• Chopin: Ballade #2

    Weekend Music Several years ago my friend Robert sent me a CD of the Chopin Ballades played by Krystian Zimerman. It disappeared among a welter of home-burned CDs that I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of, and then was forgotten, until Robert mentioned it to me a few weeks ago. I found…

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  • "kidney impaired function" says "This genuinely answered my own problem, thank you!" Of course I'm always happy to help, but the post was about the Zimmerman-Martin case. 

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  • Time continues to speed up unacceptably. And yet I am obliged to accept it. I thought it was about three weeks ago that pasted the URL for this piece on America's web site into a blog post template intending to write about it later. Actually it was almost two months ago, on June 28. But…

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  • "As the bottom of the shoes, it contacts with ground closely and directly."

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  • The Belligerent Spambot

    "Cain Velasquez, like you said (last year), I'm going to come back and I'm going to take my belt again."

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  • Elmore Leonard, RIP

    The New York Times has one of many obituaries. I've read three of his novels: The Hunted, Killshot, and Bandits, in that order. Bandits was a book on tape, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I liked it a bit less than the other two. But I thought…

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  • Only one thing ever makes you safe–putting your trust in God. –Caryll Houselander

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  • Signed itself "renal failure."

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  • Yes, as I may or may not have said in that long piece about Lovecraft last week, I had decided after those three novellas that I didn't need to read any more Lovecraft now, and perhaps not ever. But one day I needed something to read while eating lunch and the only reading matter I…

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  • Alas for me! For I have beheld the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, which dwelt in the red cooler in the kitchen. Full many and many a dark aeon, even since the Fourth of July, had it brooded in darkness, forgotten of men and nurturing the impious vengeance merited by that forgetting, and gathered unto itself certain…

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