Sunday Pun Day

    The pun's cute, but more intriguing are the notes that follow the rest.

    I can read music, and those notes are the second line in a familiar ditty that, for some reason, I can't remember the name of. This is going to bug me muchly tonight.

Romance Novels

    This is why I don't read Romance novels.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “I stopped here because I saw steam rising from your roof.”

    “That’s exhaust.  You break in to every house you find with a sign of life?”

    “Well, technically yes.  Yours was the first I’ve seen, so I’m one for one.  How did you end up here?  How did you survive?  Why didn’t you stick with everyone else?”

    “A lot of questions, but they’re all basically the same one.  One point for thoroughness.”

    “Thanks.”

    “Minus two for redundancy.”

    (from Snowfall on Mars by Branden Frankel)

     9*/10.  The full review is here.

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Music Lyrics Thursday

    They're one of my all-time favorite groups.

Bon Jovi Lyrics

Fool to Rule

    I hate to admit it, but this is a promising political strategy.

Reading Is Fun

    True dis.

National Anthem

    Everyone, please rise for the Facebook National Anthem.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail.  But memory spreads out in front as well as behind.  It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches.  Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where the tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.

    (from Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett)

  10*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Support Indie Authors Thursday

    The presence of Indie Authors gives you wider choices and a significantly larger quantity of what you want to read.  Buy a book by an Indie author today!

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    And don't forget your towel.

Dog Quiz

    I know all of these except for Dog #11.  And I don't think Dog #2 had a name, but I know which cartoon he was in.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Of course I wish now that I had asked you or Mr. Lascelles to come with me.  Men of the world prefer to be talked to by other men of the world.  I know that now.  Perhaps I should have done some magic to shew him – turned the teacups into rabbits or the teaspoons into goldfish.  At least then he would have believed me.  But I do not think the old lady would have been pleased if I had done that.  I do not know.  What is your opinion?”

    But Drawlight, who had begun to believe that if anyone had ever died of boredom then he was almost certain to expire within the next quarter of an hour, found that he had lost the will to speak and the best he could manage was a withering smile.

    (from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke)

  7½*/10.  The complete review is here.

Lefties in the Bible

    Left-handers are superior.  God says so.  It's in the Bible.  Judges 20:16.

Nancy Drew

    Probably my favorite book from the Nancy Drew series.

Pachebel's Canon in D Major

    Me too, Opus.  Me too.  I still regard this as the quintessential song ever composed.

Esoteric Pun Thursday

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “I’d like to ask you a question about that shot you gave me.  Could it cause hallucinations?”

    “Extremely unlikely.  Do you have a history of hallucinating?”

    “No.  But I had an unusual experience after the shot, and no one believe I saw what I saw.  I’m beginning to doubt my sanity.”

    “You may be the one person in ten million who had an abnormal reaction,” the doctor said cheerfully.  “Congratulations!”

    (from The Cat Who Played Brahms by Lilian Jackson Braun)

  5½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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OCD and ADD

    That's me in a nutshell.

Monday Punday

Surreal Sunday

    Sadly, between global warming and the incredible amount of trash being tossed into the seas, this may not be all that surreal.

Punctuation Poser

    Good question.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the faces of the people.  Into this festal season of the year – as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries – the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

    (from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne)

    7½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Motivational Thursday

    I'm off tomorrow, so this works for me.

Mutts in the bed

    Yep, that's our three mutts.  Bella at the top, Jack in the middle, and Lulu at the bottom of the bed.  And they all have to be touching one of us.

Tuesday "Awww"

    Our newest dog has precisely this attitude, except substitute a squeaky toy for the ball.

Blink 182

    I have no idea what the joke is here, but we are committed to posting any comic we find that features Blink 182 in it. 

Old Cheat Code

Long-term memory is weird. I remember the "code" in the second panel here as being the (start of a) secret cheat code for an early NES game. I thought it was for Mario Bros, but others have suggested it was for Contra.

Despite having absolutely use for the sequence anymore, my brain will hang on to this forever and a day.

Go the F*k to Sleep

    It's a real book, available at Amazon. 32 pages, $14.36 Hardcover; $5.99 Kindle. There's even an audiobook version of it, and an audio-CD one as well

Battleship

    Once, as a kid, I was playing my older brother in Battleship, and lost because I couldn't find where he had stashed one of his two-space submarines.

    After the game was over, I demanded to know where he had placed that sub.  He replied that it was directly below one of his four-space battleships, and when I had called those squares, it only counted against the surface ship, not the sub.  According to him, I would've had to call those same two squares again to sink the second ship.

    I countered that the battleship, as it was sinking, would've crushed that frickin' sub on its way to the bottom of the sea.

    We never did resolve our differences of interpretation of the rules.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    I always wore a fanny pack when I exercised.  Water bottle.  Sunscreen.  Pocketknife.  PowerBar.  Handcuff picks.  And, finally, a palm-sized spray bottle of my own pepper spray concoction – Massachusetts regulated the purchase of Mace and I’m the kind of girl who appreciates her privacy, so instead, I’d invented my own high-test concoction.  No, Officer, I’m not carrying Mace.  What do you mean my attacker just went blind?  Huh.  Then I hope his publicly appointed defender knows how to prepare his reports in braille.

    (from Look For Me, by Lisa Gardner)

     8½*/10.  The full review is here.

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Heels

    Seriously, why??

Aegilops

    A bodacious word.

Philosophy Monday

Nitpicking

    For the record, there is no hyphen in "nitpicking".

Germophobia

    For all my germophobic friends.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    Yes, men and women eat meals.  But they also ingest nutrients.  They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo inhuman history.  Lunch is an opening act.

    (from Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach.

  9*/10.  The complete review is here.

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The Dark Crystal - Age of Resistance

    Guess what's coming to Netflix this August!!

My First Computer

My first computer was a 386, which had just come out and was just barely starting to replace the 286's. It had a 40-meg hard drive, with 12 megs of that already taken up by MS-DOS. I felt like a pig in mud, having that much "free" hard drive space.

Don't You Dare

    When editors have nightmares.