Various Happenstances of Seth

February 27, 2007

    Hello again. It's been a few months since I've written here, for which I apologize. But I was busy. Now that I'm back, I have two good pieces of news. First of all, I finished my book Rhode Island Curiosities. The final manuscript has been turned in, and the book should be published sometime in August. Yes, I still have another book or two I need to write, but I'm happy to have finished this one.

    Rhode Island is awesome. If I had been charged with writing that book in any other state, I would have been miserable. But traversing the length of Rhode Island a few times in one day isn't so bad. Best of all, I now have a compendium of mostly useless knowledge of odd people and places around Rhode Island, which is a perfect match for my compendium of knowledge of odd groups around the country. You'd be amazed how often groups from Think You're The Only One? come up in conversation.*

    Anyway, sometime in August, the book will come out and be added to my books page. I really need to update that. Actually, I need to update a lot of this site, especially this blog. Part of the reason I've gone so long without posting is that I had a book to write. And part of the reason was the unfavorable alignment of the stars.** But part of the reason was the fact that updating this blog takes a long time because it's all hand-coded.*** I've been meaning to upgrade to some easier blog client for some time, and hopefully in the next few months I'll figure out how to get that done.

    Meanwhile, I recently was recognized by the New England Press Association, who ranked me second place in the humor columnist category for their 2006 awards. I was very pleased to get the award, of course, but I have to say that the write-up in the NEPA official statement was somewhat damning with faint praise. I quote:

"Seth Brown has a knack of turning the small observation into something that is -- well, not profound, but certainly amusing."

    Not profound? In 2006, I wrote columns about the categorical imperative and omphaloskepsis. And perhaps most importantly, I wrote columns about the most profound issues our country faces today: A wider adoption of the half-dollar, and a conversion to metric time. If they weren't convinced, perhaps I'll just have to write on those topics again.

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    *Seriously. Sometimes it feels like I write these books just so I'll have something to talk about. It seems like roughly once every month or two that someone's talking about a group that I interviewed. And I swear it's almost every few weeks that someone says something that makes me think of one of the groups, but I usually don't bring it up. I don't have to talk about the World RPS Society every time someone plays Rock, Paper, Scissors -- even if I think of them every time.

    **It is the Chinese year of the Pig, which Chinese prognosticators have said does not bode well. And I don't think they're just hamming it up.

    ***Everyone else uses machines to write their blogs. You have no idea how much painstaking work it is to add each pixel to your monitor.

   All work on these pages is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.