Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement. Raymond Carver, a writer sometimes credited with the revitalization of … 

If, out of all the punctuation marks you have at your disposal, the semicolon alone gives you nervous twitches (What IS it?! It’s not a period… it’s not a comma… what am I supposed to DO with this?!?), you’ll be glad to know you’re not alone: “Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s …

If you haven’t checked out the MUSH yet, now’s a good time to give it a try! I’ve switched to new Java software for the online connection and it’s very nice, indeed. To try it out, click the “Connect me!” button in the Beyond the Bookshelf box in the sidebar. Or heck, just click here. (This won’t work from school, … 

Voting is officially open for Homecoming court and representatives. In order to cast yours, you need to visit the online voting site and log in with the name and password you were given in Homeroom. Once you’re in, follow the instructions to cast your vote. If you run into problems, or have lost your login name and password, contact Mrs. … 

I spent some time this afternoon looking over pictures of Louisiana in NOLA.com’s photo archive. I know this may sound strange, but they’re the first images of the storm and its aftermath that I’ve seen—I just haven’t really had the television on at all this week. I’ve been listening to a lot of coverage on the radio, though, and after … 

Henry Alford reports in The New Yorker about dictionary publishers’ practice of embedding a bogus word or two in their dictionaries as a sort of copy-protection. If the fake word shows up in another publication, they’re busted. 😉 Seems one from the New Oxford American Dictionary could be found on Dictionary.com, until recently, when it mysteriously vanished…:ponder: Here’s the full … 

It’s that time of year again, when we pull down the gorgeous summer header photos, and replace them with the yellow monster. :bolt: Ah well, new beginnings, and all that, right? 😉 As we get ready to kick off another year, here are a couple of things that might interest you: » School on Thursday (August 11th): If there’s any … 

We proudly present the latest in our continuing series of gratuitous “of the day” sidebar elements—the Picture of the Day! (Scroll down a bit—you’ll spot it eventually!) These pictures are pulled from Wikipedia’s featured pictures section, which “highlights images and charts that [they] find beautiful, striking, shocking, impressive, titillating, fascinating, incredible, or in short just brilliant.” Hopefully, you’ll spot something … 

If you’re a repeat visitor, and you’re not still using a crappy browser, you’ll notice some little widgets in the corners of the sidebar headers. Thanks to some amazing DOM scripting courtesy of brothercake, you can now rearrange and show/hide the sidebar boxes to see what you want to see. Crazy. Give it a try: clicking the widget in the corner …