“How about a Bible story, kiddies?”
The children were overjoyed to escape from their monotonous captivity, and their mother was too beaten down to impose her will. Down from the loft they plummeted, stumbling on the steps of the ladder, like three half-grown squirrels on the first day of spring. Evelina started to send them back up but stopped
My absence from Fleming.Foundation was initially due to Christmas and the arrival of two our our children, but the prolongation of inertia was the result of an intestinal disease that left most of the family fairly wasted. It matches pretty well the classic symptoms of a noro-virus. The departure of the virus–and the children–has made it possible to return to my labors
My father used to say, always with a note of sadness in his voice, that the curse of politics had even come between the two Sons of Zebedee. Their father—who would be my great-grandfather—had been strongly influenced by his mother, a Scottish woman from Canada, who had communicated some of her reverence for the British Empire to her older son. She had died when James was only eight, and all the boy could recall of his mother was a sickly old woman who complained of the noise he made. When his wife died, her husband lost his loyalty to the...
A Christmas story as told to Chad Rayson. Mr. Rayson sketched this story out some some six or seven years ago, but, when the first draft aroused no interest in the few readers he showed it to, he shelved it and forgot all about it until his memory was triggered by the mention of Sam McGee.
I received from Robert Peters this Christmas gift: a newly discovered Christmas poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, which I am sharing with our readers.
How many remember this nonsensical masterpiece by Walt Kelley?
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
Wisdom comes from knowledge which comes from painfully acquired information about reality—facts. Since, as you say, you have little knowledge of the current political scene and even less of history, your concerns do not really involve rational thought but are a reflection of depression, and unfortunately, this is a mental condition that leads the sufferer to be happy to see, as the French say, “tout en noir”, all in black.
The End-of-the Worlders are going from handwringing over a possibly stolen election–please don’t tell me you know it is stolen in fact because you don’t know anything of the kind–to declaring the death of the American republic. It’s the worst sort of ditto-head approach to politics. It begins by saying, “Say, this is about the best damn country that has ever existed” and go on in the vein of Babbit’s speech to the Zenith Booster Club.
The end of the Ajax is a rhetorical battle over the corpse of Ajax, and, though it is a war of words, it is no less serious than the Homeric conflicts over the battle and armour of a fallen hero. The basic antagonists are three: Teucer, the two Atridae (who make much the same argument, though Agamemnon is more reasonable, perhaps because he is dealing with Odysseus), and Odysseus. Rather than summarize the scene, I’d like to leave it up to the readers to give their response to the following questions: First, what is the nub of each set of...
