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You know what's a terrible idea? Googling "Father's Day Gift Ideas". Don't do it. it's not wise. I found a "top ten" list of things men want for Father's Day, and of those things I have given him six already and the other four he doesn't care about. Plus I think it's cheating to list "alcohol" and "wine" separately.

Also, gift shopping on the internet is dire. I'm pretty sure it's not just me, I'm pretty sure someone is overselling wet baseball caps as "evaporative cooling hats". I already gave him a tiny portable grill, though this one admittedly is pretty awesome. I should sign R up for the Jerky of the Month club for his birthday in July, but for $24 I can buy him jerky personally, and it's not like he's picky about where it comes from.

I thought about getting Lucky a heart monitor, but I don't think he'd appreciate it...

In the end I asked Mum, and she said he really wanted to go out for a nice meal, so I'm footing the bill for half their meal. And maybe sending him something small from ThinkGeek. Man does love his gadgets.

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Apparently today's message from the internet is about Famous Beloved And/Or Very Skilled Writers Who Are Douchebags.

This Recording did a ruthless bio-essay of Roald Dahl recently, which I just found this morning; if you especially like Roald Dahl and have trouble separating the work from the person you may not want to read it.

Though apparently half of Dahl's work was rewritten by other people anyway, so you can continue to like it.

I'm quite fond of Matilda, but even at the age of seven I was never that into the toilet humour of The BFG and many of his books were just slightly too far on the side of nonlinear for me to enjoy them. Boy, his autobiographical account of his childhood, is an enchanting book, and fitting bits of that together with bits of the This Recording bio does fill in a few blanks.

In this vein, Salon.com ran a very thoughtful piece inspired by Charles Dickens' cruelty to his wife and VS Naipaul's recent sexist tirade, in which they link the desire to be ignorant of our heroes' flaws with the adolescent desire to retain our parents on the pedestal they inevitably have to topple from as we grow up.

BTW, VS Naipaul is full of shit, and the Telegraph is full of shit for defending him.

But just to remind us that misbehaving writers are a footnote rather than a focus, Self-Publishing Review is hosting a thoughtful, wise, and easy-to-follow essay on "the story", which chronicles common mis-steps for beginning writers and flaws that make a book less than it could be, not just storywise but characterwise as well. Some of these are things I'm still working on, but all of them are things that fledgling writers should be aware of and try to curb in their own work. It's one of the more thoughtful pieces I've seen on creative writing in a long time.

(This has totally sucked my morning dry, reading accounts of Alain de Botton's temper tantrums over his book being panned and re-reading Giles Coren's hilariously overwrought reaction to a newspaper editing a word out of his review, plus other Writers Behaving Badly. Someone should write a book. Maybe me.)