Click here to email us.

The Owlcroft Company Home Page

(The Owlcroft Company, a Washington State corporation.)

The Owlcroft Company Home Page

Click here to search for any book, new or used, through Abebooks.

The Owlcroft Baseball-Analysis Site

From one of the pioneers of modern baseball analysis—a long-time consultant to successful major-league ball clubs—comes this site, which not only explains thoroughly the rationale and methodology of modern analysis, but presents detailed stats on teams and players (updated daily in-season), allowing fans to see how much players are really helping (or hurting) their team, and how well any team is really playing.

Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy

For the civilized reader, too many--most--web sites about science-fiction or fantasy literature recall American Bandstand: “Uh, wull, Dick, I give it a 86 ’cause it had a good beat an’ yuh could dance to it.” What one might charitably call “naive enthusiasm” abounds. But, while a cold spritzer is often welcome refreshment, when we go into a restaurant of quality and ask for the wine card, we do not expect to see Gallo Chablis or Annie Greensprings among the listings. This site seeks to be a wine card of science-fiction and fantasy literature; it is dedicated to presenting works in the fields of science-fiction and fantasy—sometimes collectively called “speculative fiction”—that get high grades for literary quality without needing any bonus points just for being science fiction or fantasy. The books are judged as literature, not as “science-fiction books” or ”fantasy books“.

That Useful Wine Site

Whether you are a veteran wine drinker or a complete novice, you should find this site quite, well, useful. It has information pages on each of about 150 major wine grapes, from Agiorgitiko to Zierfandler, telling about the grape, what wine from it is like, and—the crux—several examples of such wine each under $20 and each recommended by numerous wine critics, professional and amateur: this site is not one person’s or a few individuals’ personal tastes, it is “data mining” of consensus critical opinion. Using it, you can sample a variety knowing you are drinking what a lot of people consider a fine example of it, yet one that doesn’t break the bank. The site also includes numerous pages of general wine-drinking and wine-buying advice and information.

The “Growing Taste” Food-Gardening Site

A rich cornucopia of detailed information for home vegetable and fruit gardeners, the site includes immensely detailed and exact growing information for a great variety of vegetables and fruits—but above all it focuses on identifying the most flavorful varieties of each; in an era of water-swollen “hybrid vigor”, where heavier and harder are the chief commercial criteria for edibles, the home gardener, who can pick those “cultivars” that make the best eating, needs help sorting through all those “best ever!” claims made for each and every variety in garden-seed catalogues, and this site provides that much-needed guidance.

Matters Criminous

The mystery-crime-detection genre is—like most literary genres—regrettably dominated by works lacking literary merit, and is indeed almost antagonistic toward such works; yet authors of substantial merit have been (and are) producing works of enduring value within the field. While this site does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey of all that is literate within the genre, it does select and describe a good number of authors and series that meet that criterion; moreover, it includes links to select further resources in the field. Possibly most important of all, it also provides a complete listing of all the books (and omnibuses) for each series, along with used-book searches for each title.

The “Steroids and Baseball” Site

Everything you think you know about steroids and other “performance-enhancing” drugs in baseball is (almost certainly) wrong.

This fact-filled site draws extensively on the medical literature and detailed analysis of actual statistics to get to the truths about what steroids do and don’t do for performance, whether any records are “tainted”, what the extent and severity of medical side effects really are, whether American youth is being led astray by ballplayer “role models”, and the formal ethics of performance-enhancing substance use in sports.

(This site is an outgrowth of the Owlcroft Baseball web site described above on this page.)

The Induction Site

Induction is a wholly different method of cooking, and this site explains in full what it is, how it works, what its advantages are (it is simply the best cooking technology there is, for both professional and home cooking), and who makes units today. Induction, long popular around the world, is finally having a resurgence in North America, with new name-brand units appearing; people who want to know why will find out at this leading internet resource site.

Oxalic-Acid Information

Oxalic acid is a component of many common foods (notably dark-green leafy ones), and many people have health-related concerns about it, because it is implicated in medical conditions such as kidney stones and gout. The internet contains a lot of unscientific rubbish on the topic; here are the facts.

The English Language

This little site is not so much about what correct English grammar and usage are as it is a reasoned (but passionate) argument that there really is such a thing as “sound English”, and thus—necessarily—such a thing as unsound English. In a time when more and more voices clamorously decry the existence of any sort of standards whatever (for English, or anything), this site explains why care with our words is essential to us as individuals and to our society and our very civilization.

What and Where is “Owlcroft”?

While this site is a “guided tour” of the real, physical Owlcroft House—establishing its location, environment, and design details, as well as its appearance outside and in—it is in a more general sense an example of the effectiveness of solar design. The entire annual heating “bill” for this 2000-square-foot-plus home not far from the Canadian border is roughly one-fifth of one cord of wood!