Arthur Hlavaty, who has an actual weblog, linked to The Gashlycrumb Torah, which is as funny as you might expect. However, the blog that contains it, Baraita, turns out to be astoundingly good when just writing, blog-like, about what the…
I’ll plow on, shall I? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that … among these [Rights] are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Here’s a question for you, Gentle Reader: do these seem reasonable to you? Because it…
I am awfully fond of the boys over at the Language Log, despite my occasional complaints about them. One of the things that I like about them is their ability to maintain a posture of astonished outrage each time a…
I’m not sure which seems less likely, that E.L. Konigsburg would have written A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, a children’s fictional biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, or that Your Humble Blogger would never have heard of it before…
I suppose one of the things about being Connie Willis is that you can write a novella and have it published as a novel. I mean, Subterranean Press does call Inside Job a novella, more or less, but it still…
As I picked up The Family Trade, I thought about the good things I have heard about Charles Stross—well, about his writing—no, actually I’ve heard good things about him as well—I think he’s friends, in an on-line sort of way,…
Count Your Humble Blogger among those who are regularly surprised that people still think that Mssrs. Strunk and White have mostly good advice about The Elements of Style. Fond as I am of Mr. White actual writing (both his wonderful…
Back to the remarkable paragraph, which I don’t know if I’ll ever finish talking about (any more than I’ll ever finish talking about the Binding of Isaac): We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,…
I’m a trifle perplexed by how perplexed Mark Liberman is by Things that are rarely better than they normally are. He quotes Matthew D. LaPlante of the Salt Lake Tribune in an article called Interpreters in high demand in Iraq…
So, we have a couple of different interpretations of self-evident, but I think that in either of them, it is clear (perhaps self-evident) that the authors are about to list some things that he is not going to back up….