Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Technical difficulties

The blackouts and brownouts of the last week, following the extraordinary snowall of the past weekend, have taken their toll – my PC display just flicked and died.

Lightning_strike

I’m currently working with a low res monitor waiting to get enough money together to have the old video fixed or to buy a new one.
This means there will be some delays in the updates for a while.
But we’ll be back – the current set-up allows me to write and handle the basics (but working on maps and images is an absolute pain).
More news as stuff happens.


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Afternoon on the Nile

Isn’t this writing business just great.
In what other field could I spend the afternoon re-watching the great Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile, and still call it research?

And by the way, the movie is from 1978, not 1974 as the trailer caption puts it.
And yes, I might inflict my opinions about the movie on you, one of these nights.


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The African Queen (1951)

The-african-queen-1-As I said, I rewatched John Huston’s The African Queen, from 1951.
And I’m pretty glad I did – because I’ve seen it so often that I knew the story almost by heart, and this time I concentrated on a number of details that, when I was younger, I missed.So, let’s do away with the plot.

So, let’s do away with the basic plot.
According to IMDb…

In Africa during WWI, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship.

Which is pretty straightforward.
The film – based on a book by C.S. Forester, is set in 1914 and it does involve the hare-brained plan cooked up by Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) and Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) to sink the Luisa, a German gunboat patrolling a lake 1The movie’s a great adventure yarn, a comedy, a drama, a love story. One of the greatest film of all time. Do they still make them like this? I doubt it. Continue reading →


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Honorary Men

Today is the International Women’s Day, a day devoted to the celebration and promotion of female equality.
Which is both good and sad, if you think about it, because it’s a good thing, but we shouldn’t need it, not anymore.

But we know how things are going, and there’s still a lot of people that form an opinion on other human beings based on their reproductive role.
Sad losers.

anne steelyard 3

And as I was thinking about what to write and how to write it for this post, I was reminded of a very fine comic, written by Barbara Hambly and called Anne Steelyard. Continue reading →


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Lost in the countryside

51xfB36OKBL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_In a (probably misguided) attempt at coming to terms with my exile in the hills of the Asti wine country, I got me a copy of John Seymour’s classic The Countryside Explained, which – if nothing else – has the right reassuring title.The very fine used copy of the hardback kept

The very fine used copy of the hardback (with great illustrations by Sally Seymour) kept me company in the last two days when we were snowed in and with erratic grid services. As expected, the book is absolutely wonderful. Lots of information, packaged with wit, a sort of gruff, down-to-earth but precise language that works just fine. Continue reading →