THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Ah, those crafty Mullahs, ever on the watch-out for the 12th Man, uh, Imam, have spied out the nefarious rabbi father of Krusty the Clown and banned the very dolls created from the Simpsons. But you know who they really fear? Maggie. The one with the gun. It’s the Second Amendment thing, you see, what gave [...]

Mrs. Charm is the television consumer at the rancho. Unless you count Mr. Boy’s periodic consumption of Sponge Bob. Her fave Roku show these days is Mad Men, a soaper return to the early 1960s urban advertising game, with lots of skinny ties, incessant smoking and martini lunches. Also the girdled wives and girlfriends, which [...]

Michael Flynn’s third installment in his January Dancer series falters nae a bit, with such lines as these: “A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon.” I’m only half through this one but it’s already safe to say it’s as good as the first two about [...]

A world where free-fall is normal and gravity is a luxury you have to pay for. A world where sunlight is not available to all and even those who have the machines that produce it have to get used to full-dark hours of sun-off with no moonlight. Some even live in full-dark all the time. [...]

The once-fabled American (and African-American) city (affectionately called MoTown) is a burned-out shambles, thanks to gimme politics, socialist policies and predator labor unions. Photographs of the ruins (above) are part of a new gallery show in, of all places, Germany. Via David at Spengler

After the war the American versions flew USA airmail routes cross-country. I used to make plastic models of these and similar planes when I was Mr. B.’s age (11 going on 12) and hang them by threads from my bedroom ceiling.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature Well, I did enjoy Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manner of thine own Or of thine friend’s were. Each [...]

This far-future sci-fi novel is almost twenty years old but it was new to me. Good stuff, about multiple human colonies, and friendly and enemy aliens in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, all trying to make sense of gigantic Builder artifacts that seem to electromagnetically converge on the planet Quake at Summertide. The [...]

I happily ended November with six more ebook sales for Alamo and Knoxville—including twice as many of the latter. Which brings that one to a total of 91 since its first month in April, 2010—finally edging in on breaking even for the cost of ebook formatting. Hardly bestseller material here, these single-digit sales months. Haven’t [...]