July 2011
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Hackett Hill Road is two twisty, depopulated, uphill-and-down miles long. It is unpaved and seriously washboarded. If you didn't know for sure that it was a public thoroughfare, you might think that you had accidentally turned into someone's long driveway. Most of our guests arrive from the South Road side of things, which is an…
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A: "What's that stand of trees that are down there by the brook?" Dr. M: "Cottonwoods. I planted one of them must be thirty-five years ago. The big one. They reproduce like aspens, underground runners. Turned into a nice stand." A: "When I was working the sawmill, sometimes the locals would bring in a tree…
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Lady Stallions!?! Not only a New Jersey soccer team, but an oxymoron of Shakespearean achievement. Not a simple oxymoron either, like Romeo's "cold fire, sick health," but a figure of speech on the far frontier of Oxymoronia, along with such classics as Utah Jazz and Christian Science. What, pray tell, is a Lady Stallion? Even…
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"I imagine," said Big Al, "that he knows as much about Shakespeare as I know about chainsaws."
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I've been reading about rugs and therefore learning all sorts of new words. For example, a yastik is a small rug or bag for designed to be sat upon and therefore serves a different purpose than a mafrash, which is bag for transporting small objects. Here's a mafrash: I have discovered that many of the terms used…
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This 1966 black-and-white oddity boasts a distinguished director (Delbert Mann, celebrated for Marty) and a group of excellent actresses (Jean Simmons, Katherine Ross, Angela Lansbury and Suzanne Pleshette). It's ambitious and sometimes imaginative. But frankly, even more than your run-of-the-mill amnesia movie, it's a mess. The amnesiac in this case is a young and puzzled James Garner, who comes to consciousness in Central…
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My mother had a pretty fair soprano and as a young adult performed in amateur musicals. She sang in that high, quavering style that I associate with artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ruth Etting ("America's Radio Sweetheart"). I remember that sometimes, when she wasn't busy putting the laundry through the wringer or scrubbing the…