Poems of the Week: Two Ballads
How blithe each morn was I tae see
My lass come o’er the hill.
She tripped the burn and ran tae me.
I met her wi good will.
Category: Access
Solzhenitzyn at Harvard After 40 Years
The year 1978 was five years after the Roe vs. Wade abortion-on-demand edict of the Supreme Court, a legal and moral outrage still not revoked. And today even children can access the worst pornography on a cell phone. The American birthrate keeps dropping well below the replacement level. Europe is even worse.
GOP Goes Full Metal Trump Jacket
What’s noteworthy is how both GOP candidates are going over the top identifying with Trump and his issues, while demonizing the other guy as a tool of Pelosi. One Rohrabacher campaign flyer features pictures of him as a young speechwriter standing next to President Reagan; next to that is a picture of Trump. The words highlight three issues: “Leading the fight against illegal immigration….Working to end the unfair ‘Gas & Car Tax’…. Supporting President Trump.”
Wednesday’s Child: Satan in the Details
This is an old story – exactly two years old, to be exact – but I completely missed it when it was unfolding, and something tells me the gentle reader was likewise napping even as mischievous Pan was sounding his pipes. In June 2016 the Alps played host to a variety of dignitaries, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande, and Italy’s Matteo Renzi, at the opening ceremony for the $10 billion St. Gotthard tunnel, at 57 kilometers through solid rock the world’s longest and most ambitious. This six-hour-long theatrical spectacle had been choreographed by a German called Volker Hesse,...
Wednesday’s Child: Question of the Century
I had intended to stay out of politics for a while, what with the Sicilian peach season in full swing and all the rest of nature’s palliatives to hand, but then it occurred to me that unless I have my say on this particular subject, nobody in the whole wide world will. It’s really the question of the century, as far as I’m concerned, and consequently I find few things more astonishing than the unbroken silence surrounding it.
Ransom Notes May 21: The Pope’s Theology of Evil
Pope Francis has once again managed to use a private conversation as an opportunity to make a heretical statement, reserving the right to take it back or fall back on issue clarification, should the storm of outrage prove to be too furious. According to Juan Carlos Cruz, an alleged victim of clerical sexual abuse, the Pope told him : “Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter.“God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care.“The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.” As a matter of course...
Poems of the Week, May 20: Omar Khayam
This is a brief section of Edward Fitzgerald’s famous rendering of the Rubaiyat by the Persian mathematician Omar Khayam VII Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing. VIII Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. IX Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose...
Wednesday’s Child: This Portside of Paradise
When a Negroni cocktail is properly made, it is just the thing to drink sitting in the shade on a sunny day. But when the humble Negroni is made with Punt e Mes instead of ordinary red vermouth, it is more than the cocktail you drink in the shade on a sunny day, it is how you set sail for paradise.
Poems of the Week, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable.
[Between a Rock and a Hard Place] 04-10-18
The only rational argument that this Iranian regime will ever recognize is force majeure
