Archive for January, 2007

Protest

It’s progress of sorts. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post described how “tens of thousands” marched in Washington on Saturday in protest against the Iraq war. In September 2005, an even bigger march was characterized by the Times as “thousands” of protesters. Technically true, but oh-so-misleading. The coverage—scant and dismissive—provoked a massive [...]

Shrieking

It should come as no surprise that composers of music for motion pictures continually mine the classical repertoire, just as contemporary novelists grab whatever they can from the stocks of literature, ancient and modern. (Have you heard the story, for instance, of “a cultivated man of middle age [who] looks back on the story of [...]

Advice

I’m going to go ahead and swipe this right out of Harper’s. First of all, it’s the lazy thing to do. Second, they swiped it from the Chicago Manual of Style Online—specifically the section that’s a sort of “Dear Abby” for copyeditors. I happen to have been one, and like they say,* once a copyeditor, [...]

Exception

I don’t usually go in for pictures of sunsets. But the one last night seemed unusual, so I took a few pictures. If I had been serious about it, I would’ve used a tripod. As it turned out, most were blurry, as I adjusted the exposure downward and paradoxically ended up with a shutter speed [...]

Corrigendum

According to this entry from a while back, my four favorite dishes are spaghetti, leftover spaghetti, spaghetti memories, and spaghetti dreams. I now realize that the third item should have been “klobasa memories”—specifically, memories of the kranjska klobasa made by my grandfather. There are shops on the east side of Cleveland that still make Slovenian [...]

Resolution

On December 31, I thought about resolving to be even lazier in 2007 than I was in 2006, but I never got around to it.