MoodyTunes

Welcome news from the Land of Arbitrary Rules I Love: more and more professors are banning laptops in college classrooms.
This isn’t exactly news — laptop bans show up on many an English department syllabus in my neck of the woods — but it did re-stimulate my amazement at students tapping away on laptops in classes. [...]

…I’d had my camera phone with me when I was in the gas station that had “Lady Bubba” walking sticks for sale. You can build one yourself online, but you should definitely try one out in the aisles of a mini-mart first.
I’ll be rambling around a bit for spring break week so such musings might [...]

I completed the final version of my thesis this weekend, and during one of my procrastination breaks I found a couple videos I thought I’d share. Here’s a kid named Sungha Jung jamming on his guitar. I went in search of classical music clips — that’s what I’ve been listening too lately, and that’s how [...]

Strange, strange feeling to learn that Barry Hannah died yesterday.
When I re-started my writing life in 2006, I found one of those Books Every Writer Should Read lists somewhere on the Internet. The list was sorted by titles, and a book called “Airships” was at the top. I thought I’d start from there and work [...]

I’m taking a break this week. It’s the last push toward thesis completion, and the Internet is going to have to disappear for a few days.
Before I go, a brief mention of what I’ll be listening to: the various streaming radio stations available through iTunes. I never knew they existed until recently — channels crossing [...]

In keeping with our Olympic theme, I’d like to post a link to a page about this year’s Olympic mascots.
I might be really tired and in the middle of a crazy story deadline crunch…but I find those mascots and the video on that page mesmerizing. Especially early on in the video, when the whale-person mascot [...]

I’ve seen a lot of “artisan” goods lately. Artisan cheese. Artisan bread. Artisan beer. I haven’t thought about the term “artisan” much, but my impression is that artisan products/wares/foods are marketed as such because they are hand-crafted with loving care by actual humans, as opposed to mass-produced by soulless machines. Makes sense. There’s Wonder Bread, [...]

I don’t know why I chose “query” in the title of today’s post. I like the look of the word. My first words, if I remember correctly (and I remember a lot from those days), were “What’s that?”
If I could live my life over again, I’d change those to “Pardon me, but I have a [...]