When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and [...]

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[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there's a link there to the first part.]
While preparing to write this post, [...]

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So, all right — I didn’t post an entry yesterday.
Well, let’s just say that after last week, when I posted not one but TWO entries on not one but TWO separate days*, I thought, y’know, I could afford to relax.
As those of you who (like me) try to post something every day already know, the [...]

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At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the [...]

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From whiskey river:
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash his teeth inside a tiger.
I am happy with a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though [...]

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The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I [...]

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Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a [...]

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Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This [...]

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[The clock above was designed by Caroline Lisfranc, replacing the numbers on the clock face with a dozen French verbs. The English translation (starting with one o'clock and moving, duh, clockwise) is to divide, to give, to listen, to work, to love, to dream, to reflect, to laugh, to tinker, to travel, to grow, and [...]

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For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).
The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” [...]

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