After a set of sexy X-rays hit the web earlier this year, viewers were left to wonder if they were real. Now we have the answer.

Image from Amy Annelle Amy Annelle at Ruta Maya (Wednesday Residency)
Wednesdays (September and October)
Ruta Maya (3601 South Congress Ave)
Free, 6 - 7:30pm
[info]

"Yesterday morning I woke to a soft rain in a Maine barn. And by tonight, I'll be all the way to Oregon. Presently, I plan to take two deep breaths." So goes the unconventional newsletter of folk singer Amy Annelle, who spent the greater part of last month navigating Portland and playing shows like a Woody Guthrie tribute at the Mission Theater, the Portland Folk Festival and the Holocene Festival. But Austin's prodigal daughter has returned, announcing that she and select guests will christen Ruta Maya's new back bar with performances every Wednesday.

Ruta Maya's an odd duck - it boasts swell acoustics, but on any given night of the week you're more likely to witness Tai Chi with Guy Forsyth or open-mic night than an honest-to-god traveling rock show. The opening of a folk-friendly back bar, however, bodes well. This evening Annelle's guest is Nick Hennies of Weird Weeds, who will accompany her "with improvised percussion." Annelle's latest album is called The Cimarron Banks and was released earlier this summer.

Amy Annelle: [official]