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…

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…

Late last fall, my literary agent relocated from offices on the upper West Side of Manhattan to new, more spacious quarters down in Chelsea. As usual, there was a fair…

For those of you who might be using Google Earth and are also YW readers, I’ve uploaded a file of Google Earth placemarks for the Young Wizards series. The list…

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.…

You saw it here first. (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…

So I start going through the email and find one waiting for me that has no topic, no salutation, and the very first sentence is as follows: First off i…

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…

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…

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…

Feh.

This appeared in a for-sale version on BoingBoing a couple of years ago; but Peter came across a do-it-yourself version of it today. With this gadget, you can use a…

Now you can find out the truth. If you dare. 😉

I’m not kidding. (Beware: slight orc-ish nudity.) The orcish poet Urrshahurruk-gah (Celadon Toadstool) was famed throughout the fifty-seven tribes for the quality of her poetry, and also for that time…

Well, don’t just sit there staring. Rush there in your thousands! (eyeroll)

The haggis diaspora. The image of the duckbilled haggis down at the bottom of the page also gives me pause. …Apparently it’s a haggis-hunt contest sponsored by the Scotsman newspaper.…

The British Museum has added something new to the “Turning The Pages” site: a Shockwavy virtual book of Mozart’s “thematic catalogue”, with 75 audio excerpts. Also available on the same…

I didn’t know that he’d been writing science fiction, though. Neat!

I’m going to be changing the OOA layout a little here and there over the next couple/few days, so if things start to look weird, please bear with me. They’ll…

The problem with e-Junkie which would have asked readers for $599.00 for each copy of the MS Reader version of A Wind from the South. (I think moderately well of…

It took some tweaking, but it’s finally ready — see the sidebar at the Raetian Tales blog for the purchase link. This version also contains (in an appendix) a set…

Not much to say about this except that it’s sad to lose so un-diva-like a presence from the artform that invented the word. Another legendary moment came after one of…