Dream A Ladle Dream Of Poo

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

So those who have been around here for a while may remember that, ever since The Event, I have had dream problems, said problems being that instead of the massively cinematic sorts of dreams I used to have, now, for the most part, I don’t remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they are sooooo boring and mundane I can hardly stand it. One of my most infamous (to me) boring dreams was one where my wife and I were sitting at an outdoor cafe. That’s it, we were just sitting there. We didn’t have food or drinks. And in the dream, I had just decided to order a scone when the owners of the cafe told us we had to leave because we hadn’t ordered anything.

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Who Was That Fast Man?

~ James Viscosi ~ 11 Comments

So recently I was watching The Flash, the standalone film about the DCU’s resident speedster:

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NextDoorBell

~ James Viscosi ~ 14 Comments

So not long ago, we realized that our doorbell had stopped working at some point; we realized this because we noticed that it was no longer lighting up the way it’s supposed to. Even in daylight, it was pretty bright:

Technically we don’t have hounds anymore, although Bean is at least a semi-hound.
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Cross-Post: Hurricane Watch

~ James Viscosi ~ 7 Comments

Since I was busy this weekend (when I usually schedule these things) battening down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Hilary*, I thought I would just share what the animals are up to this week:

Lulu: “Okay, I called this meeting because as you may have heard, we are being threatened by Hurricane Hilary … Wait, where’s Charlee?”

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Game On

~ James Viscosi ~ 5 Comments

So lately I’ve been playing a new “experimental” New York Times game on my phone, “Connections“, wherein you are supplied with a number of words. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to divide the words up into four groups of four, based on how the words are related to each other. On the results screen, your groups are displayed in the order in which you figured them out. Here is a recent example where the results, I think, sum me up pretty well.

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Teaser Tuesday: “Lock In”

~ James Viscosi ~ 8 Comments

So this week I was reading Lock In, by John Scalzi, a science fiction novel in which a global flu-like pandemic* causes millions of infected individuals to experience locked-in syndrome, where they are conscious but have no control over their bodies.

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So It’s Not Just Me Then

~ James Viscosi ~ 25 Comments

Recently I was reading a profile in The New Yorker* of the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, a contemporary of other such SF authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and Octavia Butler (who was, briefly, a student of Delany’s). Despite the fact that back in my younger days I read many, many books by authors from that era, I somehow managed never to read any of Delany’s work, although I’m quite familiar with his name. I’m going to guess that this is because our local library didn’t stock many Delany titles, since in those pre-Internet days of dead-tree books that you had to get from a bookstore, most of my reading material was of the borrowed variety. But I digress. Here’s how that New Yorker article started off:

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The Revenge of the Wal-Mart Chicken

~ James Viscosi ~ 15 Comments

Some years ago—never mind how long, precisely—while working for a lab in the small city of New Hartford in central New York, it happened that I was dispatched to our location in Herkimer, also known as “the Valley”, there to do some IT stuff. In those dark times, New Hartford had no Wal-Mart Super Center, but the Valley did; and so when my friend in the IT Department heard I was going to the Valley, he entreated me to pick him up a bag of “Wal-Mart Chicken” for lunch. Being the accommodating type, I readily assented; and so I did go down into the Valley, and I did do the IT stuff, and then I did head off to the Wal-Mart Super Center to get the Wal-Mart Chicken. Not being a regular Wal-Mart shopper, I did not know where to find said chicken. All this time later, I can’t recall exactly how it happened—bad advice from a store employee? Random wandering?—but I ended up in the frozen foods section, where, lo! There were bags of frozen chicken bearing the Wal-Mart name. And so I bought a bag of the frozen chicken and returned to New Hartford in triumph. Or did I? For as I entered the IT Department with the bag from Wal-Mart, my friend did make note:

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Neither A Review Of “Quantumania” Nor “Ambulance”

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

So if you live here in the U.S., or you just know stuff, then you are likely aware that we recently celebrated Independence Day. This typically involves things that go boom, i.e., fireworks, ranging from people setting off firecrackers in the street to window-rattling municipal displays. Oh, and also, frightened pets.

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Teaser Tuesday: “Perhaps the Stars”

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So this week I was reading Perhaps the Stars, the final book of “Terra Ignota”:

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
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