More about the books, and whatever else is top of mind.
Fear of Flying, part 1
(With apologies to Erica Jong.) You could say that the whole dreary business began at around elevenses on a Wednesday in the spring of 1982. Occupying the aisle seat of a DC-9, parked at the Pan Am gate of Will Rogers airport in Oklahoma City, I waited to take off on a short flight to…
Short Story: The Reaper of Styx Valley
“Stand by for orbital insertion burn.” The greasy-haired young man nodded without taking his eyes off the console. “Yeah, all set.” Dara Moser frowned. Can you for once answer the way you’re supposed to? There’s a protocol. She let it go and tightened the restraints on her couch. After all these months, trying to teach…
The Kingdom of Cats
Late Saturday night we got back from our trip to the island nation of Cyprus, where Carol had attended an astrophysics workshop, and I’d tried (with limited success) to get some writing done. If you know me, or you have followed this blog at all, you know that Carol and I travel a lot. Between…
The Mostly True History of Art
[Warning: If you have any respect for either art or sexual propriety (or yourself), you probably won’t want to come within the same postal code as this article. Just sayin’.] A recent visit to see antiquities at The Cyprus Museum got me thinking about ancient art in general — which led, as it necessarily must,…
Gastronomicon
Carol and I are now on the island of Cyprus for a couple weeks. This week, she is attending an astrophysics workshop involving ULIRGS and other vaguely threatening-sounding cosmic phenomena, while I do important things like blogging and hat buying. Our first 18 hours or so in Cyprus were spent in the seaside city of…
Engagement
Thursday, Carol and I got back from a short run down to Paris. The latest updates to my Adobe and music applications, after repeated warnings, have decided they can no longer tolerate working conditions inside my hoary Lenovo laptop; and (this being France, after all) they have decided to go on strike. So Tamsyn kindly…
Clusterf**k
So. How’s your week been going? If you’re a regular follower of this journal, you may have noticed that this week’s edition has been a bit slow in coming. (That’s just a rhetorical flourish, of course; no one actually reads this thing on a regular basis. Not even me.) A glance at the photo above…
Coordinates on the Vertical Axis (aka, Highs and Lows)
We’re roughly halfway through our Euro vacation with the extended family – mostly through the Italian leg – and a spell of stinky weather has providentially allowed me some downtime to catch up on my current travelogue. Here at the outset, then, allow me to introduce the dramatis personae for the voyage: Coordinates in the…
Royal Mile
[Note: Since Carol and I are going to be on the road for the next couple weeks, and I’m not sure what sort of network monstrosities we may face along the way, I’ve decided to mine the travel archive from my Feckless Abroad blog to keep things going in the meantime. In honor of the…
All Our Yesterdays
This past Sunday, Carol and I went to nearby Malestroit to catch the last day of the town’s annual Medieval Days celebration. When we lived in the US, my wife and I were big fans of medieval/Ren fairs. Unlike the States, though, which feature an unseemly dearth of thousand year old monuments, Europe is quite…
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Ronald Crittenden 