2011: The Year in Hornswoggling

This was a meme, several years ago. I, and a few others who also can't let go of anything, keep doing it. (Because because, that's why!) The point is to pull out the first and last sentence from one's blog each month, link those to the original posts, and then...well, something vaguely interesting should happen, I suppose.
 
So now, for no good reason, here are the first and last lines of each month from Antick Musings -- though some of my standard posts have been silently ignored, to make it slightly more interesting.

January
If you're looking for bleakness and misery in your comics, for lives that lead only to sadness and despair, for broken hearts and thrown-away lives and the bone-deep pointlessness of life in an uncaring universe, then Chris Ware is the creator you need.


I found it all well-done and touching without actually being moved as much as I thought I should be -- unlike Nicolas, which is more obviously a book told in retrospect, and has a greater punch.

February
The Great War is the one that's big enough for any metaphor: it's the hole that history fell into, the death of the aristocratic world, the end of European innocence, the reaper of a generation.

I can say that this is paranormal romance, and not urban fantasy, because the book itself tells me so, and I trust it.

March
The first movie the Hornswoggler family saw as a gestalt entity in a long time was the surprisingly non-stupid Gnomeo & Juliet, which is a decent animated movie that stays solidly aimed at kids but manages to entertain their parents without pandering to them.

On the other hand, the comic is funny...and sadly true.

April
As usual, the first of April is the date for a blizzard of surprising news, with a vast panoply of unexpected and odd happenings.


Hey, it may not be the reason most people go into publishing, but....

May
Sometime this last week, I got a couple of boxes from a certain online retailer named -- more and more appropriately every day -- after a gigantic river in South America, after I realized last weekend that running around to find a physical store that carried all/most of them was a waste of my time, money and energy.

The next time I'm at a SF convention and I hear some huckster-room vendor moaning about how hard it is to be up and functional at 10 in the morning, well -- somebody's going to get such a pinch, I can tell you.

June
Earlier this year, I had a half-baked plan to make May the month where I'd only read books on my iPad -- since, as we all know by this point, digital is the wave of the future and print is for squares, man! -- but it didn't quite work out that way.

Money is like gravity: it only goes where it already is.

July
I saw, via GalleyCat, that Michael Dirda had written an essay for BookForum [1] with the modest proposal that authors be only allowed to appear on bestseller lists once in their lives, and so I knew I had to check it out.

If you're a member of Renovation, vote at least in those categories you feel comfortable making value judgements -- you don't have to vote in every category, but you really should vote if you're eligible.

August
At one point, I updated this blog every single day -- no matter what.

Next is the cleanup.

September
The floodwaters have receded (I may have pictures, and a longer post, later), and the cleanup is mostly done -- we had a bunch of teenage boys (the son of our electrician and some of his friends) pulling junk out of the basement for two days, and then today was spent mostly cleaning.

And, just because, here's a random TMBG video as well -- "I'm Impressed," from their 2007 record The Else:

October
These three movies have nothing to do with each other, except that I've seen all of them recently. But Three Things Make a Post.

I thought what the Republican party represents is giving control of everything to rich third parties?

November
My first real job, back in high school, was as a cashier for the discount department store Bradlees.

I still want to see that book actually published, as ink on paper, on my side of the Pacific -- partially because I need to get a new copy of it myself, after the flood -- but that might come, eventually.

December
I was hoping to do a book-review post or two this weekend -- or, failing that, at least a Movie Log post, which I obsess less about -- but it's not looking rosy.

Actually, Local H usually plays a New Year's Eve show in Chicago every year, so they might just be playing this live right now.