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The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Prize?
The president has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Kapoor's inner patriot cheers! USA! USA! Except...that cheer is followed by a WTF moment. What has the president done to earn the prize? Apparently it was awarded for "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy". Previous American laureates had a larger body of work to which the Nobel ( Read more... ) -
Two Contests
Kapoor has entered two writing contests this week. Well, only one of them is a contest. The first was the application for the Gulliver Travel Research Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation. Its prize is US$800 put toward a writer's travel expenses for any journey undertaken for research to complete a novel. Kapoor applied using an ( Read more... ) -
The Health Care Debacle
Issues in politics are rarely easy. The essence of politics is making deals between factions with competing interests. It doesn't help that the issues themselves are often complicated, which means deals can be hard to make because there are different perceptions about the problem ( Read more... ) -
Bad Car Day
So Kapoor drives home, visions of this morning's scary collision in his head, doing his best to be extra careful. He gets into the left turn lane a couple hundred meters ahead of a white Buick. The Buick is speeding and in seconds is on Kapoor's bumper. Kapoor's fallen victim to these tail gators before (once upon a time, one smacked him through an ( Read more... ) -
Signs of the Times
Kapoor has seen a few signs around town: Images of Obama as The Joker from The Dark Knight with a caption underneath reading fascism. At first, Kapoor was irritated. Signs calling Bush a fascist made sense. The Bush regime introduced torture, warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention without charges, and the unchecked, unaccountable use of ( Read more... ) -
Crime Scene
So Kapoor goes out on his morning stroll, a quick walk around the block (two blocks, really). He reaches an intersecting cross-street, and as he looks down that road at the next intersection one block away, a speeding car whizzes into sight and smashes into a Suburban heading the other way, hard enough to flip it. Within seconds, three police cars ( Read more... ) -
Gone to Earth 35 & 36
Last night the group read the final two chapters of Gone to Earth. Meeting twice a month, with a limit of 5,000 words per meeting, and with occasional missed weeks due to Kapoor's place in the queue, it took the group twenty-three months to go through all 439 pages of the novel. The conclusion, which Kapoor dare not give away here, was well- ( Read more... ) -
Gone to Earth 34
Gone to Earth has been full of conflict but no combat apart from the space battle in which Praluna was not a participant. That changes in chapter 34. Praluna goes into battle with the Incarnate-made organic battlesuit that the Incarnate-made synthetic creature gave her in the previous chapter. The suit draws on her memories of hand-to-hand fights ( Read more... ) -
Armadillocon 31
Kapoor goes to Armadillocon again! As is typical for Kapoor, he wasted no time in causing trouble. At the welcome panel hosted by the convention organizers, Kapoor noticed that the dates on the flyer for Armadillocon 32 showed a four-day convention; he asked if they were in fact adding a day next year. The answer: No. Kapoor was just the first ( Read more... ) -
Gone to Earth 33
In chapter 33 of Gone to Earth, Praluna talks a synthetic humanoid organism (one manufactured by the Incarnate of Asti herself, and the last living link to her) into helping her and the rogue archaeologist get aboard the Big Bad's starship. The Big Bad is planning an experiment that will destroy the Forbidden Planet, and Praluna and her two allies ( Read more... )