All Purls. No Swine.
A recent post on Ricochet drew attention to the photo currently making the Internet rounds of Joe and Jill and Jimmy and Rosalynn. Here's the photo: Crimenutely. It look as if two Amazons (must they be women?) have invaded a dolls' house. Here's the comment I made on Ricochet (#42, when I finally got round… Continue reading WWE: Jimmy and Rosalynn vs Lunchbox Joe and Dr. Jill
One of very few clever little services I've signed up for on the Internet dished up for me this morning the fact that today, May 6, 2021, is the 161st anniversary of the day that Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail, together with a small army of his Redshirts, from Genoa towards Sicily, as part… Continue reading The Land of Lost Biscuits
Disclaimer, before I even start: I dread the first few weeks of May. Every. Single. Year. It’s one of those stretches of awful memory that many of us have at different times of the year, when it seems that regrets/trauma/cataclysm all pile on top of one another to render certain times insupportable and sometimes just… Continue reading May the Fourth
I originally published this post on Ricochet, on November 4, 2016, five days before the election that put Donald Trump in the White House. It would have been my stepson Michael's forty-ninth birthday. Today, May 2, 2021, is the 19th anniversary of his death. I'd signed up for the month's group writing challenge, which asked… Continue reading Gratitude: For Michael, And Why I’ll Still Be Here A Week From Now
Happy 88th birthday to one of my perennial favorites, the one-and-only (other) red-headed stranger in my life, Willie Nelson. https://youtu.be/iZaZqx9v3dU May your career last another 65+ years, and may you continue to compose instant classics for yourself and others to sing: https://youtu.be/MbnrdCS57d0 https://youtu.be/HMSWAUAKJn0 https://youtu.be/hw5yFbY9k7w https://youtu.be/juyiScREFzQ And the song that always has the same effect on… Continue reading Ain’t It Funny (How Time Just Slips Away)
The year was 1956. I knew something was horribly wrong that night, when Ahmadu dropped the soup! Normally exquisitely self-possessed, immaculately groomed, and imperturbable, our man-servant and friend was disheveled, the color of cement, and shaking like a leaf with acute anxiety and palpable fear. Our little family—myself, Kay, and our imperious eighteen-month-old daughter, known… Continue reading Gagara Yasin
One shortcoming of current machine-learning programs is that they fail in surprising and decidedly non-human ways. A team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students recently demonstrated, for instance, how one of Google’s advanced image classifiers could be easily duped into mistaking an obvious image of a turtle for a rifle, and a cat for some… Continue reading I Know a Hawk From a Handsaw. And a Cat From Some Guacamole
Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been, Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass–innocent, golden, calm as the dawn, The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face. —Walt Whitman Surely it's one of the humblest of spring flowers, and one which… Continue reading Harbinger
Those words were famously spoken by Raymond Donovan, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, after his 1987 acquittal on fraud and grand larceny charges in the State of New York. Perhaps thirty-nine British sub-postmasters posed that question yesterday. (Well not quite thirty-nine, because before some of them got the chance to inquire, they died–their families and themselves… Continue reading “Which office do I go to, to get my reputation back?”
Sure there are. Starting with any that involve frivolous harm to bunnies or other completely innocent four-legged or two-legged living creatures (as is not the case with many makeup and cosmetic brands She does not endorse). Frankly, I've never felt that the softness of the tissue surrounding my eyes, or the fullness of my lips,… Continue reading Are There Any Crazy Science Projects that RWKJ Would Not Support?