July 24, 2008
Just stumbled across a reference to this at Lou Romano’s weblog —
TotoroForestProject.com
Totoro Forest Project is an international charity effort to save Sayama Forest, also known as Totoro Forest. This endangered sanctuary on the outskirts of Tokyo is where director Hayao Miyazaki got the inspiration for his much-loved character “Totoro”.
Over 200 top international artists from animation, illustration and comics are donating artwork especially created for this cause. Find out more about the auction event, preview the incredible art collection, and please consider supporting the Totoro Forest Project with your generous contribution.
Posted in Cartoons, Comics, Current events, Fantasy and science fiction, Film and TV, Graphic and plastic arts 
No Comments »
July 24, 2008
There’s been no mention of this on the blog recently, so I thought I’d drop in a note about it now: I’ll be the Guest of Honor at StoCon ‘08 from the 1st through the 3rd of August. The convention venue is the Kulturhuset in Skarpnäck, a suburb of Stockholm (you can get there easily on the Metro: it’s about a 20–minute ride). If any of you are located locally, it’d be super to see you!
This is going to be a lot of fun, as while I’ve been to a lot of other cities in Europe, I’ve never yet made it up to any part of Scandinavia — and it’ll be super to be able to be there in the summertime.
(For those of Peter’s Swedish fans who might be wondering — unfortunately he won’t be able to make it: he presently has a work commitment that will be keeping him home.)
Here’s a Google map of where the convention will be.
View Larger Map
Tags: Stockholm, Sweden, convention, science+fiction, fantasy, media, Star+Trek, Diane+Duane
Posted in Conventions, Fantasy and science fiction, Media, Travel No Comments »
July 24, 2008
We’ve been idly looking for something to replace our old rusty hibachi. This looks like a nice possibility. It’s British (but the sales source is in the US: must see who’s carrying it locally).
The grilles both swing in and out and are height-adjustable (with the big one, the swing facility this means you can add charcoal or wood chips or whatever without fuss). The ash box underneath has a handle and pulls off for emptying. The chopping board is bamboo. Behind it you can see the utensil hooks.
Very neat!
Tags: BBQ, barbecue, grill, grille, swinging
Posted in Food, restaurants and cooking, Home life 1 Comment »
July 23, 2008
For those (Twitterers & others) who were inquiring — the recipe is over here at The Foppish Baker. If I want crumpets, I have to make them myself: the local supermarket doesn’t carry them. This is okay, though, because there’s no way a store-bought crumpet can compare with one just baked.
There are a lot of crumpet recipes out there that don’t work. Either the batters come out too thick — so the bubbles can’t break and leave the necessary holes on top — or they’re too sloppy, and the bubbles either come out too small to let the melted butter in, or break too soon, so that again you wind up with a “blind” bake with no holes. This batter works perfectly, though.
My only alteration to this recipe: I add two packages of yeast instead of one. It seems to improve the flavor. Also, you don’t really need the two kinds of flour for this recipe — they’re preferable, but not absolutely necessary. Just make sure you beat the batter the full two minutes the first time. You want to make sure the gluten develops enough.
BTW, there’s no need for special crumpet rings: I use regular-size tuna cans with the tops and bottoms taken off (we have one of those can openers that mills the edges smooth). Butter them well inside between each batch. It’s pretty easy to use a flat knife to knock the rings up and off the crumpets as soon as the outsides are solid: that way you can set them aside to cool so you can handle them as soon as the crumpets in the pan or on the griddle or bakestone are done. (Yeah, there’s a crumpet recipe on that page. It’s not as good as the Foppish Baker one: I’m going to replace it. The English muffin recipe, though, is terrific.)
When you toast these, do it under the grill / broiler, or in a toaster oven that lets you do just one side. Then… the butter.
NOM NOM NOM NOM. 
Tags: crumpet, bread, toast, bakestone, home+baking, butter, griddle
Posted in Food, restaurants and cooking, Home life, recipes No Comments »
July 22, 2008
This is fascinating stuff. Apparently Radovan Karadzic decided that to successfully elude capture, he needed to ditch his armed entourage. Having done so, he then disguised himself as a very full-bearded white-haired guy with glasses and settled down in Belgrade, renting a suburban flat under a false name, passing himself off as a practitioner of alternative medicine, even working with a local GP. He moved freely around Belgrade for no telling how long, and apparently even the people who rented the flat to him weren’t suspicious of him.
Apparently he was actually caught (while traveling on a bus) three days ago: the delay in revealing they had him may have been because the authorities were waiting for the results of DNA testing to make sure they actually had the right man.
(headshake) In the “disturbing concept” department: the disguise makes him look a little like Albus Dumbledore.
Tags: Karadzic, news, Serbia, capture
Posted in News, Politics No Comments »
July 22, 2008
Anywhere in Dublin, day or night, you’re likely to be knocked flat by people hurrying along with their heads down as they clutch their mobiles and text each other like crazy.
Now suddenly I’m can’t lose the image of people hurrying through the streets of Vegas, day and night, heads down and clutching their eDecks, gambling like crazy.
(Of course the casinos and gambling providers would need to cover the city with a WiFi cloud… but if there was enough money in it, it’d happen in a Vegas minute…)
Posted in Uncategorized No Comments »
July 21, 2008
Friends,
It’s up at last.
There are a lot of places where this notification needs to be posted, and a lot of explanations and profound apologies to be made… but for the moment it just seems best to get the news out.
Chapter Seven is now available online for subscribers: it’s linked to from the normal TBM subscriber gateway page. The same old username and password that worked for previous chapters will get you in. (If you can’t find your login info, email me and I’ll send it out to you pronto.) HTML and PDF versions are there right now — the mobile .prc versions will go up in due course, as soon as we receive the conversions.
If you’re not a subscriber, the chapter will go public on the 28th of the month. Look for the link to its gateway page in the left-hand menu at the project page at http://www.the-big-meow.com. (And for those of you who might feel inclined to subscribe, the subscription button is at the top of the left-hand column, along with info about what you get.)
Once again, I’m deeply sorry for the immense delay. I’m going back on the old one-chapter-per-three-weeks schedule: Chapter Eight will be going up in mid-August. Additionally, the book has become a couple of chapters longer in the course of being restructured — check the project schedule for the anticipated posting dates.
Thanks again, everybody, so very much, for your patience during this past crazed and difficult year. More info shortly.
Best — DD
Posted in "The Big Meow", Cats, Fantasy and science fiction, Home life, Online life, Writing 3 Comments »
December 8, 2007
As the year winds down, it seems like a good time to upgrade OOA to a newer version of WordPress so that “blogging as usual” can resume after the New Year.
With this in mind, please note that, starting now, OOA will probably be acting strangely — or may go missing entirely — until the upgrade completes some time over the upcoming week. Also, the “look and feel” may change without warning as our webmaster Lee tests out new themes.
Thanks.
Posted in Administrivia, Home life 12 Comments »
October 16, 2007
My excellent former co-writer and dear friend Michael Reaves and our old buddy Marc Scott Zicree have done something extraordinary with another mutual acquaintance and occasional dinner guest, George Takei.
Today is the last day you can vote at TV Guide’s Online Video Awards for their joint effort in the Star Trek: New Voyages series, World Enough and Time. Please have a look at this skilled labor of love… and take a moment to vote.
Posted in Star Trek and other licensed properties, Writing 1 Comment »
September 17, 2007
Now he’s gone, too, after a long, difficult illness that he never stopped fighting.
It’s some years since we saw him in Dublin. It was a pleasure to be with him, even for such a short time: he was a smart and funny guy.
We will miss you, Jim. Go well.
Posted in Fantasy and science fiction 1 Comment »
September 9, 2007
And so, to my great sorrow, passes one of the most senior, and certainly one of the most beloved, of YA fantasy writers: one of the first of us to break out, over the course of years, into worldwide fame, and to general agreement that she “wasn’t just writing kid stuff”.
She was a gifted and powerfully imaginative writer with a graceful style. Unquestionably she was an influence on me, though perhaps not in the way people might think. I read her first few books, and while in a general way I liked what she was doing, I had personal niggles about the way she was doing it. Certainly there were things about A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet that made me think, Hmmm… I’m not so sure about this. If I was going to do something of this sort, I’d do it this way (…there you have it in a phrase, the eternal/internal certainty that they have it right of writers everywhere…) – and the result, somewhat later, was So You Want to Be a Wizard.
Plainly the general similarity in themes between SYWTBAW and L’Engle’s early work has been noticed, for our books do often enough get mentioned in the same breath. It’s a development that would have astounded me if I’d known about it when I first met her. That was twenty-some years ago, when my first editor at Delacorte (where SYW… debuted) took me to a party that was being thrown by the publisher in Madeleine’s honor. We had a few moments to sit down and chat, after we were introduced, and I went into a strange sort of shock/horror after a few minutes when she said to me, “By the way, I read your new one. I liked it very much. What’s the next one about? When are we going to see it?”
The shock/horror was, I now think (a) because no new writer really expects one of the greats to say something like that to them, no matter how you may daydream about it: (b) because up until that point I had given the idea no consideration whatsoever. Srsly. If there are now eight-going-on-nine books in the Young Wizards series, I think we can all blame L’Engle, because I went home to Philly that night thinking “Hmmmm….”, and had a long, long look toward at the Great South Bay and the Atlantic past the Jersey wetlands as the Metroliner headed south. Deep Wizardry, surely, has L’Engle’s shadow lying long over it. I will very much miss the sense that the woman who cast it is still just over the horizon, still working.
..But if life, and life after, have gone the way she expected… she still is. (sigh) Take care, cousin. See you later.
Posted in Fantasy and science fiction, Writing, Young Wizards 5 Comments »
August 31, 2007
Check out this website, which specializes in nothing but the low cost airlines:
Momondo.com
If it can’t find a carrier for a route you’re interested in, it brings up a whole sheaf of other travel sites for you to search. Some of these I’d never even heard of (which is saying something).
There are also blogs associated with the site (the “wing blog” seems a little outdated, but the “wheel blog” and “bed blog” are more up to date). One interesting link that came up on the bed blog, btw: TabletHotels, “Hotels for Global Nomads”. I always like it when a site offers me hotels I’ve stayed at and loved (it just showed me, in one of the hotel images, the very table I sat at in the dining room when I was last there). Check out this one, for example, attached to a famously cool spa facility I’ve wanted to go to for a long time.
(sigh) No time right now for any kind of travel except the virtual. But it’s fun to be able to look at these things and think about when things get a little quieter, a couple of months down the line…
Posted in Note to self, Online life, Travel No Comments »
August 15, 2007
I just wanted to drop a note to thank all those of you who were so kind as to send sympathy messages to me (and to Peter) about the loss of his Mum.
We are both coping as well as we can: it’s obviously harder on him than on me… yet I’m in the strange situation that — because my own mother died so early in my life — I knew Peter’s Mum longer than I knew my own Mom. Mum was a tremendous presence, a vibrant personality, always fun to be around: it’s so, so strange not to be able to pick up the phone and call her to tell her about some weird thing that one of us heard or saw. We’re going to miss her so much.
Meanwhile, thanks again, everybody. Your support means a lot. (Thanks, also, to the kind person who sent me a six-month extension to my LJ account. That was so appreciated.)
There are many things to start doing around here that have gotten very behind. The Big Meow is particularly on my mind; chapter 7 is almost ready to go, so that’s my first priority. The month of July was supposed to be when I finished this book… but the month of July sort of evaporated in the face of inexorable events. Now I want to get the rest of that book done and get it out of here, to editorial. (Hi Keith!!) — But thanks, everybody, for your patience about this.
There is something else going on, though (as a result of urgings from our hardworking sysop Lee at the Young Wizards discussion forums). To celebrate the scheduling of A Wizard of Mars (Autumn ‘08, wheee!), the first two chapters have been installed at the Forums, and will be available to interested parties by subscription — the proceeds will go to fund upcoming Forum expansion (which we really need: the message databases are getting huge, and the overage fees are starting to smart). If you’re interested in reading this material (some 20,000 words, and a bit more than 40,000 by the time the last teaser chapter goes up in October), check here for the details on how to subscribe. (Just a note: because the subscriptions are going through the SitePay system of the Forum provider, Groupee, you have to register for the Forums before you can subscribe. But registration is free, as it’s always been.)
Meanwhile…back to work.
Posted in "The Big Meow", Home life, Young Wizards No Comments »
July 30, 2007
Peter’s Mum passed away peacefully a little after 9 AM our time.
Lost for words, for once…
Posted in Uncategorized 8 Comments »
July 24, 2007
Friends,
Peter’s mother is extremely ill with heart and kidney failure and will not survive more than a short time. With this in mind, my online activitities are going to be severely curtailed until at least the end of July. Please bear with me while we attempt to deal with our loss.
Thanks.
Posted in Home life 7 Comments »
July 17, 2007
Some of you will know approximately where we live in Ireland, so I am sorry to tell you that this story is locally germane:
Post mortems due on County Wicklow bodies
They were our neighbors. Not the kind you’re close to, perhaps (though they were close to many others), but they were the kind you’d always wave “good morning” to as you walked or biked past their property.
And now, suddenly, gone: they and their son. This is too odd, for our part of the world.
Meanwhile, I am already tired of the local media presence. You really don’t want the satellite vans double-parked down the road from you, and the people banging on your door trying to manufacture a story out of nothing.
(sigh) And I think about the family’s defensive but not deadly sheepdog, which used to run out at me when I was walking and threaten me to Stay Away From the Gate. Who feeds him, now?…
Posted in Hobbyhorses and General Ranting, Home life, Ireland, Medicine, nursing, health, Psychology / psychiatry 1 Comment »
July 17, 2007
Last night we got back from visiting Peter’s mum in the hospital up north…and it’s an understatement to say that neither of us were happy to see a woman previously so vital looking so frail, and half the time fighting for every breath.
Now this morning came a message from Peter’s sister saying that she’d been called to the hospital because Mum had taken a turn for the worse…and the consultant who’s been handling Mum’s case has said that there’s not much they can do for her now but “keep her comfortable.” This is unhappy news. I suspect we may have to go back upNorth again rather quickly: and if this happens, work and (obviously) blogging will have to take a back seat for a time. Please, everybody understand. I’ll do my best to keep you all posted as events transpire, but our internet access up there is spotty.
Any spare prayers would be very welcome right now.
Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments »
July 11, 2007
Dear folks,
Just a quick note to let you know that things are about to move into a considerably higher gear on the “Big Meow” project.
A word first about the health situation here, since it has been interfering in a big way, and some of you will want to know how things are. My gall bladder is stable at the moment, and though surgery is going to be a necessity shortly, the doctor has let me know that I should be able to keep going as I am without too much trouble for the time being. I am therefore taking the rest of the month of July off to deal with the task of finishing the book, so that it can go off for editing. (There are other circumstances affecting this, but more about those in a moment.) I want to also apologize for not having updated everyone on this situation sooner, but it kept looking like (each few days) it would be okay, and then (again each few days) something would go wrong again. I’m very sorry about this, all — I’ll work to be better about updates.
Chapter Seven is now nearly ready (after having been reworked a couple of times) and will be posted over the next few days, ideally on Friday. Other projects are all in a “quiet period” at the moment, so I should be able to get down to the business fo completing chapters Eight through Thirteen (and there may be a fourteenth — I have to see how the structure starts acting in the book’s final stages, as some new plot material has turned up that I wasn’t expecting).
The only factor likely to interfere with this is one which some of you will already know about from Peter’s blog at petermorwood.livejournal.com. His mother is in the hospital with an exascerbation of her longstanding heart trouble, and at the age of ninety, you’ll understand that we both feel our place right now is up there with her rather than down here at home. We will therefore be heading up for Belfast today, and I’m not entirely clear how long we may be up there (though right now the plan is to stay, on this visit, only until Saturday). This relocation may slow down my work somewhat, but with the laptop and the speech-to-text software with me, I should be able to keep going at a good pace. However, not being home means I will not have access to the mail server software from which the chapter-is-ready announcements come — so I’d ask everybody please to check the weblogs at the-big-meow.com and felinewizards3.blogspot.com for news as to when individual chapters will be going up. As usual, subscribers will be seeing their chapters ten days before everybody else does.
Thanks again, all. Keep an eye on the blogs starting Friday.
Best — Diane
Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment »
May 26, 2007
This ad apparently premiered in Europe a couple of days before my birthday, and the minute I saw it, I fell in love with it.
The love falls roughly into three parts: (a) The basic conceit of the ad. (b) The nuts and bolts of the production (i.e., working out how much of the construction really happened and how much only seems to). (c) Some of the little details (the [licorice?] windshield wipers and fan belt, the gelatin brakelights, the royal-icing detailing, the guy pouring golden syrup into a gingerbread crankcase…).
Altogether a yummy piece of work, and the ad agency should be proud of itself / themselves.
“Cake”
Posted in Food, restaurants and cooking, Media 3 Comments »
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