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Department of Barely Restrained Comment
(Jane Austen Desk)
From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog): Rocket launches ‘Predator’ Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic By MICHAEL FLEMING Elton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends. Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers [...]
What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 -- on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists -- appeared on Tuesday.] Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over [...]
What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)
[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song's composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.] There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is [...]
Humatons, Arise
A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners. I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like: www.someisp.com/~username Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, [...]
Dream Talk
Somewhere around here we’ve got one of those little reference books to help you interpret your dreams. You know the ones — structured sort of like a thesaurus, so when you look up a word or phrase (“coffee,” say, or “horror movie” or “lava lamp”) you get an instant read on what that object or [...]
Haunted by What’s Inside
From whiskey river: People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the [...]
“To Love Is to Suffer.” And So On.
In Kate’s post today, she tackles Valentine’s Day a couple days early. (Determined to beat the rush, perhaps. You probably didn’t know the Internet charges a premium on Valentine’s-Day blog posts about love and sex.) But her post’s title reminded me of this film. In the clip below, Diane Keaton’s character, Sonia, seems bored of [...]
I Tought I Taw…
I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — [...]
Impossibilities
Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors. Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s [...]
Comment Madness
By John on February 18, 2009 | 9 Responses
Attention readers: exciting news! Sorry, folks, the commpetition (snort, cackle) is now closed. The winner is Tessa, of Nuts & Mutton. And heck, I’m feeling so expansive right now that I’ll even toss the pen I use to sign it into the box. As you can see from the partial screen capture at the left, [...]
Posted in Music, Running After My Hat, The Online World | Tagged comments, contests, my next book, prizes | 9 Responses