Monthly Archives: March 2018

I’m studying Roman history, so I asked my Mexican friend if he knew the roman numeral for 100. He said “Sí,” but wouldn’t tell me the answer.

Then I asked my German friend if she would tell me what roman numeral IX means, but she said “Nein.”

Finally I asked my Japanese friend if he’d translate the Latin word altum for me, and he said “Hai,” but he never did.

It’s like, okay. You don’t want to help me, fine. But at least talk to me in English!

As two loyal readers commented yesterday, “crude inky blab” is an anagram for Brian D. Buckley. (I have smart readers!) Consider it an easter egg.

Incidentally, the first digital easter egg — or at least the first one to get famous — was in the 1980 Atari game Adventure, and you can read all about it here. Reminder: don’t piss off your programmers.

Less bloggy, more worky.

With my latest editing project keeping me so busy, blog posts will be on the short side for the next week or two. So it seems like a good time to mention this.

The blog has been subtitled “crude inky blab” ever since the very first post, seven years ago. But why that particular phrase? It’s not just a little self-deprecating description. Those three words were precisely chosen for a very specific reason. I would never have used “crude inky chatter,” for instance.

Can anyone tell what’s special about the phrase? I’ll give the answer tomorrow if nobody gets it, but you don’t need any special knowledge to figure it out — you have all the information you need.

Q. What is it called when the pope sends a letter to his former girlfriend?

A. Ex communication.

We live on a very low-traffic road, so when a car goes by, it’s kind of a big deal. Some of us point, wave our arms, and go “DUH-duh-dah-dahh!!”

Happy weekend, everyone.

The blog returneth.

What do you do when wonderful things rain down on you like an avalanche, when your blessings pile so high and demand so much attention that it actually stresses you out? Celebrate? Complain? Not much time for either right now. Life is crazy busy, but it’s all good stuff.

Here’s what’s new:

• I’m waist-deep in my latest copyediting project for MIT Press, a long but really interesting book that’s pushing my part-time freelancing up to about 30 hours a week. Which may not sound like much, except …
• I’ve also got other freelancing stuff in the works, including a project for McGraw-Hill, ongoing collaborations with several indie authors, and another really exciting opportunity that I can’t talk about quite yet. And besides all that …
• I’m still watching Evan part-time during the day, which is occasionally exhausting, but the kid’s just amazing. I mean, not like he has superpowers or anything (afaik), it’s just the usual parental excitement, but it’s really, really cool. He can walk outside with me now, stomping around in his little shoes. He can flip light switches. He points at electrical outlets and says “outlet” (well, “ow-leh” anyway). He correctly identifies Australia on a world map with a success rate that is lower than 100%, but decidedly higher than random pointing. I love him so much. Besides which …
• Betsy and I are exercising more, which I like, partly because it gives us a chance to watch The Good Place (we just finished the final available episode last night). It’s an odd comedy that’s nominally about heaven (“the Good Place”) and hell (“the Bad Place”), but really about morality, ethics, and human relationships. A lot (all?) of the ethical stuff is really simplistic, but it does get me thinking about what Right and Wrong really mean, to the point that I pulled Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature off the shelf last night. Also, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. (The show, I mean. Not a lot of humor in Hume. (See what I did there?))
• All the assorted craziness (only a fraction of which is mentioned above) means I’ve had little time for Crane Girl in the past two weeks, but nevertheless I feel like I’ve got a lot of momentum there. I was doing a ton of revision before the MIT Press project started, and I expect I’ll get back to it once the project’s over in mid-March.

I know, I know. I put the blog on hold because life was getting too busy, and now, just as the blog’s returning, I’m even busier than before. C’est la vie. We’ll see how it goes.

Blah, blah, blah. I’m boring myself. Tell me about you. You never call, you never write! (Except those of you who call and/or write, you know who you are.)

Tell me, hypothetical reader: what, indeed, are the haps?