It was late in the evening:
“Do you realize that this is the one thing that unites the country — people going between The Golden Girls and The Nanny?”
Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Friday, May 7, 2010
Domestic comedy
Betty White, “Live from New York”
Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live tomorrow night. But her Golden Girls character Rose Nylund has already hosted Saturday Night Live, sort of. Elaine and I saw a bit of this episode last night and marveled.
Five sentences for smoking
Another Google search that led to Orange Crate Art: five sentences for smoking. Got it:
The Continental Op smokes. Sam Spade smokes. Philip Marlowe smokes. Lew Archer smoked but quit.These five sentences can double as five sentences about private detectives or five sentences about characters created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar). By The Blue Hammer (1976), Archer stopped smoking.
Thank you, Lew Archer, for not smoking.
Doers of homework: instead of searching for five sentences, just write five sentences of your own. That’s how you learn.
Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
5 sentences about life on the moon
Five sentences from Bleak House
Five sentences on the ship
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Strunk and White cat
It will HAVE a cheezburger.
[We now return to the Continental Paper Grading Co., already in progress.]
“When Seymour was twenty-one”
(When Seymour was twenty-one, a nearly full professor of English, and had already been teaching for two years, I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.)I like “nearly full.”
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Rock Odyssey
Homer for kids: Rock Odyssey.
Telemachus is sixteen years old in this retelling, which would seem to mean that the Trojan War and Odysseus’ wanderings now run for eight (not ten) years apiece — or that while Odysseus is away, Penelope — no, not that.
Poems that dont look like plagiarism
A Google search — poems that dont look like plagiarism — brought a hapless surfer to Orange Crate Art. But I can help, sort of. Here is a poem that doesn’t look like plagiarism. It looks entirely original, like no one else’s poems. That’s because I just wrote it myself, honest. Enjoy.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Caffeine-free
For about a week, I’ve been humming along without caffeine. (See blog description above, at least for today.) I’d say I’m surprised, but in my caffeine-free equanimity, I’m only mildly puzzled.
My withdrawal began without intention. For several days, for no particular reason, I was drinking only tea, without my usual cup or two of coffee. (I like tea.) Then I began drinking less tea, more water, just to see how I would feel. (I felt fine.) Then I began drinking one cup of tea with breakfast, and decaffeinated tea and coffee for the rest of the day. After a couple of days, I could feel the unpleasant difference — call it vague anxiety — that the one caffeinated cup was making in my mornings. So I switched to decaffeinated, period.
Decaf tea and coffee make me think of filter cigarettes: flavorwise, there’s something missing — not caffeine, but whatever else gets lost in decaffeination. But I suspect that decaf, like soy milk, will soon enough turn into a real thing in its own right.
[May 22, 2010: For several days, the “blog description above” read “Now caffeine-free.” Still is. Still am.]
Monday, May 3, 2010
Grade inflation in the NYT crossword
In tomorrow’s New York Times crossword:
11-Down: “Pretty good grade.” The answer: AMINUS. In my gradebook, that’s more than “pretty good.”
[No spoilers here. Highlight the empty space to see the answer.]
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