…As bad publicity. In 1946, Kirkus Reviews described Halldor Laxness’s Independent People as “A sprawling, unselective, overlong… A bleak and bitter book, with little to interest or attract the American reader.” In 1955 Laxness took home the Nobel Prize in…
Scratch!
What’s a seven-letter synonym for ‘Awesome’? Mitch Resnick and MIT’s Scratch. 37 million projects can’t be wrong. Yeah. You read that right. That’s Thirty-seven and six trailing zeros before the decimal. So yeah, awesome. Scratching your head? You can learn…
Consciously Adapting
This started as research for a class on Hidden Biases. Disappointingly, there was a lot of suitable background material. Most emotionally accessible to me was the 2017 breakout of the top 100 academic and technical high school students in STEM…
Novel Writing
Growing up, there were families that hosted kids, and families that didn’t. I grew up in the latter. The crowd I hung out with met at a couple of places, but most often at the home of a pair of…
Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Fans of The X-Files, of Fringe owe some of our enjoyment to the trail of conspiracy crept in the 70’s by the Night Stalker. Rotten Tomatoes gives Kolchak: The Night Stalker a solid 86%, and 97% of the often overgenerous…
Fallen Apples
Artificial Intelligence, AI, isn’t going away. It also hasn’t conquered us. Yet. It has provided a looking glass of our own flaws and prejudices and biases. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay spent a day chatting with people. The dewy-eyed innocent…
Haiku
Haiku piqued my interest on several levels. My muse loves the imagery and the syntax. The linguist in me has an intense love-hate relationship with the myriad translations. The form had a rather humble start. Japanese poets would engage in…
Butterfly Catch
The Big Move back across the pond we call the Atlantic was over. Our sole remaining Papillon, Moose, had settled into the new home. But there was something missing. Two somethings. Rocky and Gizmo. Moose has always been part of…
On Creativity
What brings out your inner muse? Okay, before we go any further, if you haven’t seen or heard or read Elizabeth Gilbert‘s amazing TedTalk on creative genius, click one of the links below. Or search on the terms. Probably the single…
Why Flash Fiction?
Seems our literary focal length has gotten shorter over the years. Novellas are back–huzzah–and we’ve seen a welcome resurgence in short fiction since at least 2013. But Flash Fiction? I love a variety of music, with lyrics being the one…