• Brian Eno: This

    Weekend Music A few days ago I wanted to hear something different on my way to work, so I picked up a CD more or less at random from a group that I was using several years ago, before I got an external hard drive, to back up my mp3 files. Each CD contains a…

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  • Well, of course he does

    Bill Clinton Pulls the Race Card. I just can't stand the guy. Arguably he was a less-bad president than Obama, but I can't stand him. It's partly the unctuous-preacher/redneck-playboy smarm that's so irritating. As I've probably said here before, I can see him playing the Bible salesman in a movie of Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country…

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  • A Drowned Forest

    A fascinating story from the Sunday paper, by environmental reporter Ben Raines: it seems that the sea-floor-shifting power of Hurricane Katrina exposed the remains of an old cypress forest, now 60 feet (roughly 20 meters) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and 10 miles (16km) from land. In other words, 10,000 years or…

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  • Whittaker Chambers, in Witness, describing the time he spent working on a streetcar line in Washington (D.C.), ca. 1920: There was one job that every man dreaded. The two third rails hung, just below the surface of the street, in a shallow tunnel. It could not have been more than four feet deep. The concrete…

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  • My Word (A Letter to the Editor) I'm afraid this isn't going to be of great interest to most people. It's something I've been wanting to do for several months, but couldn't find time for, so I decided to devote to it the time I would ordinarily have spent working on the SNJ. The local…

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  • Weekend Music Dylan has a new album, Tempest,  coming out in a week or so, and this video for one of the songs was released a few days ago. I really hadn't planned on buying the album, but I like this song. Be warned that the video takes a rather violent turn somewhere past the…

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  • "French Pessimism Nears All-Time High"

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  • …that when someone describes himself as an ethicist you should run away? Especially if he refers to "the ball and chain of our squeamishness and irrationality." "expert in practical ethics" indeed.

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  • Storm-ravaged

    My front yard, as of about fifteen minutes ago; the haze in the middle is a result of the lens fogging up when brought from the air-conditioned house to the very humid outdoors: So Isaac, having barely attained hurricane strength, has bypassed us and headed for Louisiana instead. Unless something changes drastically, this will prove…

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  • A Little Quiz

    Q: What vice-president of the United States wrote the melody of a song that you probably know, and really should like if you do know it? A: [Click here.] And click here to hear the song.

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