Category: navel gazing

I don’t know why I don’t like Halloween more than I do. It’s all about dressing up in other people’s clothes, which I love to do. And, you know, candy. I like candy. No, I don’t like all kinds of…

Well, that’s odd. My initial attempt to Google for the quote I raised in the quiz in my previous note—and the following contains the answer to the quiz, but is intended to discuss Google, not the answer to the quiz,…

I just happened to read this quote from a well-known living American novelist about a particular kind of animal, which I elide here for my own purposes: “Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to … project our ideas…

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Making Light, goes to town on some journalist for passing along the perceived wisdom that “book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest”. She, presumably, knows whereof she speaks. If she says that her company, like…

Thanks to my local public library, I’ve been watching Beckett On Film, the anthology of all Samuel Beckett’s plays, filmed, each by a different director, in and around the year 2000. So far, I’ve only watched Rough for Theater I,…

So. Let’s suggest that a person owns a perfectly ordinary beverage container, holding two quarts (64 oz.), with a mouth about two inches in diameter, and a rectangular body about, oh, five inches by three and a half or so….

Bye-the-bye, just in case some Gentle Reader thought that YHB was enough of a political nerd to join a Fantasy Congress league, the answer is no. chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,-Vardibidian….

Your Humble Blogger can’t remember which particular links led to Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column Retreating to Small Talk When the News Isn’t So Good, in which he observes that in a press conference on Wednesday, Our Only President mentioned…

I know, I know, all you Gentle Readers were wondering, “OK, fine, he’s written about pundits, and lulavs, and novels, and he’s endorsed a bookstore, but when will Vardibidian write about 180-foot slides?” The answer: not soon enough. And, really,…

A question for Gentle Readers—what’s a bigger deal, the beginning of a book or the ending? I don’t mean for marketing purposes, or for writing, but some abstract sense of importance for making a book good or bad, whatever criteria…