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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Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that [...]

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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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Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little [...]

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[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]
Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with [...]

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A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.
The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain [...]

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From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The [...]

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Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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[Working today on tomorrow's post -- my contribution to tomorrow's Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y'know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]

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Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which [...]

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