Blogroll

Midweek marginalia

I’m not sure if it’s because Monday’s post mentioned “depressing” or if the spambots finally caught up with the review of the Lee Morgan biography that refers to his drug addiction. In either event, the comments here have been flooded with pharmaceutical spam. I would wager that over the last day or so I’ve deleted […]

Search term follies – Part 3

When I started this, I wondered if there would be enough unusual searches to make this a regular feature. The pace keeps up enough that it has been monthly. There is, however, a new and (at least to me) somewhat disturbing theme that I grouped together below.

GOOGLE SEARCHES:

the piano flaccid penis show the […]

Surviving Blue Monday

When I first saw the various articles today, it didn’t surprise me. Today is Blue Monday, “the most depressing day of the year.”

Here, the sun was shining, it didn’t snow, the temperature wasn’t all that bad, nothing went to hell in a hand basket at work and we got good reports after various tests […]

NBCC Award nominees (plus one)

The shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle awards — which Amazon’s blog calls one of the “three big U.S. book awards” and in which I actually participate — were announced yesterday. The impact of my votes is about as I suspected.

None of my votes in nonfiction, autobiography or biography made the shortlist. In […]

A Zappa interlude and homage

I’ve never been much of a YouTube user. I’ve found some interesting, usually humorous, stuff there but there’s just so much I find it hard to locate very intriguing material.

That said, a HUGE hat tip to the Godoggone blog for the Frank Zappa post that led me to video of a 1973 performance by […]