This one is O Ever Bountiful God of the Air! and its Amazon ID is B00BAK6S78.  The alphameric can be confusing; those are numeral zeroes and a letter S, not a numeral 5.  I seem to be stuck with the lead-in of "B00," which may have to do with my last-name initial, or with the audience response.

Yes, you heard me right, B00AVAKSEM.  No, this isn't what you say when AVAKSEM is walking by and you want to jump out and scare her/him/it.  This is the ASIN, or Amazon ID number, for the e-book I've published there.  Before the cut-tag, let me make it very clear that I'm not asking anyone to buy this thing, merely announcing its existence.  What ( Read more... )

Starting (I think) in January, I expect to self-publish collections of my comedy sketches as e-books, through Amazon.  This LJ notice is about as high-powered as my promotional effort is going to get.  Unless I'm really missing something, it's possible to publish this way at no monetary cost to me.  I'm planning four books, each essentially as a ( Read more... )

After several decades, one likes to think that one can get some things right in life.  Marrying Lisa was probably the rightest thing I've ever done, and that made possible a sequence of things gotten right earlier this month.

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This past March, after a lot of studying up (by my standards) and a long time spent keeping the old car going, I bought a Ford Fusion Hybrid.  It's based on Toyota's second-generation hybrid tech (I believe Toyota's Prius is now on third-gen).  Just past 5000 miles, the car (which I've named "Mister;" see if you can figure out why) has a lifetime ( Read more... )

I apologize in advance if, in fact, someone has already dealt with this.  It seems pretty obvious to me, and someone else must have though of it too.  I'll go ahead anyway, though.  Fell free to exit at the cut tag.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer's poem "Casey at the Bat" has plenty of miles on it, but I think it can still amuse audiences today, 123 years ( Read more... )

I'm working on coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant situation for Nuclear News, along with other folks on the staff.  We have now made contact with a source in Japan who has agreed to answer some questions by e-mail.  I'm in no position to complain about what we've been hearing from Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Nuclear and Industrial ( Read more... )

Last year, the American Nuclear Society launched a blog.  I immediately became uninvolved.  I'm not looking to do more work than that with which I'm already loaded down, and nobody has offered to give me a really steep raise, so I continued trying to meet the deadlines I already have at Nuclear News, the Society's stodgy old monthly.  A while back ( Read more... )

Thanks to acmespaceship , I can attempt to show an image of the back design of Cardoons.  Here goes:


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I have, about seven years late (by my own arbitrary schedule), finished redrawing Cardoons: The SF/Fantasy Poker Deck in electronic form.

I spent the late 1980s wooing and winning the woman who became (and continues to be) my wife (AcmeSpaceship), and drawing cartoons with SF & fantasy themes in the format of playing cards (learning much later ( Read more... )