November 2009
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Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that…
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So, a couple of days ago, we were watching some basketball on the HDTV, and despite the fact that Carmelo was going to the rim virtually at will, I was kind of down and depressed. Trying to cheer me up, the companion of fifty-plus years says, "I'll tell you what. I'll get you anything you…
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In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia. Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted. "All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of…
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I did so write a check to register the car, it turns out, but since we have changed our residence, the registration certificate and the little adhesive tab that you're supposed to fix to the license plate never arrived here, and of course I forgot all about the legality of the vehicle. Had no idea.…
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I can't drink wine, beer, or spirits. Alcohol of any kind, no matter how sophisticated or elegant, makes me ill. In this respect, I'm similar to my father and to one of my sons. People who know me only slightly imagine that I am unsociable or ascetic. Or that I'm a recovering alcoholic. In fact, I suffer from an inherited disability. Now at long last…
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The Yankees 2009 payroll was $201,449,189, exceeding the next largest (the Mets) by more than $50,000,000. The median major league payroll was about $80,000,000 and the lowest $36,834,000. With 103 wins in regular season, each victory cost the Yankees $1,955,810. The other teams that made it to the playoffs incurred considerably smaller but greatly varying costs per…
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The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom. She disappears in markets. We'll be together, innocently pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I'll wander off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk. When I return, she's gone. Nowhere to be…
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John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture." I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things. If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted…