Black swallow-wort

Behold the enemy. These are the weeds I should be digging. Just as the maple sprouts start to get scarce, the Black Swallow-wort pokes its evil head above the ground. That bit of hot weather over the weekend seems to have flushed them out, too. Thank goodness it’s cool and springlike again. Makes spending an […]

Re: Standards

Told as the rejection letter from a science journal, Standards, by Richard K. Lyon, is full of deft hints of adventure and dry put-downs of the sort of mad genius who submits patents for perpetual motion machines and trisects angles in his sleep. And I think that sentence is almost as long as the story. […]

Nebula 2008 scorecard

I wasn’t even close. I wasn’t surprised that none of my favorites won, but I guessed only 1 out of 4 right of the Nebula winners. Oh, well. It’s just a game, and I’m not even a player. Someday, someday. Here. Have a another tulip.

Flower power–wow!

Yesterday my tulip patch were all green buds, with only a hint of color. Today, thanks to our spring heat wave, they just exploded. These are my favorites, bright yellow with red flames, a small part of a mix of Darwin hybrids, which have been coming back, better and better every year.

Nebula 2008 Roundup

Much like last year I didn’t manage to read all the Nebula nominees. Not for lack of trying. I was able to lay hold of all the novels, but several of the anthologies weren’t to be found in the library. Maybe there’s less room in the budget to buy obscure small press collections. While I […]

Re: Dangerous Space

I’m not all that into music but “Dangerous Space,” by Kelly Eskridge won me over by plugging me into what’s like for people who are. Mars is a brilliant “sound guy” who seems supremely confident and competent, untouchable save for one vulnerability–music. In the perfect little divey bar, the opening band, Noir, goes on stage […]

Re: Powers

It’s dangerous to come in at the third novel of a series. You might get bogged down in recaps. You might get dumped into the middle and left totally confused. Powers, by Ursula K. Le Guin, opens at a new begining. Gavir, a young slave in the household of Arcamand, looks forward to becoming a […]

Fruit flies vs worm bin

While I still haven’t completely eliminated the fruit flies from the worm bin, I’m controlling them better. What’s really going on is the worms don’t eat the food scraps, they eat the tinier organisms that are eating the scraps. Meanwhile, fermenting food scraps are exactly the sort of thing fruit flies love. So I need […]

Re: Little Brother

In Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, Marcus Yallow is a smartass who delights in playing Harajuku Fun Madness and in evading the security at his high school. He and his friends are caught in the post-bombing sweep after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. After a harrowing interrogation, Marcus is set loose. Though he knows […]

Re: The Space Time Pool

I liked the opening of “The Space Time Pool,” by Catherine Asaro. It seemed a lovely setting, the Great Smoky Mountains covered with rhododendrons in flower and cicadas buzzing on a fine day in June. A lovely place for Janelle to go for a walk to celebrate getting a her math degree from MIT. Considering […]