Ken Newquist

The Muppets take Tatooine

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My daughter hasn’t been watching much TV — at seven months she doesn’t have the attention span for it, and would rather spend her time crawling around chasing dogs, chewing on blocks or hunting for power cords.

She does like the “Baby Genius” videos though, which feature puppets engaged in a bunch of different short films (and I do mean short — we’re talking films custom-made for baby attention spans, with each scene lasting somewhere around 30 seconds).

Given how much she liked the Genius puppets, we thought she might get a kick out of the Muppets, and decided to rent an episode of The Muppet Show from Netflix. They’ve got a bunch of the old shows on DVD, and when I saw they had one with Mark Hamill on it, I knew exactly which one I was renting first.

Speculative Fiction Weblogs

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A while back I lamented the lack of speculative fiction Weblogs on the net (or at least, my inability to find them). Fortunately, someone out there heard my cry: Doyle Eldon Wilmoth, Jr, editor and publisher of SpecFicWorld.com, who noted that he’d put together a list of scifi blogs on his site. So naturally, I … Read more

The Gunslinger Revisited

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“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” That’s one of the great opening lines in speculative fiction — or hell, any kind of fiction. It immediately evokes mystery, drama, adventure and an entire Old West mythology. It doesn’t merely tug at the mind — it rends. It compels. It forces … Read more

Thoughts from a 6 Month Old’s Dad

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iBook Power Cords are Pretty: iBooks and PowerBooks ship with power cords that have small lighted disks at the end that plugs into the Mac. This disk glows orange if the computer is charging, and green if it’s at full-power. StarGirl’s recently become obsessed with this disk, and is now aggressively trying to grab hold … Read more

Rat Urine on Soda Can Kills Store Clerk

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In 1999/2000, an e-mail hoax surfaced claiming that a man in Hawaii died after being exposed to rat urine in the back room of a supermarket. Although it offered good advice — always wipe off your soda can before drinking from it — the content’s were false. The hoax has gained a few paragraphs since … Read more

Find RPG News With an Attitude at OgreCave

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Ogre Cave (www.ogrecave.com) is a multi-person blog offering news and commentary about speculative fiction gaming in its myriad incarnations, from board games to role-playing games to card games. The site’s updated several times a week (and occasionally, several times a day) with short news updates, such as White Wolf Games lawsuit trying to stop Sony’s … Read more

Return of the iBook

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About four months ago, my faithful iBook began having problems. When I’d lift the laptop’s screen, it would fade to black, and would stay that way unless I kept it at exactly the right angle. A few weeks after the problem began, the right angle disappeared, and the screen stayed dark. A search at www.macintouch.com … Read more