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Favourite Book Blurbs from Japan

I shouldn’t do this.  I shouldn’t laugh in public at someone else’s writing.  Especially when I’m publishing some of my own work in a couple weeks.  It’s courting disaster.  It’s bad karma.  I might as well step into the crosshairs and pull the trigger on myself.  And yet I can’t help it. I’ve stumbled across [...]

Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hat

While watching Cathy Berberian sing the Appalachian folk song, Black is the Colour (of my true love’s hair), I noticed something strange.  Sitting in the top right corner of the camera’s field, from :38-:50 and again from 2:10-2:23 is a bearded man wearing a beret.  What is he doing? I wondered.  During the first segment, [...]

The Elephant Brand

Measuring Readability of Blog Posts

I installed a wordpress plugin called FD Word Statistics which applies three metrics on the backend and is supposed to help me gauge the readability of my blog posts.  The first two metrics – Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid – measure things like sentence length and word bigitude and then crank out a figure that’s supposed to [...]

The Grass is Greener on St. Patrick’s Day

Of the many things that perplexed me today, the most perplexing was the man going from door to door with flyers for lawn care services.  I watched as he went to this house and didn’t even pause to wonder at the lush green grass.  Yes, it is still winter here in Toronto.  What is going [...]

Charlie Sheen Poetry Reading

When you break a silent vow, does it count?  I silently vowed I would never mention Charlie Sheen on my blog.  It just seems too crass, too exploitative, too easy.  But then I discovered that Sheen had self-published a book of poetry in the 90′s and all my integrity went out the window.  The good [...]

Academic Freedom and Charges of Anti-Semitism

I’m thinking of introducing a WTF tag for some of my blog posts — this one for instance.  WTF?  This is old news but it still leaves me scratching my head and asking:  WTF?  It started with Richard Klagsbrun who drew attention at the National Post and on his own blog to an OISE student [...]

Seeing Red: Mainstream media invents the serialized novel

I don’t know whether to be worried or encouraged when a mainstream news outlet highlights a digital strategy I’m already using.  Does it mean I’m innovative?  Or on the fast track to the digital dustbin?  In this instance, I don’t think the digital strategy of serializing a novel is all that innovative given that serialized [...]

Signs and Wonders

Stupid Joke for Egyptologists

A mummy pulls into a gas station and says:  “Fill it up.” The attendant steps around to the driver’s side, unscrews the cap, and starts pumping gas.  When he’s done, he says to the mummy:  “That’ll be fifty bucks.” The mummy is annoyed and says:  “I said to fill it up.  You’ve only done half [...]

Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Literary Critic

The Associated Press reports that earlier today, the Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in absentia.  The last time this award was bestowed in absentia was 1936 when Hitler prevented Carl von Ossietzky from traveling to Oslo.  No doubt China is smarting at the nasty association with Nazi Germany. The Chinese [...]

The Future of Books (according to Philip K. Dick)

Sitting at the breakfast table this morning, coffee in one hand, e-reader in the other, I discovered a passage about books in Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, his 1968 sci-fi novel which served as the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner.  In Dick’s future (1992), the Earth has pretty much [...]

Russell Williams and the Reputation of the Canadian Military

The writers of Criminal Minds, as bizarre as some of their plots may be, could not have dreamed up this story.  Our friends from the Monty Python troupe, as fond as they are of cross-dressing officers, would have been vilified if they had tried to script something like this.  Russell Williams, graduate of Upper Canada [...]

No news is – well – no news.

Today we learn from the associated press (via the Toronto Star) that “The FBI and Homeland Security Department say they have no indication that terrorists are targeting the U.S. or its citizens as part of a new threat against Europe.” Come again?  The fact that something is NOT the case is breaking news?  And we [...]

Toronto Elites Sleeping on the Streets

Ever since Government House Leader John Baird’s arrogant comment about “Toronto elites” nearly two weeks ago, I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with examples of elite people I’ve met in this elite town.  As I was engaging in one of my elite activities (geotagging photos I had taken in my elite hometown), I [...]