apropos of anything

Last night, when I cut my nails, I removed the last bit of henna from my hands. Back in December, when my cousin’s daughter Saba first did them, my hands looked like this: (click on the image for the larger, uncropped photo that is less artistic because at the bottom you can see my shoes [...]

Do you go to a small, intimate party where there is a tiny chance somebody you excessively dislike will be in attendance, or do you go to a large, open gala where there is a slightly greater chance somebody you excessively dislike will be in attendance, given that both parties are on the same day, [...]

I do. I love her. And if/when the Meredith/McDreamy/Addison triangle resolves itself on Grey’s Anatomy, I’m going to be very disappointed if they find a way to dispose of Addison despite the hospital contract she signed early in the season.
It’s not fashionable to like Addison. The anti-Addison fanbase is rabid, and even Shonda Rhimes is [...]

Cartoon courtesy of Time.com

I sped through In Cold Blood pretty quickly, usually reading a little during my lunch or after work while I waited for traffic to die down or for files to deploy. I had a hard and fast rule, though: No reading In Cold Blood after 8 p.m., as Capote writes so well I easily became [...]

In the last book of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace takes a trip through time to right a series of Might-Have-Beens in the hope of preventing a nuclear holocaust in his present. As I finished In Cold Blood this afternoon, the end of which dabbles in the murderers’ childhoods, I [...]

Tonight I am attending a benefit to raise money and awareness for the famine in Niger and Mali. The snotty part of me wants to snark on how maybe this fundraiser should have been a few months earlier, say in June or July when news of the crisis first reached mainstream media (and even then [...]

Aww, Nic. Blue-shirted as always.

Nic Robertson reports on the U.S. airstrike on Samarra
The frustrating thing about watching the news is that sometimes you see Nic Robertson reporting from the front, providing actual relevant information, interviewing people who have some clue as to what they’re talking about, or Frank Sesno discussing alternative fuel sources… and then [...]

So I’ve done a bit of redesigning, some of which incorporated a bit of, well, “borrowing” of images. Specifically the rating stars. I figure it’s pretty obvious where they came from, and if I decide to keep them, I’ll probably add to the language at the bottom that already credits the cover thumbnails to Amazon.
The [...]

I suppose that should be B.E.D. Lemme ’splain.
When the weather’s nice outside like it was today, I bully Ken and Ivan into leaving the building for lunch, usually down to Broad Street where I can get a zabiha chicken or lamb wrap at Ali Baba’s (although I typically get the falafels because they’re SO GOOD [...]