Coleman Ridge
@colemanridge.bsky.social
Retired librarian. I read, train, practice, study, and take classes. Much-married. Somewhat given to getting drunk on words.
Profile picture: "Scribe," by Keith Thompson
Banner artist: Gustave Dore
Profile picture: "Scribe," by Keith Thompson
Banner artist: Gustave Dore
I find this poem about the end of the American republic mildly encouraging, because it is 100 years old this year. Likely enough something did die back then, but people reeled along somehow.
November 12, 2025 at 10:18 PM
I find this poem about the end of the American republic mildly encouraging, because it is 100 years old this year. Likely enough something did die back then, but people reeled along somehow.
If the people threatening to leave the city because of Mamdani only would, he would have solved the apartment shortage.
November 12, 2025 at 10:04 PM
If the people threatening to leave the city because of Mamdani only would, he would have solved the apartment shortage.
Some singers, you can never figure out whether they are singing about sex, drugs, or Jesus.
November 12, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Some singers, you can never figure out whether they are singing about sex, drugs, or Jesus.
I am absolutely baffled at assertions that Schumer is cowardly or incompetent because other Democrats folded. What was he to do? Kidnap their family members? Threaten to fire them? Drug them into compliance?
November 10, 2025 at 8:51 PM
I am absolutely baffled at assertions that Schumer is cowardly or incompetent because other Democrats folded. What was he to do? Kidnap their family members? Threaten to fire them? Drug them into compliance?
This article is not as foolish as the title makes it seem. It points out that American men are not newly all fucked up, we are all fucked just as we always have been. We have always drunk more, crashed cars more, got the blues more, killed ourselves more, and so on.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...
Opinion | Bruce Springsteen’s Father Complicates a Powerful American Narrative
www.nytimes.com
November 9, 2025 at 1:27 AM
This article is not as foolish as the title makes it seem. It points out that American men are not newly all fucked up, we are all fucked just as we always have been. We have always drunk more, crashed cars more, got the blues more, killed ourselves more, and so on.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...
Typed on an IBM Selectric that let me correct errors. Videos from a Korean-owned place that had started out a drycleaners with videos on the side. No recording off the radio: copyright violation.
They missed waiting for Sunday low rates to call long distance, and looking for a pay phone.
They missed waiting for Sunday low rates to call long distance, and looking for a pay phone.
November 8, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Typed on an IBM Selectric that let me correct errors. Videos from a Korean-owned place that had started out a drycleaners with videos on the side. No recording off the radio: copyright violation.
They missed waiting for Sunday low rates to call long distance, and looking for a pay phone.
They missed waiting for Sunday low rates to call long distance, and looking for a pay phone.
Arranging oneself like folding a fitted sheet, everything crooked or wrinkled inside and the outside squared and smoothed.
November 8, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Arranging oneself like folding a fitted sheet, everything crooked or wrinkled inside and the outside squared and smoothed.
"Esposito," the sixth most common Italian surname, means "exposed." It was the name commonly given to babies found abandoned by roadsides or at the doors of orphanages or churches.
-- What's In a Name, Leonard R.N. Ashley
-- What's In a Name, Leonard R.N. Ashley
November 8, 2025 at 1:23 PM
"Esposito," the sixth most common Italian surname, means "exposed." It was the name commonly given to babies found abandoned by roadsides or at the doors of orphanages or churches.
-- What's In a Name, Leonard R.N. Ashley
-- What's In a Name, Leonard R.N. Ashley
@tkingfisher.com's new Snake Eater is head and shoulders above most of her other work, and most other fantasy, because it comes right out of a beloved, lovingly described landscape. Early on there is a line something like "The sky was so big that it was hard to think." Yes. 1/
November 7, 2025 at 1:38 PM
@tkingfisher.com's new Snake Eater is head and shoulders above most of her other work, and most other fantasy, because it comes right out of a beloved, lovingly described landscape. Early on there is a line something like "The sky was so big that it was hard to think." Yes. 1/
Mamdani ran a smart campaign and made a good victory speech. Now he has to persuade the governor to tax the rich more, get the class of people who produced Trump to build affordable housing even though rents are frozen, and put together a department for managing mentally ill homeless people.
November 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Mamdani ran a smart campaign and made a good victory speech. Now he has to persuade the governor to tax the rich more, get the class of people who produced Trump to build affordable housing even though rents are frozen, and put together a department for managing mentally ill homeless people.
Waiting to vote, I remember hearing an older immigrant asking a young relative to come with him and show him how to vote. The young guy said "It's simple. Just fill in all the bubbles on the left side." That's the straight Democratic ticket, and what an Irish immigrant would have said 175 years ago.
November 4, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Waiting to vote, I remember hearing an older immigrant asking a young relative to come with him and show him how to vote. The young guy said "It's simple. Just fill in all the bubbles on the left side." That's the straight Democratic ticket, and what an Irish immigrant would have said 175 years ago.
"What am I supposed to do now? I want to talk to the boss, right now! Not you, and not your boss. The boss. Now! This shit is just not on."
Share an angry bird and the curse you think it embodies.
Share an angry bird and the curse you think it embodies.
November 3, 2025 at 12:44 AM
"What am I supposed to do now? I want to talk to the boss, right now! Not you, and not your boss. The boss. Now! This shit is just not on."
Share an angry bird and the curse you think it embodies.
Share an angry bird and the curse you think it embodies.
A sin to which I am prone: seeing someone rapt in reading, thought, exercise, or practice, and wanting to interrupt them so they will look at me that way. Like much evil, it is a form of stupidity. Like much evil, it has a virtuous form, to wit, hearing them talk in the voice they think in, and
November 2, 2025 at 12:25 PM
A sin to which I am prone: seeing someone rapt in reading, thought, exercise, or practice, and wanting to interrupt them so they will look at me that way. Like much evil, it is a form of stupidity. Like much evil, it has a virtuous form, to wit, hearing them talk in the voice they think in, and
If you play the acoustic outtake, electric guitar outtake, and horn take of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait" in that order, they tell a story of dazed inchoate longing becoming driving urgent longing, and then becoming triumphant longing soon to be fulfilled.
November 1, 2025 at 7:40 PM
If you play the acoustic outtake, electric guitar outtake, and horn take of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait" in that order, they tell a story of dazed inchoate longing becoming driving urgent longing, and then becoming triumphant longing soon to be fulfilled.
It is All Saints Day, on which we honor all those who made Heaven. I am pretty sure all the dead people I know are still in Purgatory, but Purgatory is a pretty good gig. You know you are going to make Heaven eventually, after you get a few things sorted out. Congratulations to all of them.
November 1, 2025 at 12:20 PM
It is All Saints Day, on which we honor all those who made Heaven. I am pretty sure all the dead people I know are still in Purgatory, but Purgatory is a pretty good gig. You know you are going to make Heaven eventually, after you get a few things sorted out. Congratulations to all of them.
Thought about dressing up for Halloween as mostly dead shambling rags of flesh, and realized that's just every day. Halloween, though, is when you get to celebrate it. Mostly dead is way better than entirely dead.
November 1, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Thought about dressing up for Halloween as mostly dead shambling rags of flesh, and realized that's just every day. Halloween, though, is when you get to celebrate it. Mostly dead is way better than entirely dead.
It is that time of year when we send our brightly adorned children wandering out across the borders of the shadow land, there to be enslaved, and get back various fetches, haunts, and changelings.
They would have been enslaved here anyway, and some of the fetches are perfectly charming.
They would have been enslaved here anyway, and some of the fetches are perfectly charming.
October 30, 2025 at 2:22 PM
It is that time of year when we send our brightly adorned children wandering out across the borders of the shadow land, there to be enslaved, and get back various fetches, haunts, and changelings.
They would have been enslaved here anyway, and some of the fetches are perfectly charming.
They would have been enslaved here anyway, and some of the fetches are perfectly charming.
Reading Zola's The Ladies' Paradise for maybe the 4th time, with undiminished enjoyment. This does me no great credit, for I find that the obsessed department store magnate who is determined to seduce all the women of Paris has a notion of seduction that entails exploiting weakness, intoxication,
October 29, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reading Zola's The Ladies' Paradise for maybe the 4th time, with undiminished enjoyment. This does me no great credit, for I find that the obsessed department store magnate who is determined to seduce all the women of Paris has a notion of seduction that entails exploiting weakness, intoxication,
"For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair,
October 28, 2025 at 11:57 AM
"For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair,
The poor, whacky German Shepherd has decided that her work is supervising the park squirrels and rats. It soothes her, so, just as I got interested in construction sites when I had a small boy, I have gotten interested in squirrels and rats.
October 27, 2025 at 12:45 PM
The poor, whacky German Shepherd has decided that her work is supervising the park squirrels and rats. It soothes her, so, just as I got interested in construction sites when I had a small boy, I have gotten interested in squirrels and rats.
12 years old, walking home from the Freight and Salvage coffeehouse around 2 am. Girl runs a car into an apartment building's gas meter. Gas hissing out, car still running. Guy chases the girl out into the street. She is dodging around moving cars, yelling "You know I only did it for an accident!"
do you ever have things that someone has said to you that live forever in your head (non-serious edition)? some older boomer hippie guy said “hahmmus gives you fahts” to me 26 years ago at a free fridge and i think of it every fucking single time i buy hummus to this day.
October 27, 2025 at 12:33 PM
12 years old, walking home from the Freight and Salvage coffeehouse around 2 am. Girl runs a car into an apartment building's gas meter. Gas hissing out, car still running. Guy chases the girl out into the street. She is dodging around moving cars, yelling "You know I only did it for an accident!"
Pigeons will not leave NYC in winter, even though it gets hideous and barren, and even though they are perfectly capable of flying and navigating over immense distances. They waddle around in the snow complaining, eating garbage, bundled up, and frumpy. They are quintessential New Yorkers.
October 26, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Pigeons will not leave NYC in winter, even though it gets hideous and barren, and even though they are perfectly capable of flying and navigating over immense distances. They waddle around in the snow complaining, eating garbage, bundled up, and frumpy. They are quintessential New Yorkers.
I am having a crisis of the heart over finding several ai-generated popular songs I like. It makes sense in retrospect. Except for a brief period during the 60s and 70s, pop songs have always been turned out by factories. Someone automated the factory.
October 25, 2025 at 1:16 PM
I am having a crisis of the heart over finding several ai-generated popular songs I like. It makes sense in retrospect. Except for a brief period during the 60s and 70s, pop songs have always been turned out by factories. Someone automated the factory.
Yeats just never takes a Christian turn. Wilde took last rites at the end. Eliot went belly up so fast that it looks like he went out into the waste land looking for Jesus in the first place.
October 25, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Yeats just never takes a Christian turn. Wilde took last rites at the end. Eliot went belly up so fast that it looks like he went out into the waste land looking for Jesus in the first place.
The nice thing about the secret police wearing masks and costumes is that you can see them from blocks away.
We need social media for reporting their locations. Ideally it would send out alerts if they were near.
Hunh. If I have thought of this, someone is likely already doing it.
We need social media for reporting their locations. Ideally it would send out alerts if they were near.
Hunh. If I have thought of this, someone is likely already doing it.
October 24, 2025 at 12:51 PM
The nice thing about the secret police wearing masks and costumes is that you can see them from blocks away.
We need social media for reporting their locations. Ideally it would send out alerts if they were near.
Hunh. If I have thought of this, someone is likely already doing it.
We need social media for reporting their locations. Ideally it would send out alerts if they were near.
Hunh. If I have thought of this, someone is likely already doing it.