Funimation and Orwell: Two Great Tastes

Help me out here, gang. The wife requests that everyone out there who has DirecTV please tell customer service that they want the Funimation channel added to their line-up. Believe me, if you're an anime fan, you want it too. She suspects that it may happen as they just moved Noggin from channel 298 to 301, freeing up a spot right after Cartton Network and Boomerang, but who knows? Help a sister out. You can e-mail DirecTV here: http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/global/contentPageIF.jsp?assetId=P4560006
and you can e-mail Funimation here: http://webinfo.wilengroup.com/cablefax/getfun/
She would even get a Comcast box if they picked it up.

In a related story, some Orwellians have begun posting Orwell's diaries here: http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
Having begun yesterday, they're posting each entry on its seventieth anniversary, so today we get August 10th, 1938. What's neat is that you don't just get the entry, you get a hyperlinked entry with editorial footnotes (therefore I had the fun of learning that Orwell's dog was named Marx). Very cool. I'm not an Orwell scholar but I do believe that he was one of the most important writers who ever lived, not just for the content of his work, but for the style. I've linked a couple of times on this blog to his magnificent essay, Politics and the English Language, and there, I've just done it again.

My Woman Done Left Me

My wife, daughter and my daughter's dog are now living in another house, leaving me, my son and my son's dog in this one. No divorce, no separation, just one family living in two different houses.

Today was a good day. Still on hernia leave, I spent the day at my wife's place, waiting for the DirecTV guy while she was at work. I had many hours away from the enormously distracting internet and away from my needy dogs. I had hours to write and came up with one shade of an idea, one piece of flash-fiction and one two-thousand word story. It’s amazing what you can do when there’s nothing else to do. I really need to get away from reality more often. So, anyway stories sixty-four (The Ones That Got Away) and sixty-five (Dust Dog) are in the bag, though they haven’t yet been sent out. But will be by this time tomorrow.