It’s a sign.
I go to Dutton’s (my favorite local bookstore) a few months back and order Come to Me, Amy Bloom’s first collection of short stories, on the strength of this LA Times blurb (by Karen Tapia-Andersen):
Back in college, we read a short story by Amy Bloom that sticks with us to this day. It [...]
With a new episode of “Pushing Daisies” arriving tomorrow, lets talk pie.
Here’s a fun review of “Pushing Daisies” from the NY Times: “Loner Finds He Has a Touch for Piemaking and Undeadmaking.”
In last week’s episode, Ned says that “the expression ‘pie in the sky’ entered popular culture in 1911. It refers to a dessert [...]
Any serious treatise on rear-end references must, of course, consider President Reagan’s timeless remark: “I’ve had it up to my keister with these leaks.”
William Safire wrote about it in Katrina Words. Scroll down to “Bringing Up the Rear” to find the pertinent bits, including the derivation of keister:
a borrowing, through Yiddish, of the German Kiste, [...]
As a beginning blogger, I think a lot about what makes for a good blog. The latest edition of the Good Experience newsletter includes an interview with Chip Conley, author of “Peak,” and that interview got me thinking in a new way about what makes a blog work.
Conley talks about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of [...]
Bottom words which start with “A”
(Like “aft”) seem rather sparse.
Yet sit your ass beside the Thames
By Jove, it’s now an arse.
The denouement of my Pierre Cruzatte program arrives when Cruzatte finally reenacts the accident in which he shoots Captain Lewis in the butt. I struggled for a long time to find the best word for [...]
José de Gálvez, the ambitious and periodically loony visitador (a sort of inspector representing the Crown) of New Spain from 1764-1772, once considered importing 600 apes from Guatemala to quell an Indian uprising.
Sounds like a private simian security force to me, which got me thinking about the other animal adjectives I know — like [...]
Azariah Smith was nineteen years old when James Marshall discovered gold on the south fork of the American River. Smith, there with Marshall helping him build John Sutter’s mill, had only one thing on his mind once he saw the gold. It was the same thing he wanted before he saw it: to get to [...]
Baking blackbirds into pies or of having one of those mistreated blackbirds peck off a maid’s nose does not sit well with some folks.
From “The Peaceable Table: A Vegetarian Journal for Quakers and Other People of Faith” come two attempts to do a nonviolent rewrite of “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Both do quite [...]
From a 1907 Sunkist advertising poem (via California’s Los Citrus Groves):
…If long life you would be having,
Knowing naught of human ills,
Daily eat at least one orange,
Brought from California’s groves.
So what we really needed all along was an orange a day to maintain distance from our physicians.
But it did get me curious about the origins [...]
The History of California–History 370
At Cal Poly Pomona, with Professor Christopher Bates. It’s all here, soundtrack included. Thank you Dr. Bates.
Cost of the Iraq War
At the National Priorities Project, gives you not only the total cost to the United States but also the cost for cities and counties throughout the country. Thanks to The Obfuscation [...]
