The Big Easy!

A great little picture I found of Rue Bourbon, New Orleans, graffittied with 'Love Wins'!

Click on the pic to see more of the city!

Sweet!

Picture (for no reason at all) #2

New Orleans street.

You will be punished!

Last weekend, I went with Katie to the newly opened National Museum of Crime and Punishment located in DC's Chinatown. While it's $18 to go round (compared to the free Smithsonian museums including the zoo), this new addition to DC's landscape of museums is well worth it!

The museum is impressive mainly because it combines the history of crime, mostly the state torture that passed as punishment, while profiling modern criminals up to the present. Naturally, England, this means the museum includes sophisticated ballistics and CSI-style techniques! But the best bits were the stories of human arrogance and folly in criminals causing their own downfall!

One case that still puzzles today is that of D. B. Cooper who hijacked and ransomed a Boeing 727 in the seventies, only to leap from the back with the money and never be seen again! Check out Cooper's story here! His tale suits the strain of consiracy running through American culture - was he a genius who escpaed the Feds? Or was he too smart for himself and was probably killed on landing or shortly afterwards?

Check out my novel The Murderess and the Hangman about a maid who kills her landlady for a few pieces of furniture here!

Pownce on it!

Not happy with just having one microblogging with Twitter, I got myself attached to Pownce. For some reason, I enjoy signing up for free accounts with these sites where you can post a comment to a buch of followers. Easy self-promotion for one!

What I've learned is that you can actually connect with a few people, even if just to exchange a comment or two. It's worth it if you narrow your interests down - and while you're sending a random message to 3o or so followers (some go into the thousands) your eye notices a comment about books or chess or whatever you've selected your own followers to be interested in, and the site serves itself.

Just don't spend all day there!

England World Cup qualifiers!

Dear England, Here are the England World Cup qualifying matches between now and the World Cup, South Africa 2010!

06/09/08 20:00 Barcelona: Andorra v England
10/09/08 21:00 Zagreb: Croatia v England
11/10/08 17:15 London: England v Kazakhstan
15/10/08 Minsk: Belarus v England
01/04/09 TBA: England v Ukraine
06/06/09 TBA: Kazakhstan v England
10/06/09 TBA: England v Andorra
09/09/09 TBA: England v Croatia
10/10/09 TBA: Ukraine v England
14/10/09 TBA: England v Belarus

As you can see, the first two matches are next month!

Before then, of course, it's the Olympics 2012 - in London!

Matt Fullerty is disliked by...

The best review for my novel The Pride and the Sorrow is available here. Thanks again Geoff!

"What made Matt Fullerty's writing stand out, from the very first sentence, was an unusually strong and individual way with words. Taking us into the vanished world of old America and Europe he uses a highly textured language to give an almost physical experience of being in that place and time. Drawing subtle lines between a society top-heavy with leisure and the profligate genius it produced in Morphy, he holds back the historical and personal reckoning while letting it gather and brood like the storm that finally washes away New Orleans. In my view this makes THE PRIDE AND THE SORROW a stand-out all rounder in the craft of literary fiction."

Other reviews are available here - all of which I appreciate!
Cheers internet people!

Quote of the Day #1

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstacy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you're a writer.

Who wrote it? (The picture's a clue!)

Death by Chocolate

So I never thought I'd spend $2.75 on a cupcake. But on Saturday I did - and well, it was worth it, if you like cupcakes that die in the mouth. Another sign of the small business entrepreneurs operating in the city. Check out all the crazy flavors at Georgetown Cupcake!

Only in America!

Fishing!

Recently, I had my first experience of real fishing - fishing off a boat into the Chesapeake Bay!

The cat is out of the bag (fish off the line) - we had a little help from the Captain, a former Vietnam Vet!

Rockfish and Bluefish for supper tonight! Nice!