Nonfiction

VarleyLog

We Bought a Tesla!

Here’s what happened. Lee came across what looked like a tiny, yellowing IOU at the bottom of some ancient records. It was from the Tooth Fairy, and she said she was a little short of cash and would pay me a dime the next night. It was dated May 8, 1954. I was seven! She’s still in business, you know, the Tooth Fairy, so Lee tracked her down and demanded payment. The old biddy was not eager ... Read more »
The Two Johns

It could have been funny. The PeaceHealth hospital where I’ve spent entirely too much of 2021 is overcrowded and understaffed, as are so many other hospitals all around the world. The COVID ward is full, and the other wards are feeling the pinch, too. Most of the rooms are set up to accommodate two beds. Normally there is only one patient in the room, which makes it much nicer. Privacy when ... Read more »
What a year this has been

And it’s not even over! We were only six days into it when a delegation from the Crybaby Party paid a visit to the Capitol and whined and blubbered and generally threw a tantrum worthy of a bunch of two-year-olds. The building is still standing. So far. Then on February 19th I went to the Vancouver Clinic for a CT scan, and had a heart attack while I was in the machine. They told me to hie ... Read more »
COVID-19

You do everything right, and still things go wrong. We are both double vaccinated and we’ve been masking up and social distancing since the pandemic began. Then last week after having lunch at a restaurant here in Vancouver where the vaccination rate is 54 percent we both started feeling very bad. Almost too weak to walk. I’ve been coughing horribly. Lee not so much, but neither of us ... Read more »
Recovering

Things started going downhill when Random House merged with Penguin Putnam and my long-time editor was replaced by an intern with an agenda. I’d missed a deadline for Irontown Blues which meant that PRH could re-write my contract, which they did. Deliver Irontown Blues in one month or pay back the advance. This was an advance HALF of what I got for the previous book, and cut up into three ... Read more »
RED SON (2020)

Here’s an interesting concept: Suppose the little rocket ship from Krypton carrying the infant Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman had not landed somewhere in the American Midwest, but on the Smallski Collective Farm in the USSR? Would he still stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way? … Wait a minute, this is sounding a little familiar … now where’s that book? … ah ha! Here it is: Superheroes, ... Read more »
Groundhog Day

On Tuesday I got out of my car at the Vancouver Clinic and saw my shadow! I won’t say I recoiled in surprise at the appearance of this apparition, but I did briefly wish I could get Wendy Darling to sew the elusive two-dimensional wraith to my shoes, like she did for Peter Pan. It had been quite some while since I had seen the damn thing. Of course, here in the Pacific Northwest long ... Read more »
Things to Do in Isolation

We have cabin fever so bad that some days we just get in the car and drive around. I suppose we shouldn’t, but we don’t come in contact with anybody, so what’s the harm? The traffic is negligible to non-existent. Gas prices are rock bottom. We paid $1.87/gallon yesterday, and Oregon has just about the most expensive gas in the country. Driving around, it struck me that many people are going ... Read more »
Mom’s Last Good Day

Joan Boehm Varley Litel August 21, 1926 – March 15, 2020 Sometime in January my 93-year-old mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She spent ten days in the hospital and was so unhappy that she decided to return home and thus forego the treatments available only under a doctor’s care. She didn’t want to be hooked up to machines, nor to be monitored constantly. She received home ... Read more »
And the Hugo Goes To …

Introduction I grew up in the little town of Nederland, Texas, squeezed between Beaumont and Port Arthur like a pimple full of petroleum. I hated it. (Sorry, Nederland, it’s the truth.) The main attractions of that area, known as the Golden Triangle (Orange, Texas, is the third point), were humidity, hurricanes, mosquitoes the size of Nazi dive bombers, and a perpetual petrochemical stink ... Read more »
And the Hugo Goes to … Introduction

Hi to all my loyal readers and subscribers to the website! Earlier this year I was putting together an anthology project to be called And the Hugo Goes To …. The idea was to collect all my stories that were nominated for the Hugo Award. Now, I have had a lot of nominations in my career, and have won three times. Putting them all together would make up a fairly healthy volume. So I started ... Read more »
Mount St. Helens and Castle Rock Trip Report

On May 17th, 1980, I landed in Seattle on a 747 flight from London. My trip had begun that day in Paris, where I had spent two days following a convention in Metz, France. Now I transferred to a little 18-seater for the final leg, to Eugene. We hadn’t been in the air long until the pilot told us that we were flying almost over Mount St. Helens, which had been in the news a lot lately because ... Read more »
Another One Bites the Ice

You may have seen the viral picture of the traffic jam a few days ago, nearing the summit of Mt. Everest (Known in Nepalese as Sagarmatha, in Tibetan as Chomolungma). What you are looking at is a picture of about a hundred morons … minus the Sherpas, who climb to make a living. If you are on Everest these days you are, by definition, a moron. You don’t think so? You think they are “brave ... Read more »
Annie Banks 1967-2019

A little after midnight tonight we got a frantic, hysterical phone call from Mary-Beth, Lee’s eldest daughter. You know that a call at that time of night is seldom good news. Lee’s youngest daughter, Annie, had just died in her sleep. We knew she had Graves’ Disease, a thyroid condition that causes uncontrolled rapid heartbeat, among other things. But it seemed to be under control. Lee talked ... Read more »
Opportunity

Three days ago, on 2/13/19, NASA declared the Opportunity Mars rover mission to be over. They had not heard from it since June, and all efforts to revive it for one more trip were futile. It landed on Mars in 2004. In a bit of cosmic luck, it landed, bounced, and rolled /dead center/ into a small crater that was later named Eagle Crater. The Mars Orbital Surveyor actually took pictures of the ... Read more »
Method to His Madness

Not long ago I watched some videos of that crazy Norwegian guy who goes swimming in ice-covered lakes, and drinks a lot of vodka. I opined that some people will do just about anything to get on YouTube. So a few days later I stumbled on this. The actual counting took 40 hours, but he had to compress some of it. I don’t know about you guys, but I was getting a little bored around 68,000, ... Read more »
RIP Michael Anderson, 1920-2018

You know how you’re researching something on the Internet— say, Bassett hounds, as a random example—and you click on an interesting link, then another, and then another, and half an hour later you’re looking at a street map of Beijing and have no clue how you got there? No? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, in the course of looking for something else I stumbled on a list of movie people who have ... Read more »
Woodstock

I have been a stamp collector since I was a kid soaking stamps off of envelopes and pasting them into notebooks. Then I sent away for a “Big Bag of 1,000 Stamps!” from the back of a comic book for a couple of dollars and got back stuff from all over the world. Switzerland, Japan, Norway, Mozambique, Suriname. Even Hitler’s face on stamps from the Third Reich. It was junk, probably not ... Read more »
Foreign Editions

I recently had a request from a reader in France. He wanted to know if I would be willing to sign and inscribe a copy of my novel Steel Beach if he sent one to me and paid for the return postage. I told him it would be simpler if I sold him a copy from my shelf. He could include the postage when he paid for it with PayPal. He was happy to do that. That got me thinking. I have been translated ... Read more »
Third Time

At 10:34 AM yesterday a SpaceX rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, where we watched several launches when we lived on the Central Coast of California. It was a Falcon 9 rocket that had already been used (twice!) and it was about as perfect as a rocket launch and landing could be. There were 64 satellites aboard, most of them about the size of a microwave oven. The first stage ... Read more »
Fight or Flight

An old story of mine, “Air Raid,” has just been reprinted in an anthology, Fight or Flight, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent (who is a man, by the way). It was published on September 4th by Cemetery Dance Publications. The story has an interesting history. It was a warm summer day in Eugene, Oregon, and I was sitting with a dozen other writers, from established names like Gene Wolfe to ... Read more »
Cory Doctorow’s review of Irontown Blues

Irontown Blues arrived in bookstores yesterday, August 28th. And I’ve been sitting on this review since May 7th: John Varley’s “Irontown Blues” – noir doggy science fiction from one of the field’s all-time greats. … Read more » Read more »
Getting off the road.

We were on our way to somewhere else, never mind where. We are always alert for stuff off to the side of the road. We have had some of our most interesting adventures just by happening on some event or location. This time I spotted a small sign and looked off to the right and thought I saw a little building. The sign said something about a wildlife refuge. I like visiting places like that. ... Read more »
No. No joke.

I was browsing through the local news and came upon this story. It’s about the costs of four separate recent homicide cases in Clark County. I had one of these mopes on a Google Alert, so when he was sentenced the story came up: Gregory Antonio Wright. I got to the second murderer, Ricardo Gutierrez. I recalled the case. It’s not every day somebody beats a three-year-old to death. ... Read more »
Harlan Ellison 1934-2018

They are leaving us too fast. I’m speaking of the writers of my generation or the one just before me. Not long ago it was Ed Bryant. (Happily, we were able to chat with him for an hour in MileHiCon, just a few days before he died. Damn it, he seemed fine.) Then it was Ursula K. Le Guin, then our friend Mary Rosenblum, then our friend Kate Wilhelm. Yesterday it was one of the giants. Harlan. ... Read more »
Bring a Song

Once again: The Internet is amazing. Yes, I know it is claimed that 40-60% of it is porn, and it also contains some of the vilest lies and garbage data people have ever come up with. But it is also the most incredible repository of really good information and art the human race has ever seen. Case in point: I always have a song playing in my head. Always, every waking hour. Sometimes ... Read more »
In Remembrance of Gardner Dozois 1947-2018

It is with great sadness that I report the death of Gardner Dozois, one of the greatest science fiction editors of all time. He was a friend who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in far too long. I learned today that he was exactly eighteen days older than me. I have to say that I’m surprised (and very pleased) that he made it to age seventy, almost seventy-one. He was always seriously overweight. ... Read more »
Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance

That’s the title of a story I wrote in 1976. Good lord, that’s almost 42 years ago! It was published in the July 1976 issue of Galaxy. I can’t possibly tell you just how thrilled I was to be appearing in a magazine I read faithfully every month. I mean, this was where Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Bester, Cordwainer Smith, and Robert Silverberg were published, ... Read more »
Hyphens and Asterisks

You may have heard about the Theta Tau fraternity at Syracuse being suspended for a video that was discovered by The Daily Orange, the student newspaper. The video was described as “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist and hostile to people with disabilities.” If you have a strong stomach, here it is. I had a little trouble finding it. Seems it’s been taken down in most places, ... Read more »
Olympic Thoughts: Part 1

Lee and I are hardly sports fans, but there are a few exceptions. We both love baseball, the true American game. It is played by guys who prefer to keep their cool rather than do the equivalent of a showboat slam dunk on the court, or one of those grotesque little victory dances in the end zone. I hate those guys. Baseball players usually don’t really demonstrate or show off much, even if ... Read more »
Pensive

Mike Pence, that unpalatable but inevitable alternative to Trump after he’s thrown out of office and into jail, has published a book (well, it was actually his wife, but what’s the diff?) about their adorable bunny, Marlon Bundo. It’s called A Day in the Life of the Vice President. It’s supposed to be oh so cute. Well, John Oliver got wind of this, and came up with a ... Read more »
Comfort Animals

Let me say right up front that I love dogs. I’m head over heels crazy about dogs. Unless a dog looks like it wants to take my arm off up to the elbow, I want to pet the dog, though I always ask the owner. Some of my earliest good memories are of our family dogs. (One of the worst, too, when we all saw fat old Maggie tumbled beneath the wheels of an 18-wheeler.) I can’t even name them all; ... Read more »
R.I.P. Mary Rosenblum

Our friend Mary Rosenblum was killed in a plane crash yesterday, March 11, 2018, in La Center, Washington. She was piloting a Piper Super Cub at Daybreak Field when she crashed into some trees. The news stories I’ve seen didn’t mention whether she was landing or taking off, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? The pictures of the plane look like a crumpled paper cup. She was found dead in ... Read more »
The 90th Academy Awards

It was a fairly predictable night, as far as the odds makers were concerned. In the acting categories all the favorites won: Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Alison Janney, and Sam Rockwell. The only one of those we have seen is Oldman, and I have to agree, the dude really nailed Winston Churchill, and in real life he looks nothing like him. That performance will stand beside Daniel Day-Lewis ... Read more »
An Editorial: My New Favorite Attorney

I actually didn’t have an old favorite attorney, but I liked the title. I do think highly of several fictional lawyers, like Atticus Finch, but in real life … I should start out by saying that I do believe that every defendant is entitled to a good defense. Where I start getting into trouble is wondering if they are all entitled to the best possible defense. Just how hard should an attorney ... Read more »
2018 Oscar Nominated Short Films

It’s a new year so once again we made our way to the balcony of the Hollywood Theater to see the Oscar Nominated Shorts. This is the Portland Hollywood, not California. It’s a neighborhood on the east side of the river, bisected by Sandy Boulevard, and the theater is the last surviving Portland example of the architecture that used to be common for cinema palaces. It has an ornate exterior ... Read more »
Pay It Sideways

Lee and I have been on a quest to discover the best nachos in Oregon and Southern Washington. It works out great for us. One plate of nachos shared between us is all we need in a Mexican restaurant, and sometimes even more than we can eat and we end up taking some of it home. (Too bad nachos don’t warm up better.) So far we have visited at least a dozen places, from Salem to Eugene, from Hood ... Read more »
WAAAM Traffic Jam Car Show

Hood River, Oregon, is a pretty little town located on a scenic, gentle bend of the Columbia River. I don’t know what causes it—possibly the geography of the Columbia Gorge?—but the wind there is often pretty brisk. Which is why it calls itself “The Windsurfing Capital of the World.” It is a mecca for those crazy people who practice windsurfing and outrigger canoeing, and the even crazier ... Read more »
Save Movie Madness

Movie Madness has a library of 80,000 DVDs and VHS tapes. If they don’t have it, it probably doesn’t exist. Most Mom & Pop stores went out of business a long time ago, killed by Blockbuster and Hollywood video. (Both dead now, and it serves them right!) But even for a cult store like this, times are hard in the rental business. Most people are satisfied with the pitiful handful of movies ... Read more »
My Two Eclipses

In the very early hours of February 26, 1979, I was on the road with some friends, heading north from Eugene, Oregon, in a driving rain, hoping to see a total solar eclipse. We had our maps and I had my nice little 4-inch refracting telescope in the car, but the odds seemed against us. It was really pouring, and the forecast was not good. We pulled into the little town of Goldendale, ... Read more »
2,000,000 Stars

Whenever I’m tempted to think that humans will someday create a “galactic empire,” I take a look at this. This is the nearest 2,026,095 stars in our galaxy. Bear in mind that the galaxy is estimated to contain between 100 and 400 BILLION stars. This is just the local neighborhood, just our freakin’ back yard. There are between 50,000 and 200,000 other neighborhoods. ... Read more »
Utopiales Festival

Last year I accepted an invitation to participate in the Utopiales Festival in Nantes, France, from November 1 to November 6 of this year. I had hoped to be informing everyone of our travel plans around this time. Unfortunately, due to several factors beyond my control, it will not be possible for me to attend. I would like to publicly apologize to the organizers of the Festival. I should not ... Read more »
ZOOM!

When I was about in the 9th grade a book came into the school library titled COSMIC ZOOM. It was a thin volume, and it set out to describe the universe as we then knew it, from the smallest to the largest. I went through that book over and over, awed by the scale of it. It began with a shot looking down on a girl sitting in a chair and holding a cat. Each picture after that was ten times ... Read more »
Homeo, Homeo, wherefore art thou Homeo?

Something I just had to pass along. For the last year or so I’ve suffered, off and on, from itching in my left ear canal. It can be maddening. The sensation is of a little bug crawling around in there. My doctor has examined it several times, and there is no bug, no hair, no excess earwax. It’s entirely a nerve phenomenon. So I got some earache drops. They seemed to help, after ... Read more »
MileHiCon 48 Report

We boarded United Flight 830, non-stop from Portland to Denver, and took our seats in the first class section. Leg room! Elbow room! I leaned back and refreshed myself with the steaming hot towel brought by the flight attendant and watched the proletariat in their threadbare clothes stumbling by on their way to steerage, their ragged children staring longingly at my Diet Coke. On their way to ... Read more »
MileHiCon 48

The good folks at MileHiCon 48 have invited me to be one of their author Guests of Honor! It will be held October 28-30 in beautiful Denver, Colorado. You can find all the information here at their website: MileHiCon 48 I will be appearing on quite a few different panels and other events, such as: Friday at 2 PM: Romance in Genre Fiction. No idea what that will be about, but I’m all in favor ... Read more »
The Phantom of Kansas

Back in our Bicentennial year of 1976 I wrote a novelette titled “The Phantom of Kansas.” I was pleased with it, and even happier when it made the final Hugo Award ballot. There it lost to, appropriately enough, Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man.” It has been suggested by some that my story would have won except for A) the fact that I had two stories on the ballot in that category that ... Read more »
Visit the Historic Hanoi Hilton!

I’ve often wondered how a family can afford a trip to Disney World that may last for a week or more. That’s how long it takes to see much of it. (But not all, that would take a month, probably.) I mean, what with hotels and airfare and everything else, it can come to a several thousand dollars. But it seems that a fair number of people make one hell of a lot more money than we do. I followed ... Read more »
Single Payer, Please!

Trump scares the shit out of me, so come November I’m voting Democrat no matter who’s on the ballot. I’m hoping Hillary will change her mind about single payer health insurance. Lee calls it the unAffordable Care Act. No shit. The bills just came in for my three-day stay in the hospital last February after a routine colonoscopy turned bloody. The hospital copay was $600; the doctor, $433. ... Read more »
Balticon 50

Big surprise! The people working for Balticon 50 wrote me last year saying they intended to try something no con has ever done, which is bring back all living previous Guests of Honor, expenses paid. This was a formidable fundraising task, and it seems they have done it! Lee and I were told there will be two airline tickets for us, and a hotel room for the duration! It has been a long time ... Read more »
Oscar Nominated Shorts 2015

Seeing these films that hardly anyone ever sees either before or after the Oscars has become a yearly ritual with us, since we began seeing them at the Academy Theater in Beverly Hills. Here in Portland they are shown at the non-profit Hollywood Theater. We both agreed that this year’s crop was not quite up to the high standards we have come to expect. Animated Bear Story (Historia de un ... Read more »
I won a Prometheus Award!

… in 1999, and I’m just learning it. There was a story about the Prometheus Hall of Fame, which is awarded to classic works of “Libertarian fiction” (whatever that is). They also give out an award for the best novel published each year. I wondered about past awards, so naturally I went to Wiki, where I found this. If you scroll down you will see that my novel THE ... Read more »
“Transforming”

Oh, is that what they’re calling plagiarism in this age of sampling, mash-ups, fan fiction, and ignoring copyright? Have you read about this incredible fraud Laura Harner, who has written and published SEVENTY-FIVE NOVELS in just five years? That alone should have been cause for suspicion. But it works okay if you’re just typing. Here’s now she describes it: In transforming ... Read more »
Nailed it

I was going to write something about the shootings in Roseburg, pointing out that it’s become a generic news story now, just fill in the blanks of how many dead and where. Kindergarten? High school? University? Senseless tragedy, gun control, mental health, now is the time, now is not the time, armed guards, come together, community healing, president reacts, blah, blah, blah fucking ... Read more »
… in other religious news

Yesterday the Catholic Church canonized a man who was responsible for the enslavement and deaths of thousands of native Californians. St. Junipero Serra founded the chain of missions that stretches from San Diego to Sonoma, built with slave labor. The slaves are buried in unmarked graves. Lee and I love the missions. We visited all twenty-one of them (here and here) when we lived in ... Read more »
Balticon 50

The good people at Balticon 50 (May 27-30, 2016) have come up with a fantastic, not to say crazy, idea. Here is the Balticon 50 website. They hope to bring back all Guests of Honor from the 49 previous Balticons who are willing and able to attend. The usual terms: Airfare for two and a room paid for. This is an astonishing undertaking. Please take a minute to visit the Balticon entry on Wiki. ... Read more »
Rainier Beer

A few days ago, completely by accident as these things tend to happen on the Internet, I stumbled across an old TV ad for Rainier Beer, starring Mickey Rooney. Oh, man, did that take me back! In the 1970s and into the early ‘80s, in the Pacific Northwest, Rainier was responsible for what I believe is the most outrageous and inventive ad campaign in the history of television. The spots were so ... Read more »
The Congo, and Some Science Fiction Poetry

A weird happened to me last night. I woke up with a poem moving around in my head. “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room …” I immediately recognized it as “The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race,” by Vachel Lindsay. Holy racism! We actually studied this when I was in the seventh grade! Lindsay was a proponent of what he called “singing poetry,” where ... Read more »
The REAL Solar System

I’ve seen a thousand models of the solar system, but never one that is REALLY accurate. This one is. If you scroll by pressing the arrow on the right, it will take you much of the day to get to Pluto. Even if you scroll by clicking on the bar, so that it goes by one screen at a time and you can read the comments he has strewn through empty space, it will take you a while. I’ve ... Read more »
Gift from Korea

Writing prose is essentially a lonely occupation. One thing that helps with that is now and then hearing from people who have enjoyed my work. Then every once in a while someone does something extra special, and I want to give a big thank you to one of them right now. Mr. Kim Tae-jin recently bought the rights to four of my stories and has now printed them in two very handsomely produced ... Read more »
How Big the Universe Is

I don’t think it’s possible for our minds to really visualize just how big the universe is, or even how big our own galaxy and our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy (2.5 million light-years away) are. But here’s a visual aid. As we zoom in on this, the largest picture ever taken, remember that each of those tiny, tiny, tiny specks of light is a star, and at this distance ... Read more »
Lithobraking

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft should be lithobraking just about this very minute, as I write this. In the annals of euphemisms, I think this word ought to have a special place. Maybe they just got tired of writing “crashing into Mercury.” Sounded too negative. The definition seems to be “coming to a stop by using rocks to slow down.” Right. By scraping along those ... Read more »
Overwhelming

I came across this while looking for something else, as happens so often on the Internet. The European Extremely Large Telescope is being built right now in Chile, up where the air is clear and thin. First light should be in a little less than a decade. Now scroll down about halfway. Off to the right is a diagram of “Comparison of nominal sizes.” Click on that, and then click on it again ... Read more »
There Will Never Be a Genius in the SAE

WARNING: There is a certain ugly term that society has universally decided can no longer be quoted in print and must be bleeped from sound recordings. The term is commonly referred to now as “The N-word.” I am going to use that word in this little essay. If you feel your head will explode from seeing the word, you should stop reading right here. A few days ago a busload of fraternity boys ... Read more »
My Favorite Action Scenes

Part One: The Early Years I’ve been thinking of making this list for a long time, and wondering how long it should be. Top Ten? Not enough. Top Twenty-five? Sounds better. In the end, I just decided to list all the ones I thought were the best. I’m not even going to count them. Rule: Only one scene per movie. If a movie has more than one really, really good action scene, I may make note of ... Read more »
The War Is Over!!!!

I think it’s time for a celebration. Today officially marks the end of the war, the end of the longest war in American history. Don’t you think that’s a cause to hit the streets? Don’t you think we should be painting our banners and hoisting our flags and getting drunk and dancing wildly in Times Square and on the Washington Mall and wherever your community gathers to celebrate long-awaited ... Read more »
Charles N. Brown: 6/24/1937 – 7/12/2009

When I heard Charlie Brown had died I knew I would have to write something, but it’s so hard. I’ve known Charlie as long as I’ve known anyone in the field. It must have been 1975 or ’76 when I met him at one of the first conventions I ever attended, and the next thing I knew I was spending the night at his wonderful house in the Oakland hills. I’d never seen so many SF books, nor heard so ... Read more »
Our Second Earthquake

Before Earthquake About seven years ago we were parked in an RV at Pismo Beach when a 6.6 earthquake struck the area, centered very close to San Simeon, about 60 miles north of us. The RV shook and we got outside and watched the trees swaying back and forth. There was a crack in the road 100 yards away from us with a gap of about 6 inches, and all the stock in the little liquor store down the ... Read more »
Old Dogs

I recently read a story about the death of what her owner had proclaimed to be the “World’s Oldest Dog.” She was a 21-year-old wire-haired dachshund named Chanel, and for a while she’d been quite the celebrity, awarded a certificate by Guinness, appearing on television shows, the subject of a large number of newspaper articles. I thought, “Twenty-one? That doesn’t sound that old.” It sounded ... Read more »
Paul and Me

A few days ago we lost a great American. Entrepreneur—seller of salad dressing, pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine among many other things—philanthropist, devoted husband, father, and grandfather, race car driver, owner, and sponsor, founder of a dozen camps for severely ill children … and, oh yes, he acted a bit. I’m speaking, of course, of Paul Newman. His Newman’s Own brands ... Read more »
Hard Comparisons

Some of you may have seen this photo that’s been circulating on the Internet, purporting to be a 5MB hard drive from a computer in 1956: Don’t worry, I’m not going to bust any bubbles. I’ve verified it at Snopes.com, and it really is the hard drive from an IBM 305 RAMAC, one of the last computers to use vacuum tubes, in use until 1961. This little baby measured 60 by 68 by 29 inches, ... Read more »
I’m a Martian Citizen!

About an hour ago as I write this, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander successfully delivered my novella, “In the Hall of the Martian King,” to a soft landing near the Martian north pole. Oh, sure, there were other stories aboard by people like H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Carl Sagan. And if you want to get technical about it, I ... Read more »
Molly Ivins: An American Heroine

Yesterday a great American died. I’m speaking of Molly Ivins, perhaps the greatest enemy pompous windbags ever knew. She was from my native state of Texas, and after apprenticing in the wilds of Minnesota she was hired away to the journalistic cesspits of the Big Apple by the New York Times, whose editors wanted to spice up their dull, gray prose with a little Texas-style ... Read more »
Rock ‘n’ Rock

At about 11:13 yesterday morning UPS delivered a package to me here in the RV. I took it inside and opened it, saw it was a copy of a manuscript I’d asked for from Susan Allison at Penguin/Putnam. I was looking at the first page at 11:15 when everything began to shake. Our first thought, it being Condition Orange and all, was “Al-Qaeda!” Our second thought was: EARTHQUAKE!!!! We ... Read more »
Moy Mell

New Years Eve, and the street is filling up with revelers. This is Pier Avenue, a four-lane road about 1/4 mile long, between Rte. 1 and the beach. Just before you get to the sand there is a kiosk where state park rangers collect the user fees for people wanting to use the beach. Both traffic lanes headed for the ocean are full, though not as bad as at Thanksgiving, when the lines stretched ... Read more »
Of Geese and Ghosts

This is sort of a Lack of Progress Report. Getting out of Sauvie Island, Portland, and Oregon has proven to be a lot harder than we ever realized. We’re currently battening down to weather a wet winter out here on the island. Yesterday we wrapped the outside water hose that brings fresh water into the trailer with something called “heat tape,” which is not tape at all, as it ... Read more »
Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Fred Meyer Our life out here is pretty simple. We get up early in the morning—quite a radical change for both of us—and work until about noon. Most days we drive into town for one reason or another. And at some point in the afternoon we re-enact the Bataan Death March. (Or, as Lee prefers to put it, “Take a nice little aerobic walk.”) This walk is usually about a mile out and a ... Read more »
Bob

This story came to me third hand. Lee got it from Darlene, a bartender at the old Monte Carlo, and she got it from an accountant. I can’t vouch for all the details and there are a thousand more things I’d like to know and probably never will, and probably never should know … but the broad strokes of the story are reliable. We met Bob pretty much at the same time we moved into the ... Read more »
The Trailer At Sauvies Corner

“Oh, bother,” said Pooh … … as he stripped off his little red T-shirt. When I was very young one of my favorite books had a map on the inside cover. It was probably the first map I ever looked at. It was of the Hundred Aker Wood, and it had place names like Owl’s House, Pooh’s Hunny Tree, Where the Woozle Wasn’t, and Trespassers W, where Piglet lived. We’re making our own map of ... Read more »
Blue Light Special

Had to share this one with you folks … I was in the K-Mart at Jantzen Beach a few days ago. (I was looking for a pair of slip-on canvas deck shoes and happened to be there. Found a pair, too, for $19.95 … marked down to $1.50!) So there are 20 cash registers and exactly ONE is open. K-Mart, like most big retailers, has this thing for “point-of-sale,” which means the ... Read more »
You ask why I live here…

Well, I woke up in the morning There’s frogs inside my socks Your mama, she’s a-hidin’ Inside the icebox Your daddy walks in wearin’ A Napoleon Bonaparte mask Then you ask why I don’t live here Honey, do you have to ask? ~Bob Dylan Woke up this morning, went to the shower, and found I was sharing it with a tiny green tree frog. I ... Read more »
Asparagus for Breakfast

Sauvie Island is a bird sanctuary. Vees of Canada geese are always flying over, honking their lungs out, and ducks squabble pretty much all day in the little pond not far from our trailer. I’ve seen dozens of birds I can’t identify since we haven’t unearthed our binoculars yet. But the ones I’m in love with are the predatory birds. The raptors. Even a novice like me ... Read more »