A useful pot for putting things in. . .

or, I try to exhibit the proper ho ho ho


I dunno, it's just hard this year. I thought maybe by answering some of the questions and concerns that have brought strangers to the blog the last few days that I could get a bit more into the proper frame of mind for this time of year.

How many pages are in the book Sugar Snow, the short one

32.

What is the purpose of the letters written in the last crossing by guy vanderhaeghe?

Communication. Remember, this is before the days of cell phones and text messaging.

What was the thesis of Love and Hate in Jamestown.

Life is tough and then you die.

Why gym is stupid.

Nancy Grace. Under no circumstances should you go to the gym and attempt to walk on the treadmill while Nancy Grace is on the verge of spontaneous combustion over some local crime story that she's elevating to a national crisis. If your audio player is malfunctioning and all you have to distract yourself from Her Awfulness is the last page of The Year of Magical Thinking when you're a good half-book away from the last page anyway expect to have a horrible time. As long as you can manage to avoid going to the gym while Nancy Grace is on the television seeking vengeance gym won't be near as stupid as you thought it'd be.

hannibal heyes kid curry gay

Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar from Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" are gay, but Heyes and Curry are not.

The determination of a subset of fans to put a homosexual spin on Heyes and Curry's friendship always reminds me of the time I worked for a company that scored student writing proficiency tests. One of the other team leaders had a woman on her team who told her the first day that because she was a minister's wife she would be unable to score any tests that were written by gay students. No one thought this would be an issue; no one could even remember having previously seen a paper indicating that a student was gay. But several times a day the woman would bring back a paper to her team leader that she just knew was written by a homosexual and the rest of us would pass around a totally generic standard-issue essay on how the school cafeteria would be much improved if the workers wore hair nets or if they could have pizza brought in by an outside vendor and wonder what in the world she'd read into the essay to trip her gay wire.

Munro runaway goat

Forget the little—if any—that you know about scapegoats or sacrificial goats. Ignore any info you might have on Judas goats while you're at it. Concentrate on the fact that not only is the story entitled "Runaway" but so's the entire collection! Clearly this is significant. Skip ahead to "Soon," the third story in the collection. Read the description of the white heifer. Isn't it obvious? The goat's run away and is now serving as a model for Chagall! Sometimes Chagall paints the goat as a goat but sometimes he transforms him into other creatures. The goat doesn't mind what he's immortalized as—he's just relieved to be out of that first story which he found a tad dangerous.

important passages Don Quixote

You'll impress your teacher with your thorough knowledge of the book by quoting this final passage:

However, as it is rare to cure insanity, people say that when he left the Court he went back to his mania, bought another and better horse, and returned to Old Castile. Stupendous and unheard-of-adventures happened to him there, for he took as his squire a "working girl" he found by the Tower of Lodones. She was dressed like a man and was fleeing from her master because in his house she became, or they made her become pregnant unwittingly, although not because she didn't give plenty of cause for it. She was roaming around in fear, and the good knight took her without knowing she was a woman until she gave birth in the middle of the road and in his presence, leaving him highly astonished at the birth and imagining the wildest fancies about it.

Nah. I'm still too cranky for Christmas.