Diane Duane

Something worth noticing.

European national railways [are creating] an international partnership modelled after the Star Alliance airline network to compete with the discount airlines. According to the paper, the railways from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium along with the British train operator Eurostar are planning to kick off their partnership in December.

The group, which is referred to internally as "Railteam," plans to offer the equivalent to Star Alliance frequent-flyer miles, a program that German rail company Deutsche Bahn already offers its customers. Other perks will include seamless connections at stations, through ticketing and fares, accessible information on booking and journey information, and on-train Internet access, a press release from Eurostar says.

Yay!

Lou Romano has a blog.

Wow!

 Just down from space: Nasa's paired solar imaging satellites (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, or STEREO; what a bunch of wiseacres they are over there) have sent back the first 3-D images and movies of the Sun. Yum yum.

(Some of these might be better with the red/green glasses, but they work OK for me. Especially the videos -- the depth / 3D effect is really impressive.)

I'm in the middle of crazed work on about five different things at the moment, but sometimes you come across something so cool that it has to be shared immediately.

An animation of the Bayeux Tapestry: at YouTube

(courtesy of The Classical Bookworm)

As only he can.

For an organization that exists (purportedly) to "honor" the craft and profession of cooking, the Beard Foundation continues to send a message of continued cluelessness and disregard.  With their most recent startegic masterstroke, they have, yet again, sent the message, "We like famous chefs just fine--especially if we're handing 'em the Cuisinart/Vulcan/Fiji Water Humanitarian Award--but who are these nasty 'cook' creatures we keep hearing rumors of?" 

And so much more, expressed in the splendid patented BourdainRudeSpeak. Go Tony!!

A tremendous film talent lost.

Tuesday was usually family night for film director Bob Clark — best known for "A Christmas Story" and the "Porky's" movies — and his grown sons, Ariel and Michael.

Ariel, 22, who had been studying music composition at Santa Monica College and was a part-time card dealer at a casino, would typically join his father and brother at the condo they rented in Pacific Palisades. They were night owls, said Lyne Leavy, who headed Clark's production company, Film Classic Productions.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Bob, 67, and Ariel headed out; it's unclear whether they were going to get something to eat or driving to Ariel's Santa Monica apartment.

They had just driven a few blocks and were heading south on Pacific Coast Highway near the Bel-Air Bay Club at about 2:20 a.m. when a GMC Yukon swerved across the lane, striking their Infiniti Q-30 sedan head-on. Father and son were pronounced dead at the scene.

Dammit.

Harcourt Trade Publishers will be releasing the mass-market paperback edition of Wizards at War on June 1, 2007.

Amazon.com has now made the book available for pre-order. You can pre-order your copy using this link (or by clicking on the image to the right.)

What's it all about?

After returning from a hectic wizardly holiday, Nita and Kit are looking forward to returning to their everyday routine. But there doesn't seem much hope of that what with three other wizards living in Nita's basement, her sister Dairine's computer muttering peculiar prophecies, and Kit's increasingly magical dog Ponch behaving more strangely every day.

And there's far worse trouble brewing. A strange darkness of the mind and heart is about to fall over the older wizards of the world, stealing away their power. Soon the young wizards of Earth and many other planets must defend the people of their worlds -- wizards and non-wizards alike -- against an invasion of a kind they've never imagined.

But mere defense won't combat the evil afoot. In company with their human and alien teammates, Kit, Nita, and Dairine must race to search worlds both known and unknown for the secret weapon that the Powers that Be have promised them - before the minions of the Lone Power find it first.

And then, for the first time in millennia, the wizards must go to war...

 

The Once and Future Republic of Vermont

...most likely because it's spring, and beekeepers are starting to discover empty hives...

"Crops -- and our wallets -- may get stung by bee problems"

(Funny how we don't notice till it's our wallets that get stung.)

About one-third of U.S. food depends on animal-borne pollination, and 80% of that is conducted by commercial honey bees. Among the huge range of crops pollinated by the bees are apples, oranges, avocadoes, almonds, carrots and celery -- just to name a few. The Agriculture Department pegs the value of crops pollinated by bees at a whopping $14 billion.

One big cause of trouble over recent years has been the rapid growth and spread of the "vampire" bee mite Varroa destructor. But another, as serious -- if not more so -- and much to the fore this year, is "colony collapse disorder": something causes worker bees to leave their hives and not come back. For a creature built to live cooperatively in a hive structure, this is obviously not a survival-oriented behavior.

[CCD] has swept through 22 states and into Canada, and some beekeepers have lost as much as 90 percent of their hives.

Most threatened are crops -- including Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, Texas cotton, North Carolina melons and many others -- that depend on domesticated bees for most of their pollination.

"This could, indeed, be the 'perfect storm' for pollination services," said Caird Rexroad, associate administrator of the Agricultural Research Service. "With invasive pests and diseases of bees increasing over the last two decades, we may have now reached a tipping point where the bee colony can no longer fight back."

The problem is all over Europe as well. Myself, I'm going to start looking into whether there's a queen breeder in Ireland. Time to start some hives going... since, as one story points out, it's likely that the work of the bees is involved in one out of every three bites of food we eat.

From a poster called "HumanEnhancement" at AintItCoolNews.com:

Peter David... royally screwed up those "Star Trek" novels he wrote, much like his wife Diane Duane. (snort)

(snort) (ROTFL)

Peter was amused. ...So was I.

(And I'll be even more amused after I get all this tea cleaned out of the keyboard.)

 

Revived Ninja Turtles Defeat Spartans At Thermopylae

Folks,

The two Peter Morwood "Horse Lords" prequels, The Clan Wars, Book One: Greylady and The Clan Wars, Book Two: Widowmaker, are now both available to be ordered online in print and e-book versions. These novels are set during the foundation of the land of Alba by the ancestors of Aldric Talvalin, and delve into the genesis of the uneasy legacy of blood and sorcery they bequeathed him.

More information about each book is available at their individual pages at PeterMorwood.com:

Greylady | Widowmaker
You can order both print and e-book versions of the books at those pages. Or you can go to the order page at Lulu.com:

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=566270

...It's super to be able to make these available again after more than a decade out of print:  the two of them are among the most sought-after of all of Peter's books.

Enjoy!

Normally I stay out of the political mode online, but there are days that make even me willing to break over for a few moments.

I look at this picture and I really, really keep expecting to hear --

ROD SERLING (V.O.)
Imagine if you will...

What a day.

Possibly my favorite of the Amstel ads that have been airing for a while. (This one was shot in 16:9, so you may find it looking a little squeezed. Sorry about that.)

Before the Flood...

(A few dialogue / dialect notes: 

"I'm waitin' on yer man": "Yer man" used colloquially is "That fella/guy," "this/that person here/over there." Cf. the famous poem about "A pint of plain is your only man."

"It's lashing out there":  It's "lashing down rain":  pouring, coming down really hard.

"He's after leaving these yokes!"  "He's after...":  the idiom translates an Irish-language verb phrasing that with "leaving" equals, in this case, "He's left / just left ..."  "Yoke" is Irish slang for some unnamed or unspecified object. The closest US translation would probably be "these guys".)

...A different take on the concept. (Click on the image for a larger version)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody!

I roared. An oldie-but-goodie from The Onion:

"Mary Gaughan, my mother's father's mother's mother, was from a tiny village called Ballydesmond," said the brown-eyed, brown-haired Kroeger, who is half German, one-quarter Swedish, one-eighth Dutch, one-sixteenth Belgian, and one-sixteenth Irish. "She married a sailor who was traveling from Rotterdam to America, and they settled in Milwaukee. Ever since, my family's been proud to be Irish."

...Meanwhile, I see that RTÉ is going live online with the Dublin St. Patrick's Day Festival / Parade, for those of you who might be interested in watching.

Enjoy the Day That's In It, everybody!

 

I should have mentioned this earlier, but it's been busy...

We've been doing an Irish recipe festival over at EuropeanCuisines.com: a new traditional Irish recipe every day until March 17th. If you're looking for something to make for the upcoming holiday, stop by and see if there's something that suits you. (Check the top of the left-hand column: the day-by-day list is there.)

Also, the rant about corned beef and cabbage not being the Irish national dish at all now has its own home over there, so I can stop posting about it here every year. 

Now back to work...

 

Damp-squid declaration by Hagel sums up Republican woes

(snort)

 

While working on something else, I just caught a teaser on Euronews about this exhibition marking the reopening of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

I'm a sucker for antique porcelain, and this stuff is sublime.

(BTW, Gung hei fat choi, everybody. It's the Year of the Fire Pig, which is supposed to be good for us Dragons. We'll find out...)

But only because it's too late for us to endanger mammoths much.

Fossilized mammoth ivory scrimshawed bracelets, $800 each.