December 2008
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And now a brief quiz for Metablogian readers who are familiar with nineteenth-century fiction. I will describe the situation and quote a short excerpt, and you will be required to identify the novelist. Ready? Let's go. Here's the story: a clergyman considers whether to commit a murder. Although he takes no concrete action, he's overcome with guilt about what might have been. Here's a sample of his extensive, tortured musings.…
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Last night — another horrible dream. I was riding in the passenger car of an old-fashioned railroad and there was this big puffy guy, a smaller version of Oliver Hardy, who was brandishing a pistol. He was about to take hostages and shoot us folks. I grabbed his gun arm and wrestled him to the…
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This blague's enthusiastic readers are well aware that each year for the last two, Dr. M. has made himself available for the NBA draft, but that not a single team has selected him, even the lowly, strife-ridden Knicks. It's incomprehensible, but true. Why are these GMs so unadventurous? As a consequence of being overlooked, I'm developing…
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I've experimented a bit in with flowers but in my choice of vegetables I've been quite conservative. My garden has always relied upon the standards: black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Detroit red beets, Danvers carrots, Waltham 29 broccoli. But now I've decided to take a walk on the wild side In today's mail came my brand-new heirloom…
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Just before pulling the blankets over me, I watched (via You Tube) the Iraqi journalist wing not one but both his shoes at the Duck Most Lame. Not much of an arm, I thought, but a symbolic act of courage nevertheless. A few hours later, waking from troubled sleep, I realized that my dreamatorium had…
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Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric. The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America: "I was born by the river, in a little tent." Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam…
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I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite — or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music — one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s. Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle:…
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I watched the Nuggets beat the living whatchamacallit out of the Toronto Raptors. Actually, I didn't watch the entire game — it was a gruesome mismatch. I can endure only so much garbage time at a single sitting. The high point, for me, was a comment by one of our home team announcers (I'll not…