Sara Ryan

I have been reading Paul Maliszewski’s fascinating book Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders, and learning about, among other things, The Great War of the Californias and its heroes, including this lady: “Known for her persistence and ability to embrace difficult characters, Lt. Cmmdr. Rebbeca Jordan used speed and pugnaciousness in leading [...]

Tippi Hedren from The Birds. via Boing Boing Gadgets, elsewhere.

This is so cool. Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.” This one is generated from the prologue & part of the [...]

It’s been a while since I gave in to a meme. I like the way this came out. Want to play along? Post your CD cover in the comments. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of your band. 2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote [...]

1. First I have to repost these great work-in-progress photos that Erika put up of the story we’re doing for the Snow Stories anthology. It’s about getting lost, and getting un-lost. 2. I don’t have a gym story this week, but I have a couple of snippets: Dude on treadmill, breathing heavily, to his trainer: [...]

Today I woke up at 3 am, convinced that I had booked my flight to New York for the wrong day. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either. So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin‘s A Game of Thrones, [...]

So it’s a good thing that I didn’t buy the Kindergoth bag, because then I wouldn’t have still been looking at Goodwill the other day, and then I wouldn’t have found this one: Which, when it’s not at Goodwill, nicely broken-in with some schmutz on the bottom, possibly makeup, that proves to be mostly removable [...]

Should I go back to Ross Dress For Less and buy this bag? It is cheap, and I am deeply amused by its Goth-by-way-of-kindergarten-teacher aesthetic, and by the fact that one of the eye sockets of each of the skulls has a tiny rhinestone inside. But I am unsure as to whether the whole skull [...]

Earlier this evening I identified a Pieter Brueghel painting that was in service to swank up a wine label. I was vaguely displeased with myself for not remembering the name of the painting, and also surprised that I was the only one at the table who recognized it as Brueghel. I forget that not everyone [...]

The Power Smoothie from the unfortunately named Booya Juice tastes exactly like orange baby aspirin.