All Purls. No Swine.
If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help you bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the… Continue reading The Greatest and First Rule: Make Friends With People Who Want the Best For You
…some wretched (and I use the word advisedly) “guest preacher” at Trinity (Cambridge) College Chapel yesterday, who took the opportunity, during the Evensong service, to expatiate on the matter of Jesus’s sexuality while displaying Medieval and Renaissance paintings (from Europe) in which he focused on depictions of Christ’s penis (which are vague and rather amorphous… Continue reading It seems to me that nothing screams “white, eurocentric, privilege” like….
Where were you, if you were, 59 years ago today? I was a fourth grader at the Edward Devotion School in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was 9. My family had been in the USA for 24 days, having flown into Logan Airport on October 29, 1963. I knew that the President of the United States had… Continue reading Lest We Forget
Thomas Herbert Mapson was my Auntie Betty’s father. (Strictly speaking, she wasn’t my auntie–being my great-grandmother’s niece–and her given name wasn’t Betty–they were Jenny Alice May–but “close enough for gubmint work,” as they say. He was born and baptized in Bilston, Staffordshire in the UK, on July 4, 1878. Given what I’ve found out about my… Continue reading In Memory, Thomas Herbert Mapson
A Ricochet post from four years ago, on November 10, 2018. Reposted today, November 10, 2022, in honor of the 247th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Some months ago, a United States Marine Corps career officer of my acquaintance observed that, for a foreigner, for a civilian, and for a woman, I seem… Continue reading United States Marines I Have Known and Loved–And a Couple of Others
First they came for the meat: A [London ] university has banned the sale of beef in campus food outlets in order to help tackle the climate emergency; Could Scotland Ban Meat? Parliament Considers Petition to Transform the Food System. But many of my neighbors raise and process their own pigs, beef, and chickens and are happy… Continue reading Merry Holiday Christmas Shopping in the UK!
So. Today's "Google Doodle" is (God knows why) on the subject of "Jollof Rice." Jollof Rice is a staple of West African (particularly Nigerian) cuisine, and it is--along with such stuff as fried plantains and groundnut chop, that with which I grew up. I've never found a recipe since, which approximated my hazy memories of… Continue reading Jollof Rice!
This weekend brings on that most British of holidays–Bonfire Night–Guy Fawkes Night–the Fifth of November. The holiday that, when I was a kid, was exponentially bigger than Halloween, as for a few days before, children would push around a wheelbarrow laden with a straw-stuffed effigy of Guido Fawkes, usually dressed in their father’s cast-offs or… Continue reading A Guy Fawkes Thought Experiment
...is, in my own mind, a grown--even elderly--man who establishes a social media account on a popular platform, and who not only uses a pseudonym to conceal his identity (something there's a pretty good precedent for in American history), but who then also "protects" his effusions from all those but the vanishingly few whom he's… Continue reading The Very Definition of Evil…