Happy Samhain to all!!

    Tis the reason for the season!

Book Excerpt for the Day

   Christmas is Yule with religion, and the West Saxons managed to spoil the midwinter feast with chanting monks, droning priests, and savagely long sermons.  Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up the next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral.

    (from The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell)

     10*/10.  The full review is here.

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Ignatius J. Reilly

    We are committed to posting any comic strip that has a Halloween theme and a reference to "A Confederacy of Dunces".

Indie Author Blues

    A couple of weeks ago, on a lark, I monitored Amazon's e-books "new releases" volume over a four-day period. On average, there are 1700 new e-book offerings on Amazon EVERY day.

    Those are incredible odds.   Read a book by an indie author today!

Sunday Sermon

    Good question, Calvin.

When you're both a Bibliophile and a DM

Chopsticks and Cheetos

    Genius!  Sheer genius!

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Helen was never nervous around boys.  One of the advantages of her condition was that she knew where she stood from the beginning.  She liked to think of her figure as curvaceous.  Like Marilyn Monroe’s.  Except gentlemen preferred blondes, not brown fur with white speckles.  She had yet to find a pair of heels that fit her hooves.  Troy was tall, with wide shoulders.  She was taller, with shoulders a smidge wider.  And then there was the whole cow-head thing.

    (from Epic Road Quest by A. Lee Martinez)

  9*/10.  The complete review is here.

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The Great Pizza Debate

    I vote "YES"!

Prison Surprise

    For those of you who are not desert rats, this picture has not been photoshopped.  The sign is on the I-17 freeway, just a couple miles north of Phoenix, going to/from Flagstaff.

Monday Pun Day

    Art appreciation edition.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Zedd, I’ve never seen this before.  Where have you kept it?”

    Zedd smiled proudly.  “In the cabinet, in the house.”

    Richard eyed him skeptically.  “There’s nothing in the cabinet but dishes and pans and your powders.”

    “Not that cabinet,” he said, lowering his voice as if to thwart anyone who might be listening, “in my wizard’s cabinet.”

    Richard straightened with a frown.  “I’ve never seen any other cabinet.”

    “Bags, Richard!  You’re not supposed to see it!  It’s a wizard’s cabinet; it’s invisible!”

    (from Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind)

    4½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Aging App

    I use this app all the time on Facebook.  It makes me look "stately".

Monty Python Arguments

Science Thursday

    Astrophysics can be the death of you. 

Book Excerpt for the Day

    There was a bridge at Andau, and if a Hungarian could reach that bridge, he was nearly free.

    It wasn’t much, as bridges go: not wide enough for a car nor sturdy enough to bear a motorcycle.  It was a footbridge made of rickety boards with a handrailing which little children could not quite reach.

    It wasn’t actually in Andau, nor even near it, yet it was known throughout Hungary as “the bridge of Andau,” and many thousands of refugees, coming from all parts of Hungary, headed for it.  Fleeing the Russians, with only a paper bag, or with nothing, they headed for this insignificant bridge and for freedom.

    (from The Bridge at Andau by James A. Michener)

    6½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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GoT Geography

Motivational Monday

    I noticed that too.

Sunday Sermon

    Sadly, quite true.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    It was a good day to be indoors, cleaning out closets, making hot chocolate, organizing a fresh start for winter.  And it was a good day to be outdoors, scuffing through the few remaining leaves, feeling flushed from the cold air.  It was my favorite time of the year.  And if it wasn’t for the fact that people were dying left and right, and I couldn’t find Uncle Fred, and someone wanted to kill me, and Ramirez wanted to send me to Jesus – it would be a very good day.

    (from High Five by Janet Evanovich)

    8½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Responsible Hopping

    To all my fellow parallel universe travelers out there.  Jump responsibly!

Dune

    Out here in the Arizona desert, sand worms are a huge threat.

Polyglot

    I guess that makes me trilingual.  To be fair, I have taken classes in all three of those languages.  Plus three years of French and two years of Mandarin Chinese.  Also two years of Latin in junior/senior high, but let's not discuss my grades in those classes.

Past Lives

    True story. I went to a "Past Lives" workshop once, at the local/annual Scottsdale Psychic Fair. It was an interesting experience, but what I found fascinating was that we had not one, but two people in the audience who had once been Cleopatra. Trying to figure out how that was possible was mind-boggling.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    People wandered through the streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now.  Adults were talking and children playing games.  “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face.  Minded are you? I could have said.  Minded how?  What will you do?  How will you be careful?

    We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange.  We’d lived among gods – little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their disposal and our disposal – and ignored the fact.  Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that.

    (from Embassytown by China Miéville)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Sunday Pun Day

Trippin' Saturday

    To test this claim, put your fingers over everything but the top of any given ball.  It does seem like they're all brown.

Pain Levels

    Or Art Appreciation, but we did one of those last night.

Art Appreciation Thursday

Classical Music

    Really now.  What genre did Beethoven use to describe his music?

Book Excerpt for the Day

Forgive us if we work so hard

And the muscles bunch clumsy on us

And we never know why we work so hard -

If the big houses with little families

And the little houses with big families

Sneer at each other’s bars of misunderstanding.

 (pg. 11, from “The Windy City”)

    (from Slabs of the Sunburnt West  by Carl Sandburg)

  6*/10.  The complete review is here.

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