My Blog
All Blog Posts by Date
Below is a list of all my blog posts. I hope you enjoy them.
Swingers!
They are older, they have money, they are well-educated, most of them have been married 10 years or more, and they have a divorce rate of less than 20%. Who am I talking about? Swingers! Betcha didn’t see that one coming. But them’s the facts.
"Murder At Honeychurch Hall" by Hannah Dennison
Kat Stanford is winding up on every successful career and is going into a whole new one with her mother, Iris. Except that Iris has never actually agreed to this plan and has much different ideas of her own. Kat’s father died a few months earlier, releasing Iris to leave the city to move back to the country life she’s always loved. But she’s bought a house that can only charitably be called even a fixer-upper. Kat heartily disapproves of her mother’s plans and her mother does not care.
i.e. vs e.g.
i.e. (you will rarely if ever see this capitalized) is Latin for id est, or that is, as in that is to say… Or – you know what’s coming – in other words… It gives more information on what you were just talking about. “We’ll go on the first day of the sale, i.e., tomorrow.” If you don’t already know when the sale is, the first part of the sentence does not tell you when you’ll be going. The i.e. clears that up, so you now know you’ll be going tomorrow.
Look for the Little Things
I got my sunglasses fixed today. When I had had a chunk of disposable income, I’d splurged on prescription sunglasses with a pretty expensive frame. Well, expensive to me. But they made me look cool and I had the money at that moment, so I got them.
"Flesh and Bone" by Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell is one of the more renown and successful crime writers of our time. Her corporation has annual earnings of about $10 million. She is a prolific writer, with well over 30 full length books, most of them novels, to her credit, which have sold over 100 million copies and have been translated into roughly 50 languages. And I keep reading her stuff to see why.
Making Plurals into Possessives
It’s all about the esses. You’ll see this most with proper names. That is Tom Maxwell’s. Easy enough. But what if it belongs to the whole Maxwell family? That is the Maxwells’s. Nope. It makes sense, but no. The correct way to make a plural possessive is to simply add an apostrophe after the s. That is the Maxwells’. And that’s how it is pronounced, too.
"The Shack" by Wm. Paul Young
Mackenzie Allen Phillips has risen above a childhood of unimaginable horrors to have a great life with an amazing wife and five terrific kids. Then his youngest child is murdered and what he calls the “Great Sadness” take ahold of him. The strong faith the got him through everything else is still there, but he’s getting a little ticked off at God – and who can blame him?
Honest Doesn’t Mean Tactless!
I just saw a TV show where the murder victim didn’t have a lot of friends because of his policy of total honesty. Hardly the first time I’ve seen something like that. We often hear it’s not good to be too honest.
"The Ramayana" as told by Aubrey Menen
The Ramayana is an epic poem originally written in Sanskrit and attributed to the poet, Valmiki. It’s considered to be one of the two great works of Indian literature. Yana means journey, so it’s the tale of Prince Rama’s journey. The full version is seven volumes long and there are at least 300 versions of it. So, British-Indian author Aubrey Menen figured it was okay to give it his own slant.
