It is, at the moment, verycold in the room in which I write.  I seem to be among the minority  of writers.  I’m not looking to face a blank wall to keep myself from being distracted.  Instead, I like windows, and lots of them.  I therefore write in a converted sunroom, which, when the weather…

Okay, this is not going to be a very coherent post, because I’ve had one hell of a morning arguing with people who were all convinced that they knew exactly what was right and true–and about something simply procedural, too–and all of whom were wrong. And none of them were students. That said, this is…

Yesterday, I did something I am not very happy with myself for, and I don’t know what to think of it.   Yesterday, I let a girl lie to me and get away with it. Specifically, I let a girl lie to me about the work she had and had not done.  We’d been around this…

Actually, something about cats that has always bothered me.  But first for the back-up notes. I’ve always had tomcats, and always had them from a single litter, and never had them neutered.  This is the first time I’ve ever had a problem with them being in the same house. We did, of course, have a…

Before I get started here, you have to understand something.  It is 3:20 in the morning, and I’ve been up for two hours.  I’m usually an early riser, and I like to get up and get my work done before the day has started for most people.  I do not, however, ordinarily get up before…

Sometime this month–it may already have happened; I admit to being less than attentive to the content of commercials–a movie called Sherlock Holmes is going to open.  I tend to be relatively in favor of somesthing like this, because I like Holmes.  And I like Robert  Downey, Jr. who is playing Holmes, although the real…

Okay–an admission.  I’ve never read anything by Josephine Tey. So, if I were to read something…my guess would be Daughter of Time, Miss Pym Disposes, and Man in the Queue. But I’m open to suggestions, if anybody has them….remember, I like really traditional detective novels, when it comes to detective novels.

So, let’s start with Robert’s comment here: >>>As for the interior life, we are all alone in our own skulls, and I’ve read enough Approved Literature to suspect that many who write in excellent prose understand their fellow creatures no better than I do. To judge from their personal lives, many of them may be…

It’s odd how you can be brought up short by things you didn’t even know you had an opinion about. That’s pretty much what happened to me yesterday with  Robert’s “slice of life” comment.  My immediate, visceral reaction to the phrase was a kind of distaste, and it took me a while to figure out…

Well, okay, not quite. To answer Jem, sort of–we have evidence of the use of nativity scenes, in churches if not in private homes, going back considerably before St. Francis of Assissi, at least in England and Wales.  I’d never heard the story you mentioned, but it’s the kind of story that gets told about…