’Tis a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away galleon; they have been making rum somewhere under the flag of the Jolly Roger, ye Piratical Readers, and…
For years, Your Humble Blogger has been griping to people, on those rare occasions when somebody brings up Animal Farm, that after all, at the end of the book, all Napoleon did was make the farm indistinguishable from the neighbor…
There’s a sort of misconception running around—there! Get it! Quick! Damn, it got—there it goes! Ahem. Many people seem to think that having one’s sympathies with the descriptivists rather than the prescriptivists means that you can’t make fun of people’s…
It appears that YHB hasn’t blogged anything nice for a while, and just in case somebody was looking for something other than a gripe, here goes. I’ve listened to the Klezmatics’ Wonder Wheel perhaps ten times in the last couple…
One of the great things about library book sales—well, I suppose any used book sale, but I seem to go to library book sales more often than other kinds, more often even than used book stores—is coming across some book…
I think Little Dorrit may be, in some sense, the most sophisticated, clever, well-constructed and rewarding of Charles Dickens’s’s’s novels. It’s not my favorite, which of course is Bleak House. Favorite, though, has a lot to do with things that…
This is minor, and really counts as Just Another Awfulness, nothing compared to the people that have been killed, maimed, tortured, wrongfully imprisoned, or bankrupted. But the ways Our Only President and his Republican Congress fuck with language makes YHB…
Musing whilst listening to the news on the radio and reading it in the newspapers, I happened on a phrase that I would like to see Democratic candidates and their associates begin using immediately and use as often as possible:…
It seems to me that were YHB in the US House of Representatives, I would have somebody on staff (or a reliable volunteer, I suppose) who would be responsible for scanning the top ten blogs of Left Blogovia, the top…
Your Humble Blogger has high standards for good speeches, and I certainly have my complaints about it. But Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on 9/11 deserves mention. I won’t give a detailed critique of it, partly because I would feel bad…