Tea for Tuesday

David's Tea shops are popping up all over town - I think there are four or five now, including one not too far from where I work. It's so easy to get flavoured out with tea, and after going on a peppermint binge, I just wasn't finding inspiration in the cupboard. Orange? Licorice? Lemon? Boring. My yearning for a new taste sensation eventually filed itself away, and I actually walked by a David's Tea, only to backtrack moments later. Oh right!

I remembered a sample that I instantly had to have more of. The Oh Canada blend is a smooth red rooibos with maple syrup, toffee and caramel. It smells a-m-a-z-i-n-g, plus I love the sugar maple leaves that add a bit of colour. I bet it would make a great latte.

Now here's some bonus Canadiana - the featured saucer is one of several pieces that Mom gave me a few years ago, from one china cabinet to another. The saucer is made in Japan and branded with Woodward's on the back. Woodward's was a great Western Canadian department store that is proof that good things don't last forever. After 100 years in operation, the chain was sold in 1993. It's just a bit of nostalgia that makes it precious - and just watch me dash across the kitchen every time my husband tries to put in the dishwasher!

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

As we've seen before, science fiction isn't just all about hardcore technology, new worlds or current events carefully couched as the future. I can only imagine that there was so much change going on in the 1960s that Edmund Cooper may have wistfully sighed and wished for escape to a place where he could see...

A Far Sunset

The year: 2032 A.D. The Gloria Mundi, a starship built and manned by the new United States of Europe, touches down on the planet, Alatair Five. Disaster strikes, leaving only one apparent survivor - Paul Marlow, whose adventures in the lair of a strange primeval race known as the Bayani leads him first to their God, the omnipotent and omniscient Oruri, and eventually to an unlimited power that is so great that is must include a built-in death sentence. The forces that have remained static for centuries overcome both the forces of the future and the quest for unlimited knowledge.





If you don't want to hop on over to Google, Gloria Mundi comes from the saying "Sic transit gloria mundi", which translates to "Thus passes the glory of the world". My literary insides tell me that the 1977 cover of this book by David Bergen (original printing 1967), has little to do with the story inside. Paul Marlow, who is rechristened Poul Mer Lo, is a psychiatrist who finds himself accepted by the "primitive" society as a sort of god. The chapters are short and after six of them I get the impression that it's a pulpy men's adventure book - naturally Paul ends up with an exotic alien female who seems more concerned for him than herself. My gut is also telling me that Paul saves the Bayani, marries Mylai Tui and lives happily ever after. I'll keep reading and update this post later!

If A Far Sunset piques your interest, Edmund Cooper's books are now available as eBooks. He's one of the seemingly rare older authors whose works have made the digital leap, and thank goodness, because some of these old paperbacks get pretty fragile.

My Somnambulistic Life

2014 has been the weirdest year ever! Instead of riding the horse, I feel like it's dragging me around in circles. I hope March is better, because most of February was sleepless, literally. It started with too much going on in my head:

Then it continued with randomly waking up at 4am every morning. By the time Friday rolled around I looked like the living dead:

And just when I started waking up at 6am again...my father in law started calling between 10 and 10:30pm every night. I guess seniors have no reason to go to bed early, unlike us poor young folk:

Why! Why? Why did my body and my FIL hate sleep so much? And my brain! During the last week of February, my brain had a hankering for belting out Tom Jones for a solid hour and a half:

Let me tell you, What's New Pussycat? is a really, really, really long, long song! Fortunately my before bedtime habits, body clock, father in law and brain have all shaped up, because March is so far, so good in the sleep department. Sweet dreams!

PS, if you like the font, you can download it for free from Blambot.

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

Today's Swiss Army knife post is a book review, a movie preview and a 70s Sci fi scan, because the 70s could only have produced...

Rocket Raccoon

I have been gamely trying to get through this book since I bought it in November and really pushed to try and finish the original comics collected in Rocket Raccoon and Groot. It was one of those titles I had often heard about, but didn't want to spend hours digging for every year the local comic expo rolls around. Marvel has saved me from boxes of dusty newsprint by thoughtfully combining the original Groot comic, Rocket Raccoon comics and part of the new GotG series together in one volume.

Now, part of the excitement is that Bradley Cooper will be providing the voice for the plucky procyon lotor in Guardians of the Galaxy this summer. My anticipation for it has been been up and down - nothing is worse than a bad comic book movie after all - but then I found out Vin Diesel is voicing Groot. Groot is a tree. Let me rephrase that: One of my favourite actors is playing a CGI tree. 

The new trailer is out and I don't know what to think:

But let's dial back to the mists of time, when Groot first appeared in 1960. There's something dorky about a sentient space tree that terrorizes a town, and he meets a predictable, goofy end. Rocket shows up in 1976 with his furry pals, who are the guardians of the Keystone Quadrant and protectors of the Loonies - mentally ill people who...well, I really don't know what they do except bounce around in straitjackets. They all live on a planet called Halfworld, where competing toy companies start a war. Colourful, weird and punny sum up the original comics. At times they were almost unreadable, but then I went through a box of old Thor issues and realized it was just the style at the time - it was I, the reader who had changed! I can appreciate the editorial and creative freedom that abounded.

Even though the 2008-2010 comic version of Guardians of the Galaxy is slicker and well, more coherent in its narrative, it's hard to beat the sheer gleefulness of the 1970s series. Eye popping colour, dynamic action and a whole lot of weird, is something that comics have lost. The whole "dark and gritty" thing can get pretty old. Just look at this scene - killer clown tanks! Banana bombs! What?! There's creating something to send a message, and then there's creating a work just for the sheer fun of it. In that case, it's mission accomplished for Rocket Raccoon :-)

Click on over to Comixology where you can download the issues for your mobile device or just marvel (heh!) at the previews. I suppose I'll be back in a few more months reviewing the movie - until then, I'm going to try and figure out how they're going to make a cross-over with the Avengers ;-)

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

These days when so many parts of our lives are planned and regulated, it's always nice to be surprised. And today's book thrilled me because just when I thought I had read all of Monica Hughes' science fiction books, but it turned out I hadn't read...

Crisis on Conshelf Ten

When Moon-born, fifteen year old Kepler Masterman visits Earth for the first time, he finds heavy gravity impossible to live in. An underwater atmosphere seems to offer the best solution to his problems and friendly relatives welcome him to their experimental community many fathoms deep in the depths of the ocean. But on Conshelf Ten Kepler discovers a sinister situation linked to the mysterious, water-breathing Gillmen, and realises that not only is he in great personal danger but that the survival of the entire Earth is threatened. 

I don't have any complaints about the cover. This is actually her second book, published in 1975, and thankfully it looks very impressive. I mostly want to tell all y'all how wonderful Hughes' books are - my particular favourites are Devil On My Back and the Isis trilogy. She's another author that started writing later in life, and sadly she passed away in 2003. I assumed that she had stopped writing a long time ago, but she actually put out one book (sometimes two) a year. That's productivity to aspire too, not to mention all the reading I have to do now.

The Bard's Tale

When I had my big January cold, I thought, at least, oh well, I can read something, but I couldn't. My ability to focus had gone out the door with breathing through both nostrils. Was I fated to spend my days staring at the ceiling? Fortunately, as fate would have it, I stumbled across an oldie but goodie game on the Google Play that has been ported over to mobile devices. And just like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, I was in for some interactive storytelling as I embarked on...

The Bard's Tale 

The first thing I noticed was how dated the game appeared, from a time when grass was a strange, hyperreal colour and 3D animation was still a novelty. How funny that my home PC back in 2004 was too slow to play the game. Ten years is ten lifetimes in computing. And if you like things super retro, it comes bundled with the original Bard's Tale trilogy.

The Bard's Tale is one big, hilarious send up of the fantasy genre as well as computer role playing games. There's lots to laugh at, from the first quest (kill a rat) to breaking barrels and being besotted with being a "chosen one" which forms the main quest. The Bard, who is never named, is voiced by Cary Elwes, who starred in The Princess Bride. Occasionally The Bard breaks the fourth wall and gets sarcastic with the droll narrator, Tony Jay.

But besides some goofy songs and a compelling story, there's lots of hacking and slashing. Wolves, boars, trees, evil goblins, zombies - oops - all provide a challenge for The Bard and his companions. Yup, such a sad soul The Bard is - he has to conjure up friends like the Mercenary, Electric Spider and the Crone. If there's one thing I can complain about the game is that some levels were pretty dark and hard to see even with the brightness turned all the way up on my 7" tablet. It was distracting.

Here's the best part about The Bard's Tale though - your actions determine the story and the ending. Being the nice person I am, I chose all the "nice" dialog options. On my second go round, I chose the snarky answers. Being snarky had a price though, literally, in some areas, so use with caution!

It's great to see older games can find new life. They're perfect for playing a little bit at a time, and unlike a lot of mobile games, there is so much to them than just collecting coins, launching birds or crushing candy :-D

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

I was getting worried that I was running out of 70s paperbacks - and it turns out that if I do, this column can be renamed 60s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans, because we have lots of those too! While digging through the cache I found another Arthur C. Clarke book. I suppose dreaming of going to the moon is like dreaming of going to Mars for folks today, but back in 1955, Clarke dreamed of...

Earthlight

Like many works published in the 50s and 60s, one could still dream of a fantastic future in the 80s and 90s from the 70s. Today we take the acceleration of technology for granted, wondering why our mobile devices are so slow when 30 years ago teletypes were still chunking away and 20 years ago you had to have a second phone line if you wanted to make calls and use the Internet. Just 10 years ago most cellphones didn't even have a colour display.

I grew up on the tail end of the fantasy that this cover so fondly predicts. Colonies on the moon! Domed compounds! Monorails!! No wonder Futurama wasted little time with Fry visiting the moon in the second episode of the first season (it probably would have been an amusement park by now anyway). There's also something a little weird about this cover. That, uh, moon tree looks a little suggestive. Nothing quite says "We conquered the moon" by imposing a big ol' fertility symbol on it :-D