Book Excerpt for the Day

    “You getting anything?” Graham asked.

    “I have this vague feeling that someone else is here, but that’s it.  I can’t see or hear him.”
   “Huh.  Any ideas, Bob?”
   Graham listened.
   “He says you won’t see him unless you really want to.”
    “I do want to!”
   “Some part of you doesn’t, he says.”
   Great.  I was being psychoanalyzed by a walking piece of deep shag.

    (from Nolander by Becca Mills)

    7½*/10.  The complete review is here.
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Goat's Butter

    Magnificent pun aside, who knew such a thing existed?

Jurassic Park Punnery

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Van Dorn was not prepared.  He had long ignored the physical needs of his men, and he was about to pay a heavy price.  Trudging through the mud and snow, his men were short on warm clothes and rations.  Deprived of weapons and sufficient ammunition, hundreds of his soldiers went into battle armed with squirrel rifles and shotguns.  Many in his three brigades of Native Americans opted for more dependable bows and hatchets.  Cold, hungry, outgunned, his troops were easily routed in what historian James McPherson called “the most one-sided victory won by an outnumbered Union army during the war”.

    (from The History Buff’s Guide to the Civil War by Thomas R. Flagel)

  7½*/10.  The complete review is here.
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Gandalf and the Balrog

    Never trust a wizard.

Facebook Advice

    You better believe it.

Tuesday Punnery

    Last Sunday's 'Pearls Before Swine' strip, and, being a pun-lover, I am in total awe.

35 Kids

Switching Gears

    Truth.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    She looked up at him.  “Want to learn a few tricks?  Brush up a little?”

    Nick caught the challenge in her tone.  He was good at unarmed combat, but Selena was way out of his class.

    “”If you think you can handle it.”

    “Me?  Or you?”

    Nick had sixty pounds and two inches on her.  The sixth or seventh time Selena brought him to the mat, the thought crossed his mind he was getting a little old for this kind of brushing up.

    (from Black Harvest by Alex Lukeman)

    7*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Cat Glasses

    We'll overlook the three misspellings (and we're not even counting "dis"), for the sake of a way-kewl triple illusion.

Rain

    Thanks for the rain, monsoon.  But you could've waited until we were finished walking the dogs.

The existential moment

    Yeah, I fell for it.  And I do editing.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Incest, lovemaking, illegitimate, compound incest, excrement, excrement, excrement, oral-genital contact, rectum, castration, diseases passed by lovemaking primitive anal lovechildren!  I’ll kill the lovemaking offspring of dogs!  I’ll burn this lovemaking world down to the bedrock!”

    (from The Flying Sorcerers by David Gerrold and Larry Niven)

    5½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Post-It Fun

    I gotta try this.

The Oxymoron Museum

Music Saturday

    Or Star Wars Saturday.  Either is fine.

Driving on a Runway

    True story - once upon a time, I drove on an airport runway, illegally, and in a VW beetle.  It was obviously a very small airport, called Starlight Field, IIRC, and located in Chandler, Arizona.

    I got on it accidentally, but I admit, I was aware of what it was immediately, and I thoroughly enjoyed fish-tailing down the gravel runway.  What I didn't count on was the airport's keeper living in a house at the end of the runway, coming out to see my antics, and jumping in his pick-up and giving chase.

    At the runway's end, there was a bit of a rut, then a curb, then a road again.  So it was easy to make my escape.  Alas, a VW Beetle with a driver and three passengers is no match for a guy in a pick-up, and he eventually caught up to me, and flashed his lights for me to pull over.  Which I did.

    He asked me if I knew I was on an airport runway, and I said, "Sure.  But once I was on it, I figured the quickest way off was to drive to the end."

    He accepted this story (It pretty much was the truth), and we parted on amicable terms, after he warned me that I could've been hit by an airplane landing there.

    It should be mentioned that when he pulled me over, and got out of his truck to come talk to me, my three passengers were all telling me to put the Beetle in gear and flee the scene for Phase 2 of The Chase.  I resisted the temptation.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    I liked Holgren.  I even trusted him, to a degree.  But he was still a mage, and being around a mage was like being around a ‘tame’ lion.  You could never fully let down your guard.  They were just too powerful, and too unpredictable.  Their motivations were too obscure.  Ultimately, I think, the kind of power a mage dealt with on a daily basis pushed him, eventually, beyond mundane considerations such as right and wrong.  He tended to think more along the lines of ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’, and the ‘impossible’ list was a lot shorter for a mage than it was for you or me.

    (from The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids by Michael McClung)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Buying Books

    Truer words were never spoken.

Hotel California

    Actually, Hotel California was a song about members of The Eagles visiting a Satanic service, and being rather unimpressed.  The titular hotel had been purchased by the Satanist church.

Punctuation Sunday

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Everyone in my village liked U2,” I said.  “Everyone in my country, maybe.  Wouldn’t that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks.  I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music.  Do you know what?  The first week I was in the detention center, U2 were number one here too.  That is a good trick about this world, Sarah.  No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”

    (from Little Bee by Chris Cleave)

     8½*/10.  The full review is here.

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Book Review Friday

    With our guest book reviewer tonight, Her Majesty Queen Victoria!!

History Thursday

    Strange.  Very bizarre.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    I looked out the window at the same view I’d seen for the last ten years and counting.  I was bored with Modesto, bored with being Noah Bains’s loser daughter, two loser marriages, loser modeling career, and anything else I might try my hand at – but what else could a loser like me do?  I was about to turn forty, right foot in a walking cast, cane on the left, a nonexistent love life, living with a monosyllabic father who had enough of his own hangups to put mine to shame.

    (from A Dead Red Cadillac by R.P. Dahlke)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Happy Fourth of July (again)

    Well, whaddaya know.  I did find time today to post on the blog.

Happy Fourth of July

    Yeah this is a day early, but I usually forget to post anything on holidays, and this one caught my eye today.

Tuba or Not Tuba

    That is the question.

Surreal Saturday

    Artist: Mother Nature.