Everybody's familiar with Mark Twain, right?  The quintessential American author and humorist.  But the Twain we know has been "scrubbed and sanitized" according to Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: a Life.  Twain is about to be unscrubbed and unsanitized and I'm curious to see how this new, old Twain will be received.  You see, the University of California Press is getting ready to publish Twain's unexpurgated autobiography.  His autobiography has certainly been available for many years; it ...

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It has been nearly 40 years since the last time I watched the movie, Freaks and nearly that long since I last thought about the remarkable movie.  Made in 1932, Freaks tells the story of a group of sideshow performers. "In the film, the physically deformed 'freaks' are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the 'normal' members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance." (from the film's Wikipedia entry).

Wa...
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In his recent post, Blogging to Increase Your Audience, Dan wrote

"...it has always struck me how so many of the people on xanga that indicate they would like to be a professional writer of some sort, will tend to act as if they don't care if people read them.  I would think that it would be the goal of the professional writer to be read.  I would assume that professional writers need to sell books."

As a professional writer who needs to sell books and who blogs here on xanga, I think I'd like...
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Basketball fans are consumed with the free-agent machinations of LeBron James, but the New York Times is reporting on a much bigger free-agent controversy in the world of sport.  Takeru Kobayashi will not be competing in Nathan's  hot-dog-eating contest today on Coney Island.  Kobayashi won the contest for six straight years (2001 - 2006) and is clearly one of the top two competitive eaters in the world today (the other being the reigning Nathan's champion, Joey Chestnut).  Although Kobayashi...
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A woman, observing the uncharacteristically longer line outside the men's room last night, pointed out to my wife, "At their age, they have to use the bathroom every ten minutes."  This morning, I imagine twenty thousand stock brokers and ad execs, bankers, doctors and lawyers, butchers, bakers and very upscale candlestick makers (and a certain mystery writer as well), all smiling the same tired smile, all struggling to get to work on time.  We stayed up late last night, twenty thousand of us...
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