The most adorable picture in the history of the world.
Look, I know what you’re thinking, and once I thought as you did. Who wants to look at pictures of other people’s babies? Doting grandparents, dotty officefathers, with images of their progeny plastered on their walls and foisted on their visitors - good for […]

The future gets less retro all the time; this was written in 1933, I believe.  Stephen Vincent Benet, everyone.
Metropolitan Nightmare
It rained a lot that spring. You woke in the morning
And saw the sky still clouded, the streets still wet,
But nobody noticed so much, except the taxis
And the people who parade. You don’t, in […]

Since y’all have got me thinking about the Puritans and the mixed bag of a legacy they’ve left us, now’s as good a time as any to link to this, slacktivist’s epic deconstruction of Left Behind. It begins here, and it’s well worth it. Worth it? you say, glancing at the dates of the […]

I am at that stage in my life, it seems, where I am bound to receive a lot of mail for other people. Mobile and living in housing for mobile people, I have seen mail for at least six other names come to this address. Usually they are not the kinds of missives from […]

This one is for Martin.

Passing a good idea around (From Mirabai):
1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.
2. In a few days, I’ll post one mp3 for each of you.
You can’t request music by band name or genre. You have to describe, in terms of color, mood, texture, taste, or any other creative way you can […]

This is what I get for capitulating to the patriarchy!

I opened my eyes.  It was 5:53.  Enough time to close them again, not enough time to really sink into sleep, which was what I wanted to do.  Someone presented me with a folded slip of paper.  I unfolded it, there were three headings: “Benign” “Region” and “Option”.  It was describing my alternatives.  None of […]

Some notes:
This is a writing exercise, unrefined and unedited; normally not the kind of thing one would inflict on one’s public, but hey, this is a blog, and anyone who reads it is inflicting it on themselves. The challenge is to write a poem with one stanza per metro stop on my morning commute. […]

I had thought out this post, and then I noticed that I wasn’t the only one posting about pet peeves, so now I feel partly justified and partly pre-empted.  Anyway, this isn’t a list, but more of a small cloud of interrelated things that all annoy me.
People who say “I can’t eat that” when they […]