Cynthia Closkey's blog
“I’m certain that most of you have never even heard of the stinger, and you should not feel ashamed. An obscure after-dinner drink, eighty years past the prime of its popularity, it is enjoyed now, when enjoyed at all, not really as a digestive but almost as a kind of liquor dessert. As such, the …
Continue reading “A quivering of mint over the cask-wood wine-depth of brandy”
“The quizmaster is describing various monsterish toys sold at Toys’R’Us and the teams are asked to identify them. The real monsters are having a difficult time. They are good with faces, but bad with names. They seem to “know” all of the monsters but cannot correctly identify them, so perhaps one member of the team …
Continue reading “I’ll take “Masters of the Underworld” for a thousand, Alex”
The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board announced yesterday that sales of wine and spirits at state stores in 2003 increased 7.7 percent over 2002. The increase is assumed to be caused in large part by changes in how Pennsylvania sells alcohol to its residents: new Sunday hours in select stores, outlet stores nears state borders, trials …
“Then the world blossomed into a rainbow of possibility: I was approached by someone who said he enjoyed reading My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable. This flummoxed me because I had not given him a copy for Christmas as I did not know him. Was he perhaps on the review committee for the grant? No. …
For those who want to construct their own fancy leg lamps, as seen in A Christmas Story, this is a good starting place. (Link via The Straight Dope.)
More on rejection… Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light discusses what it’s like to be responsible for reviewing unsolicited manuscripts. I agree with her: It’s not as easy as writers seem to think. She talks specifically about the comments at RejectionCollection.com, where writers send and react to the rejections they’ve received. (Thanks to Inner Bitch …
“Two years ago, the manuscript of what was to be “Everyday Matters” was lying in a drawer. At the time, it was pretty much like the book that’s in stores today but it was called simply “A New York Diary”. “In late January, 2002, I had lunch with a friend who had just published a …
Jonah Goldberg was so shell-shocked by the incident that he suffered a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that left him completely unable to generate timely pop-culture references. “Think of the more outrageous art controversies of the recent past,” he stammered, trying to think of something, anything, that fit that bill, while stumbling around the smoking …
Continue reading “Rockwellesque tableaus of multi-generational TV-watching”
A fine collection of ads this week at AdAge.com’s advertising roundup. The Beyonce/Britney/Pink ad for Pepsi is unfun–no loss that it’s intended for the European market only. (And how uncomfortable must those metal bikinis have been in the sweltering, dusty Roman air? No wonder the girls were scowling the whole time.) More amusing are the …
The Human Clock – A Photo for Every Minute of the Day