Yesterday was an extremely social day, beginning when Irene and I headed over to Maryland for dim sum at New Fortune Chinese Restaurant with Karen Newton, Charlie Newton, and Risa Stewart. Poor Sandy Stewart was stuck home sick—which meant that he ended up with leftovers. He also missed much electronics neepery, because Karen showed off her Kindle and I did the same with my new iPhone.

Since I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I could trust any of my lunch mates, I used my newly downloaded Battlestar Galactica Cylon Detector iPhone app on each of them. Luckily, I discovered that I was surrounded by nothing more than humans.

Then, after an afternoon spent with family, Irene and I took our palates to a different country when we joined a second set of friends for Greek food at the Mykonos Grill. While I enjoyed the meal, the acoustics were such that we could barely hear each other over the din of the other diners, so we headed over to the nearby Borders Books at the White Flint Mall to continue our conversation.

While browsing there, I discovered that a letter of mine had been printed in the latest issue of The Believer, a fun magazine from the good folks over at McSweeney’s. Think of it as a hip New Yorker.

My letter was in response to the article “The Henry Ford of Literature,” by Rolf Potts, which was about Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and his 1920s’ publishing company which managed to put more than 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into circulation. Serendipitously, I’d discovered from my reading of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth at about the same time that the article hit newsstands that H.P. Lovecraft had been a fan of those pamphlets, and dropped the editors a note to pass on to the author, which they decided to publish.

It’s always feels good to be tapped into the zeitgeist …