Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 166

True fact

Just now I'm reading aloud an entertaining thread on the Straight Dope message board about practicality of scavenging ammunition on a battlefield--what's entertaining are the impassioned opinions on the merits or lack thereof of the AK-47 (e.g., "The AK series does not have sloppy tolerances. It intentionally has larger clearances than are seen in the AR series ... The AK is legendarily reliable partly because its clearances make it tolerant of debris that would foul "tighter" guns ... the id...

new one-shot manga from Tinsil on Tumblr

Tinsil writes,

first three pages of my short comic “black ring”

it’s about two kids making friends

anyway you can read the rest HERE

(link is to Dropbox; you can read it there or download it--28-page PDF)




If you're on Tumblr, consider giving it a reblog (Tumblr entry is here )

A Tale of Two Cities

The healing angel and I are reading A Tale of Two Cities together in the best possible way: we're taking turns reading chapters out aloud to each other.

Oh my goodness, if you want to truly laugh at the humor, squeal at the plot twists, and be brought to tears by the romanticism, reading aloud is a must. Now, some of the sentences are quite long and intricate. Sometimes we both get tangled up and have to start over. And yet, when read aloud, the sentences have a way of making themselves clear,...

The Case of Lauren Gray

Lauren Gray is the owner of a fictionalized life, the result of a decision she made on a day in 1973, after overhearing her mother and her nana talking about her nana’s diaries. “I’m discovering all sorts of things from your childhood and before that I simply don’t recall at all,” her nana was saying. “I’ve been reading them aloud to your father. ‘Do you remember being evacuated from a sinking ferry in 1936?’ I’ll ask him. Some things he remembers, others are news to him too. It’s almost like...

blue rails, speaking in bullets

I walked home between the railroad tracks, and right beside me they were brilliant blue, though further ahead they were shining silver-white. My eyes playing tricks? No, that blue was a gift from the bright, clear sky to the rails. Here, wear this, just for the moment And the rails obliged.

I read an excellent (if dark) poem over at Strange Horizons, "Jael," by Nancy Hightower. I traveled over to her website to tell her I'd enjoyed it, and found her biography, which started with some bulleted...

put the documents in the shredder head on next time

My kindly father gave wakanomori the present of periodic delivery of bags of coffee. One came the other day, packed in shredded paper. Nice and ecological!

Except glancing at the shreds, Waka noticed they were actually financial documents--pay stubs and such--the sorts of things you shred so that unscrupulous people don't use them to find out, oh, say, social security numbers and the like.

Oops.

I've blotted out the people's surnames, but as you can see, very identifying information, along with...

Where you gonna run to?

Warning: Politics

Perhaps you’ve heard about the 2010 Department of Justice white paper detailing a legal rationale for the overseas killing, “by drone strikes and other means,”1 of American citizens who are “senior operational leader[s] of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida.”2

“All you need to know in order to understand the memo is that Obama administration lawyers have enthusiastically endorsed the once-vilified Bush administration decision to classify security operations against...

Fruitful Hands

fruitful hands: the gardener brings all things to life.



Photo taken by Matsumura Yuriko (on Twitter as @yukoshka) and retweeted by the Japanese tanka poet Tawara Machi

Matsumura Yuriko set aside her gloves, thinking she'd wash them later, and when she came back to them, she discovered that numerous tiny seeds had sprouted. "I'd better hurry up and wash those gloves," she wrote. "No: if anything, let them bloom," Tawara Machi urged.

Owl Snow

A little wedge of land, thrusting thornlike from the other world into the flesh of this land of hours and days, a wedge moreover, with very porous boundaries, such that humans will keep wandering in--troublesome creatures, with their deeds and plans and surveyor's instruments!

Owls rule that wedge of land, and they have found the most effective remedy for these intruders to be snow. Not dry, sharp, ice-crystal snow, which hisses as it falls, or sleet, which crackles, but soft, wet, silent snow...

Coyote, LimeRed Teahouse, and Fox

Coyote
"I was driving home last night," wakanomori said this morning, "and I saw a form cross the road. It was big!"

"Was it a raccoon?" I asked, remembering a lovely story queenoftheskies told about a raccoon couple.

"No... it was a coyote," he said. "It crossed the road ahead of me, then turned to watch me as I drove by. I ended up craning my neck behind me to get a better look, and then remembered I was driving and turned back round again. Good thing, too: I was heading for a tree."

"That wasn...