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You know what they say -- held hands are the devil's playthings. 

No, not a thing, I swear! I really want to read her book! And I'm not even a young adult!

The avatar is actually the residue of months of attrition. Here is what it looked like once. My avatar has gradually swollen to slightly more terrifying proportions and is now threatening to devour the whole blog.  

I never did, although I stood perpetually in awe of her body of work. So many people have written wonderful tributes to her whose lives were actually touched and shaped by what she did that I think it's best to link to those.

The knowledge that someone like that will never write to you again can be totally stunning.

Still, one thing that startled me about the whole thing was that the reason we found out about her demise was that someone posted a grieving personal essay about her inestimable contributions a few hours too soon. What a strange commentary on the whole institution of lyrical public elegies that is. Monica Hesse (I'm not Monica, I swear!) wrote an interesting piece about it. But at the rate we're going, when we pass the news will go something like, "I first discovered the magic of Jeff's writing when I read his lyrical tribute to the passing of Adam Yauch and Whitney Houston. How strange that he is no longer here to contribute to the elegiac pool." 

This being said, there's a definite value to public grief, and there is no greater tribute to a fallen writer than all the stories of the times his or her words touched you, so, have at it.

Shaking it up!

Bring gloves.

I'm here now! I hope you are as well! But yes, apologies for the traveling time!

Pics, please!

Ha! Or Greek. But that already sounds suspicious.

There is a plesiosaur in our midst!!! I always wondered about Nessie. 

I can't make head or tail of that sentence in the party platform. What are they for? What are they against? "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification)," What? Maybe they should prioritize the teaching of syntax.

To play devil's advocate, the thing about "critical thinking skills" is that they are often a nebulous ballooning substitute for learning Actual Facts or Information. It's all very well to develop synthesis skills, but you can develop those skills in isolation by watching animated whales or by actually reading and discussing an acknowledged classic. 

But that might not be what they're talking about. 

Hey, whatever keeps them off bath salts.

Oh, believe me, it's been touched on!

There's a scene in E.M. Forster's Maurice when the instructor, as a group of Edwardian college students are going along and translating some Plato, says, "You may omit the reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks." 

This never happened to me as a classics student, so I'm up on it!

Ah, the sex lives of the ancients... Fruit for prurient speculation since the days we were wandering around with our companion plesiosaurs. 

I think we may be talking about different kinds of bath salts...

No joke whatsoever! Beats "If I Did It" by several miles. 

I've only gotten him in translation! The Yowza stands, however.

I tried to send a singing telegram to Orbitz, but they sent back a slapping telegram. It was less a telegram than a disgruntled-looking courier who made me sign her form and then hit me once across the face with a wet noodle and looked disgusted.

Actually, I sometimes wish these existed, if only to stop friends located on distant coasts from making poor choices. "Kathy has sent you a slapping telegram," someone would say at the door of your office, and then the courier would come upstairs and say, "Why are you still with Earl? He is a poor choice!" and hit you lightly across the face.

There were a few lewd urns, but fortunately none of them depict John Edwards.

Hey, whoa, that's not fair. And that's less a historical epoch than it is a Biblical Incident --

Oh, no, I forgot. Plesiosaurs. 

But everyone was always urinating in the hallways...