Roadblogging

I'm blogging this afternoon from a relative's (slow, balky, cranky, arrgghh!) computer in north Dallas, overlooking an (unfrozen!) swimming pool where (green! leafy!) trees blow gently back and forth in a 61-degree F breeze.

Since Enetation has decided not to accept comments from said slow/balky/cranky computer, I'm going to take care of a few comment responses here, lest people think that I'm ignoring them.

Trebor, I didn't receive your comment until I was already here in Texas with a bought-&-paid-for return ticket to Michigan. However, if you want to get together for a beer or two, let me know by cell phone. (Number will be forwarded in private e'mail.)

Carlos and Pablo, give me a call whenever convenient. I'll be in Dallas until the 25th, then back in Dallas again from about the 28th to the 3rd. Carlos mentioned wanting to see "Barbarian Invasions", which according to the Dallas Observer's webpage is playing at the Inwood Theater.

Fiend, as you probably know, the minor contretemps over the writing honor that King received recently is just the latest skirmish in the running battle between the academic exclusivists (who, I think, enjoy feeling a snarky sense of superiority over writing and allegedly reading books beyond the comprehension of the mere hoipolloi) and those who write books that actual people really do read. I've always felt that King sort of exists on a borderline between those two clans, perhaps slightly skewed toward the populist side but not wholly engulfed in it. His books, for all their popular appeal, do on occasion have a cultural, psychological, and emotional edge to them that pure shlock writers like Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, et al, lack. (Even if his relatively infrequent sex scenes don't quite meet your exacting standards. )

As for Ken-&-Barbie Aragorn-&-Arwen, well, what do you expect in terms of related interests? I noticed that although Mattel made at least a token effort to make the Aragorn figure vaguely resemble Viggo M. from a distance, Barbie remains her usual cartoonish, smirking, decidedly un-elvish self, impossible to mistake for the ethereal Liv T.

I may post a few more Christmas-related links here over the next hour, before taking a telephone-interview call from a public library in far southwestern Michigan. Wish me luck.