Behind the Ironic Column

Even to those of us with an overdeveloped desire to be helpful and assist others with research, etc (e.g. especially people trained as librarians), the insistence of some companies on requiring a “readership” survey before they let you link on through to an online article is simply stupid.   What do ...

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I’ve had a headache all day today – no doubt caused by spending something over 8 hours reading yesterday and the tension brought on by the various wizard trials and events.  Or maybe brought on by the fact that this is the last of the Harry Potter series and I ...

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More stories from the clutter and clearing wars.  Stuck in the back of one of these boxes was an envelope of receipts for book club purchases.  I belonged to book clubs long before we had such a thing as Amazon.  We lived in a small town that didn’t have a bookstore ...

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There’s no visible scar, just one of those mental glitches that encourages me to hang on to too many things.   I’ve mentioned before that I’m in a “clearing out” phase which isn’t going very quickly – but the goal is for those things to stay gone once I’ve discarded them.  When ...

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It’s unaccountably rainy today in Portland.  I know, I know – people think it always rains in Oregon but in reality it rarely rains in July and August.  When I moved out here, it came as a total shock to me that I had to water the grass in the ...

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I read job ads – sometimes for fun, sometime in the search for a different job, and sometimes as an exercise in psychology.  I don’t remember that my psych professors made us read employment ads – but they certainly made us do an assortment of other things calculated to turn ...

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Like Blanche DuBois, I was raised in the South.  I think that’s really about all we have in common, although I’m sure some of my friends have occasionally considered that there might be more.  Blanche’s famous quote “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” really applies to everyone, not ...

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The first step in fixing a problem is admitting there is one.  And the next step seems to be getting a book about how to fix it – or, in more advanced cases, writing a book or article about how to fix it.  Or, for those of us in desperate ...

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