Heaneyland!

I'm a patriot and didn't even know it

I know it's a holiday weekend and so the Internet is closed, but if you'd like to amuse yourself nonetheless, you might like to visit Miss Conduct's column over at boston.com and enter her clerihew contest. What's a clerihew, you ask? Well, it's a short poem about a famous person written in no meter to speak of, with the rhyme scheme AABB, named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line of the poem is the famous person's name or mostly the famous person's name. Here's my entry in the contest, which may serve as a helpful example:

William S. Burroughs
Had a brow filled with wrinkles and furrows
(Which were probably exacerbated, of course,
By his addiction to horse).

And here's an autobiographical one:

Francis Heaney
Doesn't like olives, not even in a martini,
So you will not find it jaw-droppin', odd,
Or otherwise strange that he also hates tapenade.

(Thanks to Miss Conduct for helping provide content to my parched blog.)

I feel like I was writing a blog post or something, but for some reason all I can think about at the moment is legs

What sort of things do you look for in a calendar? Sure, days of the week are important, as are those numbers in the little boxes. But if you, like me, think most calendars skimp on pictures of geeky girls doing geeky things (for instance, the lovely Lorinne knitting a Sierpinski triangle scarf), then you may wish to buy yourself a copy or 3.14159265 of the Calendar Geeks calendar. You can see a lower-resolution version of Lorinne's pic on the sample page, but if you want to see it in its full Neil-Gaiman-approved glory, you'll have to buy the calendar.

Another reason our borough kicks your borough's ass

Brooklyn is going to get spoiled. First it gets a fancy new Ikea, and next month it gets its own TKTS booth. The best part is that the Brooklyn TKTS will offer tickets to events at BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse, and other Brooklyn-y performance venues. Awesome.

(Thanks to Lorinne for reminding me several times to post about this, because I am the lamest blogger alive.)

Wits writ lit crit

Sometimes I write things that aren't crosswords. My most recent thing of that nature is a short contribution to Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books, a series in which writers recount how reading a book in a particular location affected their experience of reading it. In my case, I reminisce about reading The Chronic-(what?)-cles of Narnia, which I never had any idea were supposed to be crypto-Christian parables and which didn't prevent me from ending up an atheist, which means it's probably too much to hope that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series will help create a generation of free-thinkers.

(Apologies to confused readers who saw this post a while ago, when I accidentally posted the links while the site was still in beta.)

The sweet smell of crosswords

"Starting Monday, the Colorado Lottery will begin selling $3 Scented Crossword tickets through lottery retailers statewide. They're available in three varieties: Crossword Bouquet, Chocolate Crossword and Coffee Crossword."

Now if only they could hone the technology so crossword entries smell like what they are. You might still not know what an anoa looked like, but at least you could smell it.

(Thanks to Patrick for the link.)