"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
Someone spilled paint on the highway leading to our house and my poor daughter, driving home in the dark, didn’t see it in time to avoid it. The result was brown paint all down the left side of my car. Fortunately it proved to be latex and Polly was able, with elbow grease and a […]
A reasonably busy morning for a retired person: writing a book review, catching up with friends on Facebook, posting an entry on the hashing blog, answering email from people who want their addresses removed from a list I have nothing to do with, refilling bird feeders, replacing lightbulbs, taking out garbage, rounding up all my […]
Note: I put this post up yesterday and then took it down. It came across all wrong, reading as if I were calling conservatives spiteful and stupid, when in fact I think we’re all spiteful and stupid. What I was really talking about was maturity and childishness, and the pressing need for mature leadership in […]
Last month, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, I joined a chorus of bloggers commenting on what many saw as a connection … not necessarily causal but closely related … between calls to violence from the right and the spate of politically- and ideologically-motivated shootings we’ve seen in our country over the past two […]
Regular readers are aware of my fascination with all things North Korean. I check the Korean Central News Agency site almost every day, and just this morning found this gem: China Strives to Create Sound Social Atmosphere Beijing, February 20 (KCNA) — China intensified the campaign against yellow culture and illegal publications in order to […]
Nancy Nall sums it up perfectly: “It’s just as well that the weekend is coming, as I need to unplug from the internet and stop paying attention to politics for a while. I’m starting to feel that old sourness, the simmer I maintained from roughly 2004 through 2008 … no, through now, that pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling.” […]
Please excuse the silly sibilance of this post’s title. I couldn’t stop my star-spangled self. At the start of yesterday’s Superbowl game they offered up, in effect, two national anthems. Lea Michele sang America the Beautiful and Christina Aguilera sang the by-now traditional Whitney-Houstonized version of The Star-Spangled Banner (she didn’t quite pull it off, […]
When I wrote yesterday’s post, I didn’t know the half of it. Oh, I knew the water and heat were out. That much was obvious. What I didn’t know was that when the water would come back on two pipes would burst, and that we might not have heat again until Monday or Tuesday. The […]