Tales from the Raven

Here’s a love poem, for you.  If you’re the kind of guy who usually sweeps your girl with a fancy dress event, a dimly lit but classy dinner, and maybe something exotic to the taste or delicately blooming, you can take a few suggestions from this fellow and really open her eyes.

I’m working on my Raven assassin story again this week, and have spent some time fleshing out the world.  This is no chore, since I’d rather build worlds than, say, bake cookies or play at the beach. But there’s more to world building than stacking up little rows of bucket-shaped sand.  It’s not enough to [...]

I wish I had a picture to post with this, but we didn’t quite catch the moment… Anyway, today at the Renaissance Festival there was a place of ‘vegetable justice’, in which a guy hung his head and hands out of holes in a board wall, as if he was in the stocks.  Then for [...]

So what’s the oldest-latest scheme for making money?  The art of Necropants, as detailed in the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft.  I’ll let you read it from the source, but be warned that it involves wearing a dead man’s skin as pants. Besides being the funniest scheme I’ve ever come across, it also reminding me that [...]

I’ve been enjoying the fluff and stuff hitting the fan over the SFWA vs. Cory Doctorow showdown.  I’m aware that my finding the whole thing amusing is probably unkind, just as my quietly laughing when I whiz by people stuck in traffic, while I take the commuter lane, is undoubtably small-minded of me. I’ll try [...]

Guess how much this Louis Vuitton purse is selling for. Guess higher. And the really crazy thing?  At just over $52,000, it’s by no means the most expensive purse out there, and has an embarrassing lack of diamonds. This is proof positive that insanity roams freely, and is smiling out from under those sunglasses.

I put out an antenae for weirdness tonight and came up with a couple of oddities. This article on the secret eye of your cell phone I picked up at LiveScience.com.  The fashion application of this puts me in mind of the Disco Light shirts I mentioned on a previous blog. I part of my [...]

Like any item of great import, the alarm clock has a few rules for proper handling, the code by which this wondrous and terrible tool can be used. First in importance, place the alarm clock on a stand at least four feet from the bed.  This crucial space will prevent the tool from being abused by repeated [...]

Next time your laundry is overflowing with the stinky sock smell and company shows up, just tell them you have a new orchid in your collection.  Maybe they’ll find a flower that smells like spoiled leftovers soon!

Check out this terrific slushpile bonfire.  Someday I want to be there, roasting a marshmallow on a very long stick.  And if by some twist of bad writing a manuscript of mine is on the pile, I promise to laugh my head off.  Let it be purged.