A friend is about to do a review for the DG Awards, and it reminded me that he was at a convention here in New Zealand quite a few years back now. He was a man who adored a good joke, and while at the convention he told me the following one – A kiwi …
Category: This occurred to me
Dating SF
I’ve been rereading several SF books that were originally published in the 1980s, and ran into a problem for writers of SF who are using the background of our own earth but setting the book in the future. This one gives a time-line at the start of the book. 1969: Neil Armstrong sets foot on …
Inedible Spam
I checked my spam box before starting on blog items this morning, deleted 53 comments, and it occurred to me to wonder why people bother. It’s abundantly clear that those who “comment” on my various articles and updates etc. haven’t read them, aren’t interested, and wouldn’t know me from a bar of soap. A friend …
The Internet Can be damaging TV Series
This occured to me only the other day, and I’m now wondering just how much damage our ability in this area can do. What am I talking about? Well, it was like this. I’ve been watching a continuing series I like that’s on late one weeknight and I’ve also been watching the repeat series that …
The Quiet Countryside
Every so often some city acquaintance asks me what I do all day. They ask in that tone which indicates they expect to hear that I do nothing much, that they’re sure I’m usually bored, lonely perhaps, and that I wish I lived in a city. Yes, well. I consider the ten days I had …
That we can make some awful mistakes at times.
I was talking with a friend a while back and she mentioned how easy it was to mishear something. (That’s true, for years and years I misheard the weather forecast as “Rogue Snowfall Warnings’. It was about twenty years before I realized that what they were telling you about was actually “road snowfall warningâ€.) But …
Post-Disaster Sexism.
Yup, interesting title, isn’t it? But I’ve come to the conclusion that it exists. Possibly not in real life – although I’m taking no bets on it – but certainly in the publishing of disaster novels. I’ve always enjoyed a good disaster novel of the SF type. Death of Grass, Day of the Triffids, A …
A Bad Case of the “Mysteries.â€
I was happily doing a few blog entries when, just as I finished the ‘Cuckoos’ one, an email signalled arrival and I turned to check who was contacting me. According to the email it was from the Department of Internal Affairs and they’d just deposited a sum of money into my bank account. I considered …
The Sounds of Silence
Living on a farm for more than twenty years makes you sleep lightly. That is, I sleep well, but any sound that’s out of the usual tends to have me drift towards being more awake and aware until it’s identified. Then I drift back down to solidly asleep again. I never come completely awake unless …
There Are Times I wonder About People
And what I wonder is if some of them think at all. In Toronto Canada some schools have the kilt as school uniform for girls. Apparently many of the girls hitch their kilts up well above the knee contravening school policy and public decency. So the school board authorities (covering a number of schools in …