Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 268 entries, all of them here in full.
August 17, 2010 · 68 words
Värttinä
Sage Walker and I used to call this band “the teenage Finnish witches,” for all that they haven’t been teenagers for a while now. While they’re not teenagers, they’re still pretty witchy. And come to that, Teenage Finnish Witches would be a good name for a band. My paternal grandmother, by the way, was an […]
Read entry →August 17, 2010 · 775 words
Beware the Knife
[via Jen] Nanex, a market data firm, has discovered a host of mystery bots making gazillions of trades on the nation’s stock exchanges. The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousan
Read entry →August 14, 2010 · 45 words
Cute Little Lamb Gone to Heaven
Tonight’s dinner: basmati rice, raita made with fresh garden cucumbers and tomatoes, spicy Indian lamb roast in a sauce made from yogurt, chiles, sweet garlic, sultanas, coriander, and cumin. The lamb was amazingly tender. Not that I’m responsible for that feature of the meal, particularly.
Read entry →August 14, 2010 · 287 words
Star Crunching
A rare “disrupted binary pulsar” has been discovered by three amateur scientists using their home computers. The discoverers, from the US and Germany found the object with the help of the Einstein@Home project. It asks users to donate time on their computers, allowing them to be used for searching through scientific da
Read entry →August 11, 2010 · 558 words
Doom. And, While We’re At It, Doom.
Friend of the blog Foxessa pointed me at an article about our floundering recovery from Paul Krugman. The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or
Read entry →August 10, 2010 · 690 words
Deep Culture
It has to be said we had a deeply cultured and civilized weekend. Saturday afternoon I went to the world premiere of a locally-made low-budget Western called The Righteous and the Wicked. (This was not the civilized part.) It featured a number of local actors, some of whom I know, and was made for a […]
Read entry →August 7, 2010 · 796 words
1980: The Writer’s Life
Continuing my fiscal memoirs of my career, begun a few posts back. Odd, isn’t it, that being forced to dig through a lot of old tax forms should produce fodder for nostalgia? (At least for me. The rest of you are probably watching Jane Austen’s Fight Club for the third time.) My actual Form 1040 […]
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