March 2006
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We're in Washington D. C., this week and inadvertently wandered by the Mayflower Hotel. A memory: in July of 1952, I stayed at the Mayflower for a few days with my father's sister, my peripatetic and eccentric Aunt Mollie. It was a rare and unique event. I came from an automobile-less family, and my…
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The American artist most dear to me is the impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Chase painted plein air scenes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Coney Island and also produced a truly wonderful series of landscapes set in the south fork of eastern Long Island. I knew nothing of these Shinnecock paintings nor of Chase himself until…
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The word "alcohol" originates in Arabic as "al-kuhul" (said to mean "tincture of antimony") and comes into English through Old Spanish. "Alcoholic," as in "possessing the qualities of alcohol," is an old word, but "alcoholic" does not acquire the meaning "addicted to alcohol" until 1880. In recent years, "holic", which had no independent existence, has…
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I had great hope that I would love to read The Naked and the Dead. Although Norman Mailer is quite a few years older than I, he's a Brooklyn boy who became a somebody. Mailer went to neighborhood schools, then on to Harvard and the Army, and made a quite a splash. (As a matter of fact,…
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I'm not generally given to boasting, but it's a fact: the great Don Newcombe once spoke to me — me! He asked me to refrain from conversing with him. This noteworthy event occurred in 1949. During summer vacation, it was the custom for neighborhood kids to arrive at Ebbets Field early in the morning. The…
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According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax (Bogart [William Morrow, 1997] p. 474), during the filming of Beat the Devil in 1954, legendary tough guy Humphrey Bogart (Duke Mantee, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe) was beaten three consecutive times in arm-wrestling by legendary limp-wrist Truman Capote.
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Why in the living heck do they say that the Nuggets are "within" two points of the Lakers? "Within" means less than than the proclaimed margin — 1.9 points perhaps. Why not say that the Nuggets are two points behind? Or trailing by two points? But not — goodness gracious — "within." It's a perpetually…
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I know that I read Lolita sometime during my senior year in college, which was the last year of the socially-constricted Eisenhower presidency. Nabokov was a celebrity at Cornell and I remember attending a lecture in which he delivered a hilarious destruction of Soviet realism. He was the first novelist whom I ever saw with…
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Now that "March madness" is nearly upon us, it's appropriate to reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole,…