Via Omnivoracious: Roald Dahl: sexiest spy in America Not to give away the best part, but… She proved such a tigress in bed that Dahl later claimed to have begged his superiors to take him off the assignment. He was ordered back to the bedroom, and told to close his … Continue reading →

Did any of you ever read this book as a kid? It involves a duck named Henry, who is making dinner for his friend Clara when he notices an ant in his kitchen. According to this review, what ensues is “adorable” and “hilarious.” According to young me, it was horrifying. … Continue reading →

That little icon over there refers to what I’ve been calling the “Secular Humanist Hippie Stamp of Approval.” As I think you’ll all agree, that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I’ve developed sort of an obsession with this concept, though, so I decided it needs an icon. Here’s the … Continue reading →

(Hyuck. Get it? Paging?) Anyway, children of the 70s and 80s, please to check out the weekly Fine Lines feature over at Jezebel: “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.” It’s kind of like TWOP for YA lit. In … Continue reading →

New server, new look (though not the final one — this theme largely serves my purposes, but I need to insert my own image and change the colors). And I added some new functionality! If you want to be emailed whenever someone replies to a post, just click the handy … Continue reading →

Parenthetical’s going offline for a little bit, loyal readers. I’m switching to a brand-new host — the awesome FictCo, which is the commercial venture of my current host, the even-more-awesome Jesse Chan-Norris. This switch ought to be a simple MySQL upload/WordPress upgrade…but with me, these things are never simple, so … Continue reading →

This is a test of MacJournal, a new app I?m trying out. I can journal on my computer, including attaching videos and pictures and whatnot. And apparently I can post it to Parenthetical, too. Let?s find out, shall we? (Thanks, MP!) (Subject quote from Paula Poundstone on <i>Wait Wait Don?t … Continue reading →

You may have noticed that a lot of posts disappeared. They’ve gone underground, “Private.” From now on I’ll be posting that sort of thing on my personal blog (whose address you probably have if you’re my friend, but if you don’t and you’re not a co-worker, potential co-worker, or student, … Continue reading →

Thanks to my long-suffering friend/webmaster/Blue Fairy Jesse, my beloved Parenthetical has grown up. No longer a childish mid-90s-style hand-coded plain-HTML toy, she’s become a real blog! Now we enter awkward adolescence, wherein I try to mold her into a stylish young woman with an RSS feed. Wish us luck.