Hello Blogosphere - I know I'm late to the party

As America's most obsessed amateur Moby-Dick scholar living in the midwest the first question I always get is this -

"Why did Herman Melville name his Great American Novel after a defunct Minneapolis Bar?"

That's a damn good question - I never was here for the tenure of the famously raucous dump known as "Moby Dick's." In fact I didn't moved here until many years after the "home of a whale of a drink" went out of business but in homage to the stories I hear from the aging drunks in this town - apparently it was such a great bar that I felt the only respectable thing to do as a Moby-Dick fan and transplant to Minneapolis was to go on E-Bay and buy a MOBY DICK's Bar T-shirt. - (picture to follow) - And I think I paid 10 bucks in shipping so it could be sent 3 miles from Golden Valley  - BUT - the T-shirt is great... grey - XL and brand new- never worn but for some odd reason it reeks of patchouli. Which BTW is a terrible smell and historically patchouli is only used to cover up other smells which leaves me to wonder - WTF smelled worse in your thin-walled townhome alongside a stripmall in Golden Valley than that? (But i digress...)

Oh - and so you don't completely not learn anything today - here's a better first question -

"When do you use the hyphen when typing  Moby-Dick?"

The answer to that that I've learned is simple - if you're talking about the great American novel that is Herman Melville's masterpiece than u better use the hyphen -

If you are describing the actual whale inside the book then you leave it out -

Don't know why but             BOOK = HYPHEN

                                            WHALE = NO HYPHEN

Easy enough rule which I will certainly F' Up in the writing of this blog many many times.....

Oh - and Mom if you're reading - My language isn't the best either - but on that note I recently learned that there are many meanings of the word "tinker" - most derogatory - you can google it yourself - but funny enough that there's a term called a "Tinker's Curse"- which basically means "a curse that doesn't mean shit because Tinkers curse so much"

Great definition!

Welcome to my blog - 

Come with me while I profanely dissect and discuss the bloated gas-bag of a novel that I love so much that is Moby-Dick.

Thanks for joining me -

JTM