[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern, currently available from Premier Amusements] From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book): A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. “Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks. “No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve [...]

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[Image above depicts two street paintings by Peter Gibson, which I found at the inhabitat.com site. Click it for their post about Gibson's work.] From whiskey river: Epitaph Now I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is [...]

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Like many Americans, I’m embarrassingly illiterate in any languages other than English. The one exception is/was Latin, for which I had a truly strange affinity all through high school (even though the Latin program there only went through junior year). My freshman year in college, I took a Latin advanced-placement test which landed me in [...]

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From whiskey river (italicized portion): Messenger My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not [...]

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The Missus and I watched a PBS American Masters show last night on Dalton Trumbo, the novelist and Hollywood screenwriter who (with several others) was jailed and blacklisted from working on films for refusing to answer questions about the alleged Communist affiliations of himself and his friends. The show — 90 minutes — was terrific. [...]

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[The post below uses the words author and artist more or less interchangeably. Apologies to those in either camp who might dispute the lumping-together.] A long-time friend and I have kidded each other for years about being disingenuous. This started, as I recall, when I once teased her in terms like, “You’re even more disingenuous [...]

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Check out this TED video, of lexicographer Erin McKean (note the “View Subtitles” button — an option I wish were available everywhere, for obvious reasons): Cool, huh? Especially given that two years later, her new online super-duper improved version of the dictionary concept is actually online now. It’s called WordNik, and it’s very interesting. I [...]

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One of my favorite Biblical stories seldom gets ranked among others’ top ten lists. Maybe only someone who aspires to use words professionally could so like Genesis 2, verses 19-20 (Revised Standard Version): So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought [...]

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[A modified version of the image above appears as the cover of Pascale Petit's 2008 collection, The Treekeeper's Tale. It also pretty much perfectly accompanies Petit's poem appearing below, as the first whiskey river entry in today's post.] From whiskey river: What She Wanted What she wanted was to return to the original rainforest hear [...]

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Just kidding. I don’t really have such a meter — except in my head. The progress being metered, as you may guess if you’ve visited here before, is progress towards completion of a book — especially a novel. You can find real such tools scattered around the Writing Web, enabling you to depict your progress [...]

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