"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Our friend Darrell makes the most wonderful cards. I’ll never forget the one he made for our daughter Polly on her birthday a couple of years ago — it was a small shoebox, and when Polly lifted the lid off there was suspended from it a mobile made of small objects and photos of Polly […]
A zippier title for this post would be State Secrets & Shit Lists, but I’ll refrain. The way the authoritarians in our midst are calling for Julian Assange’s assassination, I can’t help thinking of Orwell’s 1984, where the citizens of Oceania turned to their viewscreens once a day for the Two Minutes Hate directed against […]
On this day in 1965, Australia and New Zealand exchanged instruments of ratification for an agreement on a limited free trade area. In the USA, the top song on the popular music charts was The Supreme’s I Hear a Symphony. In Wiesbaden, Germany, two frightened 19-year-olds exchanged vows. Of the three events, the most momentous […]
My Nook e-reader came with a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Although prudishly Edwardian, it’s still a great read, full of fascinating vampire lore. I thought I knew all that stuff from movies I’d watched as a kid, but after reading the original, I realize the movies got a lot of it wrong. Since reading […]
My previous post was about our roller coaster leadup to Thanksgiving. Things got better, as they so often do, and after the excitement of Thanksgiving eve, we enjoyed a peaceful and happy Thanksgiving day. We try to count our blessings every day, but some days we’re really struck by how fortunate we are. Here are […]
Update (11/24/10, 4:45 PM): Thanksgiving has been saved! The electrician came, and the house is rewired for a double oven. The appliance store tech came but couldn’t fix the oven. And he wasn’t going to do anything about it until Friday. No way, we said, and it turned out an almost identical double oven was […]
Which is exactly what I did. And here it is: I was recently tagged with a Facebook survey. The instructions were to go through a list of 50 books, indicating which ones I’d read. The list was a mess: classics mixed with airport trash; books every schoolchild should have read mixed with Oprah-esque book club […]
A conservative book-banner’s question: why can’t our school libraries be filled with lofty thoughts written by dead white men again? And here’s the expected pinko response. Books the right would cheerfully ban. An old (1994) essay by conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, saying there’s no such thing as book-banning in the USA. I’m calling bullshit. If […]