Benjamin Wallace's Blog, page 7
February 11, 2020
Bear the Dog in the Woods
Bear the Dog is not the fiercest of beasts. She’s half Mastiff, half Lab and at least 30% coward. She is afraid of luggage—especially wheeled luggage—backpacks and packages. Therefore, she hates anyone that brings these to our door. Amazon, UPS and the post office all get an earful of ferocious barking for their attempts. She’s […]
30 New Curses
I’m a little behind the news, I guess, but it looks like they discovered 30 sarcophagi near Luxor—not the casino—back in October. They were untouched, perfectly preserved, and, just like a bunch of predictable B-Movie archeologists, they opened ‘em right up. So, I guess we can look forward to 29 new curses this year. The […]
February 8, 2020
February 4, 2020
12 Quick Book Reviews
In the past couple of days, I’ve hiked several miles and been to the gym twice. In that time I’ve also listened to 12 books on this Blinkist thing. That is non-fiction books condensed to 15 -20 audiobooks. I’m really enjoying it. Even when I hit a bad book, it’s not like I’ve wasted a […]
January 28, 2020
6 Miles 5 Books*
I realize I focus mostly on fiction here, but I do enjoy non-fiction books from time to time. More importantly, I know I need to be reading them for a whole lot of reasons. I usually find myself skimming them and I often find them redundant in an effort to fill pages. So I was […]
January 27, 2020
Mad Science and Booze
I’ve never read any of Henry Kuttner’s work before. I didn’t even know about him until recently. His stuff is available as ebooks so he’s hardly one lost to history. But reading what other sci-fi legends have to say about him—I am Legend is dedicated to him with thanks for help encouragement—his relative obscurity seems […]
January 17, 2020
The Man in the Arena
In my experience, not only has the critic done little to enter the arena, the critic hasn’t even read the book. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, but for anyone that dares do anything in front of others, it’s worth rereading from time to time. It is not the critic who counts; not the man […]
January 16, 2020
My favorite acronym
“And why not?” Hiro raised his voice to match the team’s leader. “Bulk’s got nipple missiles.” Val slammed a fist into the table. “That’s not what we call them and you know it! Those are the Nimbus Intercept Plasma Pulse Laser Explosive Systems!” “That spells NIPPLES!” -Hiro and the team in Goliath’s […]
January 14, 2020
This nap brought to you by the Shaw Brothers
One thing I’ve missed since cutting the cable was crappy Sunday afternoon movies. Netflix and the other streaming services are full of crappy movies, sure, but not high quality crappy that rises to the standard of UHF broadcast filled with carpet cleaning offers and ITT Tech ads. Until now. The last month or so, Netflix […]
January 13, 2020
The park of the future (ca. 1979)
Crichton did it first. As far as I can tell, Westworld was the original fantasy theme park gone awry story. He cemented his claim to the genre 17 years later with Jurassic Park. But Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes seems to be the first book where there’s trouble in a high tech […]
