Waiting for God. Oh.

...brain hurts. I'm currently contemplating the overly complicated concept of evolutionary economics and waiting for Norman Mailer's book on God to arrive. These events are not by choice. In the meantime, let's clean out the assorted links before the month ends.

At least a few of the cool kids went north to Alaska this weekend to celebrate Bouchercon, where the Barry Awards were handed out to George Pelecanos, Ken Bruen, and other criminally-minded authors. The Rap Sheet has the rundown on the awards.

The Demon Dog reflects on the "poet of collision," Dashiell Hammett, at the Guardian. His guilt, writes James Ellroy, was the driving force of his crime fiction.

Sarah Weinman gets down with the serial killers from Dexter and Heartsick in her latest "Dark Passages" column at the Los Angeles Times.

Duane Swierczynski reports that Charles Ardai (Hard Case Crime) is moderating a Crime Book Club at Barnes & Noble, with help from the steady hands of Ken Bruen, Charlie Huston, Swierczynski and collaborator Jason Starr, among others.

Andrew O'Hagan at the London Review of Books echoes my own feelings on the age of communication and the "the ridiculous, anachronistic pursuit of privacy."

"Nowadays, being unavailable is understood to be an act of aggression equal to driving tanks through the walls of the Danzig Post Office. To fail to answer your mobile phone, or to turn it off completely, is merely to announce that you are deep in the throes of a secret life. You don’t care, you’re not reliable, you’ve got something to hide, you’re screening. There are few modern crimes so remarked on as the crime of unavailability. Answer or you’re evil. Answer or you’re dead."

On that same note, I finally found something worthy of my wish list: the CJAM 1000. "Here we have one of the coolest devices in the universe. The CJAM 1000 can jam cellphones, pagers, and Wi-Fi with a quarter mile range." Too bad it's only available to governments and representives of Blackwater and such.

On the bright side, I've discovered that the original 1967 series Johnny Sokko and his Giant Robot is newly available on demand at Netflix, complete with its bizarre jazz score and horrific dubbing into English. I'm off to watch the series' denouement, "The Last of Emperor Guillotine," in which Giant Robot fights, um, a giant eyeball. Yes, really.