Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,180 entries, all of them here in full.
October 27, 2018 · 110 words
Invasion of the Grillidae!
So has anyone seen anything like this? It may be a little hard to view, but what you’re seeing is a swarm of crickets climbing the west wall of our house. By nightfall they were all clumped in a black mass beneath the eaves. Now, a couple days later, they’re mostly still there. Since it had […]
Read entry →October 24, 2018 · 119 words
Born Under the Sign of Godzilla
NASA— or maybe just a coupla scientists staying up late drinking— have looked at a new map of gamma-ray sources discovered by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope and begun plotting new constellations based on popular culture. The list includes the Hulk and Godzilla, as well as Einstein and the Eiffel Tower. This
Read entry →October 24, 2018 · 673 words
Recap
I’ve begun work on Volume VII of the Praxis series, which so far does not have a title, and I’ve ran smack into the problem of information control. Information control, as I tell the participants at Taos Toolbox, is crucial for the writer. Too little information and the reader is bewildered. Too much and the […]
Read entry →October 22, 2018 · 485 words
Lifestyles of the Rich and Stupid
One of the joys of reading contemporary literary fiction is enjoying the wealth of close observation that literary fiction demands. Close observation, done right, is delightful, but you have to hope that whatever is being observed is worth the effort, and so often it isn’t, as (for example) when the subject is adultery
Read entry →October 18, 2018 · 120 words
One-Act Play
SCENE: I (hereafter ME) am driving down the freeway in my car. The phone rings. ME: Hello? RUSSIAN ACCENT: Hello. Where are you right now? ME: I’m in my car, driving. RUSSIAN ACCENT: Can you pull over? This is an important message. ME: No, I can’t pull over. RUSSIAN ACCENT: Are you sure? This is […]
Read entry →October 17, 2018 · 309 words
Sunshine Superhouse
Last autumn we decided to install solar panels on our home. We got bids from three solar companies, but SolarCity’s bid was so much lower than the others that I never even went back to the others to see if they could put in a competing bid. Installation was delayed because we needed to replace […]
Read entry →October 11, 2018 · 345 words
Special Shapes
Morgan Stanley keeps thinking that if I just give them enough stock tips, they’ll become as rich as me. So they bribed me with tickets to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta on Special Shapes day, and maybe in return I’ll give them a little advice concerning penny stocks. Attending involved getting up at 3:30am— I’d o
Read entry →October 10, 2018 · 242 words
Hardware Hack
Now it looks as if the Chinese have managed to do a massive hardware hack into thousands of servers used by government agencies and major corporations. Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon r
Read entry →October 7, 2018 · 107 words
I Am Inevitable!
I will be interviewed on KKOB radio in Albuquerque on Monday, October 8, at 6pm Mountain Daylight Time. If you live outside the area, you can stream the broadcast live. On Friday October 12, I’ll be speaking at a speculative fiction panel at the meeting in Denver of the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Ass
Read entry →September 29, 2018 · 512 words
Resisters
This last week marked the death of Freddie Oversteegen, 92, the Dutch resistance heroine who at the age of 14 joined a resistance cell dedicated to sabotage and assassination. (She would meet German soldiers in bars, lure them to a secluded place, then shoot them.) She sabotaged railways, killed soldiers and collaborat
Read entry →September 27, 2018 · 252 words
Sekrit Island Bases
Friend of the blog Marcus sent this article about Russian real estate agents who purchase islands in strategic shipping lanes and then turned them into Bond-villain lairs. Airiston Helmi Oy was founded in 2007 as a non-public stock company for trading in real estate, and a number of the key persons behind the company w
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