Jeebus, a couple weeks ago we went up to Monterey for a car race at Laguna Seca along with the brother-in-law and his two boys, 22 and 16, and the 22 year old decided he wanted to follow up his White Russian with a Long Island Iced Tea, and I looked at his dad, who looked back at me, and I said, “Jeebus, man, you need to learn some more cocktails, because now you’ve embarrassed me twice in front of the cocktail waitress,” and he looked back at me and smirked as if to say, “I have not even begun [Read More]
Lars Peterson
Posts by Lars Peterson:
Not the Dog!
One afternoon I told my friend John Scane I was maybe planning on watching I Am Legend later that evening on streaming, and I said, “Hey have you seen it?” and he said, “Yeah, sure a while ago. It’s pretty good,” and I said, “It’s got zombies, though, right? You know I can’t take too much of the gore and stuff,” and he said, “Yeah, there’s zombies. It’s scary, but no real gore. You should be OK,” and I said, “OK.” So the movie started and there was that beautiful dog, and I texted John and texted, “the dog? do [Read More]
Good Dog Bad Heart
I have a good terrier with a weak heart. She’ll die early. She’s still young, just four, and her condition isn’t apparent unless she’s playing hard at fetch or chase the hose water. When it gets her, she stops, lies down, rolls over, breathes, and waits. It’s syncope — the light headedness you feel when you stand too fast. Her heart can’t keep pace with her legs and her lungs and eventually there isn’t enough blood to her brain. When she was a pup it would sneak up on her while she romped — Boom, and over she went. She’s [Read More]
Making a Buck
Today at the checkout in Whole Foods, the checkout girl, or young woman, I guess, scanned my fancy ginger ale and said, “Making a Ginger Ale Mojito?” “Err, no. Not a … Mojito. I will be making a Buck.” “A … Buck?” “Yes. It is an old cocktail, well not truly a cocktail since there are no bitters, but nobody really pays attention to that. It’s a descendant of the Sling, which is an even older mixture, a portable Punch. Grog fits in there, too. A Buck is ginger ale, rye, and the juice of half a lime, over ice, in [Read More]
See the Orange Write the Orange
It’s poetry month at the writing academy and I want the students to practice describing things accurately. From a suggestion in Robert Wallace’s Writing Poems, I’ve decided to use the first springtime oranges as objects to describe. We read a few haikus, first, to get an idea about how an accurate description of a thing can say something about the poet (or more). I like to keep things simple at the writing academy. I cut an orange in half, then I cut one of the halves into four pieces and arrange everything onto a translucent plastic plate. The plate is yellowish, the [Read More]
Louder Than Words
Linguists used to think there was a special region of the brain devoted to language. But beginning in the 1990s, researchers with access to advanced brain imaging equipment like MRIs found that in fact the brain did not have a single region or node dedicated to processing language. What they noticed was that when a subject was read a sentence, say, “The shortstop fields the ball and throws it to first base,” several regions of the listener’s brain lit up. Which regions? Visual, suggesting the listener recalls a related scene from experience; motor, suggesting the listener recalls making a throw [Read More]
The Chicago Manuel of Style
Someone made that typo recently, “Manuel” for “Manual,” and how I wish there really were a Chicago Manuel of Style. “Say, Manuel, do I hyphenate this or not?” “Well, it depends.” “Yes or no, Manuel. Geez. Why do you always have to make everything so hard?” “Well that’s because style is not a “yes” or a “no,” my friend. Style is feeling. Style is mystery. Style is life. Tell me. Where does this hyphenation occur? Is it an adverb that ends in ‘ly’? Is there an abbreviation involved? Is there a number or ordinal? Do not roll your eyes. Do not [Read More]
Today’s Story Is About Commerce
Actually today’s Storyweek story is about unrequited love, or secret crushes, or what the kids today call “limerence.” Commerce doesn’t feature much in the story itself (sorry, no strippers or prostitutes or escorts), but it’s sprinkled throughout in the form of affiliate links to Amazon. We will run these commerce stories from time to time and hope we can make the site pay for itself that way. Some will be incidentally commercial — we’ll just stuff affiliate links into the copy and see what happens. That’s what today’s story is. Some others will be intentionally commercial — we’ll target one or [Read More]
Shannon O’Shannon
There’s a self-consciously Irish pub on the north side of Broadway a couple of doors east of the intersection of Broadway and Redondo. The pub is tucked between the Clever Gift Shop that sells clever greeting cards and clever pewter candlesticks and the Narrow Hardware Store that has a wide selection of light bulbs and screws and spackling paste and not much else. The food is good at the pub, as is the beer (the pub doesn’t sell liquor) and there are plenty of TVs tuned in to sports for entertainment. The place is called O’Shannon and it’s a mystery [Read More]
Goodnight Stalin
Twine is a tool for making little interactive fictions (think Choose Your Own Adventure). We haven’t used it here at Storyweek, but it looks like fun. (via MetaFilter)