I love it when Ian gets annoyed. I look forward to being able to take him and Tessa and baby Lucy out to dinner some time so I can hear it live, up-close and personal.
Today’s favorite comment about the book sale:
“(For us Trek novel fans, this is of course like Moses offering some autographed copies of the Torah. Because I say so.)”
Don’t know if I’d go quite that far….
But this reminds me of Will Shetterly’s great story “The People who Owned the Bible”, which everyone should read.
Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins’s DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. At first, Jimmy was satisfied with ten percent of the price of every KJV sold and 10 percent of every collection plate passed by any church that used the KJV. But when some churches switched to newer translations, Jimmy sicced his lawyers on all translations based on the KJV. That got him a cut of every Bible and every Christian service in English. Some translators claimed their work was based on older versions and should therefore be exempt, but none of them could afford to fight Jimmy in court.
So the churches grumbled and paid Jimmy his tithe, except for the Mormons, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, and Unitarian Universalists. Jimmy said their teachings hurt the commercial value of his property and refused to let them use the Bible. All of those groups dissolved, except for the Unitarian Universalists, who didn’t notice a change…
(snicker)
In other news: thanks to Moirla, who unwittingly handed me the title for the YW short story I’m working on at the moment: “Source Material.”
(This story will be going in an anthology of wizards-in-business stories coming out next year. More data as it becomes available.)
I don’t usually do TV reviews, but I really enjoyed “Hotel Babylon”‘s BBC premiere last night. A decent break out of the starter’s gate — characters it was possible to empathize with / lock into quickly (with the necessary touches of ambvalence in background or motivation here and there), and with camera work out of “CSI” by “Vegas”, though those particular idioms not overdone. A nice piece of work: it’ll be fun to see where this goes.
I mean, seriously, just look at this.
Zowie.
Wow, what a response!
Those of you who’ve got multiple purchases and are contemplating others (or are sharing shipping with another buyer), please make sure you drop me a message via myEbay (or whatever) so that I know to hold onto whatever you bought until all the buying’s over. No point in you paying more for postage than necessary.
…Images will be going up tomorrow for those who want to see pictures. Also I’ll add a few extra things — some copies of Wizards at War and a couple of unusual things.
Thanks again!
He was an organization man who was not particularly organized, a committee man who worked most effectively through back channels. With equal gusto he preached temperance and wrote drinking songs. He practiced frugality only, he admitted, so long as it was absolutely necessary.
…His legacy is not a political philosophy but a protean existence, act after act of bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity. Once those constituted a definition of the American character. Today they would more likely be termed “hypomania,” a fair diagnosis for any individual who manages single-handedly to found a library, fire company, police force, hospital, university, insurance company, sanitation department and militia.
…A materialistic age returns him to his glory, none more so than our overachieving own. His passions are ours: smarts, self-improvement, social welfare and better cell phone reception for all.
Happy Birthday (a day late), Ben.
(It started sort of here, if you must know.)
Because Alan was asking. Here are links to two pages with (a) lots of goulash links, and including (at the bottom) goulash the way Peter made it today, which worked out really well: and (b) some other goulash recipes.
A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the first to sail around the world and discover America.
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but claims to be a reproduction of an ancient map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for another century and a half, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.
I’m something of a map freak, and will be watching this with interest…
Russian experts announce new vaccine against deadly bird flu
“Experiments we carried out have demonstrated that several weeks after vaccination the birds developed an intensive immunity that should prevent them from falling ill. And it is guaranteed that this poultry will not fall ill…”
Must be nice to be so certain after only three weeks, and what has to be a fairly short testing cycle. Going to be interesting to see how this develops…
(Thanks to the H5N1 blog for the link.)
I was tidying up some links in the my note storage today (I use OnFolio for this, and like it a lot) and, as usual, I discovered some things that had been misfiled. What this fried chicken method was doing in with the Martian stuff, I can’t imagine. Anyway, it works really well: this is the only version I know that produces a really crunchy crust while leaving the chicken moist and tender. (Don’t let the lard and clarified butter scare you off. The crust absorbs very little.)
(BTW, this is the same method that appeared in the New York Times last summer, but someone seems to have exported it to this site, probably to get around the Times‘s login requirements.)