My mind is flipping channels today. Lots of related thoughts, flashing by… Being out of control. Laughing about our own misery. God with a sense of humor. TV.
1. Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall fame released an album in 1995, filled with a whole bunch of really funny songs. Shame-Based Man gives us images […]
When I think of the south side of Chicago, two songs come to mind - Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and the theme song to the ’70s TV show Good Times. Recently, Chappelle’s Show taught me that the lyrics to the theme song were not, “Blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah,” but, rather, the […]
When we left our travels, we were in Russia with Dostoevsky, whose most famous novel is Crime and Punishment, about a young hoodlum in St. Petersburg, who commits crimes and is punished.
If I wasn’t a Web site programmer, I might like to teach English literature. I’ve thought about topics for papers where the students might […]
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has a lot to teach us about embracing our individuality. The Island of Misfit Toys is a place where insecure freaks go to grumble about being victims of a society that doesn’t want them. Boo hoo! Rudolph didn’t belong there, because he didn’t enjoy the pity party. Rudolph wanted to let […]
Happy birthday to Lori and Maggie and Ana, my lovely December birthday ladies. We’re all glad you weren’t the products of virgin births. Because that just wouldn’t have been any fun for your parents. And it would be a helluva thing for you to live up to.
I mean, think about how rough that would be, […]
If you’re like me, and your Decembers are filled with planning and shopping and cooking and singing and parties and exhaustion, then it’s never a good idea to start reading Ulysses in December. It’s just a crazy undertaking, and you’d be causing yourself an unhealthy amount of stress.
To this day I have not read all […]
Christmas carols keep me from being a big humbug, and Christmas makes me think of Christianity, which makes me think of The Bible, which makes me think of blood and gore, which appeals to my morbid side. Is that wrong?
Our local suburban arts center hosted an open house last week with a Russian Christmas theme. […]
In George Bird’s translation of Dostoevsky’s The Double, there’s a scene in the beginning of the story where the hero is described as being “as pleased as Punch.” My first instinct was to blurt out, “What?”
I thought to myself, why would Mr. Bird translate the Russian story into English cliches? I mean, how cheesy is […]
In Gogol’s Ukranian short story “”St. John’s Eve,” he describes a particular beautiful girl as “a dark-browed daughter.” It made me think of similar descriptions of beautiful girls in Arabian Nights.
The really pretty girls in Scheherazade’s tales had faces that looked like the moon and one long, black eyebrow atop their eyes. Ukraine is fairly […]
Gogol and Dostoevsky both mention serfs in their stories, these people on the fringe of society. So I had to surf the Web and read up on Ukranian and Russian feudal history. Travels don’t always lead to other books. They often lead to the peripheral knowledge that can be garnered from the wonders of Wikipedia.
It […]