The Story Thus Far

Quite a few people have written recently to ask, “Where the hell is Bruce?” The short answer is that for the past few weeks we’ve been in the land of ice and snow, with the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow—

Really, the Icelanders are very proud of their extensive use of geothermal energy, which they insist on calling “green,” even though the actual byproducts tend to be more of an unearthly blue. They claim this is merely the result of perfectly harmless silicates suspended in the water and not plutonium waste or Cerenkov radiation or anything like that, so there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

Personally, though, if I was scouting locations for the next Bond villain’s lair, I would definitely look into filming exteriors around an Icelandic geothermal plant. Between the bleak near-Lunar terrain, the miles of massive water pipelines, the networks of weird little polygonal buildings capping all the boreholes, and the constantly hissing and venting of massive amounts of steam, it’d be a great place to stage a big set-piece battle against an army of minions.

But never mind that now. The salient point is that after a few weeks of being much further out of touch than we’d planned to be—and there are many stories to be told about that, but in the interests of brevity, I’ll withhold them for now—we’re back. The Intern did a great job of keeping the slush flowing while we were gone, but there’s still a sizable pile of correspondence waiting for my attention.