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Showing posts from May, 2009

Inconspicuous nonconsumption

I own five digital cameras and three computers and an assortment of MP3 players. All became obsolete about 15 minutes after unpacking, displaced by newer models with more features. I've often wondered what I was thinking when I acquired all this crap, and now Robert Tierney, writing in the New York Times, offers an answer : It's my primal need to impress strangers. Thanks for the tip, Bob. I still wouldn't be complaining if it worked -- there are worse things in life than the fleeting admiration of passersby. But Tierney points out that sending messages with material goods is futile. If I thought my 8-gig iPod Touch might garner adoring glances from the chicks at the gym, I thought wrong. And not because they all have 32-gig iPhones. Turns out it has more to do with social invisibity. And that derives from my relatively flat scores in the "Big Five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion. Hey, stability! One out

A memorable morning in May

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I started this blog with a narrow focus on crime fiction, but it's been all downhill since. I've since veered into inane mini-reviews of TV and movies, descended into celebrity mockery, then went down a couple more pegs with trite remarks about the weather. Roughly a third of my posts now are about how pointless it is to do a blog at all. Today, it has come to this: I'm down to personal recollections. Because today is May 18. Anybody who lived in the Northwest corner of the nation in 1980 remembers that day pretty well. We were living in Yakima, Wash., where I worked for the daily newspaper. It was Sunday morning and we woke to the sound of an approaching thunderstorm. I went outside with the kids, and there to the west was a wall of gray, laced with lighting. A storm, yes, but there wouldn't be any rain that day. The radio informed us that Mount St. Helens had just exploded, and the ash cloud was headed our way. I didn't know much about volcanoes, but I knew one ha

A bit more rain to prime the pump

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I like rain in the morning, even knowing how much of it is going to end up in my basement. I like dark skies and thunder and the dog curled up at my feet, largely oblivious. I like the first of May, and the saturated greens of the grass and the trees viewed through rain-dappled windows. I like listening to NPR, at least for those fleeting hours before Diane Rehm comes on. Oh, and brown paper packages tied up with string ... Which is my way of saying that I have nothing else to write about this morning. On the news it's all flash-flood warnings and swine flu precautions and Chrysler's collapse. Not much to say about that. I have a novel on a flash drive that will embarrass me if I send it to another agent and will embarrass me more if I don't. (One of the downsides of pretending to be a writer is that you're expected, occasionally, to provide some evidence of it.) But the rain precludes yard work and I've read all the news sites, so this will be a writing day. Or a