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).

April 2019

  • Now that I'm eighty (80!) years old, it's time to think about what, if anything,  I've learned. For many years now, I've been waiting for wisdom to kick in, but so far, no thunderbolts or grand illuminations. Yet I seem to have accumulated a number of maxims and cliches, which leads to the dispiriting conclusion…

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  • Three times in the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to drop into other people's lives. The most recent was a visit to the Mountain Men Rendezvous in Antonito, New Mexico. "Rendezvous," you ask?  In the 1830s, fur trappers gathered in various places in western North America to sell their furs and purchase supplies…

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  • He:  "These allergies are getting me down.  Every morning I seem to wake up with a liter of mucus in my nose. There's so much I should probably save it and put in the garden. It would be good for the soil." She:  "Yes, we could save it one of those nice plastic jars that…

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  • Today's contribution, Little Jimmy Hurt his Arm, was written by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson, the author of the best-selling children's book Leonardo, the Enlightened Lion (2017). "Little Jimmy hurt his arm. He said to his mother, my arm hurts. His mother said, let us pray over it. So they prayed. But it still hurt. So his mother took him…

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  • This reprehensible film aspires to be an "inconsequential romp," as one reviewer suggests, but fails to meet even that exceedingly low bar. If a viewer could swallow the buddy-movie plot (Stuart Whitman as a New Orleans card shark and John Wayne as John Wayne), he'd still have to deal with Nehemiah Persoff as a brutal…

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