If I have been responding to your emails from a year and a half ago, please do not be afraid. I am quite well-adjusted and not sociopathic. This is merely a matter of having a small time window to respond properly to your various messages, and nothing more.

Jason Kottke: “Maybe kottke.org has been intentionally excluded because I’ve been so hard on them in the past. Or maybe it’s just a glitch (or two) in their system. Or maybe it’s an indication of larger problems with their service. Either way, as the company is attempting to offer an authentic picture of the blogosphere, this doesn’t seem like the type of rigor and accuracy that should send reputable media sources like the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal scurrying to their door looking for reliable data about blogs.”

BBC: “Tony Blair has announced he will stand down as prime minister on 27 June.”

New York Times: “‘Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,’ Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.”

And I’ll fourth it.

I first encountered the stories of W. Somerset Maugham as an undergraduate in an out-of-print two-volume set that I was extremely lucky to find at an estate sale a few years later. Maugham’s stories were hardly “a creaking reminder of distant colonial days.” Like Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess, Maugham was an expert in depicting British expatriates escaping to tropical isles, attempting to find meaning through run-ins, both carnal and conversational, with these new environs. I’ll have more to say on all this, as well as his Ashenden stories, in a future post when I can find the time.