Black Bees in the Squash Blossoms

I made sure to plant squash for the squash bees. Instead of squash bees, I found another bee I’ve been looking for.

Re: Palimpsest (by Stross)

“Palimpsest,” by Charles Stross had great buzz at Readercon, even inspiring a panel. When I finally squeezed it into my reading, I could see why. It’s filled with great mind-stretching concepts. There are beautiful passages that are easily the best things I’ve ever read by him. You’ve got to respect a time-travel story that goes […]

So how’s that deadline thingy working out for you?

PHLPLPLPLPLPLPLHFFFT!

Sunflower buffet

Want to eat from the sunflower? Take a number!

Re: The Latehomecomer

From the opening fable about babies falling from the sky to be born as Hmong people, to the death of the family matriarch, in simple and affecting prose, Kao Kalia Yang tells the stories of her parents, her childhood, and her grandmother in The Latehomecomer. The early chapters about her parents are so vivid, it’s […]

Re: Eros, Philia, Agape

In “Eros, Philia, Agape,” by Rachel Swirsky, Lucian is a robot purchased by Adriana to be her lover. His brain is filled with the knowledge of famous poets and physicists and gardeners etc, and he is designed to change his personality so he will be in love with her. After they marry, Adriana and Lucian […]

Re: Sleepy Joe

One nice thing about my iTouch is that I can carry it outside and play in the garden while catching up on listening to fun stories like “Sleepy Joe,” by Marc Laidlaw. This amusing story got a fabulous reading on Escape Pod.

Bugs of Summer

Summer is full of bugs. I’ll let you think up the nasty ones. The good ones include bees and syrphid flies, dragonflies and damselflies, butterflies and moths, crickets at night, and now that’s we’ve hit the hazy hot humid dog days, cicadas. Cicadas are the quintessential summer bug. When you hear their buzzing whir up […]

Re: Vishnu at the Cat Circus

The beauty of Ian McDonald’s prose keeps making me want to like his work, but it never pays off. At least I got through “Vishnu at the Cat Circus” in one pass. We begin with lots of poetical cats. How can you lose with cats? Within the framework of this cat circus, Vishnu Nariman tells […]

ITouch my new toy

If I seem preoccupied lately, you can blame my new toy, all because Amazon made the mistake of advertising the Kindle. It was just interesting enough for me to do some hunting around and decide that what I was much more interested in was an iPod Touch. So I borrowed one. I played with it […]