Have You Ever Heard of Linda Holmes?

No? Well, have you ever heard of the website Television without Pity? While she was there, she was the snarky wordsmith on several of the most entertaining review strings.

More on Linda in her own words;

Linda Holmes grew up wanting to be a writer, but quit at eighteen because she was too chicken to approach professors to get into college-level writing classes. TRUE STORY! She also discovered that her instinctive enjoyment of picking apart logical problems and human behavior was a good match for the study of law, so she went off to law school. While in law school, she started writing movie reviews on the internet, which nobody cared about except her family and friends and a couple of random fans whose names are lost to history.

She successfully passed the bar exam and became an attorney. She worked for the Minnesota legislature for six years, doing legal analysis and drafting legislation (ask her about the temporary abolition of the Board Of Boxing and why you can’t sell cars in Minnesota on Sundays!). It was during this time that she became a fan of, and then started freelancing for, Television Without Pity, where she had the remarkable good fortune to be assigned The Amazing Race as her very first show.

Those words are from her newly established website, Things What Things.

As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I'll be adding her to the links at the side of my home page -- just so I can save a few steps in finding out what essay she's posted most recently. For example, yesterday her post including this valuable information (valuable for me, because my daughter works in New York City and my son works in Washington, D.C., and the rest of their respective families are nearby):

Instead of the usual Greyhound approach of stopping fairly frequently and taking a long time as a result and costing a lot, Boltbus only goes between a few spots, and it goes express with no stops. In New York, it leaves from a couple of places, one of which is at 33rd and 7th across from Madison Square Garden, only a couple of blocks from the F train. Better yet, it drops off in DC right in front of the Metro Center stop on the D.C. Metro, making it very easy to go wherever you need to go next. I decided to try it out this weekend for a last-minute jaunt to D.C. to see the MS — missed my sis this time, but I’ll get her next time, and it won’t be long, because I LOVE BOLTBUS.

They promote two things about Boltbus very prominently: it’s cheap, and it has wireless. Indeed, even at the very last minute, I paid $40 roundtrip from New York to D.C., and if you have a little more notice, you can get a ticket for $30. Or $20. Or $14. Or, if you book a month or so in advance, $2. That’s right — part of their charm is that they offer a one-dollar fare each way, provided you book early enough. Not many of those two-buck fares are available, I’m sure, but that makes New York to D.C. and back the same price as taking the train from Brooklyn to Rockefeller Center.

Wow, huh? Thanks, Linda! I've got my eye on you (or, rather, your superb wordcraftings) from now on.