"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Feeding body and soul
I’m sitting here with my Deskbuddy™ 1.0, enjoying the quiet afternoon that comes after a busy Friday night and Saturday morning. Polly went on a date earlier in the week, and last night the young man (her age, twice divorced, with children … but hey, young to us) dropped by to visit Polly and her […]
I was going to lead off with this article from Wonkette, then follow it with a satirical headline of my own: Arizona GOP Announces Emancipation Day “Slave Auction” with Prize for Best Black-Face Costume And then I read the original article, and of course the event isn’t being held “in memory of the Gabby Giffords […]
A friend lent me two hard science fiction novels, one sword & sorcery fantasy novel, and one Arthurian romance. I thought I’d enjoy the hard sci-fi (and I do) but her brand new paperbacks are in such perfect condition I’m afraid to open the pages wide enough to read because I’ll crease the books’ spines […]
It was enormously disappointing to watch Jon Stewart fluffing Mau Mau Mike Huckabee on Wednesday’s Daily Show. Oh, Stewart gently nibbled at him about his support for right-wing fundamentalist David Barton, but he didn’t challenge any of his evasive answers. He didn’t mention Huckabee’s advocacy of religious indoctrination at gunpoint, nor did he bring up […]
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 […]
Last week I got an urgent message from the fine folks at WordPress, telling me I needed to upgrade to the latest WP release lest a security flaw in the version I was currently using bite me in the ass. They sounded genuinely concerned, so I figured I’d better do it. I’ve never forgotten the […]
This is Sinterklaas, the Dutch Santa. Formerly the Archbishop of Turkey, Sint Nicolaas, Sinterklaas is shown with two of his Zwarte Pieten (there are six to eight Zwarte Pieten — “Black Petes” — originally Moorish slaves, but today more gently described as servants or even companions). Sinterklaas arrives in The Netherlands each November by steamboat […]