• Flaking and Cursing

      Thanks to Jesus and his lot–and Lot’s Wife–I need some new swears. If it weren’t for them and all their high-fallutin’ “Biblical history,” I probably would never have heard of the Dead Sea and its abrasive salts. Which means I wouldn’t use sea salt in my homemade olive oil/cedar essence/sea salt body scrub that […]

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  • The Night Elizabeth Taylor Didn’t Kiss Me

    (Note: If you didn’t read the previous post by my guest blogger, Jim, you’d best do that before reading this one. No, seriously. Go do it. Stop skimping on every facet of your life. Just go read it, for the love of Mary Kate and Ashley. Then read this one. Still here? Kee-rist, slacker, is […]

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  • Elizabeth Taylor’s Dress

    Sometimes we see our craziness only in retrospect. Ah, hell, not sometimes. Pretty much always; I mean, if we realized how off kilter we were at the time, we’d probably tame our wilder impulses. Right, Britney? My most recent crazy decision occurred in mid-December, when I agreed to teach a class this upcoming semester that […]

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  • W.W.O.D.?

      If there is a circle of life, that circle just might be the “O” at the start of “Oprah.” It all starts and ends with Her Royal TalkNess, dunn’t it? If we need a book to read, she tells us what to buy, and invariably we’ll find ourselves gratified to have paged through yet […]

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  • The Meathead

    Although it’s not January 6th yet, I’ve had an epiphany. You see, I got to enjoy a revelation this past Christmas week. It was not a star, a star, shining in the night that drew my focus. There was no Baby Haysoos in a pile of hay what got my attention. It was not the […]

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  • Hollyday Wishes

      Wishing you and yours a dry sofa in 2008.  

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  • Shaking the Magic Google Ball

    I’ve been socked this week by a stack of research papers, student yowls, and end-of-semester freak-outs. So the writing time? Very small. You know what that means, right? Memetime, lads and lassies! Thanks, Lone Grey Squirrel, for inspiring this meme: typing my answers to the following prompts into Google Image and then choosing a photo […]

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  • Arc of Some Skivers

    In the fall of 1985, my mom dropped me off near the little town in Minnesota where I would be starting college. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle lived at the spot where she stopped the car, so it wasn’t like I was left trying to hitch a ride to campus or anything. Mom had a […]

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  • Wax On; Wax Off

    In the past week, my mid-sized burg has received upwards of a foot and a half of snow. In other words, I’ve already had my Christmas. Snow, to me, is a gift. I love that junk–slippery, light, heavy, cold, transmuting, crystalline; it satisfies my Myers-Briggsian ENFP need for change, as it takes the entire world […]

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  • From the Mouth of Dinko

    A few days ago, my new blog pal August, smitten with my irrepressible boy, challenged him to answer the Vanity Fair questionnaire that’s been making the rounds. Wee Niblet, aka “Dinko,” has subscribed to Vanity Fair for years now–two of them, to be exact (the subscription came about during potty training, as he put in […]

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