On Monday, August 21, 2017, America will witness one of nature’s grandest spectacles. The “Great American Eclipse,” as it is being called, will be the first total solar eclipse visible from the continental United States since 1979, when a massive … Continue reading →
I think you’ll see why. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s: Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of … Continue reading →
I stopped to eat my sandwich at a rest stop on the western Massachusetts Turnpike one recent weekend. It was a lovely day and the Berkshires a fine place for my little picnic, although I didn’t have time to leave … Continue reading →
Commenter “Stan McQueen” wrote on the Conrad Aiken thread: I was especially touched by the inscription of “Cosmos Mariner-Destination Unknown” on his tombstone, which is in the shape of a bench.. He saw a ship by that name and looked … Continue reading →
Sometimes random associations lead to a post. Earlier today I wrote about a story that’s big in the news: the legal, medical, ethical, and human issues involved in the case of Charlie Gard. While writing it, I noticed that the … Continue reading →
Such as yesterday, when I was wearing a silk blouse and eating something with salad dressing on it, and a couple of drops of oil dripped on my blouse. I’d had that blouse for many years and had nursed it … Continue reading →
No real answer is provided in this Vanity Fair article, although the title [“Why Writers Lie (and Plagiarize and Fabricate and Stretch the Truth and…”)] would have you believe it will offer one. This is the closest it comes, and … Continue reading →
[NOTE: The following is a re-edited and updated version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.] Unbelievable that it’s been eight years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here … Continue reading →
[Hat tip: Fuzzy Slippers at Legal Insurrection.] The NAS (National Association of Scholars) reports on the slant of the books on the typical college reading list given to incoming freshmen to prepare them for the rigors of college study: Hundreds … Continue reading →
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.] I write some poetry from time to time, And gravitate to forms, I must confess. I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme. Free verse can be illusory progress. The … Continue reading →
Remember the Miller Analogies Test? It was one of those “this is to this, as this is to which of these?” tests that supposedly tapped into a person’s logical reasoning ability as well as the person’s knowledge base. Analogies can’t … Continue reading →
I try to follow the general outlines of the current theories of theoretical physics, but it goes without saying that I don’t understand the math, and that I miss a lot of the details. So although I’d never even heard … Continue reading →