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It snowed off an on throughout Wednesday night.  Which set the stage for a lovely evening, with dinner and post-dinner conversation ranging from the best place to see a Bugatti Veyron in the wild (outside casinos in Monte Carlo, apparently) to the best method for removing the brain from a human skull, to why one shouldn’t go horseback riding during a tarantula migration. 

(Interesting folks, writers.)

It’s snowing as I type this.  But that’s okay, because we’re up in the mountains over 9000′.  So I’m going to give the weather a pass on this one.

(You hear me, weather?  We need the moisture, so the snow is okay for now.  But some rain would be nice, too.)

So today, during lunch, James Patrick Kelly turned to me and said, “You’re just a walking compendium of taglines, aren’t you?”

And David Levine said, “What did he say now?”

Today I’m holed up in the gorgeous mountains of northern New Mexico with an amazing (and, frankly, very intimidating) cast of writers.  The food is good, the scenery is spectacular, but it’s the casual insights and crumbs of writing wisdom that make this worthwhile.

Insights like this exchange, which came about during this morning’s round-table criqitue session:

“The Dalai Lama is very good at observing people.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t eat their heads.”

A few days ago, io9 introduced me to my new favorite conspiracy theory: the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

I find crackpot theories endlessly entertaining, especially ones that touch on fringe science and/or fringe scholarship.  And this takes the cake.