My story “Agent Hammer: Licensed to Kibble” was in On The Premises issue 17. Agent Hammer is a genetically modified hamster and a secret agent who does things like jumping out of burning buildings using a lady’s frilly knickers as a parachute. I keep thinking I ought to do another Agent Hammer story because it was such fun to write.
Well squee! NASA announced that the little star TRAPPIST-1 has 7 rocky planets, ranging in size from 40% to 140% of Earth’s mass. They’re all very close to the star, closer than Mercury is to our own Sun, but TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star, with a surface temperature of perhaps 2,500 ºC. Our sun is about 5,500 ºC. This means that several of the planets are in the Goldilocks…
For some time I’ve been a fan of Chris Guillebeau, who blogs about unconventional careers. He’s now doing a daily podcast called Side Hustle School. He believes it’¡s a really good idea to have a side line, both for the obvious extra income, but also fun, new skills, and to be less dependant on your employer. The episode with me is at https://sidehustleschool.com/episode/38 It’s 8 min 21 sec.
Lynx are big cats. The adults are about a metre long. There are four surviving species: the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx, the largest), the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), and the bobcat (Lynx rufus). Lynx issiodorensis is extinct, and probably the ancestor of the four modern species. The Iberian lynx, (Lynx pardinus) is on the verge of extinction. They mostly eat rabbits, so the myxomatosis outbreak…
I knew you could visit Monet’s garden in France. I had no idea there was a copy in Japan. Here’s a Monet Pond at the temple in Gifu. And another at Seki City in Japan. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Spring isn-t far away in the Canary Islands Incidently, it was a bit harder than usual to find these pictures. What do you think happens when you Google “cute chicks”? So then I tried “chicks and hens”, and got what I wanted, plus a lot of photos like this: It’s a plant called chicks and hens, which is in the Crassulaceae family, like the aeoniums. (There are lots of aeoniums…