The Job Description Me: Why the hell are we looking for someone who does this shit? This first thing that an applicant needs to remember is that the purpose of the job search is not to change what a department does. It is to make…
Soon after the announcement goes out, the applications begin to roll in. Ours requested a cover letter, curriculum vitae, writing sample, letters of recommendation, and university transcripts. The last of these is to verify that our hire actually has the credentials
William Zinsser once wrote, “Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” The comment is especially true in the case of
Up to this point I haven’t written much of anything about the hotel where we were staying. Punta Mita sits at the tip of a peninsula north of Puerto Vallarta in Nayarit. This stretch of land is pretty isolated. The advantages are that the guests can avoid the tequila-addled tourists found in the larger cities and enjoy some peace and quiet. The disadvantage is …
Blurring the lines between western post-rock and jazz, and African folk and trance, the prolific Dutch band The Ex have teamed up with Brass Unbound on the instantly infectious new 8-song LP Enormous Door.
There just seem to be too many kinds of monsters. Last month I told you about the giant spider in Earth v Spider. Now that was a monster I could understand. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf and whatever lived in my closet (not the standard under…
At about two in the afternoon last Wednesday, a guy was murdered in the town of Woolwich in southeast London. The murder was particularly grisly and not the kind of news I normally follow, but I’d been through Woolwich for the first time on the…
I think the most compelling monsters are simply human beings (or creatures with human traits, especially human emotions) who, due to one misfortune or another, or for no apparent reason at all, go just a little bit … wrong. Like when General Jack D. Ripper…
Andrew Lloyd Webber scared the hell out of me.
I was 4-year-old with an active imagination. My family was listening to the 1970 double-LP of the original Broadway cast version of Jesus Christ Superstar on the Zenith Console stereo when the creepy orchestration and voices of the song The Crucifixion conjured up the Menja Monster.
Up to this point I haven’t much of anything about the hotel where we were staying. Punta Mita sits at the tip of a peninsula north of Puerto Vallarta in Nayarit. This stretch of land is pretty isolated. The advantages are that the guests can…
If you grew up in the Tampa Bay area in the 1970’s, as I did, we had our own version of Krusty the Clown: Doctor Paul Bearer, a chain-smoking cadaver with a glass-eye that pointed the wrong way (and nearly popped out of his head),…
The average cold lasts 5-7 days; the flu can leave you feeling dragged out for a couple of weeks. Even a broken bone heals eventually. I have had daily chronic pain since 2009. 4 years, 4 months and 19 days. 225 weeks. 1585 days. Almost 40,000 hours of…
I parallel parked with, I thought, impressive efficiency, quickly getting out of the way of a pickup pulling a trailer, but the truck slowed to a stop alongside me and a college-age white guy in the passenger seat motioned for me to roll down my…