Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 272 entries, all of them here in full.
July 15, 2009 · 241 words
From Junkfood Science
I suppose we all remember the big story about how rhesus monkeys kept on a highly-restrictive diet lived longer than those who were allowed to nosh at will. Turns out that this is only true if you, well, ignore the monkeys that died. The lower mortality claimed among the monkeys on the calorie restricted diet […
Read entry →July 14, 2009 · 553 words
Mr. Brown
Charles N Brown of Locus died today.Charles was one of those science fiction people who will be very difficult to explain to future generations, a combination of gruff titan and mischievous elf. He began Locus as a one-page mimeographed newszine to support a worldcon bid, and then built it over the years into the premi
Read entry →July 10, 2009 · 139 words
Meet Mr Fusion
DARPA’s attempt to produce a microchip-sized fusion reactor has dropped out of the budget. Chip-scale integration offers precise, micro actuators and high electric field generation at modest power levels that will enable several order of magnitude decreases in the volume needed to accelerate the ions. Furthermore, ther
Read entry →July 9, 2009 · 938 words
Gaston’s Phantom
I’ve seen most film adaptations of Phantom of the Opera, including the one in Chinese where the singer was a guy (The Phantom Lover, 1995), and I’ve seen no less than two musical theater adaptations, both of which sucked. So when I saw the original 1911 book by Gaston Leroux at the library, I picked […]
Read entry →July 3, 2009 · 49 words
Now At Popular Prices!
Implied Spaces is now available in mass-market paperback! Y’all probably knew this already, but I didn’t. I’m just the author. And, because I haven’t nagged you for a while, I’ll mention that you can pick up a copy of This Is Not a Game at the same time.
Read entry →July 3, 2009 · 73 words
Kicking George
This weekend features the anniversary of the day we officially decided to kick King George out of town. In a decision largely unrelated to King George, Kathy and I are going to secluded mountaintop retreat for three nights.There may be internet. There may not be. There may be internet but I may not decide to […]
Read entry →July 2, 2009 · 146 words
Them!
A giant ant colony has taken over the world! The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South
Read entry →July 2, 2009 · 72 words
Unique Opportunity
The writer Ian McDowell needs y’all’s help. His father, who has just lost a leg, needs to move out of his apartment, where the manager refuses to install modifications to aid the handicapped. (This is legal, apparently.)Ian is raising money by offering a unique item for sale on eBay, a one-of-a-kind hand-written collec
Read entry →July 1, 2009 · 560 words
Reviews Too Late: Legend of the Shadowless Sword
The lineage of this film is a little unusual: it’s a 2005 Korean production with Korean actors, the stunt team is from Hong Kong, the movie was filmed in China, and the screenwriter is someone named Paul Sheen, who has no other credits that I can find. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the result is […]
Read entry →June 30, 2009 · 442 words
Goldman Sucks
I admire a brilliant piece of invective as well as the next guy, and the best I’ve seen in a long time is Matt Taibi’s evisceration of Goldman Sachs, which he blames for both the creation, and the collapse, of every financial bubble of the last century. (Wow! Talk about evil!)The bank’s unprecedented reach and [&hellip
Read entry →June 30, 2009 · 75 words
Charlie, Dunked
Here is our cat Charlie shortly after the catastrophe. It looks like he got totally immersed in water, or had a bucket of water thrown over him, or maybe got sprayed with a hose. I don’t know exactly what happened, I wasn’t there. I only know that I came home and there he was, on […]
Read entry →June 29, 2009 · 710 words
Reviews Too Late: The Assassination of Jesse James
This may be one of a very few films ever to be doomed by excessive devotion to its literary source material. (Watchmen might be another.) The full title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn’t the sort of name that Hollywood gives to its films: it’s taken from the the Ron […]
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