Re: Christmas, 1914

Christmas is creeping up on us, like Robot Santa with a knife between his teeth, his sack full of holiday stories to read. When it comes to the whole gift-giving business, I’d say “Christmas, 1914″ pretty much sums up how I feel. It’s all about the kids.

Revisiting The Chinese Room

I’d like to thank Alec Deason again for lifting some of my confusion about his story, “The Chinese Room” while allowing the mystery to remain.

White solstice

The junco has landed. The storm has ended. The shovelling mittens have been deployed. The back is clear. The steps are clear. The driveway is clear. The sidewalk is clear. Phew! The shoveling mittens are drying.

The cringe before the storm

Every time I see the twisted frozen leaves of the various plants that have succumbed to the cold, I want to cringe. They may be plants, but that looks painful. Don’t worry, sad, dead, snapdragon. Soon you will be covered with drifts and drifts of snow. Time to hunker down.

Re: Don Ysidro

I’m not trying to make a theme of it, but here’s another story about a revenant. In “Don Ysidro,” by Bruce Holland Rogers, the title character is narrating from the other side. I like this line about the proceeding sound to him. As if I had cotton in my ears, I heard the voice of […]

Re: Coyote v. Acme

It’s scary enough to hear something I like on the New Yorker fiction podcast, and even scarier when I remember reading it in the original issue. The original copy is probably still somewhere stuffed in a box somewhere around here. But it’s easier to just click on the link and listen to Jonathan Franzen read […]

Live Drinky Birds

Welcome back to the realm of blurry pictures taken through a window. This time, it’s the birds again. So it’s not such a great picture, but here they are, enjoying a cold frisbee of water. For a while, it was a warm frisbee of hot water steaming up in a small fog. As the steam […]

I gotta see a poem about a dog

So there was this poem I heard on Prairie Home Companion that I liked, but all I remembered was ,” “Poet Laureate,” “dog, and “fun-nee.” I got sidetracked by the wrong Poet Laureate, but another stab into the PHC site turned up the segment where I first heard it. Three years ago. Wow. This is […]

Stuff to (not) do

Stuff to do, stuff to do, and tonight writing a post is stuff I will not do.

So many guppies!

I have totally given up on trying to name guppies. The guppy tank always looks pretty much the same from day to day, week to week, month to month. In sort, there’s a lot of guppies in there. There are always lots, there are always new little ones, and somehow there always seems to be […]