We are safely isolating here at Castle Frostbite and doing what we do most of the time anyway, which is to cook food and eat snacks and play games. The kids have been in an online charter school for a year now, so not much has changed around here other than the fact that I…
Category: in the news.
Emerald City ComicCon update
Due to health concerns related to the current coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak, my publisher has decided to cancel their participation at Emerald City Comic Con, so I won’t be in Seattle or at ECCC next week. (Sorry if you were looking to come to panels or get a book or two signed.) In related news, we just…
Veterans and mental health
Part of what I have tried to accomplish with Frontlines is breaking out of the typical military SF mold a little bit when it comes to depicting soldier mindsets. With the sixth book in particular, I wanted to address the endless wars we tend to fight lately, and their effects on the minds of the…
peel’s principles of policing.
Sir Robert Peel, who in his tenure as Home Secretary established London’s Metropolitan Police in the early 19th century, set forth nine principles of policing. They are as follows: 1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment. 2. To recognise always that the…
news from absurdistan, item #2,912.
Fifth-grader points finger in gun-like fashion; gets suspended from school. “Level 2 Lookalike Firearm” sure sounds a whole lot less idiotic than “pointing your index finger and thumb”. Public education is on the ropes in this country not because we aren’t spending enough money on it, but because the lion’s share of it goes toward…
on dogs, chickens, and suburban sensibilities.
There’s a WaPo article in our local fish wrapper about the law regarding dogs who kill poultry. Current law allows for farmers to shoot dogs caught in the act of killing their poultry, and the article had a decidedly…oppositional slant. It tells the story of one Alan Taylor, a real estate developer who brought his…
the government shutdown diaries.
Tuesday: Day One of the government shutdown. Park rangers are furloughed. The fires from the grizzly bear riots are painting the night sky over Yellowstone bright orange. Bald eagles are ditching their tracking collars and skipping the country. WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END *** Wednesday: Day Two of the government shutdown. They have begun to…
yes, but how is his therapy going?
On court-sanctioned liberty from prison, a convicted rapist in Switzerland killed the therapist who was accompanying him to reintegration therapy, fled the country, and was eventually captured by German police just across the Polish border a few days later. Let’s see where the Swiss court system could have possibly gone wrong, and play “spot the…
at least we didn’t fit naugahyde upholstery to the thing.
So Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to officially leave the solar system and travel into interstellar space. Anyone else bothered by the fact that we sent a thing into space that contains a map to its origin planet and an open invitation? “Hi, we’re a barely space-faring civilization that you could probably conquer…
i’m all out of weiner jokes, and so is new york city.
This just in: Carlos Danger will not be the mayor of New York City. I doubt it’s going to keep him from trying to shoulder his way back to the public trough in the future. People like Weiner or Eliot Spitzer don’t really have any other qualifications or employment prospects. I mean, would you hire…