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Filed under: Reading | Tags: Booking Through Thursday, books, memes, Reading
All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?
Hardcovers. They last longer, and they look better on a shelf or just lying around. I also like little extra things they sometimes do with hardcovers, like when they don’t trim the excess paper after the pages have been bound, so the edge has a rough, bumpy feel. It makes the book seem old and more sophisticated somehow.
I also don’t really mind reading them or carrying them around, but that’s not to say that I won’t buy a paperback if it’s a book I want to read.
Okay, even I can’t read ALL the time, so I’m guessing that you folks might voluntarily shut the covers from time to time as well… What else do you do with your leisure to pass the time? Walk the dog? Knit? Run marathons? Construct grandfather clocks? Collect eggshells?
Free time? What’s that? Seriously, I have a very small amount. Of course, my wife and I try to spend some time together after our busy work days. We like to cook. We also like to travel, when we can. We recently also took up kickboxing.
I’m a lawyer, living in California, but I’m from South Carolina, and my family still lives there, so I’m studying to pass the bar exam there.
I write. I’m in the middle of a novel, and I started writing short fiction on the side. You can read it by clicking on the “Short Fiction” tab at the top of the page.
As another seriously needed creative outlet, I also started designing t-shirts. You can see them if you go to Blazoned Gear.
OK, so maybe I do more than I thought.
Filed under: Writing | Tags: fiction, humor, MacBeth, memes, Shakespeare, short story, Sunday Scribblings, witch, Writing
Fair is foul and foul is fair indeed! That’s the last time we do any of you a favor! That’s right, we did you a favor.
Do you think we did it just for kicks? Do you really think we like mucking about in politics? Personally I’d rather bite the head off of a live bat than get involved in all the petty intrigues and currying of favor and (literal) backstabbing, but then you probably think I like biting the heads off of live bats, just because I’m a witch.
You see we had to do it. Duncan was an idiot, and MacBeth was even a bigger fool than he was. They were ruining the country. You can’t go about attacking your neighbors just because you have a hangnail. Such a thing just isn’t done in civilized society. What with the Norse invading every other Tuesday, we couldn’t just sit back and watch. If we hadn’t done what we did…well, lets just say that your queen would be having lutefisk with her afternoon tea.
Okay, so we used Macbeth a little. And I admit, some of the things we told him may have been open to more than one interpretation. But it’s not entirely our fault. When we said that “none of a woman born” should harm him and that he wouldn’t be vanquished “until Great Birnam Wood to High Dunsinane Hill” should come, he just took us a little too literally. You know what they say about assuming, don’t you? In any event, all’s well that ends well, right?
Which brings me to my point. What thanks do we get for our benign intervention? This William Shakespeare person comes along and writes a play. Are we the heroes? No! It’s like he wasn’t even trying to depict events accurately. Do you know what he calls us? Do you? He calls us hags. I mean, the audacity. And if that weren’t enough, he has us doing all manner of horrible things like slaughtering pigs and killing sailors over chestnuts–in trochaic tetrameter! What, iambic pentameter isn’t good enough for us?
And don’t even get me started about that eye of newt and toe of frog business. Although, given that we were in Scotland, I must commend him for coming up with something more disgusting than haggis.
And then–then–on top of all of that, he calls the play a tragedy! Tell me this, how is it a tragedy when all of the right people died?
So, we’ve come to a conclusion. By a vote of two to one, we’ve decided to curse the play. (Arabella wanted to put the pox on everyone, but that’s just been done to death, don’t you think?) From this day forward, anyone saying, “MacBeth” in a theatre will bring down all manner of bad luck.
You want foul, we’ll show you foul.
