November 2017
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Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the…
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When I was for a decade the caretaker to a very ill, very disabled person, I often attended a "support group" along with folks who found themselves in similar situations. Not an easy task, being a full-time caretaker. At these useful gatherings, Information was exchanged, sympathy was given, hands were wrung and tissues were always…
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Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely…
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Certainly in the 1940s and perhaps in later decades, first-graders all over America were taught an "activity" based on a song called "The Farmer in the Dell." Older readers of this blague, if they are courageous enough to delve into long-forgotten and repressed pockets of the past, might dare to summon up the memory. Here's…
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"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres"…
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If one 4 1/2 year old grandson can launch five foot stream of urine from where he stands to the base of a tree, how many 80-year-old grandfathers would it take to equal the performance? Some answers: a) 20 (tag team line of grampas each contributing 4"). b) does it count if I hurl my…
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Judging from his spectacularly wonderful name you might guess that Bacchus Pederson is either a character in a novel by Thomas Pynchon or the son of a Swedish father and a patriotic Greek mother. Not so. He's the creation not of eccentric parents or postmodern fiction the but of the voice recognition system that's been…