Recently, I've noticed that the characters in literary novels, especially books by young writers, are just too *sad*. A pair of books by a married couple, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and Nicole Krauss' "A History of Love" are prime examples. The characters have suff… Read full post »

I was pretty excited to get a copy of MacSpeech Dictate last week. This is a new Mac voice recognition program that uses the same engine as the Windows program Dragon NaturallySpeaking. DNS is so superior to any previous Mac voice rec that I went to the trouble of… Read full post »

The universal, or approximately universal, opinion in these days is that the unpardonable sin is to be a bore.  This is a profound error.  If this awful phraseology is to be used at all, it may be safely said that the unpardonable sin is being bored. 

-- G.K.… Read full post »

I refuse to predict! I'm tired of the raging popular obsession with how series should end; the frenzy over "The Sopranos" was the last straw. 

One thing I really like about "The Wire" is its unpredictability. OK, it was obvious Omar had to go down, if only because Simon… Read full post »