All Purls. No Swine.
. . . from Geoffrey Chaucer, who, as with so many other things, is often credited with starting it all. His dream vision poem, The Parliament of Fowls, was written about 1380 and begins with the narrator (who seems not to know how to love, has perhaps never been in love, and will very likely never… Continue reading Happy Seynt Valentyn’s Day!
The church of my childhood was St. Mary’s, Handsworth, just outside Birmingham, in England. Although I probably attended services there only a few dozen times, while we stayed with Granny and Grandpa during my father’s infrequent “leave” periods from the Colonial Service in Nigeria, it was a bulwark of stability in my life. Like the… Continue reading The Power, and the Glory, of the Word
I’ve long thought that some of my better and more interesting posts are ones that I don’t think about much in advance, but which come to me spontaneously, or as a result of something I fall over on the way to looking up other things. (I do realize that your mileage may vary on this… Continue reading Patient Griselda: Perfect Wife, or Credulous Fool?
The other day, I ordered a book from Amazon. It was available in a Kindle format, so I pressed a couple of buttons, and, Wallah!, as they say around here, it was on my device within seconds. Now I don’t mind reading books on a Kindle, and I’m well aware of the amount of shelf space I’ve… Continue reading The Write Stuff
I know many of you know them by heart. I’ve seen some of you say so, on Ricochet, over the past nine years. At some point in your lives, you probably had them thrust at you; you might have struggled through them; maybe you cheated with the Cliffs Notes; perhaps you said you couldn’t possibly… Continue reading Occasional Quote of the Day: The First Eighteen Lines
Imagine yourself, if you will, as an inhabitant of late 14th-century England. You sit somewhere at the lower end of the hierarchy with the king at the top and the villeins and serfs at the bottom. If you’re a man, you’re very likely a farmer, and you and your family live in a two-room (if… Continue reading Reality TV, 1387 Edition
I saw this story the other day, and sent the link to my stepdaughter and sister at approximately the same time as my stepdaughter sent the link to me and my sister, and only a moment or two before my sister sent the link to my stepdaughter and me. The circle of life. Connections. Not quite… Continue reading Shedding Some Light on Those Beastly Dark Ages