Tad Williams

Cleaning things is, in my humble opinion, not only time consuming and smelly, but futile and morally questionable. Follow me down this convenient rabbit hole so that I can explain in detail. Watch out for the synecdoche, it’s been known to nip.

Serious People have written books about the end of evolution (e.g., about ten years ago, Peter Ward wrote a detailed account of mass extinctions which muttered darkly about our impending doom, a subject of infinite interest to me . . . if I had my own university, you would be allowed to major in Eschatology). One theory goes that humans...

Well friends, fiends and neighbors, I hope the holidays treated you well, that the turkey-induced tryptophan has worn off and the tinsel is all pulled down.

(Which reminds me: Anglophile that I resolutely am, always enjoying the turns of phrase that don’t resonate with any other than those in the U.K., have always loved that when they demolish buildings over there, they call it ‘pulling down’ as opposed to our far more harsh Yank equivalent, ‘torn down’. As if they all possessed imperceptible strings, get a few strong like bull types at every angle of the edifice, and then ...

So I had a day off from work. I had booked it months ago, knowing that deep in a Canadian winter, I would probably be grateful for a Friday where I didn’t have to resurrect myself at 4:45 a.m. Waking up to find the digital clock merrily informing me that it was 10:00 a.m.–and that my cat Dexter was curled up against me–was the sort of moment you want to put in a temporal Mason jar and hide in the attic as a refuge when a Craptastic Wednesday arrives.

My plans for the day involved being Writer Boy. I have deadlines to meet on a few projects, and the thought of actually getting to wri...