The best present I gave this year was the complete The West Wing on DVD for Cimmy.  Until this point, I had seen just a handful of episodes.  I don't think I've seen a show that has given me so many "booyah" moments.  It's possibly because it's acting as a surrogate for the hope I used to have that America could feel like more than an arrogant lout ( Read more... )

Got a cold something like two weeks ago.  Started postnasal, which felt like Tom Waits sounds without the advantage of sounding like Tom Waits sounds.  It turned into congestion with uncontrollable coughing on Christmas, and now is something like bronchitis.  I can feel the exact shape of the upper lobe of my right lung, because for some reason ( Read more... )

English has essentially two demonstrative pronouns, this and that.  This is usually only used for something near to the speaker.  It would sound off to most (but not all) if you were to look out a window at two distant trees and call them “this one” and “that one”.  Even those who feel you could say this would, by and large, agree that calling both ( Read more... )

It took twelve hours for me to remember what woke me up this morning well before my alarm was to go off.  My family (that is, Mom, Dad, and Erin) had taken me on an extended vacation with them.  We left around New Year's and toured the world in a vague way.  I couldn't conjure any details, but I knew we'd done it, and I was concerned that I had so ( Read more... )

I just read this entry from Terry Pratchett on Paul Kidby's webpage:

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news.  I have ( Read more... )

I. This story is in no way familiar to me.  No part of it made me think, "Wow, that's just like me."  I'm probably not at all like this man, Scott Glover, who writes for the Los Angeles Times.  I still think anyone who reads my words should read his words.  It's about his decision to meet his biological parents, almost forty years after he was ( Read more... )

Without knowing even half of the words, I've managed to have "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" stuck in my head at least once a day for going on three weeks now.  It's become progressively less faithful a rendition and more a profane one as the days have worn on, because it gives me giggle fits.

I will now infect you with my opinion on music I've ( Read more... )

"Older ( Read more... )

There's a thing people do that bothers me.  I know, right ( Read more... )

I'm not extremely fond of this list; not that it's not all gems, but there's too much of something.  I don't know what.  Maybe it's waiting.  Parts of this compilation have been sat in the playlist for around a year before I finished the thing.  One day in early April I decided it was done and did the last third of the work all at once, so it feels ( Read more... )