May 2006
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People out there misjudge me. Marcia Wainwright, for example, is certain that I need to lose thirty pounds in thirty days. She proposes that I use her "miracle African weight loss herbs." OK, maybe I'm a few pounds above my fighting weight, but certainly not thirty — what the heck is she thinking? Joellie Adella…
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In 1098, crusaders were trapped inside the walls of Antioch and their mission to capture Jerusalem was gravely jeopardized. When things were at their worst, one of the crusaders — a Provencal peasant named Peter Bartholomew — was visited by St. Andrew, who revealed to him that the lance with which the Roman soldier Longinus…
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The winner of the Adolf for worst person of the century goes to Pope Urban II. The century in question is the first one of the previous millennium, or 1000-1100. Like many other Adolf award winners, Urban perpetrated evil deeds that have continued to provoke hatred, war and suffering even to the present day. HIs…
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On March 10 of this year, I registered an objection to use of the word "within" in sportscaster-slang. Here's my complaint: "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…
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"Earth Angel," by Jesse Belvin's Penguins, offered, or seemed at the time to offer, a succinct and accurate distillation of relations between the sexes. The song appeared in 1954, when I was a vulnerable 15-year-old, and was a monster hit, perhaps because of its ideological clarity. "Earth Angel" is of the genre that has lately…
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Here's a letter that I wrote to the local newspaper. It appeared in 1999 when AGGP retired. "I have read all sorts of commentary in this paper about the public school system — letters from parents, students, board members and from both grudging and supporting taxpayers — but I can't ever remember reading a letter…
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Yesterday we learned that my nephew Steven's book on the philosophy of martial arts will appear in July. Hosannas to him. Steven's wife, Terrylynn, has a book out on criminal justice. It's a writing family. The direct descendants of Isaiah and Eta have produced books on a wide variety of subjects. It began when my…
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It's not often that there's an intersection of the disparate universes of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such distant areas of experience occasionally overlap. A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group of which I am a member recently wrote about Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) (a very good baseball book), "Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life…
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In Fargo, a tightly structured film, the extraneous Mike Yamagita episode might easily have been cut. Here’s the story (Fargophiles may bypass the plot summary). Mike is a high-school classmate and possibly an old boy friend of Marge Gunderson. He telephones Marge when he learns that she’s the police chief investigating the Brainerd triple homicide.…