April 2006
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My father played excellent tennis and basketball — he was a guard on the CCNY team under Nat Holman until he left school to put a few cents in the family coffers. During the 20s and 30s he also played some semi-pro baseball. He'd make $5.00 or $10.00 a game as a "ringer" — and…
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I first stumbled over Spellcheck's wayward sense of humor years ago when I was writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Spellcheck rejected Capulet, which is Juliet's family name, and presumptuously instead offered the choice of either "co-pilot" or "copulate." Spellcheck is deeply offended by proper names, uncommon words, neologisms, words in a language other than English,…
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It's been a Krzysztof Kieslowski festival here the last few days. We've watched, two times each and with concentrated and astonished attention, Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs films: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Individually (which is how we viewed them in 1993-94 when they first appeared) they're splendid; taken together, they're an even more wonderful achievement. Kieslowski tells complicated stories…
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There's more neighborhood mountain lion news: yesterday a seven-year-old boy, walking in the rearward of a group of six or seven hikers, was pounced upon in the mountains just west of town by a big guy. The child was bitten and clawed but is now recovering. Family members drove the lion away. In my view,…
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In my post on the Templeton prayer study, I did not mention the outcome least congenial to prayer enthusiasts: not only did prayer do no good, it also caused real harm. “A significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51…
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On the night of August 23, 1990, an eighty-pound, two-year-old female mountain lion wandered into our backyard. The story appears in a book on cougar-human interactions (David Baron, The Beast in the Garden [New York: Norton, 2004], 182-187) — a book which also contains a picture of "our" lioness, lying drugged on the ground (167).…
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A friend, a retired nurse, was keeping watch when her ninety-plus-year-old mother was about to breath her last. The mother, who had not been coherent for some days, was either unconscious or sleeping deeply when she suddenly roused herself, looked closely at the daughter, uttered the words "you need rouge," and died. This story is…
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The cranberry, some say, is so named because it is eaten by cranes. Perhaps. But it's just as likely that the word derives from the similarity between the plant's stamen and the crane's beak – as the common geranium or cranesbill is named after the flower's distinct enlarged pistil. (The American cranberry has an English…