Diss · I first heard someone use "diss" sometime in the mid-nineties, which probably means that it entered the vernacular a few years before that. I have the vague idea that it come out of Black American parlance as a shortening of "disrespect", but I've never seen this looked into seriously. It's a good, useful, word, and what's surprising is the hole in the language that we didn't know was there until it was filled ...
Unsuspected Parallels, Part 79 · I was thinking J.S. Bach's Fifth Brandenberg Concerto has a lot in common with Neil Young's Change Your Mind, in their shameless (and very enjoyable) displays of virtuosity for its own sake ...
Biz Travel, Chapter 312 · The route from Vancouver to Norfolk VA is not exactly well-trodden, and part of it led from gates B22 to F12 at O'Hare - Chicago airport conaisseurs are shuddering in sympathy, we're talking 20 minutes of hard walking here. But the quest had its reward, a jewel actually ...
"Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson · You have to credit Gibson with, if nothing else, extreme courage. He has a proven gift for inventing alternate realities that huge numbers of people are willing to buy his books about, and after a couple of decades of that, here he is with a linear-narrative type thriller set firmly in 2002 ...
