Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Elbow, is for posts that make us laugh.
Harry presses his back to the post of the swing set and watches a light plane pass overhead. The plane trails a banner ad for something. Harry can’t say what. A chill wind makes his eyes tear and that blurs his vision. Maybe it’s an ad for cough syrup, or condoms. Most likely an ad for a wireless service provider.
The most unlikely movie scene ever in the history of Hollywood (at least in my humble opinion) has to be the closing scene of Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on a short story by Stephen King.
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.
I confess it: I sometimes vanity google. My name is sufficiently common that enhancing my google rankings has become an exercise in frustration. However, it passes beyond frustration when I discover that I’m outranked by a dead poet no one has ever heard of.
I think I’m in love with the woman in the picture frame I bought. Do picture frame models ever have stalkers?
At the letterbox, Roger pulled out a wad of flyers, most of them advertising local businesses—palm readers, tea leave readers, tarot card readers, and Madame Zignault, emergency consultations available on request.
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.
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 problem with atheists is not that they don’t believe in God, but that they don’t believe in belief.
Sometimes, book reviewing carries risks. You’ve already seen how one negative review resulted in a threatening email from the author along with a puzzling photo of mating lions. But that’s nothing compared to the next review. After I shared my thoughts about Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, I was contacted by the FBI. Seriously.
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…
NewNorthByNorthWest Inc., a publisher of literary classics for use in secondary school curriculum, has announced that a new edition of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in the works and is expected to be available in time for the 2011/12 school year. A staple of English curriculum even a generation ago, Shakespeare’s tale of love and usury has appeared in fewer and fewer English programs as parent teacher associations increasingly raise objections to the work.
