What's Wrong With Elections These Days?

Elections are a simple affair. You go into a booth with a ballot, whether paper or virtual, you punch a series of fields, and you walk out. At the end of the period, the votes are tallied and then – surprise! In fact, surprise has been the element of the past many elections. Upsets are common, and catastrophic changes more frequent than you would expect. It seems that the new age of polling and constant feedback has made elections less predictable, not more. Continue reading

The Nazi Wonder Weapon Revealed: Die Glocke

Research for the new novel is almost completed. There are going to be twists and turns that will make a helicopter spin, and I decided to keep with the strength of In the Mission: a novel about a deep mystery wrapped in a conundrum, where science parallels art which parallels the otherworldly. Somewhere in the depth of the research (and it goes very deep), I found myself mired in a strange story. Continue reading

The Gutenberg Connection

The new novel is shaping up real nice, thanks for asking. It is going to be much in the same vein as the first one, only bigger in scope and breadth. In particular, there will be a chronological component (read: history) that spans multiple centuries. I am not going to give away the plot, but maybe I should share some of the research I did (some of it already surfaced while I was writing about the Meta Romuli). Continue reading

Heroic and Flawed: The Jesus Seminar

Unlike with many other religions, the words of Christianity’s founder were not written down during his lifetime. Jesus really didn’t seem to care much about literality in general, talking in metaphor, analogy, parable, and absurd. To make things worse, soon after he died, a series of calamities befell the new religion that brought it almost to extinction. First there was the great fire of Rome in 64AD, to the day 1,949 years ago. Continue reading

The Mystery of the Terebinthus Neronis

One of the central parts of In the MIssion deals with the overlapping tradition of betrayal that started the Christian Church. On one side, Judas gave away Jesus to the Temple; this tradition, while historically accurate, has created the false impression that Judas actually betrayed Jesus, where he simply seems to have fulfilled the instructions given to him. On the other hand, we have absolutely no knowledge of the details of Peter and Paul’s death in Rome. Continue reading

Romanizing Esperanto / Romigi Esperanton

When you grow up bilingual, you don’t feel 100% comfortable in either language. The things you say tend to sound odd to most people around you, at least some of the time. You tend to use expressions from the other language, or have a preference for words in one that are shared with the other. Thinking that learning a third language would make things right, I started learning Esperanto. The original goal was never accomplished, as is turns out there are about as many people full of scorn for my Esperanto as there are for my Italian or German (or English). Continue reading