November 2020
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Not about, but on the occasion of: the complaint I made last year about the thing called "Holiday": The American Christmas has always, or at least since the middle of the last century or so, had its secularized aspect. That was fine: we were a predominantly Christian country, but plenty of people who did not…
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Several years ago someone recommended Hedgehog here. I had seen ads for it and bits of essays and thought it was worth a try, so I subscribed. It's a little expensive, and I probably wouldn't have ventured if I hadn't gotten some kind of promotional discount offer. I was somewhat disappointed, not because the…
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After this first paragraph, this is something I posted on Facebook a week or so ago. Before hard disk space became so cheap, I backed up a lot of mp3 files to cd. I've kept them and there are dozens of them, each with typically at least 100 tracks, if it's pop music. Sometimes I…
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On the weekend of November 6, i.e. the weekend after the election, my wife and I made an overnight trip to my ancestral homeland of northern Alabama. It's a 5 1/2 hour drive at least, more if you make more than the minimal stops, so we usually listen to an audio book on the way…
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Andrew McCarthy is an experienced and knowledgeable lawyer, and also a Trump supporter. He was the "yes" in that "yes-no-maybe" note about voting for Trump that I posted a few weeks ago. Like a lot of reasonable people, he thinks there are good grounds for believing that there was some cheating by the Democrats in…
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(1) Those like the man who erected this sign, which is highly visible from I-65, a highway I travel often. (2) Those who see the sign and are indignant and say "That's so stupid. Can you believe there are such idiots in the world? I'm embarrassed that I live in this state." (3) Those who…
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An angel came to me and said, "Ok, here's our best offer: Biden wins the presidency, and the Republicans keep the Senate." I didn't have to think for very long. No more Trump craziness, from Trump himself, from his enemies, from his supporters. And the damage the Democrats can do will be severely limited. "I'll…
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I have a prejudice against ballet music. It's probably not uncommon: I call it a prejudice, but I could fairly maintain that it's a rational judgment. By its nature the music is episodic and tied to a story, or at least a series of scenes or tableaux, which are meant to be seen in conjunction…
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Just a note to say that in an effort to get control of the amount of time I spend online, and to focus on some writing I'm trying to do, I'm making it a rule for myself to stay off the net until noon every day. So I won't see comments made in the morning…
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Somewhere or other, sometime or other, I read that G.K. Chesterton, asked whether he was a liberal, answered that he was “the only liberal.” I sometimes feel that way. I long ago acquiesced to the fact that in the American political context I’m more or less correctly classified as a conservative. But as the so-common-as-to-be-hackneyed…
Light On Dark Water 