So I was about to start getting dinner ready last night, when I decided that I’d just clear up the dirty dishes that were sitting around first. Okay, but the dishwasher was full of stuff that I’d cleaned the night before but which hadn’t been put away yet, so I couldn’t put the new dishes ...
Lunch at McDonald’s today, and – stop me if this is obvious and I’m just being a dolt – I was caught by the realisation that there’s something very metaphysical going on with apostrophes. It’s not just that people don’t have a clue any more how to use them – I mean, it’s ...
Cartoony birds sitting in dit-dit-dah-dah irregular spacing on telephone wires, some in communally neat rows, like old women on a day trip to the seaside, others wanting a bit more space, dammit. The whole looking like a complex piece of music on a stave, or perhaps a coded message — though what is music if ...
Why does whether something’s true or not matter so little to people, that they’ll put so much else above it? There’s a meme that has particular currency right now. It’s not terribly important what it is. I’m sure as hell not going to try to refute it, because trying would be an exercise in ...
(Fiercely redoubling my efforts to be trivial. Ithangyou.) So last night I heated up a frozen sausage lasagna for dinner*. It was perfectly deelish, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the instructions on the back of the cardboard container thingy. See, the instructions had eight steps. To be sure, the final ...
Introversion’s a funny thing. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, but maybe some of both. Because people as introverted as me are really quite rare — I typically rate 100% ‘I’ on the ‘I/E’ continuum of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — the sense is often of living in a world that wasn’t ...
A few blocks from here, along Wilshire on the way to Third Street, there’s an empty unit in a commercial building. I walk past it whenever I head down to Barnes & Noble, or the Apple Store, or whatever. It looks like it’s not been occupied for some time — black roller-blinds cover the huge ...
I’m amazed no-one else has figured out the real reason that Alberto Gonzales has been nominated for US Attorney General. It’s obvious, and all you have to do is look: AG is the new AG. See? Nice and easy for, um, less than intellectually stellar presidents to remember. If he remembers the name, that’ll tell ...
[There’s a web-site I was intending to write about tonight, but, despite my poking and prodding at it pathetically all day, it stayed stubbornly down, so that one’ll have to wait for another time. No rush. In its place, here’s a bit of apropros-of-nothing nonsense.] I used to carry around a factoid in my ...
I read a blog post the other day by the estimable Digby. It’s a passionate and incisive piece of writing, but that’s not what stood out for me. What stood out was the fact that, after the first couple of paragraphs, she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bring herself to use the name of the current US ...