mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement

I admit I was interested in picking up Ōoku: The Inner Chambers for less-than-literary reasons, given the cover copy and the “Mature” rating, but then there was the whole nomination for the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize thing which suggested hey, this probably wasn’t just well-written porn. In fact it’s not porn, and it did (quite [...]

If I never see 2009 again, it’ll be too soon.

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He writes some pretty good mysteries, sure, but the man is the Ernest Hemingway of Westerns.

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I’m really too tired to go around punching people in the mouth today. So: if you find yourself tempted to post one of the following things to the Internet, or God forbid saying one of them sincerely in conversation, would you kindly punch yourself in the mouth? Thanks.

“IANAL, but….”
Anything describing how when you were a [...]

Because Obama is going to indoctrinate America’s schoolchildren with the socialist, Marx-hugging message that they should stay in school, work hard and take responsibility for their learning!
And I absolutely want people who are stupid enough to believe that to keep their kids out of school that day. For every Wingnut, Jr. who doesn’t have the [...]

We’ve been thinking about replacing the 15-year-old Lesbaru wagon with a more commuting-friendly car and, as it’s about time for me to have my midlife crisis, I have decided that what we need is something more like the car our neighbors are selling:
1957 Chevrolet 210
Samwise is baffled, probably because he grew up in the wrong [...]

I cannot describe the horror of this flashmob video that the Queen sent me, and yet I must — IÄ! IÄ!

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Amanda already said quite a bit of what I was thinking about the stupidity of Michael Pollan’s recent article in the New York Times Magazine, though her main point is that if you’re writing for the NYT, you need to be fashionably ‘postfeminist’. That’s the nice version. Myself, I throw in a dash of cynicism [...]

Scalzi’s thread about what you need to give up to write (spoiler: screwing around watching TV and stuff all the time) got invaded by someone who is either a total emokid or a troll indistinguishable from one, blathering about how one must Suffer in order to create Art.
Naturally we all made like he was a [...]

I would have read it eventually since it’s by China Miéville, but since Bryan recommended it I moved it up the stack – even though I was a little concerned it would be even more baroque than The Iron Council.
Miéville, darn him and his talent, has written a police procedural, set in a city that [...]