Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Elbow, is for posts that make us laugh.
At least once a week, I resolve to be a more disciplined blogger. It’s a weaker version of the New Year’s resolution. So, for example, I felt a twinge of it at the end of December and created a reading list: I would read a whack of books and blog about each of them.
It appears that more than 91% of all people pick their nose. I’m not sure about the research methodology used to arrive at that statistic, but I’m willing to accept the figure with verifying it independently. The statistic means that if you’ve got working digits, then you’re sticking them up your nose on pretty much a daily basis.
Our next case study concerns a young man named M. who presented at his family physician’s office complaining of symptoms consistent with a major depressive episode. The physician referred him to a psychiatrist, Dr. N., who prescribed Zoloft and implemented a biweekly course of psychotherapy.
When Canadians do the hokey-pokey, that’s what it”s all aboot. Can someone please tell me what it’s all aboot-er-about that there’s a proliferation of (American) TV shows that invent and then ridicule their invented version of the way Canadians speak? As a Canadian, I’ve never once said aboot.
This photo of my dog reminds me of Elton John. It also reminds me that it’s important to distinguish the functions of apostrophes.
Do you ever worry there are too many ebooks? The internet has made publishing almost costless, which means that anybody with a thought in mind can plunk away at a keyboard and send it out to all the world. Not everybody is enthused by this state of affairs.
Joey Comeau’s first novel was Overqualified, which I looked at here. He’s come out with two novels since then, & I picked up both from the ECW Press booth at Word On The Street last September. The first is One Bloody Thing After Another. It’s suburban horror (what other kind of horror is there?).
I can’t remember how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts.
The 6th installment of my January Book Project is something I picked up from the author himself at last September’s Word On The Street. It’s Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, by Stuart Ross and published by Freehand Books. Hmmmm – how to describe this collection of short stories… It’s like an ADHD version of Etgar Keret, only he forgot to take his Ritalin and swallowed a bunch of amphetamines instead.
As I was stocking canned goods, Lenora brushed past me and whispered under her breath: Wonder where they got the new girl from. She nodded to the end of the aisle where I saw half a checkout counter and a pair of forearms drawing packages of pasta under the scanner.
The following story is absolutely true. I heard it from the friend of a friend who copied it from a napkin in a coffee shop. I have reproduced it here verbatim except where I copied it word-for-word:
There were two sisters who lived in Yarmouth. One was missing a finger and the other had a squeaky whisper of a voice. The story goes that when they were young girls, they had a conversation that went like this:
It took Adams by surprise to discover at the bottom of the stack a late application from a certain Maria Grüber who claimed to have done a five-year stint working for Mother Teresa at her orphanage in Calcutta.
Like all other superheroes, Cockroach-man had a special power, which was the power to endure. He could endure the worst trials, and even when his enemies had been swallowed up in the mists of time, he would scamper along the broken ground and find his way back into the light while poignant violins wept in the background.
There’s a war coming. That’s what Brian’s mom said when she gave us some of the cookies she’d baked. We’d been playing in the fort Brian made in his basement, shooting each other in the legs with our BB guns. While we ate our cookies, Brian’s mom told us about the Book of Revelation and how, inside that book, it said there’s a war coming.