Ah, good morning. It’s a lovely Saturday and I’m taking my sweet time about getting up and about. For today’s Advent window I bring something that has been the foundation for any number of songs for a couple of centuries now, and I do enjoy it in nearly every form. It’s variously known as “La
Good morning! And a very happy Friday to you all. It’s St. Nicholas Day, which — aside from its associations with the Christmas season — is an opportunity to reflect on one of our tradition’s more interesting bishops. Besides resurrecting children pickled in brine and tossing dowries through the windows of young women about to
I mean, like one really needs an excuse to post about cats. Maugre Avenue Q, that’s what the internet is for, right? I have no idea who these folks are or how they acquired these opinionated kittens, but if I want a dose of cute and/or to make my cat sniff urgently at my computer,
Inevitably, any Advent calendar of mine is going to contain a number of my favorite choir pieces. Here is my favorite Palestrina introit, “I Look From Afar.” It’s part of the nature of Advent, too, that looking from afar is both looking at the past as from the far future, and looking at the future
Good morning! On today’s little Advent window, I give you a noise generator that I built on the MyNoise site. One of the perks of donating to Dr. Stephane’s site is that you can harvest stems from any of the sound profiles (and there are many!) in the lists, and collate them in a generator
To celebrate this website’s second year, I’m going to do a little Advent calendar of things that give me pleasure and gratitude. A year ago I started building this website in preparation for launching my first novel in what I hoped and planned to be a series; a year later, I have launched the book,
Book o’clock has arrived at last! I will probably make a more festive post later, but first, a meditation. There are special reasons why I chose to set the release date of Ryswyck to Memorial Day. Quite apart from the logistical convenience of launching my book on a, well, memorable date that dovetailed with my
It’s funny how you read something referencing a particular text or situation, and then lo and behold, you run into another reference to that thing soon after. There’s a word for this, a Greek one, I think, which basically says that the only thing funny about it is that you noticed it. But never mind
Further to my last, I heard back from the SET Game customer service. It turns out they have decided to remove QRE from the dictionary of valid words altogether. So the change is not arbitrary, and I’m not crazy thinking it’s not really a word. Meanwhile, I have given up recreational complaining for Lent. It’s
One of these days, I keep thinking, I’m going to write one of my snarky posts for this blog; I mean, it’s not like I don’t have anything to be salty about. But today is not that day. The approach of Christmas is always one of those prismatic times, where we touch the meridians of