All Purls. No Swine.
It took place 50 years ago today. I was twenty years old, and in college. I don't pretend to an exhaustive understanding of the history, but I remember it as the end of the Vietnam War, and as what has become, in the popular understanding, the largely undeserved disgrace of the United States. I knew… Continue reading The Fall of Saigon
409 years ago this month, we observe the anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, on April 22, 1616. Cervantes' greatest creation, Don Quixote, a lower-class (dare I say deplorable?) fellow who was driven to fantasies of heroism due to his mid-life immersion in, and obsession with, works of knightly valor, remains the most… Continue reading A Missed Opportunity: W.H. Auden and the Lyrics of Man of La Mancha
Mostly a reposting, from last year. Time marches on, but the message (if you're sane) doesn't change: My maternal Great Granny was a fearsome old bat. She was born in 1869, just four short years after the US Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. She died a few months before Neil Armstrong walked… Continue reading Easter 2025: On Silk Purses, Sow’s Ears, and Horse’s Asses
Happy 127th birthday, darling Granny. (Some lightly-edited content from a few years ago, together with some more recent and raw reflections): I had my last conversation with Granny (my mother’s mother) not too long before she died. She was in her late-eighties at the time, almost bedridden from the terrible arthritis that had plagued her… Continue reading Wisdom from My Granny, 2025
Well, no, actually, it isn't. But the following post, which was first published quite a few years ago on Ricochet, seems germane again, given the situation in the city of my birth, which would be Birmingham, (historically--at least in part) Warwickshire, The United Kingdom. Lord. There hasn't been a "bin" (garbage) collection in Britain's second… Continue reading It’s National “Hug A Rat Catcher Day!”
Here's wishing Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an only slightly belated, and very happy, four-hundred seventy-fifth birthday as of yesterday, April 12. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, succeeding to his position as Earl when he was only eight years old, and he kept the side up by… Continue reading Noblesse Oblige: “My Lord, I had quite forgott the fart.”
Oh, to be in England, Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England – now!! In general, and despite my childhood infatuation with the… Continue reading Thoughts of Abroad, From Home, in April, 2025
The Pied Piper of Hamelin is one of my least favorite childhood stories, one so redolent of evil--with overtones of perversity-- that I pretty much deep-sixed it to the memory hole of my life, absent unusual circumstances which occasionally and repugnantly bring it to mind for one reason or another. If you’re not familiar with… Continue reading Reflections on “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
The quote in the title is from As You Like It, and it contains a lot of wisdom, but that’s not really the quote of the day. So, April Fool! Today’s actual quote of the day comes from Charles Lamb, who was born in 1775, in London, to a middle-class lawyer’s clerk and his wife, in… Continue reading Quote of the Day 2025: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”