Today is ANTI-CIRCUMCISION DAY, a day that ought to live on in infamy. Yeesh!

from the mouths of babes
If I don't do anything to my cropped hair, it tends to stand up in spikes on top of my head. So it was doing exactly that the other night, when Dean laughingly told me, "You look like a punk bitch." (And please don't think there's anything derogatory about this; it's just the way that we talk to each other.) I laughed too; and Sage, who was sitting on the bed with us, joined in and proudly echoed her father: "Punt bitch!"


Honestly, I thought it'd be another ten years at least before she started calling me things like that...


bibliophilia
Picked up a couple of thirty-buck novels at the National Bookstore bargain bin, both of them by authors whose work I'd enjoyed in the past. Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is by Fannie Flagg, who previously wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, a lovely, lovely book about women in the American South, a region particularly dear to me since I spent a couple of formative years in Alabama. So I was prepared to cozy up with this other book, creating a nice nest in the living room sofa with chips and cola conveniently at hand. Unfortunately, Baby Girl turned out to be so wretched that I actually fell asleep somewhere in the midst of chapter five. It was trite, unamusing, and the lead character was so pathetic that even my mental rendition of a Southern-fried drawl failed to salvage the experience. The chips were good, though.


'Tis, Frank McCourt's sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes was infinitely better. I don't usually understand the Pulitzer choices (Lonesome Dove, for example, seemed spectacularly undeserving to me), but McCourt's idiosyncratic style and language just charm the daylights out of me. (I also have a soft spot for the Irish, even though the wee drop of Celtic blood in my heritage has no doubt been pretty much bred out by now.) His portrayal of an Irish boy's struggles with poverty and guilt-ridden Catholicism are as empathic, thought-provoking, and immersive as ever; and if you encounter me spouting a brogue in the next few days, you'll know the reason why.

TRIVIA QUIZ
Where did the phrase 'bought the farm' come from?


answer to yesterday's question
The World Wide Web was invented by a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, who came up with the hypertext program in order to facilitate research sharing among scientists across a computer network. He created the system to organize, link, and browse net pages in 1991, and in 2003 was named a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in honor of his achievement.


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