Ode to asters

Oh, asters, wild asters, beloved of bees. You tumble down hill and sway on the breeze.

Raccoons jangle my brain

Funny noise out back. Something banging. Something clattering. Four raccoons! One cat. Four raccoons? Get in here, cat. Go away, raccoons! <grabs camera> I said, beat it!<two raccoons go out of frame> Scram! <flash!> How do you like that? Raccoons back off. Cat walks past. I open door. Cat strolls in. Phew!

Re: Stable Strategies

After seeing Eileen Gunn at Readercon last July, I finally checked out her collection of short fiction, Stable Strategies and Others. It’s a slender volume filled out with three encomiums plus an author’s foreword plus endnotes for each story, all commenting about how slowly she writes. What she does write is good stuff.

Re: Gifting Bliss

So I’m going through my archives of stories I like, which gave me an excuse to listen again the Drabblecast of “Gifting Bliss: Fifteen Years Later, Jason Avery’s Magic is Still Saving the World” by Josh Rountree. It’s a charming presentation, a kind of musical bio show, complete with promo break. Considering that I’m not […]

More syrphid flies

I’m still, still finding more syrphid flies that I haven’t seen before. It looks a lot like a bee mimic I saw last year, but not quite. It’s about the size of a honeybee, and as bright as a honeybee, and as fond of the same flowers — but I am not fooled. Honeybees don’t […]

My favorite asteroid

Today makes the one year anniversary since my favorite asteroid, 2008 TC3, exploded over Sudan. They went and picked up some of the pieces about a month ago. When they analyzed it, it turned to be an unusual kind of an unusual kind of asteroid. Considering long it’s been since I could remember what a […]

A treehugger’s lament

Another tree is gone from the neighborhood. The noise started Friday, just about all day Friday, of a big motor running all day long, interspersed with spurts of chain saw, and the occasional chipper grinding. All day, branches vanished, until only the crown of the tree was untouched. Did they quit because it was the […]

What fall means

Fall means leaves are falling. Fall means you look at leaves on the patio And see old scars from chopping ice away. Fall means you know what’s coming.

Put up or shut up

There’s this conversation running around my head today. It goes something like this:

Re: Watchmen

Well, I finally read Watchmen, the graphic novel in which Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons so expertly deconstructed a genre overripe for deconstruction — the superhero comic. I’ve been hearing about this book for twenty years. I resisted because I just don’t care about superheroes. I always knew superheroes were silly, but I never realized […]