November 2010
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…to laugh when I saw this headline?
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I was about halfway through writing at 9 or so last night when I decided I really ought to check on some things at work, having managed to ignore them since last Wednesday. I found that the database software on my main system had locked up, and spent the rest of the evening, until way…
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I don't suppose anyone who is at all interested needs my encouragement to go see this, but if you're undecided: it's really good. My wife and two of our adult children went to see it last night, and we all liked it, including Clare, who grew up with the books and loved them. I really…
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Weekend Music This is rather late for the usual weekend music post, because I’ve been busy with Thanksgiving-related activities, and I was just going to skip doing it this week, but my friend Robert sent me a link to this appreciation of the Lionel Hampton/Sonny Burke/Johnny Mercer song “Midnight Sun,” including a clip of Ella…
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Well, the Alabama-Auburn game, aka the Iron Bowl (because it used to be played in Birmingham, which was built on the iron and steel industry) is coming up tomorrow. For those who haven’t been around Auburn and Alabama fans, which I expect is almost everyone who reads this blog, this piece will give you a…
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The existence of language is one of the many phenomena—of which love and music are the two strongest—which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. —A.N. Wilson
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Weekend Music Well, the music by married couples, or bands including married couples, theme has pretty much run its course. I’m down to couples who weren’t happily married and got divorced long ago, and/or whose music I’m not that crazy about. I’m afraid I never liked Fleetwood Mac a great deal, at least in their…
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From the moment that man died on the cross, the word sacrifice became a huge word, a great word, and it revealed—as when the sun rises, like a sun that rises—that the whole life of every man is woven of sacrifices, is full of shudders of sacrifice, is, as it were, dominated by the need…
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I think this thesis of this piece, that "Sarah Palin's happiness is what really irks liberals," is only partly true. Her detractors can present much more solid reasons for finding her an objectionable political personality. But there's probably a little something to it. For an awful lot of people who are on what I call the…
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“Mahler’s childhood was not idyllic: His first composition (age six) was a Polka with an introductory Funeral March.” —James Penrose, reviewing a new book about Mahler in the November New Criterion (not available online except to subscribers)
Light On Dark Water 