My Dog Will Eat You!

My wife wanted to give any would be criminals or trespassers fair warning.

The attack dog would have come closer... but  he's scared of the sign.

Guster, the dog of doom, will devour your toes in a fit of fury should you dare to pass through into his domain.

I hope everyone had a pleasant weekend. I suppose I did. Although it was filled with missed opportunities.

However, now that it's Monday, I'm anxious to touch on the Comment Of The Week from last week. I don't have travel too far back in time to look. Turns out Friday's post had lots of great comments to choose from.

I think within a few seconds of the post going live (well, 32 minutes) I had someone expressing their displeasure with my portrayal of Esperanto. Then, a little while later I got this beaut:

After the first poster made his comment I started to backpedal some from my original point, but after I thought about it for awhile I decided I think I will stand by my assessment. If calling it a noble failure makes me ignorant, well, then people don't have wings, or something.

It's beauties like that that make me happy I put up without 1000 spam emails a day that I get (well, maybe 5) with folks trying to sell me coffee beans or porn. I thought I would get tons of people upset over the Chiropractor stuff, not Esperanto.

THIS IS THE LAST WEEK before the A-Z challenge begins. I'm still considering scrapping my whole month's worth of stuff and starting over. If so, I'll have a busy weekend next weekend writing new posts.

Friday Again

It's funny that I still love Friday's so much, despite that fact that pretty much every Saturday I'm up and going to work just like a weekday. I would have thought that I would have grown to dread Saturday's as much as Monday's after a while, but I suppose that isn't possible after a lifetime of conditioning. I just really like Friday's.

So, it's Friday, and I didn't select a comment of the week this week. Not from things people commented on during this week, but things people said last week. I really wanted to pick Boopia's comment from my post about death and Briane Pagel's incredible novel, The After. She, among her many talents, works part time as a trauma surgeon, and related a story about how of all the people she's talked to that have been clinically dead yet were resuscitated (5) all of them said it was a pretty pleasant experience. 

I mean, everyone else wanted to talk about baby teeth.

Still, I made a promise that I wouldn't choose a comment from people I know well, because in the interest of making this seem to be fair, I decided that even though her comment was well deserving of this great honor, since I know her quite well, it could still give the impression I was playing favorites. So if I you've been a long time blog visitor, or someone I know well, if I have promised not to pick you, then I won't pick you.

So, with her entry being disqualified  I went through the archives and found this little gem from The Golden Eagle, who seemed to at least appreciate the irony of the situation where I'm discussing the mysteries of the universe and folks are still amazed about my teeth:

Well deserved. I should totally make a button for this.

In other news. Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The Big Questions

Right now, actually, for the past several years, my absolute favorite author, no exceptions, has been Alastair Reynolds. He's a British (well, Welsh) science fiction author of notable popularity. In case all have forgotten, he signed a $1,000,000 deal a year or so ago (actually, I think that should be in British pounds, which is significantly more than USD right now) and generally writes great tales with very deep science fictional themes. The guy, in a word, is awesome.

He also was a speaker at TEDx, I don't know what the 'x' stands for, but whatever. Ted talks are one of the things that makes the internet awesome.The reason I find him so compelling is because all his fiction, or most of it anyway, deals with a lot of the same questions most of have asked when we're sitting around and pondering the universe in all of its vastness. Of course, he was a working scientist with the ESA for a number of years and was writing his first several novels while working on some pretty cool science at the same time.

If I were a master of my craft in my own mind, I would probably be churning out books quite similar to what he does. If you have 20 minutes or so to kill, please sit back, relax, and have your mind blown by my writing hero, discussing my philosophical hero, as he discusses my favorite conundrum of all: The Fermi Paradox.




Now, if that just got a bit 'too real' for you, then please enjoy a new feature I'm going to include from time to time, which I will call my comment of the week, or month, or year, whatever. Because let's all be honest. Most of us just blow into a blog, skim the post, make a short, sweet, comment and move on. I get it, I really do. I wish I could spend more time interacting with everyone, but there just isn't enough hours in the day. It usually makes me sad. But I do what I can, as we all do.

But every once in a while, something happens and that comment is beautiful in a way no one could have expected.

Unfortunately, my first comment of the week comes from an anonymous user. Too bad, as I'd like to meet this person and hear more of their thoughts. Check it out:

"Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your web site and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Anyway I will be subscribing to your feeds and even I achievement you access consistently rapidly. <link deleted>"

Wow. That's all I've got, wow. Thank you good sir, I'll be clicking those links you provided right away, just after I forward them to all my friends.