“Windsor Canadian. The bootlegger’s friend. Retail price in Anchorage, seven-fifty a bottle. Retail price in a dry village, a hundred bucks easy.” “Yeah.” The bottle dropped to the table, next to the gun. —“Nooses Give,” a Kate Shugak short story Only in e. On Amazon.com, Amazon.uk, Amazon.au, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 4/26/2010]
We are lucky in our lifetime to have scientists who are as able with their pens as they are with their petrie dishes, people like Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Lewis Thomas.
# Permanent link to Carl Sagan
My personal favorite is astronomer Carl Sagan, yes, he of the billions and billions. In his collections of essays, this curious and eclectic thinker writes about everything from the sex lives of dolphins to the prehistory of earth to Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories of alien visitation. No subject is safe from Sagan, in print or in life, and he was one of modern science’s great interpreters, even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, vide the following story.
From Chapter 15 of Alaska Traveler: The Aleut visor is one of those marvelously ambidextrous Native traditions that work on both a practical and an aesthetic level. A wooden cap with no crown and an extended bill, a visor protects the hunter from the glare of the sun, the splash of the sea spray, and…
From Chapter 14 of Alaska Traveler: I followed the tram track outside to a line of miniature rail cars hooked together, a two foot-by-four foot flatbed, a mucking machine, a GE electric locomotive, a one-ton ore car. Each ore car was rolled out of the mine one at a time by trammers. The ore cars…
From Chapter 13 of Alaska Traveler: Meanwhile, back up on stage…Keys in top hat and tails and aloha shirt at the keyboard is joined by Alice Welling on the lungs, Mike MacDonald on the drums, Ed Bourgeois on the channeler, and Jelly Roll Jim on the bass. Also Martha Stewart (And you’re not, which must…
Read more Nothing is sacred, and these people will do ANYTHING for a laugh.
From Chapter 12 of Alaska Traveler: I rode the Alaska Railroad from Anchorage to Fairbanks in the early Seventies to get to the University of Alaska. It took a minimum of twelve hours, because the train would stop what seemed like every five minutes to let off a hunter, or pick up a fisherman, or…
From Chapter 4 of Alaska Traveler: If you decide to fly out of Anchorage into the Bush, you’ll be traveling on anything from a Twin Otter (fourteen passengers) to a Piper Super Cub (just you and one pilot and your knees will be crammed into the small of his or her back). Another big difference…
Read more If you have a problem with hunting or trapping, stifle it.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 7/16/2010. Reposting, just because.] I’m just saying. I was on a local radio show recently, me and host Aaron talking about good summer reads, when someone called in to say that he’d read a couple of my books and called them soft porn. I admitted that, yes, there was sex in…
So I was on the phone yesterday with Shannon Parks, whom you know as Marguerite Gavin, the narrator of my audio books. She always calls when she’s proofing the audio of the most recent book. Which would be She told me that when she came upstairs from her studio after she finished recording the book,…
'Fat smiles on the faces of the husbandmen,' said Hugh Beringar, fresh from his own harvest in the north of the shire, and burned nut-brown from his work in the fields, 'and chaos among the kings. If they had to grow their own corn, mill their own flour and bake their own bread they might have no time left for all the squabbling and killing.'
# Permanent link to Brother Cadfael
