Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,176 entries, all of them here in full.
November 30, 2007 · 314 words
And Now, From the Acme Network . . .
(courtesy of Kathy) SOCORRO – “Lights, cameras, and action!” The casting call may soon be given for the New Mexico Tech campus to become a real-life movie set for a planned cable television series about the day-to-day operations of a research university. Van Romero, New Mexico Tech vice president for research and econo
Read entry →November 28, 2007 · 779 words
Sex, Swoony and Otherwise
Now there’s a title that drew you in, I bet. I want to talk about sex because I’ve just finished reading a book— a pretty good one— that had a number of fairly explicit sex scenes, all much less worth reading than the rest of the book. All the sex scenes “threw me out,” as […]
Read entry →November 27, 2007 · 418 words
Calendar, 2008
Once again, and for the second time in my life, I have become self-published. I’ve put together another travel calendar for 2008, with pictures taken during my travels with Kathy. I make no money off of this. It’s available on a creative commons license. You can order the calendar here, or you can download a […]
Read entry →November 27, 2007 · 164 words
Cold Weather Cuisine
I’m getting sick of Thanksgiving leftovers, which are far from exhausted. I had errands today, and it was a brisk cold winter morning, and that put me in mind of a local treat.So I went to a nearby restaurant and ordered a big heapin’ bowl of menudo. Which, for those uninitiated among you, is cow’s […]
Read entry →November 26, 2007 · 148 words
Reader Response
I’d like to give a shout-out to the Weather Gods, because apparently they read my blog. Back in August, when I complained that none of the monsoon rains that were pelting the rest of the state were hitting my neighborhood, the Weather Gods responded, and hammered the district with a series of storms that washed [&helli
Read entry →November 26, 2007 · 128 words
Uh-oh
According to an article in tomorrow’s New Scientist, we may have doomed the universe simply by observing dark energy“At the quantum level, whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock and stop it decaying – something known as the quantum Zeno effect. Our measurement of the light from supernovae in
Read entry →November 23, 2007 · 72 words
The Turkey Has Landed . . . Houston, Are You Drooling?
Skin crispy all over . . . Note that the drumstick is beginning to fall off even before I have laid so much as a fork to the epidermis. Kathy deserves credit for the meal, really. All I did was make the Highly Dangerous Stuffing the night before. (Sausage, bacon, butter, hard-boiled eggs, onion, garlic, […]
Read entry →November 22, 2007 · 82 words
Thank You, David Chase
From David Ceska’s Thanksgiving piece:With The Sopranos finale as precedent, whenever I or any of my writer colleagues are stuck for an ending, we’re now empowered to just stop the thing in mid-sentence somewhere near the end and just walk away. If someone calls us on it, we can point to David Chase’s “artistic” exampl
Read entry →November 22, 2007 · 46 words
Dark Side of My Ass
So while we’ve been getting the house ready for our holiday company, I’ve been listening to XM Radio, and they’ve just proclaimed Dark Side of the Moon the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album of all time.Sergeant Pepper was number two.How fucked is that?
Read entry →November 22, 2007 · 581 words
Gumbo Rocks!
For those celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday, have a lovely one. For those not celebrating the holiday, have a nice Thursday, wherever you are. If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, you’re going to get sick of turkey pretty soon and need an alternative. And if you’re not celebrating Thanksgiving, you’ll need something
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