Tag: Sentential Links

Linkage, linkage, lots and lots o’ linkage. Click and enjoy:

:: The local Furniture Graveyard, however, never lacks for corpses, rudely ejected from someone’s flat, somewhere here abouts, at some ungodly hour. (This person found me today and left a comment.)

:: For the final chapter, Savage makes a trip to New York City just a few weeks after 9/11 to see if he can get all seven sins accomplished in one weekend while contributing to the (underground) economy per President Bush’s wishes. (Ditto. I love it when random people end up here!)

:: But what if home is the storm? (Yet another new visitor from this week. It was a good week.)

:: Contrary to a popular American stereotype, most Australians do NOT wear hats decorated with crocodile teeth or sell Subarus. That was just a phase Paul Hogan went through before he found Goth.

:: I again implore you to visit the Oregon coast. It’s groovy. (Groovy it is. I want to go back there, quite badly.)

:: This bohemian, gypsy artist……

the woman of rather…. ahem….

alternative dress code

(for 42 years)………

………now owns………..

………. slacks. (Say it ain’t so! Don’t fall into the clutches of the Docker-clad! Nothing good can come of it!)

:: The funny thing about Doug Flutie, who announced his retirement today, is that nobody in the NFL could ever quite figure out how to use him. (I’m not sure I agree with that — the Bills figured him out pretty well, toward the end, but that was pretty much the end of his effectiveness. For all the “You’ll be sorry!” chanting that occurred when Flutie was pushed out, his 2001 Chargers only went 5-11, compared with the Bills’ 3-13; and a major factor wasn’t just that the Bills had to find out if Johnson was the guy — which they did have to do — but also John Butler’s earlier, bizarre decision to give both guys big contracts. By the time Butler’s tenure ended, the Bills couldn’t afford to have so much salary tied up with one QB. Flutie was tough and tenacious, but he was small, and, even in his second year as the Bills’ starter, he couldn’t muscle the ball to the outside on the deep routes, so his production dropped dramatically. I’d also note that Homerun Throwback might have happened no matter who was the starter, and Rob Johnson did everything he had to do to win that game. I’m still somewhat surprised, seven years later, that the fiery Rob Johnson of the Homerun Throwback game, who late in the game completed a crucial pass despite losing his shoe in the course of taking the snap, turned out to not be the real Rob Johnson, who never seemed to give a shit about playing football again.

I also don’t have a problem with Flutie in the Hall of Fame, except that Canton tends to completely ignore leagues other than the NFL. Jim Kelly’s passing statistics vault him into a very high echelon if his USFL days are factored in — but they’re not.)

:: Over the last month, I’ve been fortunate to receive links from four big bloggers, and I thought it might be interesting to analyze the traffic that resulted from each link. (This is an interesting read about not just how links help blogs increase traffic, but also how different kinds of links affect traffic. Not that I would know, seeing as how I haven’t been “lanched” in a while. I’m just sayin’.)

:: The media’s adulation of McCain is genuinely stupefying. The straight talker does some garden variety political pandering by agreeing to speak at Falwell’s university, but somehow that doesn’t affect his straight talking reputation. He gives a bland, uncontroversial speech so as not to offend anyone, and that somehow adds to his straight talking reputation. No matter what he says, he’s a straight talker. It’s a miracle!

:: My position is based on the fact that I love music. I want to learn as much about music as I can, which means that I have to be open to learning new things. (That’s my position, too. I divide music into two categories: “Good” music and “Bad” music, and that’s it. It’s just too facile to say that classical music is inherently superior to all other forms of musical expression, because what does that really mean, anyway? Sure, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a towering masterpiece of human art, but I have to concede the possibility that Abbey Road is, too; and besides, we can compare specific cases until the moon falls out of the heavens, but what would be the point? We’re talking genres here, and it seems clear to me that “Stairway to Heaven” will be beloved for a far, far longer time than, say, any of Franz Berwald’s symphonies.)

That’s it for this time. Tune in next week for more.

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Time again for some linkage to good and readable stuff!

:: Now, some magicians do magic with their speedy hands. Some contort their bodies in difficult ways. Some make you laugh. David Blaine is the only one I can think of whose tricks generally consist of him doing absolutely nothing at all. (Tell me about it. I’d rather watch an old Doug Henning act than any of Blaine’s “passive Evel Knievel” crap.)

:: So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure. (There’s just something cool about astrophysicist snark.)

:: The West is a haunted place where the new ghosts push the old ones a little farther back in memory all the time, even as the writers return them to life once again.

:: I don’t know that I have ever been in a bar as divey as even a reasonably nice OTB– I don’t think a bar could be that divey, or an opium den, either. OTB is a step above crackhouse on the glamour scale– barely. (Ouch.)

:: “She’ll always be Ensign Ro to me,” he concluded. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. (Blog found by Lynn.

:: Joss Whedon has the most persuasive and stunning vision of evil in all of popular culture. (You gotta like a blog that’s unafraid of a bold statement or two! Also via Lynn.)

:: Remember, it’s Monday. Everybody’s incompetent at 7 o’clock on a Monday morning.

:: There we were, cruising along nicely, and some doofus in the trumpet section came in two beats too early. (Shit, been there, my friend. One of the movements of Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy has these giant, smashing brass chords, like six of them, all in a row. One time I lost count and added a seventh. All by myself. Really loud. Well, if you’re gonna screw up, make it a big one, eh? BTW, this blogger’s having a rough time lately. Give him some love.)

:: The big advantage that writing (and especially written fiction, my preferred art form) has over other media for conveying experience is that the writer can try to incorporate bits of other, imaginary minds in their serialized stream of consciousness. Writing isn’t just a camera, or even a technicolor camera with Dolby surround-sound recording: it’s a camera with flickering, blurry, black-and-white, routinely-malfunctioning telepathy bolted on the side.

All for now. I’m off to shove something bristly up my nose and into my sinuses.

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As per usual, click for context:

:: As things stand now, this nation may finally have one of the worst epitaphs in history: They lost their liberty — and they didn’t even know it.

:: “Is this paint?”, I ask accusingly. (Remember the great line by Fox Mulder, when told that he’d just dipped his hand in bile: “Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?”)

:: Having such small apartments, city residents want to make the most of the space that they have. In designing a loft apartment for his son, architect Kyu Sung Woo came up with an interesting solution to the space problem…he fit two stories into a one-story apartment. (Wow! Follow a few links here, folks. Cool.)

:: I love to watch the future take shape.

:: No, Christie is not staying popular due to some intrinsic quality, but by massive and well-managed reinvention.

:: This is what happened on my birthday last year: I got dumped before 9 a.m.

:: Rowing has specialized clothing as well, and it also combines fashion and function.

:: Alongside executives and officials, I toured the shiney, empty plant (workers stood in their work positions as we passed by) and applauded as ribbons were cut. Then I followed the first pigs through the slaughtering process.

All for this week, folks. Thank you for playing, and remember, there are no losers on “Sentential Links”!

UPDATE: Oops, forgot one: As far as I’m concerned, you’re at least as American as I am.. Amen to that.

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Yup, it’s that time of week again. Here goes:

:: Are we all hardwired to be idol worshippers? (Nope, I don’t worship any idols. Nosiree Bob, not me! But that’s not what she’s talking about, anyway.)

:: Occasionally on my sandy walks I come across some remarkable man-made items. (Provisionally a very nice blog, by a composer who offers listening samples of her work. I haven’t listened to any of them yet, but I will. Via ACD.)

:: I feel myself getting stupider every time I read that line, but the good news is that I have a long way to go before I would be actually stupid enough to say that line myself. (Maybe someday I’ll inflict my own Star Wars fanfic upon the world. Ye Gods, what a disaster that would make — I’d most certainly be banished to some sector of Blogistan frequented by old and dyslexic guys who keep trying to visit Polarwine and LFG.)

:: Trying to posthumously enlist Heinlein (or any dead author for that matter) in some modern political cause strikes me as a dubious enterprise.

:: So, I guess if men want to get it up, happily, they need to not keep us down. (Wow!)

:: I’ve nibbled on A; I’ve squished B; I’ve cavorted with C; but my favourite remains D. (This one might not be safe for work.)

:: How can you tell when the national immigration debate has reached saturation point and seeped too deeply into the public’s consciousness? When your wife starts having dreams about it.

:: Is every Republican in Washington the emotional age of seven? (Oh, for the love of God. This shit cannot be for real.)

:: The SS Great Britain is cleverly designed to bring as much comfort to its passengers and crew members as possible. (This is part of a series of posts. Look at the photos; fascinating stuff!)

:: Set up an account and you’re automatically admitted to the futurismic bowels of the Monkey. (All together, now: “The filthy monkey, it plans!”)

Enough for now. Tune in next week. And tomorrow. And…well, you know.

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This week’s links abide:

:: To be sure, the delightful irony of a race that sold Manhattan Island for $24 bucks getting some of its own back from the Budweiser-bloated Bermuda shorts set is not lost on me, but that’s not the sort of city I want to live in. Let the chumps go somewhere else to be fleeced. Let them go to Biloxi, or Davenport. Duluth, or Thackerville. There’s no shortage of places to go to gamble, a fact that speaks volumes about the credulity of the American public– we really don’t need to have it here. (There’s an anti-casino argument I haven’t heard advanced much. To be honest, I don’t see how a casino is going to do anything but hurt things here. Taking city land off the tax rolls, give the city a pittance of slot machine revenue, in all likelihood not spur any significant development that wouldn’t happen anyway, enrich a few Indians but not much else, establish a casino that really won’t be much of a tourist attraction since just about everybody lives within a few hours of a casino anyway no matter where they are — screw the casino.)

:: I know I know, cool is elusive, undefinable. But when your personal style makes the cover of THAT magazine, you got it. (I’ll be keeping an eye on that mag for the “long hair and overalls” look, then! Probably in vain, but you never know….)

:: I dreamed an episode of The Dick Van Dyke show last night. (I just don’t know what to add to that….)

:: Refusing to do any extras whatsoever on a film that made this large a cultural impact is hubris, and it’s that attitude that continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth about the movie. (Interesting criticism of the DVD package of the movie The Passion of the Christ. I watched the film a few weeks ago, and I was surprised that the film actually seemed less visceral than its reputation holds, and that Gibson apparently fell in love with slow-motion at some point, since I’d guess that a quarter of the film is shot that way. As a movie, it didn’t move me one way or the other — it was just kind of “there”. Oh, and I hated the music.)

:: I am going to castrate the developers at Mircosoft and Apple. (Isn’t there a whole club of people who want to do that? They could all get jackets!)

:: Anyhow, I got to thinking about which towns will never, ever have a vehicle model named after them; the kind of towns with a weird name that doesn’t conjure up the kind of imagery that, say, Malibu or Seville does. (Go check out the ones he came up with, and add some yourself. For myself, I’d love to mosey about down behind the wheel of my trusty Tonawanda!)

:: Can oatmeal be consumed during Passover?

:: And poor Judas has been so reviled that no one will even name their dog Judas. He has been portrayed as this evil man, when even the gospels tell of his remorse. He did kill himself over it, after all. I’d say he was pretty damned sorry.

:: I speak to my wife nearly every day while I’m at work. It helps keep the relationship hot and steamy when we make sure to discuss the consistency of our boys’ bowel movements and whether or not the living room furniture has acquired any more permanent stains in the past day.

:: Moreover, I’ve never seen anything supporting the idea that people who don’t go to classical music concerts or who are ignorant of classical music don’t do so because they think it’s elitist or the music of a superior intellectual or culture class. (Exactly!)

:: Lately I’ve been reading of concerns that Lost is being plotted one episode at a time rather than with a long-range story planned. Yet this off-the-cuff creation is celebrated in jazz improvisation. (I stopped watching Lost a few episodes in because it just seemed directionless, but I’m not sure that the jazz metaphor is the best one, since even in jazz the improv is melodically based and revolves pretty strictly around the chart’s chord progressions.)

All for this week. Tune in next week to hear someone say…well, something.

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A bit of a different approach this week. Jayne Says has become a favorite blog of mine, of the “personal diary” variety. Her own content tends to focus on spirituality, with a little politics and a bit of pop culture thrown in. It takes a good writer to make subject matter like that interesting, and Jayne is certainly that.

But this week Jayne’s been absent, and she’s turned her blog into a showcase for some of her own favorites, presenting posts she’s borrowed from those blogs (rather than just allowing them to post new material to her blog). So this week’s “Sentential Links” will provide links to posts from the blogs that have been featured on Jayne Says, only not from the actual posts from those blogs that have actually been used on Jayne Says. I hope that makes sense. My head hurts a bit from typing that.

(Oh, and there will be a couple additional links at the end, from my own trekking ’round Blogistan.)

Here we go:

:: Twice a year, my system and life is screwed up for nearly an entire month as Mr. Body Clock tries to figure out why the freakin’ hell I am suddenly reprogramming him to get up or sleep in early or later, and why I’m going to bed earlier or later. I think it affects me so severely because Mr. Body Clock, bless his heart, is an A-type personality over-acheiver. (Heh! Luckily for me, my own Mr. Body Clock is easily mollified with generous quantities of rum. BTW, I love the effect this blog uses when mousing over links. A little cheesy, but great!)

:: My coworker and I had been typically getting on each others nerves all day and it boiled over when he brought up the coffee late in the afternoon. In addition to ripping into him for his breakdown in logical thinking that while strong coffee could be watered DOWN… the lightly colored water he called coffee COULD NOT BE MADE STRONGER!!! (Remember the old chorus from the Letterman show: “Decaffeinated coffee — it’s useless warm brown water!”)

:: Mostly I’ve found pieces of consolations from various easter religions and I continue to do so, but if I knew I wouldn’t fail, I’d try to embrace Catholicism in the interest of having a spiritually cohesive family. (If you like knitting, this blog’s for you. I’ve never knitted; I’m more of a knotting kind of guy.)

:: Can you feature seeing this on your commute??? I mean, every road in Salt Lake has one of these looming up at the end of it. just about. (Lots of photos at this post.)

:: I like old stuff, I like being the caretaker of old stuff. I have a primitive pew like bench in my great room that is over a hundred and twenty five years old. I paid forty five dollars for it. I wonder how may people have sat there, where, and when.

:: Sometimes we change so much that we have to rid ourselves of the people that we have outgrown.

:: The thing is, when someone gives you their heart, even if it’s a bit battered and bruised and some pieces are sold separately, YOU TAKE CARE OF IT.

:: I followed the story and in time all charges were dropped against the Rabbit. I knew then that I had moved to the right town. (Heh!)

:: It only took 20.7 months, but my daughter has finally reached the point where she is insistent on pooping in private. (I’m not telling how long it took with The Daughter. Suffice it to say, modesty ain’t her thing, and I have some trepidation about what kinds of productions she’ll appear in if she majors in theater in college.)

That’s all of Jayne’s blogsitters. (I think Jayne is back tomorrow.) Here are a few links from my own Fellow Travelers:

:: There are things about other people smoking that I miss though. I miss the sounds—of a match being struck, the snick of a lighter, the first satisfied exhale of the contented nicotine addict getting her fix. (This is a great post. Go read it, if nothing else.)

:: But I’m tired of people telling me when and how I have to remember 9/11. Don’t worry, folks. I remember. I remember even though I’m a Democrat. I remember even though I don’t go to church. I remember even though I voted for Kerry. I remember even though I can’t stomach George W. Bush not for one second.

:: This disk held fast an event I had shared with my father: 71 minutes out of the 16 years we had together. Soon after, as an “enemy of Reich and Führer,” my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss. (OK. After reading Lance’s post, read this one.)

All for this week!

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GAHHH! I was just happily collecting this week’s Sentential Links when Firefox crashed, and I lost the post. Damn it all! I had some good ones, too. I’ll try to remember the ones I picked, but I’ll probably miss one or two.

:: “Beaver in disloyalty kisses the drizzle’s price” (Huh?)

:: It’s too bad that teaching courtship/sex to young men is no longer a respectable occupation.

:: Indeed, DST is a huge pain in the ass for everyone. (Yeah, I hate DST too.)

:: At forty years and two months, I came to the birds.

:: So aside from slogans, what’s the Republican plan?

:: One of the reasons I write in this space is because I consider well crafted prose a form of art and refuse to adopt a blasé attitude as concerns my own writing.

Well, that’s it. I had more before, but then the post got scorched, and I need to do some other work. More next week.

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A bit different approach this time — I found something called the “Thursday Thirteen” last week over at Adventures in Juggling, and I enjoyed noodling through the blogs Laura cited therein. One is already known to me (hi, Judith!), and one is mine (he said blushingly!), which leaves eleven. I’ve drawn the first eleven of this week’s Sentential links from this group (plus a couple from my regular haunts). Enjoy!

:: No one ever says in journalism school that when you agree to enter the field, you are prohibited from voting, from being a private citizen or from having your own opinion. (Agreed. The stuff we find to support our perceived “media biases” is sometimes laughable.)

:: I am concerned sometimes about the assertion from some members of the far right, that if one is a Liberal and a Democrat then therefore there is no way one could also be a Christian. (You and me both. What tires me more than anything is that what is portrayed as “Christian” is almost always the hardcore evangelical variety.)

:: i was diagnosed with lung cancer on 6/23/05 and now find myself on an amazing (never dull) journey to becoming cancer-free (the good Lord willin’ of course!) its been a rollercoaster of emotions, laughter mixed with tears of uncertainty… (that’s not from a post, but rather from the blurb at the top of the blog. She’s blogging her battle against cancer. Wish her well.)

:: I live in the center of what is called ‘The Strawberry Capital of the World’. (Yeah, and I spend money every week keeping The Daughter in her strawberry habit. I should put her in a strawberry detox program or something!)

:: It has been very hard for me to accept that I can’t “get” others to do what I want them to do, even if it would be good for them and for the relationship.

:: I’m facing the idea of the roller coaster with a some trepidation. It’s kinda like having sex for the first time after you have a baby…you know you’re gonna have a good time, but those first few moments make you hold your breath. (Maybe that’s what it’s like for the mother, but for the f…nahhh, I’m not gonna finish that thought. Nothing good can come of it!)

:: I’m going to blog about Purel and I’m sorry (The title of a post, actually. Damn! The NICU and PICUs with Little Quinn didn’t even demand Purel.)

:: Eric shrugs his shoulders and says, “No, Grandma just acts old,” he says pausing long enough to take a sip of his juice before adding,”It’s her job.” (Talk about your insights from the mouths of babes!)

:: Anyway freakin’ Manilow was on. Freakin’ singing. Freakin’ arranging music. Freakin’ being Manilow. It made me cackle the cackle I have. If you’ve ever talked to me on the phone and made me cackle. I cackled. I was a cackling cackleheimer. (As I wrote in a comments thread at Idol Tongues, do es anyone ever see Barry Manilow anymore without also envisioning Principal Vernon rifling through his wardrobe?)

:: Yes, I’m terrible at the business end of writing. I don’t write a variety of stuff for paying markets, I hardly ever submit anything anywhere, and I tend not to write anything that isn’t fun or interesting to me.

Am I doing it wrong? (Geez, I hope not — because I’m doing the exact same thing. I’m increasingly looking at it this way: I’ve got a job that pays the bills, so why should I expect writing to do it?)

Now a few links from more regular haunts of mine in Blogistan:

:: I’m not the least bit insulted that Eliot Spitzer has realized the economic straits that upstate is in; but unless he proposes some serious tax relief for us, then he’s not really serious about our situation. (Then why doesn’t someone in the media ask him the damn question! Seriously, whether we compare ourselves to Appalachia or not — and believe me, there are places about thirty miles and farther outside Buffalo that are as poor as anyplace you’ll find in the knobs and vales of West Virginia — it can’t be denied that the Upstate NY economy is a wreck, and that the state is losing population for a reason. So are we going to make our state more friendly to business and trade and commerce, or not?)

:: You hadn’t heard of the Chinese city of Chongqing? Neither had I. Fun to learn that someplace so little known is so huge, as well as the fastest-growing city in the world. It’s the unknown megalopolis. (Michael Blowhard also links this article about this city. Stories like this are what make me want to scream about the “Buffalo will never be a big city again” people. No, we may not become one of the economic powerhouse cities of the entire world, but why should we stop striving for growth? Why should we settle for some critical mass that’s less than what we are now, and well less than what we were when this was a “big city”? I don’t want a “smaller but still nice” Buffalo. I want a Bigger and Better Buffalo. BTW, pound for pound you’ll find more interesting linkage at 2Blowhards than anywhere else on the Net.)

:: I’m also increasingly convinced that the blogosphere is made up of people who self-select, and many are ideological and spiritual cronies of Glenn Reynolds himself — i.e., libertarians, sci-fi cultists, transhumanist fellow-travelers, and the like. (This individual has been blogging about Glenn Reynolds like mad lately. Some of it’s interesting, some of it’s really over-the-top. I’d take issue with his apparent belief that SF lovers tend to be libertarian, for instance. I also think he tends to assume that Reynolds is more of a factor in Blogistan than he really is. Yes, an Instalanche is good for mucho traffic, but what of it? For great swaths of Blogistan, Glenn Reynolds isn’t even on the radar. I myself almost never read him unless a liberal blogger that I do read mentions something of his. Whenever I have read Reynolds, I’ve found his insights dull and witless, and few people I read in Liberal Blogistan care if they’re on Reynolds’s good side or not. For my money, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen online was Reynolds enthusiastically linking Adam Yoshida, and then starting to back away when he took a closer look and realized how batshit crazy Yoshida really is.)

:: If it has seemed lately that Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, arguably the crowning artistic achievement of the American musical theatre, was likely to spend its old age in the opera house, then consider the current revival Broadway’s resounding objection. (Heads up, John!)

:: Victory! Party gains 300 experience points. Party die as virgins. (This is the winning entry of a caption contest, which is a regular event over at Dave’s Livejournal. The entry, by the way, is by Jostein.)

Wow. I could actually go on and on; it was a particularly compelling week for my comings-and-goings in Blogistan this week. But this is pretty long by now, so I’ll have done. More next week!

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Here we go with this week’s clicky goodness:

:: I say no records, no Hall for steroid-using players.

:: Guess what? Macaulay Culkin has named his, um, well, you know… (Oh, for the love of God! That kid is so messed up.)

:: The way I see it, critics can play a useful cultural role, but composers should ignore what they say, even when it’s positive. (Why limit that to composers? I’d include just about every artist, personally.)

:: The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right TEMPO. (OK, it’s not a quote from a blog post, but from a written selection that was in turn quoted within a blog post. But the words are Wagner’s, after all. If I had a time machine, I’d use it to hear Wagner and Berlioz conduct.)

:: As the raindrop scatters the sun’s light into a rainbow, so your love scatters joy into my life. (What a nice custom this guy has! It’s explained here. Lynn is always linking this guy, but somehow I never checked him out until a week ago.)

:: A mysterious communication arrived via my agent. (Man, this is surreal. But when did merely linking a site become something that could be legally challenged? Did I miss something? Am I tempting fate by linking the site? Oh no!)

:: At this point, Dems need to proclaim as loudly and as often as possible that they’ve got the far stronger hand going into 2006. President Bush is a deeply unpopular president who’s hitting record lows in the polls; he’s widely seen as incompetent and a failure; he’s lost the ability to corral Republicans in Congress, who are running from him as though their lives counted on it; and, perhaps most important, less than half of Americans approve of President Bush’s handling of terrorism — the very thing pundits somehow can’t stop describing as his “strong suit.” (Exactly! In the words of John Stewart: “Talking points. They’re true, because they’re said a lot.”)

:: What all these violent aggressive conquests by the rep-resentatives of missionary religions do demonstrate is that there are no major world religions devoted entirely to peace, and no major world religions devoted entirely to war. There are only changing motives. (Exactly. The whole problem with the “Religion of peace” meme, when applied to any religion, is that it omits the religion from the people who practice it. Violent people beget violent religions.)

:: What a wonderful concept. Most times when people hurt or disappoint us, we treat them with with judgment and alienation. What if we were to accept that we all make mistakes, we all fail miserably and often, during this human condition. What if we were to make this paradigm shift to respond with Love, compassion, and understanding instead of with anger, judgment and rejection?

:: I will tell you my opinion. Be aware of some facts first. (Good post providing a real-life example of how a skeptical bit of inquiry works.)

:: To put it in its simplest terms, for me, reincarnation is nothing more than the act of human compost. From what I’ve observed in my lifetime, all matter eventually dies and breaks down into its most fundamental elements. These elements come together to form new matter.

And at last, two I found recently that may, in one way, be kindred spirits:

:: There has been some discussion recently about the value of overalls in society but nowhere has the overall truth been mentioned – overalls bring happiness.

:: However, the potential utility of these amazing pants quickly overwhelmed the comic intent and I spent a good deal of the party imagining myself wearing them while performing chores around the house. On Sunday, I turned that reverie into reality and donned these penultimate pantaloons.

Carry that flame forward!

…and more sentential goodness next Monday.

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Wow, I’m up to 41 of these things. Cool! I’m going to do things a little bit differently this week. Over the weekend I found this little article of “Ten More Words You Simply Must Know” (somehow I missed the earlier, “Ten Words You Simply Must Know”). I’m glad to say that I do know all the words in the article, and I even remember a West Wing joke that revolved around one of these words.

Anyhow, since you can’t ever have a vocabulary lesson without giving an example of the word being used sententially, here’s a link to a blog post using each one. While I found the posts simply by using Google’s Blog Search, I did make an effort to choose interesting looking ones, so make sure to click through as always for the proper context!

:: We like to bust up the routine of the postal workers. White envelopes are just abhorrent to the mail artist’s nature.

:: [GAHHH! I’ve just spent fifteen minutes searching, and I can’t find any real blogs that use the word “masticate” unless they’re referring to the exact same vocabulary article I myself am referencing here, which is useless for my purposes. “Masticate” seems to crop up in a whole lot of Spam blogs, though — what’s up with that? Oh well — I have to admit that I’m highly unlikely to start using this word to any degree, especially since “chew” seems to serve the same purpose.]

:: In one way, I want to invert Zukofsky’s paradigm of an integral here, to suggest that, in Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, the lower limit is surreal, the upper limit real. (I have no idea what this means, actually.)

:: Therefore, the 1955 movie version of the book got twisted into the version that the CIA wanted to disseminate, making Big Brother Capitalism seem better than Big Brother Communism.

:: We must inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own without any apologies to the powers that be. (This blog is from Cameroon, in Africa.)

:: What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will. (By the way: the sample sentence for “pestiferous” given in the “Ten Words” article is an awful sentence. The word is only there to use the word, and it serves no useful purpose that the decriptive stuff in the rest of the sentence doesn’t already serve! This sentence proves that the desire to use big words often backfires, resulting in bad writing. OK, moving on.)

:: I’ve never seen a musician in any genre who is less concerned to draw attention to himself than Steve Gadd, in spite of his playing an instrument which is intrinsically ostentatious. (This post is a very nicely written appreciation of a musician, by the way.)

:: At breakfast this morning, he was regaling us with a tale of Sternutatory Goodness:…. (Tale snipped. Go read, because it’s kind of funny.)

:: Getting close up and personal with a bear can be salutary.

:: Know what’s weird about “Voyager”? On TNG, they have the pugnacious Klingon in charge of the weapons, and the cold, logical robot in charge of the science. On Voyager, they have the cold, logical Vulcan in charge of the weapons, and the pugnacious Klingon as the chief engineer spitting out the technobabble. (Damn — he’s right! I never noticed that!)

Well, that was an interesting exercise. I can’t honestly claim that you must know these words; in fact, a couple of them strike me as being nearly useless. But there you go.

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