In the past few years, Sandra Shamas has made a point of bringing her current work-in-progress to the Globe Theatre to workshop in front of a live audience. Shamas is an internationally acclaimed comedian, and she is, indeed, very, very funny. My wife and I had a blast the first time we went, and made …
Looking like something straight out of a science fiction movie, Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-area inventor of the bulky bear-protection suit that got a lot of attention a few years ago, is back with a high-tech (yet remarkably cheap, at $15,000 for the prototype) battle suit he’d like to see the military and police adopt. The …
The current top 15 (I know, there are more than 15, but that’s because of a tie) search terms bringing people to Edward Willett’s Intergalactic Library, with links to where they lead, are (drum roll, please): 38 physics of football 27 how to make french fries 26 time perception 26 hamoukar 21 spider goat 21 …
Dracula’s castle is up for sale.
U.S. Warns About Canadian Spy Coins, says the headline, and the gist is: In a U.S. government warning high on the creepiness scale, the Defense Department cautioned its American contractors over what it described as a new espionage threat: Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside. The government said the mysterious coins were …
Sometimes I mention that I feel very much stuck in the middle when it comes to political questions. Well, now I have proof that I am right (er, sorry, I mean correct) to feel that way! I took the Political Compass Questionnaire, and came up with these scores: Economic Left/Right: -0.13Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.46 On the …
Ball lighting may have been explained at last–and created artificially in the laboratory! Key segment: A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As …
The Preliminary Ballot for the Nebula Awards® for 2006 have been announced. If the Hugo Awards, voted on my members of the World Science Fiction Convention each year, are science fiction’s equivalent of the People’s Choice Awards (which are on TV tonight, I just learned. Who knew? Oh, I suppose people who watch any TV …
The candlelight is gleaming, soft jazz is playing, the fireplace is crackling, and you’re snuggled on the couch with the woman you love. You finger the diamond ring in your pocket. There’ll never be a better time to pop the question. You look deep into her eyes and say, “My darling, why don’t we get …
…than it is with Blurb.com. Traditional publishers won’t be quaking in their boots, but traditional vanity presses–and bottom-feeding writer-scamming con artists–ought to be. Design your book today and have it in a few days, one copy or as many as you want. Nothing could be simpler.
…so this doesn’t bother me at all. Reading the Swallows and Amazons books as a kid, the one thing that drove home to me the utter alienness of the culture depicted therein (1920s England) was the putting of milk in tea. Yuck!
I’ve been reading very interesting thread over at Paperback Writer about what an author “owes” a reader. Paperback Writer wrote: I don’t know what, if anything, writers actually “owe” readers. I always feel a responsibility to do my best work for the reader; that goes without saying. No one can write something that makes everyone …
