All Purls. No Swine.
The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance. The author of these words was born Amelia Jenks, on May… Continue reading On Late Bloomers
Am I the only person on planet Earth who finds the alleged proffering, by Elon Musk to his contract employee, of…umm…a horse in return for doubling down on her sexual favors towards him, more than a little ridiculous? Good. I hoped not. On the other hand, perhaps not so ridiculous (I always try to pay attention… Continue reading A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a Horse!
A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy--Elon Musk To be perfectly clear, I'm not a diehard Elon Musk fan. He's an interesting fellow who doesn’t fit into any convenient box that we’d like to put him into. We in the UK used to… Continue reading Quote of the Day: May I Live To See It
It’s true that I haven’t been able to find a single source pointing me to the place where the putative author of today’s quote said exactly these words, even in translation (perhaps someone could help me out). But they are widely attributed to St. Augustine, and certainly embody the spirit of his Easter Reflections, an… Continue reading “We are an Easter People, and Alleluia is our song!”
...so then is vice its own punishment," The first part of today's conditional QOTD can be traced back to ancient times and (at the least) the Stoic meditations of Epictetus in which he wrote "the reward of virtue is in the acts of virtue." IOW--if you do something good for others (a virtuous act) there's… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “If Virtue is its Own Reward…
Unlike many these days, I don’t pretend to know exactly what’s going to happen in Ukraine over the short and long term. My own position is that Russia has invaded a sovereign country that has just as much right to make its own way as does any other, and that that fact in and of… Continue reading Russian Soldiers: “We were deceived and used like meat shields”
Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head--Esther Lederer Yes, it's true. The phrase "living rent-free in [someone's] head" was coined, not by the late Rush Limbaugh--who probably did more to popularize it over the past two decades than any single individual--but by a petite Jewish woman born in Sioux… Continue reading On Resentment and Rental Space
I learned that little Polish phrase from the late Mr. She, not very long after I met him, on a day when we were swapping stories about our eccentric and (in wholly different ways) exceptional families. It’s one of the few (SFW) bits of Polish I know, and I say it with great determination and… Continue reading Rosyjskie Diabły
Well, OK. Einstein was wrong. (I say this because I refuse to believe, just because I indulge this particular sort of repetitive behavior--always believing that, next time, when the end comes I'm going to weather the storm without incident--that I’m insane. Obtuse, stubborn, and human, perhaps. But not insane.) Shortly before Christmas, it fell to… Continue reading Giving My Heart (Just Once More) For a Dog to Tear
So there I was a day or two ago, still in the rather miserable late stages of recovering from Covid, snuggled under the heated blanket with Psymon sitting on my lap (not so much, TBPC, because it was my lap, but because–heated blanket–hello?), watching an old episode of NCIS which had fetched up on one… Continue reading “Close Your Eyes. Think of Everything Good”