May 2010
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Clerk at bookstore: Can I help you find something? Me: My wife. Have you seen her? Clerk. Possibly. Probably. How long since you saw her last? Me. Only a few minutes. But she has a habit of being abducted by aliens. Clerk: Have you tried Metaphysics, upstairs?
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"I grew up in Durban and in Cape Town. It was a privileged enclave. I had no idea what was going on except that when I competed in sports, there were kids who had no shoes. That was my first awareness. I went to government schools, but everyone was white. The teachers were not allowed
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I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list. It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk. Always susceptible, I cried a
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The 6' 8" Russian oligarch and billionaire Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov, chairman of the conglomerate Polylus Gold and president of the Onexim Group has acquired the New Jersey Nets. The Nets (or as they are sometimes known, the Swamp Dragons), are moving to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn year after next, and Prokhorov wants to change the
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One of the awkwardnesses that we dysgeographicoids, or directional dyslexics (or whatever you want to call us) have to come to grips with is — being asked for directions. You might just be walking down a street, more or less aware of where you are, and a car pulls up next to you and a lady
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At the coffee shop, reading Crackanthorpe and drinking my horrid decaf tea, a phrase from the conversation of the important-looking business guys at the next table wafted my way. "We don't have to re-invent the wheel." Wow, I thought to myself, does anyone still perpetrate that old cliche — and do so without a shred
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The Crackanthorpe name is not as well known as it should be. The short stories in Wreckage (1893) are a good sharp antidote to the pieties and sentimentalities of Victorian fiction. There must be hundreds of novels which feature a virtuous, long-suffering heroine, who, however mistreated, turns cheek after cheek until her patience is rewarded
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I've just read, and much enjoyed, a novel called Mrs. Peixada, by one Sidney Luska. The novel was published in 1886 by Cassell & Company, Limited, at 739 Broadway, in New York City. I had it recalled it from the library's archives, where, from all the evidence, it hadn't been touched for a hundred or
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The downtown mall is home to a motley assemblage of street buskers. Some are excellent and welcome performers: the occasional string quartet, the accomplished visiting bluegrass band, a witty gaggle of a cappella singers. Others are less excellent but still tolerable; the contortionist, the magician with the rings that divide and rejoin, the sword-swallower, the
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Novacaine was discovered sometime around the turn of the last century, but it hadn't reached the backward interior of Brooklyn during my childhood. As a result, I endured hours of drilling and filling without anaesthetics. It was horrible. The local dentist was named Dr. Caress. It would have been more appropriate if he had been