All Purls. No Swine.
Well. Lugubrious Joe and Gurning Anthony notwithstanding, 2021 proceeds apace, and we’re on the cusp of closing out its first quarter.** Yikes. But before we do, here's St. Patrick’s Day, not a big seller in the land of my birth, but huge in the two areas I’ve lived in, in my adopted country–Boston and Pittsburgh.… Continue reading Food And Drink Post: Weirdest Holiday Foods Edition
EVERY YEAR, about October/November a cattle tax of one-shilling-a-head was levied on every bull, steer, cow or calf throughout all the cattle-holding provinces of Northern Nigeria. This was in accordance with the principle that in order to establish sovereignty of the Crown, every adult in the territory had to pay an appropriate yearly tax to… Continue reading JANGALI, 1947
Thomas Mallare, of Newbold Revel in the County of Warwickshire, died 550 years ago on March 14, 1471. He was born fifty-six years before that, with a bit of a silver spoon in his mouth, to a Midlands Justice of the Peace and his heiress wife. Mallare had an uneventful childhood, was knighted in 1441… Continue reading An Unlikely Troubadour; An Unexpected Gift
Before Portland, OR, became the upscale city mocked in Portlandia, it was a down-at-the-heels lumber town and port hard hit by the Great Depression. Its transformation began in World War II, when Portland and its cross-river companion, Vancouver, became major shipbuilding centers in the shipyards established by Henry Kaiser. These produced ships by the score:… Continue reading Book Review by Seawriter: Liberty Factory
From the Wikipedia entry on the World Wide Web (emphasis added): While working at CERN, [Tim] Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers. On March 12, 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled “Information Management: A Proposal“, to the management at CERN for a system called “Mesh” that referenced ENQUIRE, a database… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Dub Dub Dub!
Mr. Right was fond of saying, at the time of change of seasons, that there was always a day when you could "tell." A day when a hint of frost told you that Winter was here, or a day when a certain damp chilliness announced that Summer had fled and Autumn was on its mellow… Continue reading Spring, 2021
In terms of British history and society, "Waity Katy" Middleton scaled a far greater obstacle in her path to marriage to an English prince than that of racism. She overcame the "class" distinction. Her parents were from upper-middle -class families--not "noble," not even "aristocratic"--and they met while he was working as an air traffic controller… Continue reading Classy Kate vs Princess Pushy
Thanks to you, I feel no need to go back to "pointless, incessant barking." Whether that means I'm engaged in "pointful, incessant barking," or "pointless intermittent barking," I'll leave it to you to decide. Have at it. This blog exists for two reasons; first because I think, on rare occasions, I have something worthwhile to… Continue reading A Huge “Thank You” to Readers of my Blog
One of the enduring memes (if we had had such a word to describe them at the time) of my childhood would have been my Dad's invocation of the "gremlin in the petrol tank." He was prone to bring it up in any situation where something unexpected happened and a thing that was supposed to… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Dad: The “Gremlin in the Petrol Tank” Edition
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; for at a minimum, to love or hate someone is to have intense emotions toward them.--Elie Wiesel He would know. Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust victim who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald before the latter camp was liberated by the the US Army in April,… Continue reading On Love, Hate, and Indifference