• RA Lafferty If I could write like this man that's how I'd be earning my living. His The Reefs of Earth (a link to its Amazon.com sales page) is my all-time favorite book to give to friends, so I buy every copy I find when cruising the used bookstores for intelligent writing. He writes about BIG hairy people, with appetites and adventures to match.
  • Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914/07/11 — 2002/03/19)
  • R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page
  • Alpha Ralpha Boulevard: R.A. Lafferty
• Dorothy Parker Everything I learned about dealing with adversity started with "Dottie". Her picture "Dottie at 50" once looked down from my cubicle wall at work. [Beautiful, wasn't she? Like Rodin's She Who Was the Helmet-Maker's Beautiful Wife (description) or his closely related La Belle Heaulmiere (The Old Courtesan) 1885, Bronze (description) the fire and beauty of youth burns brightly through the ravages of time.] Every life should contain a couple of tragedies. Mine? I was too young for Dottie, and I'm too old for Christina Ricci.
  • Dot City: Dorothy Parker's New York
  • Constant Reader Home: A Dorothy Parker Biography This biography of Dottie seems to be among the missing for now, but the site in general still lives, though with little remaining homage to Dottie: Constant Reader Home
  • Dorothy Rothschild Parker (1893-1967) -- some of her quotes Also among the missing, but web searching can help find Dotty quotes.
    • Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off, and the ground all mucked up with plants.

        FIGHTING WORDS             |           (untitled?)
                                   |  
Say my love is easy had,           |  There's little in taking or giving,
  Say I'm bitten raw with pride,   |    There's little in water or wine:
Say I am too often sad --          |  This living, this living, this living,
  Still behold me at your side.    |    Was never a project of mine.
                                   |  Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
Say I'm neither brave nor young,   |    The gain of the one at the top,
  Say I woo and coddle care,       |  For art is a form of catharsis,
Say the devil touched my tongue -- |    And love is a permanent flop,
  Still you have my heart to wear. |  And work is the province of cattle,
                                   |    And rest's for a clam in a shell,
But say my verses do not scan,     |  So I'm thinking of throwing the battle -
  And I get me another man!        |    Would you kindly direct me to hell?
                 -- Dorothy Parker |                           -Dorothy Parker

• Bjarne Stroustrup One person can change the world. All it takes is brains and persistence. Bjarne Stroustrup's Homepage and a Photo of Bjarne in his office.
• Robert Sedgewick Half of what I know about creating swift-running code came out of his Algorithms . The other half is lost in the mists of time. Here's his home page and a photo of him.
• Charles F. Goldfarb Another world-shaker. Without his SGML, there would be no HTML, thus no world-widening Web in its present form, to name just one of the wonderful things encoded per SGML. And it only took him twelve years to get SGML from "I have created it" to "it is an accepted standard". Here is the home page for Charles F. Goldfarb and SGML, and the best of several available Charles F. Goldfarb photos.
• Ricky Buchanan is Not Done Living! Ace Lightning says this lady is one of her heros. Who am I to argue with Ace, who is one of mine?

This page, maintained by
Kent Paul Dolan
xanthian@well.com ,  
was last updated
20041027.