Consortium of Seven: Year 2

    Two full years of Consortium of Seven: A Daily Blog! We've all had a really good time and we hope to keeping having a good time for a long time! Last year around this time we switched from  the Blogger site where we did the first year to this site.   Now we've moved on to the Year 3 site .      

Sadly, Scotland is not known for its terrific statistics around healthy weight gain & good diet, in fact quite the opposite. We do however manage to have a sense of humour about it. Sometimes this is reflected in the art we make. What is also reflected is the spare & austere diet of the past. An island nation still reliant on a large-scale fishing industry & an all too willing participant in the hunting business – at least if you’re a landowner – our climate (not much sun, plenty of rain, probably cold) doesn’t lend us anything more than simple fruit & vegetables that could quite honestly survive if you planted them on concrete. This has meant that many of our multicultural successes have been in the food industry. Our food isn’t great, so we do one of two things. We either deep-fry it in batter or we import it & the people whose families first brought the better food here are genius at it. Our Indian, Chinese, Italian & increasingly Mexican restaurant & tak...

    Another week already?!    Too much going on for me at work, medical concerns, and then the remnants of Ida tearing through to make Wednesday and Thursday a bit of a mess. As a result, this is likely to be more a case of quick looks at things on my list to check out.       Disney's ticked me off by sticking to a theatrical release only for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings , a wholly irresponsible thing to do during a resurgent pandemic. This makes it the first Marvel Cinematic Universe release since 2008 which I won't have seen while it's new. Evading spoilers for a few days is a reasonable aim, but not for the length of time involved here. I'm peeved and disappointed, which I say both as a nearly life-long Marvel fan and as a much more recent Disney shareholder.        Moving on to brighter things...     While it's been available since mid-July, I've only just started to look at McCartney 3...

 Happy fall, everyone!  Fall has started here in the North Hemisphere as of yesterday, September 1st, so now it's time for falling temperatures and spooky movies and cider and all all that good stuff.  I've a good amount of horror in this week's offerings so let's get to it. _______________________________ Let's start with something that might seem a little silly but really isn't  Part of the excellent run of Pocket Books that expanded on the Star Trek (original series) stories, this is a tale of Kirk, Scott, Chekov and Sulu stranded on a shuttle and desperately struggling to survive and passing the time with telling the tale of how they all tried to beat famously the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru test.  Some of it gets interestingly dark (the Sulu story is sad as hell), some of it is just plain funny (Scotty, for instance) and then there is Chekov completely misunderstanding the assignment and both winning the scenario and losing. Author Julia Ecklar is a Hugo-winn...

  Everybody's doing themed mystery series these days, with titles that are puns, catchphrases, and so on. But two writers who were doing that a long time ago were Rita Mae Brown and Stan Cutler. I came across a mwention of Cutler's Rough Cut recently among the books listed in They Died in Vain , a collection of short reviews of overlooked or forgotten books.             I remember Cutler's Hollywood mysteries from the 90s, and just reserved three out of four at my local libary. Well no, not my local library but the statewide network of libraries which is the modern version of what used to be called "interlibrary loan." Overlooked books require a bit more searching than bestsellers. And I found the fourth book on eBay for two bucks plus shipping. So I'm ready to go through the four books featuring Cutler's team of two mystery solvers.  It's been so long since I read these that I couldn't remember the order of the mysteries, but a book-rela...