Apparently the Chinese government wants to look so good for world visitors at the Olympics that it will allows some groups to distrubute Bibles. Ah, God bless ’em.
All posts by Phil
I’ll Buy That Guy’s Coffee Too
In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, one woman at the Starbucks drive-through decides to pay for the guy behind her too. That guys pays for the guy behind him, and two hours later, people are still paying for the next customer’s order.
Amazon’s Kindle May Not Be Available
Amazon’s popular new e-reader, Kindle, does not have wireless service throughout the U.S. Even in Georgia, the coverage looks sparse statewide. The same with California, and there’s nothing in Montana.
Density
Mr. Bertrand writes, “A story is not a bag of potato chips. I don’t want to rip it open and get a face-full of air. It should be full to bursting. The beginning shouldn’t present a yawning void and a glimpse of substance near the bottom. Instead, I want it to spill everywhere, to get all over everything, to untidy my life for as long as it takes to get to the end.”
Sci-Fi Is a Telling a Good Story
Author John Scalzi discusses science fiction, saying it’s a commercial genre. “Academia generally wants you to show you can write [hence literary fiction]; science fiction generally wants you to tell a story.” The idea is that if you can write and tell a great story, then you have a blockbuster or enduring classic on your hands, but that ain’t necessarily so.
Increase Your Food Knowledge (and Vikings)
Sara Dickerman reviews a book for the epicurean in you, The Food Snob’s Dictionary. She writes, “[Q]uite funny throughout, the Food Snob’s handbook doesn’t so much seek to define individual terms . . . as define how such terms can be used to score points against other snobs or food-loving novices.”
Perhaps this book could explain why Snickers appeal to both vikings and pilgrims or how a bite of food can spare the monarachy.
Perhaps they just needed a little Greensleeves.
Nobel Prize Speeches
Another post from Mr. Key, this one comparing the speeches of Al Gore and William Faulkner.
Not Xanthic But Growing
Kyle Ambrose is talking Scrabble and words what begin with x. Before I press the “Publish Post” button for this one, let me take a moment to say that I enjoy using the word “what” as I did in the first sentence. It’s a British dialect thing, isn’t it? Probably marks me as nerd for laughing about sentence structure. Better to laugh than to complain. Ah, well . . . where’s that button?
Does Teaching Literature Kill a Student’s Enjoyment of It?
Harrison Scott Key points out an article on how teachers can distance themselves from those who have not read, say Keats and Donne, repeatedly with analysis, forgetting what it was like to read their poetry for the first time.
Calvin & Hobbes
Sitting in bed in the dark, Calvin says, “Sometimes at night I worry about things and then I can’t fall asleep. In the dark, it’s easier to imagine awful possibilities that you’d never be prepared for. And it’s hard to feel couragious in loose-fitting, drowsy bear jammies.”
Hobbes replies, “That’s why tigers sleep in the buff!”
I just found this search website of Calvin & Hobbes comics and some other popular cartoons. I don’t see how copyright allows for this.
(More of Calvin’s wisdom: “What good is originality if you can’t crank it out?”)