"Police in Paris discovered a cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement...  A tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing.  The tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs"...a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment and a wide variety of films.  A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.   "The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines." Source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/08/filmnews.france?fb=optOut This article dates back to 2004; I recall ment...

"...We offer "singles" for 99 cents and five story collections for $2.99 (which brings the per story price down to 60 cents.) And we offer ten story collections of the singles for $4.99.  Think of albums in music. A single song is 99 cents usually, but albums with that song on it are more. Same thing in short stories and books. The story should be both ways to give readers choices." - Dean Wesley Smith This excellent interview with Dean Wesley Smith, Joe Konrath, Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson and David Graughan explores the exanding market for ebooks, which type of ebooks sell well and why how to offer readers more choice. Read the interview:   http://www.fearnet.com/news/interviews/b23910_short_stories_ebooks_discussion_with.html   

"Archaeologist Alfonso Forgione, from L'Aquila University...said, 'I have never seen anything like this before. I'm convinced because of the nails found in the jaw and around the skeleton the woman was a witch.   S he was buried in bare earth, not in a coffin and she had no shroud around her either, intriguingly other nails were hammered around her to pin down her clothes.' " 'The second skeleton we have found was buried in a similar fashion but this time we found 17 dice around her - 17 is an unlucky number in Italy and also dice was a game that women were forbidden to play." Source: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2011/09/800-year-old-witch-burial-found-in.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+%28The+Archaeology+News+Network%29   

Hot off the press - well, off the phone, actually - comes a date for the 3rd annual Fantasy, Science-Fiction and Horror fiction event.  Parallel Dimensions will take place on December 10th, 2011, at West Kirby Library, Wirral.  Doors open at 2pm. Participating authors have yet to be confirmed.  If you're an author whose work falls within the F/SF/H category and you'd like to take part, email me ASAP at ACBwrites@aol.com .  There is no payment for taking part but you are welcome to sell your own books and to hand out flyers.  The event gives people the chance to hear new, orginal fiction and to meet the authors.  Authors get the chance to read aloud some of their work before an audience. I'll post further news as things develop.   

"The notion of the "swerve" is taken from Lucretius, who lived in the first century B.C. and taught that the world, uncreated but infinite in extent, is composed of nothing but atoms and the void.... "The message of Lucretius' poem was subversive and liberating. Following his master Epicurus, the poet placed the highest value on pleasure (voluptas)...." Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904353504576566621864350318.html?mod=googlenews_wsj (From a review of a new book, The Swerve , by Stephen Greenblatt). And yet people today generally refer to people in the distant past as being ignorant.  Ironic, hmm?   

Penelope and Felicity are eighteen-weeks old silver laced wyandottes. They arrived this morning in a cat carrier, and are now pottering around in the chicken coup in my garden. Our older hen, Joyce, who's an ISA brown, is a bit stroppy right now - marching up and down the run and clucking loudly - but she'll settle down once the pecking order has been negotiated.   

CERN scientists have allegedly broken the speed of light by sixty nanoseconds.  It might not sound much, but if these claims are verified by further tests then this discovery could herald the final nail in the coffin of classical physics - much of which has been disproved already by quantum physics. News article:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html The long-held theory is that if things can move faster than the speed of light, then time travel and inter-dimensional travel ought to be possible. Ideas about time travel and inter-dimensional travel were around long before the commercial success of Dr Who .  Actually, Dr Who was around long before the current commercial success of Dr Who...  UFOlogists have been debating the possibility of UFOs being inter-dimensional rather than interplanetary craft for decades, and HG Wells published The Time Machine back in 1895.  But tales of side-stepping i...