Richard Dansky's Blog, page 50

Honk Honk

For my Winter Holiday Of Your Choice present, Melinda is going to get my clarinet overhauled. (Yes, I know it's February. Her present hasn't arrived yet, either. It's one of the nice things about my marriage; we don't really sweat stuff like that.) The last time I took ye olde licorice stick out in anger was 2001; the last time I played regularly was my first year in Boston. If I really want to make my friend Rob Harper-Mangels feel bad, I could say that the start of the decline in my playing...

I need to start getting more sleep

Spent last night dreaming I was watching a martial arts movie starring an angry chicken. Working title? Ong-Braaaawwwk.

Incoming Writing!

Because last night's post on my schedule got me thinking about it, I've also got a passel o' writing hitting the shelves in the reasonably near future. Consider:

Dark Faith , a horror anthology edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon, includes my story "The Mad Eyes of the Heron King". It's also got stories from luminaries like Gary Braunbeck, Brian Keene, Jay Lake, Wrath James White and more, not to mention J.C. Hay, Lucien Soulban, Chesya Burke, and many other cool folk. Dark Faith hits M...

Ice Ice Sorbet-by

Right. Grapefruit sorbet, now perfected. The keys:

1-Use grapefruits (3) smaller than Roger Clemens' post-roidal head. This helps keeps the proportions straight and the ice cream maker from overflowing.
2-1 cup sugar to 3/4 cup water for the syrup. Add another 1/4 cup sugar into the syrup/grapefruit juice mixture before you freeze it.
3-Once the sorbet firms up, you have two choices. Either serve it immediately or get it into the freezer, fast. The benefit to serving it fast is that it's a very ...

Business

So I took a look at my calendar and realized that next week starts the annual spring chaos. Namely:

February 17th I'll be on a panel at the CHAT conference at UNC, over in lovely Chapel Hill.
February 24th I'll be appearing as part of a panel for Communication Week at NCSU. Go Pack! (Also: Herb's gotta go!)
The week of March 8-13, I'll be at GDC in San Francisco doing my annual Game Writers' Round Table (and possibly something else)
April 6 is the street date for the lovely paperback edition of ...

The Kage Baker Memorial Edition of Green Man Review

Here.

The Seafarer

Saw the Burning Coal Theater production of Connor McPherson's The Seafarer last night with Melinda and numerous friends (including the production's sound designer, the mighty Steve Burnett). The short version is simple: excellent production of a very good play, and I didn't even have to dig out my copy of The Complete Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Penguin Edition) from senior year at Wesleyan to figure out what the heck was going on. Consider it highly recommended. Just be prepared, if you go, for swea...

BBC to Auction Off Various Dr. Who Bits

Seriously. Who doesn't want one of these bad boys in the living room?

"Honey, the cat just peed on the floor again."

"I'll go get the Dalek."

"Mwraor?"

"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"

Random Synapse Firing

For no reason that I can think of, I find myself thinking of a dinner I had in Paris. It was maybe 5 years ago, late summer along the Champs-Elysees. The restaurant was a tourist trap, or at least a tourist delayer an Ichiro relay away from the Arc de Triomphe. There was two-level seating, with the upstairs accessible through two narrow staircases at either end of the l-shaped floor. I was seated upstairs, in the back and near a corner. It made sense, as I was eating alone, and there were lar...

Brilliant Television Ideas Nobody's Thought of

We have Man Vs. Wild (man wins)
We have Man Vs. Food (we all lose)

Clearly...we need Food vs. Wild. I would personally pay good money to watch, say, a Burmese rock python try to choke down six pounds of blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon.