Lazy Rivers of Summer - BSR Cable Park

BSR Cable Park
Waco, TX
5000 Ft?

Claims to be the longest lazy river in the world.  They also claim to have the tallest and longest water slide in the world, which it isn't and isn't.  A concrete trench of urine-filled brown water cram packed with drunken douchebros.

Things I Didn't Finish - Kid Calvert

Kid Calvert
Originally from Western Aces 1934-5
Altus Press 2015

Been on a bit of a western kick lately.  I've read and enjoyed some western pulp, and got this volume on the strength of it being a "pulp hero" type volume (implied more in the Amazon blurb than the text itself).  There are western pulp heroes (Zorro, Lone Ranger, Masked Rider, etc), but this appears to be a regular western pulp, without the outre elements of a Secret Agent X or the Doc Savage.

I say appears because I couldn't get that far.  It might just be me, but the bizarre sentence structure and obscure slang made it come across like Yoda doing a Yosemite Sam impression.  I shouldn't have to read a sentence three times to figure out "The cowboys rode their horses up a hill".  I may be dumb and lazy, but this is an oater, not James Joyce.

The more literate among you are welcome to try yourselves.

Click here to read a sample.

Available for Kindle from Amazon.

Lazy Rivers of Summer - Big Bird's Rambling River

Big Bird's Rambling River
Sesame Place
Langhorne, PA
1000 Feet



More theming than most, and lots of stuff going on.  It's integrated nicely into the rest of the park, though I can't help but think kids are going to throw french fries at you as you pass the eating areas.

Caleb Thorne 1

First Shot
Caleb Thorne 1
by L.J. Coburn (Laurence James)
1977 Sphere

Caleb Thorne starts out as one of the most distasteful western protagonists put to page, and I hope he stays that way.

He's a rich, bullying layabout who mocks the fighting men of the military and delights in killing them off in duels.  He's engaged to a girl of a rich family but is more interested in her mother.  Thorne has some mother issues, and by that I mean he's banging his mom.  Just shy of a full blown sex scene, it's made pretty clear he took his dad's place after he killed him, so he's got the whole Oedipus package going on.

After a pretty nasty sex scene of him with his mother-in-law to be during the First Battle of Bull Run, his fiance and mother both die in the conflict, giving Thorne his Batmanesque motivation to join the Union Army.

As luck would have it, his new commanding officer is the father of a man Thorne killed in a duel.  He's made the leader of a Dirty Dozen style special troop of condemned criminals forced to fight in suicide missions.  We wrap up with a quick mission to blow up a bridge.

I'm guessing there's going to be some Joseph Campbell thing where our hero undergoes a personal transformation to not be a such a horrible human being, but I hope not.  The series only lasted five issue - there's mention that Civil War books didn't sell well at the time.  I'm guessing because you risk alienating half of your reading public depending on what side your protagonist is on.

Read a sample

Get the Kindle ebook from Amazon

River Slide at Lalandia Water Park, Denmark

Lately I've been obsessed with Nordic indoor water parks, the kind that look like warehouses or airplane hangars filled with tubes and pasty white people.  Especially like indoor/outdoor rides (enclosed tubes don't count) - I like how this one has a double water curtain at the entrances.

Trash Menace Bookstore - Corgi Horror Fiction

Corgi Horror Fiction

New in the bookstore, horror paperbacks from publisher Corgi.  May not include reprints or more mainstream authors.  Links may be to different editions of the same title.  Shopping through bookstore affiliate links supports the site and keeps the trash coming.

Ali and His Gang vs Mr. Tooth Decay