Pushing into the late evening of this Tuesday night past, the Internet suddenly got a little more stupid. Discouraged by some comments left on a website about his 2010 book purge, Harlan Ellison finally thumbed his nose at the ‘Net and switched off the pops and hisses of his antediluvian dial-up modem for the last time. He’s done with it, with you and with us. He bought the ticket, took the ride and hopped out of the spinning...

I’ve spent my overabundance of free time the past couple of days trying to figure out Twitter. I’ve written about this before, and maybe I’m just too old or uncool or whatever, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I know it’s useful for quick status updates about what you’re doing in the moment, and I used it myself for just that purpose when the family headed down Disney World way. I...

I spend some of my time over in another corner of the Internet, where a few writerly type folk gather together to exchange ideas, discuss events and sometimes fling insults across cyberspace like little yellow snowballs. It’s a good time. Recently, the topic of conversation there shifted to copyright law, theft, comic books and a new horror unleashed upon the world called a virtual library. It seems there’s a website out there...

Yesterday was a strange and tiresome day, filled from morning yawn to evening snore with all manner of oddity and perversion. For starters, after setting a new alarm tone before going to sleep the previous night, I woke yesterday morning under the unconscious delusion that I was, in fact, defusing a bomb. It seems that, for whatever reason, the rhythmic chirping of the new alarm I’d set somehow registered as a timed explosive to my...

I may soon retire my blogging hat. Then again, I might not. Continuing the blog is something I wrestle with every so often, whenever the call of other projects begins demanding my time and attention. I feel dirtied, sometimes, by the self-conscious shame of the energy I waste here, stubbornly refusing to yield to sanity as I continue to devote squandered efforts on maintaining Coquetting Tarradiddles. It’s not that I don’t...