Khushwant Singh, and some time off.

It is exceedingly rare for me to take time off from work and then stay at or near home, rather than get out of town as quickly as my legs and finances will carry me, but between now and Easter, that's exactly what I'll be doing.

The intent is neither rest nor recreation, but making time for tackling numerous bureaucratic and organizational tasks (no, my taxes are finished, thank you very much) by putting one 800-lb stress gorilla (work) on hold while vanquishing another, which might loosely be characterized as home and family projects. At least, this is the fond hope. Two good weeks, and maybe I can whip it.

Whip it good, in fact.

Readers, wish me luck. Organizational skills are not a personal strong suit, so it will require sheer force of repetition (as usual) to get ducks in a row, cats herded, and whatever other anthropomorphic references I'm forgetting.

I'm not sure how much time there'll be during the next two weeks for blogging and my customary poison pen rabblerousing. Dire warnings of content reduction have been issued previously, to no effect. I'll probably make time, anyway. Finding the chance to write is perhaps the one bit of time management I do quite well, to the annoyance of many.

For your edification this Monday morning, consider this obituary in The Economist. Before reading it in the print edition, I'd never heard of Khushwant Singh. Now I wish I'd have met him.

Khushwant Singh: India’s gadfly

Khushwant Singh, India’s pre-eminent gadfly, died on March 20th, aged 99

 ... His Hindustan Times column, widely syndicated, was eventually called “With Malice Towards One and All”. Singly and collectively he shot them down: the power-crazed politicians, the Hindutva fanatics, the “barbaric” mullahs of Pakistan, empty-headed Bollywood stars, commercialised cricket, modern cricket fans with their bugles and firecrackers, and the bare-bottomed defecators who lined city avenues in the mornings. Poetry and jokes leavened the invective. If he ran out of “loud-mouthed, sweaty, smelly” Indians to pillory there was the country itself, impossible India, like an overcrowded room or a swarming dung-heap—though, affectionately, “my dung-heap”.

At LouisvilleBeer.com: " Conformity, contrarianism and a craft writing symposium."

Follow the link to read the whole essay at LouisvilleBeer.com, where my beer columns appear weekly on Monday morning. It's a high honor to be included among the beer biz luminaries at the symposium, and that's no joke. If it wasn't so damned cold, I'd consider costuming as Socrates. Perhaps a hockey jersey will do the trick.

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Conformity, contrarianism and a craft writing symposium. by Roger Baylor

In my stray jigsaw-puzzle-piece of the planet, the coming weekend is utterly devoted to the city of Lexington, Kentucky.

I never once thought I’d write that sentence, but Lexington is where my mother attended the University Of Kentucky, which is hosting an event called “Craft Writing: Beer, The Digital, and Craft Culture,” among whose participants I have been included by the symposium’s organizer, Jeff Rice.