Amazing lightning show this morning. Either there’s a big storm coming my way, or someone’s opening the Ark of the Covenant down in Chanhassan.
Amazing lightning show this morning. Either there’s a big storm coming my way, or someone’s opening the Ark of the Covenant down in Chanhassan.
A gentle reminder: When we say we dislike a word, phrase, idiom, or grammatical or syntactical variation, we’re really saying we dislike the people who employ it.
The Covid screening I have to do every morning reminds me that my normal body temperature is so low that 98.6º is, for me, a two degree fever.
So science confirms it: I am in fact very cool!
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Hmm, y’know, maybe I have enough books”?
Yeah, me neither.
ICE whistleblower: Nurse alleges ‘hysterectomies on immigrant women in US’
If you vote for Trump, you vote for this.
The Magical Powers of a New Shirt: on 9/11, violence, language, and The West Wing.
(I wrote this in May but I woke up thinking about it this morning, so here it is.)
From 10 July to yesterday, I posted bookmarks from 43 different bookstores. Sixteen of them are closed and twenty-seven are still around. A better ratio than I was expecting.
But too many are gone without having been replaced, and we are poorer and more vulnerable for it.
And this brings us to the end of the run.
I will continue occasionally posting other bookmarks — and things that serve as bookmarks — as they turn up in my books. But I’ve posted something daily throughout April, May, and July–August, so I’m ready for a break.
This version surfaced a few weeks ago, too late to be included in the original post.
An excellent bookstore so richly and lovingly stocked, it seems much larger than it is.
I picked up armloads of science fiction and fantasy here in the early 80s. Better selection that B. Dalton’s. And with a branch in the local strip mall, it was easier for middle-school me to get to than faraway Shinders or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which were rare, special visits.
The most recent version I have, and the last for this series. Some friends sent me an envelope full of these in 2018, a few years after I had moved away.
The villain sweeps on stage and strikes a pose. We boo uproariously.
He basks in it, studying his fingernails, with the occasional imperious side-eye to the audience.
We love to hate him, and hate to love him. He’s the reason why the show is sold out for the whole run.
From the last days of the Hungry Mind. After selling their name to a short-lived online school, they rebranded, expanded into Open Book, then closed a few years later.
This wasn’t how the story was supposed to end, but this is apparently how the story usually ends.
We’re over two months into my bookmark tour. I have four envelopes stuffed with bookmarks, including one filled with dozens from Powells alone.
So… what am I using in the book I’m reading right now?
Yep:
File Under: “The Cobbler’s Children Go Barefoot”
📚 What I finished this week.
The First Kiss apple debuted at the State Fair two years ago. (For those out west, the Rave is the same apple.) After looking in vain for it last fall, I spotted some at the grocery store today. It’s an extremely fragrant Honeycrisp with a bit more tartness. So good!
This turned up in a used book I bought in Salt Lake City, or possibly Santa Fe.
I wandered in during their first anniversary in May of ’96 and was instantly ensorcelled. I appeared in their short-lived lit mag, read at their open mics, and bought and sold tons of books.
Any closed bookstore is sad, but this one was especially hard.
🔗 America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them.
Up to now, people who said there was only one foot didn’t have a leg to stand on. But the shoe’s on the other foot now!
A bookmark labelled bookmark from a bookstore called The Book Store. Reminds me of the yellow and black generic brands from the early 80s.
Based on its address and the bookmarks’ colors, this was possibly an earlier incarnation of SJSU’s campus bookstore.
