All Purls. No Swine.
I remember the day, on Church Lane in Handsworth, at a time very different, in the late 1950s. With my maternal grandparents and my mother. Early church service (the children's service) at St. Mary's. Sermon by the vicar, the Reverend James Charles Harrison Tompkins, he who my father suspected had always had a lifelong infatuation… Continue reading On This Easter Sunday
Sorry, can't do it. You do you. I love you, nonetheless. Twitter, for me, exists only to advertise my many hundreds of Ricochet posts, as this site exists to back them up. I wish such a thing weren't necessary, but since Ricochet has "lost" a number of my posts over the past decade-and-a-half, and since… Continue reading Wasting Time on Twitter
Around the beginning of the second decade of my life (for those of you in Rio Linda, that means I was eleven or so), I was told the story by Bronwyn Davies, my gifted English boarding school history teacher (The Abbey School, Malvern Wells), of “Emperor Frederick,” who–legend has it–had a nameless beggar entombed while… Continue reading Resolved: Lifelong Confusion Over Ginger Fredericks
I can take it from the Commentary podcast people, because they're unabashed Jews. That's who they are. That's what they do. And I listen to them almost every day because--in spite of their acknowledged bias--they often have really interesting things to say. I can take it from Dan Senor, because his podcast is incredibly even-handed… Continue reading Newsflash for Meandering or Ambivalent Gentiles: Yammering at Inordinate Length about Israel Doesn’t Usually End Well for You
He was a staple of my childhood, an awful lot of which depended on audio rather than video, and which was marinated in a culture of literate, clever, often funny, but always appropriate, language. When I was three or four years old, it was exemplified by the likes of Beatrix Potter. And I was never… Continue reading Tom Lehrer, R.I.P.
I doubt that there are many British females of my generation (so sue me, I'm a Boomer, perhaps the last generation with some fairly comprehensive understanding of historical facts, context and consequences that the world may ever see), who wasn't stirred to her bones, in her youth, by the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and… Continue reading Speed, Bonny Boat: At least Bonnie Price Charlie Didn’t Have to Worry About the Quangos or the Disatrously Incompetent CalMac Ferries, Back in the Day
Axios has obtained and released lengthy excerpts from the audio recordings of Joe Biden’s October 2023 testimony before Special Counsel Robert Hur. Here’s just one: https://youtu.be/ugM76taxz2E And there, you have it. A focused, direct, 20-second's worth of question followed by over four minutes of painful, incoherent, and irrelevant rambling. Eventually, as Biden winds down to his… Continue reading A Walk Down Memory Lane: And the “Empathy” Myth
409 years ago this month, we observe the anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, on April 22, 1616. Cervantes' greatest creation, Don Quixote, a lower-class (dare I say deplorable?) fellow who was driven to fantasies of heroism due to his mid-life immersion in, and obsession with, works of knightly valor, remains the most… Continue reading A Missed Opportunity: W.H. Auden and the Lyrics of Man of La Mancha
Whoops. I missed it. Yesterday, November 29, 2024 was the 126th birthday of one of my favorite writers in all of recorded history, Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis. I've written about him often, even when it wasn't his birthday, but today I'm going to do a bit of a rehash of a post from a few… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “To Love is to be Vulnerable”
William the Conqeror WILLIAM THE FIRST was the first of our kings, Not counting Ethelreds, Egberts and things, And he had himself crowned and anointed and blest In Ten-Sixty-I-Needn’t Tell-You-The-Rest But being a Norman, King William the First By the Saxons he conquered was hated and cursed, And they planned and they plotted far into… Continue reading On the 958th Anniversary of the Battle of Hastings