May 2008
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Regular readers of this blague should be able to anticipate Dr. Metablog's best and favorite answer to the important question, "What is a cutter?" Familiar with Dr. M's lifelong passion for baseball, the king of all sports, an informed reader might be tempted to say that a "cutter" is short for a "cut fastball" —…
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Last month, I reported that I had read The Dean's List and that I was not sufficiently impressed to enroll myself in the John Hassler fan club. But inasmuch as Hassler had been so celebrated upon his death, and I felt negligent, I thought it only fair to give him a second try. Now I've…
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One of my childhood friends confesses to me that his otherwise peaceful early years were marred by a perfectly unnecessary bit of fighting — which he himself initiated. "We were in the middle of a softball game in the P. S. 217 schoolyard and I struck out with two or three men on base. One…
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Yesterday, in a long-buried collection of file folders, I found some papers of my father's that were written during those last painful years when he was a widower. Some of the pages comprise a "commonplace" book, the theme of which is, 'why am I still alive when my wife is dead?' In addition to the…
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My friend Otis Jefferson Brown reminds me of the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods. It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a child of Bay Ridge, was trudging his shining morning face to P.S. 102. Our guys, our…
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Walter van Tilburg Clark's 1940 western, The Ox-bow Incident, was required reading in English classes at Erasmus Hall High School during the Eisenhower years. I assume that I studied and possibly even answered some assigned questions about the novel, but judging by the minute shards of information that my porous head has retained, I’d be…
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Searching the out-of-the-way corners of this ol' house that we are leaving behind after thirty-five years, I discovered a mutilated copy of The Log, an eight-page mimeographed pamphlet produced by students of P.S. 217 in June of 1952. The entries seem to have been written not by the students but by the teachers and were…
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My friend Bob, with whom I've shared many a pleasant lunch, went outside to fill the bird-feeders and never returned. Was it heart attack, aneurysm, or stroke? Bob had taken early retirement a few months ago to spend more time with his ladylove, from whom he had been forced to live apart by circumstances. His…
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The poem that might entrance you when you're young might not be the poem for your older years. In my "mature" phase, poems that I earlier ignored take on new significance. I'm now quite taken with Tennyson's "Ulysses,'" a dramatic monologue that meant nothing to me until a few years ago. "Ulysses" celebrates perseverance, a…
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No, despite appearances, I'm not obsessed with nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles, although I do love those classic novels in which our hero dashes to the rescue in one kind of coach or another. It's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance…