I’ve been thin on Contra entries this month for a number of reasons, mostly because I’ve been putting the bulk of my creative energy into finishing “Drumlin Wheel.” Nailed the first draft (after nine years!) about an hour ago. Originally scoped out at about 11,000 words (like “Drumlin Boiler”) it ended up at 14,500. As [...]
Posts from ‘March, 2010’
Report: EntConnect 2010
The first thing you see is an unattended and otherwise empty folding table holding a Sharpie marker and a roll of duct tape. A strip of tape reads “Nametag Station” and there is an example. Remember that this is a conference for people who learn fast, do things their own way, and use what they [...]
Odd Lots
Here’s a great article from NASA on the unexpected success it’s had with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft in spotting previously unknown asteroids in the infrared spectrum. WISE is detecting hundreds of new asteroids every day, which is unnerving, since a rock no bigger than a Motel 6 could cause regional devastation greater [...]
The Longest Day
The longest day of any vacation is generally the last day, and that goes triple for Hawaii vacations. (More on this shortly.) We got packed up and checked out of the hotel by 11, and went down to Kihei for lunch and some browsing-of-shops. That done, we cruised up the west coast of Maui to [...]
Papaya, Not Popeye
To paraphrase myself paraphrasing George Carlin: What do editors do on their day off? They can’t just lay around… Oh, you bet they can. In fact, Carol and I had the wisdom to declare at least one day of our impromptu Hawaii vacation a “lay around” day when there would be no scheduled activity whatsoever. [...]
I Plum Forgot…
…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we [...]
Odd Lots
It happens all the time, but it’s rare that we actually watch it happen: a comet falling into the Sun. (It’s unclear to me what the brief tiny streaks are, since SOHO is a spacecraft and the image was not taken through Earth’s atmosphere, where meteors would look like that. Meteors in the solar atmosphere?) [...]
The Pulps Reconsidered, Part 2
Back in my Febrary 23, 2010 entry, I began a series about the pulp fiction mags of the first half of the 20th Century. Because most people would assume I’ll be talking about SF, I deliberately went elsewhere, to a category most of my readers have probably never even heard of: railroad fiction. I bought [...]
Odd Lots
Never fear; I’ll return to the pulps discussion shortly. I’m way behind on a lot of projects right now. One of the few things I remember about the old 40s Flash Gordon serials (which played incessantly on Saturday morning TV in Chicago circa 1960) are the Rock Men, who could blend into the rocks to [...]
A Viral SSID
First of all, you can stop worrying about me–Carol and I took an intense week-long trip to Chicago tending to family business, and I just couldn’t summon the energy to post while I was there. But I was reminded of an interesting thing on the trip home, while we waited at the gate for our [...]