A random collision with two Indian authors

Last night, at random, I finally started to read my long-languishing copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. She is absolutely brilliant; if you haven’t read Interpreter of Maladies, you are denying yourself a treat. She is also disturbingly beautiful.
Less so is V.S. Naipaul, a writing god who walks among us, especially if you ask Paul [...]

The bookmark shift

It’s 2008, so I have something like 15 years worth of bookmarks in my browser. I tend them like a garden, move them to new browser platforms, and back them up. Why? I rarely use them. There are a few that are more like convenient shortcuts, like bill-paying, Google Maps, local weather, my county’s library [...]

The galaxy in the laundromat

I have taken the quilt from my bed to a commercial laundromat, because once wet from washing, its sodden weight would reduce my home Maytag to rubbish. At the laundromat I put it into a washing machine called a Huebsch Originator, which seems like an odd name for a washing machine. Odder still is the [...]

The last Windows machine

I’m done, Microsoft. Finished. I will devote no further fraction of my life to coaxing your awful products to do simple, useful things. Enough. Done.
I recently bought a Dell laptop to replace a years-old Gateway that finally expired. The laptop came with Vista. The laptop would not, for love, money, threats, pleading, or force of [...]

It’s obvious to me

Read that headline again. It’s wrought unimaginable havoc on my life.
I have this awful habit of assuming that everyone gets it — or at least draws the same conclusion from things that I do. I realized it today. I was outlining a proposal for improving something that, in its present state, is kind of hard [...]

Survey, interrupting

I am reading Paul Newman’s obituary on nyt.com, and suddenly an invitation to take a survey is slapped over the text I’m reading. Annoyed, I close the invitation. It seems obvious that this is a poor way to offer a survey. I’ve just started reading something of geniune interest to me, I’m a paragraph or [...]

Lamenting the death of the friend I never met

David Foster Wallace killed himself last Friday, I learned this morning. He was brilliant; he wrote fearlessly, with a ferocious glee. As people absorb the news of his death, a lot is being said about his fiction, but I liked his essays best of all. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is one [...]

Hello, three readers

Nice to see you again! Yes, it’s been a while. I admit it — I’ve been squandering my time on Facebook and Twitter and being a dad and working for a living. But now I’m back, rejoining the ranks of the blog world’s long tail, taking my place in the lower 99 percent, and and [...]

My Muppet theremin olive dream

I dreamed this just before waking this morning.  I was watching a TV show that featured The Muppets. A voice off-camera, maybe Kermit, announced that the next guest would perform on the theremin. A Muppet character came onto the stage, and proceeded to suspend an olive in midair. A stuffed olive, to be exact; a [...]

An IKEA name generator. At last.

Two of my life’s major themes, IKEA and absurdity, rolled into a single applet.
http://www.blogadilla.com/2008/05/11/the-blogadilla-swedish-furniture-name-generator/