Much longer ago than "this morning," we hauled our tired asses out of bed, hauled our luggage to the train, and hied ourselves to O'Hare. Check-in was delightfully pleasant, our cruise through security simplicity itself, and to say that our thirteen-hour flight to Japan seemed much quicker than our recent eight-hour flight from Chicago to New York would be an understatement roughly the size of the Pacific.

We sailed through immigration, baggage claim, and customs at Narita, and after two uneventful hours of train travel (with some unasked-for directions from kind commuters), we made it to Tokyo and our hotel. We wandered the streets of Roppongi until the desk clerk's directions began to make sense, and we had the amazing meal we were hunting for at a robatayaki called Inakaya, where two cooks sit across a wide counter from you and fry up the selections you point to from the cornucopia of foods spread between. There is much ritualized shouting, and the food is served to you by the cooks on an eight-foot paddle, without them getting up. The whole red snapper we ate Laura named Bob. I named my tiger prawn Paul. Don't ask us why.

Our waiter kindly took our picture, and then he showed us the restaurant's photo book, full of pictures of patrons like Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Cameron Diaz, Peter Jackson, Viggo Mortenson, Keith Richards, and so on. They will be opening a location next year on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

The tiniest bit tipsy on sake, we wandered Roppongi again, this time in search of the Absolut Ice Bar. We didn't find it, but I am determined to get there on our return to Tokyo next week and sip vodka from an ice glass whilst wrapped in a Swedish cloak.

We're so happy to be here.

Now, to end this 26-hour consciousness binge. Tomorrow, Yokohama.

We leave for Japan in a little less than ten hours. I'd better get some sleep!

Epidode #48 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill attempts to convince you to order his brand-new six-pack chapbook—only five bucks!—and a definition for the term "chapbook" itself is sought.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=48

See also shunncast.

I understand that the August CD Mix of the Month Club meeting had to be postponed until September. (They're now meeting every other month. CDMOEOM?) Still, I pulled a mix down off the shelf for August. Memories of the Reagan Administration is a distillation of the kind of stuff I was seeking out on alternative radio during my musical coming-of-age. Until my senior year of high school, I listened mostly to jazz and classical piano. This is some of the music that helped open my head to other sounds. It seemed an appropriate mix to accompany my 40th birthday.

I hope you'll click the album cover and check out it and the back cover at full size. Of all the many disc covers I've made, I think I like this one the best.

Oh, by the way, this disc is on its way now to the four of you out there who were runners-up in my mix disc giveaway from a couple of months back. Watch your mailboxes!

(The story so far.)

Even if I could have attended, there was no July CD Mix of the Month Club meeting. Still, I had a mix for July—Welcome. I made this mix last year, and while it wasn't intended as a welcome-to-the-new-home mix, I have nonetheless deployed it in that context.

I remain in touch with the CDMOM gang, and in fact my birthday dinner at Morton's was a result of their kind largesse. Thanks, folks, and I'll keep those mixes coming!

(The story so far.)

My chapbook An Alternate History of the 21st Century (introduction by Cory Doctorow, illustrations by Mattias Adolfsson, edited and published by John Klima) is now out and available! But since you might be sick of hearing me talk about it by now, I'll let John Klima and Cory Doctorow tell you more in their respective blogs.

In fact, Cory's introduction to the chapbook is Creative Commons–licensed, so I'll reproduce it here:

Bill Shunn is a legend in certain circles. Long before I met him, I'd had many people regale me with the story of how he once threatened to blow up an airplane in Canada on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints. The story—incredible, hilarious, sad and instructive—is too long to recount here. Suffice it to say that it ends with Bill getting a rectal probe from a Mountie, trying to convert a drunk in the tank to Mormonism, and then being deported from Canada as a terrorist (the whole thing is recounted in engrossing detail on Bill's website and podcast). In my mental shorthand, I thought of Bill as "that Mormon terrorist skiffy writer."

But once I met Bill, that changed. He was developing geo-hacker software for handheld computers—this was before Big Bird hired him to program the computers at the Children's Television Network—and he was nothing like my mental image. I'd expected someone with the fresh-faced earnestness of the door-to-door Mormons who'd roused me on Saturday mornings (albeit I also expected a mad, terrorist glint in his eye). What I found instead was a hip, ironic, funny guy that I took an immediate liking to. I introduced him immediately to my pal Karl Schroeder, a skiffy writer who comes from Mennonite stock, on the grounds that they'd probably have a lot to talk about. They did.

Bill emailed me on September 11, 2001. He'd set up a message-board CGI for survivors of the attack on the Twin Towers. Log on there and tell everyone you're OK. It was a heartbreaking thing. It filled with hundred—thousands—tens of thousands—of messages. Not just "I'm OK," either. Lots of "I'm looking for my Dad, he works at—" Lots of political messages. Lots of anger. Lots of shock. It was Bill's little message board, but it became a flashpoint for the survivors of that terrible day.

Bill has the sure instincts of a twenty-first century science fiction writer. He is keenly attuned to the present (in the twenty-first century, there's no point in keeping track of the future). He recognizes those truly present-day moments that could only come now, today, in this futuristic present that we swim through without ever really seeing.

This extraordinary book is a journey through our present. From the bitingly political ("From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left") to the sad and personal ("Not of This Fold"—a gorgeous novella about faith and humanity that could only have been written by a lapsed Mormon sf writer), and everything in between, this collection is the kind of thing that you can never un-read, a book that will awaken you to the present all around you.

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Cory Doctorow. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Buy your copy here—only five bucks, including U.S. shipping.

My beautiful, brave.wife.

That's how long a flight from Chicago to New York will take you. Today, anyway. But we're here, and if we hadn't flown standby on an earlier flight than the one we booked, we might not have left Chicago at all.

Hard for me to post links right now ON THIS RUNWAY, but you should go over to John Klima's evzine.blogspot.com, find the right post, and read "Antevellum" by Ezra Pines. 'Speshly you SFWA types. It's a lovely, evocative story, and good reading even if you haven't read Hal Duncan's vellum opus.

That storm barreling down on you New Yorkers? It has us grounded in Pittsburgh. We spent a long time in a holding pattern. Our pilot wanted to refuel anyway, but then the FAA closed LGA.to arrivals. So here we are waiting on the runway.

I have a book, but perhaps The Lathe of Heaven is not the most comforting reading material....