December 2010
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Just back from the post office, where I mailed the granddaughter her gift, a zester. What is a zester, you ask? It's a kitchen device designed to remove the "zest," that is, the outermost skin of a citrus fruit. The granddaughter's zester is an inch and a half wide and thirteen inches long, including its…
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The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston. The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago. Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood…
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In Pickwick Papers, Pickwick checks into the Great White Horse Inn in Ipswich, is shown to his room by a chamber-maid only to discover that he's left his watch downstairs. He retrieves it but then cannot find his way back to his room. He's utterly, hopelessly lost. "Rows of doors… branched off in every possible direction. A dozen times…
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I watched Rebel Without A Cause last night in a state of constant twitching puzzlement. Why has this film become a cult classic? How can we account for the iconic appeal of James Dean, who moves me not the least bit? How did thirty-five-year-olds manage to pass for high school kids in 50s movies? Why, in those ancient…
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In order to illustrate the precarious social standing of Mr. Smouch, who takes Pickwick into custody for debt, Dickens described his carriage as neither one thing or another. "The vehicle was not exactly a gig, neither was it a stanhope. It was not what is currently denominated a dog-cart, neither was it a taxed-cart, nor a…
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Sometime in the early 1950s I was given a great gift: a hand-knitted gray-and-white Norwegian sweater. It may have been a bit too large for me, but I wore it almost every day through high school and college and for many years thereafter. True, it became a little ratty around the waist, but my mother-in-law,…
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In the summer of 1963, we were somewhere in southern Illinios on our first cross-country adventure (the first of many). I was not an experienced driver and the Nash Rambler was not a superb-handling car. We were driving a two-lane, and it was raining hard , and something happened (can't remember what) that caused me to brake much too…
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It's been a Charles Dickens revival here. The Dickens formula — "make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait" — works as well for me now as it did fifty years ago. I was curious to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, so I trotted over to the library and found a newish biography of Dickens. …
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My first railroad (not subway) trip was in 1945 — a New York Central train from NYC to Glens Falls, New York. I was dazzled but queasy; it was a coal-burning engine and the smoke was both visible and smellable. I spent my infant time looking out the window and studying the adjacent set of tracks as…
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As a youth, I could memorize poetry with great ease. Nowadays, with a toe into the water of my eighth decade, what was once a snap has become a frustration. But inasmuch as the authorities continually remind us geezers that we need to keep the intelligence well-lubricated, I persist. Yet it now takes two or three hard weeks to…