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Monthly Archives: November 2016

Adult relationships and the ring system

The irrepressible exuberance of Celtic (and human) eros One of the purposes of imagination is to look at the world the way it is and then to ask ourselves: How might the world be otherwise? Science fiction does this in a systematic way. Often science fiction imagines a future world. Sometimes that future world is […]

Damned by their own salvation

I wanted to post a link to this brilliant piece from Alternet, “An Insider’s View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America.” This piece is going viral among “educated elites” who understand the self-defeating stupidity of rural America (mostly because that’s where we happened to be born). “In deep-red white America, the white Christian God […]

Rediscovering the black pot

I bought the black pot three or four years ago, hoping that it would serve as a substitute for a steam oven for making proper artisan bread. I found it to be worthless for that purpose, so into the pantry closet it went, and it sat there unused. (A Cuisinart steam oven, by the way, […]

It’s always something

The guilty capacitor I can tell from the reader logs for this blog that y’all are preoccupied with the political situation, as am I. But please bear with me as I try to get oriented to the terrifying new political reality and distract myself with things that are closer to home and relatively unimportant. For […]

Up comes the drawbridge

My plan all along, regardless of the outcome of the election, was to pull up the abbey’s drawbridge the day after the election and go into literary mode. I’ll start writing Symphony in Ursa Major, book 3 of the Ursa Major series. Ken is here for the winter. He has a contract for his third […]

Nightmare? We’re just getting started.

Before I vent, let’s try to do some calculus on how life in America is going to change. We’ve known for years what right-wing radicals and the Republican Party want to do, so much of this exercise is obvious and easy. The social safety net: • They’ve promised to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Twenty […]