In case you’d like your cat to look like a deranged millionaire. 

retrogasm:

It’s Abbott and Costello night…

Happy Birthday Lou!

Happy birthday to the movie star who meant the most to me when I was a kid, by far.

I was going to save the various body parts lying around the house for after the busts, but my 4-year-old is home sick today and he asked to look at the anatomical model of a heart that is usually on the mantelpiece and I thought said heart was looking particularly photogenic. You can open the chambers. 

This was a mutual wedding anniversary present, found at a flea market in Cedar Rapids, IA. 

We have a lot of busts.

This is Lord Nelson with one arm and both eyes. He was originally ordered from an online bust emporium as a Christmas present for my late father-in-law, a retired Lt. Commander in the Royal Navy.  The proprietor of the online bust emporium made a mistake, and initially sent a bust of Napoleon instead.  This (my husband pointed out) is a little like asking for Churchill and receiving Hitler.  We straightened it all out, Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, by which I mean the online bust emporium warehouse, and Nelson arrived instead.  

My father-in law liked the bust so much he bought a friend for it: a much smaller but similar bust of Nelson.  That bust came back to us, too, and it sits on a bookshelf in the kids’ room.  He wears more medals than the larger bust, which only goes to show: even Nelson can suffer from a Napoleon complex.

I loved this essay.

I rarely take pictures on my phone (a basic model with a fourth grade education, tops), but a while back I was crossing a playground and saw this and thought, I must take a picture of this to send to Matthea Harvey.  I love it when you see something in the real world and you think of the world of someone’s work.  

How strange to live in a world where you can contemplate typing the words, “So I texted a photo…”

As I passed by the local Montessori preschool, a sweet blond kid peeped over the fence.

I said, “Hi!”

“Hi!  Where are you going?”

“To work.”

“Are you going to Home Slice?”

“No.”

“My mom and dad own Home Slice.”

“They do?  They make good pizza.”

“Have you been to Home Slice?”

“I have! I liked it very much”

“I hope you go again!” he said.

“I’m sure I will,” I said.

“Bye!  Have a good day at work!”

Things you’ll hear at Sherwood Forest Faire:

“It’s like a medieval beer bong!”

Guys who’ve been waiting all their teens and twenties to call a woman “wench.”  Well, maybe they didn’t wait, but they’re enjoying the privilege here.  

“I’m at the renaissance fair! It’s freakin’ awesome!”

People in prosthetic pointy-ears chirruping because they’ve decided fairyfolk sound something like raccoons.

“I also have oriental-slash-elven knives.”

Costumed people flirting with each other at the very top of their lungs and LOVING IT. 

Demands to be paid in pounds.  I don’t know why this makes me so nuts.  I could respect a request for groats or farthings. 

A graduate student—in a truly wonderful story, as it happens—accidentally wrote that a character was “toe-headed.”  This is about how I feel this weekend, after reading many thousands of pages of applications to the two graduate fiction programs at the University of Texas, Austin.  It’s a little like being all thumbs in the noggin department.  

We are done only with the first round of reading.  I was about to write, Now comes the hard part, but honestly it’s all hard.  When I’m all done, I’m going to write a little here about the process of reading so much and deciding so much, which will be full of advice and apologies.  

The expression “all thumbs” always reminds me of George Starbuck’s splendid poem, “The Spell Against Spelling.”

Anyhow: here I am, endeavoring to Tumbl.  I am a Twitter partisan in the Social Media Wards—I cannot stand the sentences that Facebook writes for me—but I am inches away from finishing a novel and imagine I might find myself more characterful than Twitter allows.  

If anyone has any advice on how to Tumbl, lay it on me.