Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Back to playing Go

9781400098033I started playing Go because of a novel1.
I read Trevanian’s Shibumi when I was in high school, and I liked it a lot. I knew the man that had translated the novel, and we both were chess players (he was quite good, I sucked pretty bad).
I played a lot of chess in high school – I used to carry a small magnetic chessboard in my bag, and we’d play games during break with some of my schoolmates. We played fast, and it was good training, but I still sucked.

After reading Shibumi (that is an excellent spy story novel) I started looking for a handbook for the game of Go, but in those pre-internet days the going was tough.
The friendly gaming store where I used to buy my roleplaying games had Go boards for sale, at a crazy price, and no handbooks. Continue reading →


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Robert E. Howard’s Birthday

It is Robert E. Howard’s birthday.
Is there anything I can say about Howard that was not said already, and better than I ever could? Unlikely.

I could once again say that Howard was one of those writers that I read as a kid, and made me say

This! This is what I want to write.

And I did – I wrote some horrid Conan pastiches when I was fifteen, and they are dead and buried, and it’s better that way. Continue reading →


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Dorothy Malone

Maybe I’m strange, but when I think about The Big Sleep I do not think about Lauren Bacall or Marta Vickers.
No, I usually think about the bookstore salesgirl.

Lauren Bacall Humphrey Bogart + The Big Sleep Dorothy Malone

Dorothy Malone was gorgeous in The Big Sleep like she was in so many other movies, including the 1956 drama Written in the Wind, for which she won an Academy Award.
She passed away on the 19th of January, at the age of 92.
We want to remember her like this…

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Tits & Sand: dance and censorship

I was surprised, this morning, when I found out the cobra dance clip from Cobra Woman, that I had posted in 2015 as I reviewed that movie, has been pulled off Youtube because the sensual moves of Maria Montez as she dances with a cobra muppet could cause dirty thoughts in the innocent viewers.

I am seriously worried by this weird form of preventive censorship, based on the idea that something might offend those that don’t like it – but if they don’t like it, why are they watching it?

So, just for the sake of being contrarian, here’s another exotic dance that the censors have yet to purge: Debra Paget’s dance from Fritz Lang’s 1959 tits & sand movie, The Indian Tomb.
This one, too, had the censors’ knickers in a twist.
IN 1959.
Enjoy.

… and yes, the Indian priests speaking German are somewhat unusual.

As a side note, the whole “woman dancing with cobras” might be familiar to my friends that are into Robert E Howard.
Shadows in Zamboula1, anyone?

Weird_Tales_1935-11_-_Shadows_in_Zamboula

Go and talk about censorship and undue perturbations of the viewer’s spirit.

  1. the comic adaptation of Shadows in Zamboula was actually the first ever Conan comic I read. ↩