Roses, Chinese Food and A Very Different Christmas. I'm sort-of in mourning at the moment. A few days ago, our provincial government announced mandatory pandemic measure that made it illegal for families to hold indoor gatherings, under penalty of pretty severe fines. Although the measures are "temporary" and will be revisited in three weeks'
A James Bond-worthy Setting for the Next Project Kobra Book! This place is surreal! It is the Oberoi Udaivilas hotel in Udaipur, India. Not your average highway motel. Udaipur is one of the oldest cities in India. Man settled on the banks of the Ahur River around 2000 BC, and the city of Udaipur was
Satchari National Park, Photo by Abdul Momin, CC BY-SA 4.0. I am a long time financial supporter of Wikipedia.com, and recently, as a thank you, I was sent a sneak preview of their photo competition. The winners are every bit as good as some of the stunning National Geographic photography, and worthy
This is one of the posts I lost, that I recently unearthed in a raw PHP coded archive. It first appeared on this blog in March 2011, just when I was launching my very first indie title, Blood Knot. This is some of the research I did for that novel. -- t. We tend to
I'm not entirely sure how I found this one. Not sure how I'm going to use it, either. A Russian fisherman, Roman Fedortsov, has an Instagram account where he posts images of the creatures he and his fellow fisherman find in their nets. They trawl far and deep, and some of the life in the
This is another long post that ran in conjunction with the release of Bannockburn Binding (the individual book, not the series boxed set that was released a few weeks ago!). The blog where it appeared has long gone. (Yet I'm still here. There's a sobering thought.) I'm preserving the post here, instead. -- t. I’ve been
Back in March I ran a post about the horrifying episode of Planet Earth II that ran on the BBC, showing recer snakes gobbling up baby iguanas as they rushed for the beach. I thought that one was bad enough. Since then, I have tripped across another island. This one is called Ilha da Queimada
It's a murky picture, because the men in the photo are actually throwing their spears at the picture-taker...and they're not actors. This is North Sentinal Island, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal off India. The residents of the island live a completely isolated hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have done so for what an
NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, April 15, 2018 It's a pretty ordinary looking photo. The average teenager with a cellphone could frame a better shot of a sunset. You have to let it sink in a bit to really understand how awesome this photo is. Why? Because: It was taken by a robot. It
Another anniversary date I didn't want to omit acknowledging. Western Australia Day was called Foundation Day when I was a kid, and we always had special assemblies on the day. The name was changed to Western Australian day in the 1990s, after I left Australia, as the old name had come to be considered insensitive
