Art Appreciation Sunday

Nutty Buddy

    The best Little Debbie snack ever!  And I should know; I've tried them all.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Claudine had mentioned that Claude had just broken up with his boyfriend, too, so he was unattached: all six feet of him, accessorized with rippling black hair and rippling muscles and a six-pack that could have been featured in Abs Weekly.  Mentally add to that a pair of brown velour-soft eyes, a chiseled jaw, and a sensuous mouth with a pouty bottom lip, and you’ve got Claude.  Not that I was noticing.

    (from Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Estragon

    Oh neat!  It looks like Barney & Clyde are doing Waiting For Godot cartoons for a bit.

Why We Fight

Hoarding

    I admit it.  I hoard books.  But only ones I haven't read yet.

Monday Pun Day

Sunday Edifying Editing Edition

Florence

    I like 'em both.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Let me provisionally say that we knew each other nineteen years, seven months, and around fifteen days when he passed away so tragically.  I have kept careful records my whole life.  The only data I won’t be able to record is the exact time of my own death, unless I commit suicide, which I have no plans to do.  But my lawyer has instructions to burn all my notebooks when I die.  They are of value only to me, not anyone else.”

    Wallander was starting to sense that Sundelius was one of those people who did not get enough chances to talk to others.

    (from One Step Behind by Henning Mankell)

    9*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Darwinism

    Evolution.  Just a theory.

Shellfish

Monday Pun Day

Book Excerpt for the Day

    A few entrepreneurs realized that there was a market for higher quality ice cream in small containers at high prices.  In 1961 Rose Mattus and her husband, Reuben, developed such a brand and called it Häagen-Dazs.  The success of this brand name proves that Americans like their food to have foreign names – the way they will use coriander only when it is called cilantro and the way sherbet has made a comeback under the name “sorbet”.  The Mattuses intended “Häagen-Dazs” to sound Danish, though there is no umlaut in Danish.  But if you wanted a word to look foreign, what could be better than an umlaut?

    (from Milk! by Mark Kurlansky)

    8½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Cornhole Competition

    We were reduced to watching a "cornhole" match today during breakfast. That's apparently an updated word for "bean bag". I am not making this up.

Word for the Day

    Word for the Day: "Proustian" (adj.): relating to or characteristic of the French writer Marcel Proust or his works, particularly with reference to the recovery of the lost past and the stimulation of unconscious memory.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Before the Virus, schools taught all sorts of subjects, but now they stuck to the basics.  Enough to communicate and survive in a world of rudimentary living.  And parents could stop sending their kids to school whenever they wanted to.  It was more important for your kid to help grow food or sew shirts or fish or chop wood or keep an old car or bicycle going.  Or to work one of the necessary jobs in town.

    (from H2O by Irving Belateche)

    6½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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John Cage

    We are committed to posting anything that touts John Cage's masterpiece, "4 Minutes, 33 Seconds".

Scams

    FRAUD ALERT!!  I paid $11.99 for this e-book at Amazon.  Not only does "instant pot" never appear, but there isn't even any mention of cannabis in it!! 

Hammer Time

    Once it's been seen, it cannot be unseen.

Sneezes

    Three.  Almost always.  Four is cause for alarm.  And yes, I'm OCD.

To Facebook or not to Facebook

    The saddest part is that they usually log on to Facebook to tell you this.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Is it safe to talk here?”

    “Well, sure,” I said.  “Why not?”

    “The place isn’t … bugged?”

    “Well, we have an exterminator come once a month, but in a neighborhood like this you can’t expect –“

    “No no!  I mean microphones, listening devices.”

    “Oh, those!  Oh, sure, we’ve got lots of those.  In the light switches mostly, and here and there.  But they don’t work any more.”

    “Are you sure?  You’ve deactivated every one?”

    “Well, most of them, rats ate the wiring.”

    (from The Spy in the Ointment by Donald E. Westlake)

    6½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Temporal Paradoxes

    There are some downsides to time-travel paradoxes.

Meteorological Marvel

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Two things became apparent: first, that Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived and died in the 1800s and therefore could not have written any letters dated September third, 1940, and, second, that his writing was so dense and arcane that it couldn’t possibly have held the slightest interest for my grandfather, who wasn’t exactly an avid reader.  I discovered Emerson’s soporific qualities the hard way, by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called “Self Reliance”.

    (from Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs)

    8½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Pipes

    Get your mind out of the gutter.

Handshake Replacement

    I fully support this.

Book Lovers

    I'm guilty of all of these, except #8.