Since late May I have been taking a 6:30am bus to the train station to make my daily jaunt into the nation’s capital. Since late May I have almost every day been joined on the bus, two stops after I get on, by a rather attractive woman about my age. ‘M—’ is not beautiful in the ordinary way—her lower lip thrusts too far forward, her nose is too prominent, her cheekbones are flatter than one might hope, her toes turn slightly outward, giving an ever-so-distant hint of a limp to her walk. Yet her ice-blue eyes are bright and clear, her voice is pleasant and forthright, and her wispy but perfectly coiffed wheat-colored hair surrounds her head like a Giotto halo. She dresses sharply but comfortably, usually wearing grey or black wool slacks and a button-down, half-sleeved, soft-colored shirt. She is poised but demure, reserved but affable. She generally keeps to herself, but when engaged in light talk by a stranger she will usually respond openly, with a smile. I took interest the moment she first stepped onto the bus, but my inability to approach her has steadily grown increasingly oppressive.

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I am currently 92 pages in to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë—and I am fully prepared to declare them the best 92 pages of fiction I have ever read. No amount of enthusiasm or fawning could convey the spiritual transports I have enjoyed in the past twenty hours. I won’t attempt to convey them to you. I will only exhort you to find a copy at your earliest convenience and experience for yourself the beauty that life might hold.

For some time in college, when I was subject to such lines of thought, I was convinced that I was “untimely”—born a century and a half too late. I once fell in love with a woman’s name, simply because my friend described her as a classical Irish beauty whose manners and character were quite out of place in our own time, who could have passed for a Brontë sister in another era. I never met the woman, but I was sure she would have pleased me greatly if she remotely warranted the description.

Anne Brontë may always have my heart, but I’m not so selfish as to keep her all to myself. Go forth, men, and read. You’ll thank me for it yet.

NP: The Alkaline Trio, Stupid Kid

Happy Birthday, Matthew!

I’ve built you your very own web page. Go crazy with it. Or do nothing with it. It’s yours. I hope you have a glorious day.

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Man, the web is fun.

NP: Willie Nelson, I Never Cared for You on KEXP

for eternal bliss
long life, sunshine, happiness
drink coffee daily

black pants, round bottom
callipygous roman muse*
train girl, i love you

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While checking Amazon for something else entirely, I saw that the welcome page was promoting a book [currently ranked 6th in sales at Amazon] on “spiritual healing” by a certain Caroline Myss, Ph.D. I love how they always put ‘Ph.D.’ after their name; whenever I see that, I KNOW the book is crap. My curiosity piqued, I clicked on the book to see what junk was contained inside, and it was pretty bad [don’t take my word for it, go and see for yourself]. So I went on over to Myss.com to find out what “Dr.” Myss got her doctorate in. It says on her bio page that she earned a Ph.D. in “Energy Medicine” from Greenwich University, an “autonomous accredited university.” I’d never heard of Greenwich University, and I had no idea how “Energy Medicine” could be taught at an “accredited university.” A little research was in order.

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Saturday, I went with a couple of friends to hike Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park. It was a hot day, and we got a late start—we started the approximately 8 mile hike around noon. For about the first third of the hike, I was sure I was going to die. I was hot, thirsty and I’m horribly out of shape, so my heart was pumping extra hard. It was great, though, to be out of doors, and because we started so late, we saw very few people on the trail. Shenandoah is beautiful, and as we approached the top of the mountain, we could look out across the valley below and see for miles. The trees below looked like a great green plush carpet ready to soften a fall from the heights.

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Happy Birthday, Mom!

We all know that Netscape 4 was a disaster. It claimed to have implemented CSS1 (at least partially), but failed miserably, even getting the parts they tried to implement horribly wrong. Today, I found a beautiful homage to the horrors of Netscape 4—in haiku.

A brief reminder: don’t forget the great document at “A List Apart” on the proper use of en-dashes, em-dashes and hyphens. But Michael, how can you praise proper typography when your own pages are typographical sinkholes and quagmires? Irony, anyone? Yes, but I’m aware of my failings, which makes me superior to all those other blog-trogs out there who go on making all the same mistakes I do without ever knowing about it. At least, I hope it does.

While we’re harping on the proper use of typographical symbols/objects, I should mention the Apostrophe Protection Society, a small organization dedicated to eradicating a certain despicable behavior. The abuse of the apostrophe (the punctuation symbol [Unicode U+2019, decimal #8217], not the grammatical entity) angers me as much as dangling modifiers. When I was in eighth grade, working on the Yearbook for Irving Junior High, I was silenced in my complaint that the winning yearbook design had the apostrophes on the wrong side of the dates. The theme was something like “Through the Decades” and had 80’s – 90’s on the cover rather than ’80s – ’90s. I still get flustered when I see that Yearbook.

Brad Choate is amazing. He’s got all sorts of MT goodies at his site. Don’t forget to look at the MTMacro plug-in, the MTAuthors plug-in, and the database stuff he does with his gaming pages. [Another MT plug-in essential: MT-search]

I’M NOT ALONE. Well, I might be, because I haven’t actually read this missive yet, but I will, and if it’s what I think it should be, it tells a story much like mine. It’s not a good story, but one to which I feel particularly attached.

FINAL NOTE: Kyle Fischer (with Caithlin De Marrais, whom I LURVE!) will be at the Ottobar tonight. Do not forget. Take earplugs, set alarm, and enjoy life for a few hours. [UPDATE—Caithlin wasn’t there. It was just Kyle and a portable CD player to provide drum loops. There were ten people in the crowd, including me—and the opening bands. Biggest. disappointment. EVER. —Ed.]

NP: Kyle Fischer, Just One More Day

Happy Birthday, Collin!