In case disaster, disease, and political crisis aren’t sign enough that the world is ending, Betty, of Archie Comics fame, has gone goth. Link goes to a real scan of a real comic, with real Betty dressing real goth, and smoking real clove cigarettes. Ok, made the last part up, sure.

After such unsettlement, you’ll surely need a laugh. Allow me to recommend The Hall of Technical Document Weirdness. There’s a lot there, so let me tender a few of my favorites to get you …

Please work with me to keep alive the nearly-forgotten turn of speech, “Dumber than a sack of doorknobs.”

I believe I heard it first from Tom Grunwald, native and lifelong Kentuckian, Headmaster Emeritus of Sayre School in Lexington, KY.

I want to be a vernacularist when I grow up. Vernaculophile. Vernaculophore. Vernaculophagous. Vernaculata Aficionado

If you like vernaculata
And parsing quatrains…
If you dig Desiderata…

(I leave it to you, dear Reader, to complete the verse.)

O’Naturals is my latest favorite place to eat. They usurped Carberry’s Davis Square location at least a year ago, but only over my vacation a couple weeks ago did I avail myself of their yumminesses. Everything on the menu is organic and/or free-range and/or hand-prepared by disabled migrant refugees, but it’s all still pretty tasty. And, yeah, they do have a really stupid name. Sorry. I hate to recommend places that are going to embarass you to be seen going into.

Just had the carrot ginger soup for the first time, and this is …

Midwest Tour is a rough photographic chronology of my trip this past weekend to the great Midwest.

See the previous entry for a narrative account!

Having arisen at 4:30 AM, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin a little before ten in the morning on Saturday the 15th. My bestest friend in the whole world had been laid low by a mighty illness earlier in the year, and this was my first visit out to see him since he first started having problems in April. Andrew’s mostly all better now, having spent all summer in convalescence, and I wish I could have visited earlier, but only recently have we been able to spare the funds for the airfare. It would have been better if we could have afforded for both me and Gwen to go (I think Gwen would love liberal, friendly Madison), but it just wasn’t in the cards this time, and I was overdue to go out there, so when tickets dropped below $250 last week, I snatched them up and flew out four days later.