As I’d mentioned previously, and did a bit of twittering about in theater, the family spent the weekend at ravencon, which politely decided to set itself up about 20 minutes from my front door this year. This was the first year doing the whole weekend (last year, we did a spur-of-the-moment Friday night drop-in), so […]

…stop intruding on my breakfast!: “Hop, step, jump-jump, poo! Let us cooperate yeah-yeah-woo! Magical spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!” …and give me back my caps!

Currently on my mp3 player are a couple of CDs by the now-defunct band Innocent Nixon, who I saw play once upon a time at a now defunct bar in downtown Richmond. One of their tunes is called “Big Big Ugly.” Whenever I hear it, my mind leaps immediately to alien epithets for humans in […]

Those wily English, with their tea and their Doctor Who and their National Health Service, also happen to have an interesting perspective on the American political circus. The other day, the BBC offered up a solid investigation as to why Americans tend to vote against their own interests. And, oddly enough, it’s not entirely that […]

After FINALLY closing a long-standing action item Saturday morning (Hoo-Effing-Ray!), The whole lot of us ventured across town to hang out at the VA Comicon for a few hours and rub elbows (sometimes literally, given the crowds) with fans, creators, and geeks of all stripes. This weekend’s show was a much larger than the usual […]

My head and creative muscles are in a somewhat different, distant place right now, between a new project phase at work, my electing to jump headlong into NaNoWriMo, and a few other things not worth mentioning. That said, posts here might be thin on the ground here for a while*. It’s not that I don’t […]

You’ve seen John Hodgman, even if you don’t know who he is. His appearances as “PC” in a certain fruit-flavored tech industry firm’s ads have permanently cemented his place in pop culture. He’s done a bunch of other things as well – minor acting gigs, cameo appearances in obscure pop songs, and authoring several almanacs […]

Maybe we will get something resembling a public option after all; even if there’s a “states can opt out” provision. That kind of pisses me off (given who’s likely to be running my state come January unless the polls shift dramatically in the next week), but honestly, if the eventual health care reforms actually work, […]

Another week comes to an end; a week of a bunch of big, one-time stressors that I’m glad to have gotten past mosty unscathed. As far as I can tell, other than the usual weekend mundanities, I’ve got a whole lot of nothin’ on the plate. I think I’m going to enjoy that. Maybe I’ll […]

Yeah, I know, Banned Books Week was last week, but consider it read that I’m just running a little late. That, and I didn’t have anything particularly interesting to post about it until today, when I found this, a letter from a librarian to a library patron who challenged the inclusion of a book called […]