I read Nancy Kress' Probability Moon. A good yarn, with an interesting alien world/culture, albeit one that requires a high-powered Improbability Drive. The main Earth-y people in the story are a couple (xeno)sociologists, a geologist and a biologist, so they can perhaps be forgiven for not figuring out a couple physics things until many pages after I did. Plenty of First Contact-y character goodness. Kress has written two sequels, the latter of which won the Campbell best novel award; I'm not sure I enjoyed this one enough to seek the sequels. Or maybe my experience with Kress' Beggars trilogy tells me that the first one is the one to read.

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Going from good to bad, the Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners for 2010 have been announced.

She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad checks, but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so.

The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.

For hagdirt:
The wind whispering through the pine trees and the sun reflecting off the surface of Lake Tahoe like a scattering of diamonds was an idyllic setting, while to the south the same sun struggled to penetrate a sky choked with farm dust and car exhaust over Bakersfield, a town spread over the lower San Joaquin Valley like a brown stain on a wino’s trousers, which is where, unfortunately, this story takes place.

His chest glistened like a pumpkin seed, either one fresh out of the pumpkin but with all the orange strands of pumpkin flesh removed, or one straight out of the oven after being coated in just the right amount of oil and then baked; the point is that it was smooth, fairly shiny, and that color.