Poor pronunciation

It’s rare these days, but I still have “I grew up without TV/media influence and don’t know how to pronounce anything because I only read” moments.

Case in point, last night I said something to the effect of “… to assuage your guilt,” but pronounced “assuage” as if it rhymed with “mirage.”

Matt, quite literally, did [...]

Annoyed already at GI Joe movie

Matt here – Since the Transformers movie was so good this year, I was highly anticipating the release of a new GI Joe movie in 2009. Yes, it’s a throwback to my childhood, but who can’t help but enjoy those things once in a while?

Of course, political correctness has kicked in, and [...]

Resolutions from an endless summer

I used to think the so-called “Indian Summer” in the Little House series sounded romantic and cozy. (Though now that I reread that chapter in The Long Winter I realize it was creepy and foreboding.) As you might guess from previous posts, in reality I don’t consider never ending summer to be a positive thing.

We’ve [...]

A literary trip to South America

I ran across this Virginia Quarterly Review article Friday night (via kottke.org) about a tiny town in Argentina with a large albino population. Even though I was dead tired and the article was quite long, I read the whole thing, riveted to my chair.

It wasn’t just my recent trip to Argentina that drew me in. [...]

Reviews of odd books

I’ve been looking for a venue to jot down thoughts on the books I read. My reviews don’t fit Amazon or LibraryThing, and both seem like very public places to post. So I decided to post them here, to a comfortably sized audience.

Jamestown: A Novel by Matthew Sharpe.

This book jumped off the “new” shelf [...]