My favorite opening sentence of any novel is easily the first line of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest– nothing else really comes close: I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. I mention this only because each way I consider starting this post, it starts [...]

Thumbs up: On the plus side, I managed to figure out the adding-a-side-bar-to-the-blog thing that I was alluding to in last post. See? There it is, to the right. That thing with the blog roll in it. That wasn’t there yesterday, and wasn’t built into the blog template we just switched to. I haven’t done [...]

Some changes to the blog! First, we’ve got a new home: www.mockduck.net. If you type in the old address, you’ll be automatically bumped here for the next year, after which point the domain forwarding I set up will expire and you might miss a sizzling end-of-2011 over here. Second, a new look. I was never [...]

I offer this painting as a response to Dan’s recent “Good Times” post, to suggest that not a lot of progress has been made in invoking dissolute good times in the last 350 years. Here’s a blurb I found describing this painting by the Dutch painter Jan Steen, “The Dissolute Household.” The best part is [...]

I recently came upon this interesting interview with Greil Marcus where he talks about his new book on Van Morrison. I’ve always liked but not loved Van Morrison, so I’m not about to run out to buy the book, but I was very interested in how, in the interview, Marcus espoused a form of musical [...]

I saw this yesterday when I logged onto Facebook: I must admit that the phrasing of this got me feeling a bit lonesome. No one is online? When do you suppose the final moment in human history occurred when there was no one online? I imagine that various computers, running various inscrutable ‘services’, have been [...]

Around the corner from the studio where I work, there’s a nondescript pizza/pasta place where I go sometimes to pick up take-away food for lunch. The owner, an nice Albanian guy, used to make valiant attempts to engage me in conversation while I waited for my food, but we had nothing in common other than [...]

Having dismissively sworn off yoga in the past, I’ve recently gone crawling back and started taking classes again. The reasons for my about-face: first, the 30 now 35 pound bowling ball problem (discussed here); second, an increasing incidence of disconcerting observations along the lines of ‘Why does my back hurt if I’m not slumped over in [...]