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Newsletter Archive
March 4, 2023
How to adopt a cat
Hello again, Reader. Or welcome, if you're new!
As you may know, we have a cat called Lola. She's small, feisty, and black all over except for a little white 'bikini'. She's also very vocal, so we always know when she's hungry, been out in the rain, wants scritching behind the ears, or can't get into the cupboard under the stairs. Often we're not sure which of these it is, so we have to follow a tiny shouty cat around the house until she leads us to the source of her frustration. So imagine our surprise when, being absolutely sure Lola was inside, a small, feisty black cat with a little white bikini stood on our doorstep and shouted at us. The only difference between Lola and this imposter is that Lola's eyes are greenish, and this one's are yellower. For a few mornings she started serenading us - and talking away to Lola as she came and went through the catflap. There's no fighting, just talking, and we rather suspect she was making her case for being allowed to move in. Then she stopped as abruptly as she started, but we still see her pootling about from time to time without a care in the world. She looks very well, she has a nice glossy coat and she's not too skinny, so we're certain she has a perfectly nice home already. We had a previous cat adopt us, and he was skin and bones, with gummy eyes and matted fur when he turned up and sat wailing in the rain until we took pity on him. He then ate us out of house and home, got quite stocky, and when he wasn't falling off the arm of the sofa in his sleep, he spooked people into thinking there was a puma on the loose. I suspect the local cat population knows we're a soft touch...
Space News
A Dark Sky town like no other
Living in the countryside we're spoiled for views of the night sky. Living on a hill doesn't hurt either! But we do still have street lights, there are houses nearby with security lamps, and there's a farm just down the hill that often needs floodlights on, so it's not perfect. There are places that preserve their night skies, though, and can join the international register of Dark Sky places. One such town is Moffat in Scotland. Apart from reducing light pollution as much as possible, for two weeks every winter they turn off nearly all of the public lights, to let people reconnect with the view our ancient ancestors would have been intimately familiar with. Astronomers, photographers and even the local wildlife are thriving as a result. Of course, without street lights you can't see where you're going, and so the old tradition of 'links' has been revived. Once poor street urchins, now enterprising teens, they carry lanterns to escort visitors through the dark in return for a small tip. You might also get a history lesson into the bargain, such as learning the origin of the phrase 'can't hold a candle to'.
Source: Atlas Obscura
Other Books To Check Out
I've gathered a few great books from independent authors like me, I hope you'll check them out.
And let me know if you have any books to recommend! I'm particularly interested in indie authors, but anything you've read and loved would be awesome.
Free!
First contact... at the end of the world.
Humanity is on the verge of extinction.
Earth's civilization has immolated itself in nuclear fire, ending a century of chaos and environmental decay. The last survivors of the human race watch helplessly from space as their homeworld burns, and with it, their only chance of survival.
Until Tomasz Dabrowski, an astronomer abandoned on a distant space station, detects a mysterious alien signal. Humanity's long awaited first contact with another intelligence has finally come, at the end of the world. Now, Tomasz has to decide whether to respond to the signal; because there's no way of knowing whether the aliens will be our saviors... or our destroyers.
Buy it now
It's 1911 and, against her mother's wishes, quiet New Yorker Emma dreams of winning the right to vote. She is sent away by her parents in the hope distance will curb her desire to be involved with the growing suffrage movement and told to spend time learning about where her grandparents came from.
Across the Atlantic - Queenstown, southern Ireland - hotelier Thomas dreams of being loved, even noticed, by his actress wife, Alice. On their wedding day, Alice's father had assured him that adoration comes with time. It's been eight years. But Alice has plans of her own and they certainly don't include the fight for equality or her dull husband.
Emma's arrival in Ireland leads her to discover family secrets and become involved in the Irish Women's Suffrage Society in Cork. However, Emma's path to suffrage was never meant to lead to a forbidden love affair...
Buy it now
How do you survive when your only purpose is to give your life to others... bit by bit? In the derelict house next door to a building site, Dawn lives with a young woman who says to call her Mum. Dawn loves the hole in the roof, where she can always see blue. She loves her book of birds and she loves Mrs Goring, the old lady who lives on the ground floor. But when Dawn's medicine runs out and Mrs Goring disappears, Dawn begins see the world as it really is. Next door, the new facility to hold children like her is almost finished. But Dawn wants to live. Can she escape, find Mrs Goring and the truth about her family before the doors to the Sparehouse open? A dystopian mystery for readers aged 11yrs and over, set in a world where one huge corporation sells everything, and in Britain, the NHS is a distant memory. The threat is grim, but hope is alive and well. Is that enough to save a generation of 'spares' like Dawn?
Discover Sci-Fi Giveaway!
From now until the middle of March, there's a collection of dozens of free Sci-Fi books available. Grab them now, and you can of course keep them long after the promotion is over.
Perhaps you'll find a new favourite author? There's certainly some very intriguing titles on offer...
Pick up a couple today, and then drop the author a line, telling them what you think! Believe me, it really makes a writer's day when they get an email like that.
Strange News
I've been exploring this wonderfully put-together map recently, documenting strange experiences, occurrences and places around the world.
The nearest to me is 'The Stiperstones', a very distinctive quartzite ridge near the English-Welsh border. As befits something visible for miles around, a great deal of mythology has grown up around it. One of the tors is named 'Devil's Chair', because the devil himself rested there when he dropped the stones he was carrying. Which stones? The ones he wanted to block up the path to hell, since he was sick of people wandering in, it appears! The ghost of Wild Edric, a Saxon earl is rumoured to prowl the ridge whenever invasion threatens, and there are a great many other tales of strange and inexplicable happenings throughout the years. Since lead was mined nearby since Roman times, there's a lot of history to draw these legends from. One I hadn't heard came from the Liminal Earth site:
The Stiperstones is said to be home to six birds, who whistle a beautiful song in perfect unison. However, if a seventh bird joins their song, its a sure sign the end of times is near.
You can search by country, region, type of strangeness...
Source: liminal.earth
Miscellany
See Mars in 3d
Google has put together this website to showcase the imagery from the Curiosity rover, and render it as a 3d landscape you can navigate through. It's as close to 'StreetView' as we're going to get for a while!
Source: accessmars.withgoogle.com
Robots hunting aliens
SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is one of those 'blue sky' endeavours that always seems to be underfunded and ignored. But it would be the most remarkable discovery in history if we learned that there was intelligent life out there in the universe, so fortunately the search continues. Now machine learning can help us sift through the mountain of data more efficiently, and it might already be pointing us in the right direction.
Source: universal-sci.com
Ley lines in Britain
Surprisingly the idea of Ley lines only dates back to about the 1920s, but proponents believe that they are historical routes of power which link all the ancient monuments of Britain (or other countries). Critics say there's no evidence that any civilisation believed in them prior to that, and similar logic can be applied to draw the same 'mystic lines' between the locations of phone boxes and pizza restaurants.
Source: twitter.com
And Finally
I got tricked by the weather again this week. It was glorious and sunny, birds singing and what-have-you, so when I went to put the bins out I didn't bother hauling on my heavy winter coat. Big mistake. It turns out 2 degrees C looks exactly the same as 12 degrees C through the window - the latter of which we'd had just the day before. Suffice it to say I check the thermometer before running errands again.
Did you ever see these pen-and-ink illustrations for "The War of the Worlds" by Edward Gorey? I rather like the stark simplicity of them. You might recognise him from 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies", a macabre alphabet book in which twenty-six creepy children meet their ends in various ways.
Source: themarginalian.org