Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions! I suspect Winston Churchill would have been flattered to know that his name is so cat worthy. But I couldn’t resist the Big Lebowski. It’s perfect!!

Have a wonderful weekend!! I’m busy working on my new blog template…hope to launch next week!

You can see the entire set on the UK Penguin website.

It’s for a good cause: a portion of the money raised from the sale of the books goes to help fight AIDS in Africa.

Any suggestions?

He’s the longest cat I’ve ever seen — nearly three feet long. At the moment, he’s really skinny, but he could top 18 pounds once he’s been properly stuffed with Fancy Feast. One of my friends suggested that he might be a Maine Coon — the most gigantic breed of house cat ever.

I don’t even want to tell you how many animals we now have living in our flat for fear our landlady might be reading this blog. But we have a few — and all of them are black. (Weird how it always turns out that way for me.)

This big lug of a cat with white paws was known around the neighborhood as “Shoes,” although Shoes doesn’t seem grand enough. Maybe Brando? Joe Kennedy? The Big Boss? (Imagine the jokes at the vet’s office…”The Big Boss needs his rabies shot…” etc…)

So…any ideas!?

Thank you!

In a move that some hoped would calm the fears, the NYT’s Paper Cuts blog weighed in on the controversy Thursday with a post titled “I Write Like…Yeah Right.”

“I entered my last blog post and was told I write like Edgar Allan Poe,” NYT blogger Jennifer Schuessler wrote. “Pretty neat. But then a colleague plugged in a paragraph from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and was told it sounded like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

One reader commented: “Thank you for debunking that. It told me I write like Dan Brown,
and I almost killed myself.”

Brown, meanwhile, has gone into seclusion after learning that he writes like Jane Austen.

PS: Only parts of this post are true. The rest is fiction. I would like to dedicate it to Jonas (I hope you’ve gotten that dreadful program to finally give you Hemingway.)

Also, I have no idea who did the cartoon — now floating freely about the Internet. (Email if you know the source.)

Happy Weekend everyone. It’s the third Sunday of the month, which means Long Beach and then coffee at Chuck’s! See you Monday!

Take the five-second test and let me know here how it goes!

If you write like Jane Austen, you win a special prize — a date with Colin Firth! (Joking.)

I was surprised to learn that I write like Kurt Vonnegut. I had no idea Mr. Vonnegut used so many exclamation points in his prose, but I applaud him!!

xo

(Above photo found at F— Yeah, Kurt Vonnegut! on Tumblr.)

I hope the English Muse will become your destination to learn about interesting, beautiful and stylish printed media.

I’m working on the redesign of the blog now so please stay tuned for the launch date!

Thank you!!

Tina

PS: The illustration above is by artist C.J. Metzger. It accompanied an article I did some time ago about etiquette books. I loved the illustration so much that I asked Ms. Metzger if I could buy the original. (The photo she used in the collage is of her grandmother.) It’s now framed in my kitchen!