(Picture from here.) I wrote this on the trip back and promptly fell quite sick. So it’s going up now. Today is the last day of our vacation in Nevada. I’m writing this in the waiting area for our … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2016
Since Thor and I went rambling through England recently, I thought I’d toss in my tuppence on the current Book View Café series contrasting British and American dishes. I’m nothing like a gourmet, so wasn’t planning on dining as a … Continue reading
Ursula K. Le Guin, photo by Marian Wood KolischThe FBI and other Federal agents have been in Burns, Oregon, for twenty days now, watching a crime being committed by armed lawbreakers. Today they invited Ammon Bundy, the chief lawbreaker, to a polite conversation with one of their agents, after which he was politely sent back to continue committing the crime.
Continue readingby Brenda W. Clough I love near-future SF! You can have your galaxies far far away. Give me NASA! And in The Martian we get everything the space-SF fan could ever desire. Gravity slingshots! Settling new planets! It is like … Continue reading
Brenda Clough’s Write Hacks 12 on using find and replace to change character names brought to mind another use for that valuable piece of word processing software: checking pronouns. In “Walking Contradiction”, found in my collection of the same name, … Continue reading
In these days of ferry disasters and sinking cruise liners one can be forgiven for thinking that the modern captain, far from being the last to leave the ship, likes to be the first onto the lifeboat. Here’s a story … Continue reading
Recently Phillip Pullman (author of THE GOLDEN COMPASS) resigned as president of the Oxford Literary Festival because he couldn’t stomach asking authors to appear there for free. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/14/philip-pullman-resigns-oxford-literary-festival-patron-pay-authors It’s sparked a conversation across the Internet, including a response from a … Continue reading
In times of change it’s always useful to remember that everything is a time of change. Since the advent of print-on-demand, and then of e-books, there have been approximately 47 trillion articles written on The End of the Book As We … Continue reading
I always have a hard time getting back to consensual reality after the weirdness that is December. Everyone is in a strange state of mind, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The atmosphere is frantic, the consumerhucksterism is off the charts, but … Continue reading
Raiding my Nana’s recipe notebook again. MEAT PIE Sometimes on a cold wintery day you just need something hearty and chewy and full of fat and protein for your comfort food. At the Highland Games, people make individual size of … Continue reading