October 2015
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I enjoy good relations with animal — respectful, sometimes even affectionate. I remember with great fondness the many purring, playful cats and kittens of my youth. I was once very taken with a calf named September and, I confess, almost in love with the matriarch of a small herd of Morgans, a lovely lady named Gillian. The twin Nigerian dwarf goats, Orville…
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There are two memorable moments in Kent Haruf's competent, enjoyable and posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night (2015). The first is the proposal that Addie Moore make to Louis Waters that starts it all off. Addie and Louis are long spouseless and in their seventies, solitary. Addie calls on Louis and says, without much preparation, "I wonder if…
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When I was a boy, the word boob denoted a simpleton, a nincompoop– what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The…
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A friend recalls seeing a film, many years ago (1950s or 60s), in which a character speaks the wonderful line, "0il the women." My friend cannot remember the name of the movie or much about it, except that it was a desert "sword and sandal" job in which a sheik or pasha or emir or…
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Egregious Rush Limbaugh, who ranks number three on my list of the people who, in the course of my lifetime, have done the most damage to the United States of America (Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia are one and two and Dick Nixon only slithers in at number 6) speaks a language that is extraordinarily difficult to parse. His sentences…
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I'm devoutly secular, just as I was raised. Moreover, almost all of my friends are equally unreligious: either retired Catholics or atheist Jews or freethinkers or lapsed UU's or never-wases. I was therefore taken aback and a bit unsettled last week when at a friend and neighbor's dinner party, just as the guests were starting…