Writing the good read
I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours trying to undo what the Russians have done. For many people who have tried to access my website with a mobile device, they have been surprised with porn that’s impossible to unsee. Tasteless. Not erotic at all. Icky. The particular hack is pretty well known. Sucuri, a…
I turn 50 in nine days. Today, I got the card pictured below in the mail. I know other people who, on the verge of hitting the half century mark, also got their invitation to join AARP. I don’t know what database they bought to know that I am about to turn 50 — or…
I really should call this “words of the day” because there’s no way I can pick just one word from this week’s book, Horologicon by Mark Forsyth, proprietor of the InkyFool blog. I’ve said before I’m a word geek. Show me a book about words and their origins, or the evolution of language and I’ll…
Like many people who have a blog, I started off with the intention of writing regularly. Like many bloggers, life and intentions collide and I have found myself, at times, slacking off. Happily, there is the annual Freelance Success/Word Count Blogathon to get me back on track. Usually, though, I don’t go seven months without…
Sorrel is a lemony perennial leafy herb. It grows easily and is hard to kill. There are variagated varieties that are pretty, but are tough and don’t taste as nice as the French culinary variety. It’s worth growing, especially if you like this soup, because you can’t usually find it in large enough quantities…
I had some great English teachers in high school — women who challenged my thinking and my reading. They exposed me to authors I’d never have come to on my own (Heinrich Böll), and spurred me to dig deeper into the writing of authors who are part of almost every high school syllibus (the entire…
I’ve mentioned before that people send me free stuff — samples of food, items like butter bells, cookbooks. For the first time, I got something I was truly curious about: ceramic knives. I know about good knives — I wrote about how to choose them for USA Weekend — you can see the article here;…
I remember hearing David Rakoff on This American Life and thinking he was David Sedaris, one of my favorite TAL contributors and authors, with a distinctive voice that makes everything he says funnier. I didn’t know he wrote books, too. But after he died of cancer at 47 last year, there was a lot of…
I didn’t have The Blue Book on my radar at all. But I read a review in the New York Times that talked about the author, AL Kennedy, as most closely akin to Richard Ford, whose book Canada I loved and wrote about previously. So I put it on my list. It sat on the…
I spent this evening hanging out with the extended neighborhood. We were remembering one of the most colorful of our number, Jack McPherson, who died a couple weeks ago after a brave battle with cancer. A few score people showed up with food and drink and stories tonight. Most were from the immediate neighborhood, but…