Today’s Chickens; Yesteryear’s Goats

Observed on my street today: A pair of chickens browsing someone’s front lawn. Not the sort of thing I see everyday. Or ever.

However, there was a Christmas day around ten years ago when I looked out of my front window and saw someone leading a herd of goats down the street. I’ve checked on subsequent Christmas days and not seen a single goat, which has been disappointing. I wouldn’t like to

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Guncotton and the Utility of Failure

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willey Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 80-81:

Guncotton [...] had been discovered [in 1845] by German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein, who had tried to dissolve cotton in a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. Of course, the cotton had refused to dissolve and Schönbein, writing off the experiment as a failure, had gone home for supper, after putting the

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Adventures with Jay Lake

My old friend Jay Lake discusses a dream in a recent blog post and refers to a series of real-life incidents, specifically:
“...a baby puke yellow Ford LTD wagon was in my life for a while back in the 1990s — that’s the car I flooded with raw sewage while driving it, if you’ve ever heard me tell that story; also the car I took over the river in Mexico on a canoe ferry. Also the car I was driving

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