Outstanding!

#2025Book55

DECEMBER 8
saucerian (n.)-- A believer in flying saucers; an alien that travels by saucer-shaped craft.

DECEMBER 7
hooliness (n.)-- slowness, gentility; lateness, tardiness

DECEMBER 5
licitation (n.)-- To sell at auction; to sell to the highest bidder

As for Abraham, I don't think that he wants future success nearly as much as he wants the one thing that no one on this planet gets, and that's a do-over. He wants the success of “Kars 4 Kids,“ along with all the fame and the money and the women that came with it, minus the drug addiction and the poor choices.

December 4
premonstrance (n.)-- A portent, an omen.

To succeed, an attack would have to be both clever and quiet. “They must not be knocked down with bludgeons,“ Blaine brooded. “They must have their throats cut with a feather.“

Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling raindrops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace. --James Garfield

December 3
geoplanarian (n.)-- Someone who believes the earth is flat.

That's the thing about Keith Malek--you can love him or you can hate him, but you can never, ever ignore him. Malek holds up a mirror to ourselves, and when we see our reflections, we either dig deeper to unleash whatever talents we have, or we end up in a crackhouse on the outskirts of Brownsville. He is that powerful.

December 1
obstrigillation (n.)-- The action of opposing or resisting; an act of defiance.

I had just boarded the train and sat down when I saw your drivers license on the seat. I'm assuming that it fell out of your pocket, but I could be wrong. Maybe you like to travel to different states and intentionally leave your drivers license on a form of public transportation. That's fine too. It's not something that I would do, but to each his own. I'm not judging you, and like the old saying goes, “Don't knock it until you try it.“

“Watch. When we go back out there, the defendant will probably be in handcuffs,“ said Juror #2.
“Really?“ I asked. “What's he going to do if a spider crawls across his forehead? Do you think his attorney will brush it off for him, or do you think he'll just start smashing his head against the table? If he smashes his head on the table, the judge will probably think that he's flipping out again. What if a tarantula crawls on him?“

November 29
arctician (n.)--A polar animal; a polar explorer

November 27
exsibilation (n.)-- The hissing or jeering of a performer from the stage

“Aren't you the guy who....“ He paused, as if he wasn't sure that he should continue but then finished with, “works at the bodega?“ There was so much suspense for me in that pause that he could not possibly be aware of. That pause contained the possibility of validation. He could've asked, “Hey, aren't you the guy who was the frontman in the Kars4Kids band?“ He didn't do that though, cementing the reality that I'm nothing more than a has-been.

To think that just six months prior, we had been opening for The Wiggles. That was a boring gig, for sure, but at least we still maintained our childhood innocence. That innocence was shattered on October 25, 2013. That was the day we opened for Motley Crue in Las Vegas. By the end of that tour, the cops were looking to arrest all four of them, along with their manager, on child endangerment charges.

When I invented the printing press back in 1454, I had no idea that five-hundred-sixty-eight years later, Keith Malek would go on to write the masterpiece that you are currently holding in your hands. --From the foreword by Johannes Gutenberg

November 24
vandemonianism (v.)-- Rowdy, unmannerly behavior

My second book just came out. It's available on Amazon. It's Christmas time, so make sure to buy 50 copies for all of your friends and family. I'll also post a link in the comments section for my first book, Blonde Bombshell Fails to Detonate, which came out in 2022. It's almost universally regarded as the greatest book ever written. Buy 50 copies of that book as well. Thanks.

#2025Book52

November 23
epistolisable (adj.)-- Worthy of writing in a letter

November 22
pseudandry (n.)-- The use of a male pseudonym by a female writer.

The Wodaabe are nomads of the Sahel, the rocky scrublands that signal the beginning of the Sahara. They have quite liberal sexual practices and an unsettling tendency to request sex of a woman by scratching her inner palm. The woman is expected to follow the scratcher then and there behind a bush --although, thankfully, the Wodaabe have great respect for women and typically accept rejection with a shrug.

November 19
archiloquy (n.)-- The opening of a speech

In an early-adopted eccentricity that would for him become a central “law of life,“ he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. “I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements,“ he admitted. “I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.“

November 18
bibliopoesy (n.)-- The creation or publication of books

November 17
cataractine (adj.)-- Resembling a waterfall.

November 16
arctophile (n.)-- A collector of teddy bears.

#2025Book51

November 11
eirenicon (n.) A statement or proposal intended to bring peace; an attempt at reconciliation.

November 9
parietines (n.) Fallen or ruined walls.

If you're interested in the subject matter, watch the author's TED talk instead. She offers nothing of particular value in either platform, but at least the TED talk will save you a lot of time. #2025Book50

Ideological crusaders often fall into the trap of thinking that they are living in a revolutionary moment and that the standard political rulebook no longer applies. The Weather Underground in the 1960s and the Gingrich revolutionists in the 1990s both thought that they could dispense with politics as usual. They were both wrong. And they both did a lot of damage in the process.

“Freedom is more important than equality, and the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom.“ --Karl Popper

“Those who can, build. Those who can't, criticize.“ --Robert Moses

Many (most?) of us long to be “on the right side of history.“ But this way of thinking suggests there is a bright line between right and wrong. Things are rarely that simple. Ideas are not so easy to sort into clear categories marked “good“ and “bad.“ Objectivity may be a platonic ideal that no human can ever achieve, but “moral clarity“ is a false god that can easily lead to extremism and intolerance.

Our default setting should be to admit the obvious: our problems are big and our brains are small. If we knew how to solve difficult social problems, we would have done it by now. A better civic discourse would acknowledge our limitations and commit to a process of learning by trial and error in an effort to build knowledge over time. That's why humility is essential to our brand of incrementalism.

November 8
decussate (v.)-- to mark with X; to cross or intersect in an X-shape.

November 5
quaquaversally (adv.) Moving, pointing or protruding in all directions

November 4
leggism (n.) Swindling; cheating at games or gambling

November 3
dragsman (n.)-- A thief who steals from vehicles

November 2
spurcity (n.)-- Obscenity, uncleanness

This might be the worst novel I've ever read. Hitler escaped to Argentina at the end of WWII, and now, at the age of ninety, Israeli nazi hunters have found him and have to figure out what to do with him. One would think that it would be hard to mess up a novel with such an interesting plot, but Steiner does just that. Until the last six pages of the book, NOTHING. HAPPENS. I only found that out by looking for spoilers on Goodreads. #2025Book48

Scene changes always presented the greatest challenge to the masque designer in the seventeenth century as they were virtually impossible to achieve without the audience noticing. One Italian producer solved this by having stooges at the back of the audience shout 'Help! Fire! Murder!' or snap a piece of wood to simulate the crackling of a gallery support. While the audience turned around to investigate he would change scenery. It was a great...

'Stand By Me' is the only song with its own fan club. It's true. There's a whole group of people who scour the world for different versions of the song and have meetings where they play newly discovered versions, discuss the lyrics and drink a toast to Ben E. King.

This feels as if it could have been written by the great Jonathan Tropper, one of my favorite novelists. Maybe that's why this was the best novel I've read this year. Or maybe it's because it's funny. And sad. And beautiful. All I know is that it's everything you could want in a novel. #2025Book47

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
--Virginia Woolf

Stand out on the sidewalk on Broadway, smoking, hating yourself for smoking, looking at the faces, all those lovely faces, all those lives and friends and families and loves and thinking you are all going to die one day and wondering what we are going to do with that knowledge we daily ignore.

That's the beauty of New York. If you pay enough, anything is possible. I couldn't afford this, but that's what high-interest credit cards are for.