All Purls. No Swine.
Lord. I remember, as a child and adolescent, Cliff Richard being the quintessentially British pop star. Better (and bigger) than the Beatles. He never really made it in the States, where his closest brush with fame came in the mid-1970s with something called "Devil Woman." Not really one of my faves, as I wasn't sure… Continue reading Triangulations (Apologies to Sir Cliff Richard)
Well now Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts They were true as a blue blue sky--The Ballad of Frankie and Johnny, Sammy Cahn and Johnny Green Apparently, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp met during the filming of The Rum Diary, a movie based on the Hunter S. Thompson book of the same name. Depp was, it… Continue reading The Ballad of Amber and Johnny: Make it Stop. Please.
Well, there's the Wayne Newton original, which probably should come with a trigger warning, if only because of his execrable German pronunciation: https://youtu.be/0m_giioppT4 And then there's the karaoke music. You're welcome to sing along with my revised lyrics: https://youtu.be/DNL6I-NMhTw Schadenfreude, darling, schadenfreude I find myself feeling overjoyed. Blogging site, on the Internet Was the place… Continue reading The Joys of Schadenfreude
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
Almost 60 years ago, somewhere early in 1964 to be exact, my family and I were living in a crummy little apartment building on Babcock Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. We'd been in the USA for only a few months, having arrived three weeks before JFK was shot. I was in the fourth grade, attending Edward… Continue reading A “Fully-Documented” Alien Dares to Comment on “A Great American Novel”
Tradition has it that, on April 23 in AD 303, a young and promising Roman soldier in the army of the Emperor Diocletian was beheaded after gruesome torture, and died professing his Christian faith to the end. Very little is known of his life, but it’s believed he was born into a devout Christian family,… Continue reading A Bloody Cross
Full disclosure: I'm 67 years old. This upcoming September (2022), I'll be 68. No point pretending otherwise. No point writing posts either celebrating--or bemoaning--my "hotness" in a previous life about half-a-century ago (so I'll spare you the bikini-beach-babe pic, unless you're really determined to view it, in which case knock yourself out). Things are what… Continue reading Semper Fi! My Marine Corps Tulips. And Some Other Stuff As Well.
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!”
On this April 16, 2022, a day that would have been my grandmother Molly's 124th birthday, I bring back a post originally published five years ago today, on Ricochet. Nothing's changed. My grandmother Molly could be a rather stern old lady. She was born when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, on April 16,… Continue reading On Granny. Oh, and On Chocolate, Too. And a Few Other Things As Well
For this Good Friday, a post from days of yore. The buns are in the oven as we speak. I'm trying a different recipe, one from Mary Berry, this year. I'll report back! Hot Cross Buns! A Good Friday tradition I don’t always adhere to but which, for many reasons, this year I thought I… Continue reading “One a penny, two a penny…Hot Cross Buns!”