Here, via Don of Mixolydian Mode, is another preference quiz, this time involving subjects literary. I bold my choices:
Hardback or Paperback - When I have the readies.
Highlight or Underline - Actually, other than for classes or work, I don't tend to mark books at all.
Lewis or Tolkien - It depends. I've read some of Lewis' fiction and, apart from the Narnia Chronicles, I don't really like it that much. On the other hand, I doubt Tolkien could stand up to him as a writer of Christian essays.
E.B. White or A.A. Milne - No real preference.
T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings - Oh, Eliot. Absolutely.
Stephen King or Dean Koontz - I've never read either one of 'em.
Barnes & Noble or Borders- Feh. Give me some good college town used book stores and Amazon.com and I'm all set.
Waldenbooks or B. Dalton - See above.
Fantasy or Science Fiction - I don't read much of either one. Fantasy, I suppose, since I like Tolkien so much.
Horror or Suspense - I read neither.
Bookmark or Dogear- In theory. But I'm very bad about dogearing.
Large Print or Fine Print - Large print gives me a headache. Price of being a lawyer, I suppose.
Hemingway or Faulkner - Hemingway: overrated blowhard. Faulkner: genius.
Fitzgerald or Steinbeck - Steinbeck is another overrated blowhard.
Homer or Plato - There's really no comparison. Whoever put this together just grabbed a couple Greek names at random.
Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser - Toss up.
Pen or Pencil
Looseleaf or Notepad
Alphabetize: By Author or By Title - But I don't.
Shelve: By Genre/Subject or All Books Together. I love fiddling with my library and wasting endless amounts of time trying to decide where to put things.
Dustjacket: Leave it On or Take it Off. My daughters are of a different opinion.
Novella or Epic - Depends.
John Grisham or Scott Turrow. Never read either one and don't have any interest in doing so.
J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket. Never read either one. Never even HEARD of Snicket.
John Irving or John Updike- Never read either one.
Salman Rushdie or Don Delillo - Never read either one. (Gee, this is easy.)
Fiction or Non-fiction. Well both, of course.
Historical Biography or Historical Romance. Ditto.
Reading Pace: A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter - I do what time and lack of sleep allow.
Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay
Blah Blah Blah or Yada Yada Yada. I know, I know. I can't help it.
“It was a dark and stormy night…” or “Once upon a time…”
Books: Buy or Borrow. I am a veritable Black Hole of books. Once caught in my gravitational influence, they can't escape.
Book Reviews or Word of Mouth. Although I don't rely on them much.
Well, it's about this long,
and about that wide,
and it's about this great country
about which we're singing about*
Here is a fiendish little quiz that asks you to estimate various facts, figures and dates. If you don't get the exact number asked, you can still pick up some points for being close. Alas, I only scored 28%.
Yips! to LDH of Inpenetrable Prose & Poesy.
*Ten points for ID-ing the quote.
I'm flat out head slamming the table tired right now. I was up to 4 in the morning finishing the paper, which turned out to make some pretty cool connections I hadn't realized. Yesterday I think I did seventeen pages, and it's done and out to the panel. But right now I'm paying the price.
Random day here: highlight of the morning was in Politics of Legal Order, where I had them read the Virginia State Crime Statistics Report for 2003, and then had them read the Book of Genesis and tabulate the number of felonies described. We got into a pretty wild discussion about order, justice and vengeance (the whole passage about the rape of Dinah, and her brothers go in and kill everyone for revenge), stuff like that. The idea was to think about how crime and order are portrayed in foundational narratives, to transition them into later in the week when they are looking at crime and the politics of legal order in fiction (I'm having them read The Godfather as the primary text for the week).
This afternoon was the weekly seminar, which this semester is American Political Development.
One quick link before my head hits the table: Captain Ed interviews Ed Koch, and as they say hilarity ensues. I love Ed Koch--he's one of the figures of my youth, right up there with Evil Kenevel, Ken Stabler and the Oakland Raiders, Muhammad Ali, and Shaft--who amazed me precisely because they were so out of sync with the conservative Roman Catholic/military academy family environment. Anyway, as Koch would be the first to admit, he's a royal pain in the ass, but the sort of pain in the arse you need to have around.
There's some priceless Kerryslams. I think right out of the blocks Captain's Quarters is doing the best job blogging the convention. But it's still early....
Well I got to go before I fall asleeppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp pppppppppppppppppppppppppp ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp
Check out the second item down in Taranto's Best of the Web column today. About midway through, he talks about a comedy bit at the GOP convention put on by Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston and featuring, among other things, a pic of Kerry in his space suit photoshopped on to Mike Dukakis' tank ride.
Dude - Steve-O did that weeks ago! Get yer own damn material...
Town Hall has a sad but unsurprising item up concerning an email rant shot at an anti-abortion group by a Reuters editor. Oh, as they say, that liberal media.
Y'now, I have been giving my old law firm lots of credit over the past months for the accomodating manner in which they've dealt with my transition into government service. And deservedly so - they have really been great about letting me set my own schedule and letting things wind down smoothly.
But I guess it's just too much to expect them not to blow it over something. When I left for vacation, I still had a small rug, a school alumni chair and two or three boxes of stuff left in my old office. "No problem," everybody said, "we'll just send it along when you get settled at your new place."
So today, I get a call from the HR people saying I better get my stuff out of there and that the firm isn't going to do it for me (read pay for it) after all. Sheesh! It's not as if I had a full-sized U-haul's worth of junk to go cross-country. I am now literally four blocks down the street from where I was. If I were still driving into town, I could load all the stuff in my car and cart it over in about 5 minutes. Hell, I could walk it over but for the chair. You would think that just as a matter of professional courtesy they would do this one last little thing. But noooooooo. Instead, I'm going to have to get a courier company myself.
Somebody once wrote something about "little acts of unremembered kindness". This is the opposite - a little act of petty meanness. Those get remembered much more often.
I missed it while I was off on vacation a couple weeks ago, but Gregg Easterbrooke is back at work churning out Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
I love this column. And it has absolutely nothing to do with plentiful photos of cheerbabes or ranting diatribes about Star Trek minutiae.....
The Cranky Neo-Con brings us the Neo-Conukkah Song, dedicated to the GOP-outing of Adam Sandler.
I say nothing about Gordon's Bill Clinton-like attempt to pin the thing on us in the event you don't like it. (What would be the term for that? Bail-out blogging? Conditional hat tip?)
You're doing better than I am this morning. For some reason, my computer claims it can't find any mu.nu sites. Stupid computer.
UPDATE: Curiouser and curiouser. I can get at some mu.nu sites, but not others. And I have a report from someone else who says the Butcher's Shop looks just fine to him.
Well, I dunno what's going on, but I'll try to soldier on, regardless.