By Lisa Black When you vacation, what do you take pictures of? (And don't tell me you don't take pictures, not now when everyone has a camera in their phone and their phone is never out of arm's reach. If you're failing to pictorially document every beach, cruise ship casino jackpot and stunning...
Downsizing: The Art of Letting Go
By Lisa Black I retire in 163 days, and we're building a house in another state. My husband has finally gotten tired of our home being threatened with destruction every couple of years (we live near the water in Florida) and is willing to trade the Florida house for a Florida vacation condo....
FAVORITE DETECTIVES: ChapGTP and I compare notes.
By Lisa Black Since last month I asked ChatGPT to tell me who it thought the world’s favorite book villains were, this time I thought I’d ask for the world’s favorite detectives. Its response was singularly unsurprising. Chat GPT's Top 6 Favorite Detectives 1. Sherlock Holmes Created by Sir Arthur...
FIVE VILLAINS: ChatGTP AND ME WEIGH IN ON OUR FAVORITES
By Lisa Black As an experimental time-saver, I asked ChatGTP to write me a 500 word blog on ‘the five favorite villains from books.’ I didn’t specify whose favorites or give any other instructions. Minus its flowery prose and possibly speciesist comment on how ‘true evil is not always found in the...
LYING IN WAIT FOR HOUDINI THE FOSTER CAT
By Lisa Black If you’ve ever perused my social media feed, you may know that last year I fostered four of the most impossibly adorable kittens ever. This year the animal shelter gave me a mom cat with two newborns kittens, so tiny they never moved from the carrier. I set out the litter box and...
THE STAR WARS MURDERS
By Lisa Black Way back in the dark ages before personal computers on every desk and watching TV on your smartphone, in 1983, Ronald Reagan talked about starting the Strategic Defense Initiative. A bunch of satellites would float around in space and shoot down any missiles incoming from Russia and...
FINGERPRINTS AND FISH TANKS: Does that really work?
By Lisa Black Remember that scene in Beverly Hills Cop II where Eddie Murphy uses Judge Reinhold's turtle tank and some superglue to develop a fingerprint on a matchbook? It was 1987, and that was not commonly known technology to the average viewer, who probably wondered if that actually worked....
A NOT SO COZY REALITY
By Lisa Black Truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is truth—whether it means to be or not. Any cozy mystery worth its salt has a small town, a bickering couple, eccentric characters, and a great climate. A murder in 2013 checked all these boxes and more, but to the...
I WILL FIND YOU: THE USE OF FORENSIC GENEALOGY
By Lisa Black Forensic genetic genealogy burst into the American lexicon in 2018 with the identification of the Golden State Killer, but the methodology had been around for decades. It was developed not to find the perverse and violent, but the loved. Around the turn of the millennium, companies...
HOW TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT
By Lisa Black I forgot my phone the other night. Perhaps that should be written as: The other night, I left the house and forgot my phone!!!...