Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

January 2015

  • Why Indeed?  And also, while we're considering the question, why don't chimpanzees get atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, endometriosis, myocardial infarction, falciparum malaria, HIV infection, or epithelial cancers?  Chimpanzees are, after all, our closest living relatives. We share a common ancestry and we only embarked on separate path some six or seven million years ago –a blink of an

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  • As a born-and-bred third-generation atheist, I never made much of an effort to understand theology, which is, I gather, the study of the nature and attributes of god or gods. But no god, nothing to study. No problem. Theology will always be for me "the subject without an object." And therefore when I read Michael Coogan's The Ten Commandments  (Yale, 2014), I

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  • Desperately Seeking Susan offers a cartoon version of amnesia. Pow, Roberta is knocked into a lamppost and doesn't know who she is. And then, a day later, pow again, she is knocked to the ground, bumps her head, and her memory returns intact. The film isn't interested in amnesia except as a plot device to facilitate the

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