Fragile Things; Neil Gaiman (Harper Perennial; 2007; ISBN 978-0-06-125202-0; cover by Gregg Kulick).

Smoke and Mirrors; Neil Gaiman (Harper Perennial; 2001; ISBN 0-06-093470-0; cover by J.K. Potter).

The review can now be found here.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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They've gone and planted a flag on another planet. Again!

Seriously folks, take a look at this image. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a shot of Phoenix as it was landing!!!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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...Did anybody feel the need to remake The Andromeda Strain? I'll watch it from end to end later, but the ten or so minutes I saw were...uninspiring...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:13 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The day started with me spending about an hour swatting spam comments on Ye Olde Blog (frakking bustards), then boiling rice and chopped meat (not for personal consumption; it seems that New Dog had come with, and now has passed to Old Dog, um, "digestive issues"!). Now, I've cleaned the fish tank, I am ready to get cleaned up, finish one military history, maybe start another.

In the meantime, I put on a pot of beans.

The recipe comes from The El Paso Chili Company's Texas Border Cookbook (W. Park Kerr and Norma Kerr). This is one of those cookbooks that I will probably wear out, it has a number of dishes that I make again and again. Their pot beans (Frijoles de Olla) is a favorite that leads to other dishes such as Well-Fried Beans (Frijoles Refritos) as well as being put into various pots of chili.

The author's point out that this is comfort food on several levels. The cooking process is long, but relaxes you. It's nice to know you've got a pot simmering, or waiting for you in the refrigerator. And it is nice to make a batch of frijoles refritos, put them into tortillas with some cheese and maybe some meat, freeze them, and bring them to work for several months afterwards.

Good eats!

I'd love to visit this restaurant. Several times. The cookbook, as I said, is excellent. The only problem I've found is that living in the nether regions, I often have to send away for ingredients or substitute. Things are getting easier, but you still occasionally run across something that causes you to scratch your head. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The first pictures are coming in from the Mars Phoenix Lander (only on television nothing on the web yet). From the looks of things, Phoenix managed to miss any rocks and the area that we've seen (so far) actually looks very flat. Can't tell if the surface is ice and dirt mixed, ice covered by dirt, dirt-colored ice or what. One picture being displayed is of a landing pad, it does not appear to have sunk into the ground much (if at all).

UPDATE: Raw image, taken directly from television, now available.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the last members of Werner von Braun's original rocket team has passed away.

Stuhlinger was a key inventor of ion propulsion, a system that has been used successfully on several missions to the Moon, the asteroids and one comet. Probably more of the public know him than they realize, thanks to his work in the 1950's Walt Disney television shows which featured realistic depictions of voyages to the Moon and Mars.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Mars Phoenix Lander has successfully landed in the northern polar region of Mars. Waiting on the first pictures.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I have recently discovered (and highly recommend) Liquid Tension Experiment.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Did the universe move for you? For you see, not only was John Scalzi in a coffee shop, but he was in a Starbucks and even (apparently) had some coffee!!!

See thousands of Scalzi fans rending their copies of You're Not Fooling Anybody When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop into so much pulp! See the stock price of $tarbucks climb as those thousands of fans embrace coffee again!

The paradigm, she has shifted.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Ever since William Gibson's Pattern Recognition came out, it has been impossible to purchase a Curat calculator. Now you can play with one to your heart's content, in a virtual fashion (all sorts of good stuff on the gadget can be found here).

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Related to the previous posting, I'd love to get this for my house.

Back Off I'm Doing Science.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:11 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Some nifty t-shirts for those who live in the the future (depicted in the past).

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Via Bill Fawcett...

Robert Asprin (1946-200

On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend. He is survived by his mother, his sister, his daughter and his son, and his cat, Princess, not to mention countless friends and fans and numerous legendary fictional characters. He will be greatly missed.

Asprin should have been the "American Pratchett". He wrote great humorous science fiction and fantasy. His career was impacted by the Internal Revenue Service, which took his income from solo works for a long period. With the Thieves' World series, he helped to start the shared-world anthologies that so many publishers fell in love with. The MythAdventure series and the Phule series were both great examples of humorous genre fiction.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This weekend marks the traditional "start of the summer", the "start of the driving season" and such.

It also is Memorial Day, time when we should be honoring those who served and who are currently serving.

Alas, that people in the Washington, D.C. area seem to be unable to support the troops. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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We celebrated the end of my daughter's ballet season with a meal at Fuddrucker's tonight.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One year and a few weeks after we lost a good four-legged friend, we appear to have found another. We are in the process of adopting a young female Doberman mix. Our current dog, Saffron (a 14-year old Rhodesian Ridgeback), seems to be mostly O.K., with it (if the puppy gets too rough, she lets it be known).

The strange thing is that the first dog we had as a married couple was a female Doberman mix. Her name was Java. This dog goes by Mocha.

(Cue Twilight Zone theme music...)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well, I should wrap this up. I was delayed in posting mostly because Saturday and Sunday were such hectic days that I took Monday off to try and recuperate. But that took until Tuesday. And here we are on Wednesday, and I'm still feeling the burn.

It appears (before expenses) that we did better this year than last year. Which is a Good Thing seeing that Friday turned out to be rained out and Sunday had enough rain to make the day slow. I still cooked a lot of food. I had some good volunteers working for me and some so-so volunteers.

The shuffle threw in a surprise on occasion, such as a George Harrison followed by a Beatles song, or two Brian Eno tracks in a row. Still seemed to be a preponderance of R.E.M. tracks. Considering that there are multiple days worth of music on the iPod, and some groups have significantly more tracks in the current load of songs, I dont' know why it seems to "hover" around certain groups.

And the musical mix ended with... more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It's just that time of year.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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“Accuracy and diligence are much more necessary to a lawyer, than great comprehension of mind, or brilliancy of talent. His business is to refine, define, and split hairs, to look into authorities, and compare cases. A man can never gallop over the fields of law on Pegasus, nor fly across them on the wing of oratory. If he would stand on terra firma he must descend; if he would be a great lawyer, he must first consent to be only a great drudge.”
—Daniel Webster

Lifted in toto from Timothy Sandefur's Freespace.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Is it legal to murder your teenage child?

Posted by: JohnL at 08:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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