Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 230 entries, all of them here in full.
September 26, 2008 · 324 words
Mor Karbasi
Here another whole week has gone past, and just because I have been somewhat preoccupied with world financial crisis and the prospect of sleeping under bridges, I haven’t yet mentioned how much fun I had last weekend. I was at Globalquerque, our yearly festival of world music, and it was terrific. My hands-down favorit
Read entry →September 25, 2008 · 85 words
I’m Like Totally Down With the Serial Comma
“To my parents, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II.”That book dedication is acceptible according to the AP style sheet, but not by me. This sentence cost a Canadian company over $2 million:“[This agreement] shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five
Read entry →September 24, 2008 · 285 words
You Mean I Don’t Have to Take my Shoes Off Anymore?
My sometime drinking buddy Allison Barrie has posted an article about MALINTENT, which despite its rather sinister name is a scanner that will read the evil intentions behind even the most innocent pair of blue eyes. “So here’s how it works. When the sensors identify that something is off, they transmit warning data to
Read entry →September 23, 2008 · 242 words
From Minister Paulson
Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you […]
Read entry →September 22, 2008 · 192 words
Publishing— It Sucks There, Too
I’d like to take time out from the current world financial meltdown to talk about publishing, and how and why it totally sucks. This article from New York states it very well, although for some reason it concentrates on best-sellers, and the heart-rending stories of newly-minted writers who got seven-figure advances fo
Read entry →September 22, 2008 · 533 words
1929
I was in DC when the financial crisis began to play it out. Every evening I’d turn on CNN and listen to some new horror: Lehman Brothers gone, the Treasury refusing to bail out AIG at twenty billion and then deciding to bail them out once the price had risen to eighty-five billion; Morgan Stanley […]
Read entry →September 19, 2008 · 76 words
Back Home
I’m back in New Mexico, after a day spent in a succession of pressurized steel tubes.I’m not going to chat about the meetings. They weren’t secret, but they were sort of complex, and don’t lend themselves to easy summary. Let me just say when you start getting correspondence with the letterhead HEADQUARTERS SUPREME ALL
Read entry →September 17, 2008 · 55 words
Hubble Finds Imperial Star Destroyer . . .
. . . or Something.Astronomers peering through the Hubble have found something new. Like, totally new. Like unprecedented. Like an object that no one has ever seen before.It wasn’t there. And then it was. And then it wasn’t. “We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class.”Freakin’ great.
Read entry →September 16, 2008 · 198 words
Eye of Ike
I fell asleep as I was crossing the country, and woke up at sunset. The cloud-tops below were a brilliant pink, as were the edges of the aircraft’s wings. The plane was also bouncing around a good deal. I realized I was flying over the remains of Hurricane Ike, stretching from horizon to horizon. And […]
Read entry →September 15, 2008 · 296 words
Miners’ Ink
Miners’ Ink proved to be a pleasant convention, and a pleasant surprise considering that none of the people involved had ever thrown a convention before. The few mistakes made were minor compared with the mistakes that could have been made, or that perhaps ought to have been made. The university venue offered some diff
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