Links for 2009-10-31

A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence – The Pour Blog – NYTimes.com “Beer and wine are not in competition. Yet people in the wine business, who I assure you drink an awful lot of beer, don’t often take it seriously as a beverage. And people in the beer business, perhaps in reaction to not-so-imaginary slights, rarely […]

DonorsChoose: The Final Days -or- You’ll Get Your Puppet Show

Last week, I promised to do a puppet show if my DonorsChoose challenge entry claimed more than 1% of the $200,000 that Hewlett-Packard is donating to this year’s Social Media Challenge. If you’re quick with arithmetic, you’ll see that the puppet-show threshold was $2,000. The actual contribution was $4,064.70, more than double the threshold amount. […]

Links for 2009-10-30

Pimp My Novel: Tip O’ the Week: Chasing Trends “If you’re currently penning a fantasy novel centering on a pious zombie vampire from an alternate 19th century in which science/alchemy/the Bible has predicted the earth’s impending doom, uh, please send it to me, because that could be awesome. More importantly, though, stop doing it.” (tags: […]

Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus

Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled “7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School,” which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty: What is good writing? Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is […]

Links for 2009-10-29

Sexist Beatdown: The Happy Hooker, Or Why Doesn’t Steven Levitt Suck Dick For a Living? – The Sexist – Washington City Paper “[E]ven though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can’t figure out why most of us women don’t want to have sex for tons and tons of money. Why aren’t more […]