Random 13 Feb 2008 11:53 pm
Okay, I’ve got a thing about verbal economy, but maybe this is too damn parsimonious.
A while back the online magazine Smith presented a six-word “story” by Ernest Hemingway:
For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.
A remarkably concise tale indeed—pathos concretized pithily. Smith invited its readers to go mano-a-mano with Papa, and six-word memoirs from its readers came [...]
Random 30 Jan 2008 11:39 pm
This is absolutely pathetic, and I don’t recommend it to my younger readers out there, but I’m creating an utterly meaningless blog entry just so that the month of January 2008 appears in the archive list.
I’m not going to make excuses. That would be as boring for me to write as for you to read. [...]
Random 31 Dec 2007 6:19 pm
I learned something new today. (Did I learn something new yesterday? Hmm …) It’s New Year’s Eve, and I bought a beer I’d never tried—Bell’s Sparkling Ale. I’d tried several Bell’s brews and found them all excellent. Well, here’s how they tempt you on the back label of the tipple at hand: “Fill your glass [...]
Random 19 Dec 2007 12:22 am
Sunday was Show Us Your Blog Space Day. I found out about it (belatedly) over at the Newsrack Blog, whose proprietor was invited to participate. I figure my invitation was lost in the mail or something (this being the busy holiday season for the good old US Postal Service).
I hadn’t realized there was a pent-up [...]
Random 3 Dec 2007 11:34 pm
Even more hair-raising than biking in city traffic is transferring a database-driven website to a new hosting service. At least for me, since I don’t do this sort of thing every day.
It all started Tuesday, when the database server became unavailable. Again. On Wednesday I started researching hosting companies. On Thursday I signed up with [...]
Random 30 Oct 2007 8:32 pm
I stumbled across a review of a book called Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, and given how I admire concision (or say I do, at any rate), I just had to take a look. The title in French, Nouvelles en trois lignes, is actually a pun: nouvelles can be taken as either “novellas” [...]
Random 23 Oct 2007 5:50 pm
Peddling through Georgetown this morning, I saw this bumper sticker:
Don’t believe everything you think
A block or so later, this:
MILITANT AGNOSTIC
I don’t know & you don’t either
Skeptic to the right of me, skeptic to the left of me …
Discuss quietly within yourself.
Random 11 Oct 2007 11:03 pm
As the son of a nurse and brother of a doctor (and brother-in-law of two more), this squib in the latest University of Chicago alumni magazine caught my attention: “Why Doctors Don’t Feel Your Pain.”
Brain scans show that physicians apparently learn to “shut off” the portion of their brain that helps them appreciate the pain [...]
Random 28 Sep 2007 9:59 pm
Every time I watch The Simpsons, I think: “This stuff is brilliant!” And yet I don’t watch the show religiously. I figure I’ll see every episode eventually. Why rush things?
The writing is fantastically good. It captures so much of the America of the 90s and 00s it’s uncanny. But the voices—unforgettable. So what a treat [...]
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