Random 21 May 2008 3:08 pm
The lefty blogs have gone so batscheiss crazy over the fact that Clinton is still in the race, it’s impossible to read them. So, for some weeks now, I haven’t. It’s very pleasant.
I finally got around to reading a novel a friend gave me a while back, Beyond Sleep, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik [...]
Random and Russia 3 Mar 2008 7:56 pm
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …
I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates [...]
Agora 29 Feb 2008 7:35 pm
The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”
Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, [...]
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 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 22 Apr 2007 8:40 pm
And now—you be the photo editor (click to enlarge):
Yes, it’s pathetic. I take pictures of a dandelion instead of commenting on Virginia Tech, Alberto Gonzales, or Iraq. So it goes. Adios, KV.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At [...]
Random 10 Jan 2007 12:23 pm
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.
Random 30 Nov 2006 9:02 am
Gore Vidal was on Tavis Smiley the other night. He was as sharp and funny as always, especially on matters political and historical. True to his stage in life, though, a good chunk of the conversation danced with the notion—no, not the notion, the fact—of mortality. At one point Vidal quoted the last two lines [...]
Random 18 Nov 2006 1:51 am
Now that things have settled down a bit, I thought I’d post a few photos from our recent trip to Boston. We found time to poke around Concord and, specifically, Walden Pond.
Here’s Laura foraging for stones to bring back for friends (I got one from a different section of the shore—it sits on my computer [...]
Random 30 Sep 2006 7:18 pm
I was at work in Virginia, chatting with my kid, who’s in college in Massachusetts. That in itself is wondrous. (I think I averaged two phone calls per quarter to my parents while I was in school. She talks with her mother and me four or five times a week.) She mentioned in passing that she [...]
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