"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
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 […]
Strange, I thought the great drought of 2011 would strike the Southwestern US during the hottest months, not the coldest. We’re on the edge of that arctic air mass that drifted down from Canada and is flash-freezing the midwestern US, and last night our temperatures went down into the teens (Fahrenheit teens, that is, for […]
Positive bloggage fallout: a cousin I haven’t seen since the late 1950s discovered this site and established contact. Nice. Along the way my blog has helped me reconnect with former co-workers and school friends. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s always a pleasant surprise. There are other kinds of fallout. I blogged […]
I make a dish called pasta puttanesca; literally, “whore’s spaghetti.” The sauce is made of olive oil, garlic, anchovies, chopped tomatoes, capers, basil, and perhaps a few olives, tossed into pasta. Last night, since I was about to sit down to watch President Obama deliver the annual State of the Union address to an assembly […]
Up and at ’em early this morning. A dog to water, feed, and walk, a bicycle to ride, an old friend from Las Vegas showing up in the early afternoon, a party at another friend’s house this evening. But first, a little blogging. Like everyone else, I watched the televised memorial for the victims of […]
I’ve said my piece on Gabrielle Giffords and the Tucson shootings. I’ve said what I believe to be true and laid out the things I’m going to do to help, in my small way, make my country a more civil place. I’ll be watching the Tucson memorial service on TV tonight; with President Obama and […]
I’m getting some hits over two previous posts (Gabrielle Giffords and Political Violence). As is often the case, the criticisms were emailed directly to me rather than left here as blog comments. Which ordinarily would mean you wouldn’t get to see them. It seems a bit like censorship to me, getting reasoned criticism from friends, […]