By John on May 20, 2012 |
I can scarcely believe it: my Google Reader feed now has only THREE unread items in it now (and one of them is my own Propagational Library installment from yesterday, so even that unread is provisionally not in quotation marks). It’s taken me a month to clear the backlog. Granted, in order to get to this quasi-virginal [...]
Posted in Everyday Life, The Online World | Tagged blogging, Google Reader you avaricious b*tch |
By John on May 16, 2012 |
Several of Running After My Hat‘s regular commenthood are overhauling what “home” means to them: Nance – and Mr. Mature, of course — are caught up in readying their house for a (dearly longed-for) sale. Marta — amongst writing a flash-fiction story every day this month, and competitive skating, and teaching, and the gods know what else [...]
Posted in Everyday Life, Midweek Music Break, Music, The Online World | Tagged Brian Eno, David Byrne, Froog, home, Marta, Nance |
By John on April 29, 2012 |
We got back last night from a blitz of a trip to Miami, having driven down there, stayed two fast nights, and then driven back (the latter by way of Sarosota, which made the return a twelve-hour marathon). So I’m still reeling a little.* This caps off a crazy month-long period of household repairs and [...]
Posted in Everyday Life, Running After My Hat, The Online World | Tagged blogging, routine, trips |
By John on April 20, 2012 |
[Image: the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 and the New York City skyline at night (January, 2011)] From whiskey river: Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range [...]
Posted in Art & Photography, Looking Backward, Poetry, Ruminations, Running After My Hat, The Online World, whiskey river Fridays | Tagged Alain de Botton, anniversaries, Buckminster Fuller, C.K. Williams, New York City, Queen Elizabeth 2, Rita Dove, Stephen Dobyns, thanks, Wendell Berry |
By John on February 4, 2012 |
In yesterday’s post ruminating about questions whose answers (at least in theory) may be more obvious than they first seem, I included a fifteen-point “meme” about movies; I didn’t actually respond to the meme there. In a comment, Jules asked what my choices would have been. Here y’go.
Posted in Movies, The Online World | Tagged Internet memes, memes |
By John on February 3, 2012 |
[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.] From whiskey river: This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal. (Dag Hammarskjöld [source]) …and: Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more [...]
Posted in Comics, Humor, Language, Movies, Music, Poetry, Ruminations, The Online World, Theater, whiskey river Fridays | Tagged Chuang Tzu, Dag Hammarskjöld, Duncan J. Watts, Ellen Steinbaum, Internet memes, Stephen Sondheim, Tim Johnson, xkcd |
By John on November 29, 2011 |
…which, of course, is a long way from saying that being a blogger pays no rewards at all. I know some people who do it for money, and I know some people who do it because they think it will eventually, indirectly, lead to the making of money. But I know waaaay more people who do [...]
Posted in In the News, Running After My Hat, The Online World | Tagged blogging, Pay a Blogger Day |
By John on November 27, 2011 |
When I was a sophomore in high school — this was just a plain old everyday public high school, not a school for high-achieving nerds or anything — our English teacher let us write an end-of-year research paper on any topic we liked. I have no idea why, of all possible subjects, at the age [...]
Posted in Cartoons & Animation, History, Humor, Language, The Online World | Tagged history of English |
By John on November 25, 2011 |
[For information about this image ("Mirror Mask"), see the artist's statement at the foot of this page. Clicking on the image above will enlarge it, if you want to experiment.] From whiskey river: This writing stuff saved me. It has become my way of responding to and dealing with things I find too disturbing or distressing [...]
Posted in Art & Photography, Music, Poetry, Ruminations, Style and Craft, The Online World, whiskey river Fridays, Writing | Tagged Billy Collins, Gilbert Sorrentino, Linda Ronstadt, Margaret Atwood, Terry McMillan, the mind(s) of a writer, Tom Robbins, Willie Nelson |