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For lunch I heated up a Stouffer's meal of "swedish meatballs". It came out of the microwave with an acrid smell that I did not expect. I tried a noodle. "This is not food!" I cried. "This is a non-food item!" So I stuck it back in the box and put it in the trash, and heated up some Campbell's Chunky, and that's what I'm eating right now ( Read more... )

I finished my last Doc Savage novel, and have been filling the pulp-shaped hole in my heart with Hiram Grange, but something in me still longs for vintage fiction: when men were bronze, women were broads, and children spoke in horrifically annoying lisps, if they even showed up at all. So when I found out about the local used book sale, I (went " ( Read more... )

Plant update! The lime tree is still dropping leaves. It's not bare yet. I maintain hope. The strawberry, on the other hand, decided it wanted to grow about a billion new leaves (a billion = ten), and I say go for it, little strawberry. And other than the ivy in the kitchen and the unkillable begonia, that's all I have left. Everything else died of ( Read more... )

It turns out that this "moving across the state" thing has a way of limiting your Internet use. Funny. In the meantime I've accumulated lists of updates, which I will dump upon you...now.

( Plants )

I'm re-reading the amazing Traveling Showmen by Stuart Thayer, a nonfiction look at the circus in America before the Civil War. The writing is so lively and the subject so interesting that I come back to it over and over again.

(In researching this post I found that Mr. Thayer passed away about two months ago. I ordered my copy directly from the ( Read more... )

I was looking through the Fifteen Books meme I did a while back, and thought, "Man, almost none of these are horror. What's up with that? I love horror." Then I started thinking, "Well, a lot of them have horror elements. Huck Finn has corpses. That part in Elmer Gantry where they beat up the other preacher, whatsisname, Frank, that was pretty ( Read more... )

Don't take too long to think about this ( Read more... )

Earlier this week I got my hard copy of Gunnerkrigg Court, and I'm thrilled to death with it. It's bound in a robust hardback, smaller than standard comics size, but the colors and image quality are fantastic. Best of all, it encompasses the first fourteen chapters--much longer than I expected. My favorite chapter is a little bit after that, so I'm ( Read more... )

Something has to go first, so here's the source of my (current) journal title: the song from John Gardner's Grendel:

The wall will fall to the wind, as the windy hill will fall, and all things thought in former times: nothing made remains, nor man remembers. And these towns shall be called the shining towns!