I fully support this.
Saturday, May 02, 2020
Friday, May 01, 2020
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
Pirius
said slowly, “I can’t come back.”
Luru Parz laughed. “But it
doesn’t matter. Sentient or not, it will
only be a copy, like a Virtual. And it
won’t last long. It has to be you,
Ensign.” (…)
Pirius looked at the frame. He
felt numbed, not even afraid; perhaps his imagination was exhausted. He shrugged.
“There are already two copies of me running around the Galaxy. I suppose I’m used to be being split in
half. When shall we do this?”
(from Exultant by Stephen Baxter)
.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Monday, April 27, 2020
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
Even
in the tropics, where the difference between winter and summer is minimal,
temperatures can vary significantly between the rainy and the dry seasons. Organisms have developed all sorts of ways of
dealing with those variations. They
hibernate or estivate or migrate. They
dissipate heat through panting or conserve it by growing thicker coats of
fur. Honeybees warm themselves by
contracting the muscles in their thorax.
Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs. (In very hot
weather, wood storks may excrete on their legs as often as once a minute.)
(from The Sixth
Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert)
.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
“You
drunk?” Thomas said.
“Drunk on the love of a good woman,” Pirmin said slapping Thomas on the
arm with one of his huge hands.
“Found out her name yet? Perhaps
she had time to shout it at your back while you were riding away in the dark.”
(from Altdorf –
The Forest Knights by J.K. Swift)
.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Friday, April 17, 2020
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
“What’s
going to happen to Winky?” said Hermione, the moment they had left the
clearing.
“I
don’t know,” said Mr. Weasley.
“The way they were treating her!” said Hermione furiously. “Mr. Diggory, calling her ‘elf’ all the time …
and Mr. Crouch! He knows she didn’t do
it and he’s still going to sack her! He
didn’t care how frightened she’d been, or how upset she was – it was like she
wasn’t even human!”
“Well, she’s not,” said Ron.
Hermione rounded on him.
(from Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling)
9*/10. The
complete review is here.
.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Art Appreciation Wednesday
I can feel relaxation taking hold of my consciousness! At least until someone opens the car door.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Monday, April 13, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
Mr.
Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very
large head and no neck. In his earlier
middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by
reading in Balzac’s “Louis Lambert” that all the world’s great men have been
marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness
is nothing more or less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the
head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs
approach one another; argal… It was
convincing.
(from Crome Yellow
by Aldous Huxley)
.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Friday, April 10, 2020
Thursday, April 09, 2020
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
“OK,
then,” I said, turning away, heading towards the stairs.
The phone rang as I passed it.
Hoping it might be Violet, I lifted the receiver, my heart pounding.
“Congratulations,” said a disembodied voice, “you have won a guaranteed
major prize in the Lithuanian State Lottery.”
I
slammed the phone down, muttering a curse under my breath as I walked
upstairs. They’d got me once. Never again.
(from Inspector
Hobbes and the Curse by Wilkie Martin)
.
Tuesday, April 07, 2020
More Britishisms
Moggy (n.): An ordinary cat.
Others, all from a book I just finished: doddle, jacket potato, pong, fly sheet, footwell, settles, bin liner, skint, bleeper, scarper, AGM, spotty herbert, dust-dancers, cutlery draw, shufti, picnic hamper, stodge, going to the Casualty, skip, ‘having me on’, pebble-dashed, top up, nutters, lay-by, slowcoach, selvedge, tosser, punters, dozy, bacon-butties, and ‘trying it on’.
Sunday, April 05, 2020
Saturday, April 04, 2020
Friday, April 03, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
“You
know,” said Adelsky, “four people will find treasure more quickly than two.”
“Maybe,” said Nora, “but the dig has to keep going, one way or
another. The archaeological value of
what you’ll be doing – uncovering the heart of the camp – is greater than a
chest full of gold.”
Salazar rolled his eyes.
“But a lot less fun,” said Adelsky.
(from Old Bones by Douglas Preston and Lincoln
Child)
.
Thursday, April 02, 2020
Wednesday, April 01, 2020
Monday, March 30, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
The
Voyager spacecraft and its measurements were directly accessing reaches of
space that no mission has ever entered before.
It’s true that the data collection system based on eight-track tapes had
to be tinkered with along the way, that it no longer had a working camera, and
that its equipment has about a million times less memory than a smartphone does
today. But the spacecraft is still
operational and is currently the man-made object most distant from the Earth
and the Sun.
(from Dark Matter
and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall)
.
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Friday, March 27, 2020
Art Appreciation Friday.
True story: I used the word "Crip" on the back of my softball jersey because my teammates said I ran like a cripple. Then someone enlightened me about the "gang tie-in", and I lived in fear of a Blood taking me out.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Hi-Lingual
Is it just me, or are strangers more friendly right now when you pass them on the street?
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
“You
look too young for Vietnam.”
“I
looked old when I got back.”
She smiled. You could see the
booze in her smile, too. “Peter
Pan. You told Ellen you wanted to be
Peter Pan.”
“Unh-hunh.”
“That’s crap. Stay a little boy
forever.”
“It’s not age. Childhood, maybe. All the good things are in childhood. Innocence.
Loyalty. Truth. You’re eighteen years old. You’re sitting in a rice paddy. Most guys give it up. I decided eighteen was too young to be old.”
(from The Monkey’s
Raincoat by Robert Crais)
.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Jeopardy
Really now. Given the letters already chosen at the bottom of the screen, what else could the answer be?
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Friday, March 20, 2020
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Book Excerpt for the Day
In
the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, a story is written concerning
one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and
spake thusly:
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic monastic system of
belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system
of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of
the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
(from Thief of
Time by Terry Pratchett)
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)