Jane Haddam

I once saw a television interview with George  Burns.  I think it may have been on 60  Minutes, but I’m not sure.   The reporter and the cameras followed him around for the day, and in the course of it they went to the cemetary in Los  Angeles where Gracie Allen is interred.  I can’t say…

So it’s Thursday, and I’m back here in the lab where the grammar students come, but I’m early, and they’re not here yet.  I figure I’ve got about twenty minutes before the tidal wave arrives.  In the meantime, I’m actually in a pretty good position to think. Except that I haven’t had any sleep, and…

I’m sitting here in a gorgeaou room at a gorgeous computer in a brand new technology center, and there’s a fan in the heating center that sounds likeit’s about to explode.  I was born on Friday the 13th.  Sometimes I start to think it might matter. Anyway, I feel rather odd writing about what I’m…

So, it’s Tuesday, and I’m in that situation where the only computer I have access to  is in this big computer lab where people come to do computer generated grammar exercises.  It’s a long story.  But the bottom line is, I find it almost impossible to think in here. So instead of thinking, I’m going…

A little political interlude:      Today is the last day, in most states, when you can register to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. I’ll probably go into the who and why of what I’m voting for eventually, but for today I’d just like to say that it would be a good idea, if you’re not…

So, I got home yesterday to find my e-mail full of messages all pretty much on the same topic:  how can you say all detective stories are messiah narratives?  Think of all those “crime novels!”  And what about  Gregor Demarkian?  That’s a Messiah figure?  Sometimes he seems like he’s barely paying attention. So, okay, let’s…

For hours after I wrote that last post,  I was unhappy with it.  I was especially unhappy with the word “goddesses,” which does not mean, any more, what I wanted it to mean.  We call any really impressive woman a “goddess” these days, and a lot of not very impressive ones, too.  We mean that…

So, okay. It’s a little too easy, beating up on college students for what they don’t know. It’s especially easy beating up on students at the kind of “colleges” that are really only glorified vocational schools. My kids are not going to Yale, after all, and they’re not majoring in history, philosophy or French. They…

Okay, yesterday’s post was a little…incoherent.  I apologize.  Part of that was the place where I was working.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my only acess to a computer during the day is in a big, really noisy computer lab where classes full of students get together to do “lab work” in grammar–I am not making…

I am not the world’s most prudish person, to say the least.  And I don’t have a lot of patience with the sort of person, either of the right-religious or the left-feminist persuasion,, who just can’t stop clucking over how short skirts are or how brazen girls are or…well, any of those things. But I…