All Purls. No Swine.
The lease said about me and my father’s trip from the Bureau of Manhattan to our new home the soonest mended. In some way either I or he got balled up on the grand concorpse and next thing you know we was thretning to swoop down on Pittsfield. Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “‘Shut up, he explained”
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away--Psalm 90:10 Yikes. For those in Rio Linda, I'm talking about an age of seventy years. The date is… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “Three Score Years and Ten”
So long ago. My last post has me reminiscing about a movie which purported to highlight the early life of one of my adored childhood authors, a person who was--later in my life--one of my heroines: Beatrix Potter, feminist icon. (No, that's a bit of a stretch. But boy, howdy what a girl!) Here's a… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “Once Upon A Time”
It was 104 years ago today, on August 18, 1920 that these United States granted all women full voting rights. The vote which put the amendment over the top came from Tennessee which--by just a single vote from representative Harry Burn--moved it forward. (There's a story there, disputed, but a story, nonetheless, related here in… Continue reading Happy Nineteenth Amendment Ratification Day!
To commemorate the 79th anniversary (in the UK) of V-J Day, on August 15, 2024** (funny that it receives barely a mention in the news these days), herewith a couple of family recipes for War Cake, a more-or-less appetizing (de gustibus, and all that) sop to the sweet tooth of the war-weary denizens from the Old… Continue reading Have Your (War) Cake and Eat It, Too
Ah, the bad old days, when the redoubtable and toxically masculine men of the new United States of America would bundle their wimmens, children, and livestock into, in front of, and behind, a Conestoga wagon along with a few possessions and necessities and--heedless of the danger--head off into "Indian Territory," also known as "The West."… Continue reading Batwoman vs Sarah Sturdyskirt
Today, July 27, 2024, is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first flight by what was to become the world's first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet. Almost three years after its 1949 debut, in May of 1952, BOAC (now British Airways) launched the world's first commercial jet-airliner service, flying its Comet 1A between London… Continue reading Celebrating the Early Days of Commercial Jet Flight–By One Who Lived to Tell the Tale
It will be six years ago next Thursday since my stepson Sam died, and I wrote the post below. Today, July 20, 2024, would have been Sam's fifty-ninth birthday: "His family calls him Sam.” It was the afternoon of Monday, December 11, 2017. The phone was ringing, from a number in Pittsburgh that seemed vaguely… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Our Sam
Sigh. https://youtu.be/Kz6pV4uRSc8 Nurse Nellie and not-long-for-this-world US Marine Joe Cable. I have to confess, although I’m really not interested in tying myself too much into knots over it, that it was a bit jarring yesterday to wake up and discover that the young person who’d attempted to assassinate Donald Trump and I share a common… Continue reading How Far Away: Bethel Park SWPA
A few years ago, I wrote a post on "The Great American Novel." What follows, on this, just the eighty-eighth anniversary of the publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind (what a very young country is this United States), is a lightly edited version of that post, and a few remarks on why we… Continue reading From Gone With the Wind to China Beach, The “N-Word” in Popular Culture