You may have seen this on FB — wanted to give full credit here also to photojournalist B. A. Van Sise, who also wrote the article. I think the photos are nicely WEIRD!

Camille Minichino has, in the course of her more than eight decades, been a nun, a physicist, and a mystery novelist, with more than two dozen titles to her credit, including one published this spring.

Her California home is filled with what she calls her miniatures—expansive, intricate dollhouses depicting Lilliputian versions of scenes from her mystery novels. The miniatures, like their creator and her murderers, are careful, meticulous—every bit in its proper place, no table turned over but for plot.
“In the end, it’s all the same thing,” Minichino says. “Physics, mystery, even the houses. It’s about taking the unknown and working, step by step, to know it, to make it real.”
She is effortlessly eloquent discussing physics—in which she earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the 1965 and 1968 before embarking on a long career studying and teaching high-temperature, high-pressure physics—and points out warmly that all physics is commanded by different flavors of quarks, including up, down, strange, and charm. “Come to think of it,” she says with a chuckle, “mystery stories are built on those same elements, too.”
She’s been to college three times. Now, at 82, she’s enrolled in school again, getting a second master’s degree in creative writing—a certification whose lack has always troubled her, regardless of the 27 novels to her name. She has no trouble explaining why, in spite of all her achievements, she’s back taking classes. “There’s so many days, still,” Minichino says, “and every day you’re not learning is a waste of a day.”

Minichino’s latest novel is Mousse and Murder (Berkley, 2020), the first book in the Alaskan Diner Mystery series she’s writing under the pen name Elizabeth Logan.

June 17 is Bunker Hill Day — one of many holidays in Boston and vicinity that commemorate the Revolutionary War. And one of many, like Patriot’s Day (April 19), that I had to give up when I left Massachusetts. (I take the days off anyway.)

This event is famous for the expression: Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes! allegedly necessary because the troops were low on ammunition.

An embarrassing admission: As a grade school student, on a field trip to the monument, I couldn’t make the climb! Thanks to Joey who gave me a helping hand, c. 1947.

Thursday crept up on me this week, thanks to a birthday. Okay, it was mine, which meant a lot of nice surprises but they messed with my calendar.

So I’m offering an extra cryptoquote this week, one the Cable Guy likes, from an unlikely source:

AHUDMVUAVA BIDPF PQJLV BJUMC CIDPV VTUMCA; DMCUMDDIA BJ VTDF.

                                    – EPFDA FUHTDMDI

And for a smile, a classic from an earlier age:

One time a guy handed me a picture and said ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger, I said.

Sometimes I’m late learning a very useful word. This time the word is

Paraprosdokian

— a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising, frequently humorous. It’s said that Sir Winston Churchill was a big fan.

Here’s one I like especially, since it describes me pretty well.

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

More often than not, this is my decision making process. No planning, just responses to what comes my way.

In the writing/publishing life, this is called being a pantser (writing by the seat of one’s pants), not a plotter (outlining the story).

It’s my theory, that in the general population, people fall into one category or the other. For example, how do you approach a dinner party at your home:

            a) write out a menu, check off what you have in stock vs what you need to buy, assemble menus, and so on.

            b) check out your freezer and fridge an hour or so before, and work with it.

How do you approach a project/hobby? (see above choices)

And so on.

Does your process work for you – whether you’re writing a book or learning a new skill?

That’s all that matters. The target will take care of itself.

Last week’s post, a quote from Carl Sagan, earned me nearly 100 SPAM comments over the course of a couple of days. Was it Sagan who drew them? The quote itself? I have no idea.

I eventually deleted the post and all the spam, but what a nuisance.

This is a test—a simple photo a friend of mine took of the NYPL from her hotel room across the street, to see if the spammers will follow me here.

Yours, Camille/Margaret/Ada/Jean, and now Elizabeth!

A guest blog today from my Shelter-in-Place partner, taking us down a bit of music history through technology.

Had enough time within your house to notice what’s in the nooks and crannies behind your everyday life? My last 30 years of music listening has produced hundreds of recorded media devices; LP records, “45” records, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and CD’s. They took and take up a large volume of space. Recently, I converted all of the music on these devices to digital files using computers. I made many discs with these files and stored the files on them, in addition to having them stored on my computer. These discs needed 4 computer paper boxes to contain them.

Most, but not all, of this music was performed by various artists. Some of the music was from special concerts that were broadcast and others came from satellite transmissions. A typical special was the Farm Aid concert. A typical partial content of one of these boxes is shown below.

The entire digital contents of this 30 years of musical content is about 136 Gigabytes. It can be stored on this 256 GB Flash Drive, with another 120 GB worth of other digital content, like 10’s of thousands of digital photos from a Smart phone.

Do you wonder what’s next?