Richard Dansky's Blog, page 36

LaGuardia

LGA is an airport. It is not a mall that happens to have planes stop by every so often. It is not an "experience of travel". It is a place where people get off planes, they wait around for a while, and they get on other planes. It is a throwback, a relic, a dinosaur. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Parsec Award Judging

It's always nice to be in good company.

Spotted in the Metro This Morning

A homeless man camped out underneath a poster for The Last Exorcism. The poses of the woman in the poster and the man in the corridor were eerily similar; the contrast of the juxtaposition striking

He: sitting in the corner, clothing disheveled and obviously oft-worn.
She: On the poster, a pretty young thing artfully made into what pretty people think is ugly, carefully stuffed into imitation clothing like the common folk wear, posed and prodded and photographed and retouched and all with money...

Thunderstorms at LaGuardia

They kept us on the runway for an hour or so, waiting for the squall line to the northwest to break up or pass by so we could make our way to Toronto. The heading is called Gail, or perhaps that's the flightline - the gentleman from the fight crew was cheerful and chatty and a bit random in the tidbits he shared with us. Every so often we'd get an update as to the amorphous nature of the delay, and you'd see a few of my fellow passengers looking longingly at the drink cart.


I mostly read my bo...

New Review over at Fantasy

Kage Baker's A Bird of the River - reviewed here for your perusal and pleasure. Or something to that effect.

Deathberry Sorbet

How to make:
Buy a pint of blackberries.
Buy a pint of blueberries.
Realize you haven't eaten either and you're about to go out of town.
Make sorbet with all remaining blackberries and blueberries, plus a shot of Gran Marnier. Go light on the sugar but heavy on the lime juice.
Sorbeticize.
Watch light actually start to bend in the vicinity of your freezer from the sorbet's intensity.

Note: Do not try this at home. I am a professional. Actually, I'm not, but trust me. This one is dangerous.

Things I Learned On Vacation In the Pacific Northwest

The ones I can speak of publicly, anyway:
The most dangerous part of Mt. Rainier is not the crater, nor the glaciers, nor the steep paths, nor the razor-edged cliffs. It is the parking lot.No human being alive needs 22 ounces of cake at one sitting.Any restaurant where the chef mentioning the words "duck fat" to the room brings a round of applause is worth going back to.The flotation suits they give you on zodiac-bound "nature tours" of Vancouver Harbor are not sized for people of hobbity...

The State of Things - Bull Spec Magazine Edition

Here's the link.

I'm the guy banging his shoe on the table and announcing that "we will bury literary fiction". Or something like that.

NECON

So it's 2 AM, and we're careening down the roads of North Carolina in the dark, a back seat full of books from Chizine Press and a trunk full of booze wrapped in socks, Glen Miller blaring out of the radio and a pile of Coke Zero cans big enough to hide a body in on the floor, and...

No. Back up. Not the way to start the story at all.

This year's trip up to NECON was a little different. For one thing, I didn't have to continually trim the trip down. For another, Melinda and I went together, whi...

Bull Spec on WUNC's The State of Things

I'll let Sam say it:

Tune into WUNC's "The State of Things" on Wednesday July 21! Fans of Bull Spec or whomever else, tune into WUNC's "The State of Things" on Wednesday, July 21st at noon! Guests will include Bull Spec's Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, NCSU professor and award-winning author John Kessel, game designer and author Richard Dansky, and maybe more. Don't miss it! We'll be talking speculative fiction, NASFiC/ReConStruction...