In breaking Great White news, missing and presumably charred guitarist Ty Longley turns out to have starred in several adult entertainments under the nom de porn of “Tybo.” There are of course excellent reasons for choosing an alias for one’s pornographic career, but really, what a waste: blessed with the Christian name of Ty Longley, [...]

Be somewhat afraid. (Link from Stumbling Tongue.)

Part I: Statement in Poetry Part II: External Evidence Part III: Scansion Part IV: Public and Private Reading The vehicle of a poem is the figure that carries the weight of the composition. The tenor is the subject to which the vehicle refers. (These useful terms come from I.A. Richards, author of Practical Criticism, which [...]

It’s begging week at NPR, and I have a suggestion. If they’re going to claim, as they have several times this morning, that they rely on their listeners for all of their funding, they might want to remove this smoking gun from their own site.

Now that Plague, Famine, War, and Death are spoken for, is it too late to put in for “Mild Discomfort”?

For 97 people to die in a nightclub fire requires heroic effort all around. There’s the band, who neglected even to get permission for a pyrotechnic display they shouldn’t be putting on in a low-ceilinged room in the first place. There are the owners, who didn’t bother to supervise the stage set. And then there [...]

Got my first piece today, from one mswinky@hotmail.com, who eagerly awaits offers to increase his penis size and lower his mortgage rate. Senor Swinky writes: and what the fuck are you doing about the war or anything for that matter? caught up in dirty identity politics and spending too much time on a 2000 dollar [...]

The unsuspecting reader who opens Emily Dickinson for the first time, in the orthodox modern version, confronts something like this: I started Early — Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me – And Frigates — in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands [...]

Well here’s a nasty little result. It turns out that the best way to select for optimum performance from a multi-racial applicant pool is to discriminate against the low-performing groups. You need not follow the rather daunting math to follow the reasoning: the greater the difference between a score and the mean, the likelier it [...]

Reality TV these days lacks imagination. Joe Millionaire? Married by America? How about the old Monty Python skit, Blackmail? The Blackmail set consists of the host at a desk with a telephone. A crude home video rolls, with a running meter and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen. The video begins innocuously. [...]