The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Viddy the Squiddy

    Here's a neat news story: the first video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat. Since I don't get the Discovery Channel, I'll have to be satisfied with looking at bootleg snippets on Youtube until the documentary finally makes it to Netflix. However, one line in the news story caught my attention: that…

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  • Arisia 2013, Featuring ME

    Next week I'm going to be a program participant at the always interesting Arisia convention in Boston, held at the Westin Waterfront hotel. My schedule, in case you want to follow me around and bask in my brilliance: Saturday (January 19) at 11:30 a.m.: Cambridge SF Workshop Flash Fiction Reading. The members of the coolest…

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  • Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 1)

    A few months ago I wrote a How I Did It post about my short story "The Barbary Shore." In it I mentioned that I was expanding that story into a novel. In point of fact, I had nearly finished expanding it when I wrote that post — or so I thought. When I turned…

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  • A Book About Venice

    I love Venice, and I have enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's work in the past, so I was very pleased and excited when I got his book Venice: Pure City. But as I read it I became more and more frustrated and disappointed.  Mr. Ackroyd attempts to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix…

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  • A Christmas Tradition

    Long-time readers of this 'blog know that I like to put up a link every Christmas to my favorite holiday-themed Web site in the whole world: the NORAD Santa Tracker. This year, think a moment about the people who created that site. Their normal job is air defense. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year…

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  • Confederacy of Dunces: Ahead of Its TIme

    I recently started re-reading John Kennedy Toole's great comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces. For a New Orleanian, it's kind of like Scotsmen reading Burns. It's our "national literature." It's also a very funny book. And, for the first time, I realized it's a prescient book. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, spends most of…

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  • Wizard Hygiene

    This past Sunday I took my family to see The Hobbit at the multiplex. I'm not going to give a full movie review here — the blogosphere is full of self-appointed cinematic geniuses explaining how they would have done things better. (I even do that myself sometimes, just not today.) If you're interested: I liked…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 4: The Man Who Counts

    The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria. Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an observer during…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 3: Robida’s World!

    It wasn't until 1884 that a really practical airship took to the skies. La France, built by a pair of French Army Captains, Charles Renaud and Arthur Krebs, is generally considered the first truly dirigible aircraft. It was 165 feet long, with an overall weight of about 2 tons. Most of that weight was taken…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 2: Dirigibles!

    Balloons could get you up in the air, but they weren't steerable. Various inventors tried to build powered airships which could fly anywhere the pilot wished to go, but during the first half of the 19th Century they were stymied by the massive weight and enormous fuel consumption of available engines. Turns out railroad technology…

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