Okja—Not for Children

by | Jul 10, 2017 | Popular Culture

I just watched Okja (2017) a made-for-Netflix movie directed by Joon-ho Bong. Going into it, I thought I was going to see a children’s movie. I was mistaken. Although the first two-thirds of the movie is bright and funny, the last third is dark and troubling, not...

Maeve’s Writing Guide Reformatted

by | Apr 24, 2017 | Popular Culture

My reformatted and revised collection of essays about the writing craft—So You Want to Write!—is available on Amazon for $6.99 in paperback. It’s not exactly a new edition, but I was able to catch a few typos and improve a sentence here and there. As the old...

A New Shibboleth

by | Dec 22, 2016 | Popular Culture

A reader writing a letter to the editor in my daily paper described an incident in which he went shopping, filled his basket with items totaling about $300 and then walked out of the store without completing his purchases. What prompted him to do that? When he entered...

Jeopardy and “Silent H”

by | Dec 13, 2016 | Popular Culture

Every so often the Jeopardy writers get it wrong. They certainly did on December 12, 2012. One of the categories had to do with “silent H.” The first response that I noticed made perfect sense: honesty. The word honesty is spelled with an h but pronounced...

10 Things I Didn’t Know About Tarzan

by | Jun 24, 2016 | Popular Culture

When I heard that a new Tarzan movie was about to be released, I started thinking about the Tarzan of my childhood: Johnny Weissmuller. I remember Weissmuller as a great swimmer—he usually had at least one scene in which he killed some creature in the water—and as a...