Today is National Chocolate Cake Day.
I'm stretching the fact just a touch. It's actually only National Chocolate Cake Day in the United States, but c'mon...! It's chocolate cake. Do you need a better excuse than someone, somewhere made a national day out of it? And to celebrate the day, I'm posting here my mother-in-law's chocolate cake recipe, which is simple
Australia Day 2019
I'm ironically aware that as this post goes live, Australia Day in Australia is all over and done with, thanks to the International Date Line. But it's Australia Day where I am, so I'm doing the salute, sans the tinny. 'on yer, mate. ________________________
A Gift Idea for the Impossible-to-Buy-For Person In Your Life
Original artwork by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs When I first started writing for Ellora’s Cave, way back when, the covers they gave me for my books sucked like a vacuum. I’m not being mean. They really did suck. In those days, the new electronic publishing industry didn’t understand how critical covers were for
Life Imitating Art
Damir Kotorić Atlas Obscura reported recently that "50 Escaped Baboons Shut Down a Paris Zoo", which caught my eye. We're currently working our way through the three Planet of the Apes reboot movies and the post on Obscura made me think of the scene in the first movie when all the apes escape
Western Australia Day
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
You THINK You Know Someone…
This weird little factoid made me pause: Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, because he only lost once in over 300 matches. Wow. Commenting as a non-American, I have to say that is not the usual image of Abraham Lincoln that seeps across the national borders. The man clearly had
This Will Horrify You. Guaranteed.
Sorry about the click-bait headline. I usually don't resort to them but in this case it's absolutely justified and I promise to deliver. In full. We're always weeks behind the rest of the world in our TV viewing. So it has taken us a while to get around to watching Planet Earth II by the BBC,
A New Skill Set to Make Life Interesting.
I love cracking open a new program and getting to know it. Playing around with the buttons and menus and figuring out how to get the program to do what I want is enormous fun. It scratches my curiousity bump and taps my creativity in completely different ways from story-telling. Most people I know can
The Prettiest Bookstore In the World.
Not only is the Grand Splendid bookstore in Argentina the most beautiful bookstore in the world, it also comes with a one hundred year old history that just adds to its charm. The building was opened in 1912 as a theatre, but the theatre seating was removed and the theatre converted into a bookstore in