The Windkey and the Lamplighter

1. Nightengale’s Lament, Simon R Greene
2. Angels of Light and Darkness, Simon R Greene
3. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
4. The Priviledge of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
5. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
6. Domes of Fire, David Eddings
7. Infected, Scott Sigler
8. Small Favor, Jim Butcher
9. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol (on my Palm Pilot)
10. The Shining Ones, by David Eddings
11. Saucer, by Stephen Coonts
12. Saucer the Conquest, by Stephen Coonts
13. Sorcery and Cecelia, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
14. The Hidden City, by David Eddings
15. The Grand Tour, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
16. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
17. Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

Over at Starts with a Bang! they have a fun game:
Look at the pictures, and decide whether it is of Arizona or Mars.
Click here for the pictures, scroll down for the answers
I got all but three—this is hard!

Thanks to Carnival of Space #48

Science Blog has a funny article today about why we don’t really worry about nuclear holocaust anymore. I thought this quote was worth passing on:

“Why aren’t we as worried about [Nuclear Holocaust] anymore? For starters, we aren’t fighting with Russia anymore (at least not seriously), Pakistan can’t hit us and China would want us to repay all of our loans before destroying us.”

Mutually-assured-destruction replaced with mutually-assured-defaulting. Welcome to America.

Google and Virgin Galactic had an awesome April Fool.
I decided to respond, but it took me a couple days to bend the movie-making programs to my will.
(Also, it still has no sound, even though I know exactly what song I wanted as the background track. Alas)

I was looking for inspiration for a Siderial Exalted game, and found this poem from Fantastic Poems.com

Taurus
It would be to your benefit if today you went wild.
Let your hair down and what will be will be.
Today is the day when you should unleash your inner child.
Why do I bother? You never listen to me.

(The poem is © Adam Rulli-Gibbs 2000-2006)

Also, meanwhile, http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pBaa5j_Lw2QW-opEu_gEVAw is the best dumb internet thing I’ve seen all day.

I love cookies. This weekend, I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, after not making any for a long time.

When I went to put in the brown sugar, I realized that it was one big lump. YARGH!

I wasn’t able to measure, so I might’ve gotten more sugar than usual. 1c ~ 1 not-quite-full box, right?

Anyway, after a minute in a moist paper towel in the microwave and another minute of Slasher-Movie-Action with a butter knife, I got it to the point where my KitchenAid was able to beat the sugar into submission with the butter.

Side effect: the butter and sugar mixture was much, much more creamy (I left it mixing while I went to the basement to move laundry) and the cookies came out much more flat.

I am constantly amazed at how much I can “adjust” a recipe and still get something tasty. (My snickerdoodle cookies are probably an even better example: JoC calls for like 1.5 c of flour, which makes buttery, flat, crinkly cookies, but I use like 4c to get puffball, nearly round cookies like my mom made for us. Whatever! They all taste good.)