Matt Ruff's Blog, page 54

Lollipop guild flag at half-staff

Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin coroner in The Wizard of Oz, and also served as an aviator during World War II, is dead at 94.

Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing

A reminder for those of you in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, I will be appearing next week at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. My scheduled events are as follows:

Thursday, April 15, 10:30 a.m. -- Reading and Q&A

3:15 p.m. -- A talk entitled "An Interesting Moral Education, or How I Learned to Lie for a Living"

Friday, April 16, 2:00 p.m. -- "Interior Landscapes: Kathryn Davis and Matt Ruff in conversation"

3:00 p.m. -- Book signing

Locations for all of the above are still being ...

Sulu and spouse

They are awfully cute together [via Andrew Sullivan]:

Nothing to say + deadline =

David Brooks asks whether winning an Oscar but finding out your husband is unfaithful is a reasonable "trade," then rambles like Andy Rooney for another 750 words.

What to buy with all that money you'll be saving on health care now

It's called the JetLev. It's a water jetpack -- the thruster unit is connect to a trailing "boat unit" that sucks up water and pumps it through a flexible hose (which doubles as a tether to keep you from flying too high):



Price tag: Between 115,000 and 129,000 Euros. Top speed: 22 mph. It's got a roughly 30-mile range, looks like, so despite the manufacturer's statement that "jetpacks are not practical for commuting," seems like it'd be perfect for round trips between Seattle and Bellevue or o...

A reminder that the Matt Ruff author web site has moved

The transition to my new web host is complete, and AT&T has shut down the old site and email address. Google, Bing, and the other web search sites have yet to catch on to this, so in the meantime, if you are looking for me, go here:

www.bymattruff.com

...and if you've got any links to the old site, please update them.

LOLcats, meet LOLkim

MightyGodKing creates a new genre [via Andrew Sullivan]:





More here.

New web host, new email address

FYI, the AT&T Worldnet service I've used for the past twelve years is shutting down this month, so I'm moving to a new web hosting service. My web domain remains the same -- www.bymattruff.com -- but because I'm no longer using web forwarding, links to specific pages will have a different URL than they did before. Specifically, if you've got a link to my site that begins "http://home.att.net/~storytellers", you'll need to change that part of the address to "http://www.bymattruff.com".



My email...

Yes, says Wikipedia, dreams *do* come true

So in the course of researching a plot-point, I discovered that Wikipedia has an entry titled "Reproduction and pregnancy in speculative fiction," which opens with the following (emphasis added):

Because speculative genres explore variants of reproduction, as well as possible futures, SF writers have often explored the social, political, technological, and biological consequences of pregnancy and reproduction. However many SF writers have used their dreams for their inspiration, and dreams...

In praise of trans-Neptunian objects

Lisa and I caught The Pluto Files last night on NOVA, and we are in agreement that "dwarf planet" is a nice compromise term for Pluto and other similar trans-Neptunian objects.

I also think the stained-glass window memorializing Pluto's discoverer Clyde Tombaugh (in a Universalist church, natch) is pretty cool.

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