Finally. Summer made it. After January returned last Thursday, after a solid week of downpour that held up projects in May, after chilly, overcast weeks between, Summer decided to show up today. Reportedly it’s even going to stick around. I spent the day outdoors, trimming brush and burning a heap of construction rubble (only one of several, but it sure felt good). The wood was so rain-saturated it took an hour to get the fire going, but once it caught, the whole neighborhood knew it. As you can imagine from the way the early stages of the Great Foundation and…
8 CommentsMonth: June 2017
I don’t care. Really, this time. I do. Not. Care. And I hope you don’t, either. I don’t care about the latest earthshattering crisis in Qatar. I don’t care about Qatar. I don’t care if the whole bloody Middle East (with the exception of Israel) devours itself in fire and brimstone. I don’t care what “covfefe” really means. And I don’t care that covfefe was last week’s craze and mentioning it now shows I’m hopelessly out of step with current events. I don’t care if the Russians hacked the 2016 presidential election — any more than I care about who…
16 CommentsI promised (or for those of you uninterested in art, perhaps I threatened) to make a post on the details of painting a religious icon. So here goes. If you want to skip the longish intro, there are lots of pictures and short descriptions of the process below. In the beginning For those coming in late, I spent the first full week of June at an Eastern Catholic monastery, courtesy of a friend who dared my non-religious self to do it and courtesy of that friend and others who generously funded the expedition. Though I didn’t experience the leap of…
18 CommentsThat name might not ring bells with most of you. Peder was the publisher at Paladin Press (which took over my titles when Mike Hoy closed Loompanics and which later published one of my lesser-known books). He died suddenly on June 3 while vacationing in Finland — which I suppose is a good way to go if you gotta go. But it left his traveling companion (and longtime wife? partner? co-worker) Sheila with the terrible necessity of dealing with both the U.S. and Finnish governments to get his body home. And of course it was a jolt to all the…
8 CommentsIt’s January in June again here in the NorthWET and all the way into the mountains of California. Wind, hard rain, perhaps even snow in the upper elevations. A good day to huddle inside, read and think. Congressman Barry Loudermilk seems to understand that guns save lives back in his home state of Georgia. But (how predictable can these people be?), in D.C. he’s all in favor of only the special people being “allowed” to bear arms. OTOH, another congressguy who was also on the shooting scene performed a hellova lot better. Damnfine statement. Here it is in writing. The…
10 CommentsOne day while staying at the monastery, I left to run errands and came across this strawberry stand. That’s all it sold. Just strawberries — straight from the field behind the tiny booth. On the outward leg, I noticed the place was mobbed. Half the residents of the area seemed to be there, not just buying pints but flats and flats. On the inbound leg, all the local residents seemed to be there. It took five or six clerks crammed inside the tiny stand to wait on everybody. I stopped and picked up a half-flat for the nuns. When they…
8 CommentsSo. We have this big hit superhero movie. Directed by a woman. Staring not only a woman but a minority woman. And everybody loves it. Audiences flock to it. It had the biggest-ever opening weekend for a movie by a female director. Critics lavish praise upon it like relish on a summertime hot dog. And DC Comics breathes a huge sigh of relief that their otherwise dismal movie franchises are suddenly revived. By Wonder Woman You’d think the Speakers of the Feminist World would be over-the-moon delighted. That is, you would think so if you did not already understand that…
25 CommentsSilver here. Some high and tight fastballs from ace pitcher Life have brushed me back from the blogging plate for a while. Claire’s gracious invitation convinced me to step back in the box.
The video is a great example of a gaffe – when a politician tells the truth.
4 Comments… I returned to discover that the hottest news during my absence was a peahen getting loose in a California liquor store and wrecking the place. Or maybe it was some story about one political liar lying about another political liar Comey and Trump. Or North Korea testing more missiles. But the peahen story was definitely more relevant. (Though will somebody please tell the “journalist” who covered that one that even in this day of trans-anything, “female peacock” is still not an actual thing?) In other vital news of the day, J.R.R. Tolkein has just come out with another new…
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