 Red Room Writer Profile
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Michael Lipsey's Blog
November 16, 2009
- Looking for an unusual business opportunity? I've posted another chapter from my work-in-progress, "Kitchen Sink Confidential." 4,000 years of plumbing, from the qanats to you anxiously awaiting the arrival of your plumber as water drips through the ceiling. I pull back a few curtains, and lift a few rocks, and what you see is not pretty. http://ithoughtso.net/id16.html
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November 2, 2009
- I've posted yet another chapter from my book on the history of plumbing, and everything else, at http://ithoughtso.net/id15.htmllThis is a work in progress and comments or questions are welcome.
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October 24, 2009
- Words fail me. Words cannot express... I can’t tell you how... I wish I could say... I don’t know how to say this... I can’t say. Who can say? What can you say? Be careful what you say. There are no words for...Mere words, empty words, loose talk, psychobabble, happy talk, gibberish, false words, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, running my mouth. Watch your mouth! Don’t say ...
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October 16, 2009
- In college, imagining that I loved all great literature and could never get enough of it, I signed up for a course on Henry James. Henry proved to me that I could. We slogged through book after book after book. He wrote about fifty of them and we must have read at least a dozen. He was the brother of the great William James, who wrote Varieties Of Religious Experience, still a must read for ...
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October 11, 2009
- In high school, with a brain battered by hormones, I labored through Silas Marner by George Eliot. It’s a small book, but at the time it seemed like a thousand pages of slogging through a swamp of words, every paragraph sucking at your feet. I found the book bleak and depressing, even though it is the morally uplifting story of a lonely, miserable, mean man who finds family, love and redemption ...
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October 6, 2009
- It seems that successful (and otherwise sensible) writers often succumb to a terrible urge to write a book about how to write a book. If I were to become a famous writer (which is not unlikely in some parallel universe) I would break new ground by writing a book about how to write a book about writing books. The serious question is: can a writer learn to write a book worth reading from ...
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September 22, 2009
- I’ve always been fascinated by the brand names on machines and other products. Our bathroom scale is a Health o meter (sic). The scale in my health club is a Detecto. The centrifuge for drying swimsuits is a Suitmate. The card-operated lock on the locker is a Safe-O-Mat. The combination locks on the rented lockers are Zephyrs. I have a Swingline stapler and a Parlinda illuminated magnifier on ...
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September 12, 2009
- I've put a chapter from my book on the plumbing industry, and life, death, love, philosophy, religion and the fate of the universe, on my website http://ithoughtso.net/id13.html The working title is Kitchen Sink Confidential. Comments and criticism are always appreciated.
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September 9, 2009
- This week's blog topic is repentance, a subject on which I have lived long enough to be able to write at length. I will kindly not burden you with my regrets but simply offer two of my epigrams:If you don’t think that you’ve made a lot of mistakes in your life, you’ve learned nothing.I’m planning to enter a liar’s tale contest and tell this short, but sure-fire winner, “I have ...
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July 31, 2009
- My first book of original epigrams, I Thought So, is lacking an index. The epigrams are arranged in chapters -- Manners, Attitude, Life, Death, etc. Indexing seemed unnecessary to this novice. But many of my miniature essays cross these neat boundaries, and believe it or not, and I'm sure you will, I have found myself thumbing numbly through my own book looking for a quote I know is in there. I ...
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January 28, 2009
- The economy...Oy! And my second book of epigrams will be out in a few months. Here is a selection from the chapter on Wealth. And some advice for managing the stress regarding your investments: Don't Look! When the economy crashes you need to keep your head, even if you’ve lost everything else. The mark of an amateur investor is “believing” in a stock. What you own lets you sleep -- what ...
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January 6, 2009
- My year begins with optimism for change for the better, and worry because the economy is deteriorating. Since retiring I've been a full time artist and writer, living on savings and investments, and like most of my friends, taken a finanical hit this last year. I've lived through quite a few recessions, but nothing like this one. So my recent epigrams have tended to the financial: "It's the ...
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December 15, 2008
- This was a good year for epigrammists. Politics and the economy were going up, down and sideways. Plenty of the best and worst of human nature was in evidence. Out with the old and in with the new might be coming true. We can only hope. I've completed my second book of epigrams and am well into my third. Here are a few December thoughts for this holiday season of joy and perhaps, more modest ...
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April 9, 2008
- It’s tax time, and it’s election time, and I offer a few political epigrams.“A government that is not feared could not collect enough taxes to make a living for itself.”“Politicians are the hand puppets of their speech writers.”“It’s unfair that polls influence elections, even when they’re wrong.”“The oppressed peoples of the world long for democracy -- but not for our kind ...
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March 2, 2008
- "Any kind of weather will do if you are an indoorsy person."Spring is here, perhaps, with a few fits and starts -- and here in paradise..."In California the weather is wonderful, but people complain about it just as much." And I am getting out my spring flowers and my spring epigrams, such as:"On a beautiful day you can bathe in the air."Last fall I cleared out a ...
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