Housemates I Have Known

For four years, as a graduate assistant, I lived on the bottom floor of a house in a perfect location.  It was one building away from the corner, which was catty-corner from the English building, which was the main place I had to go.  Here are the upper-floor neighbors I had during that time:

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An offer you can't refuse

Even if you don't need ten thousand chick tracts NOW, you should still take advantage.  You never know when you will, after all.  Take it from N.T., from the prestigious Facebook website that you may have heard about.

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

I think reading books written in unfamiliar idioms is probably good for your brain, don't you? Give the ol' neurons a workout. Oddly enough, I sorta kinda think this may be the first eighteenth-century novel I've ever read. Sure, I've read postmodern pastiches of the form (The Sot-Weed Factor, Mason & Dixon), but maybe not the actual thing! But, here we are. I read Tom Jones, and although I feel like it's unlikely that there's such a thing as a thousand-page novel that never bogs down, it was mostly a delightful experience.
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Duck Comics: "Donald Fracas"

My new translation is the best story I've ever translated by some margin.  DO NOT MISS IT.

Duck Translations

TWO translations in one week. Well one-point-five, I suppose. Still unprecedented! First, there's "Donald Meets Baron Münchausen," a really cool, zany story where...well, the title pretty much says it. Then there's my complete revamping of "Donaldus Faustus," my first-ever translation. Being the first, it was kind of shoddy; now it's a LOT better. Okay then.

Homeland--fucking bah!

See, here's the thing about Homeland: the initial premise was interesting but inherently very limited.  The idea is that an MIA soldier, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), thought long-dead, is found and rescued in Afghanistan, so he's all a big hero and stuff, but there's a CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) who grows to suspect that he was Turned during his captivity, and now may be involved in some sort of deep-undercover terrorist-type things--but she's bipolar and generally mentally fragile and who knows whether her suspicions mean anything?  But this was never going to last very long, was it?  Because if it turns out Carrie's just totally delusional, there's not much of a show, is there?  And it's certainly not going to just be a Crying of Lot 49 radical-indeterminacy-type thing, because it's not that arty, and anyway, it wouldn't be feasible over multiple seasons.

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Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife (1870)

Collins' reputation today rests pretty much exclusively on the four 1860s novels I've recently read (well, mostly on The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but the other two are considered to be of the same kind by people in the know).  He wrote prolifically right up to his death in 1889, but he focused his later novels on Social Issues, which--according to everyone--was very much to their detriment.  However, I decided to read the first of these later novels, which seems to also be generally acclaimed as the best of the lot.

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