Sentential Links #81

It's time again for a new year of Sentential Links. Don't forget that I'm soliciting suggestions from The Readership (that's you) for a kind of "Reader's Choice best of 2006 Sentential Links), which I'd like to run for next week's edition. See guidelines here and here, and leave your submissions in comments on either of those posts (or this post, if you have to). Or e-mail them to me. I currently have just six submissions, and I'd like a lot more than that!

And now onto my own choices for this week:

:: I ought to remember to say, "Good dinner, dear," before dear asks plaintively, "Did you like the dinner?"

:: These are resolutions built to last.

:: 2007 is truly here. January 1st is the official calendar beginning of the year but it's really more the last day of the "holiday season". The day most people go back to work and to school and put away all the holiday stuff (mentally as well as physically) is the "real" beginning of the new year.

:: When it comes to abuses of power, modern Republicans are in a league of their own. And now that they're in the minority again, worried about abuses that haven't actually happened, we're apparently supposed to feel sorry for them. Please.

:: We can't even get a hanging right. With all of the world watching, we yet again were the primary authors of a violent, uncivilized, and primitive act which -- no matter how justified in some ultimate moral sense -- was carried out in the most thuggish, wretched, inept, and (we now learn) patently illegal manner.

:: The crazy news these days is that classical music is regaining popularity, and it's time for mainstream publications such as EW, Time, and Newsweek — not to mention the TV networks — to pay heed. (Well, I'll concede on Time and Newsweek. EW, as a magazine, is tripe all nicely stapled together.)

:: In short, absent from the list of noted deaths was even so much as a single mention of anyone involved in the world of classical music. (Arrghhh.)

:: Collects third world babies like she's trying to complete a matching set. (Who? Go look!)

:: Broken ribs still hurt less than discovering that your mother wants you to patch things up with and get back together with an ex. (I discovered this week that Paul T. Riddell was journaling again, after he gave it up some time back. Cool. As for the sentence, it suddenly occurs to me that the only girlfriend of mine that my parents ever met was the one I ended up marrying, so that worked out fairly well in my favor!)

:: Writers do not have to be readers' pals, even if the reader really really likes their books. (I recall this man's postings from rec.arts.sf.written some years back. He's got some good pith and snark going.)

:: Introducing the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, trade-named "BOOK."

All for this week. Remember, submit the best things you read in 2006!