I've promised to write a short report about my trip to Russia, a trip I was so afraid to take, for the memories of my first trip to my used-to-be-home-country have been keeping me from repeating the experience for almost five years.

I bought a DVD from a Russian online store, and with the disk they sent me a postcard, which you can see on the left (click on it to see a larger picture.) This is Vladimir Lenin, the headman of world's proletariat, talking to peasants who walked many miles to visit him and listen to his words of wisdom. The words on the postcard is a quote from V. Lenin: "of all arts, the most important for us is cinema". The picture is a copy from a famous painting that now can be seen in The State Tretyakov Gallery. The quote has nothing to do with the pictuire, though.

Over there, on Unresolved References, Tom found "a new 'fun with Google' game..."

Type in to Google, "[your name] needs" and find out what it is that you need.

Background info here.

She: Are you looking for something?
He: Yes.
She: What is it?
He: I forgot what for.

He: I don’t know whom these pants belong to!
She: What?
He: I-DON’T-KNOW-WHOM-THESE-PANTS-BELONG-TO!
She: To you, of course!

She asks him to put coffee cups on the table, because he put tea cups for some reasons. He takes tea cups, stares at them for a while, and finally articulates with a sincere amusement in his voice:
“She doesn’t like you!”

Careful writers, incidentally, cling to their copy of any Webster dictionary based on the superb Second Edition, because the Third Edition is too permissive.

William Knowlton Zinsser. On writing well. Used copies available on Amazon for $0.01.

Our professor of statistics started his first lecture by introducing us to the famous taxonomy of lies: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Today I read an expression, that prompted me to develop my personal taxonomy of honesty.

Usually I agree with "the voice of majority" of Amazon's reviews. When I do not, I still can understand the reasons for disagreement, or at least to satisfy myself with a plausible explanation. Stephen King's On Writing book baffled me -- it received mostly positive, if not exalted reviews on Amazon, and I wonder what other found so enjoyable. Its content, full of platitudes? Its style -- I suspect Mr. King told his book to a tape recorder and never had time to edit the text. Its vocabulary, so relentlessly folksy, that a plumber will beg for a noun a bit more precise than "stuff"? He spends two pages to persuade a beginner writer to use the word "shit", if this is the word his personage would use, and to fear neither the mythical Legion of Decency nor the Christian Ladies' Reading Circle "if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom". Ok, I am convinced that intellectual freedom in America is rescued. Or, if to put it in a sophisticated way, "a shit is a shit is a shit".

From a review for Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form:

If I knew a really effective superlative, I'd use it here. Nothing comes to mind. Shouldn't have drunk so much.

This is the best book on poetry.

Could be written by a San Franciscan.