Never thought I’d hear Safeway’s in-house music channel play “London Calling” this morning. But I sang along with it anyway.
Tag: Hey Fanboy!
I was 6 when _2001_ premiered; 15 for _Star Wars_. I keep a set of weird-looking dice in my briefcase. Nuf said?
First Graf: Silverlock
TAKE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, STAR A grumpy Chicagoan, people the landscape with characters and places from the world’s literature and you have Silverlock — a fable of the human spirit no less great or more complex a story than a man discovering the world of letters and how it changes him. I have read it twice now, once from the depths of a great spiritual crisis, and the effect is almost electric. Half the fun is spotting the references; another half is author John Myers Myers’ love of language; a third half is how it makes you feel. Silverlock may or may not change your life, but it will certainly change your view of storytelling — and isn’t that sometimes the same thing?
If I had cared to live, I would have died.
A storm had come up. While not sick, I found my bunk the most comfortable place, leaving it only to take my meals. Dozing after supper, I learned of disaster when a wave bashed in the door of my deck cabin. The backwash sluiced me out of it and stranded me by a stowage locker.
The Secret
WHAT THE HUMANS DIDN’T REALIZE was that, for everyone else in the galaxy, it was largely considered bad form, and even bad luck, to visit planets settled by intelligent apes. (You’d think the quality of their UFO sightings would be a tip-off.)
Cheap Thrills: Bantha Milk
– 16 oz whole milk
– 1 banana
– 1 tablespoon peanut butter
– 1 egg (if the Force is strong with you)
– 1 drop blue food coloring
Put ingredients in blender. Blend at high speed for 1 minute. Pour into white plastic tumbler and serve.
The View From Superman’s Cape
FLYING OVER EARTH IN THE International Space Station? This is what it looks like.
Prosatio Silban and the Starving Survivor
A BUOPOTH IS A STRANGE beast: some say it is half-composed of dreams, others prefer not to speculate. But of the little that is known, one thing is certain: no matter what shape the beast takes, its eyes are the most soulful of any creature in all the Exilic Lands.
One of these eyes was fixed on Prosatio Silban as the cook approached with a bag of fatberry cakes. “Buopoths can lumber all day on a fatberry cake and a kind word” ran the proverb, and today had certainly proved it: a brisk sixteen-hour galleywagon pull along the Reaching Road through the light-forested countryside north of cosmopolitan Soharis. Prosatio Silban dug into the bag and surveyed his environs; a small clearing under a circle of maiden-oaks. A fine evening, and a good place to camp. He patted the beast, fed it, told it what a good buopoth it was, and made plans for his own dinner. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Starving Survivor”
Wistful Vista
Big Room, Little Box
SO NASA HAS JUST RELEASED a nifty web application that lets you whiz about the solar system in real time and swoop in next to planets and satellites and space probes to see what they’re doing (or at least what the programmers know that the scientists know that they’re doing). It’s called, appropriately, “Eyes On The Solar System” and if you don’t click on http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes/ RIGHT NOW and try it boy will YOU be sorry. (Between this, Google Earth and Minecraft, the inner and outer worlds should mesh any day now.)
Prosatio Silban and the Visitor From The Sands
He was cleaning up his galleywagon late one night at the edge of one of cosmopolitan Soharis’ more workaday fish markets, making ready to fold down the ‘wagon’s canopy-awning, when the Siddis appeared.
Now, to understand this story, you must know that Soharis, a city perched where the Rimless Sea meets the Uulian Commonwell, is the sort of place where one may expect to meet almost anyone at almost any time. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Visitor From The Sands”
Future Informal
“MY NAME IS 010180,” SAID the friendly robot. “But you can call me 0.”
Across The Rimless Sea: Folk
FOLLOWING ON THE INFORMATION REVEALED in “Who Is This Prosatio Silban, And What Does he Want?” here is a chart listing the Exilic Lands’ inhabitants. It’s meant as a quick reference rather than a last word.
Attentive readers will recognize some of what’s named herein but may or may not have light shed thereby, so: the Xao, Xai and Xax are, like the Aydnzmri and Mazei, descended from the “Antecedents” whose millennia-ago war broke the Exilic Lands (and first gave them that name); but unlike their more refined counterparts, reverted to barbarism. Continue reading “Across The Rimless Sea: Folk”
Business Plan
THERE MUST BE A WAY to get rich selling extra spaces as attachments for Scrabble boards…