Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 12

La Chimera

mallorys_camera put me onto La Chimera, the story of a haunted English archaeologist working with a gang of small-time Italian tomb robbers (tombaroli), digging up Etruscan artifacts and selling them to Spartaco, an mysterious black-market art dealer. It was so moving--I saw it alone first (but not quite alone: I took the photo I have on my desk of Lloyd Alexander and showed him the last few minutes of it, because I knew, knew, knew that he would understand and love the ending ). Then I got wak...

the carefree cowbird

amaebi has been posting extremely entertaining excerpts from Garden Birds of Britain and North-West Europe, by Dominic Couzens and Carl Bovis--fun in the way the descriptions of the various birds makes you think about people (but at the same time is very illuminating about the birds).

It got me thinking about the brown-headed cowbird. I spent a pleasant afternoon with a female brown-headed cowbird a few years back. She was hunting around in the grass for seeds and insects, and I was mowing the gr...

story news; the babies and the 18-wheeler

story news
I don't generally like to share news like this ahead of time because I'm afraid of jinxing it, but after a hiatus of two years I should have a longish short story coming out in a venue I won't name yet (again, the jinxing thing). I guess this time I'm risking the jinx because it's just been so long! And I'm very excited to share this story with the world.

It's called "Semper Vivens," but when I was writing it, I called it my Amazon Annihilation story. Not because it's about annihilating...

Mr. de Cordova and the plate of cookies

I know some of my eastern Massachusetts dwelling friends and readers know about the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a thirty-acre sculpture park and a museum building with towers that wear conical roofs like a small castle. I recall going there as a very small child.

It turns out my father went there as a very small child, too, back when it was just the house of Mr. de Cordova.

"I remember old Mr. de Cordova came out with a plate of cookies for me and your uncle," he recalled.

I looked up M...

tacü ni ñea? what's this?

My tutor Francy was out of touch for a while because she and her parents were visiting her husband's family upriver in Peru. She got back yesterday and sent me so many lovely photos and videos, including these. What are the blotches of color in the photo? They look like a weird sun artifact, or something added in in post production, but they're not: they're butterflies, green, yellow, and blue.

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Here's a six-second video she took.



Magic.

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The Navigating Fox: A Review

In the Empire, both in its home territories, centered on the Eternal City, and in its far-flung colonies, such as Aquacolonia, the port city across wide Oceanus on the continent to the west, some animals are Knowledgeable—meaning they can speak as humans do—and some are not.

Quintus Shu’al is a Knowledgeable fox. In fact, he is the only Knowledgeable fox. Knowledgeable animals are made, not born, and Quintus was awakened on the Silver Roads, special routes like ley lines that allow for non-Euclid...

A bag and a tinier bag

You know the cloth bags you can get that come with an attached tiny sack that you can stuff them into? ( ChicoBags are one manufacturer--that's what I have.)

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(When you're using it as a bag, you turn it the other way out so the attached pouch doesn't show.)

The other day I was using mine, and the guy who was putting my stuff in my bag for me seemed especially interested in that little attached pouch.

"Clever, isn't it," I said. "It means the bag folds up really small for you to carry it."

"It's also ...

How much solar eclipse are you getting today, North America?

This cool tool from NASA tells you how close to total your view of today's solar eclipse will be. I'm quite pleased with my 93.8 percent, in some seven hours and change!

https://eclipse-explorer.smce.nasa.gov

I just looked RIGHT AT THE SUN (for practice) using my official NSF glasses (given away at my public library--apparently many libraries were doing this), and I am happy to report they WORK and I'm not blind, and the sun through them, right now, is a lovely orange ball.

(comments turned off--ju...

Encontro das Águas

The meeting of the waters is where the Rio Negro joins the Amazon--or, as Brazilians name the upper portion of it, the Rio Solimões--at Manaus, Brazil. This happens over a thousand miles east of where I was in Leticia, Colombia. In other words, the broad, broad waters I experienced were the Rio Solimões/upper Amazon before the Rio Negro adds its waters in.

This vasty vastness is what you get where they join. For perspective, look at the size of that boat in the first few seconds (the whole video...

when you are a midnight volcano

Look at this bird that came up on Aves do Brasil:



Doesn't he look like a volcano at night, with lava just waiting to overbrim?



I feel it's such a good representation of how we all are. All our hot feelings at the top of our heads.

In English he's called a ruby-crowned tanager. His Brazilian name, tiê preto, translates as "black tiê" (and the word "tiê" comes from a Tupi word, "ti'ye," but my very cursory investigations haven't turned up what that means). It's funny that the English name looks at ...