Two for the weekend

A twofer today:

1. In cleaning out the attic these last few weeks, the Lady Friend and I discovered several boxes of new, uncirculated copies of my nonfiction books Flight of the Gin Fizz, Zephyr and What's That Pig Outdoors? Most are hardcover, a few are paperbacks and some are in Dutch and German.

When initial sales declined to the point at which the publishers decided to remainder the remaining copies, I bought a few boxes for what, I don't know, some vague idea of posterity. They've just been gathering dust all these years.

And so they're all for sale, along with a custom personal inscription. If you're interested, write me at author@henrykisor.com.

2. For the last couple of weeks the New York Times has been publishing a cool new blog, Schott's Vocab, dedicated to clever and sometimes just off-the-wall neologisms. Those are newly coined words that have never before existed and may have no real reason to do so, but in a few cases just might stick around and become part of our collective vocabulary.

For instance, twitturgy, or religious tweeting on Twitter. Instead of 5,000-word Sunday stemwinder sermons, pastors can issue up-to-140-words tweets such as:

Move into my neighborhood, God. Come sing in these suburban streets. Love the loveless. Laugh with the lonely. Spray the walls into beauty.

Ben Schott, a Londoner, writes the blog with the dry English humor he has infused into his celebrated miscellanies and almanacs, those arbitrary, anarchic and addictive book-length collections of facts, factoids, lists and charts for trivia hounds. I'm hooked.