Would you trust this woman with your summer reading? I was talking to a friend today who mentioned that she was planning to give away some books. She has a lot of science fiction, some random books on Africa, and a few crappy Oprah books. “Crappy Oprah books?” I asked. Of course, she was talking […]
Archive | Language/Lit
Get Your Meme On
A frequently updated news/blog/everything aggregator Web site. meme-orandum [Note that even though the word “on” is a preposition, it is capitalized in the title of this post. That’s because it’s at the end of the title. All words at the end are capitalized. I mention this because the New York Times forgot to UNcapitalize a […]
Shaggy Dog
I’m reading Tristram Shandy, the most famous shaggy dog story of all time. As it happens, I’d never heard of the book until I saw ads a while back for a movie version of it. I wonder what the less-known shaggy dog stories are. Has anyone ever heard of, or read, this book? Anyone? Anyone? […]
There's No Accounting for Taste
Among other birthday gifts this year, I received The Best American Short Stories 2007. I haven’t started yet. But I have read a lot of the “Reviews” by customers on amazon.com, and they remind me that you just can’t trust other people’s opinions. In order to even come close, you have to find a reviewer […]
Elementary School!
The penultimate coupon whore points us to the Blog Readability Test. What level do readers have to be to understand your blog? Weeklyrob scored as “Elementary School,” which I’m guessing is the lowest possible. I checked the blogs of friends of mine, and they all scored anywhere from “Junior High” to “Genius.” Now, I don’t […]
Surrey with the Bangs on Top
My wife is thinking of changing her hair style. It’s supposedly common among women to do so after breaking up with boyfriends or husbands, so I hope she’s not thinking ahead to something I don’t know about. She wants to get bangs. Only, because she’s Australian, she doesn’t call it bangs, she calls it a […]
Commodum Habitus Es
The page of Latin insults.
Bigfoot
Not TOO long ago, I made my first ever podcast of sorts, about how early (but biologically modern) humans mingled with other hominids. The other hominids ended up dying off, but here we are. Seed magazine (linked to on the right of weeklyrob’s main page) this month has printed a conversation between a couple of […]
Edmund Wilson and the LOA
Today, aldaily.com points to an article calling the two-volume set of Edmund Wilson’s essays and reviews, published by the Library of America, “one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.” This struck me because it wasn’t long ago that I received the first volume in the mail, and I was impressed with it. In fact, […]
Chaucer with an American Accent
Some people seem to think that the English spoken in England is somehow more pure than the version spoken in the US. That it better represents the language that Chaucer or Shakespeare spoke, and is therefore true English, whereas the language spoken in the US has changed into a new version. If they’re being kind, […]