Just for fun…and on the off chance it might be a useful novel-promotion tool…I’ve activated my LiveJournal account (which I’ve had for some time but haven’t really used) and will be cross-posting over there most of the stuff I post here. Although there may be some stuff that only appears there, and vice-versa. Should you …
Gordon & Dilworth’s doesn’t appear to be in operation any longer, but I found the old ad at left, also from Gordon & Dilworth’s, at the British Library’s site: it rhapsodizes even more effusively about the glories of tomato catsup. “This is the popular national sauce of America,” it proclaims, and ads, “It is made …
I’ve been asked a couple of times over the last day or so, presumably because people know I write science fiction, about my thoughts on the death of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Fact is, I don’t have any. I think I hit Vonnegut at the wrong point in my reading life–maybe tried to read him too …
I blogged briefly a couple of posts ago about the fact the early Earth might have been purple, not green. This means, of course, that other planets could even now be predominantly orange or purple rather than green, and still have organisms drawing their energy from the sun just as green plants do here. John …
On this day in 1718… Peter Atyon , of St. James’s Westminster, was indicted on two indictments; one for stealing a Pocket and a Head-dress, val.2 s. of Margaret Davis , the 12th of April last. The Prosecutor deposed, as she was going along the Street she was thrown down, and her pocket pulled off, …
I can’t find out much about this–it mostly shows up on Google in the form of vintage bottles of ink being sold to collectors (I didn’t know there were vintage-ink-bottle collectors until now!), but I did find an interesting mention in an old scientific paper online, called Herring Investigations at Plymouth, written by E. Ford, …
A 9 1/2-foot long Bosendorfer concert grand piano comes to a tragicomic end.
There’s an old joke that goes, “I’m on a see-food diet. When I see food, I eat it.” Brian Wansink, John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, says there’s a lot of truth to that old joke—and he’s done a lot of studies to prove it. (He’s also the author …
…not green. Chlorophyll, it seems, may have been a relative latecomer.
…but still an airship (I guess): the M.A.R.S. Floating Wind Generator (which, despite its name, does not generate wind, but rather electricity. Go figure.)
Robert Bigelow continues to have, er, “Big” plans for “low” earth orbit: The Bigelow Aerospace commercial inflatable manned space module venture intends to have three large multi-module outposts in Earth orbit by 2015 to serve different user communities.CEO Robert T. Bigelow says his engineers predict 800 paying crewmembers could fly to Bigelow outposts over the …
Every day or two I check the SiteMeter stats for edwardwillett.com, and today I noticed my visits were around 200 higher than I would expect (I usually get 350 to 450 visitors each day, but today I’m up over 600). A check revealed that the extra traffic is coming from people searching for “spider goat” …
