So, whilst browsing at the library a couple of weeks ago, Your Humble Blogger picked up two recent books featuring an older, post-Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. One was a well-reviewed new book, borrowed off the new book shelf for only seven…
OK, Gentle Readers, Your Humble Blogger is aware that y’all have been fretting for two days now, asking, “Now that the cruelest month has begun, when O when will Vardibidian devote some space in his Tohu Bohu to poetry?” Well,…
Mark Liberman was certain to catch my eye with a piece on the Language Log called Hartman’s Law Confirmed Again. However, other than the reference to Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (which, bye the bye, comes up first on a…
It seems as if Your Humble Blogger has yet to write a Puff Piece on A.Word.a.Day, Anu Garg’s tremendously entertaining service where he emails you, well, a word a day. Unlike some other seemingly similar services I’ve tried, Mr. Garg…
Your Humble Blogger is aware that making fun of headlines—particularly internet headlines—is the last refuge of the unimaginative, but I couldn’t help chortling at Pope Sought and Offered Forgiveness. Well, good luck finding him, whoever you are, but I suspect…
Well, and it’s time for Vardibidian Predictions (we’re never wrong, unless you count mere factual inaccuracy) to come through with another year’s worth. You know my methods; randomly jot down a bunch of names and hope that I can slap…
After some years of avoiding reading any of Kilgore Trout’s prodigious output, Your Humble Blogger happened on the Collected Short Stories (vol. M) on the new book shelf, and as things were pretty sparse around there, took it home and…
Now, The Forge of Gd, by Greg Bear, is what I call real old-fashioned science fiction. How come Your Humble Blogger never read this before? Not that it’s flawless. Heck, none of the characters actually achieve anything at all over…
The CJR Daily, née the Campaign Desk, does an excellent job (or so it seems to YHB) of examining the ways the press works and fails to work. They place stories in context, and they also remove them from camouflaging…
OK, now in the category of Least Meme-y Thing that somehow seems like a meme anyway, Your Humble Blogger, in Wikipeding Bobby Short, clicked over to the list of people born in 1924, and was entertained, in a Book of…