I just dreamt about a grilled cheese and ham sandwich and a milkshake, which I take to mean that chocolate cake for lunch was actually a miserable idea. (But it was there!) I miss J.P. Licks in Jamaica Plain. The two times I tried to order a milkshake at the local McDonald's, they were out. How on e...

Seriously, did any other Virtual On players/fan run the numbers on how fast Raiden's "lasers" travel? Also I recall that they cast shadows. cofax7 writes to the sf/f community about RaceFail '09, the Doom That came to Sarnath Will Not Die and, I daresay, what really ought to be called ShetterlyCrame...

Something I do not do often is buy a book written by someone on my legendae or mentioned by people on my legendae. Not because those books aren't worth supporting, but because I can't support all of them, and not all of them would be my taste. Limited budget, especially for $30 hardcovers (though a ...

Nostalgia: finding where your Ancestral Sword of the Unicorn and Joe's Ancestral Sword of the Crab are. Wonder if they'd go for anything useful these days? Not that we're parting with them. I...hadn't realized how many dated rares we're sitting on. Disturbing: wondering if the surgical scissors you ...

I got this quote from Mike Resnick on another yahoogroup... <<..with the death of Realms of Fantasy, we now have 17 sf/f/h magazines paying what SFWA considers pro rates....and 14 of them are electronic >> At the Dr. Tyson lecture the other night, he talked about the demise of hope in th...

1. The importance of context: Lizard: "Mommy, you and me are better than Daddy, right?" Joe and I burst out laughing. What the lizard meant was that she and I sing better than Joe does. It's just the choice of phrase was unfortunate. *g* 2. In 9th grade I wanted to major in English when I went to co...

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I am not a linguist. I do not play one on TV. (Heck, you wouldn't want me playing a Yoon on TV.) I read books on linguistics and I've conlanged. But I've never taken a linguistics course. Walter Meyer's Aliens and Linguists is one of my favorite nonfiction books ever (although ...

CAVEAT: I have only read snippets and shreds at the edges of the Cultural Appropriation Debate 2009, and don't think I have anything useful to add to that, in no small part because I don't think it's physically possible for me to follow the web of argument at this point in time. But I do have a scat...

My sister got me three wondrous early birthday presents. (Four, if you count her the fact of her visit.) One of them was a 10-lb. crate of kishu mandarins. These are the only mandarins/clementines/tangerines in the U.S. that I have ever tasted that match the ease-of-peeling, lack-of-seeds, and sheer...

I reread Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card two days ago. The book is--I can't actually call it a pleasure, although it's not the acutely painful doom-filled deterministic experience that K.J. Parker's SCAVENGER trilogy is. I like it but I don't like myself for liking it, if that makes any sense. Hart'...