Jonathan Gash is the pen name of a doctor, John Grant. But he’s not known for his medicine. I’ve read all (I think) of the 23 Lovejoy crime novels, and The Ten Word Game from 2003 was a re-read. I’m trying to avoid returning to old favorites, but sometimes a comfortable read is worth it.

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Margot at the Wedding may have Nicole Kidman, but it’s not a movie I’d recommend. I don’t think a 70 at Metacritic is deserved. But it is short.

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I didn’t have any excitement about moving to Mac OS X 10.4.11, especially since Safari 3 was a required part of the update. I’m happy to say that Safari 3 has improved cookie management, nearly catching up with Firefox and Opera. I can finally search within the thousands of cookies and easily remove just the…

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I didn’t enjoy Night Train from Martin Amis. The author is famous for many things, including being famous as a contrarian public intellectual. (English authors pull that off even better than the late Norman Mailer did in this country.) He’s not famous for this book, and he shouldn’t be. It’s brief, and the female policewoman…

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The library “books you should read” table got me again. No complaints about this one, though. John Le Carre is a known entity, but not to me. Smiley’s People is my first Le Carré read, though I did catch a recent movie. Despite missing the first two books of the trilogy, I fell in with…

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The post-Thanksgiving tradition continues. I ran the 5K in the Run Wild event this morning. A month ago, I was targeting the 10K, but a few weeks out of commission due to a back strain left me less confident of my fitness, so I stayed with the familiar. I finished in 18:46 officially, 29th place…

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I have a lot to be thankful for. I’d like to add a clean inbox to the list, so time for a link smorgasbord. Randy Pausch’s video lecture is old news, but I haven’t set aside 90 minutes to watch it. Everyone who has says it was worth it. California is still the #1 state…

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I choose to spend less time posting my wit and wisdom (?) here at clock. But some themes of interest remain constant. For instance… I had a lot to say about TimesSelect when it was introduced in September 2005. Two years later, when the wall came down, my first inkling came from this blog post.…

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Fifteen years after the author signed it, I finally finished The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958); An Epic of Urban Politics and Irish America. Read a little on Google Books if the topic interests you. The author, Jack Beatty, was a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly during my…

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I’m always impressed when a well-done magazine excerpt sharpens my anticipation of a book, rather than removing the need to read the full-length work. I first read about Michael Oher in Sports Illustrated (Sep 25, 2006). Michael Lewis’s full book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game goes deeper and broader, to great effect. The…

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